Example Character Sheet #2: Grate Oracle Lewot

Basics

Stick: D (0/21)
Other: E

n/a

1) Useless Foam Square
2) Honey Shroom
3)
4)
5)
6)
7)
8)
9)
10)

• Armor: None
• Money: None

Combat Stats

Field Stats

Strength: 3
Hand-Eye: 6
Platform: 9
Knowledge: 2
Clever: 3
Charisma: 1

• Unique: Can predict the future when aided by proximity to a grate.
• Weight: 4

Attacks

• AP: 0/3
• Basic Attack: Does a cannon ball on top of the target.

1) Towel (E)
2)
3)
4)

Special Attacks

• Grate Attack~ Attack: x2 +2, VP: 2, Target: One, unspecified action (avoids Electrification, etc.)
  "A great attack."
• Spacetime Fabric~ Attack: x1 [/], VP: 3, Target: All, Weapon: Towel
  "Waves the towel to create a rift in spacetime that damages all opponents. Similar in effect to Quake Hammer."

Psychic Attacks

• Grate Prediction~ VP: 3, Target: Self, Predicts and dodges all attacks for one turn (does not dodge healing, etc.)
  (Accuracy: 100% standing on a grate, 75% with a grate in battle, 25% if a grate is nowhere near)
  "Makes a psychic prediction about incoming attacks to dodge them. Prediction accuracy varies based on grates present."

Magical Attacks

• None

Technicalities

• Appearance: A human wearing gray sweatpants, a light blue t-shirt, and black boots. Blonde hair, green eyes, with some brown heterochromia in the right eye. Tallish and skinnyish—looking a bit like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo.
• Personality: Sort of like a combination of Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect, if that's even possible.
• Backstory: As a kid, he discovered that he had psychic powers that grew in strength when he was near a grate, and faded completely when no grates were anywhere around. He dubbed himself a Grate Oracle and bummed around the galaxy, selling psychic predictions and taking the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's advice about towels to heart. He is familiar with space travel, and the last transportation ship that he found himself on crash-landed in the setting of the current game of Arpeggio.
• Trivia: He likes Useless Foam Squares for no particular reason. He also enjoys Honey Shrooms and Cheez-Its.

As you can see, this character is based on my internet username, Grate Oracle Lewot. His theme is that he has psychic powers that grow stronger when he is near any kind of grate. A very odd theme, but let's see what he's done with it.

He's chosen an Ice Affinity and a D Weapon Level in Stick-type weapons. These are both basically self-deprecating jokes about myself, but it's nothing too different than what we saw on Bob Everyman, so let's move on.

Again, Lewot has a few simple items, no armor or money, and he's started with 10 VP instead of 10 MP. Very similar to Bob, just without any money. Doo-da-doo-da-doo, Attack 1, Magic 1, Defense 0, Brain . . . what?

Here Lewot has come up with a way for his "grate-powered psychic ability" idea to be numerically relevant to the game: his Brain stat changes based on his character's proximity to a grate. With the values listed, it seems that under grateless conditions, Lewot has 1 Brain Power just like a normal player character, but when he's standing on a grate that jumps up to the maximum of 5. If Lewot battles enemies from a grated position, he can do psychic damage like a fully leveled-up player! Surely this must be far too much of an advantage over other players?

Well, if you look further down the sheet, you'll see that, although Lewot's single psychic move is affected by his closeness to grates, it's actually a non-damaging move that merely allows him to dodge enemy attacks. Furthermore, he doesn't seem to have any grate-related items in his inventory, so he won't just have superpowered psychic abilities all the time. True, if he learned, say, PK Fire α once he reached Level 5 (which is when he would learn his first additional attack), and used it while standing on a grate, he could deal 10 psychic damage to all enemies, who at that early point in the game would probably only have 1 Brain Power with which to defend against this. But, obviously, the Maestro will control the availability of grates to Lewot, and I should also point out that this character should be unable to receive base Brain Power increases, which means that even when he progresses in the game and permanently increases his Attack, Magic, and/or Defense, his Brain will still fall to 1 when he moves out of range of grates, leaving him vulnerable to enemy psychic attacks at that time. (Also, the "5, 4, and 1" given are just examples; Lewot's Brain Power could go to 2 or 3 if the grate were in another room or another building, and perhaps he could get an injection of nanogrates into his bloodstream to boost it all the way to 6. Be creative!)

