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Table of Contents
BASIC RULES 2
ANTICIPATION 6
SOCIAL INFLUENCE 7
COMBAT SYSTEMS 8
HAZARDS 20
CHARACTER CREATION OUTLINE 22
BASELINE TRAITS 25
BODY MODIFICATIONS 54
NOVA TRAITS 71
MEGA-ATTRIBUTES & ENHANCEMENTS 78
QUANTUM POWERS 100
WEAPONS AND ARMOR 149
VEHICLES 167
EQUIPMENT 171
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 176
ALLIES AND ANTAGONISTS 181
CRITTERS AND CONSTRUCTS 183
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BASIC RULES
The systems in this chapter provide a structure by which matters of chance are resolved in the Aberrant setting. These rules are quite simple, but even then, you shouldn’t feel constrained by them. Be flexible with your adjustments, and be consistent when you make changes.
The Golden Rule
The primary rule of Aberrant is simple: If you don’tlike it, change it. The story is more important than any rule. If
the systems get in the way, ignore them or change them. These rules are merely guidelines; feel free to use, alter or dis-regard them as you see fit. After all, it’s your story. Note that the Storyteller is the final arbiter of any rules questions.
Actions
Over the course of a game, a character will do many things. Some of these tasks are considered actions, while oth-ers aren’t. Actions are anything that might produce an interest-ing outcome to the direction the story takes. Tryinterest-ing to use Te-lepathy on a Directive agent, hacking Project Utopia’s comput-ers or throwing a car at another nova - these are all examples of actions. One action typically takes one turn to complete.
In most cases, speaking and conversations aren’t considered actions. Although interesting developments may certainly arise from things that novas say, talking is typically free in terms of game mechanics. The Storyteller may rule oth-erwise, such as whether a character manages to scream out the location where the kidnapped victim is being held, before he becomes possessed by a nova with Domination, but for the most part, the game places as few limitations as possible on communication among players and characters.
It’s easy enough to attempt an action — just tell the Storyteller what your character’s trying to do and how she plans to go about it. Most actions — crossing the street or load-ing a pistol, for instance — are easy enough to be considered automatically successful. However, if you’re trying to cross a four-lane highway full of speeding trucks, or trying to reload while you’re hanging from a fire escape by one hand, there’s a chance you might fail. So when there’s reasonable doubt whether an action will succeed or not, you may have to roll dice to determine the results.
If you need only one success to accomplish an action, the action in question is called a simple action. Actions that re-quire more successes or longer periods of time to complete are called extended actions.
Reflexive Actions
In some cases, taking a particular significant action doesn’t actually take any appreciable amount of time. These actions often come as a result of or are triggered by other ac-tions. In game terms, these are called reflexive actions, and performing one may break the normal sequence of play and action resolution. A reflexive action doesn’t require “taking an action” as described above to accomplish. Your character can
perform one whenever the opportunity arises, and may also take his normal action, without any penalty.
For instance, spending quantum points to max a power is con-sidered to take less than a second of game time — no dice are rolled, and your character can do this while doing something else. Soaking — withstanding the damage from an attack — is likewise a reflexive action.
In most cases, the only prerequisite for performing a reflexive action is that the character be conscious (or otherwise capable of choosing to take the action, in the case of dream sequences or other deviations from consciousness that still allow choice) in order to choose to do so. Unless otherwise specified, a character may perform any number of reflexive actions, and they don’t get in the way of anything else she may want to do in a turn.
Extra Actions
Certain options, such as the Quickness Enhancement, can give characters extra actions. Extra actions do not suffer from multiple action penalties. On the other hand, an extra ac-tion cannot be split into multiple acac-tions. Extra acac-tions still count against the character’s action limit for the round.
If a character’s actions on an extra action are invali-dated, the character may choose to change the action as nor-mal, or abort taking an extra action altogether, refunding any costs paid for the extra action.
Ratings
Although your character’s personality is limited only by your imagination, his capabilities are defined by his Traits — all of his innate and learned aptitudes and abilities. Each Trait is described by a “dot” rating of 1 to 5 (usually); a 1 in a Trait is barely competent, while a 5 is the pinnacle of human achieve-ment. Most people’s Traits range from 1 to 3; a 4 in a Trait in-dicates an exceptional person, while a 5 is nearly incomparable — among humans, at any rate. Think of this as similar to the “star” rating system of movie reviews and restaurants — a 1 is barely passable while a 5 is superb. It’s also possible to have a zero in a Trait, which usually represents a skill that the charac-ter never learned, but some exceptions (such as certain horrific nova aberrations) do occur.
x Abysmal • Poor •• Average ••• Good •••• Exceptional ••••• Superb
Dice Pools
When your character takes a dice action, you roll one ten-sided die for each dot you have in the Traits most suited to that task. The Storyteller decides which Traits are appropriate by choosing the Attribute and Ability that best cover the action being attempted. Adding them up creates a “dice pool” of ten-sided dice, which is then rolled to resolve the action. Novas’
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quantum powers have their own dice pools and behave in the same fashion.
Most dice pools will be a combination of Attribute + Ability, but there are some exceptions. In the case of attributes with temporary and permanent scores (such as Willpower), you always use the permanent score.
Reducing Large Dice Pools
Vehicle weapons and armor can achieve extremely high dice pool numbers, with munitions such as tactical nuclear weapons often requiring 90-100 dice to resolve. Similarly, no-vas may end up with massive dice pools, requiring 20 or 30 dice to resolve. In this case, one may convert a portion of that pool into automatic successes. Every 10 dice in a pool be-comes 4 successes (0.4 chance of success). With a relevant quality or dealing with heavy weapons that automatically reroll 10s, every 20 dice in a pool becomes 9 successes (0.4444... ~= 0.45 chance of success per die). Convert a dice pool into automatic successes until 10 dice or less are left, then roll the remainder. .If there are more than 10 but less than 20 dice re-maining, and the character may reroll 10s, convert 10 dice into 5 automatic successes and then roll the remainder. If a charac-ter counts 10s as 2 successes, add 1 additional success per 10 dice converted.
Bonus Dice
A character may gain bonus dice from various sources, such as Mega-Attribute Enhancements or Augmenta-tions. A character may also be able to get circumstantial or equipment bonuses from various sources. For example, a per-fectly tailored dress by a famous fashion designer may add bo-nus dice to Style, a master-crafted set of tools may add bobo-nus- es to Engineering or Art rolls, and so on. These bonus-es generally should not exceed more than +3d or 1 automatic success.
Bonus dice from Enhancements or body modification Augmentations are even more powerful than equipment bene-fits, but are also limited by the character’s ‘natural’ stats. A character is limited to a maximum of (Attribute + 2) bonus dice from Enhancements and Augmentations. Heavy augmentation can make the incompetent competent and the masters super-human, but cannot take an incompetent and elevate him to su-perhuman ability.
Multiple Actions
Your character can also perform multiple actions in a turn. The total number of actions the character takes deter-mines how many dice are subtracted from the first task at-tempted in that turn. Each action after the first loses an addi-tional (cumulative) die beyond that amount. So if your charac-ter tries to perform three actions in a turn, you subtract three dice from the first task’s dice pool, four from the second and five from the third. If the total actions bring your dice pool for any one task to zero, that action cannot be attempted.
