Take a bit of time to think of what type of character you would like to play. Have a look in the careers section to see if anything catches your eye. Maybe you have a favourite character from a book or film that you'd like to play.
These are a person's main attributes and are ranked from 1 to 10, with 1 being very poor, five being average and 10 being outstanding. Technology and genetic engineering have improved many things and it is possible to have stats of 10 or more.
|
Characteristic
|
Abreviation
|
Description
|
|
Strength
|
STR
|
A character's raw strength. A high strength means your character can lift or move heavy objects. |
|
Health
|
HT
|
How healthy the character is. Low health characters fall ill frequently and take longer to heal wounds. |
|
Quickness
|
QUI
|
A character's physical ability from general agility to complex hand to eye co-ordination. |
|
Dexterity
|
DEX
|
The ability to finely manipulate objects. |
|
Spirit
|
SPR
|
This is the strength of a character's soul or inner being. Characters can have a high spirit rating, yet be spiritually unaware. |
|
Intelligence
|
INT
|
A measure of the character's reasoning abilities and memory. |
|
Willpower
|
WP
|
Literally, the strength of will. Low willpower characters fold under an argument; high willpower people can be as stubborn as hell. |
|
Charisma
|
CHA
|
This is that special quality that gives someone presence; the knack of what to say and to some extent, how well they react with other people. |
|
Appearance
|
APP
|
This is not a numerical value but a rated one, eg: ugly, average, attractive, etc. Click here for more info. |
A character's primary stats are used to create derived characteritics and base ratings. Derived stats are things such as a person's endurance or how fast they can run. Base ratings, however, are used to calculate how well a person performs when attempting a task.
When creating a character you need to assign values to the main stats. The minimum value for all stats is 1 and costs very little. Now, although stats are considered to be rated from 1 - 10, it is possible to have values that are above 10.
A person's race will affect their characteristics - now in Dark Age this does not mean a character's ethnenticity (i.e: indian, irish, caucasion or asian) but their genetic race. Humans have tampered with their bodies either through genetics or with surgery. This is covered briefly below and a full description of the various races can be found here.
In Dark Age, abilities and skills cost character points, sometimes written as "CP". Five is considered the average stat; one is the lowest and ten is the maximum (at least for unmodified humans). You have 100 points to spend on these stats but:
You can increase or decrease this value by selecting some quirks (details are here and there's an overview too).
It can cost character points if you choose a race other than human. See your race's description for more info.
| Stat | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| Cost | +20 | +15 | +10 | +5 | +0 | -5 | -10 | -15 | -20 | -30 |
If you are going to play a modified human, refer to that race's description there may be stat modifiers. You can find a javascript character generation here.
Example: I want Harry to be a computer expert, so I give him a high intelligence and dexterity (for repairs). Harry's 10 INT costs 30 points and his 8 DEX costs another 15 character points. That only leaves me with 75 points to spend over the remaining stats. If I thought that didn't leave me with enough points to play with, I could select some quirks to boost Harry's stat pool. If Harry was a Meta then he'd get a +1 bonus to his intelligence stat boosting it to 11 although I only pay for the stat at rank 10.
Once you've assigned all your character points, it's time to work out your derived characteristics.