Traits

Traits are abilities that are inherent to every player character in the game and most non-player characters. Here are some notes of what I've found useful.

• Strength and agility are going to be used in almost any world system that you make up. Depending on how much physical combat you are expecting, you may want to be more specific with these ("agility" for the speed of your body, "dexterity" for the speed of your hands, etc.), but I tend to like to keep things simple.

• Some measurement of pain tolerance (which I call "endurance") is useful. If I went back in time, I would probably also add a measurement of tolerance to emotional and mental pain (since a lot of my monsters end up preying on the psyches of the characters). As it is, I've ended up using "intelligence" for this instead, which my players have never complained about.

• You could place "social skills" as one broad category. However, I knew that our game would be based around a lot of talking and teen drama (it is in a school, after all). Instead I have the traits "charisma," the ability to convince other people of what you are saying, and "perception," the ability to see through deception and tell how other people are feeling.

• Pretty early on, I discovered that I needed a trait which would alert characters to what was going on in their surroundings, which I called "awareness." We had actually played through about two or three sessions before I realized how necessary this sort of thing was and after discussing the problem with my players, we decided to add this ability to everyone's character sheet.

• The Window says "that everyone has almost every 'skill' imaginable at [the d30] level of competency," which means that many abilities can be attempted without prior experience (http://www.mimgames.com/window/rules/competency.html). However, I have found it useful to make some abilities off limits to certain characters so that they cannot even attempt a role. For instance, characters who are not wizards have a 0% chance of performing a spell, so they are not allowed to roll even a d30 if they attempt to perform magic.