Welcome All!
This will be a test of the newest iteration of the Vast Empire. One of partially dice dependent play-by-post role playing, where you will build characters similar to your traditional tabletop games, but with a distinctly Star Wars, and Vast Empire, twist!
There will be more specific information to follow on how we are going to build your characters, but for now we're going to keep it relatively simple off the bat to get the ball rolling.
To begin with there will be two Topics for each story, one in which you will make your dice rolls as you are writing the story, and then in the other you will have the actual story post that you ended up writing.
You might be wondering what you will need to roll for, that depends on what you are trying to do, trying to give someone a high five? No roll is needed. Trying to give a complicated hand greeting to a member of an Alien Species? Roll, you might flip when you should have flopped and smack them in the face. (Bar fight anyone?)
We are going to start off with just the basics of character creation, generating your characteristics.
The Characteristics we are going to use are as follows:
Strength: (Str)
The measure of a character's physical strength, fitness and how hard they can punch.
Dexterity: (Dex)
A character's physical co-ordination and agility, reflexes.
Endurance: (End)
A character's ability to sustain damage, stamina, and determination.
Intelligence: (Int)
The measure of a character's intellect and quickness of mind.
Education: (Edu)
A measure of a character's learning and experience.
Social Standing: (Soc)
A character's place in society
Luck(Force): (L/F)
While those who follow hokey religions and favor ancient weapons may call it the force, there is definitely something out there that has an effect on the universe. We'll talk more about this later.
We are going to use a hybrid system of generating our statistics, Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, and Intelligence will use the following rules.
Everyone will receive a starting lineup looking like this:
Strength: 4
Dexterity: 4
Endurance: 4
Intelligence: 4
To Assign: 10
As you create your character you have a total of 26 points that you can assign. Each stat has a minimum of 1, and a maximum of 12. You can spend those 10 points however you wish, and you can even pull points from another stat if you want to boost one stat.
Anything 2 or below is considered to be barely functional, 4 is considered to be just about average 6 is considered to be above average, 8 is excellent, 10 would be impressive, and 12 would often be seen as superhuman.
You can stat your character up how you wish, but be warned. The sort of things you will be asked to roll to do will be in part based upon how you stat up your character, the higher a stat is, the less often you will have to roll it, and the inverse is true, if you have a dexterity of 2 and would like to pick up a Datapad off your desk, expect to be asked to roll to see if you accidentally knock over the drink you absentmindedly left next to it because you have an Intelligence stat of 4.
Education, Social Standing, and Luck/Force will be handled a little differently.
When generating your character you will roll 1D4 for each of these statistics, and then add modifiers based on your Species, Homeworld, and in some cases, Force Sensitivity.
Now that we have covered the basics of character generation, let's talk a little bit more about the sort of situations you might actually end up rolling the dice for.
There will be times where you will know you need to check, and there will be other times where the Game Master may instruct you to make either a Characteristic Check or a Skill Check, all of these situations will have one of the following applying:
1) The characters are in danger.
2) The task you are attempting is especially difficult or hazardous
3) You are under the pressure of time.
4) When the success or failure is especially important or interesting.
In order to make a check you will roll 2d6 and add any appropriate Dice Modifiers, on a Characteristic Check you will make a roll and then add a modifier based off of that stat.
Score Modifier
1 -4
2 -2
3 -1
4 0
5 0
6 +1
7 +1
8 +2
9 +2
10 +3
11 +4
12 +5
For a skill Check you will add your skill level and an appropriate stat modifier to the roll. When you are making a skill check if you do not have any levels in that skill you will suffer a -3 modifier.
As far as tasks:
Simple tasks have a difficulty DM of +6.
Easy tasks have a DM of +4.
Routine tasks have a difficulty DM of +2.
Average tasks have a difficulty DM of +0.
Difficult tasks have a difficulty DM of -2.
Very difficult tasks have a DM of -4.
Formidable tasks have a difficulty DM of -6
For Success on your roll, you must beat 8.
There will be more information to follow, but that is bare bones enough to get started with. For the moment please use the following format to place a character sheet under this post for the character you intend to use for this story. For Education, Social Standing, and Luck/Force, just post the result of your d4 rolls for now. For this story you can select one of three occupations for your character: Pilot, Trooper, or Technical Support.
Name: Species: Homeworld:
Occupation: Player:
Strength:
Mod:
Dexterity:
Mod:
Endurance:
Mod:
Intelligence:
Mod:
Education:
Mod:
Social Standing:
Mod:
Luck/Force:
Please head over to the story and introduce yourself once you have created your character and posted a sheet here.
For your intro post, please also add the following dice rolls:
1D4: Luck/Force base characteristic check, if you roll the same as your stat you can add 1D4 to one of the two skill rolls required below.
Intelligence Characteristic check, Routine difficulty: Did you set your chrono to wake you up in the morning for the briefing at 04:00?
Endurance Characteristic check, Average difficulty: How much sleep did you get the night before? The number you succeed, or fail, by is added, or subtracted, to 3 to determine how many hours of sleep you got.
Roll 1D3 to determine whether you are in Aurek, Besh, or Cresh Barracks.
