It Builds Character

You can tell a lot about a TTRPG by looking at its character sheet. After all, a character sheet is the main user interface that a player will use to reference their options during play. These data sheets are used to list character's statistics as well as record important information such as what resources are at the player's disposal and how moves that are commonly used work. As a result, character sheets are a billboard of sorts for what is quintessentially important to a game and give hints about how the game functions as a whole.

Sonic TTH has been and will continue to be a work in progress, and as such, every mechanic and design element has been the result of various iterations. Consequently, the various character sheets have become like rings of a tree, shining a light on how the game looked at various points. Rather than let them sit in my hard drive indefinitely, I thought it would be fun to share my process.

Stage 1 - Pre-Alpha

The genesis of Sonic TTH was as a fast and loose homebrew with friends referred to interchangeably as "the Sonic RPG" or simply "the RPG". Since the game was nebulous, even for me at this point, I took it upon myself to create characters for each player. There were no character creation rules, I created each bespoke character by the metric of "this feels right" and "close enough." Before I finalized any character sheet designs, I took the statistics I knew I wanted to include and dumped them in a Google Keep note for quick reference later. Apparently, I wasn't even sure how much TP players would have.

At this phase, many of the signature elements of Sonic TTH were established, including the base attributes and their derived skills. However, derived attributes and skills were still in flux (more on derived attributes later). You may notice that the Charisma-based skills are a bit different from the three in the final release. These included the "Lead" and "Scare" skills, which I later nixed as they were very situational.

Stage 2 - Alpha

The next step was to mock up each character sheet in Photoshop. I have very mixed feelings about these alpha character sheets. On one hand, I see amateur layout work, on the other I kind of miss the spontaneity and charm of these old sheets, with their doodles in the margins and Adventure-style bios. But, ultimately consistency became more important. Let's unpack this:

• The fundamentals are all here, Attributes, HP and TP, SA&T, "Team-Up" Attacks, and Team Blast

• Character portraits (all drawn by yours truly) were featured on the front of the sheet

• The "Deceive" and "Resolve" skills haven't been added yet

• Derived attributes are different, Dodge is "Defense," and there is no Move attribute on the sheet, players were expected to memorize their movement range from the jump

  • Initiative is arbitrarily set to 2 by default, and as mentioned on the Keep note, uses d10s instead of d6s

  • Defense was arbitrarily set by me to round out the team, rather than reflect attribute ratings. In this case, I decided that armadillos should be heavily armored, especially ones with energy shields.

• The 10-point Team Attack required another character of the same Type. This was because we had a large group of 6 players, so each type had a doubled-up Type to lean on. In retrospect, it's obviously uncommon for a typical group to have doubles of even a single Type, much less all of them, so this was changed.

• Team Blast is remarkably similar to subsequent builds, though the exact equations were tweaked for each Type to nerf it from an instant-win button to simply a major blow.

• "Equipping" Gear is not a mechanic yet, neither is tracking crits, so the sheet does not have any spaces for it

• Each character had a charming, in-character monologue to fill out the back of their sheet. These bios were mostly ignored by my players, but I had fun making them!

Stage 3 - Pre-Beta

Years later, I had the thought to dust off the homebrew system I had cobbled together into something people might actually want to play on their own, without me hovering over their shoulder. I began expanding and revamping the rules, the foremost addition of which was character creation. Suddenly, I had to systemize and rationalize all the decisions I had made for the pregen characters I had created with my friends in the alpha build. Additionally, I had to redesign the character sheet to include plenty of blank space for players to fill in all the details that were previously typed and encased in solid blocks of color, including the player's name.

So I took to my old sheets and scooped out their densely colored insides like a pumpkin, making a conscious effort to make judicious use of color so as to direct attention to important parts of the sheet where the player would fill in their stats for themselves. The golden yellow area was for Rings and related attributes (HP, TP), and the green area was for derived attributes.

Meanwhile, attacks and talents needed spaces that balanced organization with blank real estate for human writing. I grappled with an ideal layout in this version and realized I had another problem.

