Originally I was planning to deconstruct both Polaris the RPG and Eclipse Phase, due to their respective similarities and the fact that they have different, mutually exclusive, failings and rebuild them into a coherent and more useful/functional game system... the more I thought about the project the more I realized that I'd actually rather build a game system from the ground up using the basic principles I use to evaluate a game.  Blame my immersion in Fading Suns over the last two weeks if you like, but I thought it would be interesting to lay down those principles and design towards them.

So what are some of those principles?
What am I working towards?

First, I want the system to mechanically represent (a) reality, after a fashion. Call it simulationism if you like, but I'm not trying to capture a narrative flow or abstract 'protagonism'. I abhor games that abstract too far from hard, real world, measurements, or try to capture too intently genre tropes based on absurdities or failings of the writer's craft.  

I prefer no levels or classes, allowing a more open character creation, and I have sweet spots for the numbers of attributes and skills in the system, which I'll address as I get to each subsystem. The idea of dropping attributes all together does have some appeal as an abstract "what can I do with this", but I'm not going to pursue that at this time.

The system should be both light enough to be easily understood and playable with a minimal amount of 'lookup', while being complex enough to not get too boring. Tall order.   The addition of a few subsystems to the main system may be useful in this regards, but keeping the system coherent is important.

Equipment/Worldbuilding:  Regardless of how generic the setting may be, the gear system should reflect how a tool using species (humanity) actually views its tools. Subsystems for complex items should be as functional and developed as the rest of the system. Don't want to get too deep here, but a fantasy setting should have fantastic items that reflect the principles of the setting, the cultures within it, and the history. A sci-Fi setting should/could have a starship system, cybernetics/human augmentation, guns and power armor... fun stuff that nevertheless reflects the cultures.  Note that I am aiming for a sci-fi system here.


I'll probably have more to add to this later, but I'm sort of anxious to get my hands dirty.

So the first thing I suppose I need to do is look at basic resolution mechanics. I'm not convinced that I NEED to start with the mechanics necessarily... in fact the methods of tracking basic abilities and skills are co-dependent here, any one of them could be a reasonable starting point, suggesting approaches for the other two, but it seems a sensible basic starting point.

So lets look at the options.
We could use a non-standard method, the infamous 'Jenga resolution', or more practically things such as cards or diceless mechanics, but I'd rather not, so pass.
We have additive dice pools, like White Wolf/WoD, and Shadowrun... or limited dice pools like Silhouette among others. I'm not adverse to limited dice pools, but pools in general are too slow and difficult to manage statistically, so I'm going to skip this entire resolution mechanic.
That largely pushes me to a single die variable (misnomer, the 2d20 Modiphous system uses two dice to accomplish the same effect, or percentile dice for that matter), or a bell curve mechanic. I'm in favor of the bell curve so we'll go with that. What to use?

D6s are a nice default, so I think I'll build this system around a d6 bell curve. While I love the 2d6 of Traveller I don't think it scratches the complexity itch I've got, so lets look at a 3d6 bell curve dice mechanic.

So what does that mean for everything else? Well, my default average roll is going to be a ten, taking up half or more of all dice rolls.  The 3 and 18 results are very uncommon, less than 3% of all rolls for each, making them naturals for any  critical or fumble checks I may chose to include. I've got options for 'odd' results on the dice, like counting pairs for effects, if I want to go that route. Mostly it gives me a final range for all numbers.

That hasn't given me the full monty of the resolution system, however. I could use the dice to hit a target based on the numbers teh rest of the system gives me, or I could add the dice to the numbers the system gives me. I'm not terribly fond of the additive method (though for some systems, such as those involving percentile dice, I've come to realize that the Additive method actually makes the dice more palatable for some reason...), so let's skip that.  So we'll be looking to create some system of numbers that let us hit a ten on the dice for an average check.

Under or over? I'm not too concerned with this, mechanically.  Roll under might be easier to design for, which means a '3' becomes our 'good' critical number.

Now... before I close this post and move on to generating those actual numbers, and with it the framework in which these 3d6 rolls will actually function, I'm going to observe something that should inform my future work. (for the record I have not set up any preconceived details about the system. When I sat down to type this up I had no idea I'd settle on 3d6, or even, necessarily a bell curve system. I was leaning towards a d20 or a percentile system in my head...)  One thing that Traveller gets right in 2d6 that I think GURPS gets wrong in 3d6 is that even with the extra dice, each modifier is faaking important. My first GURPS book had a nice little chart that showed the exact statistical breakdown for every possible result under 3d6, which was great for showing the young teenaged me something important about bell curve distribution that Gary's bell curve chart in the ADD DMG did NOT, and yet GURPS more or less treats each modifier to the dice as identical, as if they were similar to D&D modifiers, when they are most certainly not. Each modifier stacked is actually more powerful (or less... the point is their value changes the farther you move from the middle of the bell curve).

I'm not sure exactly how I will use this reminder, but slapping down a 14- skill or something on your sheet should be a big faaking deal, whereas slapping down that 10 wouldn't be, so that will definitely inform both attributes and skills.

Having determined my basic randomizer/resolution mechanic it turns to me to begin creating a character, or the beginnings of a character so I can begin pinning down the rest of the mechanics.  I've commented in the past that there are game systems that seem to focus too much on character creation, then lose all track of themselves when they get to the rules (White Wolf is probably the biggest, but recently I've noted that Modiphous's 2d20 seems to have this problem as well), so I won't want to focus exclusively on my character design system.  

Really I can see design working in one of two directions; I could in theory build a complex framework of rules, then backtrack and determine exactly how to make characters that can use that framework, or I can build from character design, up.  I'm a character guy, always have been, so I'm naturally drawn to that focus, and since this is my first serious, adult attempt at designing a game I think I should stick where my energy is, rather than force myself to grunt out the dull stuff first. My hope is that I'll be able to get a stronger picture of the rule system as I go along, so I'll be doing a lot of the dull mechanical work as an extension of the fun, but shallow, work of creation.

So lets look at defining the fundamentals of who our character is, his attributes.

I've got a couple of design notes to keep in mind before I start. First up is that I generally dislike when stats/attributes (we'll use the shorter Stats throughout this, because I'm lazy and its easy to type), that provide a one to one correlation with skills. I say this despite enjoying systems like Cyberpunk.  This is synergetic with my last night comment that I can't let my numbers get to big because I'm using a bell curve randomizer.  

What do I mean? Well, first it means that I'm not going to have to limit my attributes to low ranges simply to avoid throwing my randomizer off. I find a list of numbers ranging from -2 to +2 (al la Silhouette), or similarly small ranges simply makes all characters feel a bit to same-y.  The more room in your range, the more you can feel like your characters are distinguished from one another, though there is a point of diminishing returns (say, a percentile range, where most people just sort of vaguely drop it down to the modifier break points, or divide by ten mentally...).  I think a range greater than ten will work well here, but I'd like to keep it on a base ten (misusing the term, I know. Divisible by ten).

Something that really hit home when looking at Polaris the RPG was that its still possible to overstreamline. I might have first noticed this with D&D3E, when all attributes provide more or less identical numbers across the range, but somehow Polaris managed to do everything right by the book and still be dull and forgettable as used dishwater.  

So I've got a challenge here to keep every attribute relevant and interesting, as well as definitional, while having them not plug right into the system directly.  One solution I've been entertaining, just to see if I can make it work, is using derived combat ratings, which I'll have to explain when I get that far along.  My overall point is... hmm how to explain... if I were to diagram how the stats 'feed' into the rules you wouldn't have a small number of straight lines and a short number of steps, but clusters of lines leading to various sub-systems, that then lead deeper into the ruleset themselves. The purpose isn't complexity for its own sake, but rather allowing for exploration of the system to increase replayability.  Keeping it easy to understand, if I'm not entirley off my rocker, will come down to presentation... and restraining my wilder impulses.  

I may put in potential negatives for over-specialization. Really strong people tend not to be very flexible and fast, really smart people can have dulled reflexes as their first instinct is to figure out what's going on instead of reacting, that sort of thing.  That may make stats a bit 'charty', like AD&D, which isn't my goal.  I'll think on this.

My second point to consider is 'sweet spot'.  How many stats does my system need?  I could just blindly lay out all the facets of human nature and group them until i was comfortable with the final results, but since I'm laying out by foundational principles, I'm going to start with 'how much granularity do I want' first.  

I know for a fact that 'three' is simply too damn small a number. It's elegant, but I think that's the problem... its TOO elegant, there is no room for differing interpretations of the same ideas.  I'm comfortable with four, but I don't think I want to pare it down that far.  On the other end I can say I'm comfortable with up to 9 (White Wolf), but that is mostly a 3x3 grid, which again strikes me as TOO elegant, so to avoid that I'm going to put my top end at eight, but do I want to simply split the GURPS Four into halves?

There is a temptation to break down the six classic D&D, to yay-or-nay elements, but I don't want to get too derivative of the classic (and then that would call for a deep textural analysis (big words, empty meaning!) contrasting the Traveller Six), or to go really wild and see if I can design an deliberately odd number of stats, like... Five. Not because I've got a good idea for five, but just to flip the bird to the classics.

Ima cut to the point: This did start out as a plan to mesh/reconcile two fundamentally flawed games (Polaris and Eclipse Phase), who happened to have similar ranges in stats, so lets start there. This means a potential stat range of thirty, with eight stats.   Eclipse Phase never tied those stats to real ability... we have no idea what a Somatic of 20 can lift or carry, and linked them one for one to skills, which I already commented on, while I've already discussed Polaris (which went to 20.... or 25, but was open ended and did not translate 1for1 to skill).  I may not keep my stated range or number of stats, but lets start there just for the hell of it...

Actually, no.*

Lets start from an assumption of eight stats, with a range of twenty or thirty, and build blind.  How can we divide human ability into 8 catagories?

I want to avoid being too elegant, so I won't try to force two stats in groups of four themes.

We've got physical attributes: Strength, Dexterity, Constituition in teh D&D formulation
We've got mental attributes: Intelligence and Wisdom in D&D
We've got social and/or spiritual: Charisma.

Hmm.  

Well, I'm never quite too happy to see a breakdown between Agility and Reflexes... it always seems to punish people who want to play fast fighters instead of bruisers, and I really DO like the idea of Size being an attribute. Most games ignore it, allowing waif-fu fighters to throw six footers around, and six-foot 250lb meatheads to hide behind lamp posts, and that's fine, but I'm rather fond of Siz being a defining attribute.  So we've got our classic breakdown of physical stats, plus size.  Might not keep the classic names, Constitution, especially when Siz is factored in, should emphasize more Endurance aspects.  Size can have a greater effect on combat durability.  This may lead to a breakdown between reach and initiative when we get to combat, something to keep in mind.

Mental? Well, the classic D&Dism simply doens't work for me at all.  I've got Fading Suns breaking smarts into Wits and Tech, with Perception being its own stat.  I'm not happy with their breakdown, but some of that comes down to presentation.  I do like the idea of splitting 'smarts' into two catagories, lets call them Smarts and Cunning, so people who aren't necessarily bright can still be dangerous in the brain pan, and people who are really smart don't dominate strategeery simply because they went to Haavaad.  I'm thinking i DON"T like perception as a stat, its too simple, too narrow. Weird, because I'm narrowing the intelligence into two catagories, but hey!

So that leaves me what? Charisma and willpower?  Charisma of some sort is fine, even necessary.  I found Traveller's removal/replacement of Charisma with social status to simply... not work, so I'm comfortable allowing people to define how likeably Blackleaf is with a number, though some good GM advice on using that may be called for later.  Willpower is a bit like perception in that the idea of it as a stat just doesn't work for me. Not simply because it is too narrow.  Outside of gaming I've been paying a lot of attention to former addicts talking about breaking bad habits (smoking), and I'm familiar with the athletic world... and my experience is that the people who point out that willpower is a finite resource resonates. Willpower is... Mental Hit Points, you run out.  So, not a Stat.  On the other hand, I do think something 'related' to Willpower can fit. Faith maybe? Focus?

