In the game of Freejacks, you play a character who lives somewhere in the big wide universe. Each character has a set of statistics recorded on a character sheet that tell you how good he or she is at something.
The statistics are broken down into two categories, Attributes and Skills. Attributes are a more personal set of stats that every character shares. Skills are a way of customising your character -- a tracker would have a different set of skills to a smuggler, and they would be different to a starship pilot, and so on.
Skills come in several broad categories such as Shooting, Computers, etc, and are honed down to specifics using Specialisations (or Specs for short). For example, a tracker with a Shooting skill might specialise in pistols, so he would take the Pistols Spec. This enables a character to shoot any type of gun, but offers a bonus when using something that he might have had extra training in.
Skills and Attributes are written in the form of "1d", "2d", etc on the character sheet. Each number prepending the "d" is the number of six-sided dice allocated to that skill. When making a test against that Skill, the player would roll the number of dice shown on his character's Skill. The tracker above might have a Shooting skill of 4d, so he would roll 4 six-sided dice and compare that to a Difficulty Number (more on that later) to determine whether he is successful.
The Specs take the format of "+1", "+2", etc. These are effectively Modifiers, in that they modify the score you get with the associated Skill. So, again, taking the example of the tracker with a Shooting skill of 4d, we'll assume he has a Pistols spec of +3. This means that when trying to shoot something (or someone), our unnamed tracker would roll 4 six-sided dice, add the results together, then add +3 to the total. This gets compared to a Difficulty Number and will lead to success or failure.
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Difficulty Numbers (or DNs) are used to determine how difficult a task might be. For example, bargaining with a street vendor to get a better price on the bread stick you want to buy might be an Easy task, but performing emergency field surgery on a crew mate while you're out in the back waters of Arsefuck, Redneckville, hidden behind a rock while the local law are shooting at you might rate as Near Impossible.
The Difficulty Numbers are ranked in six tiers, from Trivial to Near Impossible. This makes it easy to "bump" a difficulty roll to the next tier without having to do complicated mathematics.
The table shows the tier, the Difficulty Number, and what you need to roll to achieve success. It also has a couple of other useful columns including the default DNs for weapon range, and for damage saving (more on the latter in the Combat chapter).
However, it's likely that these won't be the final DNs that your characters will be rolling against. The GM will add any modifiers he or she deems appropriate, but an example might be Mr Tracker trying to shoot some mofos that done him wrong. They're at medium range, so his base DN will be 12. However, they're also using some crates as cover, so the GM assigns a modifier of +3. This means that Mr Tracker's player will have to roll his 4d+3, and will need to roll 15 or over. It suddenly gets a little tougher. Of course, for simplicity's sake, the GM may have just chosen to bump the DN to the next tier. Both are equally valid, but the former method allows the GM to fine tune difficulties by only adding modifiers of +1 or +2.
| Tier | DN | Roll | Range | Save |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Trivial | 4 | Point Blank | Half Damage |
| 2 | Easy | 8 | Short | |
| 3 | Average | 12 | Medium | No Damage |
| 4 | Tough | 16 | Long | |
| 5 | Very Tough | 20 | ||
| 6 | Near Impossible | 25 |
When you create your character, you will be given a number of points that you can allocate to Attributes and Skills. The ATTs are Physical (PHY), Perception (PER), Agility (AGI), Intelligence (INT), Willpower (WIL), and Charisma (CHA). Skills cover such things as firing a gun, hacking computers, piloting a starship, and so on.
This covers the characters physical strength and general physique. For example, PHY can be called upon when you need strength to do something that there isn't a specific Skill for such as levering open a stuck compartment hatch. It is also used to determine how many Hit Points a starting character has.
This tells you how alert your character is and what they notice when they're not specifically looking for something. For example, if you are sitting with your friends in a bar and someone who wants to kill you walks in, your GM will most likely ask you to roll your PER to see if you notice him.
This covers how nimble and dextrous your character is. He might be trying to balance on a rope strung between two buildings and would need to roll against his AGI to see if he doesn't fall off.
Some people have got brains, some don't. Intelligence covers everything from education to logic and the abiliy to work out problems. For example, if your character needs to remember some vital piece of local history to impress someone or worm his way out of trouble, then you would make an INT check to see if he knows it, or if he remembers it.