Lewot has maxed out his Platform field stat to 9, so he'll be able to jump around anywhere like Luigi, and he's also got rather good Hand-Eye, but everything else is pretty poor. That's okay: in fact, a team of characters who each have different stats maxed out at 9 (even at the expense of their other stats) will cover each others' weaknesses and create a party that together could offer a 9 in all six stats. In comparison, a team composed entirely of Bob Everymen would only be able to offer a 5 in every stat, since that's what all of them have; they don't have any major weaknesses, but their maximums are lower, so they can't excel. (It is true that some field stats can be combined, so that if one pair of characters has a 9 and a 1 in Strength, and another pair has two 5s, both pairs would be able to move a rock with a Weight of 10.) Those of you with high Clever stats have probably picked up on the joke about me having barrel-bottom Charisma—I have no social life, as you can tell by this site's existence.

Lewot's special field ability directly relates to his fluctuating Brain Power stat, conceptually tying together his battle and field abilities, so that's good. Admittedly, his special ability will probably end up being more of a plot-based, role playing one than one that directly allows him to overcome physical field obstacles, but that's alright. The important thing about a special field ability is that it should allow the character to do something that isn't covered by the other field stats, which in turn means that they can do something that no other character can do, unless another character has a similar special ability. This makes every player character essential to the party, because nobody else can perform their special field task.

For a weapon, Lewot has equipped a Towel. But wait—his D Weapon Level was in Sticks! However will he fight? Well, if you look at the Towel sheet, you'll see that it's a very special weapon that can be used by anybody without any training, and that can cast magic spells despite being considered a melee weapon. This is of course based on the "infinitely useful towel" joke in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. If Lewot wants to learn any magic spells later in his career, he won't need to find a separate magic weapon in order to cast them. How handy.

In addition to Lewot's Prediction attack, he has an unarmed move that deals a good amount of damage to one enemy, and an armed move that deals some damage to all enemies. I based these two attacks somewhat on Power Jump and Quake Hammer, two of my favorite moves from Paper Mario. Whereas Bob Everyman was best at dealing a lot of damage to one enemy, Lewot can do a few different things with his different attacks—neither style is necessarily better, but personally I like some variety.

Lewot's "Spacetime Fabric" attack has a funny "[/]" mark after its damage number—what does that mean? Well, if you're familiar with bowling, you'll know that a slash stands for a spare while an X stands for a strike. In Arpeggio, "Strike Attacks" (marked with [X]) will pierce most forms of defense, including armor being worn by the target, while "Spare Attacks" (marked with that [/]) can't get through armor, but do bypass Defense Power. In Paper Mario, Quake Hammer bypasses Defense Power, so I gave Lewot's attack the equivalent attribute in Arpeggio. It costs 3 VP because that was how much Quake Hammer was in Paper Mario 2, but you'd need to spend a little extra VP to get the [X] attribute, especially on a multitarget attack. (Similarly, Grate Attack costs 2 because Power Jump did, and Grate Prediction is somewhat similar to Bow's Outta Sight and Vivian's Veil, which cost 2 and 1 respectively; I figured with the grate-based accuracy, it could just be 1.)

Unlike Bob, Lewot has some Elemental Modifiers. These don't make particular sense based on his simple human appearance, but players are allowed to create Elemental Modifiers regardless of such logic, so this is okay. The rules they must follow are that a resistance is bought by creating a weakness; we can see that Lewot has bought resistances to Ice and Thunder by adding weaknesses to Fire and Plant. The actual numbers must fall under a small number of options: a character can either be immune (x0), resistant (-2), indifferent (--), weak (+2), or super-weak (+5) to an Element. An immunity can be bought with either one super-weakness or two regular weaknesses, or two resistances can be bought with a single super-weakness, and so on.

That's pretty much it for Lewot. His Technicalities are a little more detailed than Bob's, and you can make those as simple or as sprawlingly complex as you please.