It is now more than thirty years after the publication of Dungeons & Dragons original edition, and things are pretty different in the realm of Role Playing Games. Today, there are hundreds of releases per year, which isn’t bad for a hobby that this author has been told countless times is dying.

Modern RPGs cover a broad array of fictional genres, and display an increasingly large diversity of rules.  There are roleplaying games of popular television series (http://www.cubicle-7.com/doctorwho/Who-front-page.html), westerns (http://www.peginc.com/games.html), famous superheroes (http://www.enworld.org/forum/news/277386-green-ronins-chris-pramas-talks-dc.html), even maid manga and anime (http://maidrpg.com/). Roleplaying games can be Dungeons & Dragons clones (http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG), playable without game master (http://gregorhutton.com/boxninja/remember/index.html), feature totally player created traits and abilities (http://www.glorantha.com/index.php), or traditional but cleverly built rules (http://www.gregstolze.com/reign/).

But most telling about how things have changed is the differences between the first and most recent versions of Dungeons & Dragons.

The most recent edition of D&D is considerably different from its original version I covered in the previous post. The boxed set I have beside me contains three volumes like its predecessor, except now the books are full color hardbacks several times larger and thicker than the originals. It contains elements from every edition of D&D ever published, and more than a few totally new ones.
All of the random elements of the older edition’s character creation are gone. It’s entirely driven by allocating points and abilities. The system is not as simple, but much more elegant than the original edition. It’s rules are clear and codified, featuring an overview of how to handle any of the infinite number situations that will come up in play. Characters now take up multiple sheets, although this is mostly for clarity. Most character abilities are focused on combat, although this isn’t much of a deviation from the original game to be honest.

But the biggest difference by far is the idea that all the rules are consistent, and all of the rules are built to serve one end. In all versions of D&D, attacks are handled by a roll of a twenty-sided die, which may or may not hit depending on your character’s level and the enemy’s armor class. But nothing else works that way in any edition prior to 3^rd. If you have the woodcutting skill in AD&D 1^st ed, you roll percentile dice. You roll a six-sided die to find trap doors. In 4^th edition, all of those tasks are handled by rolls very similar to combat.
One aspect of the game is both different and similar at the same time. It’s the game’s focus on a limited range of things, and focus on them. The original D&D’s focus was largely on the ways you could die while exploring a dungeon and D&D 4e focuses on interesting combat. It focuses on A) Teamwork and B)Offering interesting options. Every class in 4e is sorted in to one of four roles, each role having a subset of things it’s good at doing. You need all of these rolls to succeed in battle, creating an environment that focuses on all the team members. In addition to this, many abilities are powerful in tandem with abilities from other classes.
To explain what I mean by choices in combat, let me explain how many other games work.
So, your characters in a fight, and you look at what kind of attacks they can use in a fight. First, it shows you that you can attack a specific body part, and that’s fairly cool, but since that’s harder to do, you take a penalty to attempt this. It’s less likely to happen. In other words, doing something more interesting is more likely to mean you won’t do anything at all, which is even less interesting than a normal attack.
This leads to how 4e handles this. Essentially, there’s nothing that you take penalty for attempting. Not everything is useful all of the time, but everything is useful some of the time. It also should be noted that none of these abilities deprive you of your usual attack, because many of them replace your usual attack.

This leads to another key aspect of the modern era of games: A growing number of games operate under the idea that rules don’t have to reflect real life, and instead focus on fictional logic. That a game that’s supposed to be based heavily on anime and kung-fu movies where characters run on walls and back flip off of swords should not dissuade you from that. Hence mechanics like Exalted’s (http://www.white-wolf.com/exalted/index.php?line=intro) stunt system, which gives you a bonus when you describe your attacks in an entertaining way.

Or, the game Spirit of the Century (http://www.evilhat.com/home/sotc/), where the way you describe your character affects likely (or unlikely) it is to succeed. This game has a feature called Aspects, which are descriptors of your character. You have a pool of points you can spend to give you a bonus to your rolls, but only when that roll is something that is described by an aspect your character has. For example, you have the aspect Built Like an Ox, you could spend a point to pry open a stuck door. Or the aspect Posh Socialite could allow you to get a bonus when dealing with rich people. Conversely, you can also be given points if the aspect affects you negatively. Built Like an Ox could make it hard for you to wriggle through a tight passage, and Posh Socialite might not make you very popular when dealing with the protesting workers union.

The spectrum today is huge, and there’s more coming along every day. The present of Roleplaying is astoundingly varied, and it remains to be seen what it will become in the future.

