How to Make Your Wizard More Magical with Skill Trappings

Written by Jeff Carlsen on 2010/07/22 – 00:00 -

Unlike their D&D counterparts, Savage Worlds Wizards don’t have a plethora of spells littering their character sheet. Also, there isn’t a described cantrip mechanism that lets them do little magical things all day. But that’s a problem that a little imagination can fix without altering the rules at all using skill trappings.

What are Skill Trappings?

Skills are just a mechanic to differentiate characters who are good at something from those who are not. The Healing skill doesn’t go into detail as to how to stitch a wound or apply a bandage. All it cares about is success for failure at healing someone. How is left up to description and the trappings of the setting. For example, in a fantasy game, Healing would include the use of herbs and prayer. In a futuristic setting, it would include dermal regenerators or bacta tanks. The result is the same, but the trappings differ.

Applying that to Magic (aka, The Harry Potter Effect)

A wizard knows magic, so there really is no reason that he wouldn’t employ it to assist him in using skills. Instead of using brute force and nimble hands to repair something, he’ll apply heat and telekinetic forces to do the same thing. This doesn’t mean he gets any sort of bonus for using magic. Instead, the trappings of the skill change for him.

Let’s look at an extreme example: Harry Potter. The characters in Harry Potter use magic for everything from dominating friends and family to folding laundry. In fact, if you took a wizard’s wand away he couldn’t operate a toaster.

So, let’s pretend that you wanted to play a Savage Harry Potter game. You wouldn’t go through and pull out every little spell they used. Instead, you’d just make all those little spells trappings for normal skills, then give extra bennies to players who are good at roleplaying their skills (i.e. having a eidetic memory for made-up Latin).

Mechanical Effects

There are time, occasionally, where a specific trapping should have a mechanical effect. These are more rare than it often seems, as trappings are powerful and extra mechanics should be avoided, but sometimes it happens.

For example, in Harry Potter, if you take a wizards wand away, he should get a -2 penalty to all skill rolls because he lacks the proper equipment. If the party is being tracked by a magic-sniffing wolf pack, the wizard will draw their attention when using a little levitation to help him climb a tree (+2 to their notice rolls). Alternatively, if the party is in a mana-rich environment, such as at the crossing of two lay-lines or in a mana pool, the wizard might get a +1 bonus to all skill rolls. These are small, incidental mechanics that can probably be adjudicated on the fly, but should be considered.

What We’d Like From You

The idea of magical skill trappings seems sound, but we need more examples if people are going to be convinced. We’d like you to come up with some and leave them in the comments for other readers to be inspired.


Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Categories: Game Masters, Players |
Comments: View Comments

Character Wheel: Relationships

Written by Jeff Carlsen on 2010/07/08 – 00:00 -

It has taken a some time, considerable thought, and a little bit of effort, but here is the final entry in the Character Wheel series. As promised, in the coming weeks I will compile all these various posts, edit and refine them, and put them out as a PDF so you can make better use of them.

By now, your character has a complex set of Attitudes and Motivations. You can describe him down to the mole on his left shoulder, and you know how he celebrated his sixth birthday. But do you know who was there?

A character doesn’t grow in a vacuum. He’s influenced by the people around him. As such, you need to take some time to think about his important relationships.

Apathy Games – Character Wheel Sheet

6 Page PDF

This Character Sheet includes sections for every part of the Character Wheel.  It is system agnostic, so feel free to use it with any character for any game.

It’s Who You Know

Relationships are complex things, and people have a lot of them. A hugely tremendous number, really. In part, they define us. In a game, a character’s relationships are powerful motivations, tinged with deep-rooted attitudes. Each has it’s own history. To a certain level, every relationship a character has is practically a character biography in and of itself.

It would be ridiculous to keep track of all, or even a significant fraction of it, so I’ve designed the relationships section to expand gracefully.

Significant Details

Every character should have a few people in their lives that will dramatically effect the game and create subplots. Perhaps your character has a serious conflict with another party member that will have to be resolved. Maybe he’s earned himself a powerful enemy. Or, it could be that he simply has dependents that he has to provide for, always draining into his personal wealth.

Write these details down and share them with your Game Master so that he may use them against you. Appropriately, that is.

