Characters

Characters in Karmic are defined by four broad categories: their attributes, their skills, their distinctions and their karma. All of these are used to determine how a character is able to interact with the game world and whether an attempted action succeeds or fails.

Karma

Perhaps the most important aspect of a character, karma represents the character’s relationship with destiny and the Fates. As a character takes actions which advance him towards his destiny or is in character with his “mantle” assigned to him by the Fates, he is awarded with positive karma. Should a character reject his role, he may be punished with negative karma.

In game terms, karma is represent by a deck of playing cards that is made up of the “karma deck” and the “karmic sideboard.” Black cards are read as positive numbers, and red cards are read as negative. Aces and jacks are ones, queens two, and kings three. Additionally, the face cards (jack, queen and king) are “hit” cards.

Each character has his own karma deck. When he attempts an action he draws cards from this deck to determine if he succeeds or fails. The GM also has a deck called the world deck, and may make up decks for important NPCs. Over the course of the game, a character’s karma deck may change: cards may be added or removed into the sideboard. The world deck never changes.

To make a deck for a new character, remove the 6-10 of one red suit and one black suit from a standard deck of playing cards. Leave the jokers in the deck. This will leave you with 44 cards. A character will have opportunities to exchange cards from his deck for distinctions (see below) and through play.

Atributes

Any time a character tries to perform an action one of the five attributes will modify his chance of success. Each attribute is expressed as a positive or negative number. The human average for each attribute is 0. While the values are theoretically limitless, +4 is as high as most humans could ever hope to achieve, +5 or greater enters the realm of the super-human. –4 or less is abysmal.

No one attribute is the most important in the game. They are all used some more so than others depending of the type of character being played. Mighty, strong warriors may prefer a high Force to deal great damage and a high Fortitude to soak it up. A fencer might prefer a high finesse to score points and deflect attacks, and perhaps a good Awareness to get the drop on his opponent. Sorcerers would want a high Awareness and Will to tap and use his essence in casting spells.

Force (Might)
Force describes a character’s physical might. It is used to determine how much a character can lift or move, if a character is able to break an object, or how much damage he can deliver during a melee fight among other things.

Fortitude (Vigor)
Fortitude describes a character’s health and physical toughness. It is used to determine how much physical damage the character is capable of withstanding, and to resist the effects of illness and poisons.

Finesse
Finesse measure’s a character’s connection between his mind and body. It represents the smoothness with which he executes his actions and the orderliness of his thoughts. Characters with a high finesse are focused, suave and have a high precision to their movements. It is used to determine if a character is able to hit a target, evade being hit, and perform various athletic feats such as acrobatics.

Awareness
Awareness describes how perceptive a character is. It measures not only how capable a character’s senses are, but also how well he pays attention to his environment. It is very possible for a character to have excellent eyesight or hearing, but to never think to use them. Awareness is used when a character is trying to find something, to determine initiative in combat, and picking up subtle social clues.

Will
Will measures a character’s internal strength and reserves. It is used in many magical feats, to resist effects affecting one’s mind, and to keep one’s concentration during stressful situations.

Skills
Unlike attributes, skills are learned abilities. They can be studied and improved more quickly that attributes. As a character improves in a skill his chances of succeeding increases dramatically, for every level a character has in a skill he may draw that many cards from his karma deck.

When a character uses a skill, he will modify the value of the card drawn by an attribute. Which attribute used will depend on the exact situation. For your convenience each skill listed below includes the attribute most commonly used in conjunction with that skill.

Fields of Expertise
Some skills are listed as Field of Expertise Skills or F.O.E. These are special broad skills. For every level a character has in the skill he must chose a subcategory of that skill. A character can only use the skill in conjunction with the field in which he has experience. For example, a character with a Musical Instrument skill of 3 chooses three instruments he knows how to play, the lute, the flute and the piccolo. If during the course of his adventures his skill raised to 4 he could choose another instrument.

A player can also choose to take a field of expertise twice instead of a new field. This gives the character +1 to any attempts in that field. For example, instead of learning three instruments, our character can learn two: the lute and then taking the piccolo twice. Now, whenever the character makes a check for using the piccolo, we add +1 to the total.

Advanced Skills
A few skills are marked as being advanced skills. Only characters who have studied the skill may attempt a check using that skill.

Distinctions
Distinctions are special abilities or disadvantages a character may have that are not properly described through attributes nor are usable skills. Other distinctions are used to provide bonuses or penalties to a character’s attributes in specific situations. For instance, a character may have the distinction “keen sighted,” providing a bonus to awareness when using sight; another might have “empathic” giving a bonus on using awareness in social situations. Distinctions could even be combined so that the same character could have “poor sight” giving a penalty to awareness checks for sight, and “empathic.” Both affect awareness, but in different situations.

The distinctions and their effects are listed below. Also included in the description is a karma value which is used during character creation.

[I'm sure that somewhere I have a list of the distinctions. You know, somewhere]