Battlelords Of The Twenty-Third Century, Part 2
When last we left our intrepid would-be employee of some future Blackwater, he had just chosen his species — the Eridani, a race of Voldermort-looking dudes (again, in the interest of fairness, I want to stress that Battelords well predates Harry Potter and I’m just using the term because everyone knows what Lord Voldemort looks like… much in the same way that people tend to compare games to WoW even if the tropes WoW uses originated in Everquest or DikuMUD) who are basically Ronin….Innnnn….Spaaaaaaace, total stick-up-their-ass stoic warrior dudes who are loads of fun to play, especially if the party has some less straight laced types in it.
There’s three methods of rolling characters. Roll percentiles in order, then roll three more and replace any three with the new rolls; Roll ten times, discard the lowest 2, then assign them in the order you wish; and roll eight percentile dice five times and then choose which set you like, placing them in the stats in order. Number 2 is the “most popular”, and it’s also the easiest, so that’s what I’m going for.
Ten rolls:9,12,44,86,25,45,55,87,54,23.
As usual, my rolls suck. Obviously, we drop the 9 and the 12.
The eight attributes are:
Strength, Manual Dexterity, IQ, Agility, Constitution, Intuition, and Charisma
No, wait, that’s seven attributes.
OK, there’s an “Agression” score. Every other attribute has a table; Aggression doesn’t. It’s very easy to overlook. So, OK, 8.
It’s recommended that you roll on the “I Was Just Growing Up” and “Fickle Finger Of Fate” charts before assigning attributes, so let’s do that, shall we?
Past Is Prologue
“Life charts” or “Fate Charts” or “Backgrounds” or whatever were really, really, big in 1990s era games. They hardly originated there… I remember the first edition of Mekton had a “Lifepath” system that could get you spinning endlessly as you diced for the hair color of your sixteen siblings and whether or not you liked any of them, but the nineties were the golden age of finding out you were born on a farm and your older brother tried to kill you and you were kidnapped by gypsies and encountered a mentor who taught you how to ride a motorcycle and then your girlfriend was assassinated by space nazis and you worked on an ice planet in their broccoli mines and then, when you were twelve… so let’s see what we get here.
There’s two tables, Table 1 and Table 2. If you want to roll on Table 2, the “good” table, you must roll on Table 1. If you roll three times on Table 1, you can roll twice on Table 2. If you are married filing jointly, subtract the total of line 45 from…
I’ll just roll once on each.
Table 1: 40. I have hydrophobia. According to the table, “Your mother dropped you in water and you sunk”.
Table 2: 32. I was a famous cyball player (+2 charisma). Since we’re on a 1-100 scale, that’s not a whole hell of a lot.
I can also roll once or twice on the Fickle Finger of Fate table, plus an additional once on the Warrior Fortune table.
Fickle Finger Of Fate: 78. I was mugged while walking my pet, -200 credits. Boy, this is going to really look crappy on my performance review.
Warrior Table: 04. Hey, cool! Obtained training in swordsmanship at the famed Swintash school. +10 to hit with edged weapons! That actually fits my character. Go, me!
Time to assign stats. As an Eridani, I get a bunch of bonuses and only a few penalties, so let’s just work this out. I want to be a kick-ass sword wielder, so I figure we’ll start with the physical and go from there. My base numbers, again, are: 44,86,25,45,55,87,54,23
Strength: 87+10=97
Manual Dexterity: 45+5=50
IQ: 44+10=54
Agility: 55+20=75
Constitution: 86+5=91
Aggression: 54+15=69
Intuition: 25-5=20
Charisma: 23+2-10=15
So what’s all this mean? Well, there’s a lot of very AD&D 1st edition tables with “Minimum for an Orion” and “Maximum for a Ram Python” here, so I’ll check to make sure I’m not breaking any bounds. There’s also plenty of attribute-dependent things like encumbrance, etc. My strength of 97 gives me a +2 to damage, an “SB”… that’s skill bonus, for strength based skill checks, or +12, and I can dead lift 660… lbs, I assume. My 75 agility gives me a -2 Defensive Modifier (that’s added to my opponents roll, so it’s subtracted, which is a good thing, except, again, we’re on a percentile scale, so that -2 is going to be more an annoyance than a real benefit. “The enemy rolls a 98, plus his attack bonus of 47, so he hits you.” “Did you remember to take away 2?” “Yes.” “Oh, OK, then.”) I also have a +4 to my attack rolls with archaic hand held weapons, so I’m already at a +14 to hit. Sweet!
I just want to note the Constitution table has “System Shock” and “Resurrection Percentage” values.
