Janus: Mechanics

Change Log
Thu Aug 23 10:56:39 EDT 2007 Added Foo Sensitive virtue.

See another mechanics writeup concept for historical context, but it's broken as Bill points out. :)

Stats

Everyone has 8 paired stats: Strength, Stamina, and Perception hopefully are obvious. Studious is how well you can focus on mental tasks in a non-pressured setting; it also governs memory recall. Communication is what's used if you're interacting with anyone at length; Will is more about snap situations, mental fortitude, and how calm you are under fire. Dexterity is more about coordination; Quickness is about speed.

You have 2 bananas to distribute across stats. Individual stats can have values between -3 and +3, but you can only have (at most) one +3 stat xor one -3 stat (but not both!). Stats within a pair cannot have a difference of more than 3.

To buy up/down a stat costs/gives 1 banana for the first stat point, 2 for the second, and 3 for the third.

I encourage characters to have at least one negative stat, rather than a series of 0 stats and 1 or 2 positive stats.

For skill checks that don't involve head-to-head rolling, Easy checks are 6+, Medium checks are 8+, and Hard checks are 10+.

2s and 12s

Rolling snake-eyes is a botch check: the SG will assign a number of botch dice to roll. These are independent 1d6s: any 1s that show up is a botch. A single botch is typically dropping your weapon in melee combat. Two botches is more serious. 3 botches is quite possibly lethal.

Boxcars can be resolved at SG discretion as an automatic success, unusual success, or by simply adding an additional 1d6 to a skill check. Also, rolling boxcars is Just Cool: generally speaking, rolling a natural 12, and then an additional 1, and adding a skill of (say) -2 is cooler than rolling an 8 and adding a skill of 3.

Skills

There are no skills in this system. There are no skill gains in this system except by troupe fiat, which should be rare.

If you do get skills, you get xp in a skill. Once you have 3 xp in a skill, you gain +1 to rolls in that skill; 6 xp = +2; 10 xp = +3. You cannot go above +3. Having xp (but no skill) in a skill is significant: some things may only be possible if you have skill xp. For this reason, it is much more common to have a skill with 1 xp in it than with more than 1 xp.

Virtue/Flaws

Buying virtues and flaws also uses the banana pool. Most characters start with the +0 Virtue: Hero.

Other Virtues and Flaws are possible; feel free to ask.

Hero: 0 point Virtue. You know that you're important, and you know that other people think you're important. In other words, you have PC glow and you know it. Don't count on it, though.

Foo Sensitive: 1 point Virtue. You are sensitive to some broad category. A few examples would be: "Magic Sensitive", "City Sensitive", "Animals Sensitive". This manifests as some sensation that alerts you to something abnormal, but the what/where/how/who is not something this virtue can help you with. It's just a binary Yes/No presence indicator.

Dumb: 1 point Flaw. You're not exactly the brightest bulb in the chandelier. You're slower on the uptake, and you naturally shy away from hard mental problems.

Moron: 2 point Flaw. You're trivially hoodwinked by people with only a trace of guile in them. Learning new things is very difficult: you're likely to lead a life doing very simple jobs.

Fatigue

Being tired or wounded affects your rolling. You have two separate charts: one for Fatigue and one for Wounds.

Fatigue
[X] Rested
[   ] -0
[   ] -1
[   ] -2
[   ] -3
[   ] -4
[   ] Unconc
You start at the top: rested and normal.

For every fatigue "box" you take, you incur the penalty listed on the right.

For fatigue, there is Short Term and Long Term fatigue. Both get marked on the same chart, but you recover differently from ST or LT fatigue:
Rest 2 minutes Recover 1 ST level
10 minutes 2nd ST
30 minutes 3rd ST
60 minutes 4th ST
2 hours 5th ST
You recover the worst fatigue level first, so if you are at -4 due to fatigue, it takes you 2 hours resting to get to -3. At that point, you need another hour before you reach -2, etc.

You need 6 + N hours of sleep, where N is the number of Long Term fatigue levels you have in order to recover. Sleeping less than 6+N hours (round up) gives you 1 LT fatigue level per hour missed; sleeping less than 6 hours will probably incur more LT fatigue levels.

Wounds

Wounds uses a pyramidal box scheme:
Wounds
[X] Normal
[   ] -1
[   ] [   ] -2
[   ] [   ] [   ] -3
[   ] [   ] [   ] [   ] -4
[   ] [   ] [   ] [   ] [   ] Incap
[   ] [   ] [   ] [   ] [   ] [   ] Dead
The incur the penalty once you reach the end of the line. So if you take 2 boxes of damage, you are at -1. One more box, and you are at -2. Thus, your body can take 6 boxes of damage between falling down incapacitated (which also means you're also unconscious) and being outright dead.

If your attack exceeds your opponent's defense, you do damage equal to the inverse arithmetic pyramid of the difference. Pyramid(2)=1+2=3, Pyr(3)=6, Pyr(4)=10. So if the difference between your final scores is 5, your opponent takes 2 boxes of damage. If the difference is 6, your opponent takes 3 boxes.

To resolve combat, roll off against your opponent. To be continued.