What are the Components of a Character Sheet?
TBD: Screenshot of character sheet with labeled sections:
- Player and Character Name
The top line is a section for the player to claim their character sheet and for others to know what name that player prefers to be called when spoken to out-of-character.
The next line is for the character’s display name, which they present to the general public in-game. - Faction, Title, Rank
If the character is a part of any in-game factions, list the faction, the character’s role within that faction, and their rank within the faction here. Higher ranked characters can order lower-ranked characters to perform specific tasks in exchange for esoterics. - Legacies
Legacies are optional supernatural traits that provide unique and powerful merits to a character, but also come with a unique disadvantages. A character can have up to 2 legacies, but is not required to have any. - Attributes
Attributes determine the number of dice a character has when they need to instinctually avoid a danger or notice something. Their values range from 0 to 3. - Skills
Skills demonstrate a character’s trained and accumulated experience in different fields of general knowledge. They often overlap, but although player may choose one over another, the effect and position may also vary with a slight difference in approach.- Overlapping and “Debatable” Skills
Skills should be broadly applicable, and many times a player may have several that could apply for a situation, or some that only kind of apply. If players agree that the best skill a character has only kind of applies for a situation, or otherwise are not able to agree and no judicator is available, they should apply half the skill’s level rounded up. - Areas of Focus
Several skills, such as Craft and Research, require the player to select an Area of Focus when investing points in them. These areas of focus narrow down a character’s knowledge within the skills. When a player attempts an action with the skill, either the action must fall within the broader knowledge that any person with that skill should have, or they must have an appropriate focus that applies. - Specialty Skills
While witchgates has a list of skills for players to select, players can also create their own skills unique to their character based on that character’s knowledge and experiences. These are especially useful for characters that want to have a focused fighting style or explicit expertise on a certain topic.
- Overlapping and “Debatable” Skills
- Miss-fortune
Miss-Fortune acts as the silver lining to failure, and a check to prevent bad-luck from steamrolling a character. On every character sheet, each Attribute has three notches beside it to record missfortune. These are marked when an action check fails; the highest result as a miss. Players can record a missfortune in any attribute, but should try to mark it under whichever attribute most closely relates to the action.
After making an action check, before any consequences are decided and narrated, a player may spend (erase) missfortune to increase the result of a card/die by 1. Players may spend up to three missfortune on a single action check, distributing the bonus across results or on a single one.
MissFortune allows misfortune to stack towards success and can help guarantee an important hit or avoid to avoid a twist. - Merits
Merits represent the core characteristics, abilities, gear, and companions that a character has at their disposal. They give characters unique options that most other players do not have, from new narrative abilities such as the ability to bend metal, to mechanic altering abilities that change how players read cards. Finally, merits mechanically act as a character’s primary health bar, whereby merit tracks are marked as a character has their gear get damaged, they take harm, or are otherwise rattled. - Esoterics
Esoterics are small items and creatures containing arcane energies that characters can further utilize for a wide variety of purposes. They differ from other generic items in their arcane qualities and difficulty to acquire. Esoterics fuel many character abilities, can be used for action checks, and can be used to acquire new temporary or longer-term abilities. - Temporary Merits
Temporary Merits (TMs) represent items and abilities that characters create from esoterics to provide a brief benefit. Each time a character benefits from a TM they mark 1 box on the TM’s track, removing the TM once all of its boxes are marked. - Injuries
Injuries represent long-term wounds, physical, mental, or spiritual, that can make regular tasks more difficult for them. If a character has an injury invoked against them, they must make their action check with a cut equal to that injury’s severity level. - Disadvantages
If a character has any legacies, they also take any of the disadvantages that come with those legacies. Each legacy has its unique flaws that balance their more powerful abilities. - Load
Load represents all of the items a character is carrying on them, aside of their worn gear, merits, and esoterics. It essentially affects how many times a player can say “I brought this thing with me.” - Experiences
Experiences can be listed by short, memorable sentences or phrases related to the situations that caused them. Players should gain a minor experience when ending a session after exiting at least one scene, and gain a major experience after ending a session and completing a major story moment.
Minor Experiences provide 1 XP while Major Experiences provide 3 XP.
Experiences are used to grow a character’s abilities beyond character creation. - Milestone Projects
Players can take a lengthy task to start or continue a milestone project of one of the following options. Players may be limited up to 3 XP on a milestone project within a single lengthy task.