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!

The Chronicles of Darkness – Background/Intro to Character Creation

Welcome one and all! This post will be the first of a multi-part series (I don’t know exactly how many yet,) where we’ll explore the themes, moods, and eventually character creation for one of my favorite worlds, the Chronicles of Darkness (formerly known as the New World of Darkness.)

To begin, the World of Darkness is just like our world, in the present day. It has our cities, our races, our technology, even our people. There are two primary differences, however. The first is that it is inherently darker. Crime rates are higher, police response times are lower, murder and disappearances are commonplace. The second? The supernatural is real. Vampires, Werewolves, the Fae, almost every story you’ve heard.

And you’re just a normal guy (or girl) living in this dark world.

And this guy is your neighbor

Now, you may be wondering how people sleep through the night, knowing that the monsters of the night could be right next door. The thing is… they don’t know. Most of them at least. Each creature has a reason to keep humanity in the dark.

Now! On to character creation!

For this, we’ll be using the base New World of Darkness, not the Second Edition (known as the God Machine Chronicle.)

This game is unlike a lot of tabletop RPGs out there, like Dungeons and Dragons, and Pathfinder. It is a game of storytelling, not dungeon crawling (most of the time.) While none is inherently better than the other, each has its own merit.

The Storytelling System uses 10-sided dice, and uses a stat system that goes from 0-5 in each stat (there are always exceptions.) A zero means you are completely unskilled in that particular stat, while a 5 means you are world-renowned for that particular stat, with the rest being the in-betweens.

This weakling here only has a Strength of 10

Step 1! Concept: This part is very basic, as it’s just a short phrase describing who your character is. This could be anything from ‘girl next door’ to ‘small town mechanic.’ This is also where you come up with some semblance of a background for your character. You could also look to your storyteller to help run a prologue for your character, to help flesh him/her out.

Step 2! Attributes: These are divided into three categories; Physical, Mental, and Social. These are then divided up into three more categories; Power, Finesse, and Resistance. Each of these starts at 1.

The Physical Attributes are, in order of Power, Finesse, and Resistance, are Strength, Dexterity, and Stamina.

The Mental Attributes are Intelligence, Wits, and Resolve.

The Social Attributes are Presence, Manipulation, and Composure.

For your character, you want to determine which of the three categories, between Physical, Mental, and Social, you want to make the Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary.

For the Primary category, you will have 5 extra points to divide between the three. For instance, if you choose Physical, you could put 2 into Strength, 2 into Dexterity, and 1 into Stamina, a fair stat spread for an athlete.

The Secondary category would get 4 points, while the Tertiary category would get 3.

Our next article will go into Skills and derived traits!