System Basics

Scaling

The system used is an exponential scale, where an increase in '2' in an attribute or parameter doubles its real-world value, and an decrease of '2' halves it. Therefore, each 1-point increase in an attribute or parameter is a roughly 40% increase, and each 1-point decrease is a roughly 30% decrease.

Conflict Resolution

Most rolls to resolve conflicts use 2 10-sided dice. Roll 2d10, then add them together with the relevant attribute and skill (or pair of attributes, or whatever else is called for) and whatever modifiers they have. If the total is greater than the difficulty of the roll, the character succeeds. If the total is more than double the difficulty of the roll, it is considered an incredible success, and if the total is more than triple the difficulty of the roll, it is considered an exceptional success.

If two characters are attempting to oppose each other in an opposed roll, both parties roll 2d10 and add it to their attribute, ability, and modifier totals. The character with a greater total wins.

Difficulties

The default difficulty of a roll is 11, which means that a character with attribute 0 and skill 1 succeeds approximately half the time. Difficulty levels are listed below.

Trivial: Difficulty 0-5

Easy: Difficulty 6-8

Simple: Difficulty 7-9

Normal: Difficulty 10-12

Challenging: Difficulty 13-20

Heroic: Difficulty 21-28

Inhuman: Difficulty 30-40

Titanic: Difficulty 41-50

Godlike: Difficulty 51-60

Nigh-Impossible: 61+

Modifiers

Some tasks have modifiers. Having assistants makes many research tasks easier, while reacting to an ambush is much easier if you have good sensor systems and squadmates covering your back, and trying to climb a mountain is harder if the mountain is in vacuum, you're carrying 50 kilograms of gear, and your spacesuit is malfunctioning.

Modifiers can be positive or negative. Either way, they are added (or subtracted) from the roll total. There is no limit to how much modifiers can affect your total.

Criticals

A critical happens when the 2 10-sided dice come up as both 10s or both 1s. If both die come up 10s, the roll is a critical success and the player can roll an additional 2d10, adding it to the total. If this comes up 20 as well, the character may roll an additional 2d10 and add it as long as they keep coming up 20s. If both die come up 1s, the roll is a critical failure and the player rolls an additional 2d10, subtracting it from the total.

This does mean that characters attempting extremely difficult feats or with extremely poor attribute/skill totals can fail even on a critical, while characters with extremely high attributes and skills can often succeed even on critical failures.

Attributes

Characters have two sets of four attributes, mental and physical. Physical attributes are entirely governed by a character's body, and may be swapped out (for example, having your memstorage loaded to a Golem body would replace all physical attributes), while mental attributes are what make the core of a character and are not swappable-but instead, increased with Experience. Attributes from -3 to 4 are generally human range, while AIs generally have mental attributes from 6 to 20+. Normal human attributes are 0, and average humans range from -1 to 1.

Mental

Intellect: Intellect determines the character's ability to comprehend concepts, come to correct conclusions from partial or incomplete data, and the character's ability to learn and commit events to memory. An Intellect below -2 means the character is likely nonsapient and thus probably not fit to be a player character, such as a flash-frozen Prador child used as a war drone mind, a severely retarded human being, a smart missile, or most animals.

Reaction Speed: Reaction Speed determines how fast a character can process information, playing a part in detecting ambush, reacting to unforseen events, and how often a character can act. Something with high intellect but low clock speed could be a slow-thinking mind based on pheromonal transfer (like wasp hiveminds), while something with low intellect but high clock speed have simple intelligence but can quickly make use of it (such as Tenkian weapons).

Resolve: Resolve determines a character's mental toughness: His ability to withstand pain, endure suffering, survive viral attack, and resist mental illness.

Interaction: Interaction determines the character's ability to interact socially with other sapients and get their way via diplomacy and social niceties. A combination of understanding social cues, personalities, and mind structure, it also governs a character's ability to succeed in virally attacking another's mind.

Physical

Strength: Strength is a character's ability to exert physical force, whether with limbs, gravplates, fields, protoplasmic blobs, or anything else.

