[personal profile] cubey posting in [community profile] machinefrontier
Character building
Characters begin with 4 Ability Points and 4 Trait Points. There are 8 abilites and not 10 (see below) so hopefully this should be enough. I may modify these values if it turns out not to be the case.

In terms of Competence, the game is basically "Hollywood Action". Normal competence is what you expect everyday humans to do (including experts who do this for a living), Exceptional competence are feats that are technically within human limits but are over the top or "unrealistic". Superhuman competence is, well, clearly superhuman.

Abilities
Okay, abilities are pretty... poorly balanced to say the least. So what we're doing is:

Awareness is gone. Its uses are moved to Wits instead, unless it has something to do with technology (especially including ancient technology), then it's Intellect.
Manipulation is gone and its uses are moved to Presence, because come the fuck on.
For Physique - I don't expect this to be an issue, but just in case: if you buy a Narrow boost, you only pick if you get a free Armor or Weapon trait, not both. If you buy a Broad boost, you get both.

Traits (equipment, powers, etc)
Weapons are a common trait. This means a level 1 Weapon is free if it's Equipment (or has any other Discount). Hint hint. Of course you can always buy a stronger Weapon as well.

No other traits are common, BUT your characters are assumed to carry whatever adventuring equipment it makes sense for them to have as long as it's something mundane: radios, rope, etc. When in doubt treat it as a Trivial power. No need to put it on the character sheet, we're not counting beans here.

Powers are best used to represent weird technological devices, maybe an artifact, maybe something your character made by themselves. They are probably governed by Intellect, or whatever other ability makes sense (Dexterity if it's a gun, etc).

Suits are a special type of trait. A basic Suit offers a combination of level one Armor and a Knack that allows you to ignore moderate environmental effects (bad air, very hot and cold temperatures, and allows water breathing - but vacuum or blazing fires are still a problem). All of that costs one Trait Point. Technically that's 2 TPs for traits and 1 discount for it being an Equipment, but if you buy a Suit it will always be available for you, so the risk of losing it is only theoretical. More advanced Suits can be upgraded by stacking extra Traits (and possibly discounts) atop of that.

In addition to the above there's also a house rule: if you are wearing a Suit and have to take a physical Injury, then that Injury is your Suit overloading, its battery dying, or otherwise it refuses to function. Either way this Injury does not create any complications, but instead what it does is that the Suit's traits do not work until the Injury is gone. This Injury also doesn't count for the three Injuries limit, effectively allowing you to have four. Of course this also means you can find yourself severely weakened if your Suit was very powerful and suddenly it stops working.
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