This system is an alternative SLA Industries rules system that was originally developed for the Syndicate City RPG. After playtesting SynCity several times and then again playing SLA we found out that we liked the newly developed combat and skill resolution system more than SLA's original system and thus we adapted the SynCity system to SLA.

You can find Word versions of the complete rules sytem (including advantages and disadvantages, combat and Ebb rules) in the File Archive section; these zipped versions also includes expanded Firearms, Armour and Ammunitons lists that are adjusted to the new system, some tables that were omitted from this version and the Combat Sheet.

Character Generation

In the standard SLA Industries system a player has a pool of 300 points to build his character. So a character can have high stats, but probably only a limited amount of skills or he can have low stats and be heavy in skills (although still limited in the skill ranks due to the low levels of the controlling stats).

This system, however, divides stat and skill pools and makes the skill pool dependent upon certain stats. In effect, the higher the mental stats of the character, the higher is his skill pool under this system.

Stats

How many points a player can spend on the stats of his character depends on the character's race.

These points can be distributed on the character's stat as the player likes, bearing in mind that each stat begins with 5 and that each race has different stat limits. Each stat increase costs 5 points.

Ebons have a higher number of stat points because they also must buy their Flux stat with these points. Flux is bought just like a regular stat and starts with a level of 5.

A player can elect not to spend all his Stat points; leftover points are transferred to Skill points on a 1:1 basis.

Movement

Base Movement gives the distance in meters a character can move within one second employing the fastest walking pace possible (but yet not running or springting). It depends upon race and certain physical factors like PHYS and DEX stat (you can find the formulas to calculate movement in the downloadable System file in the Archive).

If it is necessary to know how fast a character can move within one Action, multiply Base Move with 5 and divide by the number of Actions. Thus a character with a Base Move of 2,47m and 3 Actions has a Combat Move of 4,1m.

The calculation of Run Move and Sprint Move are equal for all races; Run Move is equal to Base Move x2 while Sprint Move is equal to Base Move x 4.

If a character employs Run or Sprint Movements during a Combat Round and it is necessary to know how much distance he can move within one Action, calculate the movement distance as above (multiply Run/Sprint Move with 5 and divide by the number of Actions). However, to successfully run/sprint in a combat environment, the character has to pass a DEX test, with a -3 penalty when running and -6 when sprinting. If the character has the Running Skill, he can add the Success Die of a successful Running test to the DEX roll (if he fails the Running test subtract (7 - Success Die) from the DEX roll. Note though, that the Running test is made with penalties: -3 if the character is running and -6 if the character is sprinting.

If the character fails the DEX roll he stumbles or falls, depending on the severity of the failure. This is mostly GMD, but you could make the character fall and take (7-Success Die) Hit Points to one leg if you are particulary cruel .

Skills

When the stats are determined the total number of skill points can be calculated. Each character has a total number of skill points equal to his (DIA+CONC+PHYS) x 8. Use the standard skill point costs (rank 1 = 1 point, rank 2 = 3 points, etc.) to spend the points of the skill pool. Ebons also buy their Ebb skills with the points from this pool. If the character takes Advantages or Disadvantages the number of skill points raised or lowered by the cost of the selected Advantages/Disadvantages.

Packages (Optional)

This optional rule concerns the handling of packages. Instead of the usual way of handling package skills, reduce the number of skill points by 40 and increase a character's package skills by 4 ranks after all skill points have been assigned.

Note though that his will usually create extremely powerful and - at least within their speciality - highly skilled operatives.

Experience and Learning

This system uses a mixed experience reward system. During a session the GM awards experience checks to skills used successfully in critical situations. If the GM deems it appropriate he can also award an experience check to a failed skill roll if the situation is critical enough.

After the session the player can choose two of the experience checks awarded during the session and make Skill Gain rolls to increase the skills. Unused skill checks (awarded but not rolled for after the session) are erased; they do not carry over into the next session.

To make a check for a Skill Gain, roll 3d6 and add the difference between the controlling attribute of the skill that is rolled for and it's current rank. If the result is higher than 16 the skill is increased by one rank.

Ebb Skills are a special form of skills; when checking for Ebb Skills roll 3d6 and add the difference between ½ of the Ebb skill rank and the character's CONC. If the roll is higher than 16, the Ebb skill is increased by 1 rank.

Additionally, the GM awards each player with 1 to 3 experience points. Rewards above this are possible, but the GM should hand them out only for excellent performances or intense sessions. The experience points are added to a character's balance (see below).

A player must not spend all points during character creation. All left-over points form a pool that is called the Balance Total. The Balance Total needs not be positive; a player can borrow points from the GameMaster during character creation and assign more points to skills and/or Advantages than he normally is allowed. This, however, comes with a cost attached.

After Character Creation, all experience points are added to the Balance Total. Balance Points can be used variously, eg. they can be used to buy stats. Each stat point bought costs 5 Balance Points. Balance Points can also be used to buy off Disadvantages or increase the rank of Advantages. In this case the cost is equal to the cost during character creation. Thus buying an Advantage with a 3 points per rank cost would cost 3 Balance Points per rank.