Hmm.  I can drop it, go to seven.

Focus. **

I want to keep it, so lets put a pin in it for now and circle back, m'kay?  


On the topic of range I've considered and I think the best thing to do is keep a 20 range, but because this is Sci-Fi, and I'm a fan of human augmentation/transhumanism we'll make it open ended. I may have to come back and tweak what numbers mean once I start in on things like cybernetics and stuff, but I'd like to avoid that.

Let me explain why I cut back from thirty. SImple: Divided by half thirty splits down to an average of 15, and that just feels like an awkward break point.  While keeping things from getting too neat or elegant is a point, I don't see that going with an awkward average is doing me any good, its untidy in a way that doesn't serve my purposes.

So... off the cuff: Every five points deviation from the average translates to a +/-1 to relevant skills?

I'm getting ahead of myself.

The numbers on the sheet have to have a real meaning, a real value to the game system. This was a problem with D&D's stats, which was aggrivated by 3E, which led to the not-unreasonable stripping of the stats just down to the modifiers they provided.

One simple example of how I can get stats to keep real meaning by the numbers is like thus:  Size=Hit Points.

Not that I'm going to go that simple or direct, but this is why I was talking about having Stats feed into multiple sub-systems.  Let me take a look at our first Stat and see if I can work out some ideas here.

Strength:
By itself: provides a bonus to certain physical skills based on muscular power (what skills? Endurance or coordination/Dexterity would have more direct effect on most physical skills... hmm...)
Combined with Size provides carrying capacity and bonus melee damage
Combined with Endurance provides what? This may be where our bonus skills comes into play rather than strength straight, from combination or averaged stats.
A combat rating for melee combined with size and dexterity maybe? Big, coordinated strong guys are simply naturally better fighters than small weak and uncoordinated guys.

But what does strength do by itself?

Maybe it does nothing? Maybe no single Stat does anything 'alone'?  Maybe too fiddly.   Will look into this.  But can the number actually be used at the table As Is? How?

Not with a 3d6 bellcurve randomizer.  The number range is too big at teh top end, though our average falls right into the curve.  A look at how the stats are generated may alter this later, as a 3d6 under stat check could be possible if the numbers are kept 'down'.  On the other hand, I hate games that assume you will HAVE to grow your stats as you improve (Fading Suns, I'm looking at you!!!),  so people should be able to emphasize and maximize a stat or two during creation if they want to...  Much thinking.


Since I don't have enough system yet to untangle those questions, lets keep working and see what we come up with.

Lets look at some derived stats. I like derived stats, myself though I can guess some people hate them. So what? Some people hate chocolate. Its not my fault they're wrong, so why worry about them?

Carrying Capacity and melee damage both derive from strength and size together, though C.Cap would be different, probably based on a chart.

Hmm... Average of Str+siz+siz= carry?  I like, though I need to present better without looking TOO mathy maybe?

Initiative: derived from Dex and Cunning. Do I want a small number or a big number? Look at initiative systems.  Reach is a separate issue, but is combat related.

Health/Hit Points: Lets call this Vitality as a callback to FS. Siz and Endurance. No levels, no classes, so this is a fixed number. How durable are heroes? Genre callback? Room for incapacitating injuries?  Again: count size twice?  

Willpower/mental hit points: Hmm... much smaller pool, with fewer attacks. DO NOT like mental hit points against tasers. Dumb.  Focus is a primary here, but End probably has an influence.

Derived combat stats:

Melee: Dex, Str, siz, provides a baseline for how capable you are at bringing the pain with fists or knives. Will have to work out basic combat rules, which would follow from skills.
ranged; Dex cunning and focus?  Three-fer on all?
Defense:

Still haven't covered an inverse for any attributes. Maybe only penalties at the top end?  Size directly punishes sneaking about and long term endurance, but what's a penality for high dex? High cunning? High charisma?   What is the benefit to extreme lows for any of those?



Well, I think I've more or less pushed this aspect of the system as far as it can go in a vacuum. I need to pin down more elements of the system to really see how I'm going to use all these ideas.

I will comment now that I could start designing the creation system alongside the stats. Point designed, or dice rolled or some other method (life paths). I'm actually going to hold off, but I do have some ideas I want to keep in mind. First, while I'm inclined to some sort of player defined (point buy) creation system, I find it obnoxious that 'who you are', that is stats, are often balanced against 'what you know'... which often leads to incongruous results... the people with the most raw potential seem to learn the least, while people with less raw potential know more?  So keeping character creation divided, so that you're not forced to chose between being smart OR being educated (But not both at the same time), strikes me as one of the better ideas I've seen in game design, and one that rarely seems to be used.

Another thing is that I think I will have stats start from the average, able to be adjusted up or down to fit the character. I know in many cases players won't 'design down', but that's not my problem, that's theirs. Heck, I wouldn't design down either, and I resent the assumption some designers have that I SHOULD.  Progressive costs for raising is useful. I'm not adverse to players being able to raise their stats, but again: They shouldn't feel pressured to do so by the system and its simpler to just let them create a capable character from the start and not include a means to improve stats (using XP, that is. Technology!)








* And despite this I ran straight to D&D. Sigh. Not even a line later. I suck.

** I apologize if this is difficult to follow. I am brainstorming rather than presenting. Usually I'm typing furiously to keep up with a whirlwind of thoughts, which allows me to at least pretend to 'present' ideas in a more or less finished fashion, but sometimes I get stuck on an idea and you get... well... the brainstorm brainlock, and the only way out is to mutter half-mad to myself until I got it resolved.

As I work things out, and during breaks between posts I have ideas for where some elements of the design will be going, as well as additional ideas on my foundational principles.

I'm going to point out the obvious: This is turning out, even so soon after I started, to be much harder than I expected.  I was orginally just going to adapt existing systems... I'm reasonably good at that. Consider it a form of creative critiquing or organized and polished house ruling, but building from the ground up is... well... its not what I set out to do.

And here's the thing: I'm not expecting to wow anyone with my innovative and super creative system. At the end of all of this what do I really expect to have? A game system that does a bunch of things other game systems already do? Maybe I'll bring a few more exotic and interesting ideas out of other games, maybe I'll get lucky and do a few things better than other games, but at the end of the day, gaming is more than forty years old, there are thousands of products on the market.... the low hanging fruit has been plucked, and the people reaching for the stars are producing games that often irritate me on a subconscious level.

So yeah: I just kinda want to tweak the games I've got and make them better, and I just want to take excellent ideas from product A and stick them in system B, so despite my rough start and maybe backwards approach, at the end I expect... a working, fun game that looks and feels like just another RPG. Hopefully just a little better.   I still can't help but think I should sit down with some relatively decent, obscure and functional system and just... improve that, but I've put my feet on the path, and I'm not going to start over just because I think it would be easier.


Now, I've had a few other things I wanted to note down/discuss before I continue my actual work.

I'm a fan of advantages/disadvantages in principle, but they often don't work as expected.  I'm not sure if I"m going to include them (though I do so love them. GURPS was my second ever game system, and we are where we came from).  Even if I don't, somethings to keep in mind: I don't like spending 'character resources' on externalities.  Owning a fancy car or house doesn't make you stupider or less educated, and things that can be taken away... or gained from game play... should remain things that can be taken away or earned through game play. That limits severely how advantages can work (I'll note that GURPS actually does violate this principle, but it does so very well, so much so that I really can't complain too much about it. In GURPS.).

Another thing is that these Advantages should never be mandatory for certain character concepts... I'm looking at Cthulutech here, with their very expensive advantages for Tagers, which contradicts fluff*, and given that Tagers are a 'we're all tagers or no one is a tager' sort of character concept for most games is just... offensive.  Ditto for all those spaceship games that practically demand you gut your character 'build' for a starship. (Fading Suns has most starships cost upwards of hundreds of benefits, when most characters will only have a dozen or so, meaning the entire party must cut their character to the bone just to have access to a ship. What.The.Fuck.).  Again: owning a thing makes you less capable of using that thing? Does not compute.

This does mean that a system of some sort for handling variable social classes and wealth may be necessary, but it should be one that is disconnected from basic build. Maybe a life path, or some form of balancing choices?

Another thing to avoid is Illusion of Choice.  I could go back to Fading Suns starships, but I'll take a more acessable, if somewhat unfair**, example from Traveller. Traveller has literally hundreds of starship designs, ranging from 100 ton scouts to the multi-million ton Tigress dreadnaut. I have yet to hear of a single traveller campaign anecdote where the characters weren't in a 200 ton far trader... any exceptions I may have forgotten would be in those 100 ton scouts.  All player parties are outclassed and overmatched in the starship realm all the time?  Truthfully, that's not exactly the system, but emergent play creating the illusory choice. A dozen starships in the main book to chose from, but you'll have a Far Trader and be happy with it, m'kay?    

Any presented choice should have meaningful options, and if I don't want to allow certain choices, I won't try to hide that behind impossible choices (again with starships? Rogue Trader puts massive warships in reach, but then gives them stats very comparable to the smaller 'player character' level ships they want the game to use, or Fading Suns simply pricing most 'good' ships right out of reach, forcing players to 'buy' crippled junk or count on the GM waving the entire system to just give them a ship)


Another thing to avoid is the 'tax', a concept I've taken freely from the Gaming Den crowd, the idea of making you take worthless or unnecessary things in order to get the things you actually want or can use. This is especially bad when the 'tax' choice has literally no game value in and of itself but providing access, often seen in ability trees, where the there are often abilities stuck in the tree with no mechanics to them but 'buy this ability to get the abilities in the next row of the tree', though less obnoxious examples (where the tax ability has some notional value) should be avoided to. This is not an absolute. To keep emphasis on fading suns, having to buy up the PSI ability to access higher level Psi powers is not necessarily a tax, where 'dead' powers in a Psi-path ARE taxes.  On the other hand of Paths, the Psi-Paths in Waste World (from the Shogunate Temples), which are optional means to reduce the cost of learning Psi ISN"T a tax, as you could still just buy the powers you want rather than follow the path. Make sense?

These sorts of things are not 'fixed', I guess. They are guidelines rather than absolutes, pitfalls to be avoided but not game breakers.

My last 'noodling' for this post is on the topic of setting.  I'm not terribly inclined to weld a setting onto the rules, but I don't think I can go 100% generic, especially not with Sci-Fi. Even paring down genres of sci-fi, you still wind up implying setting along the way. I don't think, for the purposes of design, that I'll try to hard-code setting details so much... maybe more like Traveller's implied Imperium and less like Fading Suns heavily detailed Known Worlds?  Clearly I've already decided to make cybernetics a core factor of my implied setting, so details are already coming together there.  I may do a separate 'setting design' thread in the main forum that will be linked back to this system, but that's 'over the horizon' at the moment.

As always, I encourage kbitizing.










* Specifically, being a Tager means spending four (possibly a full 20% of your total) skill points for the advantage, while Tagers are explicitely stated to be drawn from exceptional candidates and very heavily trained. Becoming a Tager is a three day investment of your life, after six months to a year of exhaustive training in skills you'll need to be GOOD at it... yet Tager characters are LESS skilled because someone put them through a three day ritual to turn them into werewolves? Pshaw!

** Just pointing out that I DID state in advance that it was an unfair point.  I'm not going to spend twenty minutes rooting around in my memories to find a better, cleaner example for a mere commentary on what I'm trying to avoid doing.

