Actions & Attributes

When you want to do something meaningful and difficult in this game, you generally use one of 9 actions. These actions are organized into 3 attributes.

The actions have levels of overlap, and sometimes there will be multiple actions that makes sense. The GM will probably suggest one action, but you can pick a different action. You ultimately decide what action you are doing, but the GM decides how much Effect that action has toward the outcome you want, including no effect.

Mind

• Modify - Altering things intelligently, or creating them from raw materials. Both physical items and electronic records.
• Understand - This is taking information that you have, and reorganizing it to deduce more information.
• Locate - Tracking down people, noticing clues in front of you.

Social

• Connect - Interacting with people honestly. Maintaining a social network.
• Order - Commanding people, with both legitimate and illegitimate authority.
• Grift - Manipulating people with lies. Hiding the fact you are lying.

Body

• Grasp - Using your hands to do small things. Pickpocketing, cracking safes, etc.
• Sneak - Not being noticed while doing things.
• Assault - Using your body to do large movements, especially harm.

Leverage RPG

In the system that this is thematically based on, there are five roles: Mastermind, Hitter, Hacker, Thief, and Grifter. Everyone gets primary and secondary role. If you were trying to build that here, assuming you were going to spend three dots total on the primary role and didn’t want to put them all into one thing, it would be something like:

Mastermind: Understand 2, Locate 1 or Connect 1

Hitter: Assault 2, Grasp 1 or Sneak 1

Hacker: Modify 2, Understand 1 or Locate 1

Thief: Sneak 2, Grasp 1

Grifter: Grift 2, Connect 1 or Locate 1

Then add in the secondary role.

Obviously it changes depending on how many dots you want to do. On one hand, you have a bit more choices you can make than the Leverage RPG allows, on the other hand, you have a bit more choices you must make than the Leverage RPG requires.

Each of those actions have a number of dots put into it, from 0 to 3. Those will control how many dice you add to an Action Rolls.

You also have an Attribute score, which consists of the one dot for each of the action that has at least one dot in it. For example, if you have two dots in Grasp, none in Sneak, and one in Assault, you would have two total dots in Body, one from Grasp and one from Assault. These are mainly used to make a resistance roll, which is what you use to try to recover from negative consequences.

Leverage RPG

You can think of these as akin to Attributes in that system, but notably they are not set independently, they are merely ‘Of the various actions you use your mind, body, or social skills for, how many of them are you moderately competent at?’

You generally are going to start with 5 dots in a standard game, starting with new characters.

Forged in the Dark

Forged in the Dark systems normally starts with 7 dots, but they also normally have 12 actions. This system reduces that to just 9, so reduces the starting dots a bit. Also, also, leveling up is somewhat faster.

Games that run for a short period of time and don’t expect much leveling up could start you with more.

In addition to what the action does, you can use all those actions to gather information about whether or not someone else is currently doing those things, or how capable they seem at doing those things.

(The character sheet can be found here. You will want to save your own copy.)

Strategy

Because you can put dots for free anywhere when creating a character, but when leveling up putting a second dot into an Action in costs twice as much as the first dot, and a third dot costs three times as much as the first, it seems obvious for newbies, or people who only played D&D, that the thing to do is to start with one trait at 3 and another at 2. That gets you the most bang for your buck when starting.

However, you also have Attributes to consider, and if you do that, you will have 0 dots in one Attribute. Also, over-specialization doesn’t help as much as you’d think, this is not D&D, you do not have a character class that relies solely on one number.

So that might not be a good plan.

However, in opposition to that, leveling up is intended to be easy. Which means if you do that, you can fix it in one or two episodes just by getting enough XP to put a dot in something in that missing attribute.

But it also means you could just start with a more even distribution and bump up the ones that end up being important to your character, which might not be the ones you think they are. But that also will take longer, just not incredibly long.

It’s ultimately up to you.