Anam:Attributes and Abilities

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Attributes and Abilities[edit]

As the Resolution system specifically calls out ‘Abilities’, we must obviously define those.

As the chapter title suggests, however, Abilities are not the only thing to consider.

Anam presents a distinction between two ways to describe and affect a character’s impact on the world.

Tests, as noted, call on a character’s Abilities to determine the success of a Task. An Ability is a measure of what the character may be able to do.

I say ‘may’ be able to do, as whether the use is successful depends on skill, luck and circumstances, and because the use can fail even while the ability itself continues to work.

A second way to describe a character’s impact on the world is through Attributes. An Attribute is something that the character is, or describes something that the character can always do, barring a situation or action that prevents it entirely.

Attributes Not all Attributes directly affect Resolution; however it makes no sense to separate the types into different chapters either.

There are four types of Attribute that will be used to describe characters. Most of these will be familiar to anyone who has played RPGs previously, if not necessarily by name.

The types are: Descriptive, Persona, Characteristic and Special.

Descriptive Attributes

Descriptive Attributes have the least impact on the Resolution system – they exist primarily to describe the character.

Descriptive Attributes are just that – descriptive. They define how tall a character is; how heavy or not, what color their hair is – anything that another person can see, hear, feel, or even smell about the character.

For any game, the Descriptive Attributes that are used are the least limited – players can use however many (or few) they feel are needed, limited only by their imagination and the need to keep the list manageable.

Persona Attributes

Persona Attributes define the character’s Ancestry, Background, Vocation and/or Personality.

Persona Attributes are descriptive, but what they describe isn’t easily picked up by the standard five senses – it’s the character’s nature/nurture.

Persona Attributes – or some of them, anyway – can have more of an impact on game mechanics. Specifically, broad Abilities are bound by the character’s Background and/or Vocation.

In most cases, a character will have one Background Attribute, and one Vocation Attribute. Personality Attributes, being the more descriptive and less impacting, have no general limits save the player’s desires to deal with them.

If the GM wishes to provide meta-currency or mechanical support for Personality Attributes, I would recommend limiting those as well.

Characteristic Attributes In some games, you’ll want to measure things that all characters can do, especially when those things aren’t going to be equal – such as a character’s physical Strength – or where they might start out the same, but can be changed by player choices – such as movement speed.

Characteristic Attributes have an impact on the mechanics of the game, usually by affecting Ability Levels, Tests, or measuring necessary elements of conflict.

When determining Characteristic Attributes for your game, keep the following in mind:

1. In common with all Attributes, Characteristic Attributes are never Tested.

2. Characteristic Attributes are all available to all Player Characters. If the Attribute is one you don’t want all characters to have, it is not a Characteristic Attribute.

3. If there’s something that all characters can do, even if not all do, make it a Characteristic Attribute only if there will be different values of the Attribute.

As noted above, Characteristic Attributes can have an effect on the Resolution mechanics. They can provide default Ability levels, or provide bonuses to certain actions (such as possible bonuses to damage in conflict, or the like.) Any such bonuses should, in most cases, be to results, rather than to the Test itself, though the GM can make exceptions.

Special Attributes Some attributes will have an effect on Mechanics, so cannot be simply descriptive, but are not – or should not be – available to every character by default.

These are Special Attributes. A special attribute can be just about anything that a character can do, but which is not commonly held by all characters.

As with all Attributes, a Special Attribute is, itself, never Tested. A character may have an Attribute called ‘Super Strength’, but that Attribute merely defines the median of what their Might or Lifting Ability can do.

Special Attributes can be Super Powers, or supernatural abilities, they can be special training that lets the character work around restrictions, they can be powers or abilities granted by virtue of the character’s species, or just about anything else that marks the character as different from the ‘average’ or ‘norm’.

Special Attributes should be just that – special. Not to say that a character can’t have more than a few – just that they should all feel like something that adds to the character.

All Special Attributes compare to each other in the same way. When determining a Special Attribute, consider the following two elements: Scope and Impact.

