What's On Your Character Sheet

*A character sheet is composed of four basic elements—your skills, your aspects, your stunts, and your supernatural powers. These represent your character’s resources for solving problems, winning conflicts, and impacting the story during the game.*

Skills are a basic measure of what your character can do, covering things like perceptiveness, physical prowess, social and mental capacity, and professional training. Aspects are a set of descriptive phrases that help you out (or make things complicated!) when something that happens in the story is particularly relevant to your character. Stunts expand the function of skills to cover a more specialized niche or allow you to do better in a specific circumstance. Powers cover a wide range of abilities outside the reach of normal mortals and have numerous benefits.

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### **Skills**

Characters have skills, like Drive and Guns, which are rated on the **ladder**. When you roll the dice, you are usually rolling based on your character’s skill. Nearly every action that your character might undertake is covered by his skills. If he doesn’t have a skill on his sheet, assume that it defaults to Mediocre (+0).

 Skills are covered in greater detail on their own page, **Skills** .

###  **Aspects**

Characters also have a set of traits called aspects. Aspects cover a wide range of elements and should collectively paint a picture of who the character is, what he’s connected to, and what’s important to him (in contrast to the “what he can do” of skills). Aspects can be relationships, beliefs, catchphrases, descriptors, items, or pretty much anything else that paints a picture of the character.

 Some possible aspects include:

·         To Serve and Protect

·         Sucker for a Pretty Face

·         My Grandpa’s Trusty Six-Shooter

·         Money-Colored Eyes

·         White Council Wizard

·         Stubborn as a Mule

·         Trained by Tera West

 When one of your aspects applies to a situation, you can **invoke the aspect**  to get a bonus by spending a fate point (see below). In this capacity, the aspect makes the character *better* at whatever he’s doing, because the aspect in some way applies to the situation (such as invoking To Serve and Protect when acting in the interests of the Law).

An aspect can also gain you more fate points, by bringing complications and troubling circumstances into your character’s life. Whenever your character ends up in a situation where one of his aspects could cause him trouble (such as Stubborn when he’s trying to be diplomatic), you can mention it to the GM in the same way you mention an aspect that might help you. Alternately, the GM may initiate this event if one of your aspects seems particularly apt. Either way, this is **compelling an aspect ,** and it limits your character’s choices in some way. If the GM initiates or agrees to compel the aspect, you may get one or more fate points, depending on how it plays out.

Aspects are a much bigger topic than we can get into in this overview. For a lot of groups, aspects make up the core of the game. For more detail on invoking and compelling, along with what makes a good aspect, see **Aspects .**

###  **Mortal Stunts**

Stunts are the special tricks your character has up his sleeves which allow him to stretch or break the skill rules. Typically, they either give a bonus to a specific use of a skill or broaden a skill to encompass some other way of using it. Some help you take a hit in a fight or other things like that.

Stunts have very specific uses and rules, which are detailed more fully in**Mortal Stunts** . Though not all characters will have stunts, many will.

### **Supernatural Powers**

Powers are a lot like stunts, in that they help characters stretch or break the rules. But they go beyond how to use a skill and into using your supernatural nature. Anything a mortal can’t just *do*, even with a lot of training—wield magic, lift with inhuman strength or run with inhuman speed, recover from damage that would cripple a mortal, etc.—is due to a power.

 Like stunts, powers have very specific uses and rules, which are detailed more fully in **Supernatural Powers.** All supernatural characters have powers—that’s what makes them supernatural.

### **Fate Points**

The other, and potentially most important, resource that you have during a game is a currency called **fate points** (FP). Fate points are central to the function of the game system;  they are basically a measure of how much power you have to influence the story in favor of your character. When you spend fate points, you take a little bit of control over the game, either by giving your character bonuses when you feel he needs them, or by taking over a small part of the story. To earn fate points, you allow your character’s aspects to create complications for him.