Classes

Classes in Shillings is a very loose term. In Shillings they are usually just there to wrap the characters up with a neat bow. Although, these are a necessary part of a Shillings game. Each class is made up of 4 (or 5) things.

Health

Each class has a set amount of health. If you haven’t played a videogame or TTRPG before this is a value that describes the character’s physical (or sometimes mental) well being. This is used to determine when you are wounded or dead.

When a character dies they can pay a set amount of tokens to revive themselves. There will usually be a cap on how many times they can do this before the character is fully dead. This is to provide longer games for players who aren’t that well experienced with TTRPGs. You can remove this rule if you want.

Current, maximum and starting tokens

On a character sheet there will need to be somewhere to display a characters maximum and current tokens. This is just an easier way to see than just knowing it off by heart. The maximum token cap doesn’t necessarily have to be include but is helpful for control.

A class will also need to show how many tokens they start the game with. This could be a representation of wealth, mastery or just be there for variety. Either way this a necessary part of Shillings games.

Talents

Talents are things a class is really good at. These could include dancing, hacking, running or anything in between. If a talent applies to a situation, you don’t have to spend any tokens on it. Talents are there so players don’t go broke too quickly. You can set all of these by default or let players pick from a list for some of their talents.

Attributes

Each character has 3-5 attributes. These could be anything. Strength, Mind, Speed, Body, Combat or even Flexibility. These are here to describe how a character approaches problems. A general rule for making attributes is have one for body related things, speed and agility and brain related things. But you don’t have to follow these rules if you do not want to. How attributes work in the game is explained in the Core System section.