Last time I came up with the player character’s stats of Body, Mind, and Spirit. I did some more thinking and believe I have a way to create your character.

First, the assumptions.

1. The player is telling a story through role-play.

2. The player will create the character, its background and characteristics—the game won’t deal with that aspect.

3. The player doesn’t want to get bogged down by a ton of stat management.

Point number 2 is the key one. The game shouldn’t have a set of tables or a form to fill out in order to create a character. However, if the player wants to use the stats plug-in, the game should have rules for initializing the values. Here is the first pass at those rules.

1. No stat can go above 10. The total, therefore, cannot go above 30.

2. A character’s base stats will be determined by rolling a single die one time for each of the three stats.

3. The player can then distribute an additional 12 points across the 3 stats as they choose.

I think this allows for some randomness and also allows the player to skew the character based on who they want to play.

The next thing I need to be concerned with is how the stats adjust throughout the game. The three stats of Body, Mind, and Spirit will be adjusted in-game based on encounters and discoveries. Any time a character performs an action in the story that involves one of the three, the action will affect that stat. For example, if the player wants the character to search a room, how that affects the stats isn’t described in the rules. The player needs to know that searching involves searching or perception which in turn maps to the Body and the Mind.. The player then needs to resolve the action based on those stats of the character. The player chooses either Body or Mind.

Let’s say the character needs to search a room for a key and the character’s Body stat is currently at 7 (a little above average.) The player rolls a single die, which gives a result of 4. What’s that mean? The way I envision dice rolls working is that a roll of:

6 - is success with a story benefit. The player finds a key, and in the process discovers what it unlocks.

5 - is success with no story benefit. The player finds a key but doesn’t know what the key opens.

4 - is partial success. The player finds something they weren’t looking for.

3 - is partial failure. The player finds the wrong key.

2 - is failure. The player finds nothing.

1 - is failure at a cost (the stat drops by 1). The player finds nothing, and his Body stat drops by 1 to 6.

This is just an example of how I envision the stats interacting and decreasing with dice rolls. It will be up to the player to tell the story and determine which stat applies to an action.

Next time, I’ll lay out how I see the stats increasing and the character growing.