Contacts & NPCs

Contacts are people who can provide some service for the character. Some games have a specific mechanism for earning valuable contacts. Others develop these organically. When starting a character, you’ll want to talk to the Game Master about any contacts you want to start with.

As the game progresses, your character will meet a variety of NPCs. Any that seem useful of significant to you should be noted down, along with their usual Location, and any other useful notes. I’ve provided check-boxes on the sheet, as well, to designate if they are an Enemy or an Ally.

Significant Locations

While these aren’t relationships, it’s convenient to track significant locations in the same space as you track NPCs, since the two are often related.

Party Members

The other members of your party are your most immediate relationships, and the ones that deserve the most thought.

Fill in the character’s name, and where you might find them when they aren’t adventuring with you. Also note down a quick description of the character. Lastly, determine the type of relationship your character has with them, and what opinions he holds.

You should talk with the other players when developing these relationships, so you can all work together to make party interactions the most fulfilling. You don’t have to, of course, and you should never feel that you have to build your character’s attitudes according to the whims of other players. Still, a little discussion as to the nature of various party member relationships and how they might progress can be valuable.

Filling out this sheet can also be a valuable tool to separate player from character. We, as players, have relationships with each of the other players at the table and opinions about them as well. If we don’t think about it, we’ll often let those relationships and opinions cross over into the game as is. There isn’t anything wrong with that, most of the time, but it’s a missed opportunity for roleplaying. Plus, some players get frustrated when they develop a new and distinct character, but all the players treat him exactly the same as all his other characters.

Family & Other Relationships

There really is no end to how many relationships a character can have. It’s certainly worth taking some time to come up with a family for your character. Is it a traditional family, or is something strange or broken about it? Is your character married? Divorced or widowed? Maybe he has children who have grown up, or who are young and have been left with a crazy aunt. And, of course, he probably has siblings. Siblings make great NPCs for a variety of purposes.

After considering your character’s family, consider giving him a few friends, teachers, distant family members, or rivals. Anything to spice things up.

Like everything on the wheel, don’t develop this all at once, but feel free to add people as time goes by. These relationships make a character far more interesting.

Wrapping Up

That’s it for the entire Character Wheel. The next step is to start over again and keep going around forever, or until the character dies, you die, or you stop playing.

The Character Wheel has been a fun intellectual effort for me, building upon and organizing ideas I’ve used for a very long time. I certainly hope it’s useful for you. If you have any feedback, I really want to hear it. Maybe it’s just too much, and you want something simpler. Maybe it’s not enough and you think I’ve missed something. Maybe it’s just perfect how it is, and you want to award me the Nobel prize for game design. Whatever it is, I want to hear it. Enjoy.


Tags: , , , , , ,
Categories: Character Wheel, Players |
Comments: View Comments

Your first Spin of the Character Wheel

Written by Jeff Carlsen on 2010/02/04 – 00:00 -

While you don’t want to build your whole character at once, you should give the wheel a quick, cursory revolution before you start play. The reason to do this is in a cursory fashion is that none of the details should be set in stone. While the order of the wheel is designed so that early categories readily influence later ones, during the first pass the whole character in malleable. New ideas you come up with later in the wheel can contradict earlier choices, which you can change to match.

Significant Details

Every good author knows not to bombard a reader with large amounts of superfluous description. It puts the reader to sleep and detracts from the story. Instead, it is best to present only the significant details, and leave everything else out.

The same holds true for your character. Comming up with pages of information that will never have an effect on the game is a fruitless effort. It is better, particularly on your first pass, to concentrate on creating one or two details for each category that you want to effect the story. These will be your go-to details. You’ll use them to describe your character to other players, to directly influence the character’s actions, and to provide the game master with plot hooks for adventure building.

Example of Significant Details:

Concept: Korinthus Talwin is an adventuring noble who has sought a life in the wilds and dungeons of the world to escape his oppressive family who has members in every major city.

Description: Fair appearance and soft skin. Looks like he’s spent his whole life coddled.

Motivation: Afraid to go into any trade city for fear that he’ll run into family.

Motivation: Gambling Addiction

Background: Member of the noble Talwin family.

Background: Lost his ancestral home in a gambling binge.

Attitude: Sneers at the poor and destitute.

Attitude: Loves opulence. Only buys the highest quality gear.

Relationship: Geron Talwin, Father. Korinthus is hiding from his father, who would make an example of him to the rest of the family.

