Parchment People

The Problem

In my recent D&D campaign (read about it here), I noticed that the players using online character sheets were split across three different platforms, each with its own problems. None of them were quite the solution we wanted (alas, not enough to send us back to paper and ink).

D&D Beyond is highly polished, but much of its content is locked behind a paywall, and its heavy automation can take away some of the fun of managing a character sheet. Roll20 provides a free alternative, but its interface and UX left a lot to be desired. When playing, I spent most sessions Alt-Tabbing between the official online PDF character sheet and a Notion document containing all the information the PDF couldn’t accommodate.

The Solution

Parchment People is my solution to this: a digital character sheet built around the same principles as a physical one. As a web app, the sheet can grow naturally with whatever information a character needs to contain, rather than being constrained by the physical dimensions of a piece of paper (within reason, and Supabase’s limits). At the same time, I’ve tried to preserve the player agency of a paper sheet, with optional automation for tedious bookkeeping while leaving meaningful decisions in the player’s hands.

It also supports party play. The Groups feature allows character sheets to be shared between DMs and players in read-only mode, making it easy for everyone at the table to keep track of each other’s characters. This was an intentional design choice: one player owns and edits their character sheet, while everyone else can see it without being able to accidentally change it.

Supabase’s row-level security policies were particularly well suited to this, allowing me to define flexible permissions for who can view a character sheet and what they can do with it. Supabase’s real-time functionality also allows party members to see changes to a sheet as they happen. Because sheets are read-only to everyone except their author, simultaneous editing conflicts aren’t an issue. In this respect, the system mirrors the behaviour of a paper character sheet: one person writes on it, while everyone else can look over their shoulder.

What’s Next

As I write this case study, I have planned - but not yet implemented - a homebrew monster feature inspired by my recent Rust project. This will allow DMs to create and export well-designed monster stat blocks. My goal is to grow Parchment People into a general-purpose D&D toolkit rather than keeping it solely as an online character sheet.