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)

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.

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.

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.)