I'm trying something here, and open development blog for a system I've been tinkering with for the past few months. It's been an on and off again thing, like a relationship that's bad for you that you can't quit. Game design's like that. You crack open a car and dick around with the guts and before you know it you have a garage filled with random shit that you'll never find a place for.  This is my garage.

The system's called New Standard. Presumptuous, I know, but what the hell. The elevator pitch is simple: GURPS meets FASERIP. For the three people on this list that don't know what the hell I'm talking about, GURPS is the system that promises the world provided you agree to fill out forms 84c-1 through 1433-zeta, and FASERIP is the cute little hatchback that will hit 60 mph in about a second flat and corners like the Batmobile. I'd say that FASERIP is probably the most robust superhero system ever produced and GURPS is the most visceral.

 It's that transitional form that I'm interested: visceral superheroics. I'm interested in Flint punching jaws off in Stormwatch, Frank Castle beating the hell out of Barracuda in Punisher, and Matt Murdock slumped against the hallway wall in Daredevil episode 2.  

GURPS handles visceral pretty well. Everything hurts in GURPS. Especially planning out a character (rimshot). It doesn't handle big power levels well. Once someone can lift a tank, you're dropping 34-six-sided dice on a punch. Don't worry, we'll wait for you to count them. Then there are a collection of hacks that have been brought in to try and make them work that will bore all but the biggest numbers wonks.  Ain't nobody got time for that.

FASERIP does a lot of things well, especially the big heroic moments, but I'd like just a smidge more edge. But they have a unified power mechanism that hasn't been beaten yet, because it doesn't rely on asking the player to come up with iterations on every possible use of their powers and stat them out. It lets the GM and the player improvise powers quickly: want Cyclops to attempt to parry a thrown boulder with his Optic Blast? It's all just one chart away.

I've put in a lot of the groundwork already. It's a 3d6 roll-under, skill based system. Opposed attack and defense rolls, nothing super fancy there. One of the d6's is the Critical Die, and if it's a '6' the check is a critical success/failure, depending on the overall result. If two characters oppose each other and both make their skill check, the character with the higher Critical Die result gets a limited win.  

Damage comes in two flavors, Wounds and Endurance. Both are derived from the same number. Wounds are just injury thresholds that are passed, and give a universal penalty and determine recovery rates for Endurance. Endurance is a catch all "Physical and Emotional resilience" stat that can power special abilities and is reduced by damage. Once it hits 0 you're in trouble, but the degree of trouble depends on the most severe wound. This gets around the GURPS problem where every boxing match ends in someone's death, but doesn't sugar coat the fact that to knock someone out, you have to do some kind of brain damage.

I'll be brainstorming ideas from time to time. This is just a good place for me to store concepts and keep myself on track. 

Blood and Bullets

Any game that takes place in both pre-industrial societies and post-industrial societies has to deal with firearms, specifically the differences between firearms and muscle powered weapons. If you want to treat damage as a quantifiable value (like every game in the universe does), you have to decide what the criteria for damage is.  Well, after years of reading up on trauma and terminal ballistics, when we talk about damage and lethality, we are really talking about the ability of a weapon to damage blood vessels.  When it comes to violence, we die from bleeding out, and a bigger weapon that penetrates deeper will kill you faster.  Seems obvious, right?

But here's where it gets troublesome. A 2" broad head arrow shot out of a modern compound bow will punch through the shoulder blades of a bear and stick in a tree on the other side, doing tremendous damage. But fire that shot against a steel breastplate and the arrow will bounce off. It might leave a dent, but that's all.

On the other hand, take the notoriously measly .32 pistol round, a bullet that under performs in every ballistics gel test, a bullet that barely gets 200mm of penetration. That piddly little round will punch through a 2mm steel security door like it isn't there. That's the same thickness as a historical breastplate.  So how do you model this?