I welcome you to spar, all-purpose roleplaying game. You can use spar to run just about anything you can think of, from Fantasy to scifi, to anything else you can think of.

To play the game, you will need several people, from two to as many as you can coherently understand at one time. One of the players will take the role of the Game Master. All other players create characters according to the character creation rules below. The Game Mater will decide things like the Threshold of Trait rolls, what kind of dice that characters other than the players have, and what other stats they have, and broadly determines situations that the player’s characters will encounter.

Creating a Character

A character is composed of several components called Traits and Emphases. Traits both serve as the numbers you use to roll dice and the numbers other characters will have to beat. Emphases are specific things you’re good at with a trait. Traits are rated from one to five, Emphases are initially one to three, but may be increased. You need to split up eight points for Traits, and another ten points for Emphases. How these numbers will be used will be explained in a bit.

The traits are as followed:

Power:
Power is the measure of how you can affect the world around you. Your force of will to change the things you interact with.
Power changes things.

Resistance:
The opposite of Power, resistance is what you use to keep things from changing. It’s frequently used as the Threshold for roll against you, but can be rolled as well.
Resistance keeps things from changing when you don’t want them to.

Flexibility:
Sometimes changing something isn’t hard, it would be simple to flip that switch, take that book, give that code to your contact, but something is in your way. You don’t want or need to change the thing in your way, but the switch is at the end of a hall of lasers, the book is the book is in the library of a suspicious librarian, or you’re being trailed by an agent from another agency. You roll flexibility to cleverly dodge the lasers, convince the man the book is of little value, and to toss that dirty napkin in just the right way to attract your contact’s attention and no one elses.
Flexibility lets you get around things, but not change them.

Awareness:
You’re grip on reality is measured by Awareness. It can be used to determine the state of something you’re not sure of, such as if a guy is tailing you, and lets you create exposition to explain the world. This follows the usual rules of exposition, described below.
Awareness lets you know things about your current situation, and the world around you.

Emphases
Traits tell you what your character is good at abstractly, but you’re defined as a character by your Emphases. Emphases are descriptors of your character that define what talents, skills, and situational advantages they have. They can be literally anything at all, from a talent with guns to working better when under pressure, to money, to magic talent. Every emphasis is connected with a Trait, and can only be used with that trait.

You’re given essentially free rein with Emphases, although they have to be approved by your GM before the game begins.

So, how do you make a good one? Simple, an Emphasis that’s broadly descriptive is your best bet. Choosing an emphasis called Master of Arms is more interesting than just having an emphasis called Guns. Similarly, you can be pretty abstract, just make sure your GM understands that Blessing of the Sun Goddess mean you work best when fighting with your holy sword.

Here are some examples of emphases, they’re not quite as good as ones I’m sure you can come up with, but they give a good idea of the kind of thing you can do.

Power
Luchador, Hideous Strength, Warmage, Master of Arms, Warrior of the Sun, Seductive Voice, Karate Kid, Break’n Things, “Could sell Ice to Eskimos”, Evil Eye, Heat Vision, Money.

Resistance
Rocksteady, Consumerist, Counterspell, Freakishly Scaly Skin, Four Lobed Brain, Adamantium Skeleton, Ten-Thousand-Leaves Style defense, Won’t Get Fooled Again.

Flexibility
Sneaky Bastard, Ninjutsu, Zinh’s Mystical Visual Dislocation, Like the Wind, Running Man, Sleight of Hand, The ‘ol Switcheroo, Invisibility Cloak.

Awareness
Third Eye, Eight-Thousandth Birthday, Roke Diploma, The Librarian of Alexandria, The Hichiker’s Guide, “I’m a Doctor not a…!”, Comic Book Guy.

Assets (Optional)
There are times when you have something that’s outside of the scope of the abilities mentioned here, and some people will want a little more variance to their characters. If this describes you, has every character pick two of the following, and you can pick the same entry twice:

Helper: Choose a trait. You may now roll a Trait Test, and each Hit you get on the roll gives one other player an extra die in that trait for their next roll.

Resource: You have something useful that other people don’t, describe this like it’s an asset. Twice per game session, you can spend this to get two extra dice when you make a roll.

Group Resource: Like a resource, but can be used by anyone, not just you. And instead of twice per session, you can get this bonus once for every player at the table. Note however, one player can use this more than once, it just takes up more than one use for everybody else too.