One thing I've got to keep in mind that I keep forgetting to lay out there is that I have to make sure there are no dead-weight systems.  In case you're curious why I've got such a mess of pottage up in my post on the Stats, part of that is quite often many games have stats that really do come across as dead weight, bogging down the game.  Fragged Empires seems to have that problem, where about 90% of their function appears to be 'hit points'.

Its easy to keep skills from being dead weight, as they are often the primary means in which a character engages the system... and when I see stats that aren't at least a little deadweight, usually its because they are inextricably linked to skills... which is fine and good to a point, but when they really are just Ur-Skills, then things start breaking down.*

So lets talk skills for a bit, as I think this is where I'm going to really start seeing how the system should work. Its possible I may reverse an earlier decision or two as I work.

Normally I'd lay down the sweet spot for skills and call it a day, but I've had a bit of a revelation in other projects lately... so the sweet spot isn't quite what it used to be... but we'll start there anyway.

For skills I'd say that the sweet spot is roughly thirty skills. The farther you drift from that number in either direction the rougher the game is, with some caveats. While there is very little difference for me between a game with 25 skills and one with 35 skills... both deviating by 5... if you look at a game with 15 skills and one with 45 the later is probably going to be a much better game, if you take the skills in isolation, for math reasons. You can't have a negative number of skills, right? I can imagine plenty of games with zero skills that are better, or worse, than those with sixty and so forth.

So what about that recent revelation?

Well, Fading Suns has a very managible skills list despite having a comparatively huge list of skills (not going to count them, lets say sixty to seventy in the main book, with later books adding more skills). The key difference here is that they have a core list of ten or so skills that every character has (Fight, shoot, dodge, charm impress, athletics (vigor), stabbity-stab....) then a bigger list of 'learned' skills that cover more exacting knowledge.  Its entirely possible to build a competent character with nothing but Natural Skills, and a character with 'no' natural skills but plenty of Learned Skills, who will nevertheless be 'baseline competent' in all the normal activities of a normal human being.  Now, I'm well aware that 'everyman' skills have been a part of gaming for a long time, but Fading Suns does it much better in that their 'everyman' skill list is actually pretty darn comprehensive, and your default skill in those is actually in the 'competent' area (Three out of ten skill rating).  By setting these aside in a distinct catagory, and making them comprehensive enough (and not falling into GURPS levels of 'learned skills'... though FS does have issues particularly with the technical skills, which I'll address on their own in a moment)...  they can casually violate the sweet spot on skills and still be managable and engaging.  

Now, part of keeping skill lists down is in part assuming a great deal of cross competence. Lets call this the Michael Jordan Principle. Mike was a great basketball player, and when he went to professional baseball he was competent. We can mock him for being bad at it, but that was because he was playing against/with great players, not 'competent'. You or I, in his shoes, would have done a lot worse. In a game sense, having a player slap down fifty points on being the worlds greatest basketballer, and then having to slap down another twenty points to be embarrassingly 'merely' competent at pro-baseball is laughable.  

I see this a lot in sci-fi spaceship games.  Its like they are embarrassed to slap down a 'space ship fixit skill' and call it a day, leaving players adn GMs alike sorting through half a dozen engineering, mechanical, electrical and science skills to figure out exactly how Scotty can goose the engines or repair a glitchy transporter.  Great: You showed you can read a technical college course catalog. In real life I expect an electrical engineer will do a much better job building a bridge across a ravine than my cousin Lou. (I don't have a cousin Lou... I'm just sayin.).  We see this a lot with people being hired in general fields that only seem/sound loosely related to what they were trained to do, so why cant games handle the same thing?  (Since I've been tongue bathing Fading Suns, let me critique here: To be the engineer of a starship I assume you need to know Tech Redemption. But there are four specialities, and mastery of one does not imply any ability with another. So if I have Tech Redemption: HIgh Tech at 6 and Tech:Redemption: Volt at 2, which do I roll to fix the Star Ship power plant? What if, in order to fix it, I need to replace a mechanical switch that opens and closes a valve? Isnt that Tech Redemption: Mech?  SHould I try to outthink what the GM might call for?  Maybe he'll get smart with me and call for a Tech Redemption:Craft, since I might need to machine a replacement switch component!)

Guessing how to be competent in your job is not something players (or GMs for that matter) should be doing at the table.  On the other hand, we should still allow for some level of specialization in academic or technical fields.  So we do have a bit of a balancing act, and clearly some crossover in skills is implied. Not sure if the hard up Traveller 0 skill is the way to go there, though.

On that note, I've seen plenty of systems that did allow a lot of cascade skills, core competency and so forth, but most of them were in rare gem games, probably inaccessable to casual players for being too fiddly, so I probably won't try to emulate those either.

So my goal here is to have a solid core of common skills... or perhaps conversely a system that enables such action seperate from skills, and a possibly longer than usual (for me) list of more esoteric skills that have cross-compatible divisions within them, allowing people to pick their own granularity.

But since I got up from this a few hours ago and just sat back down, I'm going to post this musing, then start a new post for the actual skill system, just to make sure my mind is focused on 'da werk'.






*Yes, I am a fan of Cyberpunk, and yes, in many many ways this does apply to cyberpunk. But since more than a little of what I'm doing here is entirely my own subjective choices on various points, I can still make this call. I, subjectively, like Cyberpunk. I also, subjectively, believe that the stats in cyberpunk are almost entirely dead-weight because, objectively, their primary function in the system is as Ur-skills.

Enough basic musings, on with le system!

So my basic idea, aside from actual listing of skills, is that the starting point of a skill is an 8- check on the 3d6, with our 'natural skills' perhaps starting at the 10- that is considered basic competence.  A question arises: Is it necessary or prudent to ghettoize those natural skills into a separate catagory, and I think it is.  

For a quick rundown the FS version of these natural skills, which is a pretty solid list, goes like this:

Charm
Dodge
Fight
Impress
Melee
Observe
Shoot
Sneak
Vigor

which to clarify a couple of points is Fight is Fisticuffs, Impress is possibly redundant with Charm but would cover Intimidation and other Force of Personality moment, and Vigor is general athletics, like running and climbing and shit.

Its a solid little list, and I almost regret having it, because its hard for me to objectively sit back and 'invent my own' without feeling a bit silly... which is sorta how attributes works out I imagine. D&D got there with a solid list, and everyone after has been tinkering on the margins, or deliberately rejecting it and reinventing the fucking wheel. Its such a solid list that questions like Traveller's attributes could be viewed as being parallel creation or a commentary on one of the weaker D&D traits (wisdom) adn a rejection of another (charisma), but otherwise ripped straight off... and no, I don't know which it is, nor do I care.

Now, I will put some effort into determining first of all if there is anything that isn't covered in that list that should be, but I'm not expecting to come up with any notables, so rather than full-stop this project until I've put in that effort, lets move on to tinkering on the margins of that list.  

Charm/IMpress can be, but maybe shouldn't be rolled into one. Fight/Melee probably should, especially in Fading Suns where you have 'combat manuevers' for martial arts and fencing that allow you to distinguish between punch and stab elsehwere in the system.  FOr the psychotic Fanbois who demand parkour in everything, we've got that in Vigor already. I'm not too concerned with should I/Shouldn't I roll up those skills or not, but its worth thinking about. I'm not fond of the vigor name, but I do like Observe, which makes me feel better about pulling Perception as a Stat.  

Its the three combat skills that have got me musing hardest right now. I'm pretty set on putting in a system of 'basic combat rating' as a derived stat, which would then be the default capability for, well, combat rolls, so the skills in that list wouldn't work quite as well using the standard defaults.  Since I haven't set my stat system fully, I suppose I can design the BCR as a modifier to the combat skills instead, which would be smoother but would make the BCR idea sort of... redundant. Dead weight.  One solution would be to make all of the 'Natural Skills' derived stats, with a means of improving just the derived stat through skills. In other words, instead of giving these 'natural skills' a different default rating (as currently proposed) they derive from a set of derived stats as their default. All skills could provide different defaults as well, which would make these 9 skills functionally no different from any other... I'd be hiding the brilliant point that people are naturally good at skills x,y and z within the system itself.

I don't really like the 'every skill its own default' method, not because I disagree with its relative fidelity, but because it tends to bog down creation.

So...

Yeah, I think I'm going to go with making those 'natural' skills into derived attributes, which will cover a basic rule for Perception to replace the cut stat, and gives me less worry about ripping. Now, since these can be improved, there might/should also be 'advanced' versions of those skills. Martial arts, fencing etc that provides a mechanism for improving the derived attributes through practice. Its not a crisis... in fact it fits with my intent to keep things from being too slick... to have a few skills that don't work exactly like the others.

The flip side of that is that I'm now back to keeping my over all skill list shorter, as you no longer really have those core skills to focus on, enabling a slightly more expansive 'optional list', we're back down to one list... and no, I'm not sure that I can recapture that by taking the 'improve the natural abilities' advance skills and popping them back over.   Eh, I may be getting ahead of myself here, so lets get back down to gritties, the rest of the skills.

Fundamentally I think I want it to look a bit like this

A skill starts at 8-, which is roughly 25% success rate. This seems rather high as a 'default', that is for most untrained skills, so I'll have to look at unskilled rolling before I finish this system up. Basically when you take a skill this is your starting point, your skill 0 if you like. Having an exceptional Stat (15+) lets you roll a 9-, which is 38% success.  Getting from 0 to 1 is relatively simple (WILL BE, sheesh. I know, I don't actually have a system here yet. Please, I'm still putting down the foundations!), and from 1 to 2... but once you start stacking up the +3 and +4... when your base skill starts hitting 12- (75% success rate) things HAVE to start slowing down.  I'm glad so to see my late night musing on the math has proven so close to the mark, as I've been thinking that getting a skill to +5 from the base, starting from an 8-, should be a stone bitch. If you think about it, a 'world class talent' with absolute mastery of his profession (That is a 20 stat and a +5 skill, with our notional starting point) is rolling a 15- on 3d6, which is a 95% success, and that is for a default average roll.  I'm a subscriber to the theory that average rolls represent 'under stress' rolls... shooting a motherfucker in broad daylight while his buddies (or he) are shooting at you at moderate distance (a city block or so for rifles, across the street for pistols).   An IPCC pistol course should actually be a HARD thing to run, except that no one is shooting at you, right? so it winds up being more average because the penalty for screwing up is... a lower score.

A 3/18 for crits/fumbles actually makes exceptional events very uncommon compared to most systems.  So right there we have our goal for what character creation should put on the sheet. A typical character should have a decent number of zero skills, one at most of +5 skills, and a good sprinkling of +1 and +2 skills across his sheet.  Total distribution of 'average' characters will depend on total number of skills available.  One idea I had in the depths of the night was that some asshole wanting to be a jack of all trades should be reasonably able to do just that... take every god damn skill in the game at a +0 or +1 level, while someone wanting to be the Grand Master of Fuckyouup-fu should be able to do that without being utterly gimped along they way.  

So that's how the numbers should look. Lets look at skills.

Right now I'm thinking of three (four if you count the Natural skills discussed earlier) catagory of skills. You'll have skills that just about anybody can do with no or minimal instruction, if not well. You know, crap like drive a car. Five minutes to explain the controls, and set them loose to hit half the lightpoles in the city.  You have skills you just can't do without a decent amount of study and instruction (genetic engineering?), and you've got 'binary skills' that you either know or don't know.

Lets talk the binary skills, since that's going to be the most unusual. I've got a few examples of this in mind.

