Power Level (PL) is a baseline value that provides a contextual baseline for how powerful characters within the setting currently are. PL determines how many skills and traits a character or NPC can have.

Traits and skills are what make up the bulk of your character. They encompass both who they are and what they can do, and they serve as a means of describing your character in understandable terms to other players and the Narrators. There are some common qualities that both Traits and Skills have:

Traits and Skills both:

• Have Limited Uses per Scene - Each skill can only be used a certain number of times before you become too tired to use that skill for a bit. This helps ensure every character gets a chance to try something in a scene, rather than only having the player with the most optimal traits/skills perform any interactions.
• Have a Cost to Upgrade - This cost is based on how impactful the skill is, and determines how much it costs to be able to gain an additional use of that skill.
• Have a cap on how many positive traits/skills one can have at once - This cap is equal to half the setting's PL, rounded down. This cap prevents an abuse of negative traits to gain huge amounts of trait points, or training an enormous amount of skills that the Narrators have to keep track of.

Skills are learned abilities that your character knows, which can be actively invoked to cause an effect on the world. Skills can range from something as simple as “attacking” or “lockpicking” to something as complex as “ritual invocation of the mystic arts”.

Skills:

• Are Learned - you can acquire (and lose!) skills along your journeys.
• Can Be Used Multiple Times in an Action (sometimes) - Depending on what you decide with a Narrator, some skills could be invoked more than once. For example, a swordsman might invoke the “Attack” skill twice in one action to make a Heavy Attack.
• Have a Success and a Failure Outcome - While usually, a player will know if a skill is useful to invoke in advance, any skill can still fail if used at the wrong time or in the wrong way. Trying to lockpick a door that has magical countermeasures might break your lockpicks, for example, or attempting to attack an enemy that dodges out of the way might cause you to stagger and lose your footing momentarily.

Traits are innate qualities that a character possesses. Traits can range from personality traits and fantasy racial traits, to innate magical talents and physical attributes. The difference between traits and skills is that traits are innate, whereas skills are learned. Additionally, traits can only be invoked once in an action, whereas some skills can be invoked multiple times (see below).

Traits:

• Are innate - unlike skills, which are something you do, traits are something you are. Traits may be permanent or temporary, but they can't be forgotten or lost.
• Can be positive or negative - Some traits are helpful, and some are harmful. In general, you will want to invoke positive traits to help you, and the Narrators can choose to invoke negative traits to hinder you.
• Can Only Be Used Once in an Action - Either a trait helps/hinders you, or it doesn't - there's no “stacking” a single trait multiple times. You can, however, state that you have multiple separate traits that would aid your attempt at something.

Tools are, broadly speaking, anything you have at your disposal that could help you in a situation that isn't a skill or a trait. Not all tools are physical items - pieces of information, connections to other NPCs or characters, access to buildings, or even political influence can be considered tools.

There are some tools that every character has - these are called innate tools. This usually amounts to the character's physical body - fists for punching, eyes for looking around, lips for talking, etc. Everyone is assumed to have these tools available for their disposal unless their character has some hindrance that mitigates it (i.e. a character that is temporarily blinded can't choose to “look around a room” without working eyes).

Discuss as a group how powerful you want everyone to start out as the world begins, and how powerful certain actors in the world should be in comparison to the player characters.

Should characters start out as established, trained heroes, or are they beginning as humble commoners? Is the world full of established kingdoms, villainous forces, and powerful monsters, or are the narrative antagonists starting on relatively equal footing with the players? These are the sorts of questions best determined as a group at the start, or at the very least, determined by the Narrators and clearly disclosed and explained to players before they begin to create characters.

Something important to note is that PL is contextual - it's numeric value only has meaning in relation to other established values, such as skill costs. In the below examples, small PLs will be used - 10/20/30 PL - alongside equally small numbers for trait costs - 1/2/4 TP - but you could easily multiply those numbers by a factor of ten and allow for much finer-grained control over trait costs, with no other tangible difference in difficulty.

For the sake of the rest of this guide, we'll operate off the following assumptions:

• 10 PL is a “gritty” campaign - characters are realistic and have a pretty equal balance of positive and negative traits, and not a lot of each either. Characters are tightly focused and relatively down-to-earth.
• 20 PL is a “standard” campaign - characters stand out of the pack, likely have more positive traits than negative ones (unless they chose to take some on to be even more powerful), and have a pretty wide spread of skills.
• 30 PL is a “heroic” campaign - characters are exceptionally powerful compared to the average individual, have little to no negative traits compared to their positive ones (unless they choose to), and are highly talented in a wide variety of skills.

In regards to TP/SP, minor/average/major traits and skills will be worth 1/2/4 TP or SP in the following examples, respectively.

Discuss as a group what sorts of traits and skills your characters will have, and establish rulings on how many TP/SP each are worth.

As a general rule, more specific/narrow traits and skills should cost less, and more powerful/broad traits and skills should cost more. For example: In DnD 5e, “Animal Handling” is a skill one can acquire. However, this is fairly broad; what qualifies as “handling” is left up to wide interpretation. Depending on the setting, what qualifies as an “animal” may even be fairly broad. Assuming a character wanted to take Animal Handling as a trait, this would likely cost 4 TP. However, this could be refined to be more specific to reduce its cost. A skill like “At Peace with Fauna” would be worth 2 TP; it's much more specific. A trait such as “Friendly with Canines” would is not only more specific, but also more narrow in scope, and would likely cost only 1 TP.

Another example would be the DnD attribute “Charisma”. While this system doesn't have attributes, a player might assume that a trait called “Charismatic” would suitably fulfill the role. Again, however, “Charismatic” is both broad and unspecific - charisma can manifest in a variety of ways (even within DnD rules, which is why multiple skills are derived from the trait in 5e rules). As-is, this might cost 4 TP or more. Refining the skill to something more specific like “Witty Banter” would fit well as a 2 TP trait. Further refinement would probably make the trait *too* specific, so 2 TP would likely be a good fit.

The above examples are not hard-and-fast rules, but hopefully provide some tangible guidelines as to the thought process behind selecting costs for traits and skills. Once a trait or skill has an established cost, it's best to write it down somewhere for future reference, in order to provide consistency for future characters.

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Unlike traditional RPGs, narrative-driven roleplaying doesn't easily lend itself to “leveling” in the traditional ways. Instead, it's best to simply have an OOC discussion about altering the PL of the setting. If everyone agrees, the PL simply…increases.

When moving from one PL to the next, all players are given TP and SP equal to the difference between the previous PL and the new PL. For example, if a campaign is moving from 10 PL to 15 PL, all players would receive 5 TP and 5 SP to spend. Depending on what suits the group, characters may be able to simply spend these points immediately to update their character sheets, or they may need to find narrative reasons to develop their traits and train their skills accordingly. This may be a valuable time to narratively implement a “time-skip”, if one is desired.