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Characters

When a Character Card is “locked” to a game, it creates a “Generated Character” for the duration of that game.

Every generated character in EXODE has background information (name, gender, planet of origin, faction), current status (health, wounds, stress level, current happiness) and a number of skills that we call their “profile”. The keywords on your Character Cards are called “traits” and affect the generation of background information and skills.

It should be noted that, in EXODE, for simplicity, skills encompass a very broad range of concepts so that the same mechanics can be used throughout. This removes many of the endless tables and memorization of traditional role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). Thus, not only do EXODE skills encompass traditional skills but also things that D&D considers innate abilities and attributes – so that all can be handled in exactly the same simplified, unified fashion.

For example, in many role-playing games, attributes like “Constitution” or “Dexterity” are numeric scores which may or may not modify things like hit points, saving throws or success chances (often requiring a table to sort out). In EXODE, your skill at not dying when damaged is directly equal to your TOUGHNESS * 2 (which is basically the same as D&D's hit points). Similarly, your chance of succeeding at the skill of not taking damage from a hit on the shields to which you are brain-wired (or dying from poison) simply requires a check against your TOUGHNESS (rather than figuring out which D&D saving throw table is most applicable).

Further, in EXODE, you

  • don't have to understand all of these profile skills,
  • most often don't know their exact values at the start of the game (see investigating and altering your generated crew), and
  • generally only have to pay attention to whether they have significantly good or bad values.

Helpfully, when generated characters do have exceptionally good or bad values (whether due to innate rolls or the effects of other characters and/or items), the associated trait appears on the visual representation of that generated character – so you can even ignore the skill scores entirely and just pay attention to their associated traits.

A complete list of character skills, their descriptions and their associated traits can be found here. A complete list of character traits, their descriptions and their associated skills can be found here.