Different games have tried to model this in different ways. In Twilight 2016, weapons have an Armor multiplier that is applied to the armor on a hit. An arrow might have a high damage, but they also have a high multiple, so even a little armor will slow down the arrow. This works, but I am of the opinion that multiplication at the table just slows the game down, especially if you have to do it for every hit.

GURPS handles it be treating the rolled damage as a base penetration, then multiplying or dividing the remainder to find the final damage. This works for medieval weapons, but again, we have to keep track of multiple spot rules. Is it a large piercing?  Tight burn? Cutting? Each damage type behaves in a different way, but we are again left with a small cluster of math we need to do each time a weapon hits.

It's possible to have a secondary damage number, a Penetration value that tells the attacker how many points of armor to ignore.  So your little .22 caliber pistol might only do say, 6 damage, but it can ignore 6 points of armor as well, the equivalent of a steel plate. This isn't ideal, and introduces an additional lookup in a system that has a few too many lookups in the combat system already.

In a more elegant, expandable system, the armor penetrating value of the weapon would in inherent in the damage value itself.

As a FASERIP fan and GURPS... wellwisher... I like where you are going with this.

In the .32 example you talk about how GURPS handles it.  How does FASERIP?  I remember some test of one material vs another.  And I'm guessing if you set it up right the vast majority of the results would be something like "penetrate and ignore."

FASERIP just subtracts the interposing material's strength from the damage.

I think this is a case where gameplay trumps realism. Its easier to assign a category to certain armor types and just say "this armor only protects against sub-ballistic speeds" than it is to build an entire subsystem that depends on the players interacting with every time they fire a weapon.

I could swear there was some sort of material vs material mechanic.  I think your solution is a good one though.

Quote from: JonWake;842836In a more elegant, expandable system, the armor penetrating value of the weapon would in inherent in the damage value itself.

As an idea, you could have an average damage generated by a varying number of dice, with armour applying per die. So you could have (for example) a trident that's 3d4 or an axe that's 1d10, hence with armour being a a -3 penalty to damage for the trident and only -1 for the axe. Or something like that. Just spitballing, you've set a haaard problem.

I'm also sort of fond of say Dragon Warriors which has a separate damage and 'armour bypass roll' for each weapon, but its pretty simplistic (armour is all-or-nothing, rather than providing a reduction to damage). Other games to look at maybe for ideas would be JAGS (more complicated GURPS heartbreaker), or Conan D20 is sort of fun though maybe more complicated than ideal, unlike most D20 games armour absorbs damage and weapons have individual 'ignore X points of armour'.

Personally, I'm fond of the attack ignoring X armour. It worked quite well in Fates Worse Than Death.
Especially if you are of the opinion that gameplay trumps realism.

I remember JAGS, I had no idea anyone was still putting work in on it. It's a funny little branch of the family tree. When the rest of the world pumped the brakes on complexity JAGS was spray painting it's teeth chrome for Valhalla.

It will probably help if I explain the damage and wounding mechanisms.  

The character has two primary methods of tracking injury, one which is specific, and another which is a general purpose resource tracker.  The primary method is the character's Wound threshold. This is based directly on the characters Strength. For humanoids, Strength ranges from 1 to 10, with 5 being average weight of about 150 lbs and an overhead press of 100 lbs.

Anyway, each time you take a multiple of your ST in damage, it trips another level of a Wound. So at damage >=ST, you have a serious wound, and damage >=ST*2 it's a Critical Wound, and at 4x ST you've got a Fatal Wound, for the near-instant kills.  

Each level gives a penalty to task checks, but we're only interested in the worst penalty, just to keep the paperwork down. So a Serious Wound has a -2 to all skill, and Critical Wound has a -4, and a Mortal Wound has a -6.

In addition to these thresholds, any damage taken is subtracted from your Fortitude, a derived stat from your Willpower and your Health, added together and multiplied by 2. So this ranges from 4-40. Once you hit 0 Fortitude, you're down for the count, but the degree of 'down' depends upon your worst injury.

