Thursday 6 June 2013

1) Character Generation

Statistics

Primary Statistics
There are up to eight primary character statistics (Stats for short) in Lead and Chrome: Strength, Toughness, Coordination, Agility, Intelligence, Know-How, Geniality and Nerve. GMs may rename or remove any of these Stats to fit the style of their campaign, as they wish.

Strength: This is a measure of the character's physical might, their ability to lift and carry heavy loads and so on.

Toughness: This measures the character's stamina, endurance, resistance to extremes of heat, cold, alcohol, drugs and infectious diseases, and the general ability to withstand and recover from injuries.

Coordination: This stat indicates how well developed the character's fine motor skills (also termed manual dexterity) are, and thus how good they are at tasks like driving, piloting aircraft and shooting.

Agility: This is the counterpart of Coordination and shows the level of the character's gross motor skills, which govern walking, running, climbing and other athletic activities.

Intelligence: This stat reflects the character's powers of reasoning and deduction, quick-wittedness and cunning, and their aptitude towards academic study.

Know-How: This rates the character's ability to understand technologies and techniques such as car repair, electrical wiring, musicianship and painting.

Geniality: This tells us how good the character is at relating to other people (what is known as emotional intelligence). It governs sensitivity to the emotions of others, and so affects making friends, romance, and the ability to tell when someone is lying.

Nerve: This is will-power, cool, grit, whatever you want to call it. Nerve is what you need to face down an opponent or keep your head in a crisis.
Primary stats are generated by rolling 2D4+1 for each one. This gives a range of 3-9 for each statistic. Players may reorder their stat rolls to fit the kind of character they want to create, but they cannot take points from one stat and add them to another. Once they have arranged their stats to their liking, players may add +1 to one primary stat of their choosing. This potentially allows one stat to be raised to 10, the human maximum.

Alternative stat generation methods
1) Roll 3D4+1 for each Stat, discarding the lowest die. This will tend to produced higher average stats within the normal range.
2) Roll 1D6+3 or even 1D4+5 for each Stat. This will guarantee higher minimum values (4 and 6 respectively) and a higher average too, with a greater probability of rolling a 9.
3) For truly heroic games, roll 2D4+2 (or 1D6+4 or 1D4+6) for each Stat, but remove the optional +1 bonus to one Stat. This makes it possible for characters to have more than one Stat at level 10.
4) Points-based: Assign a number of points to be distributed between stats. Assuming the eight primary stats, 40 points generates 'rookie' or weak characters, 50 points builds average characters, 55-60 points makes 'elite' characters and 65 points produces 'heroic' characters.

Derivative statistics
Once you have rolled and assigned your character's primary stats, it's time to calculate the four derivative stats. These are:

Size: Strength plus Toughness divided by two, rounding halves up.

Reflexes: Coordination plus Agility divided by two, rounded up.

Looks: Geniality plus Agility divided by two, rounded up.

Sanity: Geniality plus Nerve.

This can be summarised as:

Size: (Strength + Toughness)/2
Reflexes: (Coordination + Agility)/2
Looks: (Geniality + Agility)/2
Sanity: (Geniality + Nerve)

Derivative Stats are much easier to change than Primary Stats. Size changes with growth and ageing. Looks reduces with age and following injuries that leave ugly scars, and can be improved with plastic surgery. In Cyberpunk-genre games, Reflexes can be increased through the use of cybernetic implants.

Statistic modifiers
Once you have determined your character's primary and derivative stats, you may need to add or subtract a modifier to or from them. Adults between 16 and 65 years of age usually have no modifiers applied to their stats, but children and elderly people do.
Children between 12 and 15 years old, and people with congenital dwarfism, subtract one point each from Strength, Toughness, Agility and Size.
For each two full years less than thirteen, subtract one point each from Strength, Toughness, Agility and Size, to a minimum of one (at 10-11: -2; at 8-9: -3; at 6-7: -4; at 4-5: -5; at 2-3: -6; at 0-1: -7)
Elderly people (generally over 65, but this threshold may be raised or lowered at the GM's discretion) subtract one point from each from Strength, Toughness, Agility, Size, Reflexes and Looks, but add one to Geniality and Nerve.
Thus the minimum value for each stat for an adult is two, and the maximum is 10. These values represent the extremes of human physical and mental development. Characters can only have one stat at 10 – if they're lucky – and the GM should make them justify this.
Consider this: Intelligence 10 means you are as clever as Sherlock Holmes. Size 9 or 10 means you are at least six foot six and possibly over seven feet tall (2m plus), and well built with it, as big as actors Richard Keele, Bud Spencer or AndrĂ© the Giant or basketball player Shaquille O'Neal. Looks 10 is that possessed by the sex symbols of their age, such as Elizabeth Taylor or Marilyn Monroe. Clint Eastwood's Man with no Name character and real-life world-record trick-shooter Ed McGivern (who could put five shots from a revolver into a 1¼” circle at 15 feet, in less than half a second) have Coordination and Reflexes of 10.