However, there are limits: per session a player can only alter a Stat, Advantage, Disadvantage or Skill by 1 rank. The number of Stats, Advantages, Disadvantages or Skills a player can change, however, is unlimited as long as each one is only increased by 1 rank.

Apart from enabling a player to buy Advantages, Stats and Skills, the Balance Total has in-game uses:

A player can temporarily spend eg. 1 point of Balance to reroll one die from a test. By spending 3 temporary Balance points the player can reroll all 3 dice from a test. Other uses of Balance Points are possible; they can be found in the table below.

Negative Balance works similar, it acts as a pool that the GM can use per session to "make something bad" happen to the character. Points spent from the Negative Balance Total are usually spent temporarily, thus the "pool" is refreshed between sessions, so that if the GM depletes the pool in one session, the unlucky streak for the character is over for this session, but his bad luck comes back to him right at the beginning of the next session (and session means session, not scenario).

Balance Points can be spent with various effects. The effects of Balance Points are cumulative, so by spending eg. 3 points the Target Number of a test could be altered by 3.

As indicated in the table, certain effects require the expenditure of permanent Balance Points (such as an automatic critical success). They decrease the Balance Total permanently.

The GM can only spend Negative Balance Points if the character actually has a negative Balance, while the player can only spend Positive Balance points if his character has a positive Balance. If the GM spends permanent negative Balance Points, they are subtracted from the negative balance, (thus the negative Balance of a character is lowered by the amount).

Skill resolution uses three differently colored d6. If you don't have three differently colored dice, either buy them or mark your dice in a manner that you can differentiate between them. Also note down on your character sheet which color/marking represents which dice. We suggest the following colors: Red, Blue, Green, whereas the red die is called the Damage Die, the blue die is called the Penetration Die and the green die is called the Aiming (or Success) Die. But what's the idea behind this all?

Generally speaking, the higher the values on the single dice are, the better your attempt turns out. If the task is a simple non-combat skill-task, the value of the Success Die tells, how good the task was accomplished (if it was successful). A value of 1 means a marginal success, while a Success Die of 6 means an outstanding success. If the task was failed, a value of 1 means an abysmal failure, while a value of 6 indicates only a marginal failure.

The GM might wish to modify the difficulty of the task by assigning difficulty modifiers. These mods can be subtracted from the dice roll total or the difficulty number; although seemingly the same, the outcome can be different:

Fear
There comes a time in every character's career when they face something that drives fear into their hearts. No matter how cool a character is, there is alway something more terrifying than they can handle. This section is designed to help the GM moderate the effects of fear on SLA characters.

Many things can cause fear and each scaring situation is given a fear rating. Fear ratings run from 5 to 15, but can go beyond. A fear rating below 5 isn't usually enough to make anyone roll for. The table in the next column gives some typical example fear ratings.

Meeting with Terror
The more often a character witnesses horrific situations the more hardened they will get. This is reflected in the characters gaining one rank in the Advantage "Hardened" each time a fear roll total is higher than or equal to 18.

Each rank of Hardened subtracts one point from the Success Die of a Fear Roll. This, however, also has a drawback, for hardened characters loose the ability to get affected by what they see - after all they have already seen it all. Over the time their "mental armour" will allow fewer and fewer stimuli to pass through - they are on the way to becoming a "dead fish", devoid emotions, devioud feelings, perhaps fleeing into drug addiction to "make it all go away".

How you implement this is up to you; ideally the players should roleplay it, but some might have to get forced (by "awarding" them with mental disadvantages for each point of "Hardened" acquired) to roleplay this effect.

Phobias
If a character encounters the object of his phobia, roll COOL minus the rank of the phobia against a target number of 16. Success means that the character overcomes his phobia and can act normally (but still uncomfortable), while a result below 16 indicates that the character wants to get away from whatever it is that gives them fear as fast as possible.

The Success Die indicates the strength of the character's wish to get away, the higher the faster he wants to flee. If the Success Die is 6, the character is frozen in fear for time determined by the GM.

Psychosis
Ideally the players should roleplay the psychoses of their characters, however, some players like to conveniently forget all their character's mental scars.

In this case you might want to force them to play out their psychosis: when in a situation that would normally force the character to act in a manner appropriate to the psychosis the character suffers from (e.g. violent for psychopaths or hunted for paranoids or delusional/paranoid for schizophrenics), roll COOL and subtract the rank of the psychosis over 16; success indicates that the character is not affected by his psychosis, while a failure indicates that the character is influenced by the psychosis. The strength of the influence is determined by the Success Die.

The more useful way to implement this rule is when a player, who roleplays the psychosis of his character faithfully, wants the character to overcome the psychosis. The roll is the same, success indicates that the character can actually overcome his psychosis and act normal, while failure indicates that he cannot control his psychosis.

In this case the Success Die indicates how strong the character is affected by his psychosis: a success with a Success Die of 6 means that he is not affected at all, while a Success Die of 1 indicates that the character is uneasy and fears to slip into psychotic mood every second.

In case of a failure, the Success Die indicates how strong the psychosis' hold over the character is; a result of 6 indicates that he is completely dominated by the psychosis, while a result of 1 means that the character is almost unaffected by the psychosis.