During character generation, you'll set up your character's sheet in our RPG system. Feel free to ask the staff for assistance in doing so — indeed, we expect to work closely with players throughout the character generation process, since many players will choose to heavily customize their characters, requiring the introduction of new and unique abilities.
A character sheet is divided into the following sections:
Stats and Gifts are bought with RPG Points. Lores are normally bought with something called Focus, but when you finish character generation, a GM will set some starting lores for free based on your background.
Stats, Bonuses, Tokens
Stats are your basic abilty level at things where you have no outstanding talent. You can be good or even impressive using nothing but your basic stats, but if someone else has the same stat and gifts that provide gift-bonuses, you are likely to come second much of the time. Equally, if a coded token (see tokens) gives someone a bonus, if all else is equal, you are not favored to win, although you are unlikely in either case to lose all the time. There is no efficient way to minmax the system, and players are advised to play by what they want their story to be, not by numbers.
A Starting Sheet
All characters begin play with 100 points. You do not need to spend all your points during character generation — in fact, we highly recommend that you hold some in reserve. (20 points is a good number to reserve.)
New characters earn fast "catch-up" advancement of roughly two points a week, which slows down when they reach the point level of older characters. With catch-up advancement, you can expect to be at a total of around 150 points within a year of beginning play (i.e., you'll earn around 50 points of advancement), so plan accordingly.
We recommend that you develop your sheet in the following way:
- Talk to a member of the staff about what Gifts you want for your character, and buy those first.
- Decide how many points to reserve for additional Gifts that you want to learn after you go IC.
- Buy stats with whatever points are left.
Getting Approved
Once you've finished setting up your sheet, use +cg/done to indicate this, and a staff member can approve you to go IC.
As we've mentioned a few times previously, and want to emphasize: You almost certainly want to talk to a staff member well before this point. While it's possible to create a character using nothing other than the pre-existing gifts, it's likely that you'll want more customization than that.
Some players might not have much of an idea of exactly what they want to do with their character prior to going IC. That's fine. Leave some or all of your points unspent. We can retroactively work out a sheet later, if need be — you just can't claim any abilities that you don't have on your sheet at the time. Or, you can simply play that your character's learning a whole bunch of new things, spending the points as you find reasons to do so. It's up to you.