NaGa DeMon: A question of character

Due to some unforeseen family crisis progress on my NaGa DeMon project is much slower than I anticipated. Luckily it hasn’t come to a total standstill yet. Today I actually managed to finish the character creation section and what better way is there to present a new system than by going through its character creation process.

The character we want to create today could be a typical League Soldier who we will call Commander Shep… eh … Farmer. She’s part of the LDF’s marine corps and has already seen some action. Since we want to focus on the mechanical side of things we don’t need a fully-fledged out concept yet.

Galaxy Core (that’s what I called the system powering Galaxy Rising) is a rules-light d%-based system. Each character is described by three attributes (Physical, Mental, Social – each ranked from 1 to 20) and eight pretty broad skills that get some more granularity by player-defined specializations that grant bonuses from +10% to +30%. There are also three values directly derived from the attributes: body points, Initiative, and Damage Bonus. Last but not least each character has up to three “hooks” (think of FATE Aspects) that help to flesh out the character.

You can either randomly generate the three attributes by rolling 1d10+10 three times (a roll of 0 counts as a 0 here) and distributing these values among the attributes. Alternatively you distribute 45 points. For this demonstration I use the second method.

As a soldier Cmdr. Farmer needs good Physical and Mental abilities, so I put 18 in PHY, 15 in MEN, and 12 in SOC. This results in the following derived values: 46 body points, Initiative of 16, and a damage bonus of 4. This doesn’t look that bad. 🙂

Now lets calculate the skill base chances. Combat (PHY+MEN) is 33%, Communication (MEN+SOC) is 27%, Knowledge (MENx2) is 30%, Perception (MEN+SOC) is 27%, Physique (PHYx2) is 36%, Mechanics (PHY+MEN) is 33%, Technology (MENx2) is 30% and last but not least Stealth (PHY+SOC) is 30%.

The next step is selecting the character’s three primary skills. These are the skills most important to the character and get a +20% bonus each. For Cmdr. Farmer we pick Combat, Physique, and Mechanics.

After that we are ready to pick our character’s three specializations. Each specialization grants an additional +10% bonus but only on certain situations. A good choice of specializations would be Combat: Blaster Rifle, Physique: Dodging, and Mechanics: Drive Ground Vehicle. Specializations are player-defined by the way. The final game will probably have a long list of examples but the rules allow the players and GM to come up with their own ideas to best suit their campaign.

Last but not least each character needs up to three hooks. Hooks are short sentences like quotes, slogans etc. which describe a character’s motivations, goals, or character traits. I am not sure if the hooks are just something that helps the player roleplay his or her character and the GM to come up with adventure ideas, or if there should be mechanical aspects as well. But I guess I’ll find out during playtest. Good hooks for Cmdr. Farmer could be something like “Never give up, never surrender!” or “I still can’t forget the Jupiter incident!”.

In the final game you now pick your character’s gear, BUT I haven’t finished the gear lists yet, so this step will have to wait until another day. But let’s look at our character’s final stats:

Cmdr. Susan Farmer
PHY 18, MEN 15, SOC 12, Body points: 46, Initiative: 16, Damage Bonus: 4
Combat 53% (Specialization: Blaster Rifle), Communication 27%, Knowledge 30%, Perception 27%, Physique 56% (Specialization: Dodging), Mechanics 53% (Specialization: Drive Ground Vehicle), Technology 30%, Stealth 30%.
Hooks: “Never give up, never surrender!”, “I still can’t forget the Jupiter incident!”

Of course the system is still far from being completely finished, but I am quite happy how everything turned out so far. If you have any questions, advice, or criticism, feel free to post in the comments below. Any feedback is appreciated!