Enjoy the software very much (WAY more than using a straight word processor), and plan to buy and register, my wish, though, is for a separate section in the binder for characters. I’ve read the forums about how to bodge a work around using the research section or project notes, but really, keeping the characters straight in a novel is a trick, and your the two closest competitors (Storymill - a vastly more complicated and in my opinion inferior product, and ywriter for [gasp] Windows) both have this feature, and really, when it’s all said and done, isn’t it about the characters, really? Just a button and a place in the binder to hide the boys and girls, after all. Is that really so much to ask, a home for the children?
Do I understand correctly: you want a folder at the top level to store character files in? That shouldn’t be a problem. Make sure nothing is selected in the Binder and create a new folder. There is nothing sacred about the top-level, and you can create sections for whatever book elements you wish to organise. You could also rename any of the built-in elements as well. So if you aren’t exactly using research for “research” or anything else, why not just rename to “characters”?
The main reason there is no character sheet section built-in is that although Scrivener was designed with novel-writing in mind, I also deliberately made it more general-purpose - academics and business writers might be a little confused if there was a section for character sheets!
The idea instead is that you can set up a project however you want. Currently, for characters, you would just create another folder on the same level as the Research folder (as Amber says), name it “Characters” and create documents inside it formatted as character sheets.
Scrivener 2.0 will have a cooler solution. In 2.0 you will be able to create a “Characters” folder and assign it any icon you want - so you could have a characters folder with a special icon. And it will allow you to create document templates - so if you have a particular character sheet template you want to use, you would just set it up as a template and after that, any time you want to create a character sheet for a new character, you would just click on your Characters folder and go to Documents > New From Template > Character Sheet. In this way, you will be able to have the same features as those other apps if you want it, and users who don’t use such features won’t need to have them; and you wouldn’t be stuck with a built-in character sheet but could create or provide your own. 2.0 will come with a project template with all of this done for you, though.
So, essentially, you can already do what you want, but 2.0 will make it easier and much more seamless.
Just any document. Basically, you just assign a folder as the “Templates” folder (you will most likely bury this folder inside the Research folder), and any document that appears inside that folder can be selected as a template from the New > From Template menu. It really does little more than automate the “duplicate” function. So you could create your own character sheet using a table or whatever, put it in the Templates folder, and it’s available as the basis of a new document from then on.