dreadnaught diceless rpg – character stats

The second installment of Dreadnaught describes the basic character mechanics.

Each character possesses 3 stats: Body, Mind and Soul. A number of derived stats follow from these core stats, namely:

• Base Potential: (Body + Mind + Soul) / 3
• Fortitude: (Body + Soul) / 2
• Reflex: (Body + Mind) / 2
• Willpower: (Mind + Soul) / 2
• Hit points: BP * 5
• Speed: 5
• Action points: 10

The Base Potential (BP) of a character describes his or her basic ability to perform any action. Whenever an action is performed by that character the basic action point potential for that action is equal to the Base Potential. Thus the character performs all his or her actions with at least the amount of skill that his or her Base Potential represents. Various character abilities and feats allow the character to change the emphasis of the core stats for specific tasks; for example: a character with the “agile attacks” feat uses (Body + Mind) / 2 as his or her basic combat bonus for attacks, rather than the Base Potential.

Fortitude (For), Reflex (Ref) and Willpower (Wil) are the equivalent saves from the DnD game. Whenever an effect needs to be resisted, the appropriate derived stat is used to resist. Players may, naturally, chose to enhance the resistance by using action points.

Hit points determine the life of a character – without modification from feats or templates they are computed as BP * 5. Upon leveling additional

Speed is not properly derived, but its base value is 5 for all characters. Feats and templates may modify this.

At level 1, feats and templates aside, each character receives 10 action points (APs) as a basic daily alotment. At the start of the next day, provided the characters have opportunity to rest for 8 hours, they lose their old action points, but receive a fresh alotment of 10 action points.

The recovery of action points after resting has two cave-ats: should a character not have any action points remaining before resting, then he or she only recovers half the action points he or she would normally receive. This represents the effect of over exertion on the character. Secondly, when a character levels his action point pool increases – but the recovery of action points is still limited to 10 per rest (barring feats, templates, and so forth).