Group/Character Planning

That's fine as long as you keep it up to date.

Scratch that, lol. I saw origamisamurai's setup and took it, looks very nice!

:)

I agree that looks nice.

Phantasmoron, I'm going to have to borrow the color coding. That really makes it pop.

I'll take a stab at the more general questions I saw in the thread. (Not sure about question #2)

1) What exactly are the Hesitation and Stride attributes and how might they come into play?

Hesitation is basically how hard it is for you to act when scary/surprising stuff happens. If you have a high hesitation, you're going to be, well, hesitating when it comes to the beginning of combats, freaky stuff happening, etc. Basically you're a sitting duck, run away, or otherwise have Bad Things happen until you can regain your composure enough to act normally.

Stride is literally a measure of how fast you move, but in game terms if you have somebody with a low stride in your group you lose some of the initiative in a battle when trying to maneuver, etc. A group of dwarves is going to be more easily outflanked by a bunch of lanky elves.

3) Reputations & Affiliations (1D) does that mean I can add 1 die if I can justify that reputation or affiliation applies to the test?

Pretty much. You get to apply up to one applicable Reputation and one applicable Affiliation when you're trying to use your connections if I remember right.

4) Gear; do these items have any mechanical benefits or just for flavor?

*Weapons* (note, there's a name all the stats below but I can't remember what they are)
Damage: For melee weapons, add the weapon damage to your power. For missile weapons, it's fixed. Not sure about ranged. There are two additional damage "bands" if you get additional successes above the number required to hit your target.

# of successes to bump damage: most weapons require two extra successes per bump in damage band, but a few only take 1 per bump

VA (Armor piercing): ignore this many dice of armor when you hit

"speed": how many times in a row you can attack with the weapon before you have to do some other action (basically, a giant battleaxe is going to take you a moment to reset for another swing, while you can keep shanking somebody with a dagger all day long).

*Armor*
Basically, how many dice you get to try and negate the attack. All armor gives you a point of torso armor, but better armor will give you more dice to try and "turn" the attack. Also, better armor will armor your arms, your legs, and head. There's a mechanic where successes can be "spent" (used up so you can't use them to bump the damage) to move the attack to a more vulnerable location. But, the defender may also use successes they generate with their defense to move the attack to a less vulnerable location.

5) I have absolutely no idea what PTGS is or what all those abilities are :)

PTGS stands for Physical Tolerance Grayscale I think. For our purposes, you can pretty much ignore the "B" part of these values, unless Shark_Bone is feeling particularly cruel. When it comes to damage, "G1" is one point more damage than the highest damage on the "B" scale, so literally a killing blow.

Essentially, these values are the thresholds for taking a particular type of wound. For this example, let's use your values. You have a superficial threshold of B3 and a light threshold of B5.

If you take B2 damage, you're fine. It didn't meet the superficial wound threshold so you don't take any 'real' damage. If you take B3 or B4 damage, you'll take a superficial wound. If you take B5 damage, you'll take a light wound, and so on.

Wounds are cumulative. Superficial wounds aren't so bad and are a special case. After the first one, your tests are made with +1 obstacle, but you don't take any more penalties from superficial wounds until you've accrued a third. Any light wounds or above get nasty fast, as they directly subtract the amount of dice you can roll for every check, and every single light or worse wound stacks with all the other wounds.

You got it all right. Most of that stuff pertains to rules that we won't be using right at the beginning. We're going to just concentrate on the Hub and Spokes until we feel really good with it. Then we can start adding in other rules.

Huzzah! All those reading comprehension tests in elementary/middle school were good for something, apparently.

Also, I spent entirely too much time colorizing and re-prettifying my sheet. Check it out on my thread. If anybody wants the markup, I can email it to you if you PM me with your email address.

I wanted to colorize the Routine / Difficult / Challenging and make it super easy to cross reference with the tables at the bottom so tracking your "XP" a.k.a. Tests would be really simple visually.

Wow, ok first of all thanks for the answers, that helps a lot! Second, you really took that color-coding idea and ran with it! You inspired me to do it in the first place with your nicely organized char sheet so glad I could return the favor :)

If it's not too much trouble, could you list the stats for bare fists (damage, speed, etc...)? I'm fairly certain that's what I'll be using most if not all the time.

Lastly, Shark_Bone I know you probly have enough going on with getting ready to start the adventure but whenever you have a minute there were a couple questions relating specifically to my character (the ones about traits and the gear stats).

Fists are easy.

IMS (incidental, mark, and superb ?) are damage levels.

I: 1/2 power, rounded up
M: power
S: 1.5 x power, rounded down.

For melee weapons, you'd add their damage to the middle range band, then calculate the I and S (half or 1.5 of power+weapon damage).

It requires 2 extra successes to jump to the next damage band.
No armor piercing, and no limit to the number of times you can punch before you have to reset by doing another action.

I think the stat entry is something like

Damage bonus: -
Bump: 2
VA (armor piercing): 0
Speed: X

The lack of an SRD online is killing me.

Yeah, it's just a book game.

I saw your questions last night, Phantasmoron, but it was late and I didn't want to half-ass any answers. I'll look in detail now.

And let me just say Origami, I'm glad you have a decent handle on the rules. Its going to help answer questions quicker.

Ok, I think I'm ready to kick this one off. Anyone have questions or still need to complete something with your character before we do?

I think I'm good, but I'll probably have a ton of questions when we get started

That is perfectly ok :).

Yeehaw!

Same here but I'm ready to jump in!

Ok, regarding the Bare Fist question earlier, here are the official stats:

Weapon: Bare Fist
Power: - (doesn't add anything to your power stat to calculate damage. )
Add: 2 (takes 2 extra successes to bump damage up a band)
WS: 3 (you can make 3 consecutive attacks before having to take a different action in combat)
VA: - (doesn't bypass any dice of armor)
WL: shortest (weapon length, used for the advanced combat rules)
Handedness: one-handed

Thusly, the damage bands for bare fists are:
Incidental: 1/2 your power, rounded up
Mark: your power
Superb: 1.5 x your power, rounded down

---

Adom has a dagger. In comparison, here are the stats for that.

Weapon: Dirk (run of the mill knife)
Power: 1 (adds 1 to your power before calculating damage)
Add: 1 (takes 1 extra success to bump damage up a band)
WS: X (no limit to the number of consecutive attack actions)
VA: - (doesn't bypass any dice of armor)
WL: shortest (weapon length, doesn't give you any advantages)
Handedness: one-handed

Thusly, the damage bands for bare fists are:
Incidental: 1/2 of (your power +1), rounded up
Mark: your power + 1
Superb: 1.5 x (your power + 1), rounded down

So, the first gameplay thread is up!