Playing the Game
SPAR is a fairly simple game, really. It’s designed to flow pretty smoothly, with very little work on the part of any of the players or the Game Master before play begins.

The first step is to create a character if you are the player. Everyone should come to some kind of agreement as to the sort of game they want to play, and agree to some general parameters on what is and isn’t allowed. Then players will create the characters they want to guide through the story.

The game is played in sessions, which are roughly a contiguous story, or when everyone wants to finish, whichever come first. A session proceeds as follows:

Introduction
The Game Master introduces the circumstances the players find their characters in at the start of the session. This includes asking for details about what the characters are doing. If this is the first session, the GM probably needs to explain some details about the world. This should also include A) Determine why the players are together B) An event to spur character action of some kind and C) What the characters want the ultimate outcome to be as decide by their player.
Once this has begun, it’s time for the next step.

Action and Reaction
All of the players should now decide what they want their character to do in response to the introduction. This can be essentially anything they can conceive of. What they attempt will either A) Happen as they want it to or B) Need to be tested.

An action should be tested if there is some chance that the action could fail, and the consequences of failure would be interesting. That last bit is important; it’s not interesting to make the players roll Power every time they take a step, it is interesting to roll Flexibility to get past a security camera that would alert a guard.

A test is made by rolling a number of dice equal to the Trait being tested plus extra dice equal to the emphasis if it applies. As an example, If you want to shoot something with a gun, you’d roll 3 dice if your power is three, plus two dice for your Master of Arms (2) Emphasis.

The GM sets a number called the Threshold from one to five. The higher the number is, the less likely it is that what you want to happen will happen. The GM should base this number on the conventions of the world you’re playing.

Every die you roll that rolls higher than the threshold is called a Hit, and more Hits are better.

If you get no Hits: You utterly fail, and what you wanted to happen does not.
If you get one Hit: You kind of get what you want, but there are a lot of complications.
If you get two Hits: You get what you want, but there’s a small wrinkle that you didn’t.
And if you get three hits: You get exactly what you want.

The GM can also call for rolls if something happens, like if a gangster shoots your character, they might call for a Resistance roll on your part to see what happens.

One quick thing to remember about all of this is that declaring a fact about the setting of the game is the same thing as any other kind of action. That is, if a player says  “The Mountains of Madness! Why, I do believe that is where the dreaded Elder Things Live!” this is treated as true unless the GM calls for a roll.

Conclusion
Eventually, all of the various threads of this session’s story will end up resolved and the session comes its end. Or it could be you run out of time, and will continue your tale next time. Either way, the GM should give some brief exposition, either wrapping up odds and ends or speculating about the next game session.

Some advice to the Game Mater
Your primary role in this game is to drive the action forward. That is, when the players are not acting, you should compel them to act by sending a situation their way. You can decide a lot of how things are, but never decide something about a character after the game begins. Don’t plan your stories out in detail, just come up with a few things to throw at the players, and have some vague idea of how to react to them.
You have characters as well, but they only act as Threshold numbers for the Players. If you want to formalize the stats one has, just write it up like this:
Coward 2, Violent Acts 4, Brains 1
These are descriptors with numbers attached, so if a player wants to intimidate one, you would set the Threshold to 2 because of their coward trait. If they attack a character, the Resistance Roll’s number is.

Author’s Notes
This game is kind of rough around the edges I’ll admit, but I like it a lot. It ended up being a kind of free-form story telling game with rules to make it more interesting and unpredictable. At a various points, I intended this game to have a setting, and to have a more complex conflict system. I ended up going the direction I did because I liked how elegant the system was.
I have several documents worth of material that almost made it into the game, and you can see a number of those elements in my previous blog posts. I could never quite figure out a good conflict system with it.

I plan on developing these ideas further than this, and I have no doubt the next time SPAR pops up, it will look quite different. But this version is complete, and that is enough.

-Noah Hinz

It’s surprising how contentious the history of Role Playing Games (RPGs) is. You look at one origin for the games, and it points back to ever older sources. Ernest Gary Gygax was not the inventor of the RPG, he got the idea from Dave Arneson. Dave Arneson in turn, was inspired by David Wesley’s Braunstein game. Wesley himself got one of the biggest ideas, the impartial referee or Game Master, from a military produced war games book. And that idea can be traced to the start of wargames itself with the Kreigspliel of Baron Von Reiswitz I discussed way back in my first post in this series.

