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The River and the Road: BASICs
🕑 Added 2019-02-10 18:43:45 +0000 UTCHey look, let's see if I can keep this one actually going.
BASIC is a system that's all about keeping the party going, be it your in-game party of adventurers, or the physical party that's in your room while you're playing it. You won't need to consult a lot for clarification. Frankly, imma see how much of this information I can just fit right on the character sheets. First though, how you make a check in BASIC:
How to Make Checks
- Roll 2d6, and keep the higher of the two. Your target? A result of 7 or higher.
- This is obviously a problem when you’re only keeping one of these two six sided dice rolls. Typically if you’re going to make seven out of six sided dice, you want at least two.
- So instead, Add the Attribute you’d most want to rely on in the situation you’re checking. If you’re just doing a thing, you get to pick a way to do it, and then choose the Attribute that would come the most into play were you to do it. If you’re using an Item on your person, you’ll instead use what the Item’s dataline says to instead.
- Apply any modifiers to the check. Modifiers in BASIC don’t get more extreme than +/-3, and are most commonly 1s or 2s, so this isn’t ever going to be a lot of math.
- Check the final result. Is it greater than 7? Yes? Good, you succeeded! No? Whoops, that didn’t work. Better let someone try something else before you try again.
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The Attributes
A character breaks down into five basic Attributes. Which is where the name of the system comes from. Each of these can be used in an appropriate Action Check, provided you can sell it as plausible for the given situation.
- Body: Physical beefiness, and the ability to focus it on an appropriate task. This includes lifting heavy things, shoving and smashing stuff out of the way, or grabbing people, creatures and things in a particularly not-messing-around sort of way. Your Body level gives you a deeper pool of Health and can also just straight up make you tougher and harder to hurt, naturally increasing your Defense through sheer ruggedness. They can also provide a Damage bonus on some weapons (some let you even use Body to Attack with).
- Agility: Physical swiftness, allowing a character to move quickly and precisely. You’ll use this when you want to be fast, airborne or to act with a great deal of tactile precision. Agility is used to attack with melee weapons that aren’t particularly large or hard to handle without extra muscle, which actually covers a wider area than it doesn’t. It also determines your Mobility.
- Senses: Not simply the sharpness of all your various sensory inputs, but your ability to discern detail and put together pertinent information from what they’re telling you. If you’ve got to focus, listen, feel for something or otherwise engage the world with your senses, you’ll check with this. You can also use it for interacting with other characters- your Senses can tell you how to approach a conversation. Senses are used primarily when attacking with ranged weapons.
- Instinct: The part of your head that talks to you when you’re focused on something else, that points out important things, like patterns you’re noticing, changes in your environment, things that could mean other, greater, more important and/or dangerous things are present. Instinct is used in matters of the mind that are less logic, and more mentally feeling things out- go this way, because the air feels right, that’s an illusion, it’s too flat and desaturated to be real, this person is hiding something from me because of the things they’re not saying, and the things they are saying that they don’t realize are suspect. It’s also used in matters of Petitionary Magic, casting spells via direct communion with The Indivisible and their Convergence.
- Cunning: A mixture of both your ability to reason, to work your head around systems with their own logic, like math, chemistry and magic, and your creativity, which allows you to apply that higher reasoning to something more productive than just feeling smug about how smart you are. Cunning is what you’d use to if you were tasked with figuring out a riddle, doing complex math or bargaining with characters. It’s also used when both building and casting with Constructive Magic.
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Statistics
Your moment to moment state of health and wellbeing, your Statistics are a measure of how you’re doing- if you’re healthy or hurt, if you’re focused or scatterbrained, if you’re feeling light on your feet or more like a ton of ostensibly ambulatory bricks. Stats are small but important- each one of them can mean the difference between triumph and another bad day.
- Health: How many clean-landing hits you can take before going down and needing a revive. The more Health you have, the more abuse you can weather. When someone or something attacks you and succeeds with their check, divide the Raw Damage dealt by the check by your Defense stat; the remainder is the Sustained Damage, which you then take off.
- Add your Body level to the Health value of your chosen People and Way; that’s your base Health.
- Focus: A measure of both your physical and mental wakefulness and readiness- it’s how up, alert and fresh you are. You need Focus to bring your full self to bear, when you’re going to try something involved or difficult. Focus is the fuel for your more advanced Abilities linked to both your People and your Way. You can also spend a point of it to force a single reroll on any single check you make.
- Each Way has an associated amount of Focus to it, which will increase as that Way gains levels. Also, take your highest Attribute, whichever it may be, and add a bonus to your Focus pool based on it: You get 1 bonus Focus for every 2 levels that Attribute has, 3 bonus Focus if you have a 5 in that attribute.
- Mobility: How much ground you can cover in a single Movement action. In the Roleplay space, this is a means to compare the footspeed of characters and creatures, to determine how quickly they can move over terrain, or figure out who would win in a straight-line chase. In the Tactical space, it becomes more literal, in that it’s how many inches on the tabletop, or spaces on the table map, you can move with a single Move action.
- Each People has an associated amount of Mobility to it. To that, add 1 Mobility for every 2 Agility you have, up to 3 if you have a full 5 Agility.
- Evasion: How low a profile you present to someone that might be able to see you, and also that might be willing to shoot at you. The higher you go with this, the harder you’ll be be sighted, or be put in sights- in other words, it serves as a penalty to all searching and ranged attack checks made against you.
- Evasion is rated from 0 to 3, starting at 0. You can increase it by ticking the following boxes: have an Agility of 4+; have taken a Passive Ability that gives you +1; are wearing an Item on your Apparel Track that grants you +1.
- Defense: How hard you are to hurt when you take a hit, be it through sheer physical toughness, the thickness of the armour on your person, or the amount of magic you’ve got flying around you in protective shell. When you take a hit, your Defense value divides the Raw Damage, reducing it into Sustained Damage, which you take off your Health. The more you have, the less hurt you’ll be when an attack or hazard connects.
- Defense is based on both your Body level and the level of Armour you’re wearing on your Apparel Track. Everyone starts with 1 Defense. Raising Body to 3 adds +1, and then raising it to 5 adds another +1. What type of Armour you’re wearing on your Apparel track also adds to this- Soft Armour adds +1, Hard Armour adds +2, Warded Armour can be either, and also doesn’t restrict spellcasters. Armour doesn’t go above 5.
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Next: The Peoples, their various Culture groups, and maybe even a look at The River and the Road's class system, The Ways.
-G
