[TSoY] Creating my first characters

[Ricky Donato]

Hi, all,

I just created a couple of characters to test my understanding of the TSoY system. I have several questions.

1) During chargen, you are given 5 advances. Are you forced to spend these during chargen, or can you save them for later?
2) During play, if you have an advance, when you can you spend it? Could you spend it right before making an ability check, or even in the middle of BDTP?
3) The Scrapping ability is described as "untrained fighting". What abilities represent trained fighting, like sword use? I can't seem to find any.
4) If my character Gord has the Secret of the Hidden Pocket, can he retrieve any item, even an item I never said he owns to begin with? For instance, if Gord is trapped in a locked room, can he use Hidden Pocket to retrieve a set of lockpicks even if I never said that Gord carried lockpicks?
5) The description of Near (at http://www.anvilwerks.com/src/tsoy/book2--world_of_near.html) makes frequent mention of the Stay Up ability. What is this?
6) From the book:

Many role-playing game texts will tell you to have a nearly complete idea of who your character is before play. I don't think that's necessary, though. You and your friends will get to know your character during play. What that character did before-hand is of some interest, but even those details will emerge during play easier than before play. If you were reading a book, would the author expect you to know the main character before-hand?

Does this imply that it's a good thing to make up your character's background as you go along?

Thanks in advance for your help.

If you're interested, here are the actual characters I generated. Since I'm new at this, I decided for this test run to create characters that I've already played in D&D, to give me a point of reference.

Gord is a cat burglar in the big city. He's an unimportant member of a crime family, looking for a big score. He has a soft spot for people in need, remembering how he helped out his own mother when she needed help when he was young.
Name: Gord Rizzo
Species: Human
Unspent Advances: 4
Vigor: 4
Instinct: 5
Reason: 2
Abilities:
Adept (2): React (I), Stealth (I)
Competent (1): Endure (V), Streetwise (R), Athletics (V), Theft (I)
Unskilled (0): Resist (R)
Secrets: Hidden Pocket
Keys: Glittering Gold; Conscience

Geoffrey is a half-orc paladin of a warrior god. Raised by his human father, he was taught the importance of the spirit and prayer. His orcish heritage is very prominent in his appearance, so Geoffrey is frequently seen as a thug or a brute by ignorant humans.
Name: Geoffrey (once known as Gramalk, his orcish name)
Species: Half-orc
Unspent Advances: 4
Vigor: 6
Instinct: 2
Reason: 3
Abilities:
Adept (2): Endure (V), Scrapping (V)
Competent (1): Resist (R), Pray (V), Counsel (R), Battle (R)
Unskilled (0): React (I)
Secrets: Mighty Blow
Keys: Faith; Outcast (Geoffrey feels like an outcast from society because of his orcish blood, and he receives XP whenever he faces prejudice because of it)

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Ricky,

Let me see if I can answer all of these.

You aren't forced to spend any advances ever. You can spend them whenever you like, though, especially in the middle of BDTP. That's essential to the system - you should be doing crazy stuff like buying off Keys in order to advance in the middle of a fight.

Trained fighting is represented by different abilities underneath cultures. Each culture has its own way to fight.

Secret of the Hidden Pocket can be used to retrieve anything small. Lockpicks is a totally great example.

The Stay Up ability is from TSOY1. Ignore it, or use the Endure ability instead.

And, yes, your character's background should come out from play.

Eero, in the Finnish translation of the book, says to do something awesome: figure out the one heroic or noteworthy thing your character's done to put him or her on this path. Do this first, even before determining culture. That's your Adept ability. Then determine culture and species, and pick three things she does regularly. Those are your starting Competent abilities.

Those characters are mighty sweet.

[Eero Tuovinen]

<Crossposting with Clinton.>

1) During chargen, you are given 5 advances. Are you forced to spend these during chargen, or can you save them for later?

