7 · Your Sheet, and What It Hides

Let me walk you round your own character sheet, because it is doing considerably more than it looks like it is doing. @Missing file is the blank one if you want to click along.

7.1 · The top

Your name, your image, and a couple of chips — the two or three facts you check without thinking about it. Under those, if your world meters anything, your vital bars.

Those are live. Tap one and it saves immediately. No menu, no confirm dialog, no "are you sure". They are the current value in a pool whose maximum is computed from everything else on the sheet, which is why they move on their own sometimes.

7.2 · The tabs

Player content only. Who you are, your body and condition, what you can do, and your place in the world. Everything in that row is yours to read, and none of it is hiding anything from you.

Whatever your world happens to run on lives under Capability — stats if it has stats, pools if it meters things, abilities, languages, how you fight. If your world is deliberately narrative and does none of that, the tab says so instead of showing you a page of empty boxes. That is a finished configuration, not a broken one.

7.3 · The numbers that are not stored anywhere

Here is the bit that catches people out. Health, guard, carry, initiative — whatever your world builds out of its stats — are not written down. They are expressions, evaluated the moment you look at the sheet.

So you change one stat and four other things move, instantly, with nothing to save. And when the world's designer adds a new derived value, every sheet in the project grows it on the next render without anybody editing a single character.

It also means there is nothing to desync. If a number on your sheet looks wrong, the input to it is wrong, and the input is a field you can actually see.

7.4 · The drawer at the bottom

There is a collapsed bar under the whole sheet marked GM Only: Secrets & Metagame.

That is not for you. It holds true motivations, planned developments, and things your character has not learned yet. It is one click away and it is closed on purpose — a tab advertises itself, a closed drawer has to be gone looking for. Same information, completely different invitation.

Nobody will stop you opening it. It is your game and your sheet and there is no lock on it. But it will spoil things, and the system cannot un-spoil them for you afterwards, so — genuinely, sincerely, as someone who has done it — leave it shut.

SEE ALSO · Chapter 6 · Everyone Remembers It Wrong — standing travels the same way memory does, through people with a reason to carry it, arriving late and slightly wrong.

7.5 · What people already think of you

Somewhere on your sheet is your standing, and it is not a score you spend. It decides what the world thinks to ask you for.

At the bottom of it nobody has heard of you, so nobody brings you anything — you find your own trouble and it is small trouble. Further along, people who know you ask you for the things you ask a neighbour for. Further still, strangers bring you problems and are usually wrong about what you are good at. Past that, you get handed things nobody checked whether you wanted. And at the far end you are brought the jobs nobody else will touch, at a price, and turning one down costs you more than it used to.

Nothing congratulates you when you move between those. There is no notification and no title. The world just starts asking for different things, and if you are paying attention you notice that the requests changed shape.

It is also not one number. You can be trusted in the city and notorious in the valley two days' walk away, because a deed travels to the people who heard about it and stops at whoever did not. Where you wake up decides which version of you walks into the room.

7.6 · The thing hiding in plain sight

Your sheet is editable and that is the intended path.

If something on it is wrong, fix it. If your character would know a language they do not have, add it. If a trade they obviously learned in their twenties never made it onto the file, put it there. The GM reads the file and honours what it says, completely and without argument, and it does not treat a correction as an attempt to cheat.

This is not a console. It is the difference between the story and the record, and the record is allowed to be corrected — including backwards, if it should have been true all along.

The distinction that makes it work: you edit in Orbit, you play in the game chat. Asking mid-scene to simply have a thing is asking to edit, and editing does not happen in a scene. That is not gatekeeping, it is the difference between playing a game and opening its files. Both are completely legitimate. They are just not the same act, and doing them in the same breath is what turns a world into a wish list.

What people already believe	What the world does about it
Nobody has heard of you	Nothing is brought to you. You find your own trouble, and it is small
Known locally	The things you would ask a neighbour for
Recognised on sight	Strangers bring you problems, wrong about what you are good at
Trusted	You are handed things nobody checked whether you wanted
Notorious	The jobs nobody else will touch, at a price — and refusing costs more

Not one number. Trusted in the city and notorious in the valley is the ordinary case, not the edge one.

7.7 · The ten-second check

Open your sheet once, early, and read it as though somebody else wrote it. Blank fields, empty tabs, a language missing, a name spelled two ways.

Faster than any amount of reasoning about why a scene felt off, and it catches almost everything.