Gonna talk about gaming today. It's been a while, and I'm sorry if you came by for chat about the baby. If you're not familiar with 7th Sea, some of this is going to be fairly incomprehensible. Sorry about that. Come back Monday; I'm sure I'll be back to talking about the baby by then.

So I'm in a play-by-email 7th Sea game, run by KT.

And Karen and I, entirely without collaborating, came up with almost the exact same character.

They're from different places, and their histories are very different, but they have the same stats, the same sword-school, almost the same distribution of skills and skill-points... They're nearly identical.

Except that Karen's character (who she named Penny - not to be confused with my Penny, of course) has some extra stuff that my character doesn't. Not a lot, mind - a couple of Advantages (which is to say, she's got the same Advantages that my character does, plus another one or two) and a Background.

"Well," I've been saying to myself, "she had to pay for it somehow. Karen's not the sort of player who would cheat at character creation. So eventually something will come around that I can do better than her."

But every time I thought I'd figured it out, she'd match me. It was, to be honest, making me just slightly crazy.

Last night, waiting for my turn in an IRC combat session, I was grumbling over not having earned a Drama Die for what I'd thought was really excellent line (I have the worst time with Drama Dice. The stuff that I think is especially dramatic and witty and funny always turns out to be kind of... boring.) and I was poring over my character sheet, trying to decide if there was anything really different I could do for my next action. Matt looked over my shoulder.

"The X's are for the knacks you have more than 1 in?" he asked, sounding confused.

"No, the X's represent my level in the knack. I've listed all the knacks I have access to, even if I don't have any points in them yet."

He peered at my sheet again. "What about the Swordsman knacks?"

"What about them?"

"Well, you get one point in each of them automatically."

"No, they're Advanced knacks."

"Yeah, but when you join a Swordsman school, you get one point in each of its knacks." He picked up the rulebook and flipped through it. "I could have sworn... Ah! Yeah, here it is." He showed it to me.

Oh. You know, I'd dropped 6 points into those Advanced Swordsman knacks when I made my character. 6 points is a lot, at character creation. Enough to buy - say - a good Background and a couple of Advantages.

Well. That solves that mystery. Rather than let me re-do the character now, KT is going to let me cash in the unnecessary points I spent for extra experience points to use at the end of the Chapter (plus some for a Background - I'd already worked something into my history that I know she's planning to use against me eventually; with the Background, I'll be able to actually get credit for it).

Now, if there was just a way to learn how to be more witty under pressure...

--Liz