On Aspects
Updated 2018-01-06
(Expanded with some Q&A arising from testing.)
Aspects describe important things about a character: their life, experience, what drives them, what is important to them, Friends or Enemies, what describes or defines them. Ideally they should summarise the character.
In system terms what characters can do is mostly defined by the intersection of Aspects and Skills. Skill are fairly widely cast, but Aspects focus them.
While all Aspects are equal in potential, and depend on how you play and exploit them, here is an entirely optional list of Aspect areas I had in mind to set the number of a character’s initial Aspects to four:
- A Profession – what gives the character their daily bread? Perhaps even think of this one as a old style Character Class.
- A Background – where did the character come from, how does that shape them?
- A Hobby Horse – does the character have other affiliations or pastimes, religious, political, amateur interests?
- A Secret – guilty or otherwise? A secret society, or sex, or sexuality, or an identity, or …
… Or keep unallocated Aspects for a later reveal at an opportune moment.
(I didn’t put these up initially for fear of of being prescriptive, but as more guidance was requested, there you are.)
Some latecomers to the possible Aspect areas ball:
- Where has the character travelled, lived, traded, campaigned or whatever.
- Ethnicity, should the character be sadly afflicted by being a Foreigner.
- Species? Um, well — we can talk about it…
Aspects & Skills
How do they interact?
Take the Combat skill, which indicates a degree of ability with fighting.
- An Aspect of Soldier gives familiarity in use of Combat skill with the C18th standards: sword, musket and bayonet, brawl and sword, marching in formation under fire, and so.
- An Aspect of Soldier taken without the Combat skill might imply a non-Combat role: perhaps drummer boy, or supply-waggon driver, or poltroon.
- An Aspect of Gentleman, without any other military Aspect, with a Combat skill would indicate, perhaps, a warrior of the field of honour with weapons like a fencing sword or duelling pistol, or a robust attitude to personal safety on the streets of London employing the likes of walking stick, sword cane, cudgel or plain fisticuffs.
- Familiarity with unusual weapons requires relevant Aspects to cover: a Soldier Aspect with Combat skill and North America as an Aspect might claim familiarity with tomahawk and bow as well as the regular musket, for instance.
Where possible take generic Skills and interpret them through your Aspects rather than take a specific skill.
Someone asks about skills for, shall we say, Watchmaker – is that a Professional Skill or Handy Trade ?
Look at Watchmaker as an Aspect, and the character would make and repair watches with their Trades: Handy Skill. A deep knowledge of timepieces and mechanisms would be shown by having a Learning or Philosophy skill; the latter coupled with, say, an something like Enochian Practitioner or Mechanick Philosopher Aspect would be the skill required to make the Fop’s watch from the flavour piece on the Introduction page.
Languages
Another question has been language skills: does a character need a French Languages Skill to read / speak French.
Ans : Not if the language is implict in an Aspect. Rather than have specific language skills I would suggest that most characters will have sufficient grasp of a language implicit in their aspects for their Social or Learning skills to function in the circumstances to which the Aspect is applicable.
So with an Aspect of Sailor a character would reasonably be expected to understand and be understood sufficiently for their Social skills to function normally in waterfront bars, knocking shops and flophouses along the western coasts of Europe and into the west end of the Mediterranean, the British Americas Caribbean and Atlantic shores — the default English Sailor’s range. Those sailing further, stranger tides would likely have more Aspects, perhaps East Indies Trade or China Trade even.
The Learning (or Philosophy) skill covers reading and writing (amongst other things) in similar fashion. If an aspect suggests a character corresponds in language other than English then they must have sufficient grasp of the written form to enable common communications at their Learning skill level.
If all Aspect related rationalisation fails then, yes, you can take a French skill completely stand alone.
Aspects & Character Points
Part of the character improvement and reward system I’ve been freely promising in play tests and for old and new character write-ups (Whatever happened to… soon perhaps character introductions and, one day, point-of-view game accounts) is the Character Point.
For fuller details see the Improvement page (when it is written). For now though, what can you do with them, in relation to Aspects?
-
Fix minor omissions :
— if the player forgets something their character’s Aspects can be interpreted as suggesting they would not have, then expend a character point to fix the omission retrospectively. -
Declare Minor Facts :
— the more proactive side of the coin from fix minor omissions. Expend a character point to establish a contact or a convenient minor narritive fact – “Didn’t I hear my shipmate (Aspects: Sailor, Eastern Mediterranean) Evan ‘Ninepounder’ Morgan settled in a little place at the back of the souk here? I’m sure he’d shelter us for a day or two…”.