Sample Character: Prince Goran of Mars

Today, I made a sample character sheet to show how the character sheet looks when it's filled out. This character is for a pulp-style "sword and planet" science-fantasy setting. In this setting, Earth is the evil Terran Empire. It's currently fighting a civil war with Luna, but it has ambitions to conquer the solar system as its birthright (Earth is the birthplace of humanity, they reason, so all of humanity should be ruled under the banner of Terra). The other planets of the system have their own governments and cultures. Mars is a rugged desert frontier world with many crumbling decadent cities and an unknown number of nomadic barbarian tribes that roam the wilderness.

"Prince" Goran of Mars claims to be a prince among his own people but he's really just another proud warrior from one of those barbarian tribes. His tribe lived as hunters and pirates, but they were proud and honorable people. Although they were pirates, they always gave their prey the opportunity to surrender peacefully and they never fired on unarmed travelers. After he witnessed a Terran expedition raiding a Martian town for slaves and greenmetal ore, Goran got caught up in a brawl between the Terrans and some offworlders who were trading with the Martian city-dwellers. Goran joined up with them and now travels the system with a ragtag crew of mercenaries and traders who run cargoes for profit. They carry equipment, personnel, and information for the Lunar rebels and try to give Terra a black eye whenever they can. Although he hates slavers, Goran maintains his tribe's honor code: if his opponent only has a melee weapon, he won't draw his gun; if his opponent only has a knife, he won't draw his saber; if his opponent is unarmed... well, slavers still have to die, so Goran will snap their necks with his bare hands if he has to.

Sample character sheet: "Prince" Goran (PDF)

The Passions provide free Drama Points. Each Passion can be used once per scene to get a free Drama Point (which can be spent for bonuses) if the Passion is relevant to that scene. Goran's Rage Passion is slavery, so he never has to worry about not having any Drama Points on hand when he runs into Terran slavers. His Noble Passion is honor, so he also has a little something extra to give when his reputation is on the line (such as in a duel or when handicapping himself to face a foe with inferior weapons). His Fear Passion is obscurity, so if he finds himself in danger alone, he'll be more motivated to get back to his friends alive (or at least get word to them before he dies so his story can be told). His Focus Passion is "The free winds of the dead seas of Mars are in my blood! You'll never chain or cage me!" so he always has access to one more Drama Point when someone tries to capture or imprison him (or convince him to settle down and retire, for that matter). These are the kinds of scenes that really matter most to Goran.

The Signs are visible manifestations or hints of strong traits. There is a Sign for every Talent or Drawback and every Attribute or Skill with a score of 3D or more. Signs provide a +1D bonus certain rolls in play, but their major purpose is to provide a cool description of the character that is more than just height, weight, eye color, hair color, etc.

+Talents and -Drawbacks are situational modifiers (bonus and penalty, respectively). Goran grew up in the Martian wastelands, so he's an expert in surviving the harsh environments and dealing with the dangerous flora and fauna to be found in such wild places. He's a good fighter, but he excels with the sword which is his weapon of choice and in battle, he has a fierce battle-cry that rattles his foes. Goran also has two -Drawbacks: "Barbarian" and "Lust for Life". The first penalizes him when dealing with polite society and the second makes it hard for him to resist temptations to enjoy himself (i.e. he's easily seduced or lured into drinking contests when he should be doing other things). The -Drawbacks only apply when his player chooses to use them, but he gets a Drama Point any time a -Drawback causes a problem for him, so it's advantageous for Goran if he occasionally acts boorish among high society or parties a little too hard.

The Facets are basically different kinds of "hit points". In this setting, the GM has chosen not to use Mind because there aren't any sources of mental damage. There are psychics, but they don't have telepathic attacks; there are eldritch horrors, but this is a pulp action setting where the heroes don't really get scared (at most, they're reasonably cautious) so there's no need for keeping track of how much their sanity is blasted. For this campaign, the premise is "rogue traders ply the spacelanes for profit as a front for rebel missions", so wealth will mostly be just a cosmetic issue. The character of the captain of the ship probably has a higher Wealth rating for getting a bigger share but that would go toward maintaining the ship and funding the next mission, in the same way Indiana Jones hunts for artifacts to sell to museums so he can afford to go on more trips to hunt for artifacts to sell to museums. The money isn't really important and the Wealth Facet could easily be crossed off here. It's only real use for Goran is to put a limit on the scale of his carousing: he can spend a night drinking in a bar and getting into fights, but he's not going to be buying and crashing sports cars for fun. If the campaign were set entirely within Goran's own honor-obsessed culture, the group could add a Reputation or Honor Facet to keep track of their social standing, but for this campaign, that will just be something Goran worries about.

