User:Nod/System/Stats

Basic stat details

Physical Power

This is raw strength.

Physical Quickness

This is the quickness with which the character can move, for example hand movements, such as slight of hand or punching.

Physical Toughness

This measures how tough the character is in terms of raw physical punishment.  Generally, the higher this stat, the more damage the character can take.

Physical Prowess

This is the ability of the character to become comfortable in a given physical situation or confrontation, and their level of practice and adaptability within and to that situation.  Characters naturally gain this stat as they level up, and by encountering certain types of situations often, as well a constant practice in dealing with a given situation.

Mental Power

This is the ability of the character to gather and focus their mental energy on a task.  This affects the damage of spells as well as the speed at which a character can learn new things and pick up on new concepts.

Mental Quickness

This is the ability of the character to think well on their feet.  The higher this stat, the more quickly the character can adapt to an unfamiliar situation or emergency.  This stat is important to conserve coolness.

Mental Toughness

A character with a high stat in this can endure mental punishment up to and beyond the point when their will breaks.  Fatigue, spells, and coolness are affected by this.

Mental Prowess

This allows the character to instantly know the answer to a given question, or immediately have a solution to a given problem before anyone else has a chance to react.  This is important in many situations for many reasons, but probably most significant in face to face dealings with people or during an emergency situation.

Dodge, Grip, and Crit

These are all thresholds that allow the character to perform an action or augment an action if that threshold is surpassed on the relevant skill check or action.

Common Sense

This is the character's street smarts and their intuitive knowledge of the situation and their surroundings.  This is every man's knowledge and the ability to glide through any situation related to the day to day in a familiar or common environment.  The DM can often use this to move the game along.

Sixth Sense

This allows the character to anticipate their opponent's actions, size up a situation while in the middle of it without an overview, and their ability to overall size up a situation site unseen.  These characters this stat high seem to have the uncanny ability to move through any given situation purely be feeling it out, unless of course everyone knows how to to do it.

Social

This is the character's suave and silver tongue when hob nobbing with the brass or a hobo on the street.  These characters intuitively know what to say and what their body language should convey in order to get their point across, diffuse a situation, convince that other character to pick his nose because there's gold up there somewhere, or generally size up a situation or person before they ever open their pie hole.

Coolness

This is the character's ability to remain cool in any given situation.  After all, you can't hit your target if you're too busy thinking about that itch on your nose.  This can be tracked several different ways and is left largely up to the DM, and some of the suggested ways are listed below.  This is essentially a bonus stat in most cases players can use to bolster deficient checks or rolls at their discretion.  The regular use for this stat is to help determine initiative by being the sole determining factor, being added to the appropriate quickness, or as a guideline as players state their actions each round before and during combat at the DM's discretion.
   Can decrease for each hour in the day each character is awake, replenishing fully after a long rest or one point per hour of rest.
   The DM adds and subtracts points for each character based on their individual or party related actions.
   Decreases with each round of combat and replenishes after each battle, or each round, depending on the tracking.
   Can be allocated to large player 'cheats' that allow cheating death, automatic critical hits or successes, extra dice or rerolls, with the DM assigning point values in all cases.

Hit, Damage, Soak (augmented stats, work in progress)

Hit is an opposed check player hit v. enemy dodge.
Damage is an opposed check as player damage v. enemy soak where the defender can negate all damage by rolling equal to or higher than the offender.  Damage overflow is modified by soak.
Soak relieves damage taken up front and can fully negate damage caused by an attacker that breaks through prior to that damage removing points from the player's toughness.

When a character reaches 0 toughness, they become unconscious and bleeding. Each turn the character has a chance to regain consciousness by making a toughness check against their soak stat. If a player receives negative their toughness in damage, they cannot regain consciousness on their own. If a character takes damage equal to or more than their toughness + soak scores, then they are dead and cannot be revived by any normal means.