Heroic Characteristics

The little things that don't fit in other places.

Age
While most characters take to adventuring as young adults, sometimes characters at other stages of life end up on wild rides through the galaxy. However, being older or younger does affect your ability scores, as noted on the table below. All bonuses and penalties are cumulative the further you get from Adult. Additionally, species age differently, and characters who've lived the same number of years may be at different points in their biological lifestyle. If you want to determine the starting age of your character randomly.

Height and Weight
Determine your character's height and weight using the ranges shown on the table below. Think about what the character's abilities might say about their height and weight.If they are weak but agile, they might be thin. If they are strong and tough, they may be tall or just heavy. Feel free to select an appropriate height and weight for your character, or roll dice for random results.

The die roll given for the height modifier increases the character's height by inches(decimeters) beyond the base height. The weight modifier is a die roll multiplied by ?pounds(10 kilo), which is then added to the base height.

Personality
Decide how your character acts, what they like, what they want out of life, what scares them, and what makes them angry. Your character's species is a good place to start when thinking about personality, but a bad place to stop. Make your wookiee(or whatever) different from every other wookiee.

Background
Decide what your character's life has been like up until now. Here are a few questions to get you thinking:


 * How did they decide to become a hero?
 * How did they acquire their class? A soldier for example, might have been in a planetary militia, they may come from a family of soldiers, they may have trained in a martial school, or they may be a self taught mercenary

Movement and Distance
There are three movement scales, as follows:


 * Tactical, for combat, measured in feet (or 5-foot squares) per round.
 * Local, for exploring an area, measured in feet per minute.
 * Overland, for getting from place to place, measured in miles per hour or miles per day.

Modes of Movement
While moving at the different movement scales, creatures generally walk, hustle, or run.


 * 1) Walk: A walk represents unhurried but purposeful movement (3 miles per hour for an unencumbered adult human).
 * 2) Hustle: A hustle is a jog (about 6 miles per hour for an unencumbered human). A character moving his speed twice in a single round, or moving that speed in the same round that he or she performs a standard action or another move action, is hustling when he or she moves.
 * 3) Run:
 * 4) * Run (x3) – Moving three times speed is a running pace for a character in heavy armor (about 7 miles per hour for a human in full plate).
 * 5) * Run (x4) – Moving four times speed is a running pace for a character in light, medium, or no armor ( about 12 miles per hour for an unencumbered human, or 9 miles per hour for a human in chainmail) See Table: Movement and Distance for details.

* Tactical movement is often measured in squares on the battle grid (1 square = 5 feet) rather than feet. * May require a skill check

Tactical Movement
Tactical movement is used for combat. Characters generally don’t walk during combat, for obvious reasons—they hustle or run instead. A character who moves his speed and takes some action is hustling for about half the round and doing something else the other half.

Hampered Movement: Difficult terrain, obstacles, and poor visibility can hamper movement (see Table: Hampered Movement for details). When movement is hampered, each square moved into usually counts as two squares, effectively reducing the distance that a character can cover in a move.

If more than one hampering condition applies, multiply all additional costs that apply. This is a specific exception to the normal rule for doubling.

In some situations, your movement may be so hampered that you don’t have sufficient speed even to move 5 feet (1 square). In such a case, you may use a full-round action to move 5 feet (1 square) in any direction, even diagonally. Even though this looks like a 5-foot step, it’s not, and thus it provokes attacks of opportunity normally. (You can’t take advantage of this rule to move through impassable terrain or to move when all movement is prohibited to you.)

You can’t run or charge through any square that would hamper your movement.

Local Movement
Characters exploring an area use local movement, measured in feet per minute.

Walk: A character can walk without a problem on the local scale.

Hustle: A character can hustle without a problem on the local scale. See Overland Movement, below, for movement measured in miles per hour.

Run: A character can run for a number of rounds equal to his Constitution score on the local scale without needing to rest. See Combat for rules covering extended periods of running.

Overland Movement
Characters covering long distances cross-country use overland movement. Overland movement is measured in miles per hour or miles per day. A day represents 8 hours of actual travel time. For rowed watercraft, a day represents 10 hours of rowing. For a sailing ship, it represents 24 hours.

Walk: A character can walk 8 hours in a day of travel without a problem. Walking for longer than that can wear him out (see Forced March, below).

Hustle: A character can hustle for 1 hour without a problem. Hustling for a second hour in between sleep cycles deals 1 point of nonlethal damage, and each additional hour deals twice the damage taken during the previous hour of hustling. A character who takes any nonlethal damage from hustling becomes fatigued.