So, how does it look?

Updated Character Sheet

I finally got around to putting my scrap paper character sheet onto a PDF document today. I used Inkscape to draw the lines and boxes and insert the SVG icons that I made and a few creative commons icons that I got from game-icons.net (made by Lorc of lorcblog.blogspot.com).

This version of the sheet is rather generic. I don't expect many campaign settings to have a use for everything at once. Particular settings could have more specific character sheets that eliminate unneeded Skills and Facets and add that setting's specialties. Check it out and let me know if you see room for improvement. I'll also be happy to answer any questions about what's on the sheet. Sometime soon, I'll post an example or two of a filled out character sheet.

Impressions Character Sheet (December 12, 2012 revision)

Simple is hard

I'm still in the process of trimming the system down and editing my writing for clarity. Unfortunately, I only have a little time every day to spend on this project. Over the past two or three weeks, I've trimmed the combat section down a lot. I always try to make things too complicated, so most of my writing is actually just re-writing for simplicity. I had so many specific rules for combat situations that were really not necessary. To be honest, most of them were just examples of how to use the standard task resolution rules for combat. I struggled to figure out ways to represent things that I suddenly realized I had no interest in playing anyway, so I cut them. It's really hard to make these cuts, because I liked making the fiddly little details, but they're actually useless and need to go.

I've got the combat stuff trimmed down to a reasonable level and I decided how I want to do damage and healing issue. This week, I've been revisiting the Social Conflict chapter to bring it more in line with the revised skill list and combat rules. I've decided that I don't want to have separate "combat" and "social" rules. I want them both to be handled as "conflict". Today, while I was cleaning up the social conflict section, it occurred to me that I really need to tie it in with the damage system.

The damage system isn't particularly revolutionary, but I decided to track damage for physical, mental, and social values in addition to other things (although not every campaign or setting will need to use all of them). I originally planned for the Social damage track to relate to your position in society. If someone causes Social damage to you, it's because they humiliate you or make you look foolish in front of everyone and cause you to lose face (for settings where that matters). It occurred to me today that I need to actually talk about how this works in the social conflict section on an individual scale too.

The guiding principle here is "social skills are not mind control". Mind control can make a character do something that the character doesn't want to do; however, social skills can make a character do something that the player doesn't want. Characters only have so much willpower. I know from personal experience that baser instincts can win over better judgement. Just because the player knows that it's probably a trap when the sultry femme fatale invites him up for coffee, that doesn't mean the character will refuse. Just like I know I shouldn't eat a second piece of cake, but sometimes I do it anyway.

Cash on the barrel head

From a forum post I made earlier in response to a question about price lists in Star Wars gaming...
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I think prices in Star Wars are best handled like this:

"It costs more money than you have. You'll have to sell something big like your landspeeder to pay for it. Or do a favor for a local crimelord/politician/aristocrat/etc. that will lead to adventure (or, at the very least, some hijinks)."

or

"You'll have to pay for that." "Ok, here's some cash. Now, on with the adventure!"

Paying for something is either a plot point like paying for a high-speed, down-low ride on the Falcon or buying Anakin from Watto (in which case the actual amount doesn't really matter) or it's just a throwaway bit of color like tossing some credits on the bar and saying "Sorry for the mess" after slicing off a customer's arm or shooting a bounty hunter. The action and adventure should never grind to a halt because the PCs need to argue about who had the steak and who had the salad when they divide their lunch bill.
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I included some mention of this in Impressions. It seems that counting credits is a holdover from the early days of D&D copper counting. In most settings that inspire gaming settings (or, at least, the ones that inspire me), money doesn't really matter. It might be a key motivator for the characters, but the actual amount of cash they have never matters. The crew of Serenity needs money to keep the ship flying; Han Solo needs a big score to pay off his debt to Jabba; Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser need fat sacks of loot to pay for wine and wenches; Dr. Jones needs to sell his latest artifact finds in order to fund his next expedition; and so on. In all of these cases, it never matters how much money is involved beyond vague descriptions like "a massive debt" or "a major haul" or "enough to limp to the next planet and look for more work". What is gained by counting the pennies?