If you don't have a Serious Injury, you're just Exhausted and might be able to push on further at the risk of increasing an existing injury, or giving yourself one. If you have a Serious Injury, you're incapacitated and every action taken costs you more Fortitude, which will eventually kill you (at negative Fortitude). With a Critical Injury, you're losing Fortitude at a steady rate and need help or you will die.  With a Mortal Injury, you're dead, but if someone can get to you within a few seconds and they have super-science or amazing magic, they might be able to save you. You might be a vegetable, but that's cool.

Damage is a little different than in most games as the majority of the damage is a static number. This is because it tracks linearly with the statistic that determines it, whether that stat is strength or just the rank you have with Energy Blast. Every 10 points of a stat gets its own dice modifier, too, just to keep things a little random.

This means that a character with a Strength of 5 has a base melee damage of 5 plus the 1-10 range die (d4). Most weapons give a modifier to this base damage, and let's assume that a heavy club, like a bat, does this level of damage.

Damage is altered by the level of success the attacker gets. If they hit and the bad guy doesn't defend successfully, the damage is 1d4+5. If the hit is a critical, the base damage is doubled for 10+1d4.  However, if the target defends successfully but has a lower Critical Die, it's a partial success for half damage, of 2+1d4. So there is a dramatic range of possible damage.

This gives a certain predictability to damage, and what's more important, scales with heightened power levels. So a massive dragon might have a STR of 16, and their Fortitude might be in the 60's, but even if you don't get a major wound, you can nickel and dime him to death. You also know that if you want to really hurt it, you'll need a big damn zweihander wielded by the mightiest man you know (say, ST+3, so 12+1d6 damage) to even have a chance to bring it down quickly. On the other hand, you know that when Vermithrax hits with a bite for 14 + 1d6 damage your best option is to just not be there, because even your best armor won't save you. Negotiation is always an option.

We can see what the damage of a 9mm looks like here: say, 5+1d6 (I'm thinking that penetrating attacks use a higher die type but a lower base damage than usual).  Your standard bullet proof vest might have an Armor rating of 3, which reduces a 9mm to 3-8 damage. So for an average person, they might get a serious injury (like a broken rib), but probably aren't going to get a Critical injury.

And just in case you're curious, here's an image of the probability curve for 3d6, where 1d rolling a 6 is a critical hit.

I don't know if anything much is going on with JAGS currently, there was a blog where he was running massive computer simulations to point-balance various advantages but even that was a year or two now. I believe the designer got shanghaid into family stuff.

Anyway, I think this sounds workable (I'm not fond of tracking accumulating wounds, I'd rather make a roll every so often to see if someone dies, but its probably a matter of taste. Suits your overall objectives anyway).
I'd thought of saying that it wasn't really necessary to have a random dice in damage if you're already getting variability by flow-on from the to-hit roll, except the level of success there is quite granular, so maybe you do, particularly if you want variations in armour penetration.

Other than that I guess it seems like perhaps Fortitude should factor in ST as well, rather than being a wholly different attribute (if it is, I'm assuming Health is the equivalent of Con and not a derived factor). As in the dragon is listed there with a huge Fortitude, so it needs a large Health as well? I suppose it works if Health is size-dependent, but it might be convenient to scale in size separately and have a raw Health value that's size-agnostic...so a huge creature can't necessarily run or hold its breath longer than normal, perhaps.

Mystical or other attacks vs. melee attacks are another question. I've run into a problem in the past where if you have powers' damage based on 'power rank', vs. muscle-based weaponry based off an attribute, and because attributes are usually fairly fixed, powers eventually outpace weapons in damage. Not an insoluble problem (you can add extra physical attacks to weapon users, fiddle around with scaling factors other than attribute that add to damage - like magic swords, cap power ratings, add other balancing factors like usage/day limitations), indeed it could be a feature not a bug, but its something to consider.

Thanks guys, the feedback has been very helpful.