Because Mega-Attributes are automatic successes, they are not factored into the number of actions a nova can take. They are only factored into the result of successful ac-tions.
Action Limits
A character may not take more than (Dexterity + Wits) total non-reflexive actions in a round. A character may take any reasonable number of reflexive actions.
Extra Actions
Some powers, such as Temporal Manipulation, some Augmentations, and some Enhancements, such as Quickness, allow a character to take extra actions. These actions are like having additional turns in combat, with a few exceptions. First off, extra actions cannot be further split into multiple actions. Second off, extra actions are not penalized by any multiple ac-tions the character takes. If a character takes 3 acac-tions and a quickness action, the first 3 actions are penalized -3/-4/-5, but the quickness action has no multiple action penalty.
As extra actions act as additional turns, the character may normally move further during extra actions, effectively multiplying their total movement in one combat round by the number of extra actions taken, plus 1. At the ST’s discretion, augmentations and some enhancements may not allow a character to increase their total move distance past their sprint-ing distance, as they only increase the character’s ability to plan out actions and act, rather than actually making them faster.
Difficulty
When you roll your dice pool, you want each die to match or exceed the target number. Unless specifically indi-cated otherwise, the target number is always 7. So each die that comes up a 7, 8, 9 or 0 (10) is considered a success – a favorable resolution. Conversely, if all the dice you roll come up less than 7, your action fails.
All you have to know when you roll is the number of successes you need; if you get at least the minimum quantity, you achieve your goal. The standard number of successes necessary for any task is always one (unless the Storyteller says otherwise). Extra successes beyond the minimum can sometimes generate additional effects (at the very least, extra successes mean your character accomplishes the action in a superior and notable fashion).
Net Successes Degree of Success
One Standard Two Superior Three Remarkable Four Astonishing Five Phenomenal
Exceptional Difficulty
Most everyday tasks are successful when the charac-ter gets just one success. However, some tasks, like perform-ing a trick shot or disablperform-ing an encrypted lock, can be more challenging. The Storyteller makes that distinction when ap-propriate, designating a certain number of successes that you need to roll for your character to complete the task. The
difficul-ty to a roll is always listed as a number of additional successes
needed beyond the standard one. So a “difficulty penalty of two” (or “+2 to difficulty”) means you must get a total of three cesses. The harder the action being attempted, the more suc-cesses are required. Any extra sucsuc-cesses you get beyond the
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difficulty indicate that your character does an even moreout-standing job than required.
Each +1 difficulty roughly increases the dice needed to have an identical chance of success by 3. Difficulties around +0 or +1 are not terribly difficult for trained professionals (pools of 4-6), but +1 difficulties will generally stop neophytes from succeeding with reliability. Difficulties around +2 require elite members of the occupation to accomplish, with pools from around 7-8. At difficulty +3, a character requires 9 dice to have an even chance of success, which is commonly achieved by having an Attribute at 4, an Ability at 4, and a relevant specialty.
Difficulty +4 means a person with 10 in a dice pool can accomplish the task successfully roughly 40% of the time. At difficulty +5, someone who is at the apex of human potential in the roll (attribute 5, ability 5, a valid specialty) will succeed less than 40% of the time. Difficulties past this tend to be re-served for tasks which are nearly impossible for humans to achieve (lifting 1 ton, staying up for 100 hours without sleep, reading the entirety of War and Peace in 30 minutes) and suc-cess in these endeavors is the purview of transhumans and posthumans (such as novas).
Failure
If you score no successes on a roll, your character fails his attempted action: He misses his punch. The file is en-crypted too well. His face is caught by a security drone. Failure, while usually disappointing, is not so catastrophic as a botch (below).
Storytellers, bear in mind that failure is simply that: failure. All it means is that the attempt didn’t produce the de-sired result. Judge the narrative accordingly, but a failure prob-ably doesn’t in itself result in any harm to the character unless the circumstances would dictate such. A failed attempt to jump the gap between two buildings probably doesn’t result in a breakneck plummet, but perhaps the character lands clumsily on a fire escape below the intended rooftop, or maybe she knocks the wind out of herself and is desperately hanging onto the ledge.
Botches
A character botches a roll if it fails with a margin of failure higher than the character's Ability or Quantum Power rating in that roll + 1 and the character rolls at least one '1'. Count each '1' rolled as +1 to the margin of failure. Therefore, if a character has an ability rating of 1, he botches with an ad-justed MoF of 2 or greater, while a character with an ability rat-ing of 5 will only botch rolls if his adjusted MoF is 6 or higher.
Some rolls may not have an ability or Quantum power governing them. In that case, a character botches if he rolls no successes and at least one 1.
The Margin of Failure (MoF) is the number of addi-tional successes needed for a failed roll to succeed. If a char-acter rolls no successes on a difficulty +0 roll, the MoF is 1. If a character rolls 3 successes on a difficulty +4 roll, the MoF is 2.
The specific circumstances of a botch are up to the Storyteller, but they should affect the character adversely and relate to the action being attempted.
Retries
If a character fails in a non-combat action (but does not botch), the character may often try again, time permitting.
As all the obvious and easy methods to success have already been tried and didn’t work, retrying a failed roll is somewhat more difficult, adding +1 to the roll’s difficulty.
The only limit on the number of retries is that a char-acter may not retry a botched roll, and each roll takes time. Otherwise, a character may try again and again until she botches or succeeds.
Automatic
Suc-cesses
In addition to rolling Traits, characters may some-times add automatic successes to their pool’s result. The au-tomatic successes only count if the character rolls at least one success from their dice pool; until that point, the automatic successes do not count for any game purposes. These auto-matic successes often come from quantum powers, but may also come from other sources, such as Willpower. They usually represent a nova’s inherent ability to do things better than baselines; when they succeed, they succeed big.
Automatic successes are noted with [brackets]; dice are either in (parentheses) or have no notation.
Complications
The preceding rules should be enough to get you go-ing, and for chronicles that favor storytelling over dice-rollgo-ing, they might be all you ever need. However, they don’t neces-sarily cover all instances — for example, what if you’re trying to do something while a Storyteller character is actively trying to stop you? What if a fellow nova tries to help you hack Project Utopia’s computers?
The various ways to complicate matters below are intended to bring extra color to games.
Extended Actions
Some tasks require multiple successes to complete. These extended actions often take more than one turn to com-plete. The additional successes are cumulative, reflecting that sustained effort is needed to accomplish the action. You can keep trying to obtain successes until you gather the required amount or until you botch. If you botch during an extended ac-tion, the Storyteller may decide that you lose a “saved” success for each botch, or that you lose them all and must start again from scratch – or even that you messed up so badly that you can’t try again.
Extended actions are more complicated than stand-ard actions, and they should seldom be employed in the middle of intense roleplaying. The action in the game should reflect what types of rolls are needed, not the other way around.
Resisted Actions
Sometimes your character’s efforts oppose another’s, just like in a tug of war. During resisted actions, opposing play-ers roll using the appropriate Traits. If you score more suc-cesses than your opponent does, your character succeeds at her action before the other character does. Your total success-es are then reduced by the amount that your opponent rolled;
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the successes remaining then apply to the action itself. In this way, even if your opponent can’t beat you, she can diminish your efforts.
Some actions are both extended and resisted. One opponent must collect a certain number of successes in order to win. All successes rolled above the opponent’s total number of successes in a single turn are added together. The first op-ponent to collect a designated number of successes wins the contest.