In my old college gaming days, I have only a few vague memories of adventures where counting money was important:

• In one particularly excellent impromptu AD&D2 session, the adventure began with the PCs being hired--one by one--for 5 gold pieces each to act as caravan guards for a really shady merchant. I remember this because we all thought 5 was pretty cheap but the GM (an odd fellow named Straka) explained in an aside that 5gp was a lot of money in his setting. I happened to negotiate a better deal and got promised 10gp. The actual amount didn't matter. The important thing was that we were getting a suspiciously great wage and I was getting double. (We never did get paid anyway.) 
• In the long-running D&D game (run by the inimitable Alan), penny-pinching was the order of the day. Everyone hated it but Alan demanded exact accounting so our good comrade Kevin took it upon himself to squeeze every last drop out of the treasure that we could get. I think he took it as a personal challenge to keep the party from getting cheated by any NPCs who might overcharge or rob them. My fondest memories of that game are just of hanging out with the other players and chatting while Kevin and Alan haggled over every little thing the party wanted to buy. They seemed to like it even though it frustrated them. Looking back, we probably should have just said "Hey, let's just assume that we always get a fair price unless otherwise specified. If there's a greedy merchant or thief who wants to rip us off or rob us, let us know and we'll play out that negotiation or robbery attempt. The rest of the time, let's just skip it." 
• In a short-lived AD&D2 campaign (run by Grote), we effectively "won". In the introductory adventure, Grote wanted to give us each a magic item appropriate to our class or background as our reward for completing the adventure instead of just some random treasure. I don't remember what my character (Skank Mcgonigal) got, but I think Sir Roderick Lanternjaw the paladin got some kind of shield or sword. Our friend, Sellers, was playing some kind of third-party Alchemist class that we found in a pamphlet in our gaming club's library. Sellers got a philosopher's stone for his reward and then he revealed that it was much more efficient than normal because of his class' special abilities. When we calculated how much base metal he could transmute into gold, it turned out to be a ludicrous sum beyond the wildest dreams of avarice. We went from struggling adventurers one day to wealthier than kings the next. We decided to buy titles from the king and fund an expedition to colonize a new territory for our country. We hired an army of soldiers, laborers, farmers, engineers, and even some wizards, then we set sail and started to build a town and a castle and we set about taming the wilderness. Money was no longer an issue but we still had a lot of fun and motivation and adventure. We couldn't instantly solve our problems with the money but we quickly gave up on asking if we could afford things. We all agreed that there was no point in keeping track of our money anymore. Instead of asking if we could afford things, we had to ask "how long will it take?" That was usually more interesting anyway. 

In all my gaming experiences where money came up, the exact amount never mattered. We got enough to keep going (or enough to get going for character's motivated by greed who need something to lure them into action) or we got enough to completely change our situation. It wasn't always as drastic as buying our own country, but sometimes it was just something like "for the next season, we're going to hobnob with the middle class and sleep in our own beds and eat delicious meals at the inn".

Skills are what you do.

In working on the skills this week, I've decided to make some minor cosmetic changes and a fundamental mechanical change. First, I've decided to make all skill names into verbs for consistency. Secondly, I've eliminated some skills. I made an earlier post about how I thought "Notice" was unnecessary and counterproductive as a skill. I've made the same decision in regards to "Investigation" and "Survival". Investigation should be pursued through the use of other skills that are appropriate to the situation; survival can be replaced by a setting-specific knowledge (the Know skill) or talent.

The big change is that I've decided to cut the association between skills and attributes. I was trying to arrange the skills so that they wouldn't all be concentrated under Cunning and Finesse and I finally decided that there were too many justifications for placing a skill under one attribute or another. Is intimidation a product of projecting a strong personality to socially dominate someone? Or, is it more important to have a powerful physical presence? Could you intimidate someone by simply being clever enough to know which psychological buttons to push in order to manipulate them? Instead of choosing one "right" way to use a skill by tying it to an attribute, I've decided to just cut them all loose.

This loses the effect of some skills being easier to learn for characters that have good attributes in that area, which I liked. However, I think this will cut down on bookkeeping questions like "If I raise an attribute first, the skill will be cheaper. If I raise the skill first then the attribute, can I get the points back?" I don't really want the order to matter that much, because I don't want to encourage "character building" like that. Designing a character should be a matter of choosing what skills and attributes they have and not what order is the most efficient to learn them in. That way lies the madness of D20 arguments about whether your rogue/fighter should take rogue first for the extra skills at first level or take fighter first for the immediate use of the weapon and armor proficiencies (and never mind the fact that either combination is inferior to just playing a spellcaster).

I liked that skill discount but I don't think it would be missed in actual play, so I'm happy to cut it out to options more versatile.

