PowerFrame: Ability Descriptions

Only one more picture to go for PowerFrame! It's going to be a fairly large and involved piece, though, and I still have a little bit of proof-reading and last-minute edits to do, but I'm still looking good for a June release! In the meantime, if you haven't seen it yet, please check out the free Rules Primer!

This second-last picture is for the Ability Description section, illustrating the Tech Ability.

The Nuts & Bolts chapter goes into nitty-gritty detail of all the Abilities, Attributes, and Traits in the game. The Ability Descriptions include cross-references to the main places in the rules where the Ability is used, and also describe any unique special functions or properties.

Tech allows characters to build and repair high-tech items such as computers, lasers, cyberware, antigrav systems, starship drives, and the like. The exact functionality will depend a bit on the technological norms of the setting. Repair allows you to restore lost Structure and functions to damaged Tech-based items.

In addition, Tech is one of several Abilities that allows for Specialisations. Rather than having to buy separate Abilities for Electronics, Computers, Cybernetics, and Robotics, each of these fields is a Tech Specialisation. Every positive level of Tech allows you to pick one area of Specialisation.

For Tech, trying to do something without the appropriate Specialisation gives you a massive penalty. The same is true for Medical Specialisations (but First Aid does not count as a Specialisation). For other Abilities with Specialisations (Artisan, Craft, Engineering, Music, Scholar), a Specialisation gives the character a +1 in the appropriate field.

Ironically, there aren't currently rules for cyberware in the core book. It gets a little complex dealing with body replacements when characters have a single Health pool and start replacing parts of their body with Structure. I have some ideas for handling it, so if there's demand I'll probably release a short supplementary PDF for cybertech.


The final illustration is going to be a big battle scene, but I haven't yet decided on the genre or layout.

PowerFrame: Equipment

Only two more illustrations to go for PowerFrame! There was a bit of a lull in art production last week because I was working on a free introduction to the full rules. Check it out! If you like what you see, please consider joining the Google+ Community. Now I'm back to working on the last few pieces, starting with some equipment.

There's not a lot to say about equipment, really! I've never been a big fan of tracking huge amounts of gear in games, so I try to cut it down to the basics and essentials where I can. To keep the Encumbrance system actually usable, I tend to give expendable gear such as rations or ammunition no Encumbrance value – so you don't need to recalculate every time you use something.

While you can just stick to the basics, I have included a fairly comprehensive Equipment section for groups that prefer to outfit their characters thoroughly. Most of it focusses on camping and survival, food, light sources, and other outdoorsy stuff.

The pictures above are from the Specialist Gear section which includes tools required to apply certain technical and practical skills, medical kits to assist with first aid, and some basic computers. Most general equipment doesn't have a particular in-game effect (other than facilitating appropriate actions), so it's not too hard to figure out in-game Encumbrance and Cost if you can estimate its real-world size and cost.


I already have the next illustration planned and thumbnail-sketched – someone fixing their own cyber-arm, for the Tech Ability Description section of the rules.

PowerFrame: Arcana

I only have three illustrations to go for PowerFrame! I also now have a completed cover image, which I'll reveal sometime soon. For now, though, here's the fourth-last image – an arcane researcher, which will illustrate the section on Creating Arcana.

A while back, I overhauled PowerFrame's Mysticism system to cut down on the page-count. Going with a "build spells from the components" approach allows for greater flexibility, and does away with the need for an exhaustive spell list that's full of minor variations of similar spells.

Parameters define the limits in which a spell operates – things like range, duration, and area of effect.

Major Arcana form the body of a spell. They are stripped-back effects; if Parameters define the when and where, Major Arcana supply the how. They may describe how to make a damage roll or apply a status effect, or where to move a target, or what information is revealed, or many other effects.

Although the list is fairly comprehensive, you can create your own Major Arcana by describing the desired effect and rating its difficulty using the guidelines provided.

Minor Arcana are specific details such as a particular type of target, or a scale of hex, or an ability or attribute. Minor Arcana have no effect on their own, but some Major Arcana require a Minor Arcana to specify what the spell affects. Minor Arcana supply the what or the who.

For example, the RESTORE Major Arcana restores lost points to a pool stat such as Health, Endurance, Mana, or Fortune. It has the same effect on each pool, but you need to use a Minor Arcana to specify which one the spell is targeting.

