Step Four: Select an Origin and Determine Traits
All characters come from somewhere, whether born from a long line of ancestors, grown in a vat, built in a laboratory or assembled in a factory. To reflect the physical features of your character resulting from these beginnings, you will need to select an origin for your character. Your character’s origin determines the limits of your character's natural physical and mental abilities, as well as how your character moves, communicates, and interacts with his environment. The origin you select will describe these abilities in terms of five of origin traits.
Age
This trait determines how old your character is. The character’s age does not affect any game stats in the Default Genre. For more realistic genres, your characters age may increase your number of skills and decrease your character’s physical attributes as your character ages, while in some more supernatural genres, there may be magic or psychic effects that may age your character.
Size
The stats associated with this trait determine your character’s size. There are two stats associated with this trait.
Height
This stat is the number of centimeters tall or long your character is. Your character’s height is used to determine how fast your character moves.
Mass
This stat is the number of kilograms of matter that make up your character. This stat affects how your character interacts with objects and creatures larger or smaller than himself.
Attributes
This trait reflects your character’s natural capacities in terms of six stats referred to as attributes. Each attribute describes one of the physical or mental capabilities of your character
Strength
This attribute, abbreviated hereafter as STR, represents an estimate of the maximum amount of force your character's muscles can generate, as well as a representation of a character’s musculature. A high STR does not necessarily the size of a character and may indicate that a character either has small but incredibly dense muscles or beefy but less dense muscles.
Resilience
This attribute, abbreviated hereafter as RSIL, represents how well your character's body resists and bounces back from any physical stress or invasion be it shock, poison, disease, fatigue, or any other traumatic insult. Characters with a high RSIL are able to take larger amounts of damage, resist the effects of poisons or starvation, and exert themselves longer than most people.
Reflexes
This attribute, abbreviated hereafter as RFLX, represents your character's reaction speed, flexibility, balance, and hand-eye coordination. Characters with a high RFLX are light on their feet, quick to react and accurate in combat, and spout lightning-fast witty verbal comebacks with ease.
Intelligence
This attribute, abbreviated hereafter as INTL, represents a character's ability to store and access information, use logic, and solve problems. A character's INTL is also used to improve skills and learn new ones. Characters with a high INTL learn quickly and solve difficult puzzles with ease.
Will
This attribute, abbreviated hereafter as WILL, reflects your character's internal conscious mental resolve and willpower. It reflects a character’s level of intensity when it comes to desire, faith, self-discipline, and creativity. Characters with a high WILL more easily resist mental influence, come up with creative solutions to problems, and are highly capable of making things happen despite facing great resistance.
Perception
This stat, abbreviated hereafter as PERC, reflects the overall sensitivities of your characters physical senses as well as the character's ability to notice details and out of place things in their local surroundings. While ranges are mostly consistent from all characters of a given origin, overall sensitivities differ from individual and are reflected by this attribute. Characters with a high PERC notice hidden objects more consistently, determine patterns more easily, and sense things more quickly than others.
Hujraad’s Hacks: Charisma and Personality Attributes
Attributes represent a character’s natural physical or physiological capabilities in relation to all characters of the same origin. While many games have stats to reflect a character’s presence, natural likeability, charisma, attractiveness, and so forth, such abilities have no physiological basis behind them, so they are not reflected in a character’s origin. Such abilities of an a more supernatural, legendary, and cinematic nature and are reflected elsewhere (Step Six) in the character creation process.
Form
This trait consists of a set of stats that reflect how tough your character is, how your character moves (and how quickly), the range of your character’s senses, and how much your character can lift. To resolve actions quickly during play, your character’s form is reflected by the following stats.
Move
This stat reflects the number of meters your character is able to move in a round while still maintaining a complete awareness of the environment without difficulty.
Load
This stat reflects the number of kilograms your character is able to carry or manipulate without difficulty.
Range
This stat reflects the number of meters within which your character is able to perceive small details in the local environment without difficulty.
Armor Value
This stat (hereafter abbreviated as ARMV) reflects your character’s ability to resist damage.
Studliness
This stat (hereafter abbreviated as STUN) reflects your character’s heroic ability to take ungodly amounts of physical and mental punishment as many heroes in legend and action movies often do before being sidelined. Such things as when struck by a bullet, falling from a building, or crashing into another car in one scene but then miraculously being able to run with a slightly soiled shirt or mild limp in the next scene are perfect examples of this stat in action.
Physical Damage Capacity
This stat (hereafter abbreviated as PHYS) represents the amount of real physical damage your character can sustain from such things as sprains, broken bones, ripped open arteries, severed appendages, or internal hemorrhages
Natural Abilities
This trait describes any of the natural abilities specific to your character’s origin that may separate it from other origins. It can include anything from structural differences, such as possessing a tail or claws to unique survival adaptations such as seeing in the dark or being able to make food from sunlight.
Genre-Specific Origin Traits
Since the game can be played across multiple genres, the opportunity exists for characters of all sorts of origins to appear that are specific to each genre. In a classical fantasy genre, for example, elven or dwarven origins may be featured while in a science fiction genre, there may be any number of alien origins.
If there are any genre-specific origins available for characters, there may be additional origin traits for each origin or some of the above traits may be omitted. Any of these differences will be listed for each origin in the Heroes section of the Genre Description.
Completing Step Four
To complete this step, you will need to select one of the origins described in the Genre Description and record each of your character’s origin traits on your character sheet.
If an origin trait requires you to select a certain value, any choices you make must fall within the range of values defined for that trait in the Genre Description. Similarly, if an origin trait requires you to calculate any stats, the methods for doing so will also be provided therein.
The Default Origin: Humans
The Default Genre assumes all characters are of human origin. To make a character of human origin, you will need to determine your character’s origin traits using the following methods.