Eureka moment

I've just had a eureka moment while in the shower. I was thinking about the changes I made recently to the damage and healing system. (Specifically, I altered the way damage is recorded and finally settled on how it is healed and recovered.) Then, I suddenly remembered that I still have unresolved issues with how to balance the Powers system with everything else (i.e. how much does it cost to learn a Power compared to raising an Attribute, etc.) and I realized that I could link the two together. This is just a rough idea right now, but I haven't made a post in a while, so I'm going to put my notes here before I forget this idea.

The damage system: Each character will have Facets* that determine their state of health. Characters would have a Body Facet to represent their physical health or "hit points" in most settings (obviously in a setting like Wraith: The Oblivion where everyone is a ghost, this would be replaced with another Facet). In settings like Cthulhu Mythos investigations, there would be a Sanity Facet to represent mental stability. In settings where wealth is important but counting pennies isn't, there could be a Wealth Facet to represent how much money a character can throw around without denting their wallet. Not every setting will need or use every Facet. Facets will be part of the setting rules that must be chosen for any given campaign.

(*Originally, I called these Aspects, but I decided to change it to avoid confusion with FATE's Aspects which are more like Van Gogh's Talents and Drawbacks. I'm not really that familiar with Fate. I've only really read the Tri-fold FATE pamphlet made by Michael Moceri and absorbed a lot through osmosis by reading gaming forums like rpg.net. Still, I think that there may be some overlap between FATE and Van Gogh so I want to avoid using the same terms for different things.)

So how does this tie in to the Powers? Powers could be, er, powered by "damage" to different Facets. Warriors with special combat techniques could exhaust themselves by causing light damage to their Body Facet (or Chi in a wuxia "jiang hu" setting) when they use their techniques, so they can't use too many fancy moves without taking a break to rest. In a Cthulhu Mythos setting, using magic spells would be harmful to your Sanity Facet. In a D&D style fantasy world where magic has a limited number of uses per day but no real downsides, spells would damage your Magic Facet; once your Magic is depleted, you can't cast any more spells until you sleep/study/meditate/pray but your health and well-being is otherwise completely unaffected (because in a setting like that, the Magic Facet isn't used for anything else except limiting how much magic someone can use in a limited span of time).

Powers could be altered and adjusted for each setting simply by adjusting the Facet that powers them. In a D&D style world of Vancian magic, spells would be powered by draining the Magic Facet. The only drawback to draining the Magic Facet is not being to cast spells until it recovers, but recovering it is a simple matter of resting overnight and studying your spellbook: magic has no harmful effects but its use is limited. In a Cthulhu Mythos campaign, spells drain a resource that does more than just power your spells--it keeps you sane--and recovering Sanity is a slow and difficult process involving extensive therapy with an alienist who's probably not really equipped to handle your particular issues: magic is detrimental to anyone who wants to stay sane. In a superhero setting where all the important characters have a set of powers, they might not cost anything to use (because powers are always available unless it's a special "Captain X loses his powers to Yellow Flubtonite" collector's issue) but they have to be aimed and controlled with a skill.

Powers can also be controlled by the kind of damage they do to a Facet. A power that does light damage to a Facet can be used repeatedly because that damage is equivalent to being winded and disappears between scenes when characters can catch their breath for a few minutes. Powers that do more serious damage will have to be used more sparingly because it will be more difficult to recover the damage they do.

Another batch of icons

This is my latest batch of icons. I think I'll do a couple more and then work on making some page borders. I think page decorations and borders are important and serve a functional purpose. I've seen some badly done books that wasted a lot of space with extravagant borders, but well done books have distinctive borders that help the reader to navigate through the book (i.e. it's easy to flip to the right section when each section has its own easily distinguished look). I'm getting a lot more comfortable with Bezier curves which is the tool I really need to draw the way I want. Ideally, I'd be able to use some kind of pencil sketching action but I don't have a tablet. Bezier curves offer me the next best thing: I can make a rough outline and then poke and prod it into the shape I want.

Inkscape's growing on me

Just a quick note before sleeping. My first attempt to make an icon with Inkscape took most of a day. Then I made three icons in a few hours. Today, I cranked out several icons (about six or seven), one after another. Some of them are fairly complex below the surface but I could make them quickly. I finally figured out how to use Bezier curves. Previous attempts always resulted in tangled knots that I quickly deleted. This time I got exactly the shapes I wanted. I might have to revisit my first icon and see if I can make a better one in twenty minutes. I'll post some images later. Now it's time for sleep; long day at work tomorrow (and maybe more icons during my lunch break).

