A game’s character sheet can often tell you a lot about its level of detail and complexity. Therefore, ahead of the release of the first full draft of Catching Rats & Robbing Graves, the Hack100 supplement for running WFRP-style games, here is its character sheet.
I’m hoping to release that full draft of CRARG within the next week or so.
Hack100’s core rules assume that player characters are human or human-like. However, in some game genres, particularly fantasy and science fiction, non-human characters may be an option.
The easiest way to accommodate non-human characters is by employing the same Modified Abilities and Innate Characteristics used for Non-Player Characters.
In an earlier blog, we briefly discussed one-sentence character backgrounds and motivations and how they can be an effective way of summarising a character and providing plot hooks without the need for lengthy backstories.
Most games have some sort of encumbrance system to determine the upper limits of what a character can carry, as well as any penalties associated with being overloaded. Traditionally, this involves adding-up the weight of each item carried and comparing the total against a character’s carrying capacity. Penalties for exceeding this capacity might include a reduced movement speed or negative modifiers to movement-based tasks.
The final stage of character creation is to decide upon an adventurer’s starting equipment. In Hack100, there is no “shopping list” of standard goods for new characters. Rather, it is recommended that the player and the Referee agree upon the equipment a given character might reasonably expect to own based upon the campaign setting and the character’s Specialism, background and motivation. Of course, the Referee’s decisions in such regards are final.
So far in discussing character generation in Hack100, we’ve focussed solely on the numbers that define an adventurer. Whilst these are essential from a game mechanics perspective, they are, nevertheless, rather dry. Apart from each character’s Specialism, they tell us little about their wider background and motivations.
Having looked at character Abilities and Specialisms in the last two blogs, the only remaining numerical parameter that Hack100 uses to define a character is “Health”.
Other d100 games tend to separate-out a character’s physical condition (typically quantified by Hit Points or similar) from their magical resources (e.g. Power Points or Magic Points). The 3rd Edition of RuneQuest even introduces a third resource, Fatigue Points, that quantifies how tired a character is. In Hack100, we will streamline all of these aspects into a single parameter – Health.
The twelve core Attributes described in the previous blog are designed to cover most of the common situations that a character is likely to face whilst adventuring. However, with only twelve Attributes, there is a risk that characters end up seeming quite similar, with little to differentiate one from the next.
In the last blog, we looked at some established percentile-based role-playing games and saw how they typically define their characters by two sets of numbers: