Lionheart Points and Ability Scores

To generate ability scores for your character, roll 1d8, 1d6, 1d6, 1d6, 1d4, and 1d4. Add all your rolls together and subtract from 34. This number is your lionheart point maximum. Add each individual number to 9 to determine your ability scores. Players who roll high ability scores have low lionheart points, and players who roll low ability scores are compensated with high lionheart points.

Your lionheart point max also goes up and down as you level, in response to lucky, or unlucky, hit dice rolls. For more on that, see the rules for rolling a new hit die when you level.

Ability Scores

After arranging your ability scores, you adjust them through your choice of race. As play proceeds, you can increase your ability scores in several ways. You can use spells or magic items. Some class abilities raise scores. At character levels 5, 10, 15, and 20, you can permanently add +1 to your highest score, or add +1 to a lower score and also raise your lionheart point maximum by two points.

Each ability makes a contribution to your character's potential actions, capabilities, and potentials, both for roleplaying and for game mechanics. When an ability score changes, for example, because a spell has affected you, most of your ability score modifiers are changed immediately. Some few change only after a permanent alteration of a week or more, notably skill ranks. Note that native language fluency depends on initial Intelligence, and does not change if your Intelligence rises or falls.

Note that changes to ability scores from the same source never stack, aside from the increases gained as non-class-based advances at levels 5, 10, 15, and 20. Increases from a particular source are always limited to a maximum of +4. If an adjustment to an ability score is higher than that, please treat it as a misprint and reduce it to +4. As usual, bonuses of different kinds do stack.

Ability scores for non-player characters: As a game master, you can arbitrarily choose ability scores for your NPCs, as best suits the needs of your campaign. If you wish to determine ability scores randomly. roll dice for them just as you would for player characters — d8, d6, d6, d6, d4, and d4 — but add the die roll to a base 7 for unexceptional NPCs, to base 8 for exceptional NPCs, and to a base 9 for potential heroes. Game masters may of course also choose to assign ability scores to NPCs howsoever they like, giving an NPC mastermind a 24 Intelligence, or a bed-ridden sage a 3 Strength.

Lionheart Points

Your character starts play at your lionheart point maximum, and after using your points, you regain some or all every day:

• If you are good, each morning after resting, all of your lionheart points are regained.
• If you are neutral with respect to good and evil, you regain only half of your lionheart point total each day (minimum 1), because your selfishness diminishes you.
• If you are evil, you regain one lionheart point per day, because you lack a true lion's heart.

You can use lionheart points for one of the following options once per round:

• Before a d20 roll to make a d20 roll, you can choose to use 1, 2, 3, or 4 lionheart points as a bonus on that roll.*
• After a d20 roll to make a d20 roll, you can use points for retroactive bonuses: 2 points for a +1, or 4 points for a +2.*
• After a d20 roll to make a d20 roll, you can spend 5 points to reroll that d20 and use the higher of the two rolls.
• You can use lionheart points to buy extra actions: 1 = move action, 2 = swift action, 3 = standard action, 4 = full-round action.
• If you feel stuck at one point in the adventure, you can spend 3 points and ask the game master for a hint about what to do next. If the GM feels that there is no information to be gained, the points are not spent.
• You can spend 10 lionheart points to cheat death. How this plays out is up to the GM, but generally the character is left alive, with negative hit points but stable. For example, a character is about to be slain by a critical hit from an arrow. If the character spends 10 lionheart points, the GM decides that the arrow pierced the character's holy symbol, reducing the damage enough to prevent him from being killed, and that he made his stabilization roll at the end of his turn.

*if you successfully use lionheart points to modify a diplomacy check or other roll intended to peacefully end a conflict, prevent harm, or persuade a person to act in a way that matches the goals of good-aligned people, the DM may choose to secretly roll a d4, and grant you back spent lionheart points if a 1 is rolled.

In battle, you can only spend lionheart points once per round.

As a rule, you may only spend lionheart points to affect your own d20 rolls. However, you can spend them to cheat death for a companion or allied NPC, but not for a player character or enemy NPC.