Once again, many thanks for the help in refining this concept.
Original post can be found here.

Assigned Traits

Brawn - Physical health and strength.
Agility - Coordination and manual dexterity.
Perception - The ability to see things that others miss.
Analysis - The ability to put things together and use high tech gadgets.
Empathy - The ability to understand and influance a viewpoint.
Appearance - Physical beauty and good looks, or lack thereof.

Derived Traits
Aura - The measure of humanity and psionic power.
Reaction - Speed of reflexes.

During character creation, the player will assign 14 points across his assigned traits block. These traits start at 5 and have a max level of 10. Human stats may go above 10 through the application of Cybernetics or Psionics.

Reaction is derived from Agility and Perception, divided by 2, rounded down. Reaction is used to determine combat flow.

Aura is derived from Brawn, Analysis and Empathy, divided by 3, rounded down. The aura stat not only determines the base score for psionics, it determines the amount of Cybernetics that a character can have installed. Installing Cybernetics will cause the characters Aura to weaken. If the characters aura reaches 0, he is considered to have crossed the threshold from human to machine, and is no longer a viable Player character.


Skill Catagory - Linked Stats

Melee Weapons - Brawn and Agility
Low-Tech Ranged - Brawn and Agility and Perception
Firearms - Agility and Perception
Alien Firearms - Agility and Perception and Analysis
Vehicle Operations - Agility and Perception
Vehicle Support - Agility and Analysis
Systems Operations - Analysis
Systems Support - Analysis
Medical - Analysis
Knowledge - Analysis
Diplomacy - Empathy and Appearance
Defense - Agility and Perception
Stealth - Agility and Perception
Athletics - Brawn and Agility
Psionics - Aura

These skill catagories provide a base, untrained number for task resolution. Under these catagories, the player can apply Skill points to Base skills and Advanced skills.

Base skills are broad groups, such as Bladed Weapons. These skills can range from level 1 to 5. The player may choose to by a specialization under a base skill, such as Katana. When using a katana, his character would double whatever his skill level is in Bladed weapons.

Advanced Skills cover a more limited area, such as 'Sneak', under the Stealth Catagory. These types of skills do not allow a specialization. The level range for advanced skills is from 1 to 10.

The player will be able to choose from a number of pre-defined skillsets, such as a weapons heavy 'Soldier' or and a more technically oriented 'Engineer'. The player can also apply his skill points freeform to build exactly the package he wants.

Task Resolution

Any type of contested action can be resolved using a die roll of 2d10 plus skill modifiers.
The target numbers for tasks will fall into a scale from 10 (easy) to 40 (almost impossible). An unmodified roll of 2 on the dice is an automatic failure, and an unmodified 20 is an automatic success.

Target numbers for resisted tests, such as finding a hidden opponent, are determined by the skill level of the target, assuming that he successfully hid in the first place.

Task Resolution (better explaination)

It occurs to me that the task resolution section above needs a better explaination.

Assume an average character wants to shoot at a stationary target. His firearms skill is 7 (based off his Agility and Perception, divided by 2). He has Rifles at lvl 3, with a specialization in Pulse Rifles. His bonus to his roll is now 13, since he is using a pulse rifle. The GM sets difficulty of this task at 15 (not a gimme, but still easy).

The player rolls 2d10 then adds his skill bonus. If the total is equal to or greater than the target number, he succeeds. If the total is lower than the TN, he misses. If he rolled a 2 on the dice, he misses even though 2 + his skill = 15.

I'm still kinda up in the air about critical failures and critical sucesses.

Cool stuff thus far, ghostwolf. When I mentioned Ringworld in the previous thread, I did so because it is a variant of Basic Role Playing which relates attributes to directly to skills in an interesting fashion that might work for "Eschaton".

There are several skill categories in Ringworld, not unlike those in RuneQuest (most other BRP-based games do not have these), each of which is governed by a pair of attributes. What these serve to do is define the maximum percentages beyond which a character no longer can advance in the general (or "root") skill and must begin to advance in individual specialties ("branches") of that skill.

Knowledge skills, for example, have a root maximum of Intelligence plus Education. If a character had INT 15 and EDU 12, he would have a root maximum of 27% in all knowledge skills. If this character had Biology at 25% and increased it 4% while studying genetics, he would have Biology 27% (the root skill) and Genetics 29% (his first Biology branch skill). For any other Biology check, he would continue to use the root value of 27% but would use the higher value when making Genetics checks.

Were the character to receive another increase in Biology, since he has reached his root maximum the increase would go into a new or existing branch skill. Thus, if the character increases his Biology skill by 5%, 2% and 3% in cytology, genetics and pharmacology respectively, he would have Biology 27%, Genetics 31%, Cytology 32% and Pharmacology 30% when all was said and done.

This jibes quite well with what you have already established.

What I'm having trouble with at this point is coming up with a "hit point" tracking mechanic. I want to avoid the pure abstract method used by d20 systems.

My current plan is to use Brawn + Armor-rating to resist damage, but tracking damage after that is kind of a black hole. Damage should have some kind of negative effect on skills. I havn't been able to come up with anything that will be dangerous, without being too deadly.

Does that make sense? Basically, I want the players to be worried when firefights break out, but not paranoid about 1-shot kills.

How about each level of damage temporarily reduces the character's traits by one. Or maybe the penalty applies only to certain skills. Or, you could have another derived trait, something like "resistance" that could be Perception + Brawn / 4, and any wound that deals more damage in one blow than the resistance rating automatically knocks the character out.

SrGrvsaLot wrote: How about each level of damage temporarily reduces the character's traits by one. Or maybe the penalty applies only to certain skills. Or, you could have another derived trait, something like "resistance" that could be Perception + Brawn / 4, and any wound that deals more damage in one blow than the resistance rating automatically knocks the character out.