The reason I included the die modifier to damage was because there were certain combinations of Strength and Damage that created a safety net. Attacking a character with a Strength of even 2 points higher meant that you were almost never going to score a Serious Wound. Adding in a random element extends the threat range between damage and ST. So a little 4 ST guy with a long dagger might do 4+1d4, so he can viably threaten someone with a ST from 4-8. I also figure that muscle-based attacks can spend some Fortitude to add a point or two onto damage, pushing the threat range even further.

The wound thresholds don't track individual injuries, they track the overall status of the character. You're either Critically Wounded OR Seriously Wounded. If you're Critically Wounded and you take a Serious Wound, you just take the effects of more damage to Fortitude (which I might as well call Vitality or Endurance).  That is, unless the damage has some secondary effect that triggers on a Serious Wound, like being stunned from Impact Damage. Then you resolve the secondary effect, but don't track the additional "Injury."

The stats, as they stand currently, are Strength, Health, Dexterity, Intelligence, and Will.

You make a good point about Health being size dependent. I'm not sure if Health should scale with size. If we're taking Fortitude (you know, I'll change that to Vitality, it rolls off the tongue better) to mean both pain threshold and overall resiliency, it doesn't necessarily follow that a big creature has a high Health. It might have an average health, but then, average compared to what? Strength and size have an easily understood relationship, but health and size don't.  Consequently, Size and Dexterity should have an inverse relationship.

I went down that path months ago, and ended up with a bunch of equations and derived stats and ain't no one got time for that.

So I propose this fix: when your Vitality reaches 0 and you are Seriously Injured, additional actions cost 1d6 Strength or Health points, your choice. When either of these stats hits 0, you are dead.  When you're Critically Injured, you lose 1d6 from Strength or Health each round.

This means that you can have a slovenly, easily exhausted Hill Giant with a ST of 14 and Health and Will of 4 for 16 Vitality. He's a wimp and will probably drop on his first Serious Wound, but he won't bleed out in nanoseconds.

Likewise, you can have Brett Burdock with ST 5, HT 6, and WILL 12, giving him ((6+12)*2= 36 Vitality. This little Daredevil can take a beating and keep coming, but if he does drop to 0 Vitality he's in serious trouble.

As far as powers outpacing weapons, in a sense that's inevitable so long as one character is tied to realism and the other is tied to the fiction. It entirely possible to make a Blaster with the destructive power of a 120mm HE shell. I don't think there's any way to directly address that except by keeping the point values for abilities in check. Even then, one dude with an AT4 beats ten guys in a truck.

Avoiding the 'safety net' makes sense. Looks like the extra die makes a 'serious wound' pretty much the default wound sustained in an even fight though (unless the target has some armour); perhaps the wound thresholds should go up slightly? (1.5x Str? Str + X ?)

On powers, there are definitely ways around it. In FASERIP for instance its not really an issue since you could do Amazing damage with an energy blast or Amazing damage with your fist, depending on how the character was built/rolled up. The key being just that the powers were rated on the same scale as attributes. (Skills usually are somewhat higher, but I guess really I shouldn't complain about that until I see what the skill numbers look like compared to attributes!. Thinking about it if the skill numbers are GURPS-esque, the differential might actually not be too bad, actually. Carry on!).

The relationship between damage and game effects will have to be playtested vigorously. It's hard to figure out what the final result will be, but I suspect the ability to ameliorate damage with a defense roll will take some of the bite out of the hits.

Statistics, Skills, Backgrounds and Powers

This is all old hat to anyone who has seen an RPG in the past thirty years, but I have a couple minor innovations that are worth mentioning. The short version is that the character is divided up into four elements.

Statistics include both the base stats and the derived stats, and for humans range from 1 to 10. Each of the five base statistics determines character traits that are consistent and always apply. If you have a 10 ST, you have a 10 ST if you're in Medieval France or if you're in post-human far future. Every living creature has some rating in each of these statistics, and it is possible to have a negative number in a statistic to represent very deficient creatures.

The stats are Strength, Dexterity, Health, Intelligence and Will. If you know GURPS, these look pretty familiar to you with the addition of Will, which influences resistance to mental effects and social skills.