Fading Suns has one binary skill, Space Suits. Breaks the entire fucking skill set like a bitch to stick that sucker in there
Traveller pretty much does the same thing with Space Suits and Battlesuits, but they DO have ratings... which largely exist to tell you if you can use Item X or Y, but not formally (meaning the GM can still ask for a roll if he wants to fuck with you)
And Living Steel, which weirdly looks a little like my earlier ideas on BCR skills in some ways.  YOu either Do, or Do Not know how ot wear power armor, to use a Lasgun with your shooting skill, a grav vehicle with your driving skill and.... shit, had to go look it up... explosive weapons.

And lastly: I'll note that language skills work better as binary yes/no than as skills. Sure, you can have a guy who only mastered a pidgeon guidebook of the language, but really there aren't that many gradiations of ability. Hell, even GURPS, with its ten thousand skills under heaven doesn't treat languages like a skill to be rolled, but more as an on/off advantage (yes, with levels). And since I'm talking languages, it is STUPID to make someone who can read english learn a 'read language' skill for Spanish... or most European Languages at that.  Read language skills should be based on the alphabets/writing systems not the verbal language (anecdote, my Japanese professor shared a story of going to Hong Kong and being delighted to learn she could read all the signs on the stores and shops, despite not speaking a lick of any chinese language. Kanji, bitch!).   Why the hell does EVERY SINGLE GAME seem to miss this simple fucking point? Seriously: I can't think of a single game that has ever gotten this right.  No, that weird German backwards B letter, or Umlauts does NOT justify an entire new 'read' skill. Especially if the character speaks the damn language.  Sorry. Pet peeve.

Anyway: If I don't have any sort of advantages system (and I'm waffling but hanging around "not" at the moment.... sigh...) then all of these are 'skills' of a sort. Idea: Make them all 'cost' the same as a +1 skill, but without a roll attached. Of course, 'all of these' isn't exactly set. I'm not inclined to make people take space suits as a skill, any more than I'm inclined to make a skill out of "wear pants"... I'll assume space savvy people just get it, and non-space savvy people usually get a few lessons if they go into space, and then they got it (not a ding on FS, by the way: in their setting it actually makes a little sense).

Sure: Languages may be somewhat hard and time consuming to learn, but fer fucks sake, I don't want a PC 'lawyer' to be incapable of adventuring because he spent ten years of his life learnign the law and earning student loan debt.  Adventurers are more like prison lawyers, got a few books, roughed their way through the system in their spare time, and picked it up because they were using it. So yeah, they can be comparatively cheap to 'master' in a game.

Obviously skills that require at least some training are simple in that you need... some training, a rating in the skill.

So lets turn to the skills that can be used untrained and how should that look? Should I assume a 0 level in the skill or penalize. I guess that will depend on the skills considered for this 'use untrained' thing. I'm... sorta inclined to just default them to 0 (for that matter, should taking a 0 level skill even require any investment?).  Hmm... well that means just noodling until I've got a skill list, don't it?

So before I get there, specialties: So we can declare some skills (academic skills, scientific skills etc) require a specialty, and any (most?) skills can have one. I'm... not inclined to actually require an investment (that is: If you have a skill (+1< ) you can declare a specialty for it).  This doesn't mean you can't work out of your specialty, you just don't get the bonus (+1, which raises our 'skill cap' to 16, which is still in our bell curve range! and presents a 98% chance of succes v. 95% at 15, so... not game breaking!).

So, mister "I want to fix the starship" can take the single Skill 'Fix Starships" and even if he specializes in, say, Warp Drive Cores, he can still fix the broken life support system, he just gets a bonus to warp drive cores. No, I don't think I'll have a 'fix starship skill'... this isn't HoL.

Alrighty then, what am I looking at then?  

Natural Skills (that improve the Derived Attributes directly)
Athletics (improves Vigor)
Covert (Improves Stealth)
Martial Arts (improves Fighting BCR)
Fencing (Improves Melee BCR...which is the same BCR as fighting, different application)
Marksmanship (improved ranged BCR)
Charm (improves Charisma (changed from charm in initial list)
Observe (improves Perception secondary)
Dodge?
Impress? (? means I'm going to tweak these two as I look at my system deeper)

Binary Skills (Yes/No)
Power Armor
Language/Literacies
Jump Navigation?
Heavy weapons
more?

Untrained Skills:
Animal Handling
Artistic
Etiquette (?)
Drive/Pilot (note that failures with untrained use should always be fumbles?)
Survival
Performance (Part of art? Probably)

Trained Only skills:
Academics
Scientifics
Mechanical
Medical



Hmm... that's a bit slim, only 19 not counting binaries.  I could add a 'technical' catagory to trained only skills, but then you start wondering if this skill is mechanical or technical, or if its technical or scientific and so forth.  Lemme consult the library of games and see if anything is not do-able using our slim generic list.

Ok, so I'm missing a bunch of mostly social stuff. Beaurocracy and lying and streetwise... things like that.  Lying/Fast talking probably should fall under the charm/impress sort of thing as it is. Navigation is a good skill to add, I guess, though I could put that under 'drive/fly' if I wanted to.  I've got room to expand though. I notice a lot of skill lists are padded with four different skills for shooting crap, and certainly I can easily see that shooting a bow at someone is distinctly different from shooting a rifle... I'm not sure its really big enough of a deal to really dial it down.

I'm not going to dwell on the exact list... despite its brevity (and I am tempted to put an untrained medical skill in as well as the trained, for first aid conditions...) I'm reasonably confident with that as a starting point.  I should plan on maybe putting down up to 30 skills total, but no more than that.

Right, so things are starting to gel up a bit here.  Need to tinker with the skill list, but the format is good, the format is nice, and the numbers/odds appear to be functional, so I'm going to close this post and prepare for my next round of design.

I'm stuck on a bit of a debate. Clearly I need to tighten up the character creation rules, creating a system to generate the numbers, but I also need to work on the rules.

Anyway, I've been thinking of digging into the combat system, but I think that's jumping the gun. I think I should dedicate a post to the ins and outs of the skill system... not the skill list or the character, but how the skills are used, which will be the foundation upon which the combat system can be built.  Should get to that later in the day, maybe this evening.

This would have been up a couple of hours ago, but my browser was doing that weird thing where even typing seems to happen in a pit of molasses in january. Eventually I gave up and restarted the damn thing, so now I can brainstorm at normal typing speed.

Ok, so this post is about getting the specifics of the skills mechanics pinned down, as the last one put up some numbers and some sample skills.  I know, the whole mess o' pottage is still looking pretty sketchy, but ya gotta start somewhere.  If I was a smart man Ida been making stone soup and gettin' y'all to contribute the carrots.

Ok, so my default assumption is that a reasonable skilled actor (+2 skill, call that the entry-level professional) will be rolling a 10- for a 50/50 shot on an 'average' test, under stress. A talented amateur (+1 skill, 15+ stat) will be doing about the same on average.  I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest floating stats for skills, so the pro will come across better than the talented amateur when the skill is being used in another fashion.... but that's making me want to reduce the number of stats, so I'll pin that for a second look.

Obviously we have difficulty levels. An 'Easy' test, say a +2 to the test is something that even a relatively untalented, untrained person can accomplish 'half the time'. In abstract that's fine, many games say stuff like that, but what does it mean? Well, I put Drive into the catagory of 'untrained use', so someone who is unskilled and untalented can manage to carefully drive across a parking lot, or in light traffic to reach someplace, without incident, roughly half the times. Stories of 8 year olds driving their parents to a hospital ring in my head.

Put some stress into that, like zombies trying to get into the car, and they are rolling to even start the damn thing (normally an unrolled check).

Hard tests would be -1 or -2 difficulty, which can put our professional into a rough spot, and near impossible checks at -4 would see our professional failing almost all the time..., but are still within the realm of possible for our world class expert.  For combat we can assume a number of mostly negative modifiers for things like range, lighting and the weather, though will I want a high wiff factor? Realistically, most gunfights happen at ranges of 15m or less, and 85% of all shots miss, according to the FBI, but here we can also assume largely unskilled (-8?) shooters in moderately adverse conditions.

As a general rule, I am against having to roll multiple times for checks. Obviously every gunshot (or, alternatively, every round of combat) is a discrete attempt. I know its popular to have a system where accumulating successes over multiple rounds is used for 'big efforts', but I find the actual process of using such rules to be tedious in the extreme, so we look at 'one check' even for big projects.

If I include a 'take your time' modifier, we can use the sliding scale of rush/care to determine our 'length' of action for certain tasks... the more you succeed by, the faster you go, the more you fail by, the longer it will take you to 'succeed', assuming success is possible on a long enough time scale. Example: Bob is breaking into a safe. Its a good safe so he's at -2 to his check, and he's only a moderately competent safe cracker.  Normally, cracking a safe takes ten minutes, but Bob has failed his check by three, so we push his time... say first to half an hour, then to a full hour, then to four hours (spitballing time increments here). It will take him four hours to crack that safe, so he better hope no security guards are wandering around.  If he rolls a fumble then that particular safe has utterly stumped him and he'll never crack it, he'll have to get in another way... or if he was using some other way (blowtorch, etc), he just ruined the contents of the safe.

Now, I've been toying with the idea of counting doubles and triples as a fun optional mechanic.  So lets say Bob DOES crack the safe, he rolls 3,3,1, giving him a double 3 on his dice.  Bob's earned a benefit on his roll, which he can spend immediately (in this case) to crack that safe faster than normal, or maybe he cracks it so easily that he leaves no evidence (drill holes or what have you) that he was even there. If he succeeded with 3,3,3, he'd have two benefits.  If he failed, however, with a 4,4,4, then he'd have two complications the GM could use against him, even if he never got into the safe. Maybe there is a silent alarm, maybe the security guard made his rounds faster.*

As a general rule, all Benefits and Complications must be related to the task they were generated in, but don't have to 'appear' right away. The GM can hold onto a complication for later, but he can't use the safe cracking complication to toss a monkey wrench into Bob's failing relationship with the Femme Fatale he's wooing... unless that complication is that she went to his house to surprise him while he was on the job (cracking the safe) and found he wasn't there and now thinks he's stepping out on her...  God, I hope that makes as much sense as it does in my head!.  One exception is that Bob CAN hand over a benefit he earns to his team members to use as bonuses on their checks (or to pay down a complication), which I may tie to some sort of teamwork rule or leadership check, the benefits of a well oiled machine. Bob could not, however, hand that benefit over to the NPC henchman that they hired as an extra lookout on this job, they don't know him well enough, right?

I don't think I need a hard rule for saving/spending Benefits and Complications beyond 'use it for something related to when it was rolled'. So if Bob's buddy earned a benefit the session before while they were planning the safe cracking job, he can give it to Bob to help crack the safe, even though a full session has passed since he earned it, because it is still related.  For book-keeping reasons, however, I would advise 'spending' them right away.  

Maybe only count triples.  In my head I saw Benefits being used in a lot faster, simpler ways, but as I typed it out they seem a lot more... broad and even powerful. Yeah, maybe i'll only count triples. This seems like something to be tested in a game. Any GURPS players on board want to run a house rule session or two and give me their impression?

Group actions and Assistance:

To save time rolling, if a bunch of people are all doing the same basic thing, the class example here being 'stealth', then only the lowest total check is rolled.  That's not really innovative, but its a solid rule that I've seen and even used, and I know it works. Its irrelevant WHO fails a stealth check, right? If anyone fails, the group has failed. Now, good GM advice can improve on that, making the results of failure less binary than is usually the case, but no amount of rules I'm aware of will prevent bad GMing. Maybe if there is a 'group' failure, the next most crappy guy rolls until there is, at last, a success, if you really need to work out how many people were able to avoid being seen.