Some Minor Arcana are lists of game terms (hex scales, abilities, attributes), but others are more descriptive. The subject Minor Arcana category includes various types of characters and creatures, and could easily be added to or revised to suit a particular game world. Likewise, the matter Minor Arcana could be rewritten to reflect a particular world's elemental philosophy.


Although it's a bit of a challenge to get a handle on all the Arcana and figure out how to build spells the way you want, once you do it's a very satisfying system. To help out, I'm designing new Caster and Spell record sheets. I've found that once you have a spell written out, it becomes very easy to modify it on the fly without having to recalculate the whole thing.

If there's demand for it, I may release a supplement featuring new Arcana, and possibly even a collection of pre-made spells for those who don't want the hassle of building their own.

PowerFrame: Critical Hits

Four illustrations left to do! This picture is for PowerFrame's Critical Hits chapter, and illustrates the "Push & Stun-Only" Critical Hit Table. This post, I'll summarise how Critical Hits work.

In PowerFrame, a Critical Hit is any Attack that beats the opponent's defence by 5 or more. Every additional 5 points increases the severity.

The basic rules allow you to deal with Criticals simply by increasing the Damage by 2 for every 5 points of Attack Margin, but there's also an optional detailed Critical Hit system that gives combat a more risky and gritty feel.

You roll for Damage as normal (generally an Ability plus the weapon's damage rating plus a roll, against the defender's Toughness, Armour and roll). Even if you deal no actual damage, you still get to check for a Critical Hit result.

You roll a single die (not open-ended), add the Damage roll's Margin (which could be negative if you rolled below the defender), and add +1 for every additional 5 points the Attack hit by. This is your Critical Hit result. Look up the total on the appropriate Critical Hit table, depending on the damage type (Cutting, Piercing, Bludgeoning, Energy, Grapple, Push, Stun-only).

A result of 2 or less has no effect. Generally a result of 3 is ineffective as well, apart from Bludgeoning attacks or hits to the head. Results of 4 to 6 tend to be minor Stun or Bleed results. 7 to 9 become more serious, leading to broken bones and severe bleeding. A result of 10 or more is usually fatal, or at least debilitating – severed limbs, pulverised bones, paralysis, massive bleeding, and so on.

So although it's possible to inflict a Critical Hit result even if you don't deal any actual damage, it will most likely be pretty minor. Unless your Attack hit by 10 or 15 points, the best you can get with a Damage Margin of 0 is a 6. You generally need a Damage Margin of 4 or more, which is a fairly serious wound, to have a chance at taking out an enemy in one hit.

Critical Hits against player-characters do happen, but more often than not you can minimise the risk using Fortune to re-roll bad results. That said, I did once play a character who was hit with an Attack Margin of 20+ and a Damage Margin of only 1 who was very neatly decapitated (Damage 1 plus Attack Bonus +3 plus a 6 on the Critical die for a total of 10). Most of the time though, Critical Hits seem to affect enemies, and it can be pretty gratifying for a PC to devastate their foes in graphic style.

PowerFrame: Attack Results

The latest illustration for PowerFrame is a bit late because I had a sudden and unexpected (but welcome!) run of freelance design work all come in at once! Now that's behind me, I'm hoping I can double-time the next picture and get back on track. After this piece, I'm down to the final five!

This illustration will grace the Conflict chapter, in the section on Stun damage.

Attack Effects

There are four general types of Attack you can make in PowerFrame, depending on whether you aim to Wound, Subdue, Grapple, or Push.

Wounding causes Health loss, Grapples penalise the target's actions or perhaps even immobilise them, and Pushing causes forced movement. Attacks aiming to subdue inflict points of Stun.

Stun

While Health loss inflicts no particular penalties and results in long-term unconsciousness or death, Stunned targets suffer a penalty to most actions (apart from inflicting or receiving damage) – but it also wears off automatically at the rate of 1 point per turn. If a character accumulates 6 or more Stun they fall unconscious temporarily. Characters can't be killed from Stun alone, but every 5 Stun inflicted in a single blow also reduces Health by 1.

Normally you need a weapon that inflicts Stun damage in order to make an Attack to Subdue (boxing gloves, concussion grenade), but it's possible to inflict Stun with any weapon at reduced effectiveness (using the flat of the blade, pulling the blow to avoid permanent damage, or aiming for a weak-spot such as the stomach).

