Character Generation

Backstory

Although a lot of each characters backstory will hopefully come out organically in the first couple sessions, there are some pre-game places where you should already have a good idea. Try to touch on these in your blurb before we start.

Where in "The Row" you came from, or, if you came from outside the hood, how did you stumble into the Angel Street Otome?
What was your relationship to Omoi Kanako, the mysterious Team Mom of the Angel Street Otome whom you couldn't quite beat at anything until her recent passing away?
How do you relate to the other PCs? Try to work this out a little. Everyone has been in the gang long enough to be familiar.
Bearing in mind that everyone starts fairly poor, does the character have a job and/or spot in school? Do they already do anything legal or illegal that brings in money? This is mostly so there are details to insert into the hood.
What current motivations does the character have? What would she be doing if, for the sake of argument, shit fails to hit the fan.

Stats

Everyone starts with seven (7) Stats at 1, and 13 additional points to distribute. This gives a total of 20. The maximum starting level for any stat is 5. For more on the specifics of each stat (if they aren't already obvious), go here.

Melee

Physique

Shoot

Charm

Presence

Smarts

Tech

Skills

Everyone starts with ten (10) Skills which you may define. Skills add +2 to your stat roll when they are directly appropriate, provided they are specific enough, and +1 when they are deemed only peripherally appropriate. Feel free to support your most important skills with a tag. Only a single skill can add dice at any one time. If two or more very different skills are highly relevant, a -1 difficulty is applied.

In some cases, Skills serve as prerequisites above and beyond the simple mechanic of adding dice. Some tasks - often those involving Tech as the dominant Stat - have higher thresholds than usual if rolled without the proper Skill. This is to represent specialised fields that require equally specialised knowledge well above the norm. In other cases, a piece of Gear may require a matching Skill to unlock its true potential under the Stunt system.

Fate Tags

Everyone starts with five (5) Fate Tags as well as a Fate Pool of 5; they are based on Aspects and Fate from Spirit of the Century. Fate tags are descriptors attached to characters, places and things and are used for that entity's interaction with the stunting and the fate system. Whenever a tag limits your actions or works against you, you gain 1 Fate Point. Conversely, fate can be spent to gain extra bonuses from tags when invoking them for a stunt.

Because tags are key to regaining fate, it is suggested to avoid a spread of pure benefits, though the drawbacks don't have to be obvious. Good tags should be specific in nature yet broad in implication and different from everyone else's tags. Specificity is usually good. For example, rather than being simply a Music Buff or Kendo Girl, you can be a Rabid Hisonic Miku Fan or Trained by Yanagi Hisa (though you may have no idea who that is at the start). Catchphrases (not necessarily the character's), Steam achievements, memes and tvtrope entries all make good starting points. Tags referencing mysterious or unknown backstory can make them exist.

Social Links

Everyone starts with a B-ranked Social Link to each other as a result of being mutual homies. They start off with no effect, so leave that blank for now – they'll be filled in over the first few sessions of roleplaying.

Taken from various iterations of Persona, social links are an important part of the gangster's life, providing contacts, friends, lovers, rivals, or even enemies. Just what sort of relationship this is should be noted down along with the level, which is a letter grade starting at D. Social links do have a cost but are mostly gained through roleplaying.

Depending on depth and nature, a social link may act like a weaker fate tag that only allows effects up to the 1 Fate level, or something that can be invoked once in a while for longer term benefits. With NPCs, it also allow the character to gain some resource in exchange for something else, or some other effect. At B level or higher, the characters qualify for special emergency actions in each others' presence.

Derived Values

Everyone also has three additional derived values:

Initiative is Smarts + Physique. Roll 1d10 and add the result.

Health is Melee + Physique + 5, resulting in a starting value between 7 and 15.

Soak is Melee.

Gear

Within reason. Personal weapons (not heavy or explosive ones), an outfit, a cheap vehicle and some basic gear appropriate for your skills and tags.

Gear may have a small ability to distinguish it from other examples in its category.

Doing Stuff

To do stuff, you roll the stat and the skill together as a pool of d10's. The default success threshold is 6. Rolling 1's can botch if the number of 1's exceeds the number of successes but they do not normally subtract.

For all errors, keep the rolled dice and either add more or else cut results off from the right side of the spread.

Pressure

Pressure is an abstract representation of ambient problems that need to be dealt with or held off while important stuff gets (or doesn't get) done. It is most commonly presented by large numbers of minor NPCs – namely gangsters or cops. The basic mechanic is that, the party must collectively produce that many successes on actions devoted dealing with the Pressure each round or risk having their more important actions interrupted, taking damage etc. Significantly exceeding the number of necessary successes can sometimes help burn through the mooks more quickly or could also be a complete waste of time.

If being inconspicuous (relatively) is not an issue, the PC's can always call in some or all of the gang. Different sets of mooks have their own pressure index which directly cancels each other.

Basic Combat

Characters declare and resolve actions from highest to lowest initiative.

