Halo: The Story So Far
We’ve come a long way since I started my secret project, and I have a lot of stuff written so far. I figured that now would be a good time to bring it all together.
Aspects
All characters in Halo have 5 Aspects:
- Core Concept
- Achilles Heel
- 3 “Other” Aspects
The Core Concept is what your character is all about, what defines them. Their Achilles Heel is what causes trouble for the character. When compelled, both of these Aspects require a Fate Point to buy off. The other three aspects help further define the character, and they are mainly for self-compels. It costs nothing to refuse a compel on this Aspect.
Skills
As per the norm, skills in Halo are based on a 5-cap pyramid. You get one skill at +5, two at +4, three at +3, four at +2, and five at +1. The skills are as follows (subject to change):
Academics, Athletics, Computers, Contacts, Deceit, Empathy, Endurance, Engineering, Guns, Intimidation, Larceny, Melee, Might, Navigation, Perception, Rapport, Resolve, Resources, Stealth, and Survival. If my math is accurate, that’s 20 skills.
With the 5-cap pyramid, that’s 15 skills, meaning that you will have five skills at +0.
Stunts
Stunts give one of the following benefits:
- Give a +2 to a specific application of a non-attack trapping
- Give a +1 to an attack, improving its accuracy (if your implementation values hit-or-miss accuracy more heavily than magnitude-of-success)
- Give a +2 to an attack’s result, applied only if the attack was successful (same parenthetical comment as previous)
- Give one or two expendable 2–shift effects or a persistent 1–shift effect
- Reduce the amount of time necessary to complete a particular task by two steps on a time chart
- Extend the duration of an effect by two steps on a time chart
- Reduce a particular kind of difficulty factor faced by the skill trapping by up to two
- Combine any two of the two-shift effects from above at half value
- Get a more powerful effect, but only when you spend a fate point
Note that these options are taken whole-cloth from the official FATERPG site. For now, all stunts are following the Dresden Files verbage of [-X], where X is how many stunt-equivalents it is. Normal stunts for characters will always be 1, but vehicles and gear can have multiple.
Gear
Gear is nothing more than a collection of stunts and aspects. Unlike characters, gear can have a more powerful stunt than [-1]. For now, I’m going to follow the Dresden Files mantra that no above stunt ability be taken more than three times.
Vehicles
Vehicles are just like any other piece of gear. They are a collection of stunts and aspects. However, vehicles have skill, too. In order to cut some skills off of the character list, they were given to the vehicles. I haven’t nailed down the skills yet, but I’m leaning towards Speed, Weapons, Hull, and Cargo. Speed is analogous to acrobatics, while weapons are equal to guns, hull is the equivalent to endurance, and cargo takes the place of might.
That’s in in a nutshell. I hope to be back early next week with some weapons used by the human population against the Covenant.