Assistance checks: Generally I'm fine with a skilled and qualified assistant providing a simple bonus to checks, or a team of assistants providing a bonus, but I've been thinking about surgical operations, and how top class surgeons generally try to assemble top class teams of nurses and surgical assistants rather than just any old bunch of assholes. While I like to keep the number of dice rolls down to speed play, maybe having the team of assistants roll their own skill as a group (using the group check (lowest total rolls) rule above) to see if they provide a benefit or a hindrance.  Obviously assistants can and should provide the benefit they roll (if they roll one) to the person they are assisting.  Again with the advice: A GM can simply rule that the/an assistant provides a flat bonus, with no need to roll, and should in 'simple' cases.



As so often the case, the actual rules for simply rolling skills is actually quite brief and nearly self-explanatory, so I shouldn't feel like I've wasted my time typing all that up. Nevertheless, I'm going to expand with a thought I had on the last post, regarding experience or growing the character.

Maybe its because i've been at it so long, but I've seen more than enough times that experience systems often, eventually result in a character growing 'too big' for the game, and in plenty of cases (Fading Suns comes to mind... sadly, I'm going to keep thinking about it, since I've got a collection of books headed my way from Amazon) where the characters deliberately are kept from being 'too good' at the beginning in sometimes annoying ways, simply so they'll have someplace to spend their XP.

And frankly, I'm fucking tired of always starting out gimped.  What meaningful skills did Indiana Jones develop between Raiders and Crusade?  I'm not saying he didn't learn anything, but was it relevant to his adventures?  I can't think of anything, can you?

Not that I don't have a decent precedent here, in Traveller.  So I'm thinking about just skipping XP all together. Characters can/should come out of Creation as fully formed, capable people.  Some rules or advice for learning simple things (gaining a 0 skill for example) through study, or allowing that between adventures the characters have taken the time to learn something useful to the new adventure (like the local lingo for wherever they've gone) as standard, but 'growth' should come from things they are doing at the table... collecting wealth, contacts, allies and enemies and the like.  

I'm not entirely happy with a no-xp system, however, as I have always been of the mind that people do best when they are growing and learning, pushing themselves etc, so as a matter of personal philosophy I should allow Characters the same choice I hope people make in real life, and of course I understand that many players want XP to 'keep score', so denying them that may be cruel of me.  Thoughts.











* I'm not entirely a fan of including rules for an elastic reality that this might imply, but gaming does take place in the imagination, and no hard and fast rules can cover every variable in real life so I think I can survive this level of elasticity in my game reality.

So I need to look at the serious clusterfark that is a combat system.  I'll be honest, there is a big part of me that just wants to go simple and streamlined, nothing fancy... just a clone of almost every other combat system out there, rolls ya dice and mark some ticks off the sheet adn move to the next guy.

Seriously, I've seen so many games, so many combat systems at this point that you could probably give me a group of players, all with complete character sheets... each from a different game... and without a single clue as to rule books I could run a coherent game out of the mess.

Maybe that's why so many games fail to make an impression on me? At the end of the day what are they really bringing to the table that I haven't already got?

On the other hand, the idea of being different for its own sake is a horrible, horrible pitfall all of its own.

So there is the needle I need to thread, falling just on the interesting side of unusual without being inconceivably weird and unplayable.  But which on is Scylla and who are the sailors I'm going to sacrifice?

Well, enough philosophy, those space guns won't shoot themselves, you know?

I suppose the most sensible way to approach this is the way combat tends to play out, so the first thing to do is establish our order of precedence.
You know: Initiative.

One of the worst ideas I think I've ever seen is Exalted's (2nd?) use of a 'join combat' roll, even if at the end of the day it wound up being just another initiative check... their need to dress it up fancy just wound up being as confusing as Miss Piggy.  That said, I did rather like their action wheel, though again, the presentation wound up being somewhat sloppy and difficult to use at the table.

In the idea of keeping dice rolls down, I'm cool with a fixed initiative system*, in which our characters will generally always go on the same 'tick', a la GURPS.  Now, I've already determined that this number will be derived from our stats earlier, possibly as an average of two or three other stats, but I think we can assume there will be other ways in the system to mix things up. The point is that we're probably looking at a number that will be between 10 and 20 in most cases.

Remembering what I said about Exalted's 'wheel', we'll simplify this down. Actions cost 'initiative'. Weapons have a 'speed' the covers how far down the initiative list you move as you do 'stuff', and non-attacks will have their own speeds. This lets me ignore all that fiddly stuff with the average rate of fire of semi-automatic guns that I so often see (where you have to read deep into the rules to learn that 'typical weapon' may make... say... three attacks at a time), and also allows me to ignore fun stuff about multiple action penalties for most things, and thus ignore the reality breaking idea of someone with a high skill just acting for five or six minutes straight while no one else does, simply becuase they took a big Multi-action penalty.

So you have an initative of... lets say 15. Lets also say that taking a normal shot at someone has a Speed of 5. So you shoot someone on your initative of 15, then on 10, provided someone didn't kill you before that, you can do somethign else, even shoot again, which would let you go one more time at 5. If on 5 you instead of shooting did something with a speed of 3 (like... I dunno... jumped for cover?), you could act on 2, even potentially shooting one more time.  The question about carrying over speed costs into the next round (reducing your initative in the next round to 12 in this case) comes to mind, but I"m inclined to ignore it simply in favor of keeping things clean and simple.  After all, one of the worst problems of the Exalted Wheel was that it was an endless cycle that was a real pain to track.

I'm not too concerned with the length of time of your average turn. That's always an arbitrary call in games, and it never quite seems to add up, and in most games it winds up having 0 impact on the game. A turn is as long as it needs to be, or as short as it needs to be, to accomodate teh action within.  I can sidebar that so the spergs** don't lose their shit entirely.


Right, so now I've got the bones of an Initiative system, an 'I'm a fast motherfucker with multiple actions' system, and a basic task resolution system. If only I'd actually determined how characters were made I'd pretty much be ready to run this fucker as is.  

Ok, so I do need a bit more than a character creation system (and a definitive, finished, stat system, rather than the half baked one I've posted), in order for it to be fun. Hell, a good idea of how much damage people can take wouldn't hurt.

Alright, so we already have a good idea how to go about shooting someone, what with the rolling of 3d6 against a target number and all that.  I could sit here and start churning out lists of modifiers, but frankly I think that most of that will happen off screen, and at the end of this project I'll slap down a completed list of all the relevant things I'm glossing as I work out the hows and whys (like a final skills list and crap like that).  So I won't do that.

What I will do is talk about more complex factors, such as defensive actions and the weird things players try to do with shooting in games, and if I'm not too brainfried, I'll move into stabbity-stabbity talks, and close out with damage and armor.

Let me start with defense. One of the ideas posited in earlier posts is a sort of 'Dodge Skill' and/or secondary attribute.  I'm not adverse to a reasonable wiff factor in games as a matter of statistical reality (again: FBI shooting stats tells me most people actually can't hit the broad side of a barn), but I also know as a player and GM that a high wiff factor makes game play tedious and unfun.

Compound that is the simple fact that the NPCs that players face are far more disposable than PCs, and shit gets tight.  If players only hit one shot in six or so, and NPCS only hit one shot in six or so, we'll you'll lose about as many PCs as NPCs in a fair fight, and most of the time the fights will, numerically, be in NPC favor.  Some people hate NPCs using different, weaker rules than PCs, but frankly there is a good reason for those rules.  The question here is where on the spectrum I want to fall.

But the big question of the moment is, well, Defense and Wiff.  So I'm going to do away with opposed rolls for resolving basic combat. Maybe as an optional 'full defense' sort of action, but the standard is a passive defense, so any 'skill' or 'stat' for dodging will mostly be a penalty to hit for the shooter.   That's forcing a minor revision on the above, and will have to be reflected in the secondary stat computation, which is why I put off finishing stats, eh?

Another way of expressing it is as a matter of design philosophy: Only the Guy who is Acting rolls dice.  The guy taking a shot rolls dice (he is acting). The guy who doesn't take a shot in order to run for cover takes an action (active defense) and rolls dice. that leads me to a question: Do I still use an opposed dice check, or does the active defense guy roll, and his failure results in his being shot anyway, without accounting for the shooter's roll?  This does put more impetus on the player's actions, I suppose, but I've seen this as part of a bad design before. For the moment I'm going to go with it: If you are taking a full defense action you roll your defense skill (dodge), with penalties equal to the bonuses the shooter has (and vice versa), including skill.   If you are not taking a full defense action (or, say, you just acted in some other way... like shooting back), your passive defense is one of the penalties taken by the shooter.  Action is resolved in a single throw of the dice.

So that's defense.

Some of the things that need special attention would include two guns, autofire, sniping/aiming...

I'm interested in exploring the idea of trading speed of action for accuracy so that may be a recurring theme. Presume ranged weapons will have some sort of accuracy rating that explains how much slower you need to be to gain a bonus to hit, and maybe an inverse system for 'hip firing', shooting fast but less accurately?  It might be more sensible to simply put the fastest speed down, but one also must account for how players will USE the system, which is to say most will always just shoot at the default speed, whatever it is. Putting the default in the middle creates a more normal gameplay experience even if the rationale seems odd.

Two gunning it: Me, I love two gun combat, two knives and even two fucking longswords (which I first saw in some otherwise forgettable fantasy novel about twenty five fuckign years ago, and no, I don't remember the name), so clearly I need a rule. On the other hand, I also think I've got a somewhat realistic view of the practicality of this sort of fighting, so I've got to balance realism against 'awesome'.

I'm pretty much inclined to treat two gun fighting as simply an economical way of shaving speed off the guns in question.  If you watch a western with a guy two-fisting it, he usually fires one then the other, rather than matrix style blazing away.  Now, that doesn't tickle the awesome side much, and really I could just leave it there... no need for fancy rules, its just a way of doubling your bullets, eh?  But allowing a small speed boost to the guns in question does sort of tickle a bit of middle ground, so lets go with that rule for the nonce.

Aiming, called shots and Sniping:
Right, so I've already mentioned that taking your time lining up a shot, or conversely rushing your shot, alters your 'initiative cost' for an action. I'm not a huge fan of multi-turn aiming in RPGs, it rarely seems to work as intended at the table... or I just play with assholes who can't be bothered to try it....  And really there is a practical limit to how long you can line up a shot in organic circumstance (that is to say: at a gun range, with a fixed inanimate object and plenty of tools (gun vices, lasers and so forth) you can spend all day lining up the shot to perfection.. or at least MoA, but with an uncooperative, living target at some arbitrary range the entire process should take seconds, not minutes).  Anyway, so I'm inclined to allow, in some cases (all?) for a 'sniper' to 'spend' his initative in the turn prior to making his shot, sort of like a surprise round. Drat, now I've got suprise round rules to think up... bah.   So we've got a framework for that already. Called shots? Now there is the question. I've found over the years that hit locations are... well aside from personal tastes... largely unhelpful.  I never miss them in games that don't have them, and in games that have them they can often get in the way.  Their greatest value in a system is for those times a player really wants to shoot some guy 'in the head', or wherever... as often in games without a location the GMs' tools for dealing with that sort of action can be hit or miss.

Now, I haven't really talked about benefits and complications in combat, but here is one place that we'd see a bunch of them.  Now, forcing players to wait for a benefit to be rolled to 'call a shot' seems rather punitive so I'm inclined to instead put a 'to hit' penalty for calling shots, and a successful shot provides a benefit (whose effect is determined by the nature of the called shot rather than 'to be decided'.  A player could add a benefit from an ordinary roll to create a called shot effect, or he can roll for one by taking a penalty to his hit chance (-2 probably), and maybe a small speed penalty as well (to reflect 'lining up his shot'), and get one for free... and if he rolls a benefit on that shot he's got a benefit he can use elsewhere in combat.


