The Chronicles of Darkness - Character Creation Continued, Skills/Derived Traits

Welcome back folks to the second installment of our character creation seminar, or… post.

Needs more darkness

In our first entry, we went over the background of the World of Darkness and got our Attributes sorted out. This time around, we’re going to get into Skills and Derived Traits.

Skills are exactly what it says on the box. Each one determines how well your character does in a certain field. There are also Skill Specializations, which further augment those abilities.

Similar to how we decided how to allocate our attributes, we choose a Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary category of skills, between Physical, Mental, and Social. Only, this time, we get eleven skill points in Primary, seven points in Secondary, and four in Tertiary.

Gotta have priorities

The skills are pretty simple themselves!

Physical – Athletics, Brawl, Drive, Firearms, Larceny, Stealth, Survival, Weaponry

Mental – Academics, Computer, Crafts, Investigation, Medicine, Occult, Politics, Science

Social – Animal Ken, Empathy, Expression, Intimidation, Persuasion, Socialize, Streetwise, Subterfuge

Many of these are self-explanatory, for example, Firearms determines your skill with guns and the like, while Academics shows how educated you are. Some are a little more nuanced, like Crafts, which covers all crafting from carpentry to soldering electronics, to even basket weaving.

One main difference from before is that Skills start at 0, where Attributes started at 1.

Everyone's got a passion

 If you decide that you want a skill at 5 dots (to show that your character is world-renowned for his/her ability to do the thing) the fifth dot costs an additional skill point (only at creation) for a total of 6 points. This will make the character super specialized, but weak in other areas.

Once your skills dots are allocated, you then choose three skill specializations to give to one or more skills you have dots in. For example, an MMA fighter that put three or four dots in Brawl may want Muay Thai and Grappling as two different Brawl Specializations, and put his third one into Intense for Intimidate. The Specializations are meant to be specific, not broad, so a Firearms Specialization in Guns isn’t appropriate, but one in Pistols is. What’s appropriate for your character or not is up to a discussion between you and your Storyteller. Each specialization gives you an effective additional dot in that skill for the purpose of that specific thing.

Will Smith knows all

Your skills come into play when trying to do things covered by that skill, combined with an appropriate attribute. For example, the aforementioned MMA fighter tries to grab an opponent. He would a number of d10s equal to his Strength plus his Brawl, adding his Grapple Specialization. Let’s say he has a Strength of 3 and a Brawl of 4, which would total 8 dice. Then you would subtract the Defense of the opponent (explained later in this post,) which we’ll say is a 3, bringing his dice down to 5. Rolling those 5 dice, he gets 5 6 9 4 2. Any die that comes up with an 8 or higher is considered a success, so for this purpose, he gets the grab. Some rolls may have a required number of successes to actually succeed. For instance, trying to hack into a fairly secure computer may require 3 successes to complete instead of 1.


This is what a veteran sheet looks like

*For supernatural characters only!*
You add the supernatural template (explained in later posts) before determining derived traits!


Don't tell your mortal friends

Now, on to our derived traits. They are called derived traits because they are determined by other dots on your sheet.

The first is your Health boxes, which is determined by your Stamina dots plus your character’s Size (almost always 5 for an adult human). Our MMA fighter is pretty tough, so his Stamina is 4, giving him 9 total Health boxes.

Next, we have Willpower, which you get from your Resolve plus your Composure. Willpower is used to augment your dice pools, and is refreshed by your Virtue and your Vice (details in a later post.)

Now, we have Speed, which is your characters Size (again, usually 5) plus their Strength and Dexterity. This determines how far they can run in a single turn of combat (3 seconds)

Then, your Defense. This is what you use to dodge attacks coming at you. You use the *lower* of your Wits or Dexterity.

Finally, your Initiative modifier. At the start of combat, each character rolls a d10 and adds their initiative modifier to that roll. The Initiative modifier is your Wits plus your Composure. Whoever has the highest Initiative score after the roll goes first in a fight.

As the dots on your sheet change, so do these. For instance, if you get another dot of Dexterity, you change your Speed, Defense, and Initiative to match!

The Rock may or may not return

Next time, we’ll talk about Merits and start talking about the different types of Supernaturals!