Resilience: Resilience is a character's physical toughness, determining how resistant the character is to harsh environments, physical harm, fatigue, viral attack, and other methods of causing physical damage.

Speed: A character's speed determines his ability to move and how fast he can physically act.

Precision: A character's precision is their ability to precisely interact with the environment, whether this involves fine surgery or dropping missile barrages onto populated worlds.

Miscellaneous

Size: A character's size is a rough indicator of how much physical volume their current body takes up. Size determines scale and mass. An increase of 2 in Size is a doubling of volume (and thus mass).

Health: A character's health is her ability to survive damage. A character's base health is their (Strength + Resilience + 10). Note that the actual damage characters take is heavily modified by scale.

Skills

Skills are the character's training in a field of action, whereas attributes measure their natural talents. Skills are often more specific than attributes, but much cheaper to purchase and raise, especially at high levels.

Field Skills

Some skills (like science, engineering, academics, art, and so on) are field skills, which are a group of related but separate skills. A character chooses the specific field in which their skill is focused in. The skill is used at full value for rolls related to the specific field, and half value, rounded up, for all other rolls using the skill. Characters may buy multiple field skills in different fields if they so choose.

Specialties and Focuses

Specialties are an area of a skill which a character is particularly good at. For example, Heavy Weapons (Railgun), Viral Attack (Prador Systems), and so on are all examples of specialties. A specialty adds +1 to all rolls related to the specialty.

On the other hand, a focus means the character dedicates themselves intensely to training with a single area in that skill, at the detriment to his knowledge and competence in other areas. A focus adds +3 to all rolls related to the focus, but -1 to all rolls unrelated to the specialty. A character with Heavy Weapons (Focus: Railgun) would add +3 to attacking with a railgun, but -1 to attacking with an APW, for example.

A character may only have one specialty or one focus per skill.

Requisition

Polity and ECS Agents don't generally have to deal with their own finances, as their missions are critical enough and their equipment expensive enough that buying it outright is difficult to impossible. Instead, they bill ECS or their AI sponsors for replacements and equipment that they need, but this has its limits-not every agent can get a lifetime supply. The abstract measure of how much pull, favor, and importance a character has with the governing AIs of the Polity (or, in a non-Polity game, whatever organization they belong to) is called Requisition. This is used to purchase weapons, equipment, and even bodies.

Items purchased by requisition are essentially permanent character fixtures, replaced as soon as possible when lost or expended (although in some cases that might take a while)-as such, requisition is committed-if a character spends requisition to buy a high-mark Golem body or a war drone shell, the character loses the requisition she spent unless she returns whatever she used the requisition for.

Requisition can be traded in for money for various out-Polity uses, bribes, or general business transactions. In fact, for non-Polity groups, it may be better to just automatically convert requisition into cash for expenditures instead.

Character Generation

Character Points

Characters get a default 100 character points (CP) to split between mental attributes, skills, traits, and requisition. Characters start with 0 in every trait assuming the characters are intended to be normal human agents. More exceptional agents get additional CP, while more powerful minds get additional base attributes. As Polity Agents are selected for their exceptional ability and flexibility, no Polity Agent should have an ability below 0 (or whatever the default is).

CP Levels

25-50 CP: Average men and women, no particular talents or resources.

50-75 CP: Skilled, some talents, "everyday heroes" (ECS recruits, expert scientists)

75-100 CP: Default, exceptional talent or experience (Sparkind, default PCs, veteran ECS members)

101-150 CP: Exceptional talent and experience. (Experienced Hoopers, Old war drones, Sparkind veterans, seasoned Polity Agents)

150+ CP: Absolutely incredible, near-unique, world-shaking characters. These men and women change the fates of interstellar empires. (Mr. Crane, Sniper, Ian Cormac, Vrell)

Starting Mental Attributes

Note that these are just suggestions on starting attribute spreads. The GM is encouraged to alter spreads subtly if he/she prefers a different spread of starting attributes. These base attributes are modified by attribute modifiers, as listed below.

