Unknown Armies:Character Creation
Who you are
You are a person who is turning away from the everyday to scratch deeper. You believe there are secrets that are worth learning. You are determined to discover them.
You are not boring. You are an obsessed, passionate individual with a distinctive personality.
What you can do
You rate yourself with four stats: Body, Speed, Mind, and Soul. Each stat is a number from 1-100, the higher the better. From 30-70 is the typical range of adult human ability, so if you want a stat higher or lower than that range, you'd better have a good reason to feed the GM.
The number of points you have to divide among your stats depends on the kind of campaign you are creating a character for:
- Street-level points: 220
- Global-level points: 240
- Cosmic-level points: 260
With your stats in place, you pick skills: natural, learned, or unnatural abilities like Driving, Shooting Guns, Lying, or Seeing Auras. Each skill is assigned to a single stat. You use your stat levels as points to set your skills, and a given skill can't be higher than the stat that governs it. The more points you put into a stat, the more points you have available for the skills linked to that stat. It's a co-dependant relationship.
How you change
Only the dead are static. You are a dynamic, living person. Who isn't content to sit around doing nothing. You're going to get out into the occult underground and make waves. As you do, you're goign to make a rep for yourself. But you're also going to get better at the things you do.
Instant Improvement
If you roll a matched success or failure on a major skill check, the skill you rolled against goes up 1% immediately. A given skill can only be improved this way once per session, but multiple skills can each improve once. Stats do not improve this way, only skills, and this does not apply to minor or significant skill checks.
Gaining Experience Points
When you take action, the GM can grant you experience points (XP). These are points you can spend to improve your stats and skills at the end of the session, or you can hang on to them to spend them later.
Just for playing a session, you get 1 XP. Thanks for showing up.
If you're present at the climax of a plotline, your GM gives you 1-2 XP. Even if you didn't save the day, even if you got your butt kicked, you still get at least 1 XP for having been there in the clinch.
Each time you do something clever, your GM gives you 1 XP. Figured out a clue? Planned a good ambush? Made things exciting, entertaining, and unpredictable? That's good thinking and merits you a reward.
Finally, at the end of the session everybody but the GM votes on who did the best job. (Each person decides what "best job" means to him or her.) You can't vote for yourself. The GM breaks ties. Whoever wins the vote gets 1-2 XP, GM's call.
You can look forward to 1-8 XP per session. Don't whine if your GM seems stingy with the points—granting XP is one way a GM can pace the campaign. If the GM wants to play in a high-power style, you may get a lot of experience points so you can turn into hardcore bad-asses really fast. If she wants a gritty realism tone, she'll probably keep the point load low and make you work for 'em.
Spending Experience Points
Raising a skill by 1 costs 1 XP. Raising a stat by 1 costs 2 XP. However you can't spend more than 3 XP on a single skill or more than 2 XP on a single stat in a single session. You can improve multiple skills and stats, however.
The only exception to this is new skills. Buying a new skill costs ten experience points. It starts out at 10%. Your GM may decide that you need a teacher or special training to gain a new skill. If you want to fly a helicopter, for example, you need to take lessons.
Something to think about
Character Creation
First and foremost, Unknown Armies is about making a good story. You're not playing it against the GM and you're not playing against the other players. You're playing it against the fictions your GM is creating to oppose you.
Now this may sound real artsy-fartsy and abstract, but in the end it's simple: the best story is the one that keeps getting told. So all the point-stacking in the world isn't going to save a boring character.
What makes a character boring? Safety is the biggest thing. This game (like most roleplaying games) is all about risk, danger, adventure, and intrigue. Since you signed on to play, you have to accept the fact that bad things are likely to happen to your character, including madness, maiming, and death.
If you try to build a character who is immune to all those things, not only will you fail, but your character will be built around avoiding conflict (or at best, surviving it) instead of resolving it. Sure, you want your character to be competent, and the rules are tools to do that. But he should be just as competent at starting things as finishing them.
If you want your character to survive in UA, it's easy: ratchet up your accounting skill and play a guy who works for a bank. Of course, you won't be doing anything while everyone else is doing everything—but you'll survive! (Bleah.)
If you want to do more than survive, you'll need an interesting character. Lucky for you, the rules are designed to help you develop one.
