Steel of "G -1"... Did something go wrong?

Burning Wheel First Reading
#1

One of my players made a new character and we all played a couple sessions so far. I just got the character sheet and I’m finally getting around to importing the data into Roll20. However, I noticed the character sheet says their Steel is G -1.

This is the only stat/attribute that’s weird. Everything else looks like it’s in the realm of normalcy.

The player used Black-Charred to burn up the character, so I don’t know if it’s a glitch, or if there’s simply a different way to interpret what G -1 means. Would that equal a B 9?

#2

It’s an error from Charred Black; B4 would be the correct value.

When burning a character, you answer questions to raise or lower your starting Exponent. You can trade 5 improvements for a gray shade – G3 instead of B8, for instance.

Charred is smart enough to prevent you from taking a gray shade if you don’t have the Exponent value to trade, but if you make the decisions necessary to make the trade, buy a gray shade, and then change those decisions, you can end up with a final value in the negatives.

As is, it should be a B4. It might be that some of those reductions were accidental; I would redo the Steel questions with the player.

2 Likes
#3

Thank you. That makes a lot of sense. I’ll go ahead and do that. Appreciate it.