The sequence of events according to Wesey himself (http://www.acaeum.com/forum/about3888.html, its a few posts down) started with him running several games with multiple objectives. Wargames up to that point were an all or nothing affair, ending with the defeat of an army or capture of an outpost. With multiple non-linear objectives, the game took on a different style. Dave Arneson was a player in several of these games, and was apparently inspired to run his own.

The next fuzzy bit of the story comes from Chainmail. Chainmail was a wargame made by E. Gary Gygax. It was medieval, and therefore somewhat less common than wargames set in other eras. At some point, a section known as the Fantasy Supplement was added. This section of the book contained rules for fantasy creatures from various sources to Chainmail. I’ve found conflicting reports of Arneson being credited with this, and Arneson basing some of his campaigns on it and not inventing it at all.

In any case, Arneson was who introduced the RPG style to Gygax. This led to the two of them eventually producing the three book supplement to Chainmail called Dungeons & Dragons.
Yes, D&D was extra rules for another game originally. Its rules reference this quite few times. The game slowly picked up players, until it became something of a phenomenon. Sadly, a number of developments caused Gygax and Arneson to disagree as to the direction the game should take. To make a long story short, it ended with Arneson leaving the company, and Gygax taking over. It’s largely from this period that most people think of Gygax as the creator of the game, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was Gary’s work entirely, using nothing of Arneson’s except the initial concepts from his work on the line.

But their original document D&D game is the most important thing either of them would ever do. It created an industry, and popularized a new style of game. But what’s the game like?

Sadly, I once again have not had the chance to play it. But there are some interesting things to be gleaned from it. First, it’s impressive how much of later games are established here. Up until the third edition of D&D, all of the versions had this rule system at their core. The six basic ability scores that define your character are still here, albeit with some question of how they affect the game at all. You see, most of the stats have no mechanical impact at all. They’re merely descriptors.
In an interesting twist, the fact Ability Scores are basically meaningless counteracts the fact that they are rolled randomly, as far as character balance goes.
The writing style is incredibly casual, and frequently vague. It alludes to rules as often as it states them. There are several fairly important rules that are only referenced in Chainmail, although this is somewhat explainable by the fact that D&D is a supplement to it.

The tone compared to the later Advanced Dungeons and Dragons seems less judgmental. It’s like hearing someone talk about their cool new game, as opposed to telling you how you’re playing the game wrong.
It’s missing a number of iconic Dungeons & Dragons features, most notably the Thief class. Thieves are one of the most iconic elements of the game, appearing in literally every edition after this, albeit renamed Rogue in the more recent editions of the game. Slightly less surprising is the lack of a number of D&D’s most iconic monsters, such as the Beholder, which probably developed in play over a longer period of time.

It’s fascinating how this game started everything. While the origins of Role Playing can be debated and debated, this game is the spark that set it off. It’s influence can be felt all the way to World of Warcraft, which steals so much from D&D’s monsters and classes. Actually, everything in this game, with the exception of a few monsters stolen from Lord of The Rings and The Invisible Stalker, is in World of Warcraft.

Gygax and Arneson’s creation’s effects can still be felt today, and likely will be felt for some time to come. It’s pretty good legacy.

My abstract stats worked well too. While I had to think a bit about how they were used, they were fairly equally used.

Character Creation was a breeze in general, and all of the characters it produced were highly distinct. So I consider it pretty well done. There was one aspect of it that was sort of an issue however; the Archetypes.

Archetypes were my attempt to create quickly to develop set of rules that change character abilities in substantial ways. It did this, but there were big discrepancies in usefulness of the abilities of each one.
This contributed to my overall thinking about the game considerably, but I’ll save that for the end.

The resolution mechanics were overall fine. The basic dice system worked well, and was really quick and simple in play. I had some issues with deciding target numbers, mainly from not being sure of what factors made something hard or not. Also, the term ‘Target Number’ was criticized, as the number you needed was one lower than what you needed to roll. I changed the term to ‘Threshold’ problem solved.

The combat though, was buggy. Players commented that the way I implemented it, there was very little they could do to resist effects if they were attempting to avoid. In addition, combat felt to combat-ey. While before I called it a conflict system, it became clear running it that it really was only a system for fighting. I had been thinking about it in terms of fight too much for it to be very universal.

So, with the issues mentioned, what am I going to do to change it?

First of all, I’m dropping archetypes. They were too rigged, and specifically pointed out the direction I want to take. That is, more player defined things. Abilities should be more abstract and standardized; I have some ideas on how to do that. This line of thought also inspired me to take a look at what parts of the game were most interesting to me.

