Calculating Derived Statistics and Wrap Up

Hello everyone and welcome back to a wasteland story. This is a not a normal episode. This is a bonus episode that I'm putting together only partially to distract from the fact that I have not yet released uh the newest episode of the real show, Wasteland Story, episode number six. It is coming, it's scripted, it's recorded, it's just gonna take me a few more days to um find the time to get in and mix that properly. However, in the meantime , what I wanted to do is just uh I don't anticipate this will be a very long episode, but we'll just see. I was very kindly asked by one of the former guests that I had on the other show, Solar Role Players podcast, Thomas from Board Games with Thomas, whose YouTube channel and his solo playthroughs of Fallout were really inspirational to help me figure out how to actually play and actually start getting playing. And so he very kindly rely recentached out to me and asked if perhaps I wanted to come and play online with him playing Fallout using Mythic cooperatively, which is something I've never done before, or really thought that it was something you could do, I guess if I had just thought about it, I would have realized that so but he said he does some really great sessions just playing with a mate or a couple of mates and sort of taking it in terms to use Mythic to be the GM or you know. I'm not sure exactly how he does it. I'm gonna see in a few days when we record this. So I thought I would use the opportunity now to create a character that is going to be really important in a wasteland story in the future. Specifically, season two is likely going to start with this character. I don't want to give too much away about who they are or how they fit into the overall story, but it is a character I need to roll up anyway, and I thought I might as well take them for a test drive um playing with Thomas in a few days to put on his channel. So I thought I'd just do a little bonus episode for those who are interested in how character creation works in uh Modifius' Fallout 2D20, and maybe get a little bit of a sneak peek into who one of these characters is going to be . Now I have a bit of an idea already about who what sort of a person this is going to be what this kind of background and skills is going to be like but we'll go through the process um reading through the book now one thing to note is that although I believe it's exactly the same as creating a character with the core rules. This character is going to come from the Wanderer's Guide, which is the I believe second guidebook released before that. But you can use the same method to create a character uh just using the core game. Now what I have in mind, and this this was sort of inspired perhaps unimaginatively by the um I mean also the character I had in my head already, but the image was inspired somewhat unimaginatively by the character on the cover of the book, uh, who it to me looks like a very old snake, if anyone remembers Metal Gear, um, sort of a character. He's gonna be a sort of rough, grizzled , um older guy who's out there surviving in the wasteland for various reasons which what will become apparent later on in the show. So let's have a look, let's find the page and let's have a look at how character creation actually works. In this guidebook, they just have some extra origins, is what I meant to say earlier. So the actual process is going to be taken from the core rule book and then just using one of these um backgrounds, I think they're called, um origins, of one of the characters in the guidebook. So the first thing you need to do, which is exactly the same as the Fallout video games if you ever played them back in the day. But you go through your special attributes. I'm not going to go into too much detail on this, but just for an overview, special stands for strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility, and luck. And those things are all pretty much used the same way that they would be in most um in most RPGs. Luck is a little bit different. Luck gives you up to your skill a certain number of points that will allow you to spend to do things like re-roll a dice. Um usually re-roll a dice, but you can actually do things like add a deta- a helpful detail to a scene, like maybe you spend a luck point and say, and right there, through the window, I saw the key to the door, or whatever like that. You can you can use that in an interesting way. And luck is something that you uh you spend and um recover when the GM or when you decide uh that is is is time to get some luck back. The other thing I can believe I believe you can do is you can spend luck to switch your luck stat. If you have a high luck stat, you can do a test that requires another stat and switch it to use the luck stat instead. So like you get particularly lucky in shooting even though your um small gun skill isn't very good or whatever that happens to be. So uh importantly I'm going to get a blank character sheet and just a side note . I really love it when games come with quality blocks of character sheets. I don't know blocks in English, is what they call them here in Germany. I can't remember. But like a stack of character sheets that are on good paper. I really like that. I I miss it. When I print stuff out myself, I kind of feel like it's not as good somehow. So I got myself a blank character sheet. I'm not gonna name them just yet. I have to think about that a little bit. It's gonna have to be a code name of some