Character Creation
The following series of steps is designed to make fleshing out your character as painless and easy as possible. As always, feel free to ask for help if you have questions.
1: Choose an Archetype - Go to the Archetypes section and pick an archetype. This is your character's "class", the job or specilization that will define their abilites and any special bonuses.
2: Choose a gender, description, and personality. - This is the heart of your character, this is who he or she is. Pick out your character's look, favorite weapon, and general demeanor. Remember that your character should be between 16 and 18, as they will be graduating from SeeD training.
Then take it further, and give your character a real personality. Pick a name (first and last), and a favorite color, a favorite food. Decide if your character has dated anyone, and if not, why? Were they too dedicated to studies? Just not the kind of person that gets dates? How many friends does your character have? Do they like sunshine? Where were they born? Did they go to Trabia Garden or did they have a more traditional education? When did the character go to Garden in the first place? Is your character enough of an overachiver to be stationed at Galbadia Garden? What are your character's parents like? Do they have any siblings?
Questions like these help you flesh a character out into a real person, and will guide the rest of your character creation. It's difficult to pick an info skill if you don't know what your character is interested in, but once you know who this person is, everything else falls into place pretty easily. Don't be afraid to mull it over for a little while. Once the points have been spent, there's no reason to stop this process either. A little tweaking in the early game is fine, and in any case, this is a character. A person. They will grow and change over the course of the game, as they grow up and have adventures.
3: Add Attribute Points - So now you've got a character, and you know what his or her general strengths and weaknesses are. You've also got a character archetype that tells you what the starting point of all your character's numbers are. Now is when you start customizing the rules portion of your character.
Add 2 points to your primary attributes. Be sure to check the maximums allowed by your character archetype. Raising a Primary attribute raises all the secondary attributes that are equal to the Primary. Secondary Attributes that are lower then the Primary go up by one for each point the Primary goes up. Secondary attributes that are higher than the Primary attribute are not affected when you raise the Primary attribute.
Example Time: You're a Monk, with a Mind attribute of 6, and a Perception Secondary Attribute of 7. If you raise your Mind to 7, the Perception score doesn't change. If you put a second point in Mind (which you can't do, due to maximums, but for this example...) then Perception would rise to 8 as well, because it's now at the same level as the Primary Attribute.
Second Example: Almost everyone has a starting Luck Attribute of 1. If you raise your Magic Attribute, say from 5 to 6, your Luck Attribute will go from 1 to 2. Of course, it can't be raised past it's maximum in this way.
Next, add 4 points to your Secondary attributes, watching out for maximums again. You can now calculate your Hitpoints and Mana. Hitpoints are your Body or Constitution (whichever is higher) score multiplied by 5.
Mana is your Mind score multiplied by 2, plus your Magic score multiplied by 3. This is a lot of math, but you only have to do it at character generation, and when these stats change. Most of the time, you'll just have your Mana and Hitpoint totals written down.
4: Add Skill Points - Everyone starts out with some basic skills, both regular skills and Info skills. You get some extras to add to this, 10 points to be exact. These points can be used to buy new skills, or boost the existing ones, including info skills. You can even purchase new info skills if you like. Remember to take a look at your Action Value maximums. Each important skill will have a certain maximum that you can't take it beyond at character generation. Remember also that your Action Value maximum isn't the highest the skill bonus can go, it's the highest your Skill + it's relevent Attribute can go.
While you're at it, pick your player's choice info skills. Don't worry about picking something super useful, most of the "useful" info skills have already been chosen for each archeytpe, and your regular skills include lots of information as well. Pick something fun and typical of your character, like knowlege of a certain kind of manga (Squall has read all the Battle Series books), or fashion, or anything else you think would be fun for your character to know about. These skills can also blurr the line between action skills and info skills. If you chose Info: Cooking, then you'll know how to cook. It's not an essential skill, and it doesn't need to be on the official skill list, but you can give your character some cooking skills with an info skill.
Also, these skills are not the totality of what your character knows. With the Cooking skill, for example, not having it doesn't mean that your character doesn't know how to cook. It means they don't know how to cook well. Someone with a few points in cooking would be a gifted chef, everyone else just gets by like a regular person.
5: Record your Special Techniques and Limit Breaks - Finally, take 2 special techniques from one tree, and 1 from the other. Take the first break for each skill tree your character gets. Note anything else the archetype tells you about your character. For instance, Thieves have a special ability relating to Luck points.
You'll find a character sheet for your use here, in a nice printer-friendly format. Feel free to open up the source code and customize your character's info into it, and put the page up yourself, or send me the HTML code. If you don't know how to do that, no worries. I'll be putting up the pages of anyone who's not HTML savvy, but I know that people with the skills like to customize things. On the Character Sheet, SeeD rank is 0 (trainee) for now.
You're all done! Congratulations on your new character. Now all you have to worry about is passing the SeeD Field Exam.
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All images, thoughts, stories, backgrounds, etc copyright Tim Diaz 2001 unless otherwise noted.