Building a Team
Don’t worry if the characters do not seem to be that evenly distributed. You do not have to build a perfect team where everyone is the best at exactly their own skills. A TV show where it’s always the perfect person doing exactly what they are skilled at is boring.
You want a diverse set of abilities across the character. Not because there are any required character abilities for this game, a good GM can give the players a fitting challenge for whatever characters exist. If the team has no one that can pick a lock, a lot of doors are going to be kicked in, or keys found, or neighbors with spare keys conned, or upper-story windows unlocked, or just the players trying to lockpick, rolling badly, and having to accrue Stress to fix.
The problem in the party composition arises in the opposite direction, when some amount of players are all good at the exact same thing. One of principles of writing a show like this is ‘Every main character should have one thing that they are objectively the best at. Don’t have other characters step on that.’
Game Master
Unless, of course, two players want to build a deliberate rivalry between their two characters, as they both think they are the best in the same field. Which can be done, but should be on purpose.
Most games that are based in the Forged in the Dark system would start out by having you pick a playbook, which would give you a few special things that only applied to you. And two players would not pick the same playbook. Meanwhile, the Leverage RPG would have pick a role, which is even more limiting mechanically, and only one player would have that as a main role. But this game does not have playbooks, or roles. You have no restrictions on what you can do, or special abilities only you can have. At least, not in the rules. So, how do you and the other players keep from accidentally stepping on each other’s toes while creating characters?
The easiest thing is for you, during character creation, to either announce a character archetype they are aiming for, or ‘claim’ a specific Action. There are nine Actions, more than enough for everyone, so you should announce something you’re best, and other people try to avoid that. The default rules have you get five dots total, so often you’d put three dots into that ‘best at’ Action and still have two for elsewhere. With smaller teams it might make more sense to only do two dots into that ‘best at’ Action so you can get a wider array of skills.
Here’s the small team that was put together for examples in this manual.
Minerva
Minerva in an incredibly skilled computer security expert that has been fired more times than she can count because she cannot stop pointing out that people are idiots when asked for her opinion. She has no idea why people keep asking her questions they don’t want to know the answer to, or why that always resulted in her getting fired, but crime seems to have much less of that.
While she doesn’t do ‘interacting with people’, she doesn’t just sit in front of a computer. She isn’t adverse getting in the field to sneaking into secure facilities personally, or flying a drone overhead. Somewhat infamous for being so quiet and overlooked that people often fail to notice she’s even in the same room, to the point if you want to find her, just check the nearest corner, because she’s probably sitting there quietly fanfic reading on her ereader.
Somewhere in a past life, she earned a minor in English to go along with her Computer Science degree, and she used to write for fun.
| Name | Minerva |
|---|---|
| Mind | ▮▮ |
| ▮▮▯ | Modify |
| ▯▯▯ | Understand |
| ▮▯▯ | Locate |
| Social | |
| ▯▯▯ | Connect |
| ▯▯▯ | Order |
| ▯▯▯ | Grift |
| Connect | ▮ |
| ▯▯▯ | Grasp |
| ▮▮▯ | Sneak |
| ▯▯▯ | Assault |
| Aptitudes | Knowledges |
|---|---|
| Computers | Writing |
| Drones |
How long have they been there?
If you want to be in a room that you can get to, and it wouldn’t cause any sort of narrative issue or paradox, you can retroactively already be in the room, without anyone there seeing you enter it. You do a Stealth Action Roll, and instead of the normal Success, Partial Success, or Failure, the result is instead are the max number of minutes you’ve been in the room. Additionally, on a Success, if you then do nothing at all, you are assumed to be unnoticed for a few more minutes, although eventually you will have to start doing more Stealth checks.
I just read an article about that
Whenever you attempt to gather information that would plausibly be public information, take a Stress to coincidentally have read up on that topic recently and thus have Knowledge in it. This Knowledge stays with you the entire episode, but then goes away at the end.
Reuben
Rueben was in the Secret Service, then went were the money was, to become a very expensive professional bodyguard, guarding wealth and power. After working for the wealthy for two months, his conscious got the better of him and he quit that job to do violence to people, a much more ethical career.