Stun can also be inflicted from means other than an Attack to Subdue, such as poison or a mystical effect.

Stealth Attacks

On the subject of ninja, PowerFrame has built-in ambush rules accessible to anybody – but characters with high Stealth who use the environment to their advantage are more likely to pull off stealth attacks with greater success.

If a character is unaware of your presence, and your Stealth roll is 5 or more points higher than their Wits roll, they don't get to make an Avoid roll. You simply have to beat their base Avoid value with your attack, which also increases the chance of a Critical Hit (an Attack with a Margin of 5 or more).

If you beat their Wits roll by 10 or more, they don't get a Toughness roll either. You roll Damage against their base Toughness plus Armour value with no die roll added. This greatly increases the chance of taking someone out in a single hit or, if you managed to score a Critical Hit, of at least maiming or debilitating them.


I'm unsure what picture will be next; I'll just see where my artistic whims take me. The pieces I have left to do are: Tech (Cyberware), Critical Hits (Push), Professional Equipment, Creating Arcana, and a Battle Scene (genre uncertain).

PowerFrame: Characters

Six illustrations to go for PowerFrame RPG! This week I drew a picture for the "Nuts & Bolts" chapter, which is a reference for the various elements that define characters. In this post, I'll introduce those elements.

Characters in PowerFrame are defined through three major categories: Abilities, Attributes, and Traits.

Abilities

Abilities are the primary means by which characters, creatures, and even objects are described in game terms. Characters are differentiated by choosing which Abilities they are good or bad at.

Abilities can represent physical traits (Strength, Toughness, Looks), learned skills (Melee, Engineering, Driving), and knowledge (Languages, Appraising, Bureaucracy). There are also some Special Abilities which either work in unusual ways (Fortune, Magic) or have restrictions on which characters can use them (Berserk, Fly).

Abilities start at 0, which is the level of an average untrained adult human. That baseline varies depending on whether we're talking about Strength, Riding, Medical, or Magic. Abilities can go up to 5, and you can also take some at a negative to represent weak areas. Races often have special modifiers that raise or lower the starting and maximum allowed values.

Intelligent Races can improve their Abilities through learning and practice. The list of Abilities is quite long, but it combines everything that would be separate "stats" and "skills" in other systems. Once you're familiar with them, you can probably pick a dozen or so Abilities to build your character around and ignore the rest. 

Attributes

Unlike Abilities, Attributes are assigned rather than chosen. Most are either dictated by a character’s Race, or derived from one of their Abilities.

Attributes normally can’t be improved using Experience Points, although those based on an Ability will improve as the Ability increases.

• Health: How much damage the character can take before they pass out or die. Normally 6 for humans. Health is a static value because being Tougher and better Armoured reduces the amount of damage you take.
• Size: Humans are Size 0. Things larger than 2 metres are Size 1 or more.
• Hit Locations: Characters usually have six Locations, which are used for equipping Armour.
• Carry: Based on Strength and Size, this determines how much Encumbrance you can carry before suffering a Burden penalty.
• Endurance: Based on Toughness, this is used to track things like hunger, thirst, exposure, and exhaustion.
• Movement: Based on various Movement Abilities and Size, you have several Movement Rates for walking, swimming, and climbing. Some Races also have access to flying or burrowing.
• Threat: A measure of advancement and dangerousness in combat. Used when calculating combat XP.
• Ranking: Arbitrarily-assigned ranks in organisations.

Traits

Traits are special descriptors that represent unusual capabilities or weaknesses that can't be modelled with Abilities or Attributes. They are assigned to Races and creatures, and aren’t available to characters that don’t start with them.

Traits describe things that make a character or creature different from the standard human baseline. They include things like natural weapons and armour; the ability to fly, burrow, or use another type of movement more or less effectively than a human; breathing underwater or not needing to breathe at all; fast-healing regeneration; phobias, aversions or reactions to various things; innate powers that mimic spell-like effects; and many more. Traits are a catch-all category, and it's possible to invent new ones to represent powers that work in specific ways.

Traits are rated in Threat, to give some indication of their effectiveness. Drawbacks have negative Threat.

Flexible Creations

By putting together a set of Racial Ability Modifiers, Attributes, and Traits, you can quickly and easily define a new fantastic race or creature. If the existing Traits don't have what you need, you just need to define how something works and assign a Treat rating to it and you can plug it into the existing system.