Autofire:
This is actually a host of separate issues.  Burst Fire seems easy to me, you trade ammo expense for an increase in damage, so in a modern assault rifle you get ten shots (3 round bursts) but only gain a few extra points of damage per shot (reflecting that some of the burst may miss, or at least miss vital tissues... and that bursts don't really cut through armor better than single shots).   One potential use for a benefit rolled in a burst is actually counting it as three single-shot hits.

Actual autofire is a bit more complex. Most fully automatic weapons are still fired in bursts by trained shooters to conserve ammo, but there are times when things are just let rip. My first thought is to allow a character to declare how long (speed) he intends to shoot, with a rate of one or more bullets fired per initiative 'tick' he spends hosing. that's great for tracking bullet expenditure, but what about 'hitting'? Well... hosing an area isn't really great for precision. I could go into details about enfilade and defilade but frankly it winds up being mostly the same idea: You put a bunch of bullets into an area where people are (or could be) and hope for the best.  Skill actually does matter, of course.   Hmm...

So: The shooter puts his arc of fire (in front of him, say a centered 90 degree arc) down, rolls his dice, against a fixed target (That is, not counting any personal defensive modifieres from targets. Things like visibility and range, or universal modifiers, are the only ones counted).  Each margin of success (may vary by weapon and other factors?) counts as a 'benefit' rolled. As long as his only action is covering his arc, he may apply those benefits as full burst hits against any target in his arc. Benefits vary if he is 'actively hosing' or selectively supressing the area (the latter being far more economical and sustainable, but also easier to slip past).  A player actively in the area is meat unless they use a full defense action to get through.

Concentrated fire,that is a full auto hose of a single target is really just stringing together multiple 'bursts', and fully automatic weapons should have their own burst stat to cover the average length of a burst based on their cyclic rate.

So, I think that covers most shooting. I suppose I could got into cover, but I think that's more a hit/defense modifier (one that would apply against supressive fire).  I should also put in a word on grenades, but honestly I'll probably wind up stealing most of that from 'generic every-other-modern-game' rules, 'cause I don't think I got anything worth adding just yet.

So, stabbity-stabbity:

Now SHadowrun, among others, posits an opposed roll, where the defender can do damage in melee/fisticuffs. I reject that, both on the philosophy of design I'm using (as above), and because I don't think it really captures the ebb and flow 'everyone gets hit' way that scrums tend to have.


Ok, so I had a monsterous crush of ideas all at once, so I'll see if I can put them out in a coherent fashion.

Alright, so the first idea was that our previous defensive secondary stat here is used less to avoid hits but to mitigate damage. Its pretty hard to avoid getting hit in a fight unless that is literally all you are doing. Now this doesn't work the same if someone is trying to stab you and you are unarmed, as you've got nothing to put between you and painful bloodshedding to 'mitigate' the hit. This will need some refinement, but I think it'll work out okay.

Leading into grappling rules, and keeping in mind thoughts I was having regarding guns in a fistfight I was having at the start of this, melee combat takes place at two different distances, with different rules for each. Call them Clinch and Fight ranges.  There isn't really a rule for getting into clinch ranges per se, the attacker just sort of declares he's trying to get that close. Certain weapons/attacks don't work at that range (guns, generally, also big long swords and axes and shit), while others really only can be used at that distance (biting...).  A clinch range fight isn't necessarily a wrestling match, but you've got to be that close to really grapple with someone.  Light levels don't really penalize as much in clinches either, since you're pretty much holding on to the other guy as part of the deal.

Now I haven't really worked out all the details, but normal RPGs put in these sorts of grappling rules like everyone is putting on a singlet and mouthpiece and going for a three point takedown, where that would normally be a rather exceptional position to be in for a real fight (unless one of the fighters was a trained wrestler going back to his basics, I guess...), while grabbing someone around the waist while stabbing them in the gut shows up in movies all the damn time, and probably about as often in real life when stabbing is happening (hopefully rarely, right?).  In action-movie land, when you see a couple of bruisers actually 'grappling', usually its for a single move or two, not the whole damn fight.

So... I'm gonna have to work that all out in my head.

The 'fight range' is more like our normal kung-fu fight, with a couple of guys squaring off and kicking and punching hte shit out of each other, or stabbing, whatever.  Pretty usual fight senario, where the guy with better initiative may try to outlast his opponent by actively dodging until he's worn out the other guy, then flipping the script, or he'll take a few weak hits to do his own damage, hoping for a telling blow.

Dunno... this will require more work.

For punching people in the face, I'm thinking the default is non-lethal damage is the standard. However, a benefit rolled can allow lethal damage to be done, and a complication roll can mean lethal damage is taken even if that wasn't the intent of either fighter... but I'm not prepared to make that sort of thing mandatory and fixed just yet.  

The Overall intention is that getting into a scrum with someone should be the sort of thing you end quickly and decisively, or you accept that its going to hurt, especially when lethal weapons are involved.


On the other hand, I really do want some sort of martial arts system in there, so maybe that's not a good 'overall'.  I'm not at all ready to DO a martial arts system for this game just yet, but I sort of know what I want, which is to say something more colorful and tactical than Cyberpunk 2020's cheap list of bonuses and broken damage adder, and maybe a little more organized than Fading Suns generic list of manuevers (and also easier to get into, maybe...).



So, clearly I've got more work to do, particularly in the melee combat realm, and overall I may be stuck until I've started punching out some actual numbers I can use with the system to put it together (like weapon stats), but I'm starting to see where I'm going, and thats a good thing.

Before I go, I was going to talk damage, so lets talk damage.

Already have the idea of fixed hit points, derived from stats.  We're looking at a probable range of 20-30 or so points, maybe a bit lower depending on how I chose to calculate them.  Planning to include more or less fixed damage from weapons, but the use of benefits (or for defenders, complications) to alter that damage taken, with an idea that three or four hits should be 'game over' unless heavy armor is in play.  Not the most lethal system ever, but it could be close depending on what features I include for defensive.   One 'advice' to GMs would be to avoid things like called shots against players and other 'damage boosting' techniques, unless you're trying to run a high body count campaign.   With a high lethality system, increasing the wiff factor may actually not be a bad idea. Fewer hits may be tedious in D&D, but in a system where a single hit means something maybe not so much.  

On the other hand, as much as I dislike it in play, the 'toughness save' used in various 3E products (D20 Modern I think was the first) actually strikes me as the most realistic way of handling damage.  Maybe a combination? A toughness save that allows half hte damage to be converted to non-lethal? That would increase the likelihood of people passing out before dying, obviously.  I'd ask for opinions, but nobody is talking to me in this thread.

Though it may be somewhat realistic, a full on death spiral is a bit much. I"m inclined to leave wound penalties to the bottom of the wound track, so tough guys can take a few hits before they start to slow down, but once you're in penalty phase you may be a single hit away from dying.  


The natural outgrowth of this is that armor would provide a 1for1 damage stopping effect. Idea of splitting off soft armors, that would never stop all the damage (1 point minimum damage?), or might provide a bonus to the toughness test?  Lots of twists on ideas in there, but most of them strike me as too fiddly, too complex for a game system, especially one designed to be fairly fast and easy to learn. Its the wrong place to add complexity back into the system.  Actually the system as a whole, so far, is shaping up a little too simple and elegant for where I started from.  Hmm...











*Its not like letting players add a dice roll to a fixed number requires a lot of work to houserule in, mind you...

** I say lovingly, as I have been one in more than my share of cases...

Continuing my meandering way through combat rules. I was feeling like baked crap this morning, so I wound up truncating myself.

Lets talk movement in combat.

Pretty much every game I know treats fighting as Move OR Fight, and only allows both in certain circumstances, often quite rare (and may even require special training), which is weird... like game designers are unfamiliar with human.  I'll admit that certain weapons, particularly big swingy melee weapons may not lend themselves to carving on the go, but for the most part mammals don't have to put too much thought into 'place left foot here, right foot there', which frees up a lot of brain power to 'shoot asshole in the face'.

Now maybe I'll look at a few weapons along the way and say... yeah, bucko, you pretty much gonna stand right where you're at if you wanna use that thing, but those will probably be obvious.

So movement. Been planning to have a movement secondary stat, but even without that I can sorta put out that a character can move 1 meter per initiative tick (break it up in chunks based on your 'cost' actions). Maybe I'll dink with the rate, slow it down a bit, meter per two ticks.  Not too worried about needing maps to play, but I should at least make it an option, eh?  Anyway...

To move or not to move:  We're not trading economy of action here, but accuracy. Standing still means you hit more often, but will be hit more often (making cover necessary), moving means defense but also hinders accuracy. Moving really fast means a big trade off in accuracy for a bit less defense, but still better than moving slowly.

OF course, dropping all pretense of shooting means moving flat the fuck out. Dead Sprint time.


Moving and melee:
Well, I'm pretty sure if you have room you can swing your way through a crowd of assholes as you cross them (which could be cinematic as fuck), so for that I'm not too worried. Take your shot as you move on by, whatever.  Here, moving may actually hinder your defense, however, as anyone who sees you coming and can act as you go by can just stick a weapon in your path pretty easy.

But I'm more thinking about the complexities of a fight, a duel if you will, than a mass combat vidya game killin' spree.

I'm half thinking about clinch fights moving almost at random, like grenade deviation. If you're not in the open that can be 'bad'... fall right off a cliff bad, but then we're looking at fine detail maps. Maybe this is a GM Sidebar 'how to handle' situation rather than hard rules?

For a non-clinch Fight distance, I imagine the fighters should be moving around quite a bit, like a Jet Li fight in The One or something.  How best to capture this in rules, though?  I'm not trying to write Street Fighter, the Game... hell, the guys who DID write Street Fighter teh game didn't put that much effort into how fights move around an area.

Hmm. I'm thinking this is something the defender in the fight (which, obviously, changes from round to round) pretty much makes the call between three choices. Move Away (the default)... which may be 'mandatory' for a full defense action, in which he is constantly moving away from (not necessarily straight, mind you. Lateral is still away) the attacker to avoid getting hit, Standing Ground, in which he plants his feet and blocks... or doesn't... and prepares to counter attack, or Clinch, in which case he moves forward to close, negating the big sweeping 'FIGHT' range attacks.  THe Attacker mostly responds to what the Defender does, using his own movement to keep up, or aborting his attack to keep out of clinch range (or alternatively, keeping his attack, counting on a big solid hit to end the fight, and accepting the clinch after).  If the Defender is somehow much faster than the attacker, then playing keep away might be a super defense, but I'm cool with that... in fact breaking and running from Fight distances should probably be pretty easy, all things being equal.


Surprise rounds?
Thinking I can mostly do without a formal 'check for surprise' sort of situation. Striking from stealth or deliberate ambushes are means of gaining surprise, but those are planned things.  Random encounters shouldn't be treated like organized ambushes.  That said: Aside from denying defense modifiers or full defense options in the initial attack, I'm thinking this calls for an automatic benefit (so an ambush attack with a called shot which rolls triples could result in three benefits on a single roll).


Rapid Fire:
Should be in the auto-fire section, but many (not all) semi-automatic weapons can be fired in a sort of gimped auto-fire (or at least burst fire) mode simply by pulling the trigger fast enough.  THis should be treated as a regular or even long-autofire burst with lower accuracy and ammo efficiency by the rules.

As with other big projects I've worked on via the internet, I find it useful to post occasionally with things I still need to do, so I can reference them and realize what I've actually got on mah plate.

So, I've stripped the system down a bit further than I expected, so I will have to take a second look at my stats block and quite probably strip it down to the bones. Right now I've got something akin to a Rolemaster complexity stat block welded to a Unisystem rule set? (I was gonna say Serenity RPG, or Margret Weis productions, but I figured I'd lose people with that one, thanks to the Firefly RPG that was later released....).

