During the session on Sunday, I found that there might be a valid use for a ‘combat character sheet’ for characters during… combat. Realistically you need a characters Defenses and Attacks, stats take up little room so might as well put those in there and perhaps a few basic skills like Healing, Stealth, Perception, other than those just some weapons listings and you should be pretty golden for informational needs for combat.
Speaking of which and completely off topic, the combat yesterday took about an hour for the 8 rounds it lasted and if I had it to do over again now it’d be about 45 minutes at a guess. I’m seriously hoping that gone are the days of the three and four hour combats from the old days. And at no time was there any real sense of “man this boring” and the tactics involved I thought were pretty cool. But then I like battle maps, I’ve had one since 1st edition and have made many many different ones over the years. Roleplaying is supposed to be abstract and cool and fun. Combat is supposed to be tactical and cool and fun.
DnD 3.x lost sight of the cool and fun part and devolved into ‘character optimization’ and minutae and everyone looking up rules every 10 minutes. Great for some, not so great for me.
In fact, and man I’m getting way off topic here, that’s precisely why I left DnD and moved to True 20 as well as home brew and various others was precisely to speed up combat. There’s a fine line between speed, fun, detail and ‘realism’ and DnD 3.x lost me. And I no longer have my second edition books, not real sure what happened to those or my first edition books for that matter. Lost in some move over the years I assume.
Yesterday (to get back on topic) I was primarily referring to defenses first, attacks second and that was before I filled out the power cards (modified Ander_001 format) with the numbers and then very rarely there’d be a need for a skill.
What I found was that between the big character sheet, the stack of power cards, dice and misc space it can get crowded even on my table with enough characters, mapping and the like in the mix. So a nice little mini-sheet might be ideal.
So tomorrow I’ll see if I can find the time to come up with something in Illustrator on half a sheet of paper with emphasis on conciseness and general layout to ease finding the information. Then we can refer to the main character sheet for expanded information and to the secondary sheets once it hits that point. But those going to be really only needed during Skill Challenges and or general Roleplaying stuff. Or loot recording etc.
I might try and use MSE to create the sheet but I’m not sure how good that would look blown up to half sheet size. I print them four to a page and they’re just about right for my old eyes to be able to read without bending down or picking them up.
And for anyone who’s wondered, this is the power card set I’m using. I chose it over the others because it’s simple, it’s mostly white and I customized it a bit by cutting the color title bar in half and modifying the lower text to always use black which makes it even whiter as in uses less ink. A single ribbon of color is more than enough to let me know what kind of card I’ve got and it saves money on ink. I wish I had access to the free printing that some of these folks apparently have with their photorealistic gold on leather style cards. 
 I’m betting a lot of employer’s are subsidizing power cards for a lot of folks.
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