kind. But we're just gonna start going through and working it out. Step number one is choose your origin. Decide the origin of your character and it determines their tra it as well as the equipment that they have and how their basic abilities are going to impact their skills. This is where we flip over to the new book because the origin of my character is going to be a Brotherhood Outcast. Now the Brotherhood Outcasts um there's lots of of great text here about about who the Brotherhood are. I I'm not going to read that for you now . I recommend looking it up. Uh it's pretty cool. But important ly , the Brotherhood initiates or one of the Brotherhood origins in the core game, the specific trait is that they have the chain that binds, and that means that they are part of this faction for life, presumably, and they have a chain of command. And if breaking that chain of command or doing something against the brotherhood or deserting or something like that, then the Brotherhood will come after them. On the flip side of that, it means the Brotherhood may come and come and help or be more likely to help in situations, but it it's a two-way street, double-edged sword. So for the Brotherhood Outcast, it's interesting that and fitting, that the trait is the chain that breaks. And this says you believe your superiors in the Brotherhood lack a vision beyond acquiring pre-war technology, and that your strength as a member of this fraternity of military descendants gives you a duty to help others and pursue different goals than the dogma of the Brotherhood leadership dictates. And this is exactly the backstory kind of of the character that's going to appear in the show. So it says you gain an additional tag skill. We'll come to that when we get to it. But it must be energy weapon science or repair, which makes sense for the Brotherhood. And you gain an extra d20 of junk. Ooh, that's nice, because that means craft ing is maybe something that is going to make sense for this character to do, and I love crafting, so that's good. They can also spend an action point up to three times for one uncommon material per action point spent. That's nice . Usually you can only get uncommon materials when you get a perk that allows you to have a chance of finding uncommon materials when you search for materials. And this meaning that you can use just an action point to get an uncommon material. I really, really like that idea. I'm getting more into this idea that I had already. Uh you can also make an additional roll on the loot table without having to spend action points. Excellent . So what I know from this, uh, we're going to make a little scribble here of the extra benefits that this gets, and then we'll go back to the other book to actually craft the character. So the one is one d20 worth of junk. Let's get a high number here. That's a five. That could have been better, but that's okay. For my playthrough of Fall out, this might be interesting to some people who are playing or wanting to play the game. For my playthrough of Fallout, I use the character sheet uh for the skills and stats and weapons and things. But for this the inventory, for the backpack, I actually have another sheet which is a bit I can't remember where I got it, if I can find it I'll I'll link it in the show notes. Um but it gives it's just laid out in a way that allows you to organize and carry your your items on paper a little bit better. But for now, I'm just gonna put it down on the character sheet. I'm also going to make a note of this trait . It actually doesn't say here as a consequence of the chain that breaks, but I'm going to assume that uh if we do come across Brotherhood members, they are not going to be particularly friendly to me. The next thing we have to do is work out what our attributes are. This is the special that I mentioned earlier. So each attribute starts with a base of five, and then you can spend five points across all of the attributes to increase or decrease them as you see fit. You can't go lower than four, I think. It says you can reduce any attribute from five to four, gain a point, and spend to increase another attribu te. So let's say let me see. Uh he's gonna be someone who is in energy weapons, being an ex-brotherhood member, someone who can repair, someone who is probably quite if not raw brute strength, then like resilience, constitutional though that's not a strat. I think he's quite intelligent, but not agile, because he's an old guy. And that's that's gonna be one of the main differences from Soskade. Okay, maybe even his perception isn't that good because of his old eyes. I'm not sure. So let's start . We have five points to spend. So let's just start with let's let's pick which stat is gonna be the thing that they are best at. Uh I think I think it has to be either repair , energy weapons . Um so we're looking at intelligence. Maybe intelligence is actually his best stat. So let's let's just put intelligence at a seven. Just to see. That leaves us three other things to do. Let's find what he's weak at. I think I'm going to make that agility. Uh which gives us one point back. We have four more to spend. I'd like to give one I'd probably like to give two to perception because that's gonna be all our shots. And he's a grizzled , well-experienced, uh, trained military fighter who's been out in his own for a while, so I feel like he's got to be a pretty good sh ot . So let's put that at a seven as well for now . Strength, we're just going to leave at five for the