I've got to pop up with some ideas for setting elements, like do I want to deal with Psychics and stuff, and if so, How

Starships. Oy, starships.

Cybernetics and other fancy toys... which means dealing with the question of Tech Levels.

At some point, soon, I'm going to have to buckle down and pop out some hard numbers, cleaning up the brainstorming in previous posts.

Setting, setting setting!  Its not like I'm entirely building a completely generic rule system for the sake of rule systems. I gotta build in an interesting and evocative setting... while again threading the needle of keeping it wide open for interpretation and even 'porting' over to other settings.  Hey, I like making settings, but I suppose it could be a bit of a distraction.

What else?  Aliens maybe? Genetic engineering, both pre-natal clades and macro-alteration?  Could fall into a similar catagory as cybernetics, or rather divided between cybernetics and aliens.  How far into the transhumanist realm do I want to take it?

Since I'm not getting much motivation from my silent readership, I'm going to take a bit of a break from grinding out rules ideas to dink around with something a bit moar fun... I'm going to play around with setting and starships.

So what am I looking at as a goal for starships? Well I sort of like the design of Traveller with some caveats, I probably will pull back the granularity a bit.

Ok, lets pull back from that a bit. What I want is a game that allows players to have a starship so they can go on adventures and explore.  I want ships to be big enough to support a party of players (and maybe some support NPCs if it comes down to it), but small enough to allow landing. As a matter of simple math, it doesn't make sense for deep space ships to always be landing on planets, but landing ships on planets is cool.  Inspirational ideas include Millenium Falcons, Serentities, Moyas and some others.  We're looking at a sort of industrial age of ships, compared to an exploratory age of ships (I should explain that somewhere, but I won't...).   Plenty of ship designs, reflecting differing cultural values, but plenty of room for customization and unique designs. Ships are expensive, but within reach, options for setting up the campaign that don't funnel players into unfun circumstances (Eg, my attempt to run Traveller by the book failed, as no one wanted to play Accountants&Lawyers to pay for, or track, things like maintenance costs... yes, there are options to ignore that, but the game funnels play into that style by default...)

I'm not sure how much work I want to put into engineering starships. I do know that something like Fading Suns is a little too simplistic, and something like Serenity (which was awesome in its way) is too abstract. There is a point where I"m looking at all my goals and thinking what I really am trying to do is rejigger a Traveller game, which is an irritating thing to be thinking at this stage of the project.


Anyway, I'm not going to start designing the system right here and now, because I'm mostly just spitballing out what I want, and following up with some setting ideas.

So something I've got in mind is the understanding that starship combat should be (realistically) terrifying. Starships scale up from modern warships, and have guns to match, and when you start looking at common velocities you're talking about kinetic energy in the 'orbital strike' range as a fucking baseline.  That's.... not such a good thing from a game standpoint, one bad dice roll and you're looking at a TPK.  We can artificially assume super-tech armors and the like, as well as 'force fields', but now we're talking about how realistic and how tech the setting is going to wind up being.  One solution to the TPK problem is that ships have modular compartmental designs by default, so that a section of the ship absorbing the kinetic equivalent of a nuclear strike doesn't wipe the whole ship, but shunts all that excess damage in that one compartment.  That's not so much a reach technology/science wise, but it does raise the specter of losing players peicemeal as a ship is shot up in combat.  How brutal should we be, and all that.

Another factor in the realism department is factors like Delta V movements and faster than light. FTL is a macguffin we just have to accept, or we've got a boring little setting in a single star system, which is boring.  FTL is a Plot Device, meaning that exact rules for its function can be assigned arbitrarily without affecting the game too much, but will have a power effect on the setting itself.

Options for FTL include
Warp Drives (possibly to include Hyperdrives), and other movie style 'go-fast' drives
Jump Drives (Trav)
Jump Gates (Fading Suns, Babylon Five)
Extra-dimenensional journeys (40k, B5 again)

Also implied is the scope and scale. Faster drives means a much bigger setting, as worlds are closer together.  I'm not a fan of Star Wars style hyperdrives, where crossing the entire Galaxy seems to take a few hours tops, but on the other hand, the Imperium of Man (Traveller) has a massive number of worlds/systems, and yet no group of players can reasonably expect to adventure in more than a tiny pocket of it, due to the slow rates of travel... and yet its all in a small pocket of a single arm of a single galaxy (adn MASS props for understanding how fucking big space is!, but they don't need mah props....)

Weirdly, I'm tempted to make a setting inspired by Jupiter Ascending. Horrible fucking movie but some interesting implied worldbuilding. It does sort of imply a Universe Spanning civilization, which is MUCH MUCH bigger than pretty much any setting I'm familiar with.  On the other hand, its got furries all over it.

Lets pin the FTL for a moment, since that is very deeply tied to setting building, and concentrate on, shall we call them 'system drives'?  Sure, lets do that.

This is an idea I've had bouncing in my skull for a couple of years now I think, for a form of gravitic drive. I think its got some theoretical problems (bootstrapping, conservation of momentum shit...) but:

Rather than a drive pushing the ship along, per normal (and all the questions about reaction mass implied in Trav, but ignored...), a ship generates a micro-singularity just ahead of itself adn FALLs towards that point of gravity. Some ships may allow the singularity to be moved to various degrees allowing complex trajectory changes, but most would rely on vector changes (realigning the whole ship to change the direction of falling) for various reasons (safety).  Obviously this drive has a problem in that it would be useless as is for leaving a gravity well (planet), which reinforces the idea of using shuttles (Farscape and Firefly.... though they do land Serenity all the faaking time) as a primary means of going up and down.   Now we're looking at gravitic technology as a standard, which is fine by me.  

Now, in simple terms I'm absolutely fine with technology and setting advanced over B5. I'm not adverse to a Farscape sort of setting, but I think that's a little too fantastic overall, a little glib on the science if you will.  

Anyway... ideas bouncing around and all that.  Since no one wants to interrupt the master (or whatever) to encourage me, maybe I'll make a separate thread for setting, complete with poll, in the main forum.

So turning my attention to the possibility of psychic powers I find myself back at the beginning of this project in that I don't actually have any cunnin' idears to explicate. I'm starting from scratch, mang.

So what do I want from a Psychic system?  Expansion of the mind and enlightenment? Well.... sure, but I'm not sure how that applies to a game....

No, what I want for a game system is powers that really POP, that make psychics stand out as, well, psychics. Power, muddafaaka! Only, you know, without being the end-all be all of character design.  I don't mind a Kwisatz Haderach, but Akira flying around and blowing up cities is a bit much... and really, was he any more powerful than Muad'dib? In a fist fight? Absolutely, but in a more general sense I... sorta don't see it.

So, what does that mean? Subtle powers then?  

Well, it certainly means no Hadduken.  If yer a psychic you'll still want a gun to shoot a fool.

Here there is some value in the poll I put up in the other thread. By far the biggest response has been to Babylon 5, and psychics are a big part of the B5 setting... and they are very powerful. But they really do ONE thing... read minds.  This makes me think about all the other games I've seen with psychics, where they are given all manner of weird powers, space magic and shit, but actual mind-reading is seriously downplayed. Even Traveller has this problem to some extent, with flashy teleporting powers and an emphasis on telekinetics, though yes, actual Mind Reading is a part of the Traveller universe.

So, from here I can determine that the fundamental focus of all psychic power starts and ends in the mind. Mind reading isn't some power you get jacked up into when you reach higher levels, its the fucking foundation of all later powers.  Great. So what's that mean?  Well, that's what I'm exploring, innit?

So, system?

Well I could keep this focused on the skill system side of things, a bit like Corporation perhaps, but that explicitely goes against the plan. Here is a fine opportunity to introduce a relatively simple additional subsystem to keep the system from being a little too tidy.  

I'm tempted to stop here and go on about character creation, but FOCUS!!!

Okay...

So, a person with Psychic power, or even just potential, essentially has a Psychic Combat Rating (like our Base Combat Ratings earlier), a secondary Stat.  This is applied as any other attack against others (so... everyone has a rating?), and the better you do, the more access to their mind you have. There aren't specific powers that need to be learned, just levels of access due to overpowering other minds. Weak psychics just pick up surface thoughts, strong psychics can take control of other minds.

But doing psychic stuff has speed costs, probably a lot slower than just shooting a fool, and can be detected. We'll still use the 'active participant rolls' method, and non-psychics can throw off some psychic defense.

Then you've got the potential for 'psychic rituals', which is just a fancy way of saying a psychic who has control over the subject for extended periods of time (and/or works with teams of psychics), can do stuff that you couldn't pull off in day to day contact, like brainwashing and crap like that.

Now, I'm not adverse to opening up some other forms of psychic activity, particularly the ESP related activities (Prescience, psychometry clairvoyance, etc) and my personal fave: Prana Bindu (psychic alteration of the self... super-yoga! Its like a really intense form of Pilates, where the reward isn't just a fabulous ass, but, like, totally opening your third eye adn becoming one with, like, the universe and stuff)...

The question becomes how to manage it.   Using the idea of combat style checks has potential... I'm particularly eager to explore the idea of using a psychic rating check against a characters OWN toughness (or whatever defense seems to make the most sense) to use Prana Bindu stuff... but how do you know you're a Prana Bindu user instead of just a run of the mill Telepath?

One method is to introduce addtional skills representing specific uses of power, but I was trying to avoid that... well, avoid making that the focus of this purported sub-system.  Hmm... I think it will work though as you won't NEED the psychic skills to do basic psychic feats, they just help make those easier and expand how you can use your gift.

Now, for the moment I'm pretty set on keeping telekinesis out of the system. First, now that we're out of the LSD fueled 1960s I find psychic powers are a little too magical for good Sci-Fi as it is, a little too 'Space Magic'. Restraining our psychic gifts to exclusively perceptive and mind-over-matter keeps things almost believable, while external powers like Telekinesis start getting into weird questions about conservation of energy and so forth.  Also, I'm pretty set on keeping Space Wizards blasting foes with lightning out of the question.

Another factor is the common requests for setting style are blends of Dune and Babylon 5, both of which have psychics, neither of which includes people tossing shit with their minds on a casual basis.

Lastly: When SPace Wizards have kick ass powers like telekinesis, people start playing Akira, and then the dudes with the guns start looking small in the pants.  There gets to be a temptation to start constructing 'fighting man spells' like force shields and head-assplode powers that render the rest of the system obsolete.

Alright, so now I have both an idea of how psychic powers will work... which gives me something to play around with as I tighten up the rules (an ongoing process), and I've got some idea how I want character creation to look, which I'll explain in the next post... and hopefully along the way I'll get more keen insights into my baby game.

So I've been thinking about character creation, especially the various unstated problems I've been seeing as I move forwards, which sort of makes me glad I didn't just dive right in and knock out a system half assed and call it a day!  I mita hadda go back and redo the whole shebang!

So basically I've got a chunk of a stat system and most all of a skill system. Where I've been falling down is in fitting characters into stuff like aliens and psychics and other crap like social status and genetically engineered whatsits... which could be viewed as Aliens I suppose.

I also knew I wasn't terribly interested in doing a randomized creation system, if only as a matter of personal taste. I suppose I could slap on some randomizers along the way for people who DO like to randomly generate ideas. Bar wit me, folks, as I'm sorta rushing this one out the door (whine, women and song is callin' me out!).

Okay, so I do like the sort of structured creation you see in stuff like the WoD, where you can't just decide to be a perfect human with no skills or what have you. That's about the only thing I like about WoD's creation system, mind you...

So we're gonna riff offa that.

