Every RFI:Freelancers game involves several Players and their corresponding characters. One of the Players will be the Gamemaster (below), but everyone else will take on the role of Player Characters. These Player Characters (PCs) are the protagonists of the game, and each player has a single Player Character of their own, for whom they will make decisions, roll dice, and engage with the events of the story. Each Player Character has a character sheet, which is a record of their game statistics, abilities, and other important information.
The Player Characters aren't the only types of characters around, however. Non-Player Characters (NPCs) are everyone else, from allies and innocent bystanders, to the adversaries the Player Characters face. They are collectively controlled by the Gamemaster.
Of the Players gathered for the game, one will be the Gamemaster, or GM. The GM has a different set of responsibilities, and interacts with the rules of the game differently to everyone else. The Gamemaster controls the NPCs, is responsible for coming up with challenging situations and indomitable opponents the Player Characters will face, and oversees the ways in which the PCs overcome these problems.
The GM establishes scenes, building on the actions and choices of the PCs to shape the game at every state, providing a challenge and giving the PCs opportunities to shine. They also interpret how the rules apply to a given situation, such as ruling on the Difficulty of skill tests, or adjudicating when unusual situations or disagreements arise. Above all else, the GM is not the Players' enemy: the game works all the better when the GM is a fan of the Player Characters and their exploits, albeit one who seeks to make those characters' lives as dramatic, exciting, and challenging as possible.
The RFI:Freelancers uses a few types of dice to resolve the actions a character may attempt and the situations they may face. In most circumstances, more than one dice of a given type will be rolled at once; these dice collectively are referred to as a dice pool.
The first, and most commonly-used is the twenty-sided die, known throughout these rules as a d20. D20s are used for resolving skill tests, and for rolling on certain large tables. Often, two or more d20s will be required. This is noted as Xd20, where X is the number of dice to be rolled. Thus, 2d20 denotes that two twenty-sided dice should be rolled. It's helpful to have at least two d20s for each player, and more is better than less, as players may be rolling as many as five at a time.
Many circumstances allow a character to re-roll one or more dice. When re-rolling dice, the Player choose the dice they wish to re-roll. They roll those dice again, and the new results replace the original ones, even if the new result is worse.
Some situations allow for a specific number of dice to be re-rolled, while others allow all the dice in a pool to be re-rolled. Players may always choose how many dice they wish to re-roll, up to the number listed – in essence, you may always choose not to re-roll a die if you wish to keep that result.
Having a supply of paper and pencils will be handy for making maps, keeping notes, and tracking various game effects. The players may wish to make notes of temporarily impairments affecting their characters, the names of characters they encounter, important events, and clues to help them through their adventures, amongst other things. The Gamemaster may need them to record the status of NPCs, and to keep notes of key details from the game. Sometimes, when secrecy is required, the Gamemaster may pass notes to Players rather than providing information to the whole group at once.
It is possible to track all of this (and more) with tablets, smartphones, and computers, but electronic devices at the game table can be distracting to some groups and should only be used with the Gamemaster's consent.
The Players and GM will also need a few counters. Players will need a set of six tokens of some kind to track Momentum saved up, while the Gamemaster will need a dozen or more to represent the Threat pool; each of these resources is described later. The players may also want extra tokens to denote Luck points, though these are somewhat more scarce and easier to track without tokens.
While the tokens themselves can be similar, it's advised that they be visually distinct in some way – normally a different color – to avoid confusion between them. Poker chips, coins, glass beads, counters from other games, or similar tokens are all suitable for this purpose.
While these resources could be tracked on paper, or by using dice to track the total, using chips or beads for this purpose has a few advantages. It's often more intuitive to track each resource by simply adding or removing tokens from a pile in the middle of the table, and it's easier for everyone to quickly gauge how many of each of these resources remain. Further, there's a visceral psychological benefit to be had in the players seeing the GM's Threat pool grow and shrink over time, and to having a tangible object to hold and move around that represents Momentum earned and spent or Threat generated.
The following are a few of the core ideas present throughout these rules, and a basic primer on the most common mechanics that Players will encounter in play. This section is presented slightly differently to the rest of the rules, addressing the reader – an individual playing a RFI:Freelancers game – directly.
As noted above, each player has a character, and each player character serves as one of the game's protagonists. These characters – as well as many of the non-player characters the GM controls – have several common elements that help describe their abilities.
A character's attributes represent their core aptitudes: the things they are innately good at, the things they're bad at, and the ways they prefer to approach problems. Each character has six attributes: Agility, Cunning, Fitness, Presence, Reason, and Will. Each attribute has a rating, normally from 6 to 12, with 8 representing an average capability.
A character's skills represent their training and expertise: the things they know, the things they're trained to do, and the things they spend time and effort practising. Each character has nine skills: Combat, Influence, Investigation, Leadership, Piloting, Science, Security, Systems, Survival. Each Skill has a rating, from 0 (no training or knowledge) to 5 (absolute mastery and expert training). A character will also have several specialties, which represent areas of specific training and expert knowledge, building from those six broad skills.
A character also has a few talents, which are the tricks, techniques, and feats of prowess or knowledge that allow the character to triumph against impossible odds. These are special abilities, ways to obtain bonuses in specific circumstances or under a certain condition, or ways that they can benefit from a unique approach to a situation.
A scene is the basic building block of an season, much as TV shows, movies, and books can be broken up into scenes. A scene is a place and time involving a specific set of people, during which exciting or dramatic events occur.
At the start of a scene, the GM will inform you where your character is, what's going on nearby, and anything else useful, important, or obvious that you should know. There'll often be a reason behind this scene, driven by what happened in the scenes before it: perhaps you came here because of a clue left by a murderer, or because you're looking for a specific person. This is setting the scene. Once the GM has finished setting the scene, you and your fellow players can ask questions about the situation and choose for your characters to do things within the scene: move around, talk to other people, or otherwise take action. Once you've reached a point where you can't do anything further towards your goal, or you've gained a new goal that requires you go somewhere else, the scene ends, and a new one begins.
During a scene, your decisions are important; the choices you make have an impact upon the world around your character, and you'll have to face the consequences of those choices in turn. The Gamemaster can shape the events in a scene too, by spending Threat and through the actions of NPCs, but this is normally in response to your choices and those of your fellow players.
During a scene, you'll want to do things; indeed, you're encouraged to. Some of those things will be so simple that the GM agrees to them instantly. Others will be impossible to attempt because of some quirk of circumstance. Some, however, will fall into the grey area between automatic and impossible.
This is where Skill Tests come in – for determining whether you can succeed, at times where success and failure are uncertain.
First, state your intent to the GM. The GM will consider the situation, and decide if you can get what you want, if your goal is impossible to achieve (even if only temporarily), or if you need a task. In the latter case, the GM will tell you three things: which Attribute you'll use, which Skill you'll use, and what the Difficulty is. You'll have Attributes and Skills for your character on your character sheet; add together the chosen Attribute and Skill's scores, to get a Target Number. Also, look at your character's Specialties: if you have any that you think apply, ask the GM if you can use it.
Next, gather up some dice. You'll want two d20s here, or more if you've got some way of gaining extra dice for the Test (we'll cover that later). Roll those dice, and check what each one rolls: any that roll equal to or less than your Target Number is a success! Even better, if you're using a Specialty, any dice that roll equal to or less than your Skill score by itself score two successes instead of one (if you don't have a Specialty, any dice that roll a 1 score two successes). Then, set aside any dice that rolled a 20 – they'll be
important in a moment.
Add up all the successes you scored. If you scored successes equal to or greater than the Difficulty, you've succeeded at the task. If you scored fewer successes than the Difficulty, you've failed.
In either case, the GM describes what happens to your character as a result. If you succeeded by getting more successes than the Difficulty, each extra success becomes a point of Momentum, and you can spend those points to improve the outcome of your task: gaining more information from a search, or hitting more accurately with an attack, or taking less time to do something, and so forth. If you like, you can save some or all the Momentum you generated, so you can benefit from it later.
After this, the GM then takes note of any 20s you rolled. Each 20 is a Mishap, a little problem that occurred as part of the task. They can't turn success into failure, but they're extra challenges, incidents, or events that've cropped up that you now must contend with. The GM could decide that the Mishap created a complication for you and your friends: perhaps your gun is now out of ammo after your attack, or you took too much time doing something, or you made a mess during a search, or that hand-hold you used while climbing broke after you used it. Alternatively, the GM could save this problem for later, and add two points to the Threat pool instead. If you want, you could even ask the GM to add to Threat instead of facing a new problem immediately.
Once all this has resolved, the game continues as normal.
As noted above, Momentum is what happens if you score more successes than you needed during a task, with each extra success turning into a single point of Momentum. Momentum can be used for all sorts of things, limited only by your imagination and the GM's permission – it allows you to turn mere success into glorious triumph, achieving your goals swiftly and in style, and pull off daring stunts and spectacular feats of prowess.
Momentum represents the benefits of success, the small-but-crucial opportunities and advantages you and your friends create with your successes and decisive action, and the value found in teamwork and in being patient, resourceful, and tactical.
Throughout the game, there'll be plenty of suggestions for different ways to spend Momentum on specific types of task, or in specific situations, but these are suggestions first and foremost, and shouldn't stop you suggesting alternatives to the GM if you've got a clear idea of what you want to use your Momentum for.
There are a few common ways to spend Momentum too, which pretty much always apply. You can spend Momentum to buy extra dice for a future task, or to make an opponent's task more difficult. You can spend Momentum to alter the scene or otherwise create some advantage to capitalize upon later. You can spend Momentum to ask the GM questions about the situation, gaining extra information with each point of Momentum spent.
You can also save your Momentum, putting it into a group pool to use later. As a group, you and your fellow players can have up to six points of Momentum saved up at any time. Whenever you succeed at a task, you can spend Momentum from that group pool alongside, or instead of, spending Momentum you've generated on that task. Further, some uses of Momentum, like buying dice or increasing opponent task difficulty, can be paid for directly out of the group pool, without needing a successful task first.
But sometimes you won't have enough Momentum available to achieve what you want to achieve. In these situations, you can take risks, brave the uncertain, and make your own luck, by adding to Threat, with each point of Threat given to the GM providing the same benefit as a point of Momentum spent.
The GM has a pool of tokens like the players' Momentum pool, called Threat. Threat is the counterpart to Momentum, representing potential unknown challenges and perils. It's all the things that could go wrong.
The GM spends Threat to change things in an ongoing scene. That might be to bring in reinforcements, or create some unpleasant reversal of fortunes, or make abrupt changes to the environment around the players. The GM also spends Threat for NPC adversaries in the same ways that you can spend Momentum on your own character, such as buying extra dice, or increasing the Difficulty of Skill Tests, or creating advantages.
The GM gains Threat when NPCs save Momentum – they use the Threat pool instead of a group
Momentum pool – and when you and your fellow players choose to add to Threat because you've run out of Momentum. Threat can also grow because of Mishaps on Skill Tests, and for a few other reasons, so the GM will normally warn you if a particular action or event will add to Threat.