Before you play, you’ll need to create a character. Now, in real life, making a living entity is a rather messy business. Individual abilities and personality traits are determined by an insanely complicated interaction between the environment and a whole bunch of coded organic spirals rolling around in a person's cells. Even setting aside the experiential aspects of this process, you still have to deal with messy chromosomes, amino acids, lipids, and lots more mushy organic goo. Of course, all this messing with nucleotides and proteins doesn’t even begin to consider the difficulties inherent to locating a suitable partner and convincing this person to engage in a whole series of bizarre physical activities with you, which has to happen first anyway.

In Story Arc, fortunately, the process is much simpler. Once you've determined your character concept (which depends on the world in which you're gaming and is therefore not explained here), all that's left is to assign experience points (points earned for having experiences) to your choice of the various abilities, skills, and spells, and choose from other miscellaneous Benefits and Drawbacks. The number of experience points that Story Arc players start with depends on the game being played and the power level at which the GM wishes to start the players. If the game you're using doesn't specify, a good starting number is 400 points.

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