There is, of course, no obligation to use digital character sheets whilst playing online.
A simple sheet of paper on your desk can easily do the trick. It is certainly enough for my notes and for tracking PCs, NPCs, scenario info... but some players prefer to have their character's info on the screen, alongside the VTT display. So, why not?
Some of the most used online VTTs provide sheets that you can use within the program, more or less customizable, more or less limited and more or less available, depending on the VTT and the game played.
There are two BIG problems with those embedded sheets. The first one is that you have to fill lots of stuff on those sheets, because peoples designing them never think there is enough information on them.
The second one is that if you play one of the games for which no charsheets are provided, you are out of luck. You'll have to setup one yourself in a programming language that is generally not intuitive, and with almost no control on the look and usability of the sheet.
It can be quite frustrating, but, you don't have to use those.
There is a far easier way to have online charsheets and in a very simple way: using simple PDF forms that you can generally find online for your favorite game, or that you can produce yourself by making a form in Open Office or Libre Office (in odt format) and export as a PDF form.
Making PDF forms is really easy: you make an image of the form you want to design. Set it as background in Open Office or Libre Office. And then place the fields you want onto it (bullets, check boxes, text, images...). Let's have a look at the result.
Here is the exemple of the charsheet I have made for Lamentations of the Flame Princess. As you can see, the page setup is in landscape format to be in the same orientation as a screen.
And there is a space for an illustration of the character, which means that there is an image field in the odt form (obviously).
To fill it, open the odt file (sample files are found at the end of this post to let you try it). Note that if you make charsheets where there is no illustrations to place, you can directly use the PDF in your browser without going through the odt first, but it is less funny...).
- odt file of the charsheet in Libre Office -
Check that you are not in design mode.
Double click on the illustration field and choose an illustration, ideally more or less square (to avoid black areas padding the image, but it will work with any proportions of image).
Export as pdf form (check that form is active).
And that's it. If you open the pdf form in a tab alongside your VTT page (on Owlbear Rodeo, preferably, it is the best one available -and free- at the moment), you have a charsheet as accessible as those imbedded in other online VTTs, but much more flexible, easier to produce, and adapted to YOUR game and tastes. And if you need special sheets to add for certain class of characters (sheets with lists of spells, for exemple...), you can always make one that the player can open in another tab.
Indeed, any information that a player may want to have available can be turned into a pdf, fillable or not, that can be opened in a different tab. The difference here, with the sheets offered by VTTs like Roll20 or Foundry, or .... is that here you only have what you want, in the way you want, and each player can have his own setting without having to use a predefined one.
CAVEAT: When you have finished using the form in your browser, don't forget to save it WITH the changes. If you just close it, they will be lost. It is probably a good idea to save regularly your progresses (yes, we all know that and still...).
If you don't want to go through Open Office or Libre Office to export PDF forms customized with an illustration of the character, you can just do it once and place the logo or the cover of the game as an illustration. And then use directly copies of the same pdf for every player.
But, above all, remember: it is not because something can be turned into a digital format that it must be, and papers and pencils are still the most versatile way to record information. But, of course, YMMV....
If you want to experiment a little, here are the LotFP sheets (english and french) in odt, and the samples in pdf that you can open directly and fill in your browser.
