God Slayers - TTRPG - Character Sheets and Attributes

Character Sheet!

Do you like character sheets? I like character sheets! Let’s talk character sheets.

This is the first most roughest possible draft of our character sheet. (I guess not technically the first most roughest, but certainly the first most roughest that is worth showing to anyone). I'm not much of a graphic designer, turns out, so... yeah, it's rough. But I’ve opted to limit it as best I can to only one page, in fact only one side of one page, and it should contain enough space for all the things a player may want to track over the course of the game (or so I think).

So, using lil Riley as our guinea pig, let’s go through some of the sections here, giving a brief overview of some important bits. I’ll cover more stuff in future posts, cuz there’s a lot to talk about, and I don’t want to overwhelm you with a massive info dump. And yeah, granted, some subsystems are still pretty raw, details are rough, maaaany things still exist in a state of To-Be-Balanced (honestly balance is the last thing on my mind right now,) some stuff hasn’t been updated yet for changes I made later, some stuff just simply isn’t done yet, and other stuff is kinda resting on the chopping block in a Might-Need-To-Be-Cut state. I even noticed some issues and lingering questions I have to answer as I was filling out this sheet. BUTT, the point is to get your eyes on this and hear your thoughts, so I can maybe shift my focus away from the little, possibly inconsequential things that are bugging ME and focus more on the things that matter to YOU. Now let’s move on before I seize up even more and drown in my doubts and uncertainties!

A Picture of Health, not a Spreadsheet of Numbers

So from the very start, looking at this sheet, I want people to get a nice picture of their character, and not just see a big ol’ meaningless math test. With just a single glance, I want you to be able to get a pretty good sense for your character’s overall status. A “healthy” character will not have a lot of markings on their character sheet. They’ll have a lot of empty boxes, and their character sheet will look nice and neat. Over time, as they accumulate pain, injuries, trauma and other problems, all slowly building up more and more, their character sheet will start to reflect that by having more and more Xs and markings on it. It pleases me to think that as beat up as character sheets often get from so many repeated writings and erasings, the remnants of such markings will almost become the character’s scars in a way.

As you can see in our example, poor Riley is currently hungry, tired and sick, she’s suffering from pain, a ton of stress, and she’s nursing some burns and cuts. These are all very normal things that we’ve almost all experienced before in some form. We can all understand what that means. Compared to friggin Hit Points, where despite a lifetime of playing RPGs I still don’t know what the hell hit points are even supposed to represent. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a floating health bar over my head, and I have no personal experience subtracting 37 points from my IRL red goo pool. Gods damned frikken hit points I swear. But I digress. Hunger, Thirst, Rest, Sickness, Pain, Stress, Wounds, removed from context these are all things we understand, and what I hope is that a player doesn’t need to have read my whole rulebook cover to cover to imagine how the things we see on this sheet might affect poor Riley here if they were to try roleplaying her right now. We have an immediate sense for how she might be feeling, and what she might want. (Probably food and a nap).

Core Attributes

Next let’s talk about Attributes. These are core to the game, probably the most important thing on the page that’s needed to actually play the game, and they are the defining statistics of your character. There are only five Attributes, but they are divided into two smaller scores, Active and Passive (pending, you know, better words for such things, if better words indeed do exist), and then those two scores are totaled up in the middle. Your Total score is often used to define stable, static elements of your character, or to compare a character with others for different reasons. (Example: The character with the higher Total Grace is considered quicker overall than those with lower Total Grace.)

Your Active score represents your ability to consciously use the attribute, purposefully and with effort. Your Passive score for each attribute represents your ability to use it subconsciously, reactively, or defensively when things happen to your character without their awareness or active participation. Your Active and Passive scores will be the scores you are using to pay down Threat for any given roll of the dice. Your Active and Passive scores are also the scores that you will increase over the course of the game.

So, for example, Riley’s Total Brawn is 5, which is pretty low, with a balanced spread of 2 points in the Active score and 3 in the Passive one. This means when she tries to push open a rusty door, she would use her 2 Active Brawn points (representing physical power) to pay down the Threat for that check. Then perhaps she rolled a very high amount of Threat and failed catastrophically, and the GM decides her efforts to open the door caused some nearby shelving to topple onto her, she might need to resist damage from the shelving, and would use her 3 Passive Brawn (representing your toughness) vs the Threat to try and shrug off the damage and/or ignore the Pain. The player could argue for the use of Passive Instinct or Grace instead, to either notice and react to the falling shelves or for the ability to simply dodge out of the way before she's hit by them. In this case, I'd allow either of those, and it would make more sense for Riley anyway.

So I think that gives you enough of an idea of what Brawn does, but what about the others?

Grace represents your ability to move (active) or your dodge/flexibility (passive). In our example, Riley is pretty well-balanced with a high Total Grace.

Wits is your ability to solve problems or think critically (active) and your knowledge (passive). Riley is a genius, and she has phenomenal scores in Wits, but she leans a bit more on the problem-solving side over having a pool of experience and knowledge.

Empathy is your ability to interact with others (active) and how you carry yourself/how others see you (passive). Riley has a terrible Empathy, and isn’t great at talking to people, but by leaning more into the Passive side, she’s a bit less likely to offend people by simply walking into a room or being around.

Instinct is your ability to use all five senses to explore your surroundings (active) and your ability to respond or react to anything you weren’t otherwise aware of (passive). Riley’s Instincts are pretty good, and fairly well-balanced, but she’s a little better at reacting to stimuli than she is at actively looking and searching for things.

So why not just have the 5 attributes and use those? Well, I find splitting it up allows for more flexibility in character customization. Originally when I had just five total attributes, period, characters who just wanted to be strong at character creation would all have the same stat spread, which can feel kind of icky in a system without distinct classes. Now you can have two players in the party with a high Brawn, but one can be more punchy-focused and the other will be more of a tanky boi.

I believe these five attributes, thanks to the two different ways of using them, should account for pretty much everything I can imagine a player might need to check for. If you can think of anything it seems to be missing, lemme know!

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And I think that’s about all for today, I wrote a lot more, but again I don’t want to infodump on you all. (I kinda did anyway, sorry!) Thanks for reading, lemme know your thoughts, you know how to reach me, and lemme know which section of the character sheet you want me to cover in more detail next!