Obsessed skills
Your obsession skill is a really big deal. Besides defining the focus of your character, it jacks up your chances of success in a major way because you can always flip-flop the roll. The statistics show that when you account for flip-flopping, your effective skill is substantially higher than your actual skill:
| Actual Skill | Effective skill with Flip-Flops |
| 10 | 18 |
| 20 | 34 |
| 30 | 50 |
| 40 | 63 |
| 50 | 74 |
| 60 | 83 |
| 70 | 90 |
| 80 | 95 |
| 90 | 98 |
Of course, adepts get this all the time because Magick is their obsession skill. But if you have a 50% obsession skill in firearms, martial arts, or whatever, it works like a 74% skill in play.
Why no skill list?
Some roleplayers, and even some entire groups, are just not going to be happy without a hard-coded list of skills for the game and a definitive list of which stat governs which skill. And, frankly, they're not out of line. Most games do something like that, and our approach can potentially lead to disagreements and confusion. (There's a list of sample skills in this chapter, but we freely admit it's not exhaustive.) Here's why we've done it this way.
First off, it's simple. Having a big list to choose from—and a much larget pool of points to spread among them—really ratchets up the time it takes to make a character and the complexity involved in doing so. When you have a big pool of points to spend and a lot of choices to make, you're going to sweat over every decision and worry about juggling the numbers in umpteen different ways. We think that just having a handful of important skills&mdashand resolving actions without a related skill by common sense, GM fiat, or a roll against an appropriate stat—is a smarter and easier way to play.
Second, it's pure. In games where characters all have big lists of skills, the differences between characters aren't immediately apparent. Keeping the number of skills down makes it obvious what the character's specialties are. It helps to define the character without a lot of rigamarole.
Third, it lets you use your imagination. Instead of going through a shopping list of standard skills, you are asked to think, "What does my character do that is noteworth?" and then you see what pops into your head. Maybe white-water rafting is something that would be a big part of your character's life, but a skill like that isn't going to turn up on many roleplaying game skill lists. You can also modulate a skill to better reflect your character. Where a typical roleplaying game skill might be History, you can take 17th Century French History. Make your skills reflect who your character is, rather than having your character defined by what skills are available.
Finally, it encourages cooperation. Yes, there is a red flag over this approach to skills—you're reading it, in fact. But that flag doesn't mean you're supposed to challenge the GM over the governing stat of every skill or what a skill can do. What you're supposed to do is work with the GM in an open atmosphere of cooperation. If the two of you disagree over the nature of a skill, find some middle ground. But just accept that the GM's word is final. If your disagreement occurs during a game session, feel free to discuss it in depth after the game. But don't hold up play with an argument. Accept the GM's ruling and move on.
Why the weak skills?
A common question people had about first edition UA basically boiled down to, "Why are the skills so low?" There are a couple of reasons for this: the mechanics and the setting.
A skill in UA is not like skills in other games, in that it measures your ability under duress. Most games, particularly horror games, are about perilous, terrifying situations. Yet it's not uncommon for a skill to measure your chance to do something under laboratory conditions. Some games don't even bother to modify this: your chance to fix the Jeep on a lazy Sunday with your tools, your buddies, and a case of beer is the same as your chance to fix the Jeep when it's your only escape and the monsters are going to show up in twenty minutes. Others give you the "lazy Sunday" score and make you add and subtract all kinds of modifiers on the fly.
Rather than slow the pace of play with all that math, it seemed smart to have "nail-biting tension" as the benchmark skill level. So if a skill seems low, ask yourself "what would be my chances if it was life or death."
The setting reason is a little more involved.
UA is a horror game. It's about uncertainty and tough choices. Really high levels of competence reduce the horror. If you can rely on your 75% Firearms skill to see you through, enemies aren't terrifying: They're just paper tigers.
If the skills seem low, don't trust your skills. Push things in your favor. Don't like your Initiative? Plan ambushes! Struggle seem too low? Outnumber your opponents! Can't get help with just a low Charm roll? Think of compelling reasons the guy should help you even if he hates your guts!
The two halves of a PC are player and character. In a lot of games, if your character's stats are buff enough, you can be a lazy player. And sure, that's less work, but it's less rewarding too. We want you to get your money's worth out of UA, and if that means more planning, more scheming, and more sacrifice—well, so be it.