Create your own original races for your own original worlds. It's possible to stat up and play the Oni-Faced Naga pictured above (Natural Armour, Natural Weapons, Comfort Zone: Warm, Dark Vision, some Racial Modifiers; possibly some additional weaknesses or powers). Heck, I once created and played a five metre tall pearlescent chipmunk-thing, the spawn of a holy sky-squid, with fleshy "dreadlocks" that dropped off and turned into small versions of itself. It made sense at the time...

I'm not sure what I'll be drawing next, but my list of possibilities is getting shorter!

PowerFrame: Weapons

This week's Polearm illustration isn't very exciting, but it was fairly quick to create. It's going in the weapon lists, on the Spears & Polearms page.

Yes, PowerFrame is one of those RPGs with pages of weapon lists, although I haven't gone all-out with glaive-guisarmes and voulges and such! This post, I'm going to talk a bit about how the game provides interesting choices by differentiating weapon types, and how it supports you in making your own creations.

Differentiating Weapons

The baseline melee weapon in PowerFrame is the sword. It uses your Melee Ability to attack, and your Strength Ability to do damage. Bigger swords cost and weigh more, and have bigger damage bonuses.

Different weapon types such as axes, bludgeons, chains and flails, daggers, and even some sword varieties, change up not just the Attack Ability but also the Damage Ability.

• Axes – Attack: Strength, Damage: Toughness
• Bludgeons – Attack: Melee, Damage: Toughness
• Chains & Flails – Attack: Avoid, Damage: Melee
• Spears – Attack: Melee, Damage: Hunting
• Light Swords – Attack: Melee, Damage: Avoid

This also applies to ranged weapons, although things like guns and lasers (and chainsaws) do damage based on a set number, not an Ability calculation.

Varying the Abilities creates a couple of interesting effects. Firstly, it serves to make the weapons feel distinctively different. Secondly, it means characters with diverse Ability choices can find a weapon that suits their style (or conversely, allows you to create a character tailored towards a particular fighting style).

Given the other functions of Abilities such as Strength (Carry, Pushing, Grappling), Toughness (Damage Resistance, Endurance), Avoid (Dodging), Melee (Throwing, Catching), or Unarmed (Grappling), choosing a particular weapon style has other implications for a character's playstyle.

Polearms

While the different polearms use a variety of Attack and Damage Abilities (mostly defaulting to Melee and Strength), their main distinguishing features are the Reach and Hold-Off Attributes.

Normally close-combat weapons can attack a target in an adjacent 2m Hex. Weapons with the Reach Attribute can make a close-combat attack against a target a number of Hexes away equal to the Reach rating. All the listed Polearms have Reach 2, although particularly long pikes might have Reach 3 or 4.

When you're attacked by a weapon that has Hold-Off, it imposes a condition on your movement. For example, if attacked by a Pike you need to make a Move roll against the wielder's Melee in order to move closer to them. There is some variation; Boar Spears prevent any movement closer to the wielder, but only if you are wounded by the attack. Man-Catchers prevent all movement if you are caught by its grapple.

Not all Polearms have Hold-Off. The Lance provides a damage bonus if you use it in a mounted charge.

Designing Your Own Weapons

As with many of its subsystems, weapons are created using an effects-based system. All Weapon Special Attributes are listed and rated in Threat (used to calculate Experience awards from combat), so it's just a matter of coming up with a literal description of what the weapon is capable of and then going through and selecting the appropriate options.

Case in point – we're just setting up to start a new campaign in a post-apocalyptic techno-gothic setting (think Vampire Hunter D). One of the guys is playing a werewolf, and he jokingly suggested he have "lightsaber claws". To his surprise I said I could stat them up no problem, but I was interested to know how he imagined them working. I think he's either gone with fingertip implants, or some sort of knuckleduster projectors.

Actually creating them was a simple matter of adjusting the Beam Sabre I already had on the weapon list.

Beam Claws x2 – Attack: Unarmed, Damage: 4 (+2 for dual-wielding) Energy, Close Only, Cost 7 ea., Enc 1 ea., Threat 4 ea.

It's lining up to be a pretty nuts campaign, and I'm glad to be able to demonstrate the system's flexibility and diversity. The first session is tomorrow!

The next picture on my to-do list is a character who displays several nonhuman Traits, such as armour, weapons, and wings.