As a player, this is where the adventure truly begins. The process of creating a Player Character (PC) can be deceptive. What begins as a simple series of numbers and entries scrawled on a sheet of paper will suddenly take on a name and personality and come to life before your very eyes.
Many aspects of character creation are essentially random. You can spend Build Points (BP) to control the process and define the type of adventurer you want to play. As your character participates in adventures, he gains experience points (XP) that help him improve and become more powerful.
Remember: BP are for character creation, XP are for character advancement.
Every character has six attributes that represent the character's basic strengths and weaknesses. These attributes - Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma - affect everything a character does, from fighting to using skills.
Attributes are rolled randomly, but Build Points can be used to adjust the results. An attribute score of 10 or 11 is average. Higher scores give characters bonuses, and lower scores give penalties. When you create your character, you'll usually want to spend BPs in the attributs most closely associated with the type of character you want to play.
Each character belongs to a specific genotype (species or race). The world of Ground Zero offers a wide selection of post-human genotypes to choose from, such as stock humans, mutant humans, furries, and munchkins. The Character Genotype and Additional Genotype pages describes these in detail. Your GM may place restrictions on character genotypes for some campaigns.
To reflect a character's upbringing and life experience before the campaign begins, each PC has a background. A background defines a character's technological aptitude, language and literacy, and starting equipment. It also provides attribute modifiers, special abilities, and skill restrictions or additional class skills. Not all backgrounds are available in all campaigns; see the Character Background and Additional Backgrounds pages for details.
Most characters (and monsters) have mutant perks and flaws. These are the chief way that PCs are differentiated from each other. Mutations are determined randomly, but Build Points can be used to reroll a particularly nasty result. The Mutations page has all the dtails.
Your character class is a defining aspect of your PC. It serves as a starting point to help you define your adventurer, a hook on which you can hang the character's personality, skills, and other traits.
The classes are described in the Character Classes page. Your beginning adventurer can be an enforcer, an outlander, a scavenger, or a thinker. The four classes represent basic archetypes from the post-nuke genre. Additional advanced classes will become available as your character gains experience.
A character's level measures his personal 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, 2nd, or 3rd level (depending on the campaign), and attain additional levels as they complete adventures. Attaining a new level provides an adventurer with improvments to important characteristics, such as his base attack bonus, Defense bonus, saving throws, hit points, and skill points.
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 an adventurer has better than average ability and so can use these skills to attempt tasks in dramatic situations.
Skills are measured in ranks, which represent how much training a character has applied to a specific skill. Each rank adds +1 to any check (d20 roll) you make with a skill. See the class descriptions for the skills that are associated with each class. (Experienced RPGers take note: the specific skills in Ground Zero are different than those found in most d20 games.)
Talents are special features that provide a character with new capabilities or improvements. (These are called 'feats' in most d20 games, but I don't like that name.) All characters start with at least one talent, though certain genotypes and classes provide additional talents. Examples of talents include Armour and Weapon Proficiencies, which are gained by each character depending on his class.
More details can be found on the Skills & Talents page.