The portrait square, which had been a staple of the character sheets up to this point, was eating up valuable real estate that could be used for more writeable space. I wanted to include movement range with the other derived attributes, but there simply wasn't room for it as-is. The Gear and Items space didn't seem too well proportioned, either, especially now that equipping gear was going to become a defined mechanic. Mobiums had way more space than it needed...

It was time to go back to the drawing board.

Stage 4 - Beta

Between the pre-beta sheet and this image, there were numerous small iterations done, such as adding tracking for crits and equipping gear. These changes came about as the rules were continually expanded and revised. This sheet looks almost exactly like the one currently in use, with the most notable difference being the still-named "Team-Up Attacks." The name of the game was one of the last things finalized before public release, with the working title remaining "Sonic RPG", so "Tag-Team Attack" wasn't the obvious name at this point.

By the end of beta testing, the character sheet had taken shape. The formatting for attacks has fallen into place, with their various modifiers and terminology becoming better defined in the rules, so generic spaces were created that balanced practicality with flexibility.

Once the portrait square was moved to the back of the sheet, everything fell into place for the bio section. I researched character bios, both official ones for Sonic Team's characters as well as those created for OCs in the fan community, and picked the attributes that seemed universal enough to warrant a prompt for the average player to fill out (i e., someone who isn't necessarily a passionate creative writer). Team Blast took on the form of a Mad Libs-esque fill-in-the-blank section, another balancing act of ease of use and creative freedom for the player.

Stage 5 - 1.0.0 Release and Beyond!

I won't bother going over the current sheet here, since it's nearly the same and the differences were discussed earlier.

Instead, I'll talk about (surprise!) the upcoming character sheet. But why is there going to be yet another iteration of Sonic TTH's person paper? Primarily, two reasons.

For one, Sonic TTH has been out for a couple years or so now, and in that time I've improved my graphic design skills. The current sheet has a few things that bug me, little imperfections that most players won't notice but make me aware of how long I've come since the early days of this project. I can do better, and I dare say that I've outdone myself with my latest iteration.

For two, big changes are coming to the ruleset. Since the beginning, Sonic TTH has leaned into the traditional Sonic Heroes typing system for characters, and the character sheet reflects that. While the balance of the game works as-is with these archetypes, certain character concepts inevitably won't fit neatly into these defined roles. So, I have set out to create a fourth Type, Technique. Stay tuned for how this will work, but in short, they work outside the typical action-oriented team mechanics of the game and complement them. To break that mold, the character sheet changes, yet again.

Starting from the top:

• "Type" is no longer an icon checkbox. It was fun, but it was an inefficient use of space, and changing it to a standard blank field allows a fourth Type to be seamlessly introduced. It also allows the field to be a tad more compact, granting extra breathing room for the character and player name fields.

• Gray type has been darkened to pure black to enhance readability after printing. Colors have been tweaked as well to reduce bleeding (both of ink and the reader's eyes).

• Line thickness has been adjusted to create a visual hierarchy, each box has sub-boxes with thinner lines that read more clearly as part of a whole.

• Crit boxes have been adjusted to read more clearly as a linear progression of detriment, with numbers above indicating how many Rings the character can recover after each hit.

• Gear has expanded its writable space to its limit, allowing for more complex rules to be recorded. This is important as gear has become more defined in the game as the primary source of player progression, effectively functioning as additional slots for attacks and talents.

• Subtle tweak to 15-point Attack, "Works with ____ Type." This reflects the updated rules that open up 15-point attacks to characters of a specific Type rather than a certain PC.

• Team Blast has been replaced with Special. Technique Types do not have access to Team Blast, instead, they will have a once-per-session move unique to them. To reflect this, the formerly Team Blast section has been adjusted to allow a wider variety of Special moves.

• Other extremely minor tweaks here and there to give a cleaner look to the sheet as a whole.

Looking forward to sharing more with you in 2024! Keep on Rollin'

McShmoodle