Stats. Last I checked I still had eight stats, with a range from 1 to twenty, and important break points at 10, 15, 20 (for skills bonuses).

Lets start by postulating that every stat defaults to 8, which is a big fat -1 to all related skills. From here we can start putting together a sort of point total for how many stat points players get to build their dude.  Anything less than 16 is insulting to reality (and, frankly, 16 is still pretty fucking low), so that our absolute floor to make a bland, perfectly average shmuck.  Lets say that the cost of each point doubles after 14 (so 15< are two points a stat), which would be... hmm... 18 points to have a single 20 on the sheet... so lets make 18 our new floor.

Our roof would have to be 'all 20s', which would put our roof at 144 with my napkin math.

Somewhere smack dab in the middle of that is a good starting point.  65 points to build a character's stats?

Now, this is just the starter point, our ballpark to start testing the system. I've got a lot of room to play around with this (and will have to start mocking up characters at some point to test it myself, once I've gotten far enough), and a lot of means to play with it, including moving around the costs of attributes and so forth.

So, lets look at what this gives us: A straight 15 down the line for stats, with a few points left over to raise a couple of stats to 16.  That does seem a bit high. Lets chop that down to 55 points then.  Remember: I'm not planning on having a system to raise stats with XP, so players will have to be comfortable with their character out the gate, not planning to raise shit later, so a bit high isn't a problem.  Straight 14's means a flat 'high average', no bonuses to any skills.

Now, I've still got tons of work to do with attributes (namely calculating secondaries), but I think at least some of that will have to happen with a pad and pen, so you guys won't necessarily see my work.

Skills:
Similar to Stats, we get a pool of points.  We also know our range here ( no skill and 0-5), and we can 'wipe out' the no-skill, as its not really a factor.  Now, I believe not every skill will have a 0 rating, but it IS something to keep in mind.  Right now we're ballparking a 30 skill skill list, with room for specialties, though I'm wasn't planning to charge for specialties I think I will, simply because everyone does, yo.

Now, I don't know of any really successful games that use cumulative skill costs, but I do know plenty of second tier games that do, so I think I'll use that sort of system.  A 0 or 1 skill cost 1 point, the 2 point level costs 2 points, etc, with each level of skill having to be bought seperately, so a +5 skill should cost either 15 or 16 points, depending on if its got a 0 level or not.  A speciality costs a flat +1, even for skills that require a specialty... meaning those skills (which would all have a 0 level...)would cost 17 points to 'max out'.

So, having a range of skills (30) and an idea of the costs we can look at our range of points for skills. We don't really have a floor here, as 'no skills' is a mechanical possibility, and our ceiling is... 450~, which is too damn high, just like the rent.

Lets look at a jack of all trades, having every skill at +1. That's roughly 60 points (allowing for an offset between skills with a 0 level and skills without, through the mechanism of mandatory specializations... but this is napkin math, so exactitude is unnecessary).  Now, that DOES put us well below the bottom quarter of our range, but it also allows 3-4 skills at max, or roughly 10% mastery of the skill list.  Then again, characters aren't really growing per se, so moving up isn't bad. We could probably go up to 100 points in skills without getting two broken up about it, enough to just about give our theoretical Jack a +2 in half the skills, with +1 in the remainder... and would conversely allow a specialist up to 6 or so maxed skills.

Now, I had a plan for combat manuevers/martial arts that would make use of skill points, which could throw these numbers off, but it seems for the moment to work just fine, so we'll leave that.


Now this brings us to the new and exciting part of today's program... other stuff.

This is where the player gets to really define who, or what, his character is.  Now, I clearly don't have any numbers to play with just yet, so this is purely spitballing at the moment, but essentially here Characters are defined from a pool of points that lets them do things like buy psychic powers, or alien racial abilities and so forth. I've got some idea that I could lay out example -prebuilds or packages with their own costs... but also pull back the curtain to let more experienced players make their own packages, including races.  Now, some of the builds would be less exotic... say "The Natural", who gets more Stat points to reflect his greater natural abilities, or "the Pro", who starts off with extra skill points and/or combat techniques.  Then you've got stacking builds, so you can be a normal, not terribly exciting psychic, or you can 'stack' additional psychic builds to be Almost-Akira, but at the cost of pretty much only being a mental beast.  

The idea is that a player should be able to take something like three 'builds' in order to get a rounded character, with none of them being mandatory 'everyone gotta take 'fat stacks o'loot' or something.

The builds also allow me to tweak 'generic' seeming rules to the setting more closely.

Let me spit ball some more and give a proximate example of how it could wind up looking:

let us presume that you've got 30 build points, and each build has an average (not exact) cost of around ten points.  You'd like to be a psychic, so you take a single build 'Psychic' for ten points (our average), that gives you the Psychic Trait (access to Psychic Combat Rating) and the Mind Reading ability, and it gives you five points to spend on Psychic Skills, and you may chose to be registered or unregistered.  Now, with your remaining twenty points you also chose to be a member of the Qabiri Eugenic Clade (giving you some genetic tweaks, enhancing your intelligence as well), which we'll say costs 14 points just for the purposes of examples, and you spend the last six on 'spares', like a bit of social status and implied income and maybe a cybernetic Third Eye.

Now, from my end I have to have a damn good idea what the relative values are for stat points, skill points and various cool abilities and the like, so that the builds are all balanced properly, and so players can spend their points more or less freely around the builds. I don't really want this part of the character creation to be massive (no GURPS advantages mega-chapters or what have you).

Now, from there character should have money and gear, as well as access to a starship, and again, I'm for letting folks start out reasonably well geared.  And that is the basic format of Character Creation.

Next I'll work on some of those pesky subsystems so I can begin pinning down values for step three of creation! When? Eh. THis weekend, sometime, maybe.

It seems I'm running out of steam for various sub-system ideas, so maybe I should re-energize myself... do a few lines of coke off a dead hooker's ass or something... er... I mean... um... go back and tighten up the core system, yeah, that's what I meant!

I dunno. Anyway, I figured I'd take a look at Aliens, since its increasingly looking like I'll be doing a lot more with Aliens than I had originally intended. So much so that actually trying to design all of the possibilities up front would be a bit misplaced.

Ok, so right out the gate the basic concept is to start from a humanocentric point of view.  Most aliens will look and think within a certain standard number of deviations from the human perspective. The upright bilaterally symetrical bipedal form is actually fairly useful and a likely outgrowth of natural evolution in most environments, at least according to many futurists, so we can do away with the idea of 'weird for the sake of weird' designs like Xorns or what have you.  Sentient beings will have to evolve predominantly from tool using species, and we can presume that in order to reach space they'll have to have had access to fire of some sort and metallurgy.  Exceptions could exist, but they would be just that, exceptions.

Same thing with hive-mind bugs and aliens that are so hypercapable that it would be hard to imagine they'd NEED to evolve towards tool use to survive in their environment.

But that just gives us a superficial take.  We can do a lot within that realm, more than TV could (since, you know, we don't need Human Actors wearing Makeup, or extensive puppetry/cgi. Power to the Imagination yo!), so quite frankly our aliens can still be pretty damn alien.  In fact, aliens that look very human could be, psychologically, far different than an alien that looks very alien but is very humanlike in behavior.

In terms of differentiating Aliens in terms of abilities, I will probably tie this into the same system I develop (promises, promises) for the genetically engineered and other 'altered humans'.  One thing that will set the Aliens apart, at least at the moment, is a sort of Alien Rating, which is a 0-value (balanced) attribute.  Each point of Alien Rating represents a 'permanent' floating Complication that the GM can use in cases where the Alien is interacting with Humans (or other, humanlike aliens), but conversely can be used as a Benefit by the Player in circumstances where the character is in an advantageous position.

Each level of Alien should be at least moderately detailed.  For example, a Methane Breathing race would have at least one point of Alien from that, but the use of the Complication/Benefit point comes primarily when dealing with environment.  Humans and non-methane breathers are disadvantaged in Methane Environments,  Methane breathers are disadvantaged in Oxygen environments.  Methane Breathers of different species will have an easier time socializing and understanding aliens that share this trait, even if the species are otherwise hostile. Human doctors trying to do medicine on Methane breathers... yadda yadda.

Certain alien abilities could be linked to certain Alien ratings, or even come free with some standard alien traits (Methane breathers probably enjoy colder environments? I dunno, this is early work...).

Other Alien ratings are predominantly cultural, possibly linked to biology.  It could even represent a biological trait that humans find patently offensive (a modern example would be slavery), which could lead to incidents where humans try to free a 'slaved' caste, only to find that the percieved slaves actually cannot survive or function without the master caste. That's an awkward example, I suppose, but vastly different cultural values, espeically inexplicable ones (I'm thinking of the Green/Purple Scarves in Babylon 5....) are expressions of cultural alien traits. We can't understand WHY they value this or that, much less why they act in certain ways, and that causes potential problems.

But cultural and psychological Alienness doesn't have to be defined up front. Its just an omnipresent factor of dealing with alien races, and not every race should necessarily have ratings in certain areas.  

I've been toying with the idea of letting characters buy up or down non-biological Alien traits to represent moving away from Humanity, growing closer to a specific Alien Race (or for aliens, trying to shed their alien nature to better co-exist with humanity), but that suggests a certain flexibility I'm not sure is wise to include, given what Alien should be representing.

One reason I've been stalling on this post is that I forgot a few basic facts, chief of which is that I don't have to crunch all the numbers at once as this is still largely in the brainstorming phase.

Likewise, I don't have to create a deeply evocative and memorable system (a la Cyberpunk 2020's cybernetics) for this step either, not now nor in the polished final phase. This is always going to wind up being a sort of brute force, functional pragmatic rules driven part of the game, as much as I'd prefer it to be evocative etc.

Here's why: Ultimately I don't want to pile on dozens of competing redundant systems all focused on doing the exact same job.

Wait! What exactly are we doing here today?

Ah. Yes.

That is the question that I wasn't really addressing when I was dragging my feet all week on this, letting the more entertaining 'raw creative purge' take primary focus, eh?

Well, structurally we're dialing in on the mechanics of customizing our character by use of spending bonus points, as discussed in the previous post.

More than that we are talking about a system for defining core, unchanging traits of the character fundamental to race, deep inherited genetic engineering and other sorts of things you don't pick up at the corner market for the cost of a six pack.  

And that's just it: all of these sorts of changes may have a number of exciting fluffy reasons for being a part of your character, and I honestly appreciate systems that make the effort to make them seem different mechanically... that's just terribly inefficient when pretty much they all come down to "I was born/made this way".

But how does that meet my design goals? Well... honestly it doesn't.  I mean, in one sense I'm meeting the goal of keeping everything running like a smooth, well oiled machine that is easy to understand, but I'm anally violating the design goal of having layers of additional subsystems providing additional complexity to keep it interesting over a large number of games.  Frankly, that particular design goal seems to be failing fast, and I'm doing myself no favors with this idea.

No, that's weaselly. I'm missing the fucking point entirely on that goal.  If playing an alien is no different than playing a genetically engineered superhuman is no different than playing a guy exposed to too many comic book super-chemicals... then there really is a lack of interesting subsystems to explore, isn't there?

On the other hand: Another goal is to avoid creating illusions of choice, and if I see all these as fundamentally the same, any arbitrary divisions I create will wind up being illusory choices, so I guess I'm stuck with what I've got.

So what have I got?

Well, to begin with what do I see happening inside the customization step of creation?  

Well, I see 'buying' extra attributes at some arbitrary cost (say, two points per point of attribute?  Balancing is for after I've got the framework...)
And I see people buying extra skills for some arbitrary, but presumably cheaper than stats, cost (1 for 1?)
I presumably see buying some