It’s easy to miss the detail between the player and GM books over how many hardened notches you have to take for your character.
Very early in Book 1 Play’s Characters chapter, the expectation is set that 1 is the minimum per meter (p7):
What you’ve seen: shocks. … Each meter also starts with eight open notches … Every character starts with, and keeps, one hardened notch on each meter (for a total of five notches on the gauge). It’s a hard-knock world, pony.
This is mentioned briefly again in Book 2 Run’s detailed character and cabal creation chapter (p26 | p25 pdf):
Notch the Unnatural Meters: … As each describes an event, they put up to five hardened notches in their Unnatural meter (in addition to the one that’s there initially). Make sure your players know they don’t have to use all of them if they don’t want.
Later on, the character setup talks about hardening other meters (p30 | p29 pdf):
Notch Two Meters: … make sure they know they do not have to spend all ten points! They don’t have to spend any of them!
Read in isolation, the suggestion is that a character could go through the entire character phase without hardening any notches. This is true – but a character always has one that is already hardened in each meter, so they are never entirely innocent to the dangers of the world.
So, by the end of the character creation, a character should end up with:
- between 1 and 6 hardened notches in their Unnatural meter
- a total of 5 to 30 hardened notches across the whole shock gauge
- between 1 and 6 failed notches distributed across the different shock meters