Finally, most of the changes I ended up making implied a different game world then I described initially. This game world is back to my initial New Weird game approach. In fact, I think I cracked the issue with my city rules.

Anyway, I’ll be posting more about it literally in the next few days, so stay tuned.

First off, I think this is the first time I’ve called the game Spar on this blog. The name is specifically a reference to the term ‘Sparring’ to mean a fighting competition. It’s also going to be the name for a large artificial structure in the game world.

The overall premise is essentially the classic RPG premise in a lot of ways. The game focuses on teams of individuals attempting to complete missions, which is the same basic idea as most RPGs.
What’s interesting is that despite the fact that this is the template for most RPGs, very few games actually seem to emphasize this in the rules or setting.

Everything in the game is handled with rolling six-sided dice. The specific method I’m using for rolls is called a dice pool. This means that characters in the game have stats that determine how many dice you roll, the more the better. The particular dice pool system I use is based on the dice in the pool being compared to a Target Number. Each individual die that rolls a number higher than the target number is called a Hit, and you can spend Hits to influence the game world, the flow of the story, and affect other characters.
I like dice pools because you can get complex information from them with little or no math. This can keep the game running smoothly, but still have interesting consequences from your roll.

Rolls generate narrative control. The better you roll, the more control over the narrative you have.

Another major philosophy of design that this game is that the rules are discreet, but the narrative is flexible. For example, while I have a list of option for what rolling the Power trait can do in a conflict, all of these options are strictly rules. There is no assumption of what this means in the story.
For example, if you use your Power trait to punch someone, and choose to reduce their defense instead of hurting them, you could read it as you winded your opponent, you pulled a clever feint that gave you an opening, or any number of much more interesting things that someone could come up with.

This extends to character creation as well. While there are four Traits (Power, Resistance, Flexibility and Awareness), and those four traits always do the same thing in the rules, characters in the game also have various Emphases that are player defined. Power is roughly your ability to directly and bluntly affect things, and is the stat used for attacking things (although it could also be used to convince someone you’re right, or break down a door). But you could have an Emphasis called Guns that meant you would roll more dice whenever you shot a gun. Or, if you wanted to be more unique, you could call your Emphasis Southern Ilse Martial Arts. In game rule terms, they’re the same. In narrative terms, they’re different.
These emphases are totally player created. While I plan to have a list of suggestions, players essentially have free reign. The Game Master is empowered in this case to say a trait like All Powerful at Everything is not allowed.

Before I leave, I’m going to say that the next post you see will be after my Playtest of the game this Sunday. I’ll explain more of the ideas, and what worked and didn’t work then.

A few years ago, hard as it may seem to believe, I was just about to give up on videogames. I just couldn’t find anything I liked to play anymore. It had specifically been triggered by the Game New Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo DS. By all means, it should have been a good game. I should have liked it, it was exactly the kind of game I wanted to play.
But I didn’t like it at all. It was confusing to me; it was a new Mario game. It had more levels, more powerups, and more characters. It should have been perfect, it should have been great, and it shouldn’t have made me seriously consider never buying another game ever again.

This turned around when I discovered Independent video games. I was attracted to Indy games for their frequent attempts at innovation, unique art direction, and general quality of their design. There are so many out there, so this article is going to profile a few of them.

Cave Story (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_Story)
Cave Story is really interesting because of how it manages to be totally unique, but at the same time is composed of many old ideas. Originally released in Japanese with no major promotion that I’m aware of, Cave Story has come to be the face of independent games.
It’s a side-scrolling platformer, recalling games like Mario, Metroid, Megaman, and many other games who’s titles do no start with the letter M. The graphics are pixilated and simple, but evoke a bygone era of gaming. Perhaps the most impressive thing about Cave Story is the fact that it was made entirely by one man. He coded the game, wrote the story, composed the music, and drew the game’s graphics. Everything in this game is the vision of one guy, and it shows. Nothing in the game feels out of place, everything feels like it has purpose.
Recently, Cave Story was releases as a download for the Nintendo Wii. It took more people to remake the game for a new system than it took to make the game in the first place.

Interestingly, the Cave Story’s retro style graphics became a major indy game aesthetic. This aesthetic has even made it to mainstream games, with major publishers like Capcom making new installments of their Mega Man series in the style of games from the 1980s:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mega_Man_9. And in the smaller, but still big budget game 3d Dot Game Heroes, which combine the pixated graphics of an NES game with 3d polygons.

