Primary and Secondary Traits

Edition 13 of the 4C System is designed to let its players vicariously act out the lives of costumed adventurers. Whether they be good, evil, or somewhere in-between, these folks stand apart from others by donning some manner of conspicuous ensemble or another, all the while engaging in activities that ostensibly involve exceptional, if not super-human, capabilities.

Players utitlizing Edition 13 cannot do so, however, without a basic understanding of what these costumed adventurers are capable of. And the essential abilities of every character in the game, no matter how strong or weak, can be described by their traits.

Standard Traits

Almost every character in Edition 13 is represented by eleven distinct traits. The seven primary traits are Melee, Coordination, Brawn, Fortitude, Intellect, Awareness, and Willpower, while the four secondary traits are Lifestyle, Repute, Health and Fortune. All eleven traits are described here, with generalized benchmarks provided to give one an idea what a certain value in each trait means to a character.

Melee: 'You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.'
- Napoleon Bonaparte

Melee is a strange hybrid ability, an amalgamation of physical and mental prowess in the field of battle. It is meant to describe both natural and trained ability in a scrap. One can certainly have more of one than the other, depending on their background and origins, but either way the sum of these two qualities can be used to describe someone's net fighting skill.

Melee as an ability is used to resolve mêlée, or hand-to-hand combat (surprise), and is also used to determine how many 'moves' a character can attempt each turn (whether talking about offensive or defensive actions). Melee is used to determine one's prowess in unarmed combat, and is the base value used whenever a character has a melee weapon in hand (whether a blunt, edged, or even an improvised implement).

 

Coordination: 'There's no secret to balance. You just have to feel the waves.'
- Frank Herbert

Coordination is the means by which a character's inherent agility and nimbleness can be measured - it is both manual dexterity and one's sense of balance. Coordination exemplifies grace, if not grace under fire, and is used whenever a character indirectly interacts with his or her environment. Such interactions can involve anything from carving a statue to operating machinery to catching a Frisbee ™.

Coordination also comes into play when piloting vehicles of any type. Of course, Coordination is the primary measure of one's prowess in ranged battle, as well. It is used to handle almost all non-adjacent combat actions, whether flinging shuriken or firing a handgun. When attempting an offensive or defensive maneuver involving ranged combat, Coordination is the trait which handles such concerns.

 

Brawn: 'Perhaps I am stronger than I think.'
- Thomas Merton

A bridge of sorts between Melee and Fortitude, Brawn exemplifies the raw physical power one's body possesses. Brawn, at its base, refers to how much weight a character can lift. It also determines the amount of brute force a character can apply to their environment, or in other words, how much damage they can inflict in melee combat, whether punching, kicking, biting, or even smashing a foe with a baseball bat.

Brawn is more than just a damage rating, however. It describes how well one may apply their power over time, as well. Such indications involve how fast a character can run over distances short and long, how quickly they can propel themselves through a liquid medium (swimming), and how much weight a character may carry on his or her person without being slowed down by it.

 

Fortitude: 'A fight is not won by one punch or kick. Either learn to endure or hire a bodyguard.'
- Bruce Lee

This trait is a gauge of physical toughness and endurance. Fortitude describes how long a character can continue strenuous physical activity, how resistant to killing blows and metabolic attacks they are, and how quickly they can heal actual damage inflicted upon his or her person. In other words, Fortitude is used to determine a character's base healing and recovery rates over time.

Fortitude closely ties into Brawn for movement purposes. While Brawn shows how fast one can move and with how much weight, Fortitude details just how long they may do so before collapsing in a sweaty heap. Similarly, while Brawn is a measure of how much punishment a character can dish out, their Fortitude value is instead a metric by which one can measure the punishment he or she can take.

 

Intellect: 'Let every man judge according to his own standards, by what he has himself read, not by what others tell him.' - Albert Einstein

In loose terms, a character's Intellect is an indicator of his or her IQ - a measure of intelligence and the capacity for logical thought. It describes one's ability to create items either from scratch or from the spare parts and salvage of others, as well as their ability to understand and operate equipment from the simple to the arcane. So basically, Intellect helps when mastering either geometry or German.

Practically speaking, Intellect also shows how well your character can learn and retain knowledge - both in the short and long-term - which comes in handy when trying to solve a crime or graduate from college. This is utilized for recalling the features of a person's face, specific details of an encounter, or even the schematics of a device you've invented after some villain makes off with them.

 

Awareness: 'Those with the greatest awareness have the greatest nightmares.'
- Mahatma Gandhi

Awareness is the sum of a person's wisdom, common sense, and that sense of self that (most) people possess. A counterpart of sorts to Intellect, Awareness tends to rely upon inspirational leaps and bounds as opposed to logical deductions - a fine distinction, but an important one. It also helps to gauge a person's awareness of their surroundings, showing just how in tune with the multiverse they really are (or aren't).

