Torg Player Rules

Improving Attributes
Attributes may also be improved, but at a far greater cost. An
attribute may never be improved beyond the attribute limits of the
character’s home cosm as given in Chapter Two.
Improving an attribute with possibilities has its cost figured in the
same manner as improving a skill, but the cost is tripled. Increasing
an attribute from 10 to 11 would cost (11 x 3) 33 possibilities. As
with skills, the increase is considered to happen immediately.
Improving an attribute by training over time can be done but
the method for calculating the required amount of time is different
than it is for skills. The value the attribute is being increased to is
the number of months that the character has to train. So increasing
an attribute from 10 to 11 requires 11 months of training.
The definition of a month is the same as for skills, eight hours
of effort a day for 25 days. Unlike skills though, this cannot be
stretched out over a greater amount
of time, the 25 days of training
must all occur within the span of
one calendar month. Increasing an
attribute over time requires intense
effort and dedication, often at the cost
of having time for doing anything else.
Olympic weightlifters and professional
bodybuilders are examples of the types
of people who have this time— they
do nothing but train. Most people,
especially player characters, will not
have this much free time.
Example: Barbara wants to increase
the Strength of her ninja character,
Yukitada. Her Strength is 8 so increasing
it to 9 would require nine months of
intensive, dedicated physical training.
Yukitada would not have the time for
adventuring while she was training up her
Strength so Barbara decides to save up the
possibilities for it instead.
Optional Skill
Rules
These optional rules will allow your
gaming group to fine-tune the level of detail
and realism in the Torg skill system. Pick the
rules that your group wants to use, if any, and
ignore the ones you don’t want.
If a rule is being used, it has to apply to every character in the
game; individual players cannot choose to apply one rule to their
own character if no one else wants to use that rule.
Simplified Unskilled Use
Keeping track of which skills can be used unskilled, which skills
can be used unskilled at a penalty and which skills cannot be used at
all unskilled can get rather complicated. Characters are allowed to
attempt some unskilled uses at a penalty because in adventure fiction
passengers are always landing planes after the pilot dies, people
with no medical training are delivering babies while trapped in an
elevator and non-combatants are able to load and fire big, heavy
weaponry after watching it being used once. It’s not easy, but they
somehow manage to do it anyway.
Chapter Three: Attributes and Skills
If your group is having trouble remembering what their characters
can and cannot attempt unskilled, consider all non-Dexterity
boldface skills to be unusable unskilled, as if they were boldface
italics skills. Under Dexterity, the only skill that could not be used
unskilled would be martial arts.
Narrower Skills
Most of the skills are intended to be very broad, to cut down
on the number of skills a character needs. For additional detail, the
skills can be more narrowly defined. Characters will need to have
more skills to cover the same amount of abilities.
Every skill in essence becomes a limited skill. For example,
instead of being able to shoot every possible type of firearm with the
one fire combat skill; each distinct type of firearm requires its own
separate fire combat skill. The exact definition of
what constitutes a separate type of firearm is up
to your group; the distinctions can be as broad
or as narrow as desired.
Broader Skills
If, on the other hand, your group feels that
there are already too many skills to choose
from, you can reduce the number of available
skills by simplifying definitions and widening
the scope of many skills. Characters then
need fewer skills to cover the same amount
of abilities.
Turning limited skills into normal skills
for example would be one possible approach.
Instead of requiring characters to take a
separate science skill for every field they
know they only need one science skill to
cover every possible field of science.
You could go even further and combine
similar skills into one broader skill.
For example, fire combat and energy
weapons could be combined into a
single skill, grouping all “point and
shoot” handguns under the same ability.
Specialized Skills
The rules for skill specialization can
be changed so that instead of being better
with a particular subcategory of abilities
that fall under a skill, the character is
worse at all other aspects of the skill. A
type specialization for every skill must be chosen as outlined in the
regular rules but no skill bonus is assigned and it does not cost the
character any possibilities.
Instead, the skill value is used for the specialization and all other
uses of the skill are treated as if the character has zero adds in the
skill. The base attribute for the skill becomes the skill value for
anything not covered by the specialization but the character is not
considered unskilled so no unskilled use penalties are applied.
When this rule is used players may purchase a skill more than
once to cover different abilities of the skill. For example, a player
might buy fire combat twice for her character, once for pistols and
once for rifles.
Trademark specializations are still allowed and will add to the skill
value normally. The cost though is reduced to one possibility.
37