Attribute-based rich text?

I'm working on a character sheet (duh). I would like to include formatted blocks, with the contents and formatting based on user input. Arbitrarily marked-up text should go into a field, and then that text should be interpreted and displayed in another place (or the same place). My use case is dozens of paragraph-long skills, most of which are unique to the character. I could just use textareas, but custom styling would make the text much easier to read. I tried just putting HTML directly into a textarea with an attribute, and also binding that attribute to a span, but the tags get stripped out. And that makes sense, I guess--automatic sanitization is better than the alternative. I tried Markdown, as well, with no effect. Is there any way to do what I'm trying to do, or something similar?

I don't think there is. Handouts (which can have rich text) might be your next best option.

Regarding styling—it's safe to assume that the only tags/attributes that won't get stripped are those which can be created using the Rich Text Editor's toolbar.

Unfortunately, even those get stripped out. I could  do it with a repeating field set, where each repitition contains a text input and a set of checkboxes or radiobuttons, each of which would reveal a span with a specific style that contains the text input's value. So, a checkbox for regular text, one for bold, one for italic, one for bold+italic, etc. Basically, render all possible stylings and hide what you don't need. When not editing, everything except the spans would be hidden. Each differently-styled block would need to go in its own block, and you'd probably also want to re-style the repeating field set buttons, when not in edit mode. But that'd be a real pain to use. For my application, it's not worth it, but I figured I should post the idea anyway, in case someone really needs this functionality in the future.