Character Creation

Character Creation

1. One at a Time. You may only ever have one PC in Pinscher at one time. If you already have a character, that character must either die or be retired permanently in order for you to create a new one.

2. Humans Only. Whatever their destiny, all characters begin their lives as totally ordinary human beings. Your character will start his or her life in Pinscher in the same fashion. Supernatural (and partial) templates are only acquired during play.

3. Get a sheet. Either download one from this link, or ask staff or players to send you one (you may want to get skype or discord for that).
Mortal Character Sheet
Innocents (Child) Sheet

4. Basics. Before you even look at stats, decide Concept, Virtue, Vice, three Aspirations, and five Breaking Points. The sheet itself provides further instructions.

5. Attributes, Skills, and Specialties. Follow the instructions on the sheet. When deciding your character's traits, consider the entirety of this person's life and try to create a person who is three-dimensional and believable. Characters with min-maxed traits (especially for combat) will not be approved.

6. Merits. You begin with seven (7) dots in Merits. You must meet all prerequisites for any Merits that you take.

You may only start out with Merits which are listed in the core Chronicles of Darkness book (Or Innocents, for child characters).

The following Merits are prohibited:
Common Sense; Eye for the Strange; Investigative Aide; Investigative Prodigy; Alternate Identity; Hobbyist Clique; Mystery Cult Initiation; Closed Book; Spin Doctor; Pusher; Professional Training; Table Turner; Takes One to Know One; and True Friend.
Additionally, all Supernatural Merits (Telekinesis, Unseen Sense, etc.) are also prohibited at character creation.

The following Merits are restricted: Mentor, Retainer, Staff, Status, Esoteric Armory.  
These Merits may only be taken if the Storyteller gives you permission beforehand.

The following Merits require you to provide additional information in the Expanded Merits section near the bottom of your sheet:
Allies, Contacts, Fame, Fixer, Safe Place.
For each of these Merits, you must provide justification for your purchase. In the case of Allies or Contacts, who are these people? If you have a Safe Place, what kind of place is it exactly? Etc.

The Staff reserve the right to reject any Merit on any character for any reason.

7. Derived Traits. Follow the instructions on your sheet.

8. Equipment. If you want to start with any weapons or gear which could conceivably affect play, list them in the Equipment section. Include desired traits for your equipment if possible. The Staff may ask you to adjust these traits during the approval process. You must have a rating in Resources equal to or higher than the Availability rating for any equipment you take.

9. Background. Write up a character background in the appropriate section of your sheet. If your character background pleases the Staff, they may award you a Beat. If you need more space for your background, add it in a separate document, or if your familiar with editing pdf's, feel free to make more space. Notice that blocks of text dosnt have to equall a good background story, quality beats quantity.

10. Submission. When your sheet is finished, PM a Staff member on Discord or Skype and send it to them. The Staff will review your sheet and decide if any changes need to be made. When the sheet is satisfactory to the Staff, your character will be approved for play.

More detailed Character Creation help for the sheet.

1. Get the relevant core book. Yes really.
Chronicles of Darkness for Adults.
Innocents for Children.
Also, use it.

2. You start with 1 dot in each base Attribute.
To this you add '5/4/3' points.
This means your getting more points to put out as you like, theres three categorys (nicely framed, really hard to miss).
'5/4/3' means you get 5 points to put out in ONE of them (beside the 1 start dot in each attribute, thats on top of this), 4 in one of the remaining two, and 3 in the last.

3. You have 3 categories of skills (Mental, Physical and Social)
To these you get points to place out, similar to above, but instead you get
A: If your Adult; 11/7/4, NO dot in any for free, and 3 specialitys (read up on specialitys in your core book), or;
B: If your a Child, your starting skills is depending of your characters Age, see the Innocents book for this.

4. Merits, 7 points to put out. See above about forbidden and restricted merits. Notice that Children have a few special merits they can take, and some they wont be allowed to have (really, read the Innocents book if this is relevant for you).

5. If your character is a Child, your Strength score is relative, any use of Strength vs an Adult character gets a -2 Strength penalty (not on the sheet but you should know).

6. Derived and Age Stats:
Size; 5 for a human adult, Children varries, usually 3-4 (Age dependant, see Innocents Core book).
Health; Stamina+Size
Willpower; Resolve+Composure
Defense; Lowest of Dexterity or Wits +Athletics skill
Initiative Mod; Dexterity+Composure
Speed; Strength+Dexterity+Size
Starting Integrity; Adults 7.
Children does not use Integrity, if they loose their Innocense their nolonger chidren, regardless of physical age.

7. Aspirations
Chronicles of Darkness characters start with three Aspirations. Aspirations are goals that your character wishes to accomplish. They’re also statements about the sort of
stories you want to tell about your character.
Accomplishing an Aspiration is one of the main ways you can earn Beats to improve your character.
Ideally, you should have a mix of Aspirations, some of which can be resolved in one session, and some which will take many sessions to accomplish.

If you know that your character is going to start out hitchhiking, “Find a place to stay the night” is a perfectly reasonable Aspiration. If she recently had a fight with her
girlfriend, “Reconcile with Jane” is a fine Aspiration.
Another important thing to consider when deciding on your Aspirations is that you want them to be active goals.
They have to be something that you need to do, rather than something that you need to avoid. For example, “Don’t get drunk” wouldn’t be a very good Aspiration for a character, but “Go a day without taking a drink” could be, if your character would find this to be a struggle.