Relationship: Mak, Friend. The gnome who snuck him out of town in the first place. He said he was going to join Korinthus, but never appeared.

As you can see, these details are just small pieces of information, but they tell a lot about the character, and provide a number of hooks for the game master to use. And better yet, the whole process only took me a few minutes.

A Note on Secrets

It’s often tempting to make a character more interesting to yourself by giving him a secret, but many players then spend the entire game trying to keep the secret from the other players and feel violated if the game master exposes them.

This behavior is anathema to the entire nature of tabletop roleplaying and characterization. If a character is going to have a secret,is must affect the game in a positive way. In essence, your character’s secret is a significant detail that provides the game master an adventure hook, and is useless if it isn’t exposed at some point. You should work with your game master as to how you would like the secret to effect the story.

Write Down Your Details

In addition to filling out any relevant sections of your character sheet, make a list of significant details collected from all categories and give it to your game master so he can use them. If your sheet doesn’t provide space for these details, make sure you write them down for yourself as well.

Continue Indefinitely

Your character, like the campaign, is not complete until you stop playing. Keep moving around the wheel a little at a time. Character advancement is a great time to do a little more work. You’re already having to make mechanical choices, so you may as well take a spin around the wheel, adding to the character and considering how the character may have chanced.

Make sure you go over your significant details occasionally. If any of them have been used as hooks, and probably won’t be again, then it’s time to come up with new ones. You never want your character to run out of interesting ways of landing in trouble.


Tags: , , ,
Categories: Character Wheel |
Comments: Comments Off

Introducing the Character Wheel

Written by Jeff Carlsen on 2010/02/03 – 00:00 -

Character creation is an ongoing process that, like any art, resists too much structure. Nevertheless, it benefits from a guidelines and process. What follows is a development tool that will help you grow a character alongside your campaign. It’s called the Character Wheel.

The Basics

The Character Wheel is a simple metaphor. The wheel’s hub are both your character’s core concept and the image you hold of them in your head. All other aspects of the character are spokes that revolve around, and are informed by, the hub.

The wheel itself never stops turning, because character development never ends, but also to provide a convenient order of operations when considering aspects of your character. As you play the game, you just keep moving around the wheel, adding to your character.

Finally, the wheel is a reference. Every has aspects of their character that they develop more easily than the others, but this can make the character’s wheel unbalanced. This isn’t terrible, by any means, but it points out weaker aspects that deserve attention.

As the Wheel Turns

Alright, Mr. Carlsen. You’ve beaten me over the head with a metaphor, but how does it actually work?

Fair enough. As this is an introduction, I won’t dive deep into the details yet; the individual parts of the wheel will each get more dedicated development, but what follows is an overview.

First, you must establish goals. You need to consider what you wish to accomplish with the character prior to anything else. Establishing goals and guidelines prevents you from creating a character that doesn’t fit the campaign, or that doesn’t work with the party.

Second, come up with a character concept. Your concept is a short description of the character. Your elevator pitch, no longer than a few sentences.

Third, develop an image of the character in your mind. This includes tone, atmosphere, emotions, actions, sounds, smells, and anything that adds to that intangible feeling you have of a character. Everything that follows is an attempt to capture and define that image.

Finally, once you have a concept and image, you can start working your way around the wheel. You start with one category, develop some ideas within it, then move on to the next. The spokes, or categories, are arranged in an order so that what you develop in one will most readily influence what follows. But this order is what works best for me, so rearrange it at will.

  • Description: This category includes physical description, interesting marks, accents, behaviors, and mannerisms. Essentially, all the things that someone might notice about the character.
  • Motivations: Goals, fears, dreams. That which drives a character to act.
  • Background: The events and places that have influenced the character, including history, education, and hometown.
  • Attitudes: Characters have opinions on everything. Record them for posterity.
  • Relationships: These are the people who have influence on the character.
  • Mechanics: The game rules. These come last because they feel more natural if they are influenced by the other categories.

That’s it for the basic outline, and is probably enough that you’re already considering how to use it. Tomorrow I’ll start digging into the meat of the process, so stay tuned. In the meantime, I’m interested in what character creation systems you have most enjoyed. Let me know in the comments.


Tags: , , ,
Categories: Character Wheel |
Comments: View Comments