Teamwork
Characters can combine successes, generally during an extended action. At the Storyteller’s discretion, two or more players can roll separately and total their successes. While teamwork is effective in repairing devices, collecting infor-mation or combat, the tag-team approach can be confusing in social situations.
Time
Time is a fundamental element of Aberrant. There are four distinct ways to describe divisions of time within the game, progressing from the smallest to the largest unit.
Turn - The smallest unit of time in the game, considered long enough to take one action. A turn is defined as 2-5 sec-onds in most combat situations, although turns taking 1 minute or more may happen in some other situations.
Scene - One compact period of action and roleplaying that takes place in a single location. A scene is comparable to a scene in a movie. It takes as few or as many turns to resolve events as are necessary.
Episode - One independent part of a series, often played in one game session and made up of scenes connected by downtime.
Series - A complete tale, with an introduction, buildup and climax, that often takes several episodes to com-plete. Your series is the continuing narrative that your cast cre-ates. Also called the story.
Besides these four active time divisions, Aberrant stories sometimes include:
Downtime - Time between scenes or episodes that characters may spend resting, recuperating or possibly learn-ing new talents. Any time that characters are not actively par-ticipating in a story is considered downtime.
Distance
In Aberrant, distance is often important. Can a char-acter get to an event in time? How long does a charchar-acter have to spend in transit while carrying a ticking time bomb? How far away is the plot-critical McGuffin?
In combat or dramatic scenes such as chases, dis-tance is more abstract and measured in successes on Dexteri-ty + Athletics rolls. Out of combat, distance is generally meas-ured in meters or kilometers.
An Aberrant character normally can walk at (4 + Dexterity) kilometers an hour and run at (10 + [Dexterity x 2]) kilometers an hour.
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ANTICIPATION
Oftentimes in Aberrant people will play characters smarter than they are. Due to this, a player may not consider an element in the story or predict a turn of events which the character, by all rights, should have been able to predict and prepare for. This section covers how a Mega-Intelligent (or in certain cases, Mega-Witty or Mega-Perceptive) nova may be able to alter a situation to their advantage.
Requirements
To be capable of using Anticipation, the character must either have a relevant Mega-Mental attribute or be ex-tremely skilled at forward planning (they have a relevant Attrib-ute + Ability dice pool above 8). Being able to predict a situa-tion isn't just about raw intellect, after all. Someone superhu-manly perceptive can twig onto extremely minor changes in tone or disposition which might betray future plans, while someone with superhuman thinking speed and poise can run through a half-dozen scenarios with their merely human intel-lect. Characters without any Mega-Mental attributes must pay 1 WP to use Anticipation.
At the ST's discretion, having any mental ability at a low level may prevent the use of Anticipation without spending WP, or forbid it entirely. Planning is not all about perception, or thinking quickly, or thinking well. It requires all three elements. A character may use Anticipation a number of times per scene equal to (1 + Highest Mega-Mental Attribute).
Systems
During a situation where the player thinks their char-acter could have anticipated, the charchar-acter may roll an Ability which makes sense. Examples would be Rapport to plan for a social encounter or predict the actions of a hated nemesis, Tactics or Intrusion to have a safehouse already set up when you're on the run, Computer to have infiltrated a virus into the security system ten minutes ago when you were at that unat-tended terminal, so on and so forth.
Successes on that roll translate to points which can be used to access effects. These effects must make some degree of sense. Effects include bonus dice, inflicting penalties, having equipment accessible, so on and so forth. The opponent may attempt to counter as per the rules, either canceling out
antici-pation successes, or using his own anticiantici-pation successes to alter your desired outcome.
Example Effects
1 success: Having a small item on hand ("I thought we might run into guys with guns, so I happened to be wearing a bulletproof vest")
1 success: +/- 1d on any one dice roll (yours or the opponents), cannot add more than +/-3 to any one roll ("I could see that he favored his right eye. If I made a run for it when he was only looking at me with his left, I'd have a better chance.")
1 success: Define a minor element of the scene ("There happens to be an abandoned building a block away which is pretty empty, we could hide there.")
2 successes: Having a larger item on hand ("I thought we might face that guy. Fortunately I have a RPG over here somewhere.")
2 successes: 1 temporary background dot (Allies, Followers, Resources/etc) for the scene
2 successes: reroll any one failed or botched roll for the scene.
3 successes: Define a major scene element ("You just happened to have stepped into a minefield." "I shut down the security five minutes ago.")
3 successes: Change an already taken action ("Okay, I read about the minefield and so I don't step into it, but hose the ground down with high-explosive 30mm shells in-stead.")
Complications
Complications are added per effect, not as a total of all the changes one wants. An ST is in their rights to add additional difficulty if the sum total of the anticipation results is exceeding-ly unlikeexceeding-ly, unbelievable, or just plain dumb.
+1-4: Desired effects are extremely unlikely ("You want me to believe that you, a law-abiding citizen, happen to have stashed a RPG and a half-dozen reloads in your car's trunk?")
+2: Repeating the same effect again and again. Don't be boring!
+2: Desired effect does not mesh with setting ("You're in an affluent neighborhood. An abandoned building nearby? Really?")
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SOCIAL INFLUENCE
Making a character do what you want is simple, in practice. Any logical combination of Attribute and Ability can be used to attempt to create Sway, which the subject may resist via straight Willpower and bonuses from Wits/Enhancements, or a related Attribute + Ability combination if so desired. Un-successful attempts to generate Sway create a cumulative +2 difficulty penalty for rolling the same attribute/ability combina-tion during the scene, and a cumulative +1 difficulty penalty for any other attempts to create Sway. Botching extends the pen-alty duration for the rest of the story, or permanently if the character was attempting to create Intimate Sway.
By default, this roll is over the timeframe of one day, which co-vers several hours' worth of schmoozing someone. Reducing the time taken for this roll increases the difficulty, as shown be-low. Note that certain very trivial requests may reduce the diffi-culty and/or timeframe (asking someone to lend you a dollar or get you a drink are probably going to be closer to the 1 minute timeframe).:
If Time Reduced To… Difficulty Increases By…
Half-Day 1 3 hours 2 1 hour 3 Half-hour 4 10 minutes 5 5 minutes 6 1 minute 8
Each net success over the opponent's defense and the difficulty creates one point of Sway of the given type (Cas-ual or Intimate) which can be used to make the target take a desired action. The first action costs 1 point of Sway and each action past that costs 1 additional point (so the second costs 2, the third costs 3, etc.), so if you wanted for someone to "stop chatting, tell your friend to go home, and go help me with this project", that would cost 6 points of Sway, one for getting your lab partner to stop chatting, another to make him ask his friend to leave, and a third to help you with your stuff. The opponent may resist with Willpower, paying 1WP to cancel out 1 action. If canceled with WP, any attempt to demand a similar condition automatically fails for the rest of the scene.
Extending the influence of any single action for a scene costs 1 additional point, extending them for a session costs 3, and ex-tending them for an entire story costs 5. Exex-tending your influ-ence longer, to years or even permanently, can easily cost far more successes than that and is the result of weeks or months of constant influence.