But there are other ways you can reference old games. Take Braid for example: http://www.braid-game.com/. Braid, like Cave Story is the work of one man. Well, two guys, but the other guy was making the graphics according to the first guys exacting specifications.
The first guy’s name, by the way, is Jonathan Blow.
Jonathan Blow was very outspoken during the development of Braid. He talked about his theories and principles constantly as he made Braid, and consequently is the basis for a lot of my thinking on games.ning
Braid is like some kind of surrealist take on Mario. Your character in the game is capable of running and jumping. If you touch an enemy, you die. Most of the levels have other hazards, like spikes and lava, which also will kill you. The goal is to get all of the puzzle pieces in each level, and assemble them.
There is a twist, however. Time is not normal in this game; it can be rewound at will. That is, whenever you want to, you can press a button and literally turn back the clock. As you progress through the game, you discover certain things that are unaffected by your ability to rewind time, and thus the game’s puzzle elements enter. The challenge in Braid is not to survive; it’s to get all of the puzzle pieces. When you can rewind time and undo your death, the challenge becomes something different. And this is reflected in the games story, which is cryptically talks about your character, Tim, and the Princess he loves.
This too is an obvious reference to Mario, but Braid’s take on it is very dark. Namely, it brings up the question of does the princess wants to be rescued in the first place? Does Tim only think he’s rescuing her? And what does the princess stand for, anyway?
Other references to Mario include carnivorous plants that sprout from green pipes, at least one visual reference to Donkey Kong, and every world ending with Tim being informed his princess is in another castle.

While my last game concept was super ambitious in innovation, this game is a little less so. It’s an extrapolation of traditional game ideas, much more than something totally unique. It follow the traditional team of characters doing dangerous and adventurous missions.

But it isn’t just Dungeons & Dragons with a new coat of paint, this game is still quite a bit outside of the traditional model of game rules.

Here’s some bits of the rules which are (hopefully) fairly legible:

Success Rolls
Whenever you try to accomplish something, you roll a number of six sided dice. The GM assigns a Target Number (TN) from one to five. If any of the come up with a number higher than the Target Number, you succeed. A die that rolls higher than the target number is called a Hit. While you only need one hit to succeed, there are a large number of instances where you can spend additional successes to get more effect.

Commentary
This is a fairly traditonal component of game design. While alot of older games use a bunch of different kinds of dice rolls to determine things, more recent games usually use one kind of roll for everything. This kind of thing is in a lot of games.
Quick example of how this works in play: You want to hit a guy with a sword, so you’ll roll your Attack trait. Your attack trait is four, so you roll four dice. Each die that rolls higher than your target’s defense is considered a “hit”. You spend these hits to buy negative consequences for your opponent, such as hurting them or restraining them.

***
Traits
Traits are one of the basic components of a character. Traits define how well you do what you do things. They do not describe the literal reason that you’re good at them. For example, if you have high ATK, you could just be a very strong gladiator who smashes things, or a precise assassin who elegantly cuts things, or master gunslinger who could shoot through a man heart from thirty feet away. Traits are used to determine how many dice you use in a Success roll, and are sometimes used to define the Target Numbers of other characters.
Every trait has things it can do, and things it can’t do. These are listed with the trait below.

Finesse (FIN)
Whenever you need to be somewhere else, Finesse is the stat. FInnesse handles movement and control, if you need to do something that’s very touchy, whether it be disarming a bomb, or debating in a courtroom. Finnesse also get you through difficult places, such as a hard mountain pass, or running on top of a train.
Can:
*Get you from one point to another faster
*Move you through difficult areas
*Do something delicate, that requires careful control

Commentary:zz
Traits, as you can see, are what determine what dice can roll. They basically determine how likely something you’ll succeed at something you try to do. Traits are purely game mechanical, and say nothing about how your character is in the fiction. IE: You’re high Attack might mean you’re a guy who grew up in a street gang and fights with a rough punching style, or a master swordsman trained at one of the most prestigious gentleman’s war academy in the Western Kingdoms.

Some bit about the setting
The setting is no longer ‘New Weird’ but is still non-traditional fantasy. The world is industrialized, the industrial nations have very similar amounts and types of technology to the 1920′s and 1930′s. There are a number fantastic techs, like heavier-than-air flying craft. These craft are of the sort you’d see in Last Exile, big heavy aerial battleships and cruisers.

Magic is relatively common, but low powered. Most charcters will have some magical skill. There are a few rare individuals with the title of Mage that make a mockery of local physics, however.

There are a number of non-human species that are still up in the air as well.