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Example Fusion Sheet: Buck McEverymagic

Basics

Current Stats

HP: 19/20, VP: 15/15, MP: 15/15, Status: Drunk
Blood Alcohol Level: 0.08

Weapon Levels

Support Levels

Inventory

Combat Stats

Field Stats

Attacks

Weapons

Special Attacks

Psychic Attacks

Magical Attacks

Elemental Modifiers

Information

A fusion of Bob Everyman and Muck McMagicman. Since Bob is bland and boring while Muck is a party animal, they mostly just frustrate each other, resulting in Buck McEverymagic being kind of a simmering hothead who only gets brought into temporary existence when necessary. He would probably look like a slightly more human-shaped Muck (i.e., individual legs instead of just a shapeless bottom half, and maybe eyes visible in the sockets and wearing Bob's clothes).

Notes

This is a sheet demonstrating the results of the fusion mechanic, where two characters combine into one. In this case, I've fused two of the example characters from this section, Bob Everyman and Muck McMagicman. So you pretty much need to read the fusion page and both of their individual sheets in order to understand what's going on here.

Done? Okay, so... Yeah, I just smooshed their names together to make "Buck McEverymagic." You don't necessarily have to name fusions in that manner, or name them at all really. But anyway, you'll see there's a new field on the sheet indicating the "Fusers"—obviously, these are the characters who have combined to create this fusion. Generally I'll have those names link back to their solo sheets so that you always have easy access to those.

Fusions of multiple player characters are controlled jointly by the corresponding players. On this example sheet, this is rendered awkwardly as my name listed twice, but you get the idea. Cooperation is key; disagreements between players about what action the fusion should take can result in the fusion unintentionally unfusing.

We're missing the Level and XP fields from the solo sheets: that's because fusions have no Level of their own. Instead, the fusers just earn XP separately like they normally would, with any resulting changes also applying to the fusion. For enemies, though, the XP reward for defeating a fusion is equal to the XP rewards of the fusers added together.

Affinity: the fusion gets its own, in this case Fire. This is because Affinities can't really be mathematically added, and characters, even fusions, are restricted to only having one. Only the fusion's new Affinity is used for support bonuses while the characters remain fused—but for convenience, if you want to see the Affinities of the fusers, hover your mouse over the guillemet (») next to the fusion's Affinity, and they will appear. This system is used for most of the stats on a fusion's sheet, allowing you to view the stats of the fusers without even needing to click away to their own sheets. Anyway, a fusion's Affinity will depend on its own personality, which depends on those of the fusers and their relationships with each other. Since Bob is just a boring everyman and Muck is constantly looking for fun and socialization, the two aren't especially suited for fusion, and this results in Buck being mostly characterized by anger, which is best represented by a Fire Affinity. This does not mean that Earth and Poison Affinities would always combine into Fire: characters with the same Affinity can still have pretty different personalities, so each fusion's Affinity must be determined just like each individual character's.

Buck has retained Muck's Insomnia. Since Bob didn't have a disorder of his own, we can pretty much just assume that Muck's carries over. If different fusers have different disorders, the fusion may end up with all of them, or some of them may cancel each other out. A fusion could even have a completely new disorder if the combination of the fusers' personalities would make sense for this.

In the Current Stats section, we can see that because Muck was drunk with a blood alcohol level of 0.08 before fusing, Buck retains this—in fact, if Bob had also had a BAL above 0.00, their two values would've added together, making Buck even more drunk. But wait a minute—why is Buck also missing 1 HP? That's actually because Muck is Made of Poison: the act of fusing dealt the Made of Poison damage to Bob, so it's present on Buck. Muck himself is immune to the Poison Element, but Bob isn't, so even though Buck will end up retaining Muck's Elemental immunity (see below), Bob still got hurt by touching him. That being said, touching someone who's Made of Poison also has a chance to inflict Poisoning as a Status Problem, but Muck (and therefore Buck) is immune to that Status Problem thanks to his Poison Element immunity, so in this case there's no need to run the calculation for whether or not Bob got Poisoned, since it would just go away on Buck.

Weapon Levels: Buck has both Bob's Sword skills and Muck's Bow skills. That's easy; what's more complicated is when you fuse characters who both have skill with the same weapon. If it's an enemy fusion, I'll pretty much just bump up the Weapon Level to the next full letter or whatever I please (with everything capping out at A), but for player characters, what happens is that we add together the individual weapon use points that go toward increasing their Weapon Levels. In the case of Bob and Muck here, they're assumed to be just starting out as Level 0 player characters, so while they get a D Weapon Level, they haven't actually used their weapons in the game yet. For a player character who has the minimum Weapon Level of E in a given weapon type, in order to increase that to the next level of D, they need to use that type of weapon 11 times. Thus, we can say that Bob has 11 Sword points and Muck has 11 Bow ones. If both of them had Swords, we would start at D Level, which covers one set of 11 points, and then we would add the other 11 into the pool of points going toward C Level. It takes 21 to get from D to C, so Buck's Sword level would just stay at D. But for player characters who have actually played some of the game, the number of points might be high enough to bump the level up to C. That would mean that by fusing, the characters could temporarily use C-Level swords even though their individual levels are still down at D. And, since both of them are present within the fusion, they would both earn these use points whenever the fusion attacks with a weapon, so the fusion effectively earns 2 use points per... use.