Casual
Casual sway has no significant emotional component and is generally short lived. It is most useful for forming the ba-sis of a personal relationship, creating vague positive or nega-tive feelings, or getting minor favors done which might cause some trouble for the other character, but is not capable of do-ing anythdo-ing more than that. Gettdo-ing your captor to hand you his gun is not something casual sway can do, but it might let you stall him for long enough to build a rapport. Casual Sway cannot be extended past a scene, and fades at 1 point/day.
It requires (Willpower x2) successes worth of Casual Sway to start creating Intimate Sway. For most normal people,
that requires days of work, but a particularly capable Nova may be able to become your best friend in a handful of minutes.
Intimate
Intimate sway has an emotional component, and tempting to build it also renders you vulnerable to similar at-tempts, for it requires you to stay in close contact with that per-son, allowing them to build Sway over you as well. Intimate sway can allow you to make a target act against his morals or ideology, take actions which might cause them serious trouble, have them abandon long-held beliefs or change the target's opinion on an important issue, or even temporarily change the character's Demeanor. The few things it cannot do are change the character's Nature, make them take actions that directly lead to self-harm (such as jumping off a bridge or in front of a bus) unless they're already inclined towards that, or perma-nently change their personality.
Bonuses and Penalties
There are social "weapons" that can be used to give bonuses to Sway attempts, such as Influence, Backing, Fame, high appearance, having a loaded gun to the victim's head, threatening his children, so on and so forth. These bonuses tend to increase the dice pool of the person attempting to Sway others by their dot rating, or may alternatively increase the dif-ficulty of resistance by the same amount if they would be par-ticularly powerful in that situation. On the flipside, social "ar-mor" exists that protects against Sway. Having a ideological or ethical objection to the task requested (+1-5 difficulty), negoti-ating from a position of strength (+1-5 difficulty), being request-ed to perform an action which could be dangerous to life or so-cial standing (+1-5 difficulty) are all examples of potential "so-cial armor".
Similarly, if you're the one staring down the barrel of a loaded gun, difficulty penalties can often be insane. A Mega-Charismatic Nova with no non-social powers staring down the barrel of a shotgun (+3 difficulty to Sway) against fanatics who absolutely loathe the Nova and what he stands for (+5 difficulty to Sway) might still be able to talk his way out of the situation if he's good enough and has enough time... but if he's about to be executed in a minute (+8 difficulty) that's a total of +16 diffi-culty and the opposition can roll to resist beyond that and will almost certainly pay Willpower to resist your condition of "don't shoot me".
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COMBAT SYSTEMS
Combat in Aberrant attempts to capture the larger-than-life feats common to nova-level conflict without downplay-ing the grim reality of injury and death. What results is a sys-tem true to the dynamics, limitations and viciousness of real combat - particularly combat involving superheated plasma blasts and building-rattling punches - that leaves room for the spectacular elements that novas bring to it.
The Storyteller should be flexible when arbitrating combat situations; no rules can fully reflect the variety of situa-tions encountered in warfare. If any part of these systems slows the game or causes bickering, don’t use it. Combat sys-tems are meant to add depth to the game, not create out-of-game conflict.
Combat Areas
Fights rarely take place inside white rooms with no features whatsoever. A combat area should be defined with major features, important locations, and likely ranges. The game mechanics effects of a combat area are listed below.
Multiple Locations
An area does not have to be a single location. Fights can take place in multiple locations (for example: A gunfight that starts in an office building and spills out onto the streets in-to a wild car chase). Each of these locations can be defined as a set of ranges, cover, and complications. As a fight goes on, the locations relevant to the fight can expand and contract as necessary.
Range
Possibly the most important thing that a combat envi-ronment does is restrict possible ranges. Tanks in an open field can easily murder infantry as they seek to accumulate the doz-ens of successes needed to get into weapons range. However, in an urban environment where ranges are short, the tables are turned. See below for the maximum range at which combatants can engage and examples of such environments.
Maximum Range Examples
Melee Very small room, closet, bathroom Thrown Average sized room, house Handgun Large office building Rifle-Support City, highway
Heavy Suburbs
Artillery-Theater Open plains Orbital-Extreme Outer space
Cover
The second most important feature of a combat envi-ronment is cover. Cover is an important defense against ranged attacks, adding to the difficulty of ranged attacks made against the character. Examples of what environments provide what level of maximum cover are below. The rating given is the maximum difficulty increase the cover can provide. Utilizing cover is part of the movement rules (see Combat Movement). Maximum Cover Examples
+0 Outer space, midair battle, undersea +1 Open fields, grasslands
+2 Broken terrain, tall grass, swampland +3 Destroyed city/village, rubble
+4 City, jungle, the inside of most buildings
Cover and Size
Very large and very small things interact with cover differently. Obviously, small things have a much easier time finding cover, while very large things have a much harder time finding cover. Many fights will take place in an environment with one or two types of combatants (humans and vehicles). Rarely, three types of combatants (humans, aircraft, and ground vehicles) will show up. In such a fight, it is important to define the kind of cover each combatant may use. For example, vehicles may only be able to take cover up to +1 difficulty in a destroyed city, but humans up to +3, while aircraft may not take cover (maximum +0 cover).
Complications and Benefits
Furthermore, terrain may also give special complica-tions or benefits to combatants. This represents, for example, rough terrain making it difficult to move, a lack of roads ham-pering wheeled vehicles, ubiquitous cover making it easy to take cover, darkness or smoke making it hard to see, and so on. Examples of these complications and their mechanical ef-fects are given below. STs are encouraged to make their own complications if none of the stock ones suffice.
Darkness: Poor lighting conditions (nighttime) can add +1 difficulty to movement rolls, Awareness rolls based on sight, and attack difficulties. Darkness (a moonless night) adds +2 difficulty to movement, sight-based Awareness, and attacks in-stead. Total darkness, rendering people completely blind, adds +4 difficulty to the aforementioned rolls. This may be mitigated by night vision systems.
Difficult Terrain: Difficult terrain adds penalties to movement rolls and prevents fast movement. Difficult terrain may add anywhere from +1 (rough ground) to +4 (swampland or quicksand) difficulty to movement rolls and multiply the number of successes needed to change range brackets or get to cover by anywhere from x1 (rough ground) to x4 (swamp-land, quicksand, similar extremely difficult environments).
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Environmental Hazards: Environments may be haz-ardous to the health of a character. See the “Hazards” section for potential environmental hazards.
Obstacles: Obstacles can limit movement in a direction. For example, a sniper might set up in an elevated tower, which makes it much harder (+2 difficulty, doubled successes need-ed) for non-flying characters to reach him. Or an area may be fenced off with barbed wire, requiring the character to crawl under it (2 total successes on crawling movement needed) or take 10L damage.
Smoke/Fog/Mist: Thick smoke or fog may block vision as Darkness with identical gameplay effects. Furthermore, de-pending on the type of smoke they may have additional harm-ful effects (see Toxins). Some forms of sensor, such as radar, may be able to see through concealing smoke.
Underwater: Being in shallow water (such as a swim-ming pool or river) limits vision like nighttime. Being deep un-derwater renders all characters blind. Neither nightvision equipment nor radar (or other electromagnetic senses) may mitigate this loss of vision. However, characters may still use sonar normally.
Walls and Doors: Walls and doors limit movement and lines of sight, limiting combat range for all participants and providing cover. Characters who are sufficiently strong or equipped with demolitions charges and similar equipment may take an action to breach a wall or door, allowing them to ignore movement penalties from such obstacles.
