That said, I’m also a fan of transparency with character stats. Too many bad experiences with the “OOC Masquerade” from WoD games.

Me too, but I understand some people enjoy that Masq stuff, so having the PDFs kept somewhere away from prying eyes would be ideal in that regard. If no Masq, then just have them somewhere that staff can easily see when players are updating the important bits of the sheet. If a character in a fantasy game suddenly has 18 Strength when they had 7 the week prior, staff need to notice that stuff. And yes, I’ve had a few poor experiences in games where the players kept their own sheets privately.

I’ve never done it, but I don’t think it’d be that hard to make the character sheet tab on the Ares web portal visible only to the character and staff.

That said, I’m also a fan of transparency with character stats. Too many bad experiences with the “OOC Masquerade” from WoD games.

The only downside is that everyone can see your stats, so, if you’re trying to keep that hidden, coded stats it has to be.

At this point, it should be pretty simple for the staff of a game to create a Google Drive folder or something equivalent to hold the PDFs in a fashion that each character’s sheet can only be accessed by the player of the character and the staff of the game.

So I’m curious: would PDF sheets be a dealbreaker for you, or would it not really matter as long as the game itself was solid?

Nope. A lot of the games I played had that as the method, especially the Kushiel games. The only downside is that everyone can see your stats, so, if you’re trying to keep that hidden, coded stats it has to be.

Would you avoid a game if it used PDF character sheets instead of a coded chargen/web-based character creation system?

No, as long as the staff on that game had control of the database of PDF sheets and were alerted if anyone was to update their sheet outside of what was allowed by the rules of the game.