8.2 Personality

The PCs’ personalities are expressed in several ways on the character sheet. While most of who they are comes out when they are played, those indicators on the sheet can change over time and express the development of the character’s personality. Let’s talk specifically about passions and traits.

Passions

The character’s passion expresses her overall emotional state. While her mood can change, her passion is something that’s fundamental to who she is. A change in passion represents a fundamental shift in the character’s personality. Someone whose life purpose used to be gaining glory now focuses on protecting the one she loves. Someone who used to be full of compassion now revels in her lust for blood.

These kinds of changes don’t come about easily. The rules won’t prevent you from switching your passion just because you want to earn charge dice in a different way. But if you want to get the most out of playing the game, I suggest using the passion as a core ingredient in developing your character.

You can change your passion on the spot, either during a character scene or at the beginning or end of your turn in a conflict, but only once per play session. Any additional changes need to be approved by the GM. Given that passions are profound states of mind of the characters, such changes should be reasonably rare, and even a change once per session is probably more than the events in the story warrant, but that determination is up to you.

The best moment to change your passion is when the PC is at a critical decision point. Either something very dramatic just happened to the character, or her decision will bring it about. If her loved one was severely hurt, does she choose to pursue vengeance or keep focusing on her love? If given the choice between helping innocent bystanders or raking in immortal glory, which way will she go?

The game gives you a mechanism to express this in addition to just describing it, and that’s changing the passion. Use it sparingly and with the right timing, and it can be very powerful.

Traits

Traits are used to give you a better feel for who your character is, as well as what’s currently on your character’s mind. They can express emotions, thoughts, quirks, mottos, and all sorts of other aspects of your character’s personality.

You can use traits in two ways: either you treat them flexibly to indicate to other players what your character’s current state of mind is, or you treat them more like passions, in that a change of a trait expresses a fundamental change of the character.

Contrary to passions, the type and content of the trait has no impact on how it works mechanically in a conflict or character scene. Your character might still be the very same person, just with a different focus. When you change the trait away from “In love with Bea,” it doesn’t have to mean that the character’s not in love with Bea anymore—that’s up to how you play the character. But it does indicate that you the player are not as interested in playing out that aspect of your character anymore.

In other words, traits are mainly used as roleplaying inspiration and as signals for your interest (see the essay on Flags in chapter 11).

You can change your traits at any time. The more often you change your traits, however, the less likely your fellow players are to pay attention to them or to give them any weight.

If you use the optional rule for added trait bonuses (see chapter 10), you have to change stars into checks when you change a trait.