Creating a Game (Part 9) - Our Character Sheet

What do we need on it?

This game doesn't have attributes, it doesn't need them. It kind of has skills, in the form of core traits. Let's go throgh what we do have in the game, and start to sort out the varyingdegrees of importance and how those game elements are used.

Name

Every character needs a name, ths is typically one of their key factors. A name says a lot about a person, often explaining something about the person who chose the name (within the context of the story setting) and what they may have intended from the character. This could be just as true for parents choosing the name for their child, farmers givig a name to the scarecrow they've just built, or a person who as chosen their own name as a part of a change in their life direction. A name should be in a prominent location on the sheet, maybe the first thing your eye is drawn to at the centre or in the top-left. 

Stuffing

We do't have a lot of visually defining features for our scarecrows, and this is in some way synonymous with the way "race" is applied in many games (or "clan" in Vampire). This is one of the key factors in our character description, and while it doesn't have as much impact on the narrative as a lot of other elements, it does provide access to key traits which are directly used during the course of play. 

Age

Age is similar to Stuffing in this game. It's a key factor that plays more of a narrative role than a mechanical role, but it provides access to core traits that are drectly used during play.

Season

As Age and Stuffing. but in this case it provides access to a supernatural gift as well. Season is a more ephemeral concept, it doesn't so much inform the appearance of the Scarecrow as it informs the motivations and mentality of the creature. Season is probably a little more important than Age and Stuffing, so it might be an idea to place this centrally while sitting age and stuffing to either side of it. 

Accessories

Two accessories house two of the gifts possessed by the scarecrow (or help push them from a basic gift to a more advanced one). I'm seeing a drawing of a scarecrow, perhaps in the style of DaVinci's Vitruvian Man, with the player circling the accessory locations and indicating what benefits the has character has from this particular special feature. 

"Accessories" doesn't sound very mystical, rustic or befitting a scarecrow force of nature empowered by primordial magics from the edges of time and space. Moving forward, I'll be shifting this name to "Foci".since these are the items that focus the magic of the creature.

Core Traits

These are the parts of the character that give them bonuses to actually perform tasks. They tell us what a character is good at, and hint toward their history (or their intended duties). These could be near the other elements described so far, but I'm a bit torn about whether to place each of them near the character element that grants them, or whether to make a separate location on the character sheet and cluster them all together to make them easy to find during play. I think that second option works best. Maybe at the lower left, since we read left to right and they're used more often... 

Gifts

"Gifts" is the name that I'm gong to be using for the magical powers of the scarecrows. This works on a number of levels, because if someone has a special talent, they are uually described as being "gifted", and in addition to this, the powers are bestowed on the scarecrows by fey spirits as a part of the magic that rigs them to life. 

If I'm putting core traits in the lower left, then it makes sense to put the mystical gifts at the lower right. Again, it could be interesting to put them near the location of the eement that grants the gift, but that's probably too confusing dring play. Gifts have their own specific rules, so they'll get descriptive cards (as I indicated in a previous post), but the names of the gifts can go on the main character sheet as a reminder.  

Non-Core Benefits and Penalties

These regularly change during play Non-Core Penalties, so I'm notparticularlyputtingthem on the sheet unless they are really commonly used. Most iterations of FUBAR just have the non-core traits written on cards which are distributed as needed in the game.

Do we need anything else? 

How do characters change? ...and how is this monitored.

One of the key thing about the FUBAR fundamental play engine is that the traits applied to characters can be incredibly freeform. They have a specific flat mechanical advantage or disadvantage, but the actual descriptions an be incredibly variable. In this way, the varius traits probably have more impact on the story side of things than they have on the game side of things. It's also a way of making the game adaptable to the stories people tell with it, rather than forcing those stories to adapt to the system. That's a strength and a weakness of the game engine. Option paralysis.

With this flexbility, it would be futile to try to write trait cards for every possible advantage or disadvantage that a character could possibly achieve durng the course of a story. Whenever I run FUBAR at gaming conventions, I usually have two piles of cards. One pile prewritten with the most obvious benefits and penalties that you might expect to find in a session, and one pile blank to make things up as we go along.

Even though the traits are usually pretty obvious in their usefulness, I like trying to include a couple of keywords, or a phrase that clarifies how it might be gained and what types of tasks the trait impacts. We don't really need this, but a clarifyig word here and there can help solve disputes during the game later on. We don't need too muc structure here, just enough.

Obvious prewritten traits could include the following... 

Injured (negative trait)
    Gained: during combat, as a sacrifice in physical tasks
    Affects: physical tasks

Hidden (positive trait)
    Gained: when succesfully hiding
    Affects: opponent's ability to see or target you,

Scared (negative trait)
    Gained: when affected by a fear effect
    Affects: ability to think rationally in a situation

Armed (positive trait)
    Gained: when carrying a weapon you know how to use
    Affects: ability to deal injuries to someone, or cause intimidation.