Stat checks
Occasionally a character must make a die roll one of their Stats in order to avoid something unpleasant. This is called a Stat Check. The player or GM rolls a D10. If the result is equal to or less than the character's relevant Stat, they pass the check. If the roll is higher, they fail. A natural roll of a 10 (before modifiers) on a Stat Check is always a failure (but not a fumble like with skill checks, below), while an unmodified roll of a 1 is always a success.

Sanity and psychological trauma
Sanity is a special stat: there are no skills associated with it, and it cannot be increased, only reduced.
Every time a character suffers a psychological trauma (such as witnessing the murder of a loved-one, having a near-death experience, suffering torture or killing someone in cold blood) they must make a Sanity stat check – rolling a D20 instead of a D10. Failure means the character loses one point of sanity and one point of either Geniality or Nerve and therefore a point of sanity. Thus, the more your mental health deteriorates, the more fragile it becomes.
The GM or source book may rule that certain traumatic experiences affect Geniality and others Nerve.
Alternatively, and when in doubt, the stat point that is lost can be determined randomly. Roll a D6: On a result of 1-3 the character loses a point of Geniality, on a 4-6 they lose a point of Nerve.

Sanity check modifiers
Some situations are more potentially damaging to one's sanity than others. To reflect this, a positive or negative modifier may be applied to the die roll.

Nerve point loss
Losing your nerve, as you might guess, leads to neurotic conditions, primarily anxiety but also including depression, phobias, obsession and hysteria.
A character with Nerve 3 or 4 is pretty nervous. At Nerve 2 they jump at everything , commonly experience panic attacks and manifest irrational fears and obsessive, ritualistic behaviour. At Nerve 1 they suffer a complete nervous breakdown. Paranoid delusions take over and the character begins to suspect others, even their friends and relatives, of plotting against them. They may resort to violence, even murder, to defend themselves from such imagined threats.

Geniality point loss
Losing points in geniality represents the process of brutalisation and alienation, as is often experienced by soldiers and civilians in war or by prison inmates. This leaves the character progressively colder, more callous and alienated from the rest of humanity (including friends and loved-ones).
Someone with Geniality 3 or 4 is a bit of a 'cold fish' who has trouble relating to others. If Geniality falls to 2, the character is very cold, distant and uncaring. At Geniality 1 the character becomes a complete sociopath, viewing other human beings as simply a means to an end. Other people are dehumanised and objectified in the sufferer's psyche, and so the social inhibitions against dishonesty, theft, assault, rape and murder break down. Such a person can be very dangerous.

Psychotherapy
OK, you did one too many tours in the 'Nam (Tottenham that is), and now you just sit staring at the walls of your local bar all day, hitting the dirt every time a car exhaust backfires in the street outside. When your wife's lawyer served you with divorce papers, you almost snapped his neck like a twig. It's time you sought professional help.
A qualified psychiatrist, counsellor or psychotherapist can help you confront your mental traumas and overcome them, but you will always at risk of a relapse. In game terms, a successful Psychiatry task by the professional treating the character allows them to regain one lost Geniality or Nerve point. However, lost Sanity points cannot be restored in this way, leaving the character more vulnerable to psychological trauma in the future.
The difficulty of the Psychiatry task (to restore one point of either Geniality or Nerve) depends on how many times it has been done. Restoring the first point is an Easy task, the second an Average task, the third Difficult and so on. If a stat is regained and lost again, the difficulty level to restore it again still rises one level, so a record needs to be kept on the character sheet of how many points of each stat have been lost and restored. No amount of expensive therapy will keep your marbles together if you get shot at every day or torture and murder people for a living.
The therapy task takes one month of daily treatment, during which the patient needs to be in a stable, serene environment (but not necessarily a mental hospital) and away from the cause of their trauma. It doesn't work if the character is getting into gunfights or carrying out mob hits between their therapy sessions. In game terms, a good time for such therapy is in the down-time between scenarios.

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