Passion Icons

I just came back from a lovely holiday to a tropical island. I relaxed on white sand beaches and swam in blue seas. I climbed up a mountain into the jungle and swam in a grotto under a waterfall. I saw a little baby monkey that grabbed my finger with his little baby monkey hands. I drank wines made of fruits I can't identify. It was nice long weekend. I had one more day before I had to go back to work, so I spent this afternoon working on more icons in the same style as the Rage Passion icon I showed earlier.

I figured out some shortcuts in Inkscape that made the process much easier this time. It's still less WYSIWYG than I would like, but I'm working around that. The program offers total freedom in where to place elements, but I don't want total freedom. I don't need to be able to draw a line anywhere; I just need to be able to draw a line from here to there (where "here" and "there" are specific points such as "tangential to this arc" or "on the point of this angle"). I often found myself zooming in very close to position points manually when I felt that the program should really have a "snap to" option. It seems to allow snapping to a grid, but I haven't discovered any functionality for snapping to other shapes.

I found some shortcuts for doing some of the things I wanted. For example, instead of trying to draw a shape by assembling it's component parts, I found that I could use the drawing tools to quickly overlap some preset shapes, use the Fill tool to outline and color the space where they overlap, and then delete them to leave the filled space. For example, in the Noble Passion icon (the spiral sun), the rays of the sun were made by drawing a star (with the star/polygon tool) with points extending around the central spiral and then a circle (with the circle tool) around the central spiral too. I filled the corners of the star then deleted the circle that formed the bottoms of the rays and the star that formed the points, which left the rays behind. It was much faster and neater than trying to draw and resize and rotate a bunch of triangles. I wasted a lot of time trying to do that before figuring out the shortcut.

In a previous post, I showed the Rage Passion icon that I made. Here are the black and white versions of the Rage icon along with the icons for the other Passions: Fear, Noble, and Focus. In game terms, the Passions represent major facets of the character's personality (what they hate most, what they fear most, what inspires them to be their best, and what do they most enjoy doing). They provide a description of the character's personality and serve as a source of free Drama Points that can be used to boost a character's abilities in a scene. If your globe-trekking archaeologist absolutely hates Nazis and is terrified of snakes, he'll never have to worry about being short of Drama Points when a Nazi with a pet cobra shows up. Any opinions on my artistic abilities?

Rage Icons

I had a lot of free time today so I worked on the icons that I tried sketching out earlier. I have some ideas for icons that I sketched in pencil in a notebook. I did a relatively clean version of one of them on a sheet of white paper and took a picture of it with my phone (Samsung Galaxy SII). After a minute, it had been automatically uploaded to Google+, Ubuntu One, and Dropbox and the latter two both downloaded it my laptop. Then I opened the photo in Inkscape. This is where things got frustrating.

I know that there has to be an easier way to do this and I'm sure I did it the hard way. The icon is made entirely out of circles and arcs. I'm sure I could have just traced the picture automatically (in fact, a tutorial on how to do that is on my to-do list) but I thought it would be easy to just draw the arcs and circles on the photo myself with the Ellipse tool. That's what I did, but I didn't like it much. I don't like the way the Ellipse tool draws circles. You click and drag across the canvas to draw the circle but it creates a circle inscribed inside the square formed by the starting and stopping points that you click and drag across. I would have really preferred to click on a point where I want one edge of the circle to be and then drag to expand the circle. Having to drag a square that contains the circle meant that the circle always ended up in the wrong place so I would have to switch to the Selector tool to move it around and get it into position. I think I eventually got the hang of it but the final product still looks kind of rough to me. This is the color and black & white versions of the Rage Passion icon I came up with.

Redoing Core Rules examples

(I've been having some trouble connecting to Blogger. I can see my dashboard and stats, but I can't see the blog pages (mine or anyone else's) unless I connect with my smartphone. I'm using wifi tethering to make this post from my laptop.)

So, this past week, I didn't have much time to spend on the things I wanted to do. Some nights I only had 20 minutes or so to do some editing. I'm trying to trim the core rules down to be clearer to understand and easier to present. I'm looking at things that I wrote a long time ago when I started. I thought that this section was done but now that I look at it again with fresh eyes, I can see that many of these examples are just terrible. I need to redo a lot of them. They have too much going on; they don't focus only on the point that needs to be illustrated. I think I wanted to show the example cases in a larger context, but now I realize that it's better to have a more focused example to just make the point clear. Also, some of them are just not very interesting situations.