Combat Turns
In combat, many things happen at virtually the same time. Since this fact can make things a bit sticky in a game, combat is divided into a series of intervals called turns. Turns generally take about 2 to 5 seconds. Each combat turn has three stages - Initiative, Attack and Resolution - to make keep-ing track of thkeep-ings easier.
Stage One: Initiative
This stage organizes the turn, and it is the point at which you declare your character’s action. Various actions are possible - anything from leaping behind a wall to shouting a warning. You must declare what your character does, in as much detail as the Storyteller requires.
To determine a character’s Initiative for the turn, roll (Dexterity + Wits).The character with the lowest number of successes must declare his action first, with the remaining characters declaring their actions for the turn in increasing or-der. If two characters get the same total, the one with the lower dice pool declares first. If lnitiative ratings are also the same, roll again until the tie is resolved. (Note that novas with certain Enhancements may transcend the normal Initiative order.) At this time, you must also state if any multiple actions will be per-formed, or if Willpower points will be spent. You wait until the
attack stage to implement your action.
Characters act in order according to their initiative-the character with the highest Initiative acts first, then the character with the second-highest Initiative, and so on until all characters have acted.
There is only one normal exception to this rule. If your character delays her action, her maneuvers happen when she finally takes action. Your character may act at any time after her designated order in the Initiative, even to interrupt another, “slower” character’s action. If two characters both delay their
actions, and both finally act at the same time, the one with the higher Initiative score for the turn acts first. Note that some En-hancements, powers, or other abilities may work outside of the normal Initiative order.
Stage Two: Attack
Attacks are the meat of the combat turn. An action’s success or failure and potential impact on the target are deter-mined at this stage. You use a certain Ability depending on the type of combat in which your character is engaged:
Close Combat: Use Brawl or Melee.
Ranged Combat: Use Athletics, Firearms, Gunnery, or the quantum power skill total.
Remember, if your character doesn’t have points in the necessary Ability, simply default to the Attribute on which it’s based (Strength for Brawl or Melee; Dexterity for Athletics, Firearms or Heavy Weapons; Perception for Gunnery).
Certain factors can adjust your attack’s accuracy (due to rate of fire or a targeting scope, for example); check the combat maneuver, weapon’s vital statistics or power descrip-tion for details. Attacks are usually standard acdescrip-tions, but a diffi-culty may apply depending on the circumstances of the attack. If you get no successes, the character fails her attack and in-flicts no damage. If you botch, not only does the attack fail, but something nasty happens; the weapon jams or explodes, you hit an ally or your power backlashes into your body.
It is at this stage that quantum points are usually spent (as this is when powers usually activate).
Stage Three: Resolution
You roll damage in this stage. Soak is subtracted from raw damage, then damage is rolled and applied to the un-fortunate victim. In combat, every success above the minimum needed to hit an opponent adds 1 or more (for weapons with Overwhelming) damage die to the damage roll. Normally, only 5 additional successes may be applied to additional damage in this fashion, as there are limits to how precisely you can aim at weak points and how weak those weak points are. Area at-tacks may not add attack successes to damage, as there is lit-tle opportunity for finesse when delivering such an attack.
Defenses
All characters in combat will generally attempt to pro-tect themselves from harm. These defenses come in various forms, which are listed below.
Soak
All characters can resist a certain degree of physical punishment; doing so is called “soaking” damage. Soak comes in three types:
Natural soak: Natural soak comes from Quantum, Stamina, Mega-Stamina, and certain body modifications. They represent a person’s inherent ability to withstand harm.
Stun/Bashing Soak: Stamina + (Mega-Stamina * 2) + Quantum
Lethal Soak: Stamina/2 + Mega-Stamina + Quan-tum
Aggravated Soak: Quantum/2
Power-Based soak: Power-Based soak is gained from quantum powers.
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Armored soak: Armored soak comes from bodyar-mor or eufiber, and some other body modifications.
Any character may only gain the full defensive value of one source of each soak type (normally the highest soak value). The second source of said soak is halved, the third source has its value divided by 4, and so on, to a minimum of +0L/0B from stacking. Round soak values down.
Example: A Nova with Eufiber 2 (+4B/4L soak), Ad-vanced Body Armor (+10B/9L soak), and a Hyperdense Skele-ton (+2B/1L soak) calculates his armored soak by taking the full value of his Advanced Body Armor (10B/9L), then halving the value of his Eufiber (4B/4L halves to 2B/2L), and then quar-tering the value of his body modification soak (for a final value of 0B/0L), giving him a total of 12B/11L soak from armor, rather than 16B/14L.
Round down all fractional soak.
Armor Piercing Attacks and
Soak
Certain weapons and several powers have an Armor Piercing rating, which represents their ability to pierce protec-tion such as armor plate. Each point of Armor Piercing reduces the target's non-natural soak by 1, down to a minimum of 0. The target's natural soak is not affected by armor piercing.
Other Defenses
Ablative defenses: Ablative defenses give external health levels, providing a pool of damage reduction that gradu-ally is used up. A character may only have one ablative de-fense ‘active’ in a turn. If a character has multiple powers, body modifications, or pieces of equipment that provide ablative de-fenses, only one is considered ‘active’ and allowed to absorb damage. All others are considered to be on ‘standby’, meaning that they can recharge themselves but will not absorb attacks. If a character has multiple ablative defenses, he may choose which one is absorbing damage and which ones are inactive as a reflexive action at the start of each turn.
Stacking Other Defenses: Defensive powers or benefits that do not provide soak or ablative defense, do not
stack unless they are explicitly stated to. Simply use the most
effective defensive power against the specific attack.
Damage
If a character or vehicle’s defenses fail, then the character takes damage. Damage can come in many types and, like any other roll may have automatic successes. Fur-thermore, there are some special rules related to dealing dam-age against large objects and damdam-age which is fully resisted by soak.
Pulling Your Punches
Characters don’t have to hit at full force. A nova may subtract any amount she wishes from damage dice and/or au-tomatic successes when declaring her attack. With quantum powers, if this reduction takes the nova’s damage effect below half of its normal value, the nova pays only half the normal quantum point cost of the effect (round up).
Damage Types
There are four types of damage that apply to hu-mans: Stun, Bashing, Lethal, and Aggravated. EMP damage is a special case that applies only to vehicles.
Stun: Stun damage is momentary impairment that has negligible long-term effect, examples including the damage from tasers, the disorienting effect of flashbangs, and other such attacks. Stun damage may be painful or incapacitating but heals in relative moments.
Bashing: Bashing damage is a catch-all for any form of damage which is relatively superficial and unlikely to be instantly fatal. Blunt trauma blows are often Bashing damage, and so is superficial fire and most forms of electrical shock. Soft radiation, with low penetration, is also Bashing damage as it liberates most of its energy into surface tissues.
Lethal: Lethal damage is any penetrating damage, which can hit vital organs directly by piercing or ignoring the protective structures around them. If a character's health levels are fully filled with Lethal damage, they are dying and will likely expire if not quickly given medical aid.
Aggravated: Aggravated damage is a catch-all cat-egory which represents damage from attacks that are either absolutely overwhelming, such as the fireball of a nuclear war-head, or extremely difficult to heal, such as some chemical burns. In general, Aggravated damage is hard to soak and even harder to repair. Certain chemical weapons and chemical fires inflict Aggravated damage from a combination of poison and burning that is nigh-impossible to repair (although they tend to be soaked as Lethal damage). Hard radiation's genetic damage is also generally Aggravated, and loss of body mass is the most common method of dealing Aggravated damage.
