It’s time to move from theory to practice. As we move on to the next stage of this System Hack, I’m going to start taking the elements we discussed in the first set of articles and make them into actual game elements. For today, that means character creation. When we discussed characters for this System Hack, we landed on some pretty straightforward prime sets: Attributes, Skills, and Distinctions. As such, we’re going to lock in our Attributes and Skills. For Distinctions, the number I’d want to write is perhaps a bit high to cover comprehensively in one article, but I am going to lock in what the three Distinctions each character has are, what they do mechanically, and how they’ll be roughly categorized.

Attributes

For attributes, we’re going to be sticking with the standard three used in Cortex Prime: Physical, Mental, and Social. This trio has strong foundations in psychology, with psychologist Benjamin Bloom discovering that human skill development happened along these three avenues. It’s also a logical division without excessive granularity, which lets us use the Stress track mechanics with all three attributes and still not make things too complicated.

Skills

There are 12 skills in RimWorld and 19 in baseline Cortex Prime:

RimWorld skill	Cortex Prime skill
Shooting	Craft
Melee	Drive
Construction	Fight
Mining	Fix
Cooking	Fly
Plants	Focus
Animal	Influence
Crafting	Know
Artistic	Labor
Medical	Move
Social	Notice
Intellectual	Operate
	Perform
	Shoot
	Sneak
	Survive
	Throw
	Treat
	Trick

I’ve put skills with direct equivalents in both games in bold. You can begin to see the difference in specification; a number of skills in Cortex Prime cover things that RimWorld characters don’t have to do. On the other hand, RimWorld breaks out labor into significantly more categories, while Cortex Prime literally has a labor skill. 

My goal is going to be to streamline the Cortex Prime skill list but also add a few new skills while keeping everything down to 18 skills (or one less than what there is now). First, let’s nix Trick. Deception is a way to Influence, and one that changes the consequences of failure more than the skills involved. Second, we can take Move and Throw and condense them down into Athletics. I also want to take Survive out and replace it with Botany and Husbandry, to imitate RimWorld’s separate skills for Plants and Animals. Survive doesn’t need to be a separate skill, instead using Craft or Know for things like finding water and shelter, and either Botany or Husbandry for food. Finally, I want to add Social as a Skill. Social is just being affable and being able to communicate, but that will have an important role in our regular colony interactions and leaves Influence as a separate skill for trade (and depending on how RimWorld we get, prisoner conversions). That makes the final list Athletics, Botany, Craft, Drive, Fight, Fix, Fly, Focus, Husbandry, Influence, Know, Labor, Notice, Operate, Perform, Shoot, Sneak, Social. Drive and Fly may not come up in RimWorld, but I think it’ll be likely that we’ll work vehicles into our game in some way, shape, or form.

Distinctions

We discussed before the idea of having Distinctions based on RimWorld backstories, traits, or both. There are 67 traits and over 200 backstories, and it’s likely we don’t need that many, at least to start. Backstories especially are also where we want to perhaps depart from RimWorld and write some of our own stuff, so maybe picking from the existing list isn’t the right approach here.

Let’s start with traits, as these are a bit less tied to the setting. Instead of looking at all 67, let’s look at the categories as listed in the RimWorld wiki. We have Lifestyle traits, Living Space traits, Social traits, Combat traits, Skill traits, Relationship traits, and then ‘spectrum traits’ (less categories than one meta-trait with versions on a spectrum from positive to negative) around drugs, industriousness, speed, base mood, nerves, neuroses, shooting accuracy, beauty, psychic sensitivity, and immunity. A few of these we can throw out for mechanical reasons: Shooting accuracy is there for introducing a bit of variety into video game combat, but is significantly more redundant in a tabletop game. Psychic sensitivity we can drop for now because there aren’t any planned rules around psychics for the moment. Speed and industriousness we can also drop because we’re either not using it for our rules (Speed) or we’re going to model it in a different way (Industriousness). Finally, we’re going to drop Social, which sounds odd until you look at what the “Social” traits are: Bloodlust, Cannibal, and Psychopath. ‘Social’ in RimWorld is for characters who are, in essence, socially unacceptable in one way or another. For the sake of this game, at least initially, we’re not going to model those traits in that way. There are other ‘traits’ in RimWorld we don’t want to model as traits; we don’t want to make sexual orientation a trait that takes up a mechanical slot, even if it’s something we want the game to recognize as we get into thinking about social interactions and relationships. So what that leaves us with, really, are circumstantial buffs and debuffs. This may be a good place for SFX to come in, but it also means the full trait ‘list’ may have to wait until we have the mechanical cycle nailed down a bit more.

