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[b]What is your opinion onn character sheets?[/b]
These days I take individual partners as a whole into account over sheets, but if it's a public context and I want to indulge the very likely dose of death, then it's a pretty minimal standard for things to have the beginning of a chance to work. Remove this step in a public roleplay and more times than not, the anarchy just wipes out the game even faster. Beyond the minimal quality control, it's good to give people a general idea of who exactly they are dealing with, what they see as an accessible reference when handling someone. Yeah, yeah, personality is fluid. I'm taking about physical elements, their 'default' presentations unless otherwise noted in posts, their abilities to know what they can do (and hold them accountable for it). Even the gist of who they are to see what kind of 'feel' someone would get on a first meeting.

[b]Faceclaims? Real life? Anime? Digital? Hand drawn? None?[/b]
Doesn't matter much to me, at least as far as what others use. If it conveys the proper gist, it works, and I can pretty much abstract everything into the same 'style' of appearance so that anime-built characters can mingle with the more realistic. Sometime I have no character image at all, and it is almost impossible for me to find one. In that case, I'd have a total lack of images, because I am incompetent at drawing and unwilling to learn, leaving me dependent on internet images that may not convey what I'm looking for at all. An image is ideal and practically standard on a CS around here, which is why I started to build characters [i]from[/i] images. That makes the finding job easy, obviously >.>

As for the actual image, if the real life version fits, by all means I go for it. Same with digital, which I find is often easier to find the niches that I want when I go for characters in more fantasy contexts. Anime I find too restricted and lacking in the diversity I want for me to use it on a regular basis aside from a few niche games. It's simply not diverse enough for me, nor do the images often fit if I haven't picked one beforehand. Hand Drawn is something I don't come across too often given the above system, but rarely does that suit me at all in any context.

[b]Color codes?[/b]
Meh. But then, I'm something of a minimalist as far as formatting goes. I strictly prefer to read the content over pretty colors and what the flavor of cool is on the guild or whatever else. If it seems appropriate, maybe. Approaching this all in the context of a CS.

Someone evidently took it to IC colors. To that I respond, meh. I take two perspectives here. First is that if people can't read my dialogue from my action/internal pieces, then my writing has failed, and adding colors is just a bandaid to bad writing. I just don't think it will help one bit. Conversely, if my writing is perfectly solid and everyone/almost everyone reading it is perfectly able to distinguish action/internal from dialogue, then there is no need for colors. At that point, all I'm doing is making it easier for people to skim it. No thanks.

Some people make abysmal color choices that blend so badly with the guild background I wonder if they're trying to kill me. My iffy eyesight probably doesn't help.

[b]What's the 'right amout' of images?[/b]
On average, just one. Here, I'm average. I couldn't be arsed to find a dozen gifs of an already rare faceclaim (and if it's digital, how am I going to piece together a bunch of images?) to lag up someone's reading of my sheet for aesthetic purposes (isn't that what it usually is?). If it's beyond the character, then only if context appropriate, such as a piece of equipment I found a decent image for. If the logic is just to provide more ways to see the character (perhaps just static images), then I simply don't believe in finding that many images after the first one nor do I think it would contribute to people's understanding of the gist I try to make.

[b]Freeform or GM provided code?[/b]
Assuming I didn't find a lot of the GM provided code I've seen frivolous and unnecessary, then I'd say I would go for GM code because it establishes a baseline of uniformity that I like to see in a roleplay. Yes, as you can probably tell, I'm a boring sheetwriter. It's not my focus. But in any case, GM unless the GM's code is too fancy or if the code is inefficient to the extent that minimalists like me and proper sheet coders would say it's pretty bad.
[b]Things that should be be included/excluded?[/b]
Primary elements that I always look for are appearance (basic building block for IC content), capabilities (their spells, their talents, their cybernetic implants, everything they can whip out of a hat to modify a scene. Especially looking to avoid gimmicky shit like a 22 year old female with no mentioned powers or things of note being able to beat the living shit out of a traditional orc while using fire magic), and a general summary of who the character is. It can come from their past, listed attributes, and a synopsis of a character's personality (which, if you're putting effort into creating it and being as authentic as possible, is impossible to sum up on the sheet completely and maintain across a roleplay unchanged).

And as others have hit above, personality is a tricky thing. That's the biggest dynamic factor and something I have multiple theories for designing. I consider it the sum of basic character traits/attributes/keywords, their biases, and other elements of their past that serve as modifiers along with the situation they're handling. Basically, it's four parts, and there is absolutely no way I will be able to make a fully accurate summary (note, summary, not synopsis) about every way a character thinks. Too many bits and pieces. I parse all of the modifiers and try to create an authentic decision based on the relevant variables. Aside from that being why it often takes forever for me to post, it's something I just don't feel fits into a roleplay if expressed in the way that I perceive it. I never list out the modifiers and biases in the way that I think them (very flat and probably confusing, I tell ya) and the history is just an element if I even express it completely in a sheet. Still, I think it is completely possible for you to ask your character some basic questions about how they would generally handle things, and develop a paragraph or two from there to see where the character [i]generally[/i] comes from. That is usable information.

What specifically you look for and how you word your sheet is very dependent on what kind of game you're running. You probably won't ask for a list of abilities in a slice of life high school game with nothing special to development, etc. The point beyond the essentials above is to vet and see what people are bringing to the table, as well as provide ammunition for the GM. Other motivations are always involved of course. Case by case.

[quote=@Sierra]Gonna crash the party with an outlandish opinion. [b]There is no such thing as a good character sheet.[/b] There are only varying degrees of bad. Why do I dare say such heresy? [b]In no world can you condense the complexities of human emotion and psychology into something remotely digestible.[/b][/quote]
I'd call this only applicable if you approach a character sheet as something more than just an intentionally limited summary designed to a) give a reference point for other players, b) present abilities and hold them accountable, c) something to indicate you actually put a degree of thought into the character being used, and d) a step for a GM to see what kind of characters are coming in and if the character is suitable just from its basic summary, which is ultimately what a character sheet is. Perhaps we just have different ideas of what a character sheet is supposed to accomplish, but based on those four factors, I entirely disagree with your opinion because I don't believe a character sheet was ever supposed to be a complete analysis of the beast that is pshychology and other changing elements of a character. On average, that's not why they're made, and that's rarely a complete motivation unless someone is naive enough to think the entire sum of their character can be completely maintained by one sheet. So on some level, yes, I do think you can measure what is objectively good about a sheet if you go by the elements that you [i]can[/i] describe almost completely and by the gists created that help a GM figure out what they're dealing with.