Lastly, my Intuition of 20 makes me “Absolutely Clueless” and gives me a -20 to sight, hearing, and smell checks, and my Charisma of 15 means I am “Ugly as !%$&*”. No, really, that’s what it says — literally transcribed. Oh, and there’s a Henchman Loyalty Base. By the way, if Charisma is pure appearance, as would seem to be the case by the comments, why did being a professional Cyball player improve my Charisma, however slightly? Did we get free plastic surgery or something?
Secondary Statistics
This covers random other stuff. The first is Terrestrial Knowledge, which is the chance you’ll know anything about a particular planet. To determine it, you roll %ile dice and divide by 3. 17, divided by 3 is 5.6, and we round up to 6. I have a 6% chance to know anything, but since there’s 20 galaxies in this setting, I think that’s pretty good.
Military Leaderships: I add Intelligence, Aggression, and Intuitions, divide by 4, and round up: I end up with a 36.
Persuasion is Intelligence+Charisma, divided by 3. 23
Bargaining is Persuasion-15, or 8.
Given that there’s a bunch of skills later on, I have no clue why the “Secondary Statistics” are not just, you know, skills, or why Persuasion and Bargaining are broken out as they are. Anyway, there’s the numbers. I do get to add some racial bonuses, though, so my final Secondary Scores are:
Terrestrial Knowledge: 21
Military Leadership: 56
Persuasion: 18
Bargaining: 8
Frankly, I think any race of beings known throughout the galaxy twenty galaxies for being warrior-lunatics would have a huge bonus to “Persuasion”, but, then again, I got mugged while walking my pet. I don’t even know what kind of pet it was. Fooey.
Hey, there’s a Racial Preference chart!
Yeah. Getting a bit of déjà vu here….
One of these things is not just like the other….
I now need to figure out my size class, which is based on my height and weight, so I have to go back to my racial description to see what dice I roll. I am 82 inches tall and weigh 280 lbs. This makes me size class 6. I have 10 Body Points, and can make 3 punches per turn. My Social Status is content, which gives me a 25% bonus to starting money, which is determined by my race, which gives me 100 * 6d6, and I rolled a total of 25, so, 2500*1.25=3,125 galactic… whatever, minus 200 since I got mugged walking my pet. Yes, I’m still bitter about that. That leaves me 2925.
Skills to Pay The Bills
Everyone begins with 50 Proficiency Points, except I’m not Everyone, I’m an Eridani, so I begin with 40. I will be complaining to the Galactic Equal Opportunity Board forthwith. I get a few bonuses due to my race, as well — I get three levels in Archaic Hand Weapon, and Archaic Hand Weapon skills cost 1 point less. I can start with only three levels in any skill above and beyond my racial levels, so let’s see max out “Whack People With Sword”. Lessee, here’s the skill table and… my eyes! Sweet cold and merciless gods of space, my eyes!
I’m obviously spoiled by modern layouts. Wow. This is just one giant wall of numbers and symbols. Sure, it all makes sense eventually, but this is the kind of thing that tends to send folks running in terror.
There’s two full pages of this. Yeow! (Really, though, this is cleaner and more straightforward than many similar games of the era, and it’s probably better to have all the vital information in a chart, however abbreviated, than to have to flip across multiple pages to compare skills, but it’s still an overwhelming mass of numbers and symbols, hard to take in all at once.)
The most important number is “SC”, which is “Skill Cost”, which is “How much it costs to get a level in this skill”. Archaic Hand Weapon only costs 2 points per level, or one point ’cause I’m an Eridani and I rule, baby, but there’s a little squiggly symbol next to it which means “Does not give standard +10$ modifier”, see skill description to see how it is used.
I need to specify type of weapon… that’s easy, “Big Ass Sword”. Then I look at the Hand to Hand Combat Chart. If I add 3 levels (for a total cost of only 3 points), to my pre-existing 3, I will be at level 6, which gives me a +24 hit bonus and +2 damage and +1 to “number of attacks”. Add in my +10 from my race and my +4 from my Agility and I’m at +38, which seems pretty good without any knowledge of what the combat system is actually like. I also have a +2 damage from my Strength and a +2 from my skill level, so +4, which if most people have Body Points in the low double digit range, as seems to be the case, means I’m doing serious whackity with each hit. (A two-handed sword, which requires minimum strength of 70 to wield, does 2-12 points of damage and has a base 85% chance to hit, so my chance to hit is, I’m guessing, 85+38 minus some defensive whatever. 2-12+4 is pretty sweet damage, though. Maybe. Actually, I have no idea.
And I think I will stop here for the nonce… picking skills is the best part of games like this, so it deserves its own take. Then we ought to be done!
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