Looking at Backstories you see something a bit different. While backstories do sometimes come with traits (a level of cross-reference I may opt to avoid), the primary differentiator for backstories is skills. Each backstory has different starting skill ratings, and may even come with work type bonuses (which for us at the tabletop is essentially redundant with skill ratings). This is already baked into the Cortex Prime mechanics through Highlighting, which allows Distinctions to ‘highlight’ or give a free step-up to specific skills. This sounds like exactly what we should do, and can help narrow what we want each set of distinctions to be.

The two backstories each RimWorld character gets are a childhood backstory and an adulthood backstory. These each can add onto a character’s personality and sense of history differently, but we also want to think about those skill highlights. With our 18-entry skill list, there are 288 possible permutations of two skill sets, even excluding any sets where you pick the same skill twice. That’s too many, I’m not going to write that many, but it does go to show that when we pick the Backstories we do write, we’re necessarily changing the spread of early-game skill distributions. We can say, for instance, that Drive isn’t a skill we want to attach to a child backstory. That’s going to mean fewer early-stage characters will have any points in drive. Perhaps a better way to think about it is not so much the skills we’re worried about people not taking, but the ones we want more people to take. What skills make sense as something everyone has learned?

That gets to an interesting way RimWorld backstories are generated. It’s not so important in a vacuum, but it matters a whole lot when you consider that the game is selecting these backstories on the fly for every single NPC. Each backstory is divided into six-ish categories (there are overlaps, and one of the categories has three subcategories): Tribal, Outlander, Pirate, Offworld, Outsider, and Imperial. In RimWorld, these align with factions (or, for Outsider, sometimes a lack of faction), but they also provide a good shorthand for who’s populating these planets. While I don’t think I’ll actually come up with a list of several hundred (or even several dozen) backstories (at least not for an Alpha version), I can come up with our social clades here. I’m going to vary these a bit; I want to avoid using a category like pirate which immediately makes you hostile by default. So instead, we’ll go with Tribal, Homesteader, Nomad, Spacer, Bureaucrat, and Hermetic. I don’t want to write a setting that evokes a feudal empire, but at the same time if there’s huge technological drift then there will necessarily be some people who grew up in a high-tech society; that’s where Bureaucrat comes in. Spacer, in contrast, is someone who lived their life specifically on a spaceship. It may well be that in systems closer to Earth there are densely populated sci-fi planets where everyone on the ground is a Bureaucrat, but that is not this part of the galaxy. Even so, it gives a nice set of social strata that we can build off of when we start generating characters. And there will eventually be a finite list of these Backstories, because characters must be able to be generated. For child backstories, each one of these may have two or three that make sense. For adult backstories, I think my initial aim will be for a d66 table, which splits the difference between granularity and ease of use (and makes for an easy generation roll to boot).

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We’ve taken the first step to locking this hack down! There are many more lists to come, and some of them will require a bit more lateral thinking and creativity. For character creation, we were able to mostly color inside the lines that Cortex Prime provided, which kept things consistent. And of course, I will fulfill my promise that all these lists will be part of the article. Developing those Distinctions is not something I’m going to take lightly enough to just bang off in a typical article cycle, but I will make all the lists available before the next article comes out. Watch this space, and be sure to come back as we continue this System Hack!

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