Text-Based Actors is an intentionally minimalist system designed to stay out of your way to allow to get right into playing the game!
The guiding principle of this system is that you should be able to use it instead of using a physical character sheet. So without automating stuff yourself, there is no character-creation helpers and no dice automation (beyond what FoundryVTT provides on it's own); you need to fill everything out yourself as if you were filling in a piece of paper.
Actor Sheets
Default Sheet
The default sheet allows you to have both a read mode and an editing mode for your characters. This is most useful if you don't need to be changing your character information very often.
Always-Editing Player Sheet
This sheet always has the text editor in "edit mode", useful for characters you'll be changing frequently.
Textless Sheet
This sheet is helpful if your characters can be represented exclusively by attributes and items without needing any custom text.
The main benefit of this sheet is that it is smaller than any of the other sheets due to not having the big text box on it, so it can save precious screen space.
Attributes
Attributes are a special type of item in Text-Based Actors, they are used by the system to allow you to create custom data for the character (e.g. health total, strength modifier). These can then be used on tokens and in macros and roll commands in order to provide data that is available all of the time
Items
There is a basic item system which lets you provide an inventory for your character. Once an Actors owns at least one item, a new tab will appear on their sheet that lists all of the items as well as how much weight they can carry. These items allow providing a description as well as providing a macro that can be used to have automation for specific items as desired.
Automation
Due to the minimalist nature of the system, there is no automation included in the system by default, if you want to add automation to Attributes or Items you can do so with macros. You can read more about how that works in the Attribute and Item Automation wiki page .