I'm having trouble visualizing how I want to lay this section out. I want to make it a little more graphical rather than just blocks of text. But how do I lay this out to fit everything on the page that should go together? It's hard to do. I'm thinking of using some mind-mapping or diagramming software to try laying things out in a simple flowchart or something, but I might just go completely low tech with it. I learned layout back in the days of light boxes when "cut and paste" literally referred to scissors and glue. I'm thinking of just printing things out, cutting them up, and arranging things on my floor to plan how I want to lay them out before using my layout software to make the digital pages. Doing things fully digitally would be nice, but it's just too hard with a small landscape laptop screen and a touchpad. A big monitor (or two) and a decent mouse (or better yet, some kind of stylus and tablet) would make this a lot easier but I don't have the work space for a setup like that. I don't even have a desk!

During my recent attempt to redo the character sheet, I discovered that I don't like the damage system. The damage system has been there since the beginning in a provisional "good enough for now and I'll sort it out later" form but I don't like it now that I really look at it. I've got an idea forming in my head right now for how I'd like to handle it, but it's not solidified yet. Maybe that will be next on my "To Do" list after I clean up the examples and settle on the layout for the core rules section. I already know how I want to handle healing, but I need to sort out the damage system before I can do the healing in detail.

I'm starting to wonder if I'm just being a perfectionist and fretting too much over little things.

Icons

I spent today hunting for icons that I could use to label sections of the character sheet and, possibly, section headers for the text. All the half decent icons cost $45+ for a commercial license. I'm not willing to drop that kind of money on something that isn't a perfect fit. I saw plenty of things that gave me ideas of what I would like to see in an ideal icon, so I might have to make my own.

I'm kind of stumped on what to use for the three Passions: anger, fear, and heroic. I considered several themes. Elemental (fire for anger, ice for fear, and sun/star for nobility and self sacrificing heroism); animals (snake or spider for fear, lion for heroic, and bear our honey badger or something for anger); emoticons (angry, scared, and determined faces). Still not sure what way to go, but leaning toward some variation of the elemental set.

Any suggestions?

Designing from the sheet

I've heard people say that the character sheet is one of the first things they look at in a new game. I agree with that sentiment. When I first started playing RPGs back in 19*cough*, there weren't any character sheets. My friends and I spent a lot of time trying different arrangements of information on notebook paper. Some tried for thoroughness and completeness of information. Some tried to be succinct. I liked the big complicated sheets in theory, but found them confusing in practice. I still distinctly remember trying to fit an AD&D character with all the gear and powers on a 3x5 inch index card. I managed it for my thief, but not a wizard. (Looking back on it, this may be why I rarely played wizards: too many things to track.)

In my recent revisions of the skills list, I decided to redesign the character sheet I had thrown together. I want everything on the sheet to be meaningful but easy to see and understand without a lot of calculating. It occurred to me that I should clean up the character sheet as a tool to aid me in cleaning up the system. I think the best way to explain the system to new players is to show them a good character sheet and tell them what all the parts are and how they are used.

When I'm reading a new game, I usually find myself flipping back to the sheet as I read anyway, so I might as well build the explanation around the sheet. I remember how easy the Call of Cthulhu game (don't recall which edition we used but it was after the 1st) made character creation. The double page spread explaining the steps of character creation in relation to the parts of the sheet really made it simple to understand. A picture is worth a thousand words and I'm hoping the sheet will help me trim a few thousand words of explanatory text.

It should also help me tighten up the game in general. I have a tendency to start simple and then add bloat fairly quickly, which I have to trim out later. I'll have a cool idea and toss it in and later I'll take it out when it doesn't fit. Arranging the elements on the sheet should help me realize what is important to keep and what I can toss out. Focusing on what the finished sheet should look like and be used in actual play is a good easy to keep the development focused. Once I get things sorted out, I'll make a nice looking version in Inkscape and post it for comment.

(In blogging news, it seems that blogspot is blocked here again. I can see my dashboard and visitor traffic, but not the actual posts. That's why I haven't posted in the past few days. Once again, I'm posting from my phone so kindly overlook any bizarre phrases that may result from auto correction.)

Pay attention! See what I did there?

(I'm posting this from the new Blogger app I just installed on my phone. If I say something really bizarre like "purple monkey dishwasher", just chalk it up to predictive text gone awry.)

