Character Generation

“Who are you, really? A brave adventurer, ready to take on the world? An explorer, delving into the caves? Maybe you’re just a working stiff, part of the gears of underground society? Sometimes, you don’t get to be what you wanted, but a lucky few are just built that way.” —Angus Greg, Barkeeper

Creating a Character

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Everyone has to start somewhere, and with Canal City Stories, you start with character generation, or chargen for short. The chargen command will give you a readout of what has and hasn’t been completed to qualify for approval to roleplay, and this article will cover the specific parts and how to get more information about it.

Pokemorphs are generally built around a few facets that you need to know about. Species, Nature, IVs, and Moves are all the statistical components of a pokemorph. Then, you need to be visible to everyone else as more than just lump of stats. This is where descriptive elements come in, which include your Desc, Short Desc, and Full Name. Finally, there’s an optional Player Name if you’d like to be found by others, and an administrative Player Contact in case staff needs to get a hold of you.

Species

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A pokemorph species is the “origin species” of pokemon a pokemorph is based on. This provides you a baseline for your statistics as well as your typing. It also determines what moves you are able to learn.

All pokemorphs are considered to be at level 50 for purposes of determining stats, to make things easy to compare.

If you’re not sure what kind of pokemon you’d like to be, there’s a randmons command that will give you 5 random selected pokemon to consider.

Stats and Their Meanings

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When comparing a pokemorph to a human standard, you can simply use their base stat values as an indicator. The average human capability is around 50 stat points, while a well-trained human may reach as high as 100. Above 100 exceeds what an unmodified human can accomplish, and the farther away from that you go, the more incredible things are.

• Health: General hardiness, resistance to disease, recovery speed. Also helps hold one’s breath.

• PhysAtk: General strength, lifting and raw muscle power.

• PhysDef: Hardiness against injury. This can indicate hard skin, natural armor, or a martial-arts-like ability to ignore physical damage.

• SpecAtk: Control over the special abilities inherent in pokemorphs. The higher the SpecAtk stat, the better control over their elemental or type-related powers are. A 50 may indicate basic control of, say, fire, whereas 100 may indicate being able to shape it or change the colors.

• SpecDef: This is a natural defensive “field” that diffuses incoming hostile pokemorph abilities, lowering their effectiveness. This also counts as resistance to more normal forms of elemental damage, such as electricity, fire, or radiation.

• Speed: Raw, natural speed. Getting somewhere fast and acting or reacting before others. A 50 will get you a 10-minute mile.

Nature

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A “nature” provides two things: a general idea of how a character sees the world, as well as a set of small stat adjustments to potentially anything but Health. To set your nature, use the setnature command. This command will also provide you with the full list of 25 natures including what they add to or remove from, stat wise. There is a nature for every plus and minus combination, plus the five “Neutral Natures” that do not have any effect on your stats (Bashful, Docile, Hardy, Quirky, and Serious).

Intrinsic Values

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Intrinsic Values, often called IVs, are what differentiates a pokemorph from another of the same species. These are ‘bonus points’ that can be used to buff your base stats to provide a bonus. All player characters start with enough IV points to have 50% investment in all stats. Coincidentally, this will also let you maximize three of them, but you can allocate as fits the character. IVs are provided in sets of 3, so each IV “token” you spend on a stat with buyivs <stat>=<count> increases its IVs by 3, to a maximum of 30 in any one stat. The source game maximum of 31 is unobtainable. You can see the number of IV tokens you have left and what you’ve allocated with stats.

Character Growth: Effort Values

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Effort Values, also known as EVs, are gathered through experience. EV tokens can be gained by people voting for your excellent roleplaying with vote and can be spent using buyevs. Unlike IVs which are set at chargen, you can only get EVs through roleplaying. Staff can also award experience for participation in plots.

Moves

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Moves are a pokemorph’s secret weapon: their link to their primal type element, and how they can manifest it in the world. Most moves can be used in general roleplay with some ingenuity, but all can be used in combat. Each pokemorph starts with three moves that they know. Gaining moves is incredibly difficult, often requiring the ancient technology of human artifacts like TMs. Given the chance, though, a pokemorph can learn an unlimited number of moves, as species allows, but can only ever “equip” up to six. Changing what moves are equipped is generally done through overnight preparation. It isn’t something that can be done on the fly, and certainly not under pressure.

Moves have “Power Points,” or PP, that indicate how many times they can be used without rest. Some rare tonics may be able to refresh these power points without rest, but in general it’s best to assume that per day, full combat use of a ‘morph’s moves is limited to their PP maximum.

