Every player in Dark Frontier plays one of the “touched.” Setting wise, it means that they have the powers to revive themselves after defeat, and to harness the same powers as the Dark. In other words “touched” simply is a setting excuse for why the player characters are different from the defensless NPCs.
Primary Attributes
Every character, including monsters and NPCs, have three main attributes. These attributes are Vigor, Agility, and Spirit. Each attribute has influence over single exclusive function of the character, and two that it shares with the other two attributes.
Vigor measures the characters physical health and strength. A character with high vigor is more athletic and harder to injure. Vigor exclusively sets how much damage you do in melee combat, and how much equipment your character can carry. Vigor also combines with Spirit to create Health, and combines with Agility to create Speed.
Agility measures the rate at which a character moves and reacts. A character with high agility is swift and harder to hit. Agility exclusively sets how quickly you attack in combat. Agility also combines with Vigor to create Speed, and combines with Spirit to create Accuracy.
Spirit measures the strength of the characters will and supernatural powers. A character with high spirit has more powerful techniques and can use them more frequently. Spirit exclusively sets how much essence a character has for techniques and also determines how effective those techniques are. Spirit combines with Vigor to create Health, and combines with Agility to create Accuracy.
Secondary Attributes
Secondary attributes are the functions of a character that are influenced by two attributes instead of one. By focusing on either of the two attributes, or even by splitting between the two the character will be just as effective in these functions.
Health is how much damage the character can take before falling unconscious or dying. It also sometimes determines how effective your charater is at resisting certain effects.
Speed is the rate at which the character runs. Since this is an action game, this makes the character more effective at avoiding damage. Also, since trade and travel are also important in this game, the rate at which you can move is again important.
Accuracy is the character's ability to deal damage from a distance and occasionally extra damage in melee combat. Since this is an action game, ever attack will simply be a hit or a miss, determined by the location of the enemy and not some random attack chance. Thus accuracy determines the character's ability to score extra damage and keep light weapon damage competitive even at higher levels.
A character starts with 2 points in all 3 attributes (Vigor, Agility, and Spirit) and also 5 extra points to distribute between the attributes. The character also starts with 3 techniques he can qualify for based on his attributes. Several templates are available that distribute the attribute points and pick techniques for the players who are not interested in customize their character.
Character Advancement
Characters advance by gaining experience points and progressing through levels as they do in many roleplaying games. While the neccessary experience points to gain levels increases almost exponentially, the benefit remains the same. Each level a player gains one new attribute point and one new tecnique he is qualified for.
Comments:
** I'm thinking of making it so that each secondary attribute is created by one attribute and one half of another attribute instead of two attributes together. This way a spirit based characters wouldn't have as much health a strength based character, an agility based character would be faster than a strength based character, and a spirit based character would have higher accuracy than an agility based character. - Reinhart