His training allows him to read body language and when they are trying to mislead, despite the fact he himself can’t lie to save his life. For a big guy who is often found looming, he is surprisingly dexterous with his hands, and can easily slide things out of people’s pockets. No one’s quite sure where that trick came from.
His standard method of communication is barking orders at people at people, which probably technically makes him the leader, because the other two just usually shrugs and follow them if they make sense, or just…don’t if they don’t make sense.
| Name | Reuben |
|---|---|
| Mind | ▮ |
| ▯▯▯ | Modify |
| ▮▯▯ | Understand |
| ▯▯▯ | Locate |
| Social | ▮ |
| ▯▯▯ | Connect |
| ▮▯▯ | Order |
| ▯▯▯ | Grift |
| Connect | ▮▮ |
| ▮▯▯ | Grasp |
| ▯▯▯ | Sneak |
| ▮▮▯ | Assault |
| Aptitudes | Knowledges |
|---|---|
| Hand to Hand | Protection details |
| Pickpocketing |
You have a tell
You’re an expert in watching people’s microexpressions and listening to the timber of their voice.
You can take one Stress to see right through another person for the rest of the episode. Once you do, if you are interacting with them or observing at close range, you can always tell if they are lying. If farther away or over comms, it’s not automatic, but you have increased Effect in gathering information about whether or not they’re lying.
Fluent in body language
Whenever you gather information using a Body action, you get an addition 1d.
Greg
Greg has, as many suspect, a history in theatre. He was a successful up-and-comer for a bit despite often getting a little too method. He has been blacklisted from the industry. Let’s just say they become reluctant to cast you when you steal the entire box office proceeds.
Greg can charm anyone, and he has a network of social contacts that can get him, or his somewhat infamous wealthy-party-bro alter ego Theodore ‘Theo’ Cramer, into quite a lot of events. What people often miss, including other criminals who assume he’s just a grifter, is how often he disappears from fancy parties, even when people swear he was right there. And he often ends up doing a little light trespassing into locked backrooms to make off with very valuable things.
Assuming he remembers to stop playing Theo, that is, which he sometimes doesn’t.
| Name | Greg |
|---|---|
| Mind | ▮ |
| ▯▯▯ | Modify |
| ▮▯▯ | Understand |
| ▯▯▯ | Locate |
| Social | ▮▮ |
| ▮▯▯ | Connect |
| ▯▯▯ | Order |
| ▮▮▯ | Grift |
| Connect | ▮ |
| ▯▯▯ | Grasp |
| ▮▯▯ | Sneak |
| ▯▯▯ | Assault |
| Aptitudes | Knowledges |
|---|---|
| Physical Locks | Theatre |
| Guise: Theo Cramer |
Fully In Character
When you commit to a character, you commit to the character.
1d to Grift when you are grifting as one of the characterizations you have an Aptitude Guise in, in addition to the normal increased Effect. However, the GM can add an additional Outcome that you are temporarily unable to exit the character.
I hate when he does that
If no one nearby has reason to be watching you or trying to confine you, you can disappear into a vent or through a door even when it doesn’t really make sense that you can vanish that quickly. You can do this once per episode per dot you have in Stealth.
Team Summary
So the team has Greg, the face, Minerva, the hacker, and Reuben, the fighter. And no thief or brains.
Greg can sneak moderately well, and does have theft in his background, and is the guy who climbs buildings. But if you need to remain unspotted, Minerva is a surprise standout there, because she basically just fades into the backgroup. And Reuben is the only person who really does pickpocketing.
Meanwhile, there’s no brains of the operation. Rueben comes closest, which is likely why he ended up mostly in charge. He’s as good as putting things together as Greg, and can read people’s body language like no one’s business. Minerva, meanwhile, always has useful information at hand, and is probably the most well-read of the group.
All the characters have something they’re good at, they follow the stand team tropes, but also have some oddities that make them different, and the players even built a team that, in a perfect world, can produce someone with at least a 1 in any needed Action, which isn’t required.
But all of them will end up having to do things they’re not good at, and it’s really fun to make them do it.
(The character sheet can be found here. You will want to save your own copy.)