time being. Charisma at five for the time being . Endurance should probably be a little bit better. We'll put it at six for now. We'll put luck at five and then we'll see what we've got here. So we have plus two, three, four, five minus one is four so we could actually spend one more point here somewhere if we keep the agility that low . I'm I'm sort of wondering here, I don't know whether to put it into perception for his energy weapon skills, or to intelligence for his repair skills, or into strength, because maybe he is someone that can use melee weapons as well, and that would be quite different to Suscohead 2. So I think I'm gonna put it in strength. Um, I may tweak this after we actually play the game with Thomas. Um, obviously, there's gonna be a timeline issue. Thomas's setting is taking place a couple of hundred years after this one, but whatever. I want to make this character anyway. It's a good opportunity to do it. He fits into the setting that Thomas is doing, which is going to be a uh like a caravan, members of a caravan travelling from one place to another. Uh and so it it fits that sort of thing. So I think for now I'm gonna go with uh strength. So a bit higher strength, even higher perception, decent endurance, normal charisma, good intelligence, slightly less than average agility, and average luck. The next thing that you have to do is take those strengths and go down the list of all the actual skills, so athletics, barter, big guns, energy weapons, so on, and put in the appropriate rank. Now what the rank means is what number you have to roll under, or rather what the rank is is what number gets added to your base stat , special stat, in order to give you the target number that you have to roll under. And if you have that tagged, if you do roll under the rank number when it's tagged, then that is considered two successes. So it increases your chances of being able to succeed in the things that the character is good at. I mean, same as any RPG more or less. Right? So I have now spent those points. The next thing to do is to tag skills and buy skill ranks. I get to choose three tags skill, remembering that I get an additional one in repair, energy weapons, or science . And we're gonna do that now. And each tag skill starts at two ranks, at rank two instead of rank one . The way that works then as well is you get to spend nine plus your intelligence points to increase your skill ranks. And so each point that you choose you can increase a rank by one. So each skill starts at zero. First thing is what we're gonna tag. Now we are gonna use we're gonna do repair anyway. We're gonna do energy weapons anyway. I've never really played around with energy weapons nor nor in the video games nor in this. I d I don't know why I don't like them as much as a good rifle or something, but uh for the for the sake of it being a ex Brotherhood of Steel member, they traditionally use energy weapons, so I'm gonna do that. I think I'm gonna do science as well. I have never done much with a uh hacking sort of a character, and I think I think that's this guy's gonna be good at that. I can now tag one more thing . I think it's gotta be survival, doesn't it? I think it has to be survival. Because he's a survivor. I'd like to do maybe some sneak or some speech, or maybe some melee like unarmed or or melee weapons or unarmed or something like that, but I think it's gonna have to be survival. So now we have tagged energy weapons, repair, science, and survival. Is repair actually that critical ? I'm just thinking now that in the store like in in the game, what I mostly want to use repair for probably is to craft things and then I have time to do it. It's maybe the skill isn't that important, but I think it makes sense thematic thematically, so we are going to leave that in there for now . Now I get to see how many points I can use to buy additional ranks in these skills. My intelligence is seven and I roll a nine plus intelligence. So nine, I didn't roll. Nine points plus intelligence. So I have sixteen points that I can put into this with the tagged ones starting at plus one. So let's put energy weapons at three. So that means I have spent one point of my what did I say? Nine plus seven is sixteen. Science, I'm gonna put it at five, just for fun, hey? Because that's another three. Repair I'll put in a two, which doesn't cost me a point because it was already tagged. Uh survival I'm gonna put in at a four , which is spending another two points . Um what else might we want to deal with here ? Ooh, let's put a couple into pilot because maybe we can fly a verde bird. Let's put three points into pil ot . Don't know how often that's going to come up, but it's fun and it seems like he should be trained in that. So that's another one, two, three . Then we might wanna go into let's put some into melee weapons I'm gonna put three into big guns. Uh not big guns. Ooh, big guns, maybe. Let's put three into big guns. Because that's based on endurance, which is also good . Although it's the same as strength. Uh I have used nine. I have seven left. So let's put two in big guns. One, two, let's put in two in melee. Three, four, and let's put in two in unarmed . Uh uh . That leaves me with two points remaining. Do I want to bump up my energy weapons a little bit further even? Currently the best thing I'm at is science. Let's put one more in repair. Um I'm gonna change this tag. It's just a gut feeling. I might even take it off the science. Have more points in science, but mm-hmm . I'm tempted to take the tag off repair . I think I'm gonna take the tag off repair. I think he's good at it, but it doesn't have to be a tag skill. So we're gonna take the tag off uh and then put it on to melee . And then I'm gonna put those two extra points into repair . So that gives us we are we have a a little bit in big guns, we're tagged and pretty good in energy weap ons. We are tagged and okay in melee weapons. I'm feeling like fight for survival things on top of you at the last minute. Can you use your strength to actually take it out? So I think the tag is cool on that. It gives an opportunity for maybe a a crit to come in at that point um or an extra success to to maybe get lucky. We're gonna have a a few points in pilot, which is fun. Have to make a point of of making that work in the story. That'll be really fun. Repair is not tagged now, but it's pretty good at four. For example, repair is intelligence based, so I take my intelligence score which is seven, I add the four, which makes it 11 and that's my target number that I have to roll equal or lower to uh in order to on 2d20 in order to succeed. So I think that is it for our skills. The next thing to do is to choose your first perk. I love perks I love perks, but I'm going to use the new book for this. I know there are a few perks scattered out scattered throughout various books. Hmm. Um. But there are some in this book. So just for the sake of using this book we're gonna take our first perk out of this book I even when playing the video games as a kid the perks was one of my favorite things so things that are standing out at me. I can see sturdy frame, which is army or wearing counts as three quarters of its weight. Okay, so armor's not as heavy. I'm not that meticulous about tracking encumbrance yet. Um so that's not that important. Blocker. When you're struck by a melee attack, count your physical damage resistance or energy damage resistance as plus one higher. That's cool. I like that if he's getting hit, um, he can take a bit more punishment. So that is on the short list . Martial artist doesn't really make sense. Um Perception Perks. Let's see what there is with One-handed weapons, no, I think we're probably not gonna have one-handed weapons. Cannibal? No, don't want to do that. Although it is fun, if you become a cannibal , uh you're not allowed to be a robot, obviously, but you can basically butcher a dead human requiring a test and then you can uh restore HP using the food. But it has dark cravings, it can be addictive cannibalism. Uh after you roll an effect then um you're addicted. When you're addicted you need more human flesh. That's cool and gross uh but not for me . Interesting. There's an ironclad here which says oh that's level five plus. Okay, that doesn't matter . There's one junk shield, uh, which I could take. Oh no, I need more luck for that, but it says for every five items of junk you're carrying, add plus one to your physical damage resistance. That's pretty funny. The picture is the little fallout guy carrying boxes of junk and bullets just bouncing off . Okay, I've seen enough. I think I'm gonna go with um the early one which was what was it? Blocker. So when you're struck by a melee attack, count physical damage resistance or energy damage resistance as plus one higher. Okay, so we can just take a little bit of an extra hit. Um good. He's a tough guy, he can take an extra hit or so. Excellent. Next thing to do is to calculate your derived statistics . Carry weight, defense. What not? We'll come back to that because uh I'm still in this other book. And in this book is choosing your starting equipment. So. Ooh, okay, so the Brotherhood Outcast. Characters who select the Brotherhood Outcast origin can select one of the following equipment packs . We can get X Knight or X Scribe. So X Knight is more military minded than some. You took to the wasteland with as much firepower and protection as you could muster, ready to stand between those who I don't even need to read X Scribe. That's definitely what it is. Uh scribe is more the sciencey one. We are Scribe is you have a pension for the mechanical over the military. When you left, you did so with the most important possession you could bring. Your knowledge. Now we're gonna be a fighter. So that means we start with a laser rif le, an eight plus . Time to roll dice. One, two, three, four, five. Zero six one. Yes. One, two, three, four, five, six. So we start with a laser rifle and eight plus one, two, three, four, five, six, eight plus six fusion cells, which is gonna be fourteen. We get a tattered set of Brotherhood fatigues. I'm gonna look up later what the actual stats on those are. We get a military canteen filled with water. Two rolls on the outcast equipment table and ten caps. I'll put in the ten caps first. Now let's roll on the outcast. Oh, there's some juicy things on here. First roll is 10. A combat arm ? I'll look that up in a sec . It does say I can roll additional time on the loot table for free. Um it probably doesn't r mean the outcast equipment table, but let's see. So second roll then . A 12 is a sensor array. Okay, a little bit confusing, but in the book it's only a it says it's there's only a laser gun in the core rule book, and then it says if it has a stock modification on it becomes a laser laser rifle. Could have been clearer, but that's okay. So let's look at what what his base is and what sort of stock we're gonna have on it. I guess we can just choose the stock for fun. So its