A fatigued character can’t run or charge and takes a penalty of –2 to Strength and Dexterity. Eliminating the nonlethal damage also eliminates the fatigue.

Run: A character can’t run for an extended period of time. Attempts to run and rest in cycles effectively work out to a hustle.

Terrain: The terrain through which a character travels affects the distance he can cover in an hour or a day (see Table: Terrain and Overland Movement). A highway is a straight, major, paved road. A road is typically a dirt track. A trail is like a road, except that it allows only single-file travel and does not benefit a party traveling with vehicles. Trackless terrain is a wild area with no paths.

Forced March: In a day of normal walking, a character walks for 8 hours. The rest of the daylight time is spent making and breaking camp, resting, and eating.

A character can walk for more than 8 hours in a day by making a forced march. For each hour of marching beyond 8 hours, a Constitution check (DC 10, +2 per extra hour) is required. If the check fails, the character takes 1d6 points of nonlethal damage. A character who takes any nonlethal damage from a forced march becomes fatigued. Eliminating the nonlethal damage also eliminates the fatigue. It’s possible for a character to march into unconsciousness by pushing himself too hard.

Mounted Movement: A mount bearing a rider can move at a hustle. The damage it takes when doing so, however, is lethal damage, not nonlethal damage. The creature can also be ridden in a forced march, but its Constitution checks automatically fail, and the damage it takes is lethal damage. Mounts also become fatigued when they take any damage from hustling or forced marches.

Encumbrance
These carrying capacity rules determine how much a character’s equipment slows him down. Encumbrance comes in two parts: encumbrance by armor and encumbrance by total weight.

Encumbrance by Armor: A character’s armor determines his maximum Dexterity bonus to AC, armor check penalty, speed, and running speed. Unless your character is weak or carrying a lot of gear, that’s all you need to know; the extra gear your character carries won’t slow him down any more than the armor already does.

If your character is weak or carrying a lot of gear, however, then you’ll need to calculate encumbrance by weight. Doing so is most important when your character is trying to carry some heavy object.

Encumbrance by Weight: If you want to determine whether your character’s gear is heavy enough to slow him down more than his armor already does, total the weight of all the character’s items, including armor, weapons, and gear. Compare this total to the character’s Strength on Table: Carrying Capacity. Depending on the character’s carrying capacity, he or she may be carrying a light, medium, or heavy load. Like armor, a character’s load affects his maximum Dexterity bonus to AC, carries a check penalty (which works like an armor check penalty), reduces the character’s speed, and affects how fast the character can run, as shown on Table: Encumbrance Effects. A medium or heavy load counts as medium or heavy armor for the purpose of abilities or skills that are restricted by armor. Carrying a light load does not encumber a character.

If your character is wearing armor, use the worse figure (from armor or from load) for each category. Do not stack the penalties.

Lifting and Dragging: A character can lift as much as his maximum load over his head. A character’s maximum load is the highest amount of weight listed for a character’s Strength in the heavy load column of Table: Carrying Capacity.

A character can lift as much as double his maximum load off the ground, but he or she can only stagger around with it. While overloaded in this way, the character loses any Dexterity bonus to AC and can move only 5 feet per round (as a full-round action).

A character can generally push or drag along the ground as much as five times his maximum load. Favorable conditions can double these numbers, and bad circumstances can reduce them by half or more.

Bigger and Smaller Creatures: The figures on Table: Carrying Capacity are for Medium bipedal creatures. A larger bipedal creature can carry more weight depending on its size category, as follows: Large ×2, Huge ×4, Gargantuan ×8, Colossal ×16. A smaller creature can carry less weight depending on its size category, as follows: Small ×3/4, Tiny ×1/2, Diminutive ×1/4, Fine ×1/8.

Quadrupeds can carry heavier loads than bipeds can. Multiply the values corresponding to the creature’s Strength score from Table: Carrying Capacity by the appropriate modifier, as follows: Fine ×1/4, Diminutive ×1/2, Tiny ×3/4, Small ×1, Medium ×1-1/2, Large ×3, Huge ×6, Gargantuan ×12, Colossal ×24.

Tremendous Strength: For Strength scores not shown on Table: Carrying Capacity, find the Strength score between 20 and 29 that has the same number in the “ones” digit as the creature’s Strength score does and multiply the numbers in that row by 4 for every 10 points the creature’s Strength is above the score for that row.

Armor and Encumbrance for Other Base Speeds
Table: Armor and Encumbrance for Other Base Speeds provides reduced speed figures for all base speeds from 5 feet to 120 feet (in 5-foot increments).