Abilities

Every character has six abilities. Roll 2D and assign them in order to start character creation.

STR — Strength

Muscle, capacity to exert physical force

Strength is the abstract measure of a character's physical power. STR 7 indicates an ability to bench press about half of a given character's body mass. STR 9+ might be a trained weightlifter. STR 12+ could be a professional gladiator or an Olympic powerlifter.

AGI — Agility

Speed, finesse, deftness of action

Agility is your character's quickness, fine-motor skill, grace, and deftness of movement. Agility is the innate ability of a character to dodge, throw, and shoot. AGI 9+ could make a living as a dancer, acrobat, or stage magician. AGI 12+ could be an Olympic athlete in shooting sports, gymnastics, or figure skating.

END — Endurance

Toughness, determination, fitness

Endurance represents how tough your character is. It is an abstract measurement of your character's ability to withstand pain, hunger, thirst, disease, and infection. Endurance can be used to determine how long your character can run, how far they can swim, or hold their breath. Along with Strength and Agility, Endurance is the third characteristic used to track wounds. An END 9+ character could run a marathon and place in the top 1,000 of any major city, whereas an END 12+ might indicate the ability to run 150km or more without stopping.

INT — Intuition

Speed of thought, pattern recognition

Intuition represents your character's connection to the quantum realm of thought. It is your character's ability to attain direct knowledge or understanding seemingly without prior knowledge or inference. Intuition affects who strikes first in a fight. It is your character's ability to surprise others and to be surprised. High Intuition indicates a greater likelihood that your character will be able to figure out that something isn't right, what a contact or patron really thinks of them, and whether or not that case of surplus laser carbines is actually a good deal. Low Intuition characters don't bore easily, are less affected by stress, and have a lower likelihood of acquiring self-destructive vices.

EDU — Education

Acquired general knowledge

Education represents how much formal and informal knowledge your character possesses. It's everything they've read, been taught, figured out on their own, and learned against the sum total of all human knowledge. EDU 7 is equivalent to a GED, but you know, in space. EDU 15 would be a polyglot/polymath and likely quite insufferable, spouting random little-known facts and waving around their knowledge in a most lascivious fashion.

PRE — Presence

Style, panache, charisma

Presence is your character's ability to control the amount and type of attention they draw from others. Characters with a high Presence can light up a room, or choose to be completely anonymous in a crowd. A low Presence score means you have difficulty controlling the attention you attract, if any, and whether or not that attention is positive.

Notes

The ability score array represents your character's most basic capabilities. How fast are they? How strong? How do others react to them? How much do they know about the universe around them?

Abilities are the basis for resolving tasks, competitions, and crises in Hyperlite — compared against a die roll, alone or combined with skill. See Rules for how those checks work, and how each ability can only support one roll per session until all six have been used.

Remember the golden rule of Hyperlite: "You narrate. The Dice dictate."

Give the PCs the benefit of the doubt and keep the flow moving. When the outcome of a given action is more than a little uncertain, bring out the dice and let them decide.

A Note on Intelligence

Hyperlite intentionally leaves Intelligence out as an ability. It is this designer's belief that the intelligence of the character should be the intelligence of the player. The character is the player's avatar in Hyperlite, and while their physical and psycho-social characteristics may be entirely different than that of their player, it is not fair to any player to constrain the use of their own intelligence to solve problems within the game.