Age
Humans naturally live to a maximum age of 125 years by default. The adult human age of physical maturity in the game is 18, though the physical onset of adulthood can start as early as 10 years of age. The average lifespan of a human is dependent on the level of technology and type of environment, but typically falls in the range of 50 to 90 years of age.
You may choose any age for your character within the human range.
Size
Adult humans reach a maximum height of 272 centimeters, but typically average 170 centimeters in height. The default height assumed for all human characters is 170 centimeters. If you wish to be more specific about your character’s height, you may choose your character's height within the ranges listed above.
Adult humans reach a maximum mass of 650 kg but typically average 70 kilograms in mass. The default mass assumed for all human characteris 70 kilograms. If you wish to be more specific about your character’s mass, you may choose your character's height within the ranges listed above.
Attributes
For humans, the values for each attribute stat range from -5 to +5 with an attribute of 0 representing the average value for a heroic human character. An attribute of -5 represents the normal human minimum and an attribute of +5 represents a human attribute that is among the best of the best among all humans currently alive.
To determine a human’s six attribute stats, you will assign one of the following six values to each: 0, +1, +2, +3, +4, and +5.
Form
Humans are bipedal and possess two arms ending in hands with fingers and opposable thumbs. These features enable humans to walk upright, run, climb, and jump, swim, and use tools.
Move
A human’s Move stat is affected by the height stat and is calculated as follows:
Height in meters (rounding to the nearest meter) x 10.
A human may run up to five times this distance within a span of ten seconds, however the faster the human moves, the more difficult it becomes to pay attention to the surroundings and perform other actions. The Move stat also affects how far a human can jump. All humans can jump two meters upwards and two meters forward from a standing start. When jogging or running, humans can jump further forward based on how fast they are running.
Load
A human’s Load stat is affected by the STR attribute and is calculated as follows:
Load = 10 + STR
All human characters may manipulate or carry up to ten times this mass, however as the mass being carried or manipulated increases, the ability to perform actions with it becomes more difficult.
Range
A human’s Range stat is affected by the PERC attribute and calculated as follows:
Range = 10 + PERC
All human characters may perceive major details (such as the size or color) of an object any distance up to ten times the Range but perceiving small details at this becomes more difficult as the range increases.
ArmV
By default, all human characters possess an ARMV of 0 and must wear protection of some sort to resist sustaining damage from environmental hazards or weapons. Any such protection will specify what types of hazard or weapon from which it protects its wearer.
STUN
A human character’s STUN is affected by both the character’s RSIL and the heroic factor of the genre, using the following formula
STUN = (10 + RSIL) x heroic factor
PHYS
A human’s PHYS is affected by the character’s STR and is calculated by the following formula:
PHYS = 10 + STR
Natural Abilities
Senses
Humans have five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Within the distance of their Range stat, they can perceive objects without difficulty if they fall within the range of these senses. Objects falling between this distance and up to ten times out from this distance may or may not be perceived and are more difficult to determine details about. Beyond ten times the Range stat, characters can perceive nothing but the barest details about the environment.
Speech
Humans are born with the ability to communicate through language but not the skills to do so. All humans automatically learn to speak or sign one primary native language as they develop.
For characters within the Default Genre, you may select any language commonly spoken (or signed) in the modern world. If your character’s adventures will be taking place within a different genre, the native languages available to your character will be listed in the Genre Description.
The ability to speak a native language is not the same as the ability to read and write in that language; the ability to read and write a language is reflected in a character’s skills and is determined in Step Five of the character creation process.
Step Four Example: Johnny Parkour
Ogun now needs to select an origin and determine all of the game stats related to it. Since the game will take place in the Default Genre, all player characters are of human origin, so the decision of which origin has already been made for him. All that remains is to record his character’s various origin traits.
He begins by first settling on his character’s age stat. He decides his character will be a young adult and decides 21 years old will work just fine.
Next, because he has no interest in creating a character of any particular size, Ogun simply chooses the average height and mass for a human and writes a height of 170 centimeters as his height stat and a mass of 70 kilograms as his mass on his character sheet.
Ogun next turns his attention toward his character’s attributes. He first decides that since his character concept will be one based on being “acrobatic” the RFLX attribute would be the most important and ranks it at +5.
He next ranks his character’s STR attribute at +4 since it is also important when performing acrobatic feats. He then ranks his character’s RSIL attribute at +3 to represent the long number of hours his character has spent practicing and perfecting his various acrobatics routines.
Looking at his character’s remaining attributes, he looks at his character concept again and decides that his character’s desire to share his happiness with others is more important to his character than his intellectual ability or awareness of his surroundings, so he assigns a +2 to his WILL. Finally, deciding that a life of a circus performer doesn’t allow for a lot of time to develop his mind, he assigns a 0 to his INTL, leaving a +1 to assign to his character’s PERC attribute.
His final attributes are as follows:
STR +4
RFLX +5
RSIL +3
INTL +0
PERC +1
WILL +2
With his character’s attributes ranked, Ogun now calculates his character’s Form stats:
Move
=170cm (height) = 1.7 meters
= 1.7 meters (rounded to 2) x 10
= 20 meters
Load
= 10 + STR
= 10 + 4
= 14 kilograms
Range
= 10 + PERC
= 10 + 1
= 11 meters
ARMV = 0
STUN
= (10 + RSIL) x Heroic Factor
= (10 + 3) x 5 (From Step 1)
= 13 x 5
= 65
PHYS = 10 + STR
= (10 + 4)
= 14
Finally, Ogun decides that he will choose English as his character’s native language.
Ogun writes the various traits and stats associated with them on his character sheet in the appropriate spaces and moves on to the next step of the process.
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