Because the Statistics are open ended, and can range from 1 to 100 in superhuman creatures, and we resolve pretty much every task by 3d6 under the relevant skill, we need some way to translate the stats into a Task number. And we do this with five skills that every creature has that are directly linked to their stats.

The five skills are Athletics (ST), Agility (DX), Fortitude (HT), Awareness (IQ), and Persuasion (WI). They're identical to skills, but because they're so common we just lump them in with the stats.

Anyway, each skill has a default value of 8-, and you get a bonus equal to 1/5th the related stat to the base score. So you have a ST of 9 and you get a +2 to the base of 8, for a total Athletics of 10-.

** note: I'm not entirely happy with the relationship between skills and stats. I'm cribbing Hero games, and it's easy to adjudicate, but it's a very tacked on solution to the problem with open ended stats in a roll-under game. And at a certain point (a stat of 50), the default skill level for any related skill is 18-, which is justified but not completely desirable. ***

There are four derived stats: Vitality, which is (HT+WIL)*2, Reactions (average of IQ and DX), Movement (Average of DX and HT), and our Damage Thresholds (each at ST*n) .

[ah yep missed that some hits only do half damage! doh]

The '+1/5th bonus' probably isn't too complicated. I don't think you could make it less complicated without removing the derivation completely, which isn't always feasible. Arguably the main purpose of having the stat distinct from modifier would be so it can be used to take damage, which doesn't quite hold up since you're actually deriving a separate Vitality as well, though I suppose 1-10 is also nice as a range that lets humans relate to values conceptually (as in knowing that a 10 is great and a 1 is terrible).

As usual its hard to comment because the blog approach gives out rule data piecemeal when actually any given rule is functional or not only in the context of the whole system. What worries me potentially about the '+1 per 5' bonus scheme however is balance between the attributes, assuming some provide predominantly a skill check boost while others have benefits based on the score. In particular you might find that combat builds are going to favour STR and dump DEX, since a bonus to STR would give much better DPR (damage per round), unless DEX is also going to give other benefits like multiple attacks or the like, or if the defensive and other skill benefits are especially good value. IMHO a problem in FASERIP too, or would be except that characters are all random-rolled and crazily imbalanced anyway.

A Deeply Abbreviated Guide to Character Creation, using three different methods.

One of my big goals with New Standard is to take the morass of rules mastery that is needed to create a character in most point games and break it down into steps that can be easily digested by even a complete noobler, and that let a fully-built character go from concept to character sheet in less than an hour.

 Step 1: What's the Concept?

Because concepts have slowed down new players more than any combination of dice mechanics I've ever seen, each setting will have it's own chart of character concepts, little three word combinations that tell the player where to focus their attention. Each keyword will also have a suggested statistic minimum.  The setup will look similar to Monte Cook's Cypher system character traits, a, [adjective noun] [noun] who [verbs], but where as the Cypher system is prescriptive, the Concepts are descriptive.

Here's a simplified list for a Cyberpunk game I was running in an earlier playtest. Roll 1d6 three times.

roll - adj.  -  noun - verb
1 - Violent - Criminal - takes no prisoners
2- Charming - Spy- knows everyone
3 - Cunning - Hacker - has upgraded their brain
4 - Obsessive - Investigator - is always prepared
5 - Resilient - Soldier - has replaced limbs with machines
6 - Quick - Street Rat - knows how to scrap

The real list would be longer and more refined, but you get the idea. The player rolls 1,6,3, for a Violent Street Rat who has upgraded their brain.  Referring to the (imaginary) game information, we see that Violent characters should make sure to grab some kind of weapon skill and put their best stat in either ST or DX, a Street Rat has an expected set of skills and backgrounds, and a character who has upgraded their brain should buy enhancements for their mental stats with their freebie points.

Next up: Stats, redux

Also, here's the current Unified Power sheet. The mass lifted is labeled, but Area is in ft (radius) and speed is in MPH (or total movement per round).

Master Chart