No, you can save them and spend later. Actually, in my games it's a pretty smart thing to save one or two, because I tend to emphasize one-time opportunities and all kinds of weirdo secrets that deal with free advances. It's good to have an advance or two lying around if you have to learn something right now. Like, you could meet a drunken, desperate martial arts master who wants to teach his touch of death to you right now, right here. No matter you're both in a whorehouse at the time! Or something like that, anyway.

2) During play, if you have an advance, when you can you spend it? Could you spend it right before making an ability check, or even in the middle of BDTP?

Yes you can. Only secrets require "realistic" considerations of training time, teachers, etc.

Note, however, that you cannot remove anything you learn the same way. You take it, you keep it. (Unless a secret allows you to, of course.)

3) The Scrapping ability is described as "untrained fighting". What abilities represent trained fighting, like sword use? I can't seem to find any.

It's intentional, or that's how I interpret it. About the only culture with a half-decent organized killing technique are the Maldorites (and, by extension, Ammenites) with their Infantry ability (or whatsitcalled, I'm already happily forgetting the English terminology after getting the Finnish version). Others get by with decidedly non-organized fighting abilities, because their cultures don't have any. Near is a world half-destroyed, and not only things like currency and common language were lost, but also fighting schools, martial heritages and conscripting. Thus people like the Qek don't have a concept for training to war, only training to hunt, for example. Violence is personal in scale, and the idea of somebody having the profession of killing is weird in a world of small villages and tribes, where you don't even know that many people you'd want to kill.

Oh, now I realized that you probably aren't reading the cultural part at all, if you're only seeing Scrapping. So go read that, next. Because you get all kinds of fighting abilities there, including Spearfighting (Khale), Assasination (Ammeni) and so on. None of these is what you'd expect from a D&D warrior (the Maldorites come closest in that regard), but they're certainly useful.

Also, you can define "Sword-fighting" yourself (indeed, I think it's one of the examples in the part about making your own abilities) if it fits your concept of the world (I recommend not taking it as granted that the game world or a given culture recognizes an ability of using a piece of honed steel to kill resisting opponents.) and the character. I've myself felt that kind of abilities dull as all hell for years now, ever since I realized that nobody really trains swordfighting (except modern hobbyists). It's much more interesting to give your character an ability that tells something about the cultural context he learns in. Like, if your character is a knight, it's a pretty stupid game that makes you buy "Use Mace", "Use Lance" and "Use Sword" one-by-one, as if he really could get trained in only one or two of those. Much better to give him "Fight mounted" and "Fight in armor" or something like that, which are much more descriptive and tell something interesting about your character.

Except, Near doesn't have knightly training (or if they do, only in Maldor). But the principle remains. One ability I underestimated when first reading the game was "Bamboo warrior". That makes one bitch-slapping kungfu warrior! Man! I'm still falling out of my chair remembering a couple of weeks ago, when we uncovered the true power of the bamboo-splitting Ammenite cruelty. My favourite was when the character, after getting mutilated with acid to hide his high birth, used a bamboo spoon to escape a tightly guarded prison in one fucking explosion of carnage. When he was still a high noble of a merchant house he pretty much went everywhere with an armsman trailing him with a big stack of bamboo, just so he could use it in all kinds of acrobatic fighting stunts. He spent the bamboo like a starving man eats a five-course dinner.

But, that's me and Bamboo warrior. My point is that you should probably read the setting part to find all the cool abilities. Your example characters make me pretty certain that you're not there yet. If and when you're playing in another setting, the things are of course different: if organized killing is a commonplace event there and the skills used for that are the same the world over, just add the appropriate abilities to the common list. And don't forget to give some thought for the cultural abilities of the world, either. Realize that it's up to you to have an ability list that gives interesting play in the style you want.

4) If my character Gord has the Secret of the Hidden Pocket, can he retrieve any item, even an item I never said he owns to begin with? For instance, if Gord is trapped in a locked room, can he use Hidden Pocket to retrieve a set of lockpicks even if I never said that Gord carried lockpicks?

As long as it's small and inexpensive, yes. There's no inventory in the character sheet for a reason.

