Roll a 20 sided die.
Add modifiers.
Compare the result to a target number.
If equal to or greater than the target number: success!
Of all men's miseries the bitterest is this:
--To know so much and have control over nothing.
Herodotus
Every character has six abilities that represent the character's basic stregnths and weaknesses. These abilities - Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma - affect everything a hero does, from fighting to using skills.
An ability score of 10 or 11 is average. Higher scores give characters bonuses, and lower scores give penalties.
Roll 4d6 seven times. Drop the lowest and assign the remaining six to your six attributes.
A class represents a defining aspect of a character. It serves as a starting point to help you define your hero, a hook on which you can hang the character's personality, skills, and other traits.
Your beginning character can be a Strong, Fast, Tough, Smart, Dedicated, or Charismatic hero. Each of these basic classes is associated with one of the abiities in the game.
Strong: demonstrates training in athletics. If you want to be good at melee combat, take levels in this class.
Fast: indicates training in agility, hand-eye coordination, and reflexes. If you want to be good at ranged combat, take levels in this class.
Tough: Indicates improvements in physical fitness, health, and stamina.
Smart: provides the means to improve a character's reasoning and skills.
Dedicated: a devotion to a cause, an ideal, or a higher purpose. The Dedicated hero's class features revolve around investigative, empathic, healing, and spiritual devotion.
Charismatic: Indicates training in winning friends and influencing people with a combination of charm, confidence, and charisma. The Charismatic hero can be a leader, a celebrity, a con artist, or a flirt.
A character may add new classes as they advance. Adding a new class gives a character a broader range of abilities, new skills to choose from, and different class features and therefore become a multiclass hero.
Level measures a character's advancement and relative amount of power. A 1st-level character, for example, isn't as powerful as a 5th-level character.
Characters generally begin play at 1st level and attain additional levels as they complete adventures. Attaining a new level provides a character with improvements to important characteristics, such as base attack bonus, number of attacks, saving throws, bonus to Defense, and hit points.
Each character can withstand a certain amount of damage before becoming fatigued, getting knocked unconscious, or dying. A character's hit points (hp) determine how much physical damage a character can withstand before dying. Damage reduces hit points, and lost hit points can only be recovered through medical aid or natural healing.
A character's Constitution score, class, and level determine his number of hit points, and that number increases with each level gained.
Skills represent how well a character does at dramatic tasks other than combat. All characters are assumed to have a wide selection of average skills; the game only measures the skills in which a character has better than average ability and so can use these skills to attempt tasks in dramatic situations.
Feats are special features that provide a character with new capabilities or improvements. All characters start with at least two feats, though certain classes and starting occupations provide additional feats.
A starting occupation represents the training and life experience the character had attained prior to the start of the campaign. A hero may hold other jobs as his carerr unfolds, but the benefits of a starting occupation are only applied once, at the time of character creation.
Many starting occupations have a prerequisite that the character must meet to qualify for the occupation. Each occupation provides a number of additional permanent class skills that can be selected from a list of choices.
Academic, Adventurer, Athlete, Blue Collar, Celebrity, Creative, Criminal, Dilettante, Doctor, Emergency Services, Entrepreneur, Investigative, Law Enforcement, Military, Religious, Rural, Student, Technician, White Collar.
Urban Arcana: Apothecary, Hedge Wizard, Novitiate, Psychic, Shadow Scholar, Squire.
Select a name for your character. What gender? How old? Height and Weight?
Where is the character from? Give some idea of who and what the person is and what they like and dislike. There is a Reputation score in D20 Modern; is your character so well known (like a celebrity or politician) that moving around in public is a chore?
How wealthy is your character? Roll 2d4 and add your occupation wealth modifier to get the character's wealth bonus.
Note: all starting characters will be human.