Hi folks!
Fun announcement today – we’ve just released another free sheet for your 5E game, but for your group rather than your character! The Adventuring Company Sheet lets you track all the stuff related to your party – I released it on the DM’s Guild back in 2018 after making it for the Chronicles game, and it’s now updated to be (I hope!) even more useful. You can grab it from our store (if you always want access to the latest version), the download link below (if you don’t care), or DriveThruRPG (if you also want access to the latest version but on DriveThruRPG).
Here’s the lowdown on everything you can track with it:
- Your group’s money!
- Your group’s treasure! (As distinct from just your raw cash)
- Your group’s equipment, including spaces to track torches and healer’s kits, and two more write-your-own-in boxes for whatever’s most useful to you (on the original sheet these were food and water reserves but could be healing potions or alchemist’s fire or…whatever you want!)
- Up to three passive skills for your group
- The current date
- The party’s default watch rota
- The members of the party and their darkvision capabilities
- Your party’s default marching order
- Quests, rumours and leads that your party has outstanding
- Allies, enemies and other NPCs you want to keep track of
- The proficiencies and languages your group possess
Most of that should hopefully be straightforward, but let’s also look at an example of how I envision it being filled out. You might have different ideas!
I mocked this up for our game, they do use the original sheet (or did, before we moved online), Izzy’s normally in charge of it, but I didn’t have it to hand and it’s been a while. Up top there’s space for your party’s name – every party needs a good one and yours is no exception. In the next row, left to right, you’ve got space for passive skills, coinage, and the current date.
Passive skills for a group aren’t something that natively exists in 5E1 (as far as I know), so it’s sort of up to the GM how you determine something like your group’s overall passive Perception or Stealth. They might not even be determined the same way! Makes sense to me that a group’s passive Perception might be the highest within the group, whereas Stealth might be the lowest. You could also just take the average of the group’s scores.
This might not be useful for everyone, but I know personally as a GM there have been instances where I’d have really liked to know “hey how likely are they to be noticed by this creature” or “how likely are they to see this thing” for the players as a whole, without going through and finding everyone’s passive score or getting them all to make rolls. Your mileage may vary.
Coinage is fairly straightforward, it’s just the raw money the group has. You might make a distinction between the money they have on them and the money they have in storage or in a bank or whatever, and I don’t know what currencies your game uses, so that’s why it’s just a big, free-form box. Go wild. The old sheet had separate boxes for copper, silver, electrum, gold, platinum and so forth but with the benefit of hindsight I don’t think it’s as useful as just a big space. Perhaps I’m wrong.
Current date might be very useful or not at all useful, depending on your game and how closely you track time. It’s there if you need it. Below that we have watches, party members, and marching order.
I think watches is a useful thing to have a note of, but it does depend on your game. A dungeon crawl or wilderness game will probably find that far more helpful than one set in noble courts and the intrigue of the big city. There are four slots provided – I think in a lot of games folk just take two but playing by the rules you can’t be on watch for more than two hours and get your long rest benefits, so four should account for most scenarios. This is mostly helpful for the GM – it just speeds things up slightly if something’s going to befall the party on a specific watch, and cuts out the potential for leading questions like “who’s on third watch?”.
Party members is…I mean you probably know who’s in your party but I’ve found myself being curious about people’s vision capabilities and the like, so there’s space for darkvision. There might be more useful fields here, I’ll be updating it as and when I find improvements. Marching order is laid out as a mini 4×4 grid and is there just to cut out a bit of faff if something befalls the party on the road – you don’t have to have the debate about who’s standing where at the beginning of a random encounter, just set them up as noted.
Quests, Rumours & Leads and Allies, Enemies & Persons of Note are below that, and serve as freeform note space for collective group notes. This may be something you have covered already, but it seemed like useful information to record on a shared sheet. Proficiencies & Languages below that allows you to track all the languages and tool proficiencies within the group, so you don’t have to do a roll-call every time you find a note written in Goblin. In the example I just wrote them in as a list but I think the way my players use it is as a note of what languages they have and who speaks them. It’s also useful if they want to communicate secretly with one another!
The five boxes in the centre are for various resources the group has, and the weight of group stuff. Weight doesn’t play into every game but for campaigns where it does, you can record the weight of group gubbins and know whether you need a wagon or some other kind of transport for it. The four other boxes are for group resources that you use frequently, like torches or healer’s kits. There’s two for write-in resources that are most useful to your game – I imagine healing potions would be a useful one to keep track of but anything goes. These boxes were food and water reserves in the first version of the sheet so that’s what’s in the example.
Equipment is for group possessions that you use, like tents, bedrolls, stuff like that. Quest items maybe? Depends on your game. The big box below is for treasure, which I envision as gems, paintings, art objects, magic items and similar. Stuff that is valuable, but which isn’t actual money.
And that’s it! The sheet’s designed with player use in mind, but you can hopefully also see why it might be useful as a reference sheet for a GM, with stuff like languages, passive skills, watches, marching order and the like. I’ll be keeping an eye on how the sheet is received and used, and I might make changes or alternate versions of it keyed for different use cases. Right now it’s most useful for a grittier, lower level campaign where the players need to be concerned about stuff like how much food they have, whether they have torches or healer’s kits, who has darkvision, who’s on watch. I could imagine a version that’s for a more handwave-y game, or one that’s for an even more book-keepy game. I just don’t know what would go on those sheets yet! If you have ideas on how it could be more useful, get in touch through Twitter, Discord or the comments below!
Thanks for reading folks, I hope you get use out of the sheet – people seemed to find the old version useful. Lots of exciting stuff coming down the pipeline soon, so be sure to follow us on Twitter or Facebook, drop by our Discord, or join our mailing list below. Cheers!
1 – The sheet’s designed with 5E in mind but it wouldn’t be that difficult to use in other systems. It’d probably be useful in most RPGs to be able to track NPCs, quests, money, treasure, marching order maybe, resources, etc etc so you may still find it useful for your sci-fi or western game!