EMP: Some attacks deal EMP damage. EMP dam-age, signified by an E for the damage tag, e.g. "10E" for 10d of EMP damage, represents the electronics-damaging ability of EMP grenades, HERF weapons, and the EMP technique of Magnetic Mastery. These attacks are not soaked by armor, alt-hough EMP hardened vehicles and computers may soak this damage. Generally only military vehicles and important infra-structure are hardened, and soak EMP damage with half of their normal soak. Each level of EMP damage rolled deals 1 Lethal level of damage to a machine. If a civilian vehicle, ro-bot, or electronic device takes more levels of EMP damage than its Size, it shuts down for 1 turn, while a military vehicle, robot, or electronic device requires [Size + 5] levels of EMP damage to be shut down. EMP damage does not affect hu-mans.
Damage effects cannot botch; a botched roll simply means the attack glances harmlessly off the target.
Automatic Damage Levels
Certain weapons and most offensive powers have automatic successes (damage levels) on their damage rolls. However, unlike automatic successes on other rolls, automatic successes on damage rolls are not fully applied with even 1 success. Instead, a character applies 1 automatic damage lev-el per rolled success up to the maximum number of automatic damage levels. Attacks with higher numbers of automatic damage levels may apply more of those per rolled success, see below:
Damage Lev-els
Damage Applied (up to total automatic damage levels)
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11
[1]-[9] 1 extra level per success [10]-[19] 2 extra levels per success [20]-[29] 3 extra levels per success [30]-[39] 4 extra levels per success [40] or more 5 extra levels per success
Therefore a weapon that deals 20L [10] will apply 2 extra damage levels per success rolled on damage, up to [10] extra damage levels (at 5 rolled successes). Past that point, each additional success on the damage roll deals 1 health level of damage, as with any other attack. A weapon that deals 40L [40] would apply 5 extra damage levels per success rolled, up to [40] extra levels (at 8 rolled successes), then behave nor-mally after that.
Ping Damage
If an attack fails to deal more damage than a target's soak, the attack rolls a single die of damage instead, "ping damage", representing the chance for a 'golden BB' or other form of lucky hit that causes some injury. However, ping dam-age is not of the same type of damdam-age as the attack, but is downgraded one level of severity (Aggravated -> Lethal -> Bashing -> Stun). Stun damage, if fully soaked, deals no ping damage. Unconventional damage types such as EMP damage deal no damage if fully soaked.
Note that a weapon with damage reduced to 0 or less by soak does not apply automatic successes even if it deals ping damage.
Size
Objects have a Size, which represents how large they are. Size 0 is considered to be "human" or close to human, such as motorcycles or hovercycles. Each Size level is approx-imately 2 times the volume of the previous scale. Size increas-es the difficulty of attacking and defending against smaller tar-gets, but makes the attacks of smaller foes less damaging. A table of examples of each Size is below.
Size Examples
-8 Small pistol, hand grenade, baseball, hamster -7 Tablet computer, pistol, kitten
-6 Basketball, Purse, SMG, Heavy Pistol
-5 Bowling ball, human head, small watermelon, purse, carbine
-4 Luggage bag, laptop, rifle, shotgun
-3 Housecat, small dog, large bird, desktop computer, light machine gun
-2 Large suitcase, duffel bag, rocket launcher, heavy ma-chine gun
-1 Young child, dog, midget, scooter 0 Human, large dog, bicycle, moped
1 Great cat, gorilla, large human, motorcycle, small bear, aircraft-dropped bomb
2 Bear, large moose, cow 3 Small car, dune buggy 4 Car
5 SUV, midsize truck, Humvee, small elephant
6 Large elephant, truck, small civilian helicopter 7 18-wheeler truck, military helicopter
8 Light APCs and IFVs,
9 Main battle tank, fishing boat, artillery vehicle 10 Trinity supertank, jet fighter
15 Bomber, pleasure yacht, jumbo jet 18 Battleship, large cruise ship, cruiser 20 Aircraft carrier, skyscraper
23 Trinity-era space cruiser 27 Leviathan Jumpship
Each point of Size difference reduces the post-soak damage the larger combatant takes by 1 health level, to a mimum of 1, and increases the pre-soak damage any attacks in-flict on the smaller combatant by +1d, to a maximum of double damage. A Size 0 character shooting at a Size 9 tank reduces post-soak damage by 9 health levels unless using a weapon with its own Size.
Furthermore, every 2 points of Size difference alters the difficulties of attacking and dodging. The smaller combatant gains an automatic success on attack rolls for each 2 full points of Size difference, while the larger combatant suffers a +1 diffi-culty penalty on attack rolls for every 2 full points of Size differ-ence.
Size modifiers may not reduce an attack’s damage to less than 1 level nor may it more than double incoming dam-age. Size modifiers to attack difficulties may also apply to things such as Stealth rolls or rolls to fit into cramped spaces. .
Movement and
Ranges
Characters in a fight don’t generally stay still—they’re always in motion, whether it’s to pop out of cover and take a potshot or to flank an unsuspecting enemy.
Range Brackets
Ranges in Aberrant are given in rough categories, ra-ther than strict numbers in meters. The definitions and rough scales of each of these categories is given below. Some weapons or powers are extended-range, allowing them to at-tack enemies at longer-than-normal range at the cost of addi-tional difficulty. These weapons or powers have a “+” on their range.
Melee: Melee range covers a distance of anywhere from 0 to 2 meters between opponents, wherein fists, feet, blades, and other melee attacks are effective.
Thrown: Thrown range covers a range where thrown weapons, such as rocks, throwing knives, shuriken, and so on. Most thrown attacks are made at Thrown range. Thrown range typically covers any range past melee up to ~30 meters.
Handgun: Handgun range not only covers hand-guns, but also shothand-guns, light grenade launchers, and various muscle-powered ranged weapons such as bows, slings, and other medieval weapons. Handgun range generally reaches up to 150 meters.
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Rifle: Rifle range, defined as roughly up to 500 me-ters, is where most military infantry weapons can engage at ef-fectively.
Support: Infantry support weapons such as guided antitank missiles and light mortars, as well as light vehicle weapons such as autocannon, fall under the ‘support’ category, reaching up to approximately 2km ranges.
Heavy: Covering the majority of ranges vehicle weapons engage at, this range bracket touches approximately 10 kilometers.
Artillery: Reaching to about one hundred kilome-ters, artillery range covers the range at which modern artillery is generally capable of engaging at. It also covers anti-aircraft missiles and other
Theater: Theater weapons have hundreds of kilo-meters of range, up to nearly a thousand kilokilo-meters. Covering short and intermediate-range ballistic missiles and the majority of space combat weapons in the Trinity era, very few weapons reach beyond this level.
Strategic: Strategic weapons are capable of reach-ing thousands of kilometers, across continents or beyond that. Only very long-range nova powers, or weapons such as ICBMs, have this level of range.
Orbital: Only very rare weapons have “orbital” range, capable of reaching tens of thousands of kilometers. Anti-satellite weapons, space-to-surface bombardment weap-ons, and the longest-ranged starship weapons of the Trinity era reach into this range bracket.