I spent some time revisiting the Attributes and Skills section today. I think I'm going to cut "Notice" as a skill. In my experience, perception skills have always been an automatic choice for players because a character with higher perception skills is always better. Of course, I'm not counting all the times that jerk GMs pulled the "you fail because you succeeded" trick (e.g. "congratulations, you can clearly make out the details of the sanity blasting abomination and lose extra sanity points" or "you successfully spotted the beady eyes of the cockatrice spying on you from the bushes, so you turn to stone").

When I think back to all the campaigns I've been in, it seems that perception skills were called for by the GM more than any other skills. In D&D 3, it was considered madness not to take max ranks in Listen and Spot if you had access to them as class skills. In other games, I list count of how many times I've heard "roll perception" in response to a player's question. I've come to realize that I don't like this for several reasons.

1. Taking the Notice skill or not doesn't make characters different; it just makes a character better or worse than another. Choosing between "awesome" and "awful" is not a meaningful choice.

2. Why should someone trained to recognize forged documents by looking at the minutiae of handwriting be better able to spot an ambush than a grizzled veteran of numerous military campaigns against the goblins and their irregular hit-and-run skirmishing tactics?

3. When the GM constantly defaults to "roll perception" in response to player questions about a scene, item, or situation, it cheapens all the more interesting (and more character-defining) skills that the PCs have.

I once made a character for a Star Wars D6 game who had "tactics" because it fit his background as a former lieutenant in the imperial army. He never used it. In situations where it might have been useful, perception was called for instead. Could I see how the squad of stormtroopers is deploying and identify their most likely next move? Sure. Forget about all that knowledge of tactics and imperial military doctrine: just roll perception to see if you can spot their positions and make out their movement clearly.

4. When players have access to a "spot something important" skill, it's too tempting to just default to it instead of thinking of things from the character's perspective and trying to use more specific skills. Why use your piloting skill to see of that ship has inconsistent registration numbers? Why use your mechanical expertise to look for signs of recent damage or modification? Why use "bureaucracy" to chat up the customs officer for clues about who was on that ship? Just "roll perception" and hope for random clues to spray from the GM like candy from a pinata!

I don't think Notice is needed as a skill. Noticing things can be done with a relevant skill. Is that swordsman really favouring one leg our is he faking it? Roll Fighting to gauge his stance. How many shots did he fire from his revolver and could he reasonably hit us at this range? Roll Shooting. Are we walking into an ambush? Make a check with your tactical or stealth skills (or even Shooting to recognize the best lanes for sniper fire).

Cutting the bland Notice skill will leave more points to spend on things that give a character more flavour without sacrificing the functionality the character would have gained from the Notice skill. For keen-eyed, paranoid scouts and twitchy lookouts who spot everything, there are Talents that can grant them a bonus to spotting things in their signature roles: +1D to perception checks "while taking point" or "while searching for traps", etc.

Spent the day fighting with websites that wouldn't load properly because the Google API server has been down. Most of my Blogger dashboard isn't working yet, so this is just a quick post to say that I'm still working. I'll try to do a real post tomorrow about what I did today in between hitting the "reload" button on my web browser.

Cleaning up some loose notes

I use Linux for my computer (specifically, a Gnome 3 desktop environment on top of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS for those who are interested). Linux has a nice little note-taking program called Tomboy that makes it easy to cross-reference notes because it automatically creates hyperlinks to other notes when you mention them. For example, I have a note called "layout" where I put all my ideas for page layouts; when I type "layout" in another note, the word "layout" automatically becomes a link to the "layout" note. I stopped using it because the Ubuntu One cloud service (similar to Dropbox) stopped supporting Tomboy's online syncing. In addition, the only app for my phone that could sync with Tomboy would only allow reading notes and not editing/creating them. I found that to be only slightly better than useless.

I started using Evernote instead. Evernote doesn't automatically link your notes together like Tomboy, but it does have some other useful features. It's available as a desktop app (which I have installed on my Windows 7 partition for when I need to boot into Windows for something) and as a web application (which I have pinned in a Chrome tab so it's always at hand). It allows the use of tags to make it easy to categorize notes and sort them later. And it has a very neat browser extension that allows you to select part or all of a webpage and save it as a note. I've clipped a lot of interesting snippets with this feature: online articles, forum posts, pictures, or other things that sparked an idea.

I didn't have a lot of time to work on the game this evening, but I did try to do something useful to keep my promise. I exported my Tomboy notes to .HTML and put them into my cloud folders for safe keeping. Then I opened them in Chrome and clipped their contents to Evernote. My next project will be to use the Evernote app on my phone to sort through and upload scans of my loose paper notes and tattered notebooks. This will let me put everything in one place to more easily sort it out and put things together.