You can do one Move, one Melee and one Shoot action in a single turn subject to caveats:

1) Things must be in range and weapons in hand when it happens.

2) All attacks must be at one target. (Mook groups are a single target.)

3) The weapon used may prescribe restrictions.

Just rolling the skill for successes is usually sufficient against mooks but actual combatants get to roll a defense and may do so multiple times a turn. For each defense rolled after the first in a round, a cumulative -1 is applied. The final penalty further applies to each of their actions if they had to defend before acting.

On a tie, the defender wins. On a hit, damage (threshold successes + combat stat + weapon modifier if any) is subtracted from soak (Melee).

Attack and defense difficulty can be modified, though generally not nearly as much as in Wartime (thank goodness). The default difficulty assumes common but non-perfect conditions.

Moving and Surroundings

By default, you move one range bracket per turn though the Long and Extreme ranges might weird things up. If the terrain is challenging somehow, moving may require a roll. If you want to move more than one range bracket, you must have a valid stunt or some method of generating a large edge in successes if chasing a fleeing target.

Too Close: Right in the face. Most guns are too ungainly to function and melee is in its element.

Close: Across a small room.

Short: The shortest range at which cover will function outside of dramatic showdowns. Most fights indoors is limited to this range unless it's...

Medium: ...a notably large building such as a dockside warehouse or combatants shooting from extreme ends of the Gothedral.

Long: Ranges that are relevant only to militaries in the field. Rare.

Extreme: Sniping ranges in the mid-high hundreds of meters.

Stunting

Stunting works by meaningfully referencing fate tags while executing impressive actions vibrantly described in IRC text. To be clear, you do not need to spend Fate while stunting but there does need to be at least one clearly relevant Fate tag either attached to you, the environment, the enemy or something in the situation. The simplest way to invoke tags that aren't your own is to know about them beforehand. These might take significant effort to discover but you can easily extrapolate tags within reason - an enemy queenpin acting all cocky can reasonably be assured to have the Cocky tag (or else the Consumate Actress tag) and burning buildings tend to have the tag On Fire. Tags can also be discovered accidentally, stumbled upon or assessed with a successful second glance. A stunt where no tags are involved is still cool but has no actual ingame effect. When a stunt does properly invoke tag(s), stunt benefits are gained and the narrative can be controlled to a degree. Players can never regain Fate using circumstances linked to their own stunt.

The default bonus that you always get for a valid stunt is a single extra success. You can choose to spend Fate for one of the following:

Pay 1 Fate to gain an extra success for every tag involved. That means a bare minimum of one more success (since you had to have at least one valid tag to reach this stage) but prolly more.
Pay 1 Fate to reroll the pool (after you've rolled it once) and take whichever result you like. This can be triggered after the above so long as the stunt is still being resolved. For example, if you roll five dice and get three extra success using Fate and roll rubbish with the five dice, you can spend another Fate to reroll the five.
Pay 2 Fate for a personal perfect defense. This works for both mental and physical attacks and is mechanically equivalent to having just enough successes to deal with any attack it covers - even if you don't normally have enough of a dice pool to make it happen. For lingering effects besides, like being poisoned with polonium, it can be triggered in any stuntable situation after the attack itself but before it kills you. Perfect defenses usually last until your next turn and is universally effective against mooks unless one of them has an attack against which the stunt itself would be clearly ineffective. Boss characters have more leeway and can bypass an already-triggered perfect defense with a stunt of their own. Perfect defenses cannot normally cause harm or inconvenience to others in and of themselves but are explicitly applicable if the character stunts to remove herself entirely from the combat situation.
Pay 2 Fate to turn the pool into automatic successes.
Pay 3 Fate to hand it to the GM to make some dramatic awesome happen. This is for when a full pool of automatic successes and a bunch of extra successes from tags still wouldn't do the trick for some reason and typically involves dramatic sacrifices or what-have-you. A good way to view it is a perfect defense for the entire group.

Regaining Fate

Characters, or indeed anything in theory, regain Fate by having their Fate tags work againt them in some significant way. This is most relevant when the PC's voluntarily take actions that are appropriate for their Fate tags but clearly disadvantageous in the short or long run. In very appropriate situations, the GM may trigger the tag himself and force a decision - either the character pays 1 Fate to do whatever she wants or gains 1 Fate by following her nature. You cannot gain Fate when the results of being compelled by the Fate tag are positive or neutral. This caveat applies to all of your own stunts even if they result in failure. Stunts, on the other hand, will give 1 Fate for every Fate tag triggered to their respective owners. This technically applies to all entities - mooks, buildings, vehicles and so on. Of course, most mooks don't have a Fate pool to hold Fate points in and it's a rare building that will spend Fate points doing anything besides collapse dramatically.

Some established standards:

Being distracted during dangerous situations with no further repercussion generally involves losing one full round.
Stunts that trigger an opponent's tag(s) directly grants them 1 Fate for every tag so triggered. This works for all sides.

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