Scope considers which areas of the game the Special Attribute will affect. There are five such areas – Environment, Interaction, Intellectual, Physical and Conflict. Special Attribute can potentially have a Scope that affects more than one – or even all of them.

Environment Scope covers any Special Attribute that affects environmental effects, or actually affects the environment around the character. The ability to actually see in the dark, to breathe water or to ignore extremes of temperature would be examples of the first; the ability to create fog or smoke, to raise or lower the ambient temperature, or even create illusions of light and color would be examples of the latter.

  • Interaction Scope covers Special Attributes that have an effect on social activities. Incredible Beauty (or Ugliness), Unearthly Voice, or an unusual ability to be viewed as an equal by anyone of any social status are all examples of Interaction Attributes.
  • Intellectual Scope covers those Attributes which affect the mental area. Being able to perceive connections beyond what a normal person could, being able to calculate items that most people would need a computer to manage, and the various psychic abilities of Science Fiction are all examples of Intellectual Attributes.
  • Physical Scope covers those Attributes which affect the purely physical. A character who is super strong, able to run at supersonic speeds, can shapechange or has a malleable body are all examples of Physical Attributes.
  • Conflict Scope covers those Attributes which impact Conflict. Many, if not most, of these will also belong to one of the other Scopes. Claws are a Physical Scope Special Attribute, but they also affect Conflict. Mind Control is a Mental Scope Special Attribute, but again, also affects Conflict.

Special Attributes all also have an Impact. This is a measure of how much impact the Attribute has within its Scope. Impact is measured as Negligible, Minor, Moderate, Strong, and Astounding.

  • Negligible Impact means just that – the impact is so minor that it doesn’t touch the Resolution mechanics at all – or it does so in such extremely rare circumstances that there’s little difference.
  • Minor Impact indicates an Attribute that impacts mechanics in a minor way – about as much as a minor Circumstance – or in a slightly stronger way, but in rare circumstances.
  • Moderate Impact indicates an Attribute that might affect its Scope about half again as much as a minor impact – or double, in rare circumstances.
  • Strong Impact indicates an Attribute that has an effect on its Scope sufficient to equal 1½ to 2 full Levels of impact on Resolution, depending on the Circumstances.
  • Astounding Impact has such a major effect that it’s essentially the same as a ± 6 Circumstance modifier.

There is no Flaw system involved here – any limitations that a Special Attribute has are part of the Impact consideration, specifically, what circumstances a given Special Attribute may be subject to.


Abilities

Abilities are a listing of the Tasks your character can expect to perform and how well they can perform those tasks.

Abilities are rated by Levels. These Levels are just like the Levels that Tasks are rated by – literally, as Ability Levels are rated by the Tasks the character can readily perform at that level.

Level # / Name Difficulty
0 Untrained Anyone could hope to fulfill this task.
1 Neophyte Almost anyone could do this task, as long as there’s even a small amount of knowledge or talent.
2 Student A task suitable for someone learning the subject.
3 Apprentice A task for someone expected to work with careful supervision.
4 Journeyman A task for someone expected to work with little supervision.
5 Adept A task for someone expected to work with no supervision.
6 Master This task is appropriate for a true master of the subject, someone who can work by themselves with little need for assistance.
7 Grandmaster This task is for those who can work in the rarified levels – the teacher of those below.
8 Paramount This task is for the true subject matter expert – the one who wrote the book.
9 Legendary This task is best performed by the avatar of the ability – the best there is at what they do.

As with Tasks, we start at Untrained (0) and go to Legendary (9). All Abilities, unless determined otherwise in Character Creation, are Untrained (0). The GM will likely want to define some Abilities as so complex that the Tasks they are needed for cannot be performed until the character has an actual Level in that Ability.

There are three basic categories of Abilities – Default; Standard; and Special. Not all of these will be used in every game.

Default Abilities

Default abilities are those abilities which every character – or at least, every player character – has, to one extent or another. More to the point, they are Abilities that do not start out at Level 0 or 1 necessarily. Instead, the GM determines what level these Abilities start at for her game. In general, though, this really is an innate, almost instinctual ability - the act of training an Ability often involves unlearning those instinctive elements. Thus, when learning an Ability that would have a Default Level, the player still starts at 0. This obviously applies only to defaults from certain innate capabilities - Abilities learned from a Culture or Background are learned.

