Assigning Character Elements

Once you have the general idea down, figure out what parts of a character you need to make up the extra .

• If the extra influences the story, then it should use Aspects . • If the extra creates a new context for action, then it should use skills . • If the extra makes skills more awesome, then it should use stunt s.
• If the extra can suffer harm or be used up somehow, then it should take stress and consequences.
An extra might use an Aspectsas a permission—requiring a certain char acter Aspectsin order to use the other abilities of the Aspects. Your character might need to be born with some trait or have obtained some level of status to make use of the Aspects. Or the extra might provide a new Aspectsthat the character has access to, if it’s the extra itself that is important to the story.
There are a few ways an extra can use skill . The extra might be a new skill , not on the default skill list. It could re-write an existing skill , adding new functions to the skills four actions. The extra might cost a skill slot during character creation or advancement in order to be obtained. It’s possible that an extra might include one or more existing skills that the character has access to while controlling the extra .
Writing up an extra as a stunt works just like building a new stunt. One extra could have a few stunts attached to it—it may even include the skills those stunt modify. extras that include stunts often cost refresh points, just as stunts do.
An extra that describes some integral ability of a character might grant a new stress track—beyond physical and mental stress—directly to that character. An extra that is a separate entity from the character—such as a location or a vehicle—might have a physical stress track of its own. You might also designate a skill that influences that stress track—just as Physique pro vides extra stress boxes and consequence slots for physical stress . With a firm grasp of what the extra does, you’ll choose which character elements best reinforce those ideas in play and how you’ll use them.
For Zird’s magic, the group decides that it should use Aspectsand skill for sure—there’s a clear story influence, and magic cre ates a new avenue of dealing with problems. They don’t want it to enhance other skill , but rather stand alone, so it doesn’t use stunts. They don’t envision any kind of “mana pool” or other resource associated with it, so it doesn’t use stress or consequences.

Permissions and Costs

A permission is the narrative justification that allows you to take an extra in the first place. For the most part, you establish permission to take an extra with one of your character’s Aspects, which describes what makes your character qualified or able to have it. You can also just agree it makes sense for someone to have an extra and call it good.
A cost is how you pay for the extra , and it comes out of the resources available on your character sheet, whether that’s a skill point, a refresh point, a stunt slot, or an Aspectsslot.
Fortunately, because extras use character elements that are already familiar to you, dealing with costs is fairly simple—you just pay what you’d nor mally pay from the slots available to you at character creation. If the extra is a new skill , you just put it into your pyramid like normal. If it’s an Aspects, you choose one of your five Aspectsas the one you need. If it’s a stunt, you pay a refresh point (or more) to have it.
GMs, if you don’t want players to choose between having extras and having the normal stuff available to a starting character, feel free to raise the number of slots all PCs get at character creation to accommodate extras — just make sure that each PC gets the same amount of additional slots.
Amanda establishes that Zird should have an Aspectsreflecting that he’s been trained in the Collegia’s magic, as a permission. Zird already does, so that’s a non-issue. As for cost, because his magic is going to be primarily skill based, she’s just going to make him take the magic-using skill and put it in his skill pyramid. Further, in order to save effort, she decides that the skill in question is going to be just plain old Lore, and suggests that anyone with the appropriate training and a high Lore skill could call on magic, rather than it being an issue of genetics or birthright. Ryan likes this, because it’s simple and down to earth, and agrees