Extreme: “Extreme” range weapons or attacks have range beyond orbital. This is almost exclusively the pur-view of high-level nova powers.
Combat Movement
Movement in combat, like most other combat actions, is done by rolling. To move in combat, a character rolls Dexteri-ty + Athletics if on foot or DexteriDexteri-ty + Drive/Pilot when in a ve-hicle. This roll is generally reflexive-characters in combat are generally assumed to be in motion and do not need to specifi-cally take an action to move around. Some powers may sup-plement this roll or replace it; look in the power descriptions and systems for further details.
The table below lists the number of successes need-ed to change a range bracket in a normal, 3 second turn. Note that the number of successes to change brackets works the same way no matter whether a character is closing range or opening it. So, for example, going from Thrown range to Melee range needs only 2 successes, as does going from Melee range to Thrown range. A character may accumulate these successes over multiple turns if necessary.
Moving multiple range brackets in a single action re-quires a total number of successes equal to the total number of successes to move each bracket. So moving from Rifle range to Melee range requires a total of (10 [Rifle to Handgun] + 5 [Handgun to Thrown] + 2 [Thrown to Melee]), or 17 successes. Bracket Change Successes Needed
Melee-Thrown 2 Thrown-Handgun 5 Handgun-Rifle 10 Rifle-Support 20 Support-Heavy 30 Heavy-Artillery 40 Artillery-Theater 50 Theater-Strategic 60 Strategic-Orbital 70 Orbital-Extreme 100
Multiple Actors and Movement
In many fights, there will be more than two characters taking part. When multiple actors are moving, changing a range bracket with regard to any one character may change the range bracket you are in regarding all other characters. In this case, three new concepts must be introduced. Your start-ing range bracket is the range bracket you start movement at, and your ending range bracket is the range bracket you end movement at. Finally, sometimes the rules may ask for ranges with respect to the target. The target is the character you’re currently moving towards or away from.
When moving away from a character, all characters who have a range bracket that is closer than your ending range bracket replace their current range bracket with your ending range.
When moving towards a character, if any other char-acters have ranges with respect to the target greater than or equal to your starting range bracket but less than or equal to your starting range bracket, replace their current range bracket with your ending range bracket.
Positioning and Cover
Movement is also useful not just to alter range, but to alter positioning in combat. If a character wishes to get superior positioning on an enemy, the character rolls Dexterity + ics, and the target may either reflexively roll Dexterity + Athlet-ics or Wits + TactAthlet-ics to defend against the attempt. If the char-acter succeeds, each success up to a maximum of 5 adds +1 difficulty to the target’s defensive actions and +1d to the at-tacker’s attack rolls. This lasts for one turn. Furthermore, even 1 success eliminates any bonuses the character may get for cover.
Characters may also attempt to seek
cov-er/concealment. In this case, every success on a Dexterity + Athletics roll adds +1 difficulty to incoming ranged attacks, up to the limits of cover available in the area. This caps at a max-imum of +4 difficulty (total concealment against ranged attacks).
If a character wishes to change positioning and/or seek cover while also changing range brackets, successes on the Dexterity + Athletics movement roll must be split between changing range brackets, taking cover, and also seeking an advantageous position.
Speed Bonuses & Automatic
Suc-cesses
Some vehicles, such as race cars, helicopters, fighter jets, and sub-orbital airliners, are extraordinarily fast. Novas with Hypermovement can also achieve such speeds. To repre-sent this, fast-moving vehicles and novas gain automatic suc-cesses on Movement rolls, via their Speed, making them faster and also harder to hit. These automatic successes may only be added to rolls to alter range brackets-they may not be used on rolls to achieve superior positioning or seek cover.
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13
As with all automatic successes, these only apply if the character rolls a single success.
Special Movement Rules
Crawling/Shimmying: Prone characters, or char-acters who have temporarily (or permanently) lost the use of their legs, may attempt to crawl around in combat. Crawling al-lows the character to roll 1d for movement for every 5 dots of Dexterity + Athletics they possess, +1d for every dot of Mega-Dexterity they possess. This pool is also used for movement while shimmying on ledges, climbing, or similar hand-based movement.
Jumping: A successful Str + Might roll allows a character to literally jump into the action, adding an automatic success (+1 success for every dot of Mega-Strength) to a movement roll. Jumping may also be used to scale vertical ob-stacles (a waist-high fence or chest-high wall is +0 difficulty, while scaling a 3 meter high wall is +4 difficulty and leaping a building in a single bound is easily +9 or more). In the case of jumping to scale an obstacle, Mega-Strength adds 5 successes per dot instead of 1 success per dot. Unlike most movement methods, jumping is not a reflexive action.
Sprinting: Characters may also sprint, sacrificing offense and defense for additional movement speed. The character gains +2 automatic successes on movement rolls while sprinting, but is at +3 difficulty to all other actions.
Swimming: Characters normally swim at their crawling speed. While swimming all-out, they may swim at their walking speed.
Walking/Prowling: The default pace of combat movement is a fast jog, but occasionally characters may wish to move more slowly (or be forced to, by injuries). While walk-ing, characters halve their movement dice pool (round up).
Maneuvers
These maneuvers give you a variety of choices in combat. Roleplaying combat is more entertaining if you can visualize your character’s moves instead of simply rolling dice. Most of these maneuvers take one action to execute. New ma-neuvers can be added with Storyteller permission.
General Actions
These maneuvers cover various combat-related ac-tions which do not generally relate to directly hurting an enemy.
Aborting: A character can attempt to abort from her declared action to another action if she has not acted in the turn. The character can only do so if her declared action was invalidated (such as shooting a gun that was knocked from her hand). The new action, and any others taken, will be at a +1 difficulty penalty. The character also reduces all her DVs by 1 for the turn.
Aiming: The attacker adds +3d to her accuracy on a single attack for each action spent aiming. Additional aiming on subsequent turns increases this bonus up to a maximum of (Perception + 2) dice. Aiming may be used with either ranged or close combat attacks. A character may not take non-defensive actions while Aiming.
Getting to your feet: Characters may rise from the ground in one turn without making a roll. If a character wishes to get to her feet while doing something else in the same turn, she must take a multiple action (see “Multiple Actions,”) with an Athletics roll to rise successfully.
Guard: A Guarding character takes some action to restore their DVs. They catch their breath, reposition their weapon to receive attacks, recharge their powers, so on and so forth. The character rolls Stamina + Endurance, with every 2 successes or fraction thereof restoring 1 point of lost DV to a chosen defense value. This is not a reflexive action, and if tak-en in conjunction with other actions, uses the multiple action rules.
Movement: Moving is a Dexterity + Athletics roll. See details on how movement works below, in the Movement and Ranges section.
Readying a Weapon: In most cases, readying a weapon requires no roll. If the character wishes to ready a weapon without multiple action penalties, the player must roll (Dexterity + Melee) at +2 difficulty to ready a melee weapon or (Dexterity + Firearms) at +2 difficulty to ready a firearm.