base is four dice of damage, piercing one, fire rate two, range C quality's close quarters, I bet that'll change as soon as we do it. Wait for cost sixty nine . Okay, let's look at some of the mods and we'll see what makes sense to be the starting mod. I guess it's gonna be let's see, stock mod, standard stock. Let's go with that. Um full stock . Okay . So standard stock means we it gains two-handed, removes inaccurate, and removes close quar ters. That's that's fine, that makes perfect sense. Same amount of damage. We can upgrade it to have it better fire rate, to become accurate, uh, but nothing much with more damage. Maybe the ammo can help with more damage. I'm not for about that. Sure about that . Okay, so that is our laser rifle. Now we need to look up what was the other one? A combat arm and a sensor array. What are they? I'm guessing it's uh melee thing. Science sensor arra array re roll one D twenty on all perception test while armour is powered. I'm starting to get the feeling that this is for power armor, and that's why I haven't found it. Because I've never actually looked at power armor. Here we go. That's what it is. So it's a modification for the power armor. I bet the combat armor is as well . So probably he used to have power armor and it broke down for whatever reason. He managed to salvage, um, or from someone else, salvage a sensor array, which is when it's equipped um on a helmet, you get to roll re-roll the D twenty on a perception test. That's pretty cool. And I wonder what the combat arm is. I'm gonna call the slightly not great organization of this taking too long for me to find and therefore I'm gonna let myself choose the first thing I see that looks cool on here, which is a copy of Fixin' Things . Uh it's a magazine. I have never used a magazine in the TTRPG, but that's what I've got. So we'll get rid of the combat arm unless I figure what it is out later. And we have a copy of fixin' things . And that is pretty much character creation. The one more thing we didn't do there was calculate your derived statistics. So we'll do that quickly. Page seventy-four of the core rulebook. And derived statistics are carry weight is 1 5 0 pounds plus strength times 10. So our strength is six, so 150 plus 60 is 2 10 carry weight . We also do our damage resistance. Base resistance is zero for physical, zero for energy and zero for radiation. But uh so that's determined by your equipment. Okay, so defense is the basic difficulty of any attacks. Now with Suskage, she's really hard to hit because she's so agile. Uh she has an agility of nine, I think, means that everyone needs to roll two dice or get a minimum of two successes against her, which makes it harder. So his defense is only one . Initiative is perception plus agility which is seven plus four is eleven. Oh he's a bit slow he's an old guy as I said health points endurance plus luck which is going to be eleven . And melee damage. Um strength is still only six, so we don't even get the plus one. Maybe I'm going to adjust that so we at least get a plus one on melee damage. What else could I change? I could bring my luck down a little bit. Maybe he's not that lucky. I'm gonna do that. Also bringing down our hit points by one as well. So we're gonna have 10 hit points, which is not many. But we do have a little extra damage resistance against melee, so maybe he he's not afraid to push into close quarters to get melee combat. We're gonna have to buy a close range weapon as well, I think. And strength is then seven, which is very different to Suskade, and it means that we get plus one melee damage. And that is it for creating the character. Really quite straightforward, a lot less rolling than there is on a lot of traditional RPGs. I quite like roll- I quite like rolling up stats, but this is far more akin to the actual video game where you get to really choose how you spend those points to build the character that you want, and then your origin gives you a little bit of a starting point and more of a background. So that was our character . I'm gonna name him um later, I think, and we'll talk about that when we actually play it. And that's it. He is pretty strong, pretty percep tive, pretty intelligent, uh, not very agile, not very lucky, charismatic. Um he's gonna be quite a different character to Suskade. I just gotta figure out what his armor gives him, and we'll be good to go. So I didn't say at the beginning, but catch up. I'm not sure when exactly the video is gonna go live. I'm gonna put this up pretty much straight away. I think this episode, we're gonna record in a few days with Thomas on his channel Board Games with Thomas. And I think he's going to bring that out next week. But I'm not sure exactly. It'll be out soon anyway. Do join him and I over there on YouTube . It'll be my first ever time playing on um one of those online RPG platforms, so it might I might be hilariously bad at it. Uh, but I'm really excited to try playing Fallout, and my first time as a player that is not solo GM'd as well playing Fallout. So I'm really looking forward to it. I hope to see you over there, and I do promise to get mixing on episode six of a wasteland story and have that out as soon as humanly possible. Um I'm working on it every day. It's just this is quite a long episode and it's just life. Thank you so much. I hope to see you soon. Keep an eye out for the new episode and I'll catch you next time on a wasteland story. I've been PJ. See you soon. Be careful out there in the Wasteland.