Being a fusion of two characters, Buck can now carry 20 items instead of 10 (and 8 weapons instead of 4). He's holding Bob's Mushroom and Muck's Hot Drumstick and Vulnerary, and he's got Bob's Iron Sword and Muck's Thunder Tome and Iron Bow. He can still only equip one weapon at a time, or use one regular item per turn. It's possibly possible to fuse weapons along with fusing characters, but here I've gone with the simpler option of leaving them alone and just giving all of them to Buck. Similarly, he's carrying Bob's 100 Coins and Muck's 42 Rupees, as well as Muck's Quiver and arrows. He's also wearing Muck's armor (the Bronze Platemail). This is one case where things can go a little awry: if both fusers were wearing armor, the fusion can only wear one of the two, so the other will go into an empty slot in the fusion's inventory, but if that's all the way full, then it just falls on the ground, becoming a discarded item; if this happens in mid-battle, there's a chance of enemies grabbing it, so watch out for that. On the other hand, armor stats aren't too complicated, so you could try fusing the armor as well, which you will see me do with Koopa Shells.

Anyway, the cool part: Buck's stats are those of Bob and Muck added together (handled automatically by code here on Ostinato), which can even result in things like field stats exceeding 9. Since Bob and Muck are both merely starting-level player characters, there's nothing hugely impressive here, but because Buck has both an Attack and Magic of 2, when he uses Bob's sword attacks or Muck's Petrificate spell, they'll come out more powerful. On top of that, he gets Muck's Defense of 2, plus the Bronze Platemail. The Iron Bow, of course, has its own set power, so that isn't affected, but still. By fusing into Buck, Bob and Muck can combine their power to take on stronger enemies that they might not be able to otherwise handle. On the flipside, Buck only gets one action per turn, so there might be some times when staying unfused proves more beneficial.

But yes, Buck can use all the special attacks known by both Bob and Muck, be they physical, magical, or psychic. As with weapons, it's possible to instead fuse the attacks into newer, better, stronger, combined versions, but the easier thing is to just keep them all—hence this sheet indicating that Buck has 6 AP instead of just 3. Since the stats that power the attacks are already combined, the attacks will be stronger when used by Buck, so there's not a lot of need to change them. In this way, fusions can avoid being overly complicated, mechanically revolving around just adding the stats of the fusers.

Bob didn't have any Elemental Modifiers, so what happens here is that Buck just inherits Muck's. Any other modifier overrides "--", even a super-weakness or immunity. Things get more complicated when fusers have conflicting modifiers, but you can probably guess how a regular weakness and a resistance to the same Element would cancel each other out, and so on. Buck also retains Muck's property of being Made of Poison, as we've already touched on. Yet again, Bob, being the supremely uninteresting fellow that he is, had no special effect of his own that would potentially alter this, so we just kept Muck's thing. The "Notes" section being all about abilities and effects that can't be defined by the existing fields on the character sheet, you'll have to reason things out yourself when it comes to how to combine complex conditions, but the fusion page offers some more ideas to work with.

The same deal goes for Muck's Unique field ability: Bob didn't have one, so Buck just gets Muck's. But naturally, two characters who both have different Unique abilities might fuse. Typically, in that case, the fusion will either retain both Unique abilities (allowing it to have more than one, which is never possible on a single character), or else the two abilities will in some way combine into an entirely new one. Even when a fusion ends up with more than one Unique ability, though, I'll tend to describe them both within the single field provided on the character sheet, mostly out of laziness. If you prefer, you could separate them into multiple fields, perhaps labeled simply "Unique #1" and so on.

Unique attributes aside, the fusion system is designed so that you don't really need to write a separate sheet for a fusion—its stats are just derived from those of the fusers, and generally via simple addition. The only proper exception is the fusion's Affinity, but given that it's only one thing to remember, most of the time the Maestro can handle that. On the other hand, if you are doing things like fusing attacks or field abilities, you'd best have them written down somewhere, so a sheet is probably necessary. Generally, a fusion sheet needs only an "Information" section with a quick blurb, as opposed to the more detailed "Technicalities" section of a player character sheet, because a fusion cannot really have any personal history outside that of the fusers. But designing the fusion's appearance is part of the fun, so feel free to gush about that (even as much as Arpeggio is still normally a non-visual medium).