Reloading: Almost all ranged weapons require some form of reloading. Reloading out of combat is automatic. However, reloading in combat or stressful situations generally uses a “Dexterity + Firearms” roll. Larger weapons often need extended rolls to reload. Most ‘modern’ firearms use detacha-ble magazines, stripper clips, or speedloaders and can be re-loaded in a single success on a Dexterity + Firearms roll. Ener-gy weapons, using disposable capacitor/battery packs, reload in the same fashion. Weapons with ‘loose’ ammunition, like bows, crossbows, rifles using non-detachable magazines, and revolvers without speedloaders reload 1 shot per success on a Dexterity + Firearms roll. Support weapons such as light ma-chine guns use belt feeds or box magazines and require 5 total successes on an extended Dexterity + Firearms roll to reload. Breechloading or muzzleloading weapons, such as RPGs, gre-nade launchers, anti-tank missiles, tank cannon, artillery, and so on require 10 + Size total successes on an extended Dex-terity + Firearms roll to reload. This normally requires an action, however, certain Enhancements may allow a character to re-load reflexively.
Yielding: The character allows the character with the next-highest initiative to act. She may still act at the end of the turn. If all characters (player and Storyteller) yield during a turn, no one does anything that turn
Defensive Actions
Most characters in combat seek to avoid getting hit as much as possible, and thus take defensive maneuvers to avoid being hurt.
There are two basic types of defensive actions: dodge and parry. Some novas have access to a third defensive action: the power block. Using these two (or three) maneuvers, your character can defend against virtually any kind of attack. However, your character may not be able to avoid every single attack that’s directed at her. She can’t dodge when there’s no room to maneuver, and she can’t parry if she doesn’t know an attack is coming.
Each defensive maneuver uses the same basic sys-tem: The opponent’s attack roll is compared to the defender’s defense value, or DV. Unless the attacker gets more success-es, he misses. If the attacker gets more successsuccess-es, those that he achieves in excess of the defender’s successes, if any, are
ABERRANT
used to hit (the attacker doesn’t necessarily use all thesuc-cesses he rolled). So even if the defender has fewer sucsuc-cesses than the attacker does, the defender’s maneuver can still re-duce the effectiveness of the attack, even if the maneuver can’t counteract it completely. Difficulty modifiers from any factors, such as Size, impairment, or so on, are added or subtracted from the defense value when it is compared with the attack roll. Dice penalties from wounds and other factors are also sub-tracted from DV directly, as if they were difficulty modifiers. Furthermore, every non-defensive action the character is plan-ning to take or has taken subtracts 1 from the character’s DV temporarily.
However, defending against attacks is tiring, and eventually a point is reached where a character may no longer effectively defend. Any attack which is dodged, parried, or power-blocked reduces the all of the character’s DVs by 1 as long as the attack rolls even a single success. Every 5 suc-cesses rolled further reduce the DV the target used by 1. These reductions are not until the end of the turn, and last until a Guard action is taken or until the end of the combat.
Dodge: An Athletics, Drive, or Pilot maneuver use-ful for avoiding attacks of all types. Your character (or the vehi-cle she’s driving/piloting) bobs and weaves to avoid Brawl or Melee attacks. This can be used against both melee and ranged attacks, although there are a few exceptions. If there’s no room to maneuver, she must block or parry instead. No characters can dodge an area attack without moving out of its area of effect. The Dodge DV is (Dexterity + Athletics) for char-acters and (Wits + Drive/Pilot + Handling) for vehicles.
Parry: A Brawl or Melee maneuver using a weapon to block a Brawl or Melee attack. If a character makes a Brawl attack and the defender parries with a weapon that normally causes Lethal damage effects, the attacker can actually be hurt by a successful parry. If the defender rolls more successes than the attacker does in the resisted action, the defender rolls the weapon’s base damage plus the parry’s extra successes against the attacker as automatic damage. Characters using their bare hands to parry attacks that deal Lethal damage re-duce their DVs by 2. The Parry DV is (Dexterity + Brawl/Melee + Weapon Defense) dependent on the type of parry (hand to hand uses Brawl, melee weapons use Melee). The character generally, but does not have to, use the weapon with the high-est defense for parrying. Reduction in Parry DV from blocking multiple attacks or from non-defensive actions applies equally to all weapons, not just to the weapon used to block the attack.
Power Block: Many quantum powers can be used as part of defensive actions. Barrier is the most likely power for such a feat, but Gravity Control, Elemental Mastery and similar powers can also provide protection against certain attacks. Some attack powers can literally shoot an incoming projectile out of the sky.
To perform a power block, the player takes a defen-sive action as normal, then simply substitutes her
Dexterity + power rating skill total for the normal parry or dodge roll. Each success on the power block roll subtracts one from the attack successes, as normal.
A power might be able to perform a power block against some maneuvers, but not against others. For example, Magnetic Mastery can certainly pull bullets off their trajectories, but it is useless against a flamethrower attack. The Storyteller must arbitrate power blocks on a case-by-case basis. The Power Block DV is (Power Dice Pool). Reduction in Power Block DV from blocking multiple attacks or from non-defensive actions applies equally to all powers, not just to the power used to block the attack. Some powers explicitly enhance dodges or
parries. Use those DVs instead if those powers are used in conjunction with a defense.
Close Combat Actions
A character attacking in close combat may make a simple Brawl or Melee attack. However, she may choose to use one of the following maneuvers to modify her attack. These maneuvers work only with unarmed attacks, unless the text specifies otherwise. The statistics for these maneuvers may be modified at the Storyteller’s discretion, depending on the combat style the character uses. As always, drama and ex-citement take precedence over rules systems.
Touch: Touching an opponent when he or she doesn’t want to be touched is much easier than actually hitting them with any level of force, but not guaranteed. However, a touch does no damage, and so this “attack” is only used when acti-vating Touch-range powers on unwilling targets. Touching a character may use Strength + Brawl or Dexterity + Brawl at the attacking character’s discretion even if the character lacks Mar-tial Arts.
Accuracy: +5 Damage: None Defense: +0
Grab: Grabbing a target deals no damage but initiates a grapple attempt. Grappling rules are listed below, in “Grappling Maneuvers”. Grabs can also be used to attempt to grab onto a speeding vehicle or swinging rope.
Accuracy: +3 Damage: None Defense: +0
Basic Attack: Basic kicks and punches have two stats-one for quick, fast attacks and another for heavy, powerful at-tacks. The statistics before the slash are for fast attacks, the statistics after the slash are for slow, powerful attacks.
Accuracy: +2/+0
Damage: Strength + 1B/3B Defense: +0
Disarm: When facing an armed enemy, turning the tables on the opponent by stealing their weapon is often advisable. A Disarm rolls the character’s attack pool (normally Strength + Brawl) versus the opponent's Strength + Might, Strength + Me-lee, or Strength + Brawl (the opponent may choose). If the character succeeds, the weapon is flung away from the oppo-nent. If the character succeeds with 5 or more successes, she may immediately take possession of the weapon. Disarms may be done with a weapon, in which case they use the weapon's attack pool and inflict half normal damage in addition to disarm-ing.
Accuracy: N/A (see text) Damage: N/A (see text) Defense: N/A
Tackle/Ram: Tackles (on foot) or Rams (when in a vehi-cle) involve running into the target at full speed, dealing fairly impressive amounts of injury to both parties. Tackling uses Strength + Brawl to hit, while Ramming uses Dexterity + Drive/Pilot to hit. In both cases, the target takes damage as listed below. The person or vehicle who initiated the Tackle or Ram takes damage equal to the victim’s Strength + the tackling character’s Dexterity or the ramming vehicle’s Speed.