In the past, I always wanted to have hard copies because I've lost files in the past to hard drive failures or lost USB drives. Using paper notebooks felt safer to me, but now I'm satisfied that I have enough redundancy to go completely digital. I've got all my files backed up in several places at once (Evernote, Dropbox, Box, Ubuntu One, Google Drive, and--on the rare occasions I boot into Windows 7--everything gets backed up to Skydrive too). I've even got a portable 1TB hard drive for back ups too, so I'm not really worried about losing my files anymore.

Back on track

I've been making some minor progress on collecting some more art. Here and there, I've been compiling a list of small tweaks (minor additions or clarifications) and big changes (eliminating or combining major sections that might be kind of redundant). I've also wasted a couple of weekends being unproductive or just distracted by other things, so I'm going to try a new productivity technique called "Don't break the chain". Hopefully, that will help me get things done a little more quickly. The basic idea is that I'll do something useful every day and post it here. If I miss a day, I'll "break the chain" and... uh. I'll wear a scarlet P for Procrastination on my chest or something. (I'm still not sure about the penalty, but keep an eye on this space for daily updates.)

The Die Cap

By default, all rolls are limited to a maximum of 6 dice. Any dice lost to the Die Cap are converted to Free Wagers, the ability to retroactively Wager (adjust the difficulty of a roll for extra Advantage on a success). I feel that a Die Cap of 6 is perfect for any of the settings or campaigns I would like to run and I don't anticipate writing any settings or supplements that will use a different Die Cap, so I'm cutting the section about adjusting or eliminating the cap. For those that are interested, this is the section on alternate caps that I'm cutting out:

"The Die Cap can be adjusted or eliminated if desired for a particular setting, but this will have an effect on levels of success. A lower Die Cap means that highly skilled characters will have their maximum level of success reduced (because they will not be able to roll as many successes), but the Free Wagers will ensure that they perform more consistently near their peak because they will have more Advantage on their rolls. A higher Die Cap means that highly skilled characters will be capable of scoring more successes (each die is potentially 0-2 successes), but they will need to risk wagering to make full use of those extra successes."

Scissors and Glue

Wow! Has it really been three months since I last updated this blog? The time really flew by. I was too busy with my regular job to do much work on the game, but in the past three months I have managed to get a few pieces of art together (although still quite short of what I'd like to get for a final product). I also have a week off and a few leads on where to get more art, so hopefully I'll have some good news on that front soon.

Today I also fired up my copy of Inkscape and played around for a while to test different layout patterns. This is going to be a digital release so landscape orientation might be easier to read on a monitor (especially on a laptop), but portrait orientation feels more like a book to me. One thing that always bothers me about reading PDFs on a laptop is when the page is laid out for reading when you see the whole thing at once. I hate having to constantly scroll up and down to follow the text down one column and then back up to the top of the page for the next column. If you zoom in (or fit the page width to the window), you usually have to do that and I want to avoid that. I think I've settled on a three section page that seems to avoid all that scrolling up and down.

The typical page will be divided horizontally into three sections each about 10 cm high. These sections will be used in various ways to break up the block of text:

• two columns of text for easy reading
• a chart
• a callout box with commentary on the rules
• examples of the rules in use
• illustrations
• one column of text and a small illustration or graphic
• Etc.

Tomorrow, I'll get my copy of Scribus out again and review some tutorial videos on how to use it, then I'll try putting together some "lorem ipsum" pages to see how well the format works.

Stuck

I've been having some difficulties lately. I was busy with my regular job and the holidays, so I had little time to spend on Impressions. When I tried to update the blog, I found that blogger was temporarily inaccessible. Today, I finally sat down to get some more work done on the game and I realized something. Every time I try to do some more writing, I don't add anything new. I just re-read what I have already and clean up or rearrange some parts. I guess the writing is pretty much done. At this point, I'm just shuffling passages around to try to make it flow better and tweaking some examples. I think I might just be making things worse at this point by continuing to fiddle with the text. It's time to stop padding and start editing and organizing everything.

I'd really like to start doing the layout for the PDF, but I don't have any art yet. I'm not sure if I should start doing the layout and just leave gaps where I can insert the art later or if I should focus on getting some art somehow. My budget for the whole project is zero, so I can't just buy or commission some art. I'm not very good at drawing, but I might have to take matters into my own hands on this one. I'm considering making a rough, bare bones, "zeroth edition" with some really basic (bad and made by me) art just to see how everything fits together on the page.