Simplified Template Design Concept

[tbone]

Initial impression: Looks fantastic! The way templates should look. The use of checkboxes, in particular, is smart – it's not just a template for picking out stuff to be copied onto a character form; it actually serves as the character form itself. (Great use of gray to keep lesser-used info, like point costs, from distracting. I'd do the same for skill difficulty, too.)

(I'd also be interested in seeing right-aligned skill levels, as Stormcrow mentioned. Same with costs for everything; having them in a neat vertical line would make it very easy to skim costs to quickly come up with a total 20 pts or whatever. Not sure these would be improvements; just saying maybe.)

The potential difficulty I see is space: This template is pretty simple, but still fills a page. Higher-level characters with lots more "stuff" will be hard to fit onto a page, even with less intro text and a smaller picture. (Which isn't all bad; it's an incentive to keep templates fairly simple.)

Going back to the sample: It does a great job of serving up his key archaeologist traits (and even a lens!), ready for instant adventure. But I'll note that many gamers will want to see "everyman" background stuff to complete a believable character. This fellow, for example, has no experience with driving a car (lens aside), riding a horse or bicycle, swimming, climbing, hiking, using a computer (or older-TL electronics); he has no influence skills, no hobbies (well, other than archaeology!), etc.

That's not at all a criticism of your template; any fully-rendered GURPS PC template ends up having to deal with a pretty large number of items. I really like your design, and hope it'll continue looking great when the lists inevitably get longer.