Man, how lame would that secret be otherwise! I've never in my fifteen years of roleplaying had a character stripsearched in a situation where he would actually have had something useful for escaping later, or whatever. So yes, the true power of that secret is in getting to use it in a wide variety of situations that have nothing to do with being prisoner. Need picklocks? Need a long string? Need wax? Need a needle? The man's a McGuyver himself, gentlemen.

5) The description of Near (at http://www.anvilwerks.com/src/tsoy/book2--world_of_near.html) makes frequent mention of the Stay Up ability. What is this?

Deprecated. The game was first published in 2004 (the first edition, I think it's called), but Clinton revamped the system a year later and published the current, much better effort. Any secrets mentioning Stay Up should just be reworked to accord with the current version. Most of the time you can just replace Stay Up with the innate ability of Endure.

6) From the book:

Many role-playing game texts will tell you to have a nearly complete idea of who your character is before play. I don't think that's necessary, though. You and your friends will get to know your character during play. What that character did before-hand is of some interest, but even those details will emerge during play easier than before play. If you were reading a book, would the author expect you to know the main character before-hand?

Does this imply that it's a good thing to make up your character's background as you go along?

That's what it says. Just make up enough to get the game started, and figure the rest out on the way. For added fun, pick secrets that let you really embellish on your character's history, like the Secret of Contacts.

[Twobirds]

5) The description of Near (at http://www.anvilwerks.com/src/tsoy/book2--world_of_near.html) makes frequent mention of the Stay Up ability. What is this?

I took that file and edited it to match the revised (hard)copy of the book, except for a few small things.  It might be more useful.

http://www.smokingmirror.net/SoY/book2--world_of_near.html

[Ricky Donato]

Thanks to all for the quick replies.

Eero, in the Finnish translation of the book, says to do something awesome: figure out the one heroic or noteworthy thing your character's done to put him or her on this path. Do this first, even before determining culture. That's your Adept ability. Then determine culture and species, and pick three things she does regularly. Those are your starting Competent abilities.

That's brilliant! I'm definitely going to use that.

Those characters are mighty sweet.

Thank you! I really think I will enjoy TSoY, because it seems I put conflicts into my characters naturally.

3) The Scrapping ability is described as "untrained fighting". What abilities represent trained fighting, like sword use? I can't seem to find any.

It's intentional, or that's how I interpret it. About the only culture with a half-decent organized killing technique are the Maldorites (and, by extension, Ammenites) with their Infantry ability (or whatsitcalled, I'm already happily forgetting the English terminology after getting the Finnish version). Others get by with decidedly non-organized fighting abilities, because their cultures don't have any. Near is a world half-destroyed, and not only things like currency and common language were lost, but also fighting schools, martial heritages and conscripting. Thus people like the Qek don't have a concept for training to war, only training to hunt, for example. Violence is personal in scale, and the idea of somebody having the profession of killing is weird in a world of small villages and tribes, where you don't even know that many people you'd want to kill.

I understand. I asked the question for my character Geoffrey, who is a soldier; in my D&D game, he was a paladin of Helm in the Forgotten Realms. I wanted to represent his warrior training in TSoY. But as you said, that would be culture-specific, so I would need a warlike culture first.

Oh, now I realized that you probably aren't reading the cultural part at all, if you're only seeing Scrapping.

I skipped reading about Near because I wanted to focus on understanding the basic mechanics before I tackle anything setting-specific.

I took that file and edited it to match the revised (hard)copy of the book, except for a few small things. It might be more useful.

http://www.smokingmirror.net/SoY/book2--world_of_near.html

Perfect! That's just what I needed.

[IMAGinES]

Eero, in the Finnish translation of the book, says to do something awesome: figure out the one heroic or noteworthy thing your character's done to put him or her on this path. Do this first, even before determining culture. That's your Adept ability. Then determine culture and species, and pick three things she does regularly. Those are your starting Competent abilities.

Clinton, I took the liberty of adding that paragraph to Doyce's Wiki.