Due to the exhaustive collection of moves available, each with specific side effects and descriptions available, we recommend using a 3rd party service such as Bulbapedia to look up moves and pokemon compatibility.

You can add a move with learnmove. While unapproved, you can also forgetmove to remove a move from your character. You can also do a lookup of a specific move in game with movelookup.

Describing your Character

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The second half of creating a character is coming up with background information and descriptions for others to see while in game. This is how most other players will first experience your character, and is just as important as their statistic block and moves (non-staff players can’t even directly see those).

First impressions count. After all, a generic meowscarada is hardly eye catching and might even be considered a feral, whereas a meowscarada in a top hat and a formal black-tie suit might just be trying to sell you some snake oil, and is probably safe.

Description

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A description, or desc, is visible to anyone in the same place in the game as you, and is what they see when looking at you with the look command. This should generally be at least two paragraphs: A good style is for the first to give an idea of your physical features, and the second describe their current outfit. Don’t write an entire novel, but err on the side of detail rather than brevity. A description should be at least 255 characters in length. An example description is below:

At a fairly short height of 4'8" (142cm) stands this black-furred example: a very tired looking sneasel. With short-cropped hair that barely counts as more than just headfur, and that telltale bright red feather attached to their right ear, they might be mistaken for an abnormally large feral if not for their always-tired-looking gray eyes and general expression of exhaustion… and the lack of permanently-on-display claws. They’re pretty average in build all around, too, nothing to write home about. When not ready for combat, they sport short white claws on the tips of their fingers. When ready for trouble, their larger claws slide out of the backs of their hands. They are currently wearing a fairly prim and neat Guild uniform. It is a muted slate in color and consists of a button down short-sleeves shirt with breast pocket, and matching cargo shorts. A belt is around their waist holding up the shorts as well as a small adventurer’s pouch that is also connected to a thigh belt. A simple scarf is around their neck as well, in black color. A patch on their shoulder display the guild insignia and the rank of “C”. Their name is on a patch over their breast pocket: “Pat”.

You can set your description by using setdesc <description>. For new lines, use |/ or %r. Tabs can be made with |- or %t. For a lesser indent, try two blanks: |_|_ or %b%b.

Please note that your description must be all one line when put in!

Features

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Features are unique sub-descriptions supported by Canal City Stories. You can see what features someone has with lookat <name>. Once you know a feature exists, you can look at it with lookat <name> = <feature> or even just look <name>'s <feature>.

In practice, this will look like lookat seraphine = ball or look hina's tail.

You can use this to provide additional detail that you may not want to put in a description if the desc is getting too long as it stands. Set a feature with @feature me/<feature>=<description>. While a feature name can have spaces in it, please avoid this if possible.

It is customary to call out features in descriptions with ANSI yellow text. This is an advanced topic, but the general formula is |Yfeaturename|n, the |Y starting the color and the |n ending it.

There are also features in rooms. These should always be called out in yellow, and take a mere lookat <feature> or even just look <feature> to be seen.

Short Description

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Your short description is a brief, 1-3 sentence quick idea of your character, what someone might see at a brief glance. You short desc is shown in the glance command and a few other places. Taking our sneasel friend from above, a good short desc might be…

A short (4'8", 142cm) sneasel wearing a slate Guild Uniform with a black scarf. They also have an adventurer’s pouch attached to their belt.

Your short description is part of your “info” which is all set using the setinfo command. In this case, it is setinfo sdesc=<description>. Where a desc should be long, a sdesc should be, say, 150 characters. Think twitter, in the olden days.

Full Name

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This is your character’s full name, if different from their “Character Name” that is displayed in commands. A character named “Pat” might have the full name of “Patrick Lombardi” or “Patricia Ellingson”, as an example. Another “info” command, this can be set with setinfo fname=<full name>.

Player Name

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Your player name is an out of game contact that is provided to others publically as general information. Another “Info” command, this can be set with setinfo pname=<player name>.

Player Contact

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This field is used for GMs and other staff to get a hold of you. Only staff can see this field, and it will only be used in order to reach out to you for things like password resets or administrative information. Another “Info” command, this can be set with setinfo pcontact=<ooc contact>.

Approval

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Prior to approval, you will not be able to be in character—it’s basically required to play in the game.

To be approved, you need to first verify that all the results from chargen are showing complete and green. Then, page a staffer for approval. You can find them using the staff command. If one is not available, most staff will have contact information for an alternate contact in their Player field. Use info <staffname> to see this.

Please note that once you are approved chargen commands will be limited, so you will not be able to reset your IVs or forget the moves you have selected.

Approval grants you the ability to be on the in-character grid—and the IC grid is set to automatically reject your presence if you ever lose approval.