Armoured (positive trait)
    Gained: when protected in some way
    Affects: ability to resist injur from someone, or from an environmental condition

Flat-footed (negative trait)
    Gained: when ambushed by an opponent,
    Affects: ability to react quickly or avoid injury from a person or situation

Confused (negative trait)
    Gained: when someone has done something that makes no sense
    Affects: ability to concentrate or think through an issue

Favour [SPECIFIC PERSON] (positive trait)
    Gained: when you do someothing for someone and they owe you
    Affects: your influence with this person in future

But we need to make sure we have some ready to go for the various mystic effects that we're planning to incorporate into the game, and a few that we can generally predict as likely possibilities.

Enchanted (positive trait)
    Gained: at the start of each session, this is the magic that empowers you.
    Affects: all attempts to empower mystical gifts

Drained (negative trait)
    Gained: when you need more magic to empower yourself
    Affects: All actions until you manage to find some way to refresh yourself

Lost (negative trait)
    Gained: when you fail an attempt to find something or someone
    Affects: your ability to find your way out, or way back home

[SPECIFIC] Allies (positive trait)
    Gained: when make friends within a specific subculture or group in the area
    Affects: your standing when dealingwith this group in future

Notoriety (negative trait)
    Gained: when you do something terrible and word of your deeds spreads
    Affects: your standing when dealing with a people in a specifc area

Home-ground (positive trait)
    Gained: when you have prepared and are in a territory that you know well
    Affects: almost anything that you can justify while in your territory

I'm probably going to throw a couple of these on the characters sheet with a spot for tokens to go. The trait is there as a reminder of what could be applied to your character, A token is placed face up on the space if you've got it. It's only really applicable for easily-understandable temporary effects such as being hidden, being scared, or being temporarily empowered by an ally, anything more substantial will get it's own trait card.    

How about permanent changes?

I'd suggested previously that the characters were basically reset at the end of a night, and it was more a case that the world changed aroud the characters rather than the characters themselves. Part of the reason for this is that the FUBAR system was originally written for one off games. It was meant for telling the kinds of Revenge stories that you'd see in a Tarantino movie, a cheesy 1970s exploitation flick, or John Wick. Later tinkering with the system came up with a few methods for developing characters in the game, but few of them really fit well for Scarecrows. 

In the game, non-core traits tend to be short term when they're first gained, then shift to long term and eventually permanent if you work at them. In this way certain items might become regular elements of the character that are easier to acquire in future sessions... think of James Bond and his Aston Martin, or Walther PPK... even though he basically resets at the beginning of each mpvie, and even though these items don't show up all the time, they become common features that are associated with him. Wheher or not it's realistic, that's how stories work.

With that in mind, it's probably a good idea to add something to the character sheet that reflects the signature moves and signature items that players develop for their characters over the course of play. These are never things that yu have in mind when the character first gets made, their just things that develop organically as the story unfolds. The character resets, but it becomes easier for them to get these things again later. 

Another way for characters to improve could be to acquire new accessories as upgrades. A new mask, a new hat, a new pair of trousers. Such upgrades might provide the expected mystical gifts, but will probably need some kind of attuning. I need to think more on this, but the whole idea can still fit into the pattern of the character sheet with minimal modifications. 

Bonds

As I've been working through the sheet, I've realised that I've done one of the things that I didn't necessarily like on some of the sheets I critiqued oon my previous post.

I've been including a lot of the "what can characters do?" and "how do they do it?", but haven't really touched on the "why?". For this reason I'll be adding a section that I'm just calling "Bonds". These are links to people, places and things. It links a bit into the permanent changes I just mentioned, so that's good.

A bond to a person might be a farmer whose land the scarecrow lives on, a child who helped build the scarecrow, a particular faerie spirit who regularly animates the scarecrow, or a notable enemy who always seems to be present in this character's stories.

A bond to a place might be the farm where they reside, a particular place of power where the energies of enchantment magic can be drawn, a local cemetary where the scarecrows gather to discuss the happenings in the world, or a place of known danger. 

A bond to a thing might be like the aforementioned vehicle and weapon used by James Bond, maybe the scarecrow has fairly reliable access to a tractor, or a favourite scythe. 

The bonds are what ties the character to te world around them, they serve as both a strength (giving them advantages when activated), and weakness (driving stories when they are threatened, and causing pain if they are ever lost). If a character has bonds on their sheet, they don't have to make use of them every game, but regular links to a bond will make it stronger.

Current Sheet

With all this in mind, here's the current sheet progress...   

I might do a black/night-mode version... we'll see.