Pilot RPG Character Creation

I got a bit more of Pilot written this weekend. In many ways it is slow going, in others it skips forward pleasantly.

So far what we have is the 10 stats that you would expect. Stat bonuses use the ‘Hurin’s Rule’ of (Stat-50)/3. Temps are all 100 and and the absolute maximum value for a playable race is 101.

The rules are being evolved from Old School Essentials. The first change is that anything even vaguely D&D-like gives non-humans infravision, typically to 60′.

I didn’t want that. We [Terefang and I] are building the talents and flaws that are used to construct the ancestries (I don’t want to use the word race, so these are ancestries in the fantasy rules, species in the sci-fi game, others remain to be seen). Our Elves and Dwarves have grayscale darkvision which reduces penalties for seeing in low light.

That was the first explicitly RM style change.

We are working in a sort of tag team style at the moment. I write, I find something missing from the toolkit and Terefang makes it for me, as if by magic.

Right now, you can roll your stats, and choose an ancestry. The goal for this week will be to allow you to pick a culture. This will give you your final stats, some special bonuses from your talents and flaws and some starting skills.

I do not think the cultures will be particularly difficult. They should be largely the same as the Navigator RPG cultures, all baring the starfaring culture. We already have the rules in place for creating new cultures. It should be realively easy to translate them over.

The next part will be the first template professions. These will combine the two elements of the profession setting your skill costs and them coming with a predefined set of skills. In essence when you pick your profession, you get a Training Package at the same time.

This model makes character creation fast, there is no agonising over which skills are important for a starting character, that has been done for you. It is wonderfully easy to customise for a GM, you can have unique fighters from any tradition by finessing the skills.

The last stage will be that each player gets 20DP to spend on additional skills. This is a chance to customise your character, knowing that all your basic bases have been covered.

The skill list should be pretty much the same as the Navigator RPG list, but swapping in some low tech skills in place of the Piloting, Science and Engineering.

It is this part, the skills list that I think will eat up my development time for the rest of the month. It is also the cool bit for the character creation process.

If I can hit all my waypoints, in November I get to play with Terefang’s new magic system, cantrips, spells and rituals. That, I am looking forward to.