In Actlite, characters do not have classes and they do not level up. Instead, they buy skills or attribute score increases with skill points. They should grow organically as their story progresses and as their circumstances change. I want unique characters with unique challenges, characters should not be progressing along the sorts of largely predetermined paths that classes provide. I want characters to have to actively choose whether they are going to mitigate their weaknesses or lean into their strengths. In this post I’ve attempted to create a light, modular, expressive system for describing characters mechanically.
What is the core of a character?
Not every old lady selling fruit in the market needs a statblock. You should be able to describe a character offhandedly with no specific information and then improvise the details later. But what do we need to describe player characters, enemies, significant NPCs? How quickly and concisely can we describe characters that will end up in initiative?
What has to be stated
Health: How much damage a character can take before they are killed or incapacitated.
Movement Speed: How many spaces can a character move per action in initiative.
There are reasonable default values for all of these statistics based on the species and background of the character, but these are all important enough and variable enough that they should be stated explicitly.
What can be assumed
Size: Most characters take up one space because the way we think about space is primarily oriented around how much a typical character needs! So this can be omitted most of the time.
AP: AP describes how much you can do in a round of initiative. Almost all characters have 3 AP. When characters have more AP this AP is often earmarked in specific ways (can only be used for movement, can only be used for an attack, etc.) so you could easily just list these extra AP cards without explicitly listing the total. If the character’s base AP is not 3, state that explicitly.
Attribute Scores
An attribute score in Actlite is not a mandatory description of a quality a character has. Instead, the presence of an attribute score is a positive statement about an ability. Every attribute score is also a “move” that a character can use.
What that means is that if you have a STR score, your character can and does use their strength to solve problems. A STR of 0 doesn’t mean that you have no strength, it means that when you roll a STR check, you add 0. Having a negative STR score is better than having no STR at all.
But what does it mean if you have no STR at all? It doesn’t mean that you are completely unable to move, it means that you are so weak that you lose any contest requiring strength and cannot do anything that would require a strength check. Lifting a cup does not require a strength check but breaking down a door does. If you have no STR and are locked in a room, you cannot muster up a reasonable effort to break down the door. You have to figure out some other way to get out of the room.
Strength is an extremely basic quality. You are allowed to make a character without any STR but playing that character will be a challenge. Maybe you are a member of a psychic slug species and can compensate for your complete lack of muscle with your complete lack of bones which allows you to easily squeeze under locked doors. Of course, most characters will have some STR. Baseline scores will be given by your species and background.
Defensive Scores
I want to make it relatively easy to improvise fully functional characters. There should be minimal boilerplate so that more attention can be spent on unique traits.
To make this easier, a list of “defensive” scores needs to be established for the setting that the game takes place in. These are the scores that other characters will be making checks against. Right now there is only one setting, the one I’m working on. The following is the list of defensive scores I’ve settled on, what sorts of things they are used to defend against, and what sorts of actions they are used for. This list should be applicable to most fantasy-type settings. Remember that passive resistance is 6 + SCORE.
STR / Strength
Strength is used to resist the usual actions like being grappled, pushed around, knocked over, etc. Weirder, it’s also your ability to resist physical conditions like poison, disease, and exhaustion!
This deserves some explanation. There used to be a CON / constitution score, but it was a purely passive score. You never rolled a check “with” your constitution, it isn’t a positive statement of ability, so CON and its skills were consolidated into STR. This feels right to me intuitively. Characters with high STR tend to have or need high CON. Strength and vitality go together. Strong characters seem like they would be less likely to succumb to disease.
STR is also used in weapon requirements and for damage scaling. It is used to grapple, lift things, break things, etc.
AGI / Agility
AGI is your ability to evade attacks, grab on to ledges to keep yourself from falling, avoid falling rocks, etc. It is your ability to avoid physical danger.
It is also your ability to do a flip, jump over a chasm, etc. Crucially, this is not your DEX / Dexterity! DEX is your fine motor skills, your ability to do card tricks, pickpocket, and juggle. DEX is not a “defensive” score.
WIL / Will
WIL is your ability to resist mental conditions like fear. It is used to resist many supernatural effects.
WIL is your ability to push yourself. This is an interesting attribute! I would like to experiment with some mechanics wherein WIL gives you a resource you can use to augment any check.
PER / Perception
PER is your resistance to stealth and being tricked.
It is also your ability to investigate, spot things other people miss, quickly find things, etc.
SOC / Social
SOC is your resistance to being manipulated.
SOC is also your ability to manipulate, to schmooze. It’s your gab, your social acumen.
Other Scores and Exceptions
You can have other scores like KNO / Knowledge or MED / Medicine. These allow you to perform checks or gain access to particular skills, but other characters shouldn’t be performing checks against those scores.
I am hesitant to put strict rules on what you can do with scores. It is possible to end up in a situation where you make a check on a non-defensive score. Say you’re a wizard trying to show up another wizard at WizCon. Maybe you try to flex on your rival by dropping some crazy arcane fact they are ignorant of, embarrassing them in front of all the other wizards. In this situation you could be making a check against their KNO, more likely you’ll be in a KNO contest. Players may find edge cases where contextually it makes sense to perform a check against a non-defensive score, but this should only happen if both characters have the non-defensive score.
The purpose of defensive scores as a mechanic is to allow people to have a good idea of what scores their characters need to function. People should know what bases they need to cover when creating a character so the character isn’t automatically failing all the time. Any exceptions made to the rules around defensive scores should keep this in mind. The KNO-checking wizard example only works because both characters have a KNO score and it really matters how much knowledge they can display in the context they are in. If the wizard KNO-checks a steppe warrior by quizzing him on obscure arcana, the wizard is just being annoying and strange.
Skills
“Skills” can be a specific ability/move or any capacity that builds off of a score. The skill of Grappling builds off of STR, pickpocketing builds off of DEX. Being “adept” with a skill means you get BASE SCORE + 2. Having “expert” status in the skill (“Expert Grappling” on your sheet) means you get BASE SCORE + 4. Any greater degree of granularity or expertise should be negotiated at the table.
Bringing it all together
A complete character consists of:
Health, Move Speed
STR, AGI, WIL, SOC, PER
Any extra scores, and any skills that build off of those scores.
Additionally, all the usual details about what weapons they have, their background, notes on relationships or backstory, etc.
Score and Skill Pricing?
You increase attribute scores and acquires skills using the same resource, SP. Initially the system was that going from X to X+1 would cost X+1 SP. That is, going from SCORE 0 to SCORE 1 costs 1 SP, going from 1 to 2 costs 2 SP, etc. This made pricing skills impossible. So now going from X to X+1 costs (X+1)*10 SP so that purchasing skills can cost less than going from 0 to 1 in a given SCORE. I’m considering making it so that different SCOREs have different multipliers. This way a marginal level of KNO will cost less than a marginal level of STR. This would be good because STR is really valuable. This is bad because it adds more complexity! The good thing is that you don’t need a table to figure this out, you just need the multiplier. If the multiplier for STR is 15, then you know that reaching any level X+1 always costs (X+1)*15 SP. Is that too much complexity? Possibly.
Pricing the progression within some mechanic seems a lot less important than making sure that the mechanic itself works well and is fun, so I’m not too concerned over finding the best way to do this now. The pricing of skills and scores won’t be solved definitively in this post. Going forward I will experiment with assigning each score a cost multiplier.
Changes since publication:
I found “Defense” to be clunky and annoying, so it’s gone! Characters can have only one source of Defense (unless otherwise stated). By default, their defense is equal to their passive AGI, this can be changed by armor, shields, etc.