Post by Jack Photon on Mar 28, 2022 6:53:52 GMT -5
The 1st and 2nd edition Familiar Faces Attributes and Skills are generally 'ridiculous', cherry-picked and cannot be generated using the game system. That's partly intentional as the Fanta crew held 1701 as an unattainable standard no PC could ever achieve or come close to. I disagree, but that's me.
1701 as a whole are indeed a step-above, but to my mind PC's should at least be able to go a few rounds with them even if 1701 ultimately 'wins'. Even Kirk has contemporary heroes. If Kirk himself is a hero, that makes those that much more.
No PC should be so great as to eclipse 1701, but could certainly be in 'friendly competition'. The 'greats' must come from somewhere and they should be the PC's of your campaign is my thinking. However, any PC that thinks they're so so-great should be introduced to the newer, younger, faster, smarter kid that just moved in next door.
We will see that even among the 1701 crew, there are 'greats' and 'normals' in the mix.
The only way that I can see to get a fair look at the 1701 crew and thereby set any kind of standards or dice equivalencies for everyone else in the galaxy is to lay all their Atts out in a matrix such as this and compare and contrast each Att relative to each character.
Here's my take on the numbers.
For these purposes, this math assumes the LUC and PSI are natural rolls and no bonus points have gone to them. This leaves six Atts of STR, END, INT, DEX, CHA, COOL. If you don't like COOL, drop it and sub LUC as the 6th Attribute for these purposes.
There are only two anchors in the chart above, Kirk's STR and Spock's INT. Everyone else is based around those and then relative to each other. Kirk must be able to throw a big punch, so is set to min of STR 76. Spock's INT 102 is okay by me from 1st edition. Then it's all 'Is McCoy stronger than Scotty or Uhura and how does Rand compare', and so on. Sulu is likely as strong as Kirk, but no one else is and since the next threshold is STR 50 for dice and 55 for SFC, it doesn't matter the actual number values. With all that set in place, who is stronger than each other, who is smarter, faster, talkative, etc. Change this, tweak that, set those there.
Kirk is the best as he is the star. He is the ideal mold that everyone flows from. Characters are listed by importance or arrival, so chekov is down bottom. To round an even dozen I threw Hadley in as he is the most bad-ass of them all.
To set numbers, I went with game mechanics, so for END or DEX, any singles column is rounded away so doesn't matter if a 71 or 79, it's still a 7. Right?
So in that regard, I went for plateaus. I chose each ATT as a player would, looking for die mods on the generation charts and so on. I allow Caitians to round DEX down/up for AP purposes so MRess has an 86 for 13AP instead of 12AP as an 85 would round down to 80 for Caitiains. But we digress. Whether you agree with given numbers, we'll go with what I've done here while you go about creating and posting your own analysis.
Mean Dice
The next chart takes the above and averages and counts the pips.
3d10+40+bonus points. Max avg ATT = 78.
That is 48 Bonus Points divided evenly across 6 Atts. The 2 straggler points making 50 bonus points are unimportant for these purposes.
The following math assumes each character rolled three 10's for a 70 and then has up to 50 bonus points available. (Read as: 70+50)
Every Attribute above 70 counts as bonus points spent while every ATT below 70 counts as 'bonus points accrued' (as it were) for math purposes. 55 is Starfleet minimum.
Assuming a 5.5 on 1d10 is the bell curve, that is 40+16.5=56.5 average Attribute. If average % is 25 bonus points, that is +4 each for ATT 60.5. The following math assumes mean 61 rather than 60.
This analysis also resulted in the chart at the top right; Hero, Co-star, etc. I'll get back to that later.
MAX 70+50. Each character's Atts are counted as above or below 70 and disregards Species modifiers. The mean is 70 - 54 bonus points for an average ATT 61.
This resulted in the bottom right results of Kirk at avg 77 to Rand at 59 and everyone in-between. The 40+16.5+4=61 puts the average PC just above Rand while Shatner at the top rolled three 10's and 46 bonus points for Kirk. Nimoy did well with 27 bonus points and Takai with 21. Everyone else did not need to roll straight 10's and therefore have 'negative bonus points' as if they had rolled 10's. Right, rights? So while Spock lists at 70+27, McCoy is 70-17.
I can say from this chart that I like to have my PC's be in the average roll of 3x7's+24bp's yielding a Chekov to McCoy/Scotty range. Hadley is the next plateau at 3x8+24bps. The ordered list bottom right is interesting as the ATTs are steady from Rand at 59 to Hadley at 68, then there's the jump to Sulu, Spock and Kirk.
59, 60, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 67, 68, 73, 75, 77.
That's an interesting number set. I wonder if there's something to the gaps or if it's just coincidence.
If you, the GM, allow no re-rolls, your PC's are Rand - Uhura.
Re-roll 1 & 2's and your PCs are now in the MRess - Hadley range.
Re-roll 3's for McCoy - Sulu.
I will guess that re-roll on 4s if not 5's puts you are in the Spock/Kirk range with big bonus points to boot.
That gets back to the top right chart of Super-hero, Hero, Co-Star, Support and Background actors.
Roll LUC/PSI normal but...
If you want a fast Co-Star, assume base 60, add 1d10(d10) bonus points.
If you need a Kirk, base 70 + 1d10(d10) bonus points.
If you need a Garth, roll Super-hero 80+. Daystrom might be in there as Spock's super-hero.
Any titan of the era would count as super-hero.
A Dr. Sevrin, Korby or Adams would count in this framing... Lawrence Marvick as Scott's super-hero...
I guess Perhaps Larry is the quiet, unassuming super-hero type in sheep's clothing. lolz.