In game terms, one's Awareness is used when attempting to detect something, whether intentionally (such as looking for clues in a crime scene) or subconsciously (picking up on things not readily apparent). It also is the basis for most empathic abilities, whether passive (the empathy power) or aggressive (emotion control, life force manipulation). Finally, a person's Awareness value determines their initiative modifier in combat.

 

Willpower: 'He who gains a victory over other men is strong; but he who gains a victory over himself is all powerful.'
- Lao Tzu

Somewhat similar in function to the Fortitude trait, Willpower is a gauge of one's mental endurance. It is an excellent descriptor of the sheer strength of will and personality one has, detailing such elusive quantities as mental presence and a sense of focus. While all mental abilities are used in psychic combat to some extent, one's Willpower determines a large component of their success in such arenas.

In game terms, Willpower has two practical aspects. One is how focused a body can be in the face of adversity, such as intense fear, withstanding pain, or even psychic assault. The other is sheer presence, and defines how well the character can impose their will upon others, whether he or she does so in a subtle (leadership, debate skills) or overt (manipulation, intimidation techniques) fashion.

 

Lifestyle: 'A penny saved is a penny earned.'
- Ben Franklin

A measure of personal finance, Lifestyle describes all of the assets currently at a character's disposal. While this is mostly used to show the material resources an individual has access to in the day-to-day functions of the game, it can also be used to detail additional resources available to them through an organization they are a member of (though such funds often come with strings attached).

This takes into account liquid funds as well as material goods; bank accounts, furniture in storage, a perfectly preserved comic book collection, that old cave filled with high tech gadgets - all these and more contribute to the Lifestyle trait. Individuals tend to have more materials than funds, while the reverse is often the case with large financial bodies (think corporations).

 

Repute: 'Avoid popularity if you would have peace.'
- Abraham Lincoln

A quirky statistic, this secondary trait measures the public acknowledgment or approval people have in their normal environment. Repute, then, is used to modify the reaction result characters receive when they interact with others (when such results are not determined in the course of regular role-play). The trick is that a character may have two separate Repute traits.

A body with a secret identity will have both a 'public' and a 'private' Repute; the former is their adventuring notoriety, while the latter describes their 'home life'. Furthermore, Repute can be positive or negative; a positive value implies adoration by the public (such as it is), while a negative Repute means the character is feared and/or reviled by the world at large.

 

Health: 'Health is worth more than learning.' - Thomas Jefferson

Health is a descriptor of the amount of damage a character can sustain before losing consciousness, and possibly their life as a result. Instead of being represented with rank values as are the primary traits, a character's Health is instead determined by adding together the rank values of their Melee, Coordination, Brawn, and Fortitude traits.

Health, then, is a pool of well-being that represents the character at the height of his or her ability. Whenever a character suffers harm, whether physical or mental, the damage inflicted (after any protective powers or gear) is subtracted from their Health. When one runs out of Health, they will pass out, and may or may not begin to die, depending on the nature of the harm inflicted upon them.

Fortune: 'Like gravity, karma is so basic we often don't even notice it.' - Sakyong Mipham

Fortune is essentially a measure of a person's placement in the universal scheme of things. At the beginning of play, each character will have access to an amount of Fortune that is equal to the sum of their Intellect, Awareness, and Willpower traits. They will have no more, however, unless they earn it - which can be done by engaging in activities that fit the ethos of said character.

This means that heroes must fight crime to earn Fortune, whilst villains must engage in it to achieve the same. Either way, Fortune acts as experience points as well as luck; it can be saved and eventually spent to improve one's traits and powers, or it can be wielded to manipulate die rolls as a player sees fit. There is much more on the uses of Fortune later on in the Edition 13 rules.

Special Traits

Each character, in addition to the standard eleven attributes that are used to describe their basic capabilities, may also be quantified in terms of special traits. These are qualities that are not common to every single entity in the game, and may in fact be unique to a specific character. There are four types of special traits, including powers, skills, contacts, and quirks.

Powers: powers are what make super-humans super, as opposed to being 'just' a random bystander. Most PCs have at least one power, whether it takes the form of an inborn ability, a sample of high tech equipment, or studied equivalents such as spells or psionics. Just like primary traits, almost all powers are gauged by rank values, though some are instead quantified with Row Shifts.

Quirks: quirks are modifications added to a character towards the end of its creation. They are oddities that contribute to the uniqueness of a character, potentially adding or subtracting a Row Shift to certain rolls, or merely making their life a little more interesting. Whether beneficial or an impediment, they will typically come into play at least once in a given adventure.

Skills: skills are talents that may be learned by virtually anyone, whether they be super-human or not. Instead of having a rank value, almost all skills offer a boost to trait or power values in the form of a +1 or +2 Row Shift to the standard rank value on all skill rolls, making the character far more proficient in that area than someone who does not have that skill.

Contacts: a contact is a person or an organization that a body can rely upon when needed, for either information, resources, or whatever else may be required. Contacts are automatically considered friendly to a character for the purpose of NPC reaction rolls. A character's contacts may help to shape their origin, and are extremely useful for background information.

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