I'm getting close to my first draft of the character creation mechanics and I think it is worth outlining some of my ideas around "health", skills and traits in my system.
Breath (Health)
The characters in BTTL won't have a hit point or health counter as you might see in other rpg system. A player's overall "health" is instead tied to a stat called Breath and their Characteristics.
Breath is your character's ability to act during intense situations. Damage taken by the character is first applied to their Breath before it is subtracted from the appropriate Characteristic. Characters may choose to spend their breath to take more drastic actions during combat, use combat abilities, or to cast spells.
Once a player reaches zero (0) breath, any additional damage is applied to the appropriate characteristics.
At the conclusion of combat or a strenuous activity, characters may rest for ten minutes to "Catch their breath" and restore their points.
Characteristics
Characteristics represent a character's innate abilities, their physical capability, and mental acuteness. Characteristics are comprised of two numbers, which when added will total 20. If you are familiar with games like Call of Cthulhu or D&D, then this would be the closets representation to a Skill in one of those systems.
The purpose of the two number system is to be able to establish a Difficulty Check (DC) score for characters to roll against yours as well as a Saving Through score for a character to roll against themselves. Characters will only roll dice if they are the ones taking an action. They will either roll to beat another character’s DC or roll a ST roll if there is a risk to themselves.
You might be asking why, for these two numbers? The reason is to maintain a "roll above" system while maintaining some sort of target number that is directly tied to the character in the challenge. I could have kept the math simpler by having players roll under for one type of stat and roll above for another, but while doing a quick survey with my personal play groups, my players just didn't like roll under systems. They wanted to "roll 20" for success.
The example below will exaplain a common example of how the system is expected to work.
Example
Player 1 rolls 3d6 for their character Elsa's Strength, Dexterity and Fortitude with the following results: 11, 13 and 5.
| Characteristic | DC Check | Saving Throw |
|---|---|---|
| Str | 11 | 9 |
| Dex | 13 | 7 |
| Frt | 5 | 15 |
A thief is trying to pickpocket Elsa, but Elsa is pretty dextrous meaning that she has a high chance of detecting the thief trying to pickpocket her. The thief will roll 1d20 and must beat Elsa’s DC of 13 in order to be successful. The thief rolls a 9 and is caught by Elsa. The thief turns and makes a run for it sprinting across a roof top and jumping to the next building.
Elsa pursues the thief and makes a jump across the gap between the buildings. This is a dangerous jump so Elsa will need to make a Saving Throw to see if she makes it. She needs to roll a 7 or higher on her Dex to successfully make the jump. She rolls an 11 and successfully jumps over the gap.