This can be based on Attributes (especially Characteristic Attributes, but also Background Attributes and the like) or the starting level can be the same for all, randomly rolled – whatever fits the game you want to create.

Possibilities for each option follow:

Default from Characteristic Attributes

Athletics (from Might or Agility Attribute)

Awareness (from Perception Attribute)

Defense (from Agility Attribute)

Default from Background Attribute

Acrobatics (from Wood Elf Background)

Ride Horse (from Nomad Background)

Intrigue (from Cosmopolitan Background)


Default for All

Firearms (All characters in a military game get a base default Level)

Survival (All characters in a post-apocalyptic or Wilderness game get a base default Level)

Standard Abilities

Standard Abilities are those which anyone – player character or NPC – can learn in the game. More, they must be learned to be useful. Most will likely be such that a character can attempt them even if Unskilled (0).

As noted above, if the GM determines, some Standard Abilities can be considered too complex for use in any Task unless the character has actually studied that Ability.

Standard Abilities can be set up ahead of time by the GM, or can be freeform, but should always be limited in how many different types of Tasks can be performed.

I would suggest around 20 to 30 Standard Abilities as a good average. Fewer than that and they are broader than they should be, more and they begin to get too narrow.

There is a subset of Standard Abilities to consider however. These are Background Abilities. They are Standard, in that they are available to be learned (though they may be Default), but they are expected to be relatively broad.

Background Abilities Background Abilities allow for Task attempts to be made when the Character’s Background (or Profession) would provide the needed knowledge or experience. They are not a replacement for other Abilities, but a way to give characters the necessary breadth of action without the players having to purchase every Ability that their background would reasonably need.

Some Abilities are defined as Background Abilities to limit the number of variants needed. Instead of requiring a Character to purchase Ride Ability with sixteen different creatures, Ride is an Ability that is limited by Background, and what creatures can be ridden comes from there.

Possible Background Abilities are:

Social Circles, knowledge of the social mores of the character’s background, who owes whom, who to contact for what.

Scholarship is knowledge of those intellectual pursuits appropriate to the Character’s Background. While called Scholarship, this is as appropriate for the least schooled Backgrounds as for the most schooled.

Special Abilities

Special Abilities are those which a character cannot possess without some rule or game mechanic that grants permission.

Perhaps the game does not allow characters to learn magic without having a Gift for the supernatural. Perhaps a character with Psychic powers can learn to use them to perform Psychic Surgery. Perhaps a Teleporter can learn to use her portals to make attacks.

Or maybe the extremely intelligent Dr. Fèral, rather than needing to purchase eight or nine Abilities to cover all the sciences she’s studied, can purchase just ‘Super-Scientist’ and use that.

In all cases, the character must have some Game Mechanic that allows them to learn the Ability. Special Abilities pair well with Special Attributes. As long as that mechanic is there, Special Abilities work just like other Standard Abilities.

One note, however – Special Abilities may also have pre-defined Tasks. For example, Magic may have Spells. The Game Master will need to define the Task Level for each spell if such is desired, as well as a means of determining which Spells the character can use, and whether there are any restrictions on their use.

The broader the Ability, the more I recommend setting up those pre-defined Tasks. Magic can be pretty open-ended. You’ll want to have some sub-system to determine what the Task Level is for any attempt at Magic, and quite often you’ll want to avoid having to do calculations at the table – so having a list of pre-defined Spells can be a very good idea.

What a Special Ability can accomplish will feed back into how difficult or expensive the required Attribute is. If Magic is slow and difficult, and can’t do much more than a person could do on their own, the Attribute that grants Magic doesn’t need to be difficult to obtain. If, on the other hand, Magic is a broad, powerful force, the GM will want to make it very difficult or expensive to gain.

At the GM’s discretion, a Special Ability may also be more difficult to learn and advance than a Standard Ability – though I would recommend that should be applied only to Special Abilities that are very, very powerful.