Intellect

-2: Prador war drone

0: Average human or Prador.

+2: Average Golem

+4: Haiman/War drone average

+8-12: Veteran war drones are often somewhere in this range.

+12: Attack ship AIs, Jain soldiers, and other proper AIs start at this level.

+20: Planetary Governor AIs, Runcible AIs, and Dreadnought AIs are at this level.

Reaction Speed

-8: Wasp hive

0: Average human.

+6: Average golem or haiman.

+8: Tenkian weapons, smart weapons

+12: War drones, missiles.

+20: Warship AIs.

Resolve

0: Average human

+4: Golem average

+6: Haiman average

+12: Attack ship/war drone AI average

+20: Planetary governor/runcible/dreadnought AI average

Interaction (Note that most AIs get bonuses to Interaction for viral attack via programs, hence their relatively poor scores.)

-2: War drone average

0: Average human, haiman, or golem

+2: Average attack ship AI

+4: Planetary governor, runcible, or dreadnought AI.

Attribute Modifiers

Note that these are added (or subtracted) from the base scores given by the averages.

-Additional: Transcendentally bad. (returns CP equal to half the square of the negative, rounded up. So -4 returns 16/2 = 8 CP, -5 returns 25/2 = 13 CP, and so on.)

-3: Pathetic, incompetent, 1/3rd normal ability. Returns 5 CP.

-2: Feeble, incapable, half normal ability. Returns 2 CP.

-1: Weak, below average, roughly 70% of average ability. Returns 1 CP.

+0: Average, normal. Cost 0 CP

+1: Above average, solid, competent. Cost 1 CP

+2: Good, twice average ability. Cost 4 CP

+3: Incredible, top five percent, roughly 3 times as good as average. Cost 9 CP

+4: Exceptional, 99+ percentile, one of the gifted few. Roughly four times as good as average. Cost 16 CP

+Additional: Square of the cost (so +5 costs 25 CP, +6 costs 36, +7 costs 49, etc.)

Skills

A full skill list will be found when I finish one. Skills are capped at 6 or a character's Intellect, whichever is higher. Skills cost 1 CP per level (so a skill at 5 costs 5 CP). A GM may want to limit the number of skills a character has above 3, as skills

0: Untrained. Cost 0 CP

1: Neophyte, partially trained. Cost 1 CP

2: Competent, fully trained in the skill. Cost 2 CP

3: Professional, has extensive training and/or significant experience. Cost 3 CP

4: Expert, has both extensive training and experience, well-accomplished. Costs 4 CP.

5: Elite, top in their field, can easily accomplish difficult tasks. Costs 5 CP.

6: Grandmaster, famous leading expert in their field. Costs 6 CP.

7+: Inhuman, a level of mastery impossible for normal humans. Costs (skill rating) CP.

Development

Physical Development

Physical development is not done by experience, but by requisition. Drone and golem bodies don't grow stronger with use, but can be upgraded. If a character wishes to improve physical ability, implant hardware, VR training, and Polity medicine mean that as long as one has the money, physical upgrades and trait increases are easy, whereas most of the time people don't have the time to put in to achieve the same results via exercise. Even if they do, if they lose that body, that's it. Better to make sure your replacements are also in that kind of condition.

Mental Development

Mental development is done by XP.

Attributes

Raising an attribute costs XP equal to the square of the attribute's new modifier rating. This means that it costs less to raise a negative attribute modifier as it goes on, which represents the fact that as someone's aptitude in a field increases, learning becomes easier.

Example: Armistad, a War Drone with base Intellect 4 and a modifier of +2 (for a total of 6) wants to educate himself further and seeks to raise his Intellect to 7 (for a modifier of +3). To do so, he must pay (3)^2, or 9 XP.

Skills

Raising a skill costs XP equal to the skill's current rating, plus 1. Buying a new skill costs 3 XP.

Example: Armistad wishes to learn more about the Aetheter and thus buys Academics (Aetheter) up to 1. This costs him 3 XP. He later seeks to increase Academics (Aetheter) to 2, which costs only 2 XP.