It is also okay to select Aspirations that your character doesn’t want, but that you want to see happen to the character. For example, your character almost certainly doesn’t
want to be kidnapped by the man with the gray face that used to be her father, but that might be a story that you are interested in seeing. You can choose Aspirations that represent you trying and failing to do something. You can have an Aspiration like “Fail to find proof of the existence of ghosts,” or “Fail to reconcile with Jane,” if you think that it will make a more interesting story.
Even though the character has failed at what she wants, you as the player still get the reward for completing that Aspiration.

Aspirations are one of the best ways for the players to signal to the Storyteller what sort of stories they want to be part of.

Sample Short-Term Aspirations
Find a new job.
Find out why my sister hasn’t called me back.
Get beat up by the school bully.
Go on a date with the new guy at work.
Indulge my addiction.
Mug someone.
Put myself in mortal danger.
See a ghost.
Show myself that I’m not cursed.

Sample Long-Term Aspirations
Become a parent.
Destroy the beast that killed my lover.
Discover what happened when my father disappeared.
Figure out what happened during those weeks I can’t remember.
Find my soul mate.
Find out what was really living in the culvert near my childhood home.
Prove that my mother isn’t crazy.
Put my daughter’s ghost to rest.
Take over the company.

8. Breaking Points
When a character performs certain actions or endures certain experiences, he might reach a breaking point. A breaking point simply means that what a character has done
or seen has outstripped his ability to rationalize or handle it.
A breaking point can fall into one of the following categories:
• The character performs an action that either violates his personal moral code or that is considered unacceptable in society.
• The character witnesses something traumatic, terrifying, or that rattles his understanding of the world.
• The character is the victim of a supernatural attack, whether physical, emotional, or mental.

Breaking points are somewhat subjective, obviously. A homicide detective with 30 years of experience in seeing dead bodies and hearing confessions of killers has a somewhat higher tolerance for human depravity than a sheltered 20-something in a middle-class liberal arts college.

Note that a breaking point is not necessarily something that the character considers wrong. A character might kill someone in a clear-cut, unambiguous case of self-defense, but the experience is probably still a breaking point, even if the player (and the character!) feels the act was entirely justified.
Actions take a toll on the psyche, regardless of whether the actions were righteous.

During character creation, the player should answer the following five questions. Each question provides a breaking point for the character. If, during the character creation
process, additional breaking points become apparent to the player, add them to the list. There’s no limit to how many breaking points a character can have. The list isn’t a strict list anyway; the Storyteller can stipulate that a given occurrence is a breaking point regardless of whether or not it appears on the player’s list. However, the better-defined your character’s outlook is, the better your Storyteller’s understanding will be of what constitutes a breaking point for that character.

• What is the worst thing your character has ever done?
This doesn’t have to be anything dastardly. If the worst thing your character ever did was steal money from his mother’s purse and lie to cover it up, that’s fine.
What’s important here is to consider something that your character did that made him hate himself. The superlative “worst” is something that the character would apply. Choose a breaking point based on the answer to this question.

• What is the worst thing your character can imagine himself doing?
We imagine ourselves in various scenarios to test our own self-image against a hypothetical situation.
When children do it, it’s called imaginative play, but it fills the same niche. What can you can character reasonably see himself doing, but still know that it would be wrong? Can your character imagine killing someone in self-defense? Torturing someone for information? How about robbing a store with a gun?

• What is the worst thing your character can imagine someone else doing?
Of course, we all know that people are capable of some hideous atrocities. What tops your character’s list? Serial murder? Rape? Torture? Spree killing? If your character is extremely sheltered or misanthropic, he might have a skewed view, here; he might hang on to some lofty, cerebral notion of “dishonor” or “betrayal” as the nadir of human behavior.

• What has your character forgotten?
In the Chronicles of Darkness, it’s next to impossible to grow up without any exposure to the supernatural. Decide what your character saw and forgot. Did she see a vampire take the form of smoke and vanish? A man turn into a wolf? Maybe she caught a glimpse of an impossible nightmarescape through a door that should never
have been propped open? Describe this scene in as much detail as you can. This is a breaking point that already occurred, but it helps set a benchmark for what your character would have to see in order to experience one now.

• What is the most traumatic thing that has ever happened to your character?
No one goes through life with no trauma. Your character might have been mugged, beaten as a child, in a serious car accident, been kidnapped by a parent during a divorce, survived a lifethreatening disease, attempted suicide, been attacked by a supernatural (or natural!) creature, or any number of other traumatic experiences.
The goal here, again, isn’t to make a traumatized character. It’s to set a bar.

9. Flaws -may- be aproved, check your idea with the Storyteller, but generaly, characters wont start with Flaws.

10. Write up anything else you think the storyteller should know about your character, preferably in an easy way to get an overview, remember, were going to read more than your characters novel... brick of text... keep it to whats relevant and necessary.

Expanded Help

Here is some things thats generaly not on the standard sheet that you may want to add in (though its not required):

Alias (unlike your given birth name)
Sexual Orientation
Occupation
Religion
Current Residence (dont forget to fit it to your actuall resources for an upper limit)
Hometown
Citizenship
Membership (clubs, organisations etc)

Family information
(Are you married? Who are your close relatives? Who would inherit you if you end up less lucky?)

Distinguisging marks (scars, tatoos, piercings, birthmarks etc)