Certain terminology familiar to seasoned RSG gamers might be used in a unique way in Chromatic. For example, Chromatic uses the generic term gamer for all RSG enthusiasts, both players and referees or game masters, who are called narrators in Chromatic.
A core part of Chromatic is to use the term character to refer to any conscious entity in the game. This, of course, includes the player characters (PCs) that the players control and non-player characters (NPCs), which in Chromatic refers to all conscious entities controlled by the narrator. This includes what traditional RSGs call monsters, deities, and sentient objects, including conscious magic items, artificial intelligences (AI), and robots. All of these could be characters in Chromatic.
It’s also possible for aspects of the setting to be a character. This is most common in fantasy settings, where the world itself can act as a sort of animistic deity, but we also have the classic comment on hardboiled/noir stories that the city itself is a character. How this works out in the game is up to the narrator.
Characteristic is the generic term Chromatic uses to encompass the attributes, drives, and skills that define characters, as well as the features of equipment. All characteristics are organized under the color-coded typology of chromatics, which define the eight potential aspects of all action rolls. So, modifiers to action rolls have a neat typology to determine how they influence gameplay results, regardless of whether they are attributes, drives, skills, or the features of equipment.
One game system, one gameplay system. Nice, right?
In Chromatic RSG, chromatics and characteristics are referenced with ALL CAPS. This is because there are so many potential ways the same words might conceivably be used in their everyday, non-RSG sense. The use of ALL CAPS helps distinguish RSG usage from standard usage.