One of the things that I found slowed the official version (1st ed) down was the fact that since gangs had roughly 10-12 members, each of whom had 9 characteristics (plus a grab-bag of skills) even relatively new gangs swiftly became difficult to remember correctly. This led to a lot of looking things up, taking things back due to a misremembered stat influencing the roll and other unpleasantness. For this reason, I have shorn the stat line down to a more manageable size and restricted skills to things such as "Inspiring" that the gang leader gets (see the campaign section for my reasons for dropping the importance of skills).
The New StatlineThe new characteristic profile contains 5 values rather than the original 9, which have all been given more "authentic" sounding names. Whilst losing four whole stats may sound drastic, I believe that it was merely cutting away "dead wood" - they siply did not need to be there. For example, the new "Body" characteristic is an amalgamation of Strength, Toughness and Wounds - strength and toughness really go hand in hand, whilst wounds were no longer required by the system and so became meaningless. I also followed 40K third edition's lead in taking Movement out of the profile and simply assume everybody moves at a standard rate. Exceptions to this rule are sufficiently rare to treat individually - when was the last time you had a gangster with anything but 4? Below you will find a description of these five characteristics, together with their 1st edition equivalent. I have also included both the average and maximum Human profiles to give you some idea of the numbers involved. It is important to remember this shorter profile when reading the rules which follow as they were designed to use it rather than the full 1st ed one. Also, I occasionally use the abbreviations for 1st ed stats rather than their ME counterparts if a direct correlation exists (eg Shootin'= BS) to avoid confusing people, so bear this in mind.
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