This covers mental strength. If your character is at a really good strip joint, but has to meet an important business associate or he will lose out on a big payoff, he might have to roll his WIL to see if he can drag himself out of the dancer's cleavage.
This covers everything from the ability to socialise to how one behaves in polite company. It is also a useful trait among leaders, false prophets, and salesmen. If your character was trying to impress an important lady at a ball, you might want to roll his CHA to see if he pulls it off.
Skills are broad generalisations and Specs are, well obviously, specialties. Skills are listed below with their associated Specs in brackets. Not all Skills have Specs, but that's not to say you can't make some up if you can think of them; same for any Skill. In fact, with the GMs approval you can even make up your own Skills. The idea is to customise your character in a personal and unique way.
If a character doesn't have a particular Skill, then he should roll an appropriate Attribute, but against a tougher DN. This should be at the GMs discretion, but should be 1 tier higher for non-technical tasks, and 2 tiers or more for technical or highly specialised knowledge.
For example, if Jeff wants to fire a gun but doesn't have the Shooting skill, then he'd probably only face a DN of 1 tier higher than a skilled person would. I mean, how hard is it to fire a gun right? Point it in the right direction and pull the trigger. Now reprogramming your ship's firewall software is probably gonna take a bit more head scratching.
Specs: electronics, explosives
This is a basic skill of improvisation. Spies have it. MacGuyver has it in spades. The A-Team have it. It's the ability to make stuff out of any old crap that may be lying around. Maybe you're able to futz with electronics to jury rig a small alarm to notify you when the guards have approached the safe you're trying to break into. Perhaps you can build explosives out of bleach, pudding, and toilet paper.
Specs: programming, crawling, bot AI, firewalls, hacking, cryptography
Using a computer might be basic enough, well, except for my dad, but anything complicated like writing a program, crawling (aka searching, or digging for info), futzing with bot AIs, hacking into peoples' networks, setting up firewalls, or breaking them down, all take a bit more skill and dedication to the silicon Gods.
Specs: handguns, rifles, semi-autos, full-autos, plasmas, flamers
This should be pretty straightforward. Guns go bang, knowledge of them helps you ensure it's not your feet going splat.
Specs: brawling, martial arts, improvised weapons
Unarmed combat is covered under melee, everything from bar brawling to martial arts.
Specs: wheeled, tracked, hovercar, bike, truck, convoy, evasive
Drive covers driving (oddly enough) land-bound vehicles; be they with wheels, tracks, hovering in thin air, or whatever. Getaway drivers, cops and mercs sometimes need to know how to drive in high speed convoys and how to drive evasively without wrapping your vehicle around the nearest power pole.
Specs: starship, subatmos, helicopters, evasive
This covers any kind of flying. Sub-atmos planes and starships are generally pretty similar, hence coming under the same general Skill, but the little things like landing and taking off can sometimes be a bit different.
Specs: none
A few militaries and private security firms use walkers, but these are pretty rare as most tasks that were favoured by walkers (or Meat Socks as they are more colourfully known) are now done by bots -- no meat inside to be harmed.
Specs: climb, jump, endurance, dodge
This could be anything from your character being a gym bunny to a marine to a professional athlete, but typically implies someone who is physically very fit. Other Specs you may want to consider are distance running (useful for everyone from the long distance runner to the local hood who's always running from the law, to the local lawman who is always chasing that damn burglar), swimming, or whatever you feel fits into your personal profile.
Specs: con, persuade, bargain
There are some folk who know the shadier side of the street like the back of their hand. Put them in any new city and pretty soon they'll have a bunch of friends in low places. Or they'll know how to score you some quality drugs. Of course, this riff-raff don't often like to tell the truth, they also know how to talk up a deal to make you see the up-side, even if there isn't one.
Specs: bot repair, computer repair, weapon repair, electronics
This field is a little broader, but computers, bots, and all manner of consumer electronics are made out of the same stuff. Chips, circuit boards, wires, and other fancy stuff that you'll have to ask the engineers about for more detail.
Specs: none
Stealth can be anything from general sneakiness, to being able to hide in shadows, to breaking into someone's house undetected.
Specs: first aid, revive, surgery, forensics
Doctors, medical technicians, street docs, and witch doctors all know a thing or two about patching people up, or so we'd like to think. If you want to play a real doctor, then you might want to make your own skill and assign your own specs, but this will suffice for everyday play.
Specs: none
Even though computers do a lot of the navigation work for you when you're travelling at face melting speeds across the cosmos, it still helps to be able to read the charts and the warning signs should they crop up. This is a very different skill from flying a ship and involves the sort of serious mathematics that has numbers, letters, little triangles and other odd shapes that don't look like they should have a place in my two times table.
Specs: none
A separate skill from normal shooties, in which the user knows how to use the complex tracking systems of a ship-mounted turret.
Specs: none
Not just practical knowledge of creating explosives, Demolitions is also the art of knowing where to place charges to bring down a building with little or no "collateral" damage. Feel free to add your own Specs for working with specific explosives, or building demolition, or whatever best fits your character's background.
Specs: none
Resisting torture is a skill that some militaries teach their soldiers. It involves a certain amount of mental willpower, but also the ability to withstand pain. Sometimes this can be "switching off" pain recepticles, and sometimes it's just gritting your teeth and thinking happy thoughts.
Specs: none
This is the art of concealing your true features.
Specs: IDs, documents, signatures
Creating forgeries is big business. People want to disappear, or they want to buy items normally restricted, or they want some legal documents claiming ownership of something, or they want to claim to be somebody they're not. This is the skill of creating different forged documents.
Specs: cards, blackjack, poker, dice, one-arm bandits
Games of chance, games of skill, but always games of high risk for big reward. Have you got the skills to take on the best at the biggest casinos?
Specs: whatever you want specialised knowledge of
This Skill should be treated a bit differently. For example, it's not logical to have a generic Knowledge Skill with a bunch of unrelated Specs. You could, however, have Intergalactic Confederation Knowledge and have Specs in History, Important People, and so on. This should be used in close consultation with your GM.
The first step is to look at the Level Progression table to see how many points your character gets at first level. For example, a starting players gets 20 points to allocate to Attributes, and 50 to allocate to Skill points.
1. Allocate 20 points to Attributes 2. Roll (Int+10)x2 for points to allocate to Skills and Specs OR pick a default career template 3. Roll Phy to work out your character's Hit Points (HP) 4. Work out extra stats as necessary 5. Figure out your character's financial status 6. Buy some stuff 7. Work out your character's background
That's all there is to it. Once you're used to the game and the Skills, it shouldn't take you more than a few minutes to generate a new character.
The following table is the Level Progression table and shows how a character advances through the levels, what extra points they get to allocate to Skills and Attributes, what extra HP, and so on.
| Level | XP | HP | Max Karma | Max Spec. | Attribute Points | Skill Points | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0 | Phy | 5 | +5 | 20 | (Int+10) x 2 | 1 |
| 2 | 500 | +Phy/2 | Int | ||||
| 3 | 1250 | +Phy/2 | 6 | +6 | +1 | Int | 2 |
| 4 | 2250 | +Phy/2 | Int | ||||
| 5 | 3500 | +Phy | 7 | +7 | +1 | Int+5 | |
| 6 | 5000 | +Phy/2 | +1 | Int | |||
| 7 | 6750 | +Phy/2 | 8 | +8 | Int | 3 | |
| 8 | 8750 | +Phy/2 | Int | ||||
| 9 | 11,000 | +Phy/2 | 9 | +9 | +1 | Int | |
| 10 | 15,000 | +Phy | +1 | Int+5 | |||
| 11 | 18,000 | +Phy/2 | 10 | +10 | Int | ||
| 12 | 21,500 | +Phy/2 | +1 | Int | 4 | ||
| 13 | 25,500 | +Phy/2 | 11 | +11 | Int | ||
| 14 | 30,000 | +Phy/2 | Int | ||||
| 15 | 37,000 | +Phy+5 | 12 | +13 | +2 | Int+10 | 5 |
All characters get 20 points to allocate to Attributes for a starting character. Attributes can be bought on a one-for-one basis; i.e.; 1 Attribute point buys you 1d for an Attribute of your choice.
Characters can choose a career template (archetype) to make character design simpler and faster, or players can assign the starting points among Skills of their choice. Starting characters roll their Int, add 10 to that result, and multiply the total by 2. This should give you a lot of points to spend, but you can refer to the Level Progression Table to see how many points your character gets as he progresses through the levels.
Skills cost 3 points for 1d, and Specs cost 1 skill point for each +1 you allocate.
As your character advances through levels, the Spec Modifier maximums increase allowing higher level characters to be much better at something than a starting character. At level one, a character can only have a maximum of +5 on any of their Specs. When the character reaches level 3, the maximum for all Specs is increased to +6. This doesn't mean that all your Specs are automatically increased -- what it means is that when you allocate more points, you can now increase any Specs to +6, instead of the +5 restriction you had at levels one and two.
Again, referring to the Level Progression table, you can see that starting characters roll their Phy score to get their Hit Points total. Roll a number of six-sided dice equal to your PHY Attribute and record that number next to HP on your character sheet. For example, if you have a PHY of 4d, then roll four six-sided dice and add up the total. Nice GMs might let you roll again if you roll all ones, or may allow a minimum HP score for all starting characters. Heck, some GMs are wonderfully generous and allow first level characters the maximum automatically. But this generosity can be pretty rare (and doesn't really provide enough of a challenge).
On your character sheet you will see a few other stats, such as Armour, Karma, Actions, and so on.
Initiative isn't a listed Statistic, but instead is equal to your character's AGI. When in combat (see Chapter 3), the GM will ask each character to roll their Initiative at which point everybody rolls their AGI score and determine the order that the combat happens.
Each character can make one Action per combat round at level one. As the character progresses in experience and levels, he gains more Actions. For example, each character gains one more Action at level three, and another at level seven. See the Level Progression table for details.
This is an optional rule allowing GMs and players to add more depth to the game, and focus on the heroic nature of characters in role-playing games. Each character has a limit on how many Karma points they can accrue depending on what level they are. For example, a starting character can only accumulate a maximum of 5 Karma points at level one.
Karma points are given out by the GM for players who do heroic or selfless acts. A newly created character has no Karma points and gains them as rewards during play. These points can be accumulated between game sessions for use at critical junctures in the game. A player who spends a Karma point that she has earned can roll one extra d6 for any Skill or Attribute roll. It is possible to use multiple Karma points to increase your chances in succeeding.
All armour has an Armour Rating using the same format as Skills – a number of d6's and sometimes a Modifier. Once your character buys armour, record the Armour Rating on your character sheet.
Experience points (or XP) are rewards players get for participating in adventures. As characters accumulate more XP, they are able to advance in levels, and in turn level advancement allows the characters to increase their Skills and abilities.
The universal monetary system in Freejacks is the Confederation Credit (cc), often just called the Credit. Credits come in one form: credit chips. There are three common types of credit chips (or credchips). The difference is in their shapes, but all are approximately one inch across.
The most common in use in the Intergalactic Confederation is a hexagonal plastic card with a display on it that reads the number of credits it holds. These credchips come in multiple permanent denominations; 1cc, 5cc, 25cc, 100cc. They contain circuits that emit a frequency enabling their value and validity to be registered by being scanned.
The second most common type of credchip is the p-chip, or personal chip. It is like a personal credit card that allows access to the owner's entire bank balance. These can also be scanned, but each transaction must be cryptographically authenticated by the owner before any amount is transferred. P-chips are square with rounded edges and their display shows a holographic image of the owner's face and their name and unique ID number.
The final type of credchip is a bankchip and is round. Its display shows the amount of money it is valid for and an imprint of the bank that issued it. A bankchip is special in that once the amount has been transferred to a p-chip or directly into a bank account, it is wiped and becomes void. A voided bankchip's display shows the word VOID. Bankchips are one-read only, and require online authentication from the issuing bank before the amount can be transferred. Authentication will fail if a partial transfer is attempted, so all the money must be extracted or nothing.
Starting players get their own p-chip with 5d6 x 100 credits to start with, although the GM may adjust this if he feels you or your group are richer or poorer than normal.
Once you've worked out how much money your character will have, go to Chapter 4 and spend up large.
Now it's time to flesh out your character. Spend as much or as little time as you like, but consider things like his past career, family, friends, business connections, and so on. A lot of GMs like to work with their players, either individually or together in a group to figure this stuff out. This is a good idea because it means that you can help the GM come up with friends and enemies that will be intertwined into the game.
This makes for a much more interesting and personal experience.
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