Datafiles

Datafile is what this system calls what in other systems is simply referred to as your character sheet.

Your datafile provides all of your character’s statistics, gear, powers, listings of NPC contacts, and so on. XXXA blank one is available hereXXX.

Primary Abilities

Your datafile has the following primary abilities:

• Fighting: hand-to-hand combat prowess.
• Agility: dexterity and maneuverability.
• Strength: raw physical might.
• Endurance: physical stamina and durability.
• Reason: logical acumen, intellect, and complex problem-solving.
• Intuition: instinctive insight, social awareness.
• Psyche: force of personality, willpower.

Secondary Traits

You also have a number of other traits:

Profiles

Roleplaying choices and guidelines that grow and change your character’s role in the world. These provide you with a metagame currency called Karma.

Karma

Your accrued bonus points for roleplaying your character (determined by your Profiles), which can be spent to improve your character’s luck or call in extra help.

Initiative

Your placement in the action order sequence during combat or social interaction scenes (see COMBAT).

Health & Damage

Your hit points; a static number that represents your overall physical well being. Normally, it is equal to the sum of your FASE Rank Numbers. When you get injured, you accrue Damage. Once it equals your Health, you’re not dead right away, but it’s certainly a growing concern! (See COMBAT.)

Resolve & Stress

Your emotional and mental well being. Normally, it is equal to the sum of your RIP Rank Numbers. When you face social, psychological, or psychic damage, you accrue Stress. Once it equals your Resolve, you’re stressed out. (See SOCIAL INTERACTION.)

Popularity

How the general public views you. This is a modifier used in social interactions with NPCs (see SOCIAL INTERACTION).

Resources

Your access to money and financial assets. Used to buy stuff, access or requisition things, invent new stuff, or apply financial leverage.

Powers & Gear

The cool stuff you can do that nobody else can. Otherwise known as abilities. See SUPER POWERS & GEAR.

Talents

Learned skills or innate competencies that give you a boost on applicable dice rolls. Generally, they provide a +1R to applicable rolls, and they stack, so if you’ve got three that make sense, add +3R! Some Talents have special rules, though, and are described in TALENTS.

Affiliations & Contacts

NPCs you are connected to who can provide you aid (see Profiles and Karma, as well as SOCIAL INTERACTION).

Ranks

Your primary abilities and some secondary traits each has a Rank consisting of its name and a Rank Number used to determine some effects.

• NULL for Zero (0)
• WK 2 for Weak (2)
• MD 4 for Mediocre (4)
• AV 6 for Average (as in average human; 6)
• GD 10 for Good (10)
• EX 20 for Excellent (20)
• RM 30 for Remarkable (30)
• IN 40 for Incredible (40)
• AM 50 for Amazing (50)
• SP 75 for Spectacular (75)
• UN 100 for Uncanny (100)
• X150 for Extreme (150)
• X200 for Extreme (200)
• X500 for Extreme (500)
• C1k for Cosmic (1000)
• C3k for Cosmic (3000)
• C5k for Cosmic (5000)

The Rank is what is used to determine which column on the Uni-Table you reference for your dice roll results. The higher the Rank, the better your odds of achieving success (Green result), or exceptional success (Yellow and Red results).

Your Rank is modified by things like Talents and situational modifiers. There are relatively few situational modifiers, in order to keep things fast moving.

The Rank Number comes into play when you might punch a villain or fire a repulsor ray, damaging them. You might try to bust through a wall, or catch a fast-moving object. You might try to stress an opponent out, intimidating them or breaking down their willpower through interrogation. In all these cases, you will reference the Rank Number of some pertinent ability or trait, and that is the amount of effect you have. For example, your Strength is the damage you deal on a punch: if you have RM 30 Strength, you deal 30 points of damage when you punch someone.

Use the Rank Descriptions table for a general overview.

Profiles

Profiles are clever roleplaying cues that reinforce who your hero is, what they stand for, and how they grow and change over the course of a session or larger campaign.

Playing to these cues nets you a metacurrency called Karma, which you can spend to improve your rolls, shake off detrimental effects, or call in help.

Anatomy of Profiles

A Profile — you’ll have two of them — is kinda like a personalized story arc for your character. Choose ones that help you tell the story you want to tell about your character.

Each has different roleplaying activities you take to carry them out and hit their milestones…

An example would be Born Leader:

• +2 Karma when you give orders to your team.
• +5 Karma when you take advice from a teammate to heart, or rely on teamwork to defeat a villain.
• +10 Karma when you survive a major encounter without your team’s help, or when you sacrifice in order to give your team a chance to fight again another day.

Milestones

Milestones are written like this: “+2 Karma when you…” and then list some things the Hero would often do. This is called a “milestone”: if you do the thing, you get the Karma for doing the thing. For example, you might have a milestone that says: “+2 Karma when you say ‘Heroes Assemble!’ for the first time in a battle.” Literally every time you say that, you get 2 Karma.

You’ll notice that all characters in Let’s Start Over, Shall We? get a single +1 Karma milestone for quoting superhero movies or shows in a contextually appropriate way. That’s because it’s both fun and easy to do! (“Easy” because you can find character quotes on a bunch of movie sites.) You can double-dip on a single milestone, hit two milestones at the same time, and so on. Generally that doesn’t happen often, but it’s possible. Don’t be afraid to ask the GM if you’re unsure.

Once you hit the +10 Karma milestone in a Profile you can choose to stick with the Profile you have and play through it again, or you can say it’s “closed out” and change to a new one to highlight a new story arc for your character. (You can change Profiles anytime you want between sessions, too: you don’t have to close one out, just decide and make it so!)

The following are loose guidelines on the different milestones and the frequency that you can get rewarded Karma for them.

• +2 Karma milestones can be hit as many times in a scene as you want or can conceivably do. Every character comes with a bonus +1 Karma milestone involving quotes, so feel free to memorize movie dialogue or keep a print out of character-specific quotes on hand!
• +5 Karma milestones generally are big enough story beats that you only hit them once in a scene, and you won’t hit them every scene. Don’t force it.
• +10 Karma milestones are always a hard choice: “+10 Karma if you do ABC, or if you do the opposite XYZ.” These usually only happen once in a given game session, if that; sometimes they take many sessions before they come to fruition.

Tracking Karma

Keep a running total of your Karma, modifying it when you spend it (more on that in a moment). It otherwise never goes away, though, and doesn’t reset. Whatever you have at the end of a game session is what you start with at the next game session!

Starting Karma

You start a campaign with Karma equal to your Resolve divided by 10. If you ever lose track of how much Karma you had, default to that number.

Optional Rule: Session Karma

If players get a little crazy about banking their Karma for big events — something more common in campaign play— you can have them reset their Karma each session to the starting amount of their Resolve divided by 10.

Spending Karma

Karma can be spent to improve your dice rolls, resist some debilitating effects, or call in a little help. These are all immediate things you do during the game session. Think of Karma like “Save Your Butt” Points.

Here’s what you can do and how much Karma it costs:

Improve Your Roll!

1 Karma = +1 to your percentile dice roll. So if you roll a 50 and get a Green result on the Uni-Table, but needed a 55 in order to get a Yellow result on the Uni-Table, you would need to spend 5 Karma.

Shake Off Stun!

1 Karma = Reduce the duration of a Stun effect by 1 round. If you get knocked out in a fight for 4 rounds, you could spend 1 Karma and be awake in 3 rounds, or 4 Karma and wake up on your very next turn! “I can do this all day…” I Know Someone…

5 Karma = Establish a new, temporary contact for a scene. This is someone not listed on your datafile. For example, a rich playboy can reasonably call the editor of TIMELY Magazine and for 5 Karma say they get along great and kill a story that’s about to up-end his latest PR campaign.

Hey, Buddy!

10 Karma = Call in a supporting character for a scene. This is a Contact on your sheet. Normally, you can call them up or visit them without spending Karma, but if you want them on scene (or to physically affect the scene through remote resources or something like that) when the action gets going, you gotta spend the Karma. (Your listed contacts are always going to be more meaningful assets than a 5 Karma temporary one.)

Stay With Me!

15 Karma = Stabilize Endurance loss for 1 round. When you are dying, you start losing Ranks off of your Endurance. This slows that down…but doesn’t stop it! Hope your buddies know first aid… (See COMBAT.)

Character Creation

Now that you know all the parts of the character sheet, the question is “how do you create a character?” There are three ways:

• Narrative
• Standard Array
• Random

Narrative Character Creation Method

So, how do you create a character for an Astonishing Super Heroes game? That is the focus of a whole other book!

With the rules presented here, you can easily emulate any character you’ve seen in popular media simply by assigning them the values that most make sense. The rules you’ll find in the COMBAT and SOCIAL INTERACTION rules will prove that game balance is not as big a factor as you might find in some games: a character who has incredibly high physical abilities and lots of Health can still get stressed out, just like a powerful psychic character with all the Resolve in the world can still be beaten to a pulp if they take too much damage.

The Astonishing Super Heroes character creation and advancement systems will be presented separately, with a host of options in order to help you build the types of heroes you want to play. In addition, a number of pregenerated heroes and hero templates will be included to make it easy to jump right into the action!

Summary

1. Your primary abilities are FASERIP: Fighting, Agility, Strength, Endurance, Reason, Intuition, Psyche.
2. You have a bunch of secondary traits such as combat-related scores (Initiative), financial assets (Resources), overall condition (Health), and more.
3. A Profile is a little “How to Roleplay Your Character” guide. Hitting the milestones gives you Karma to spend on improving your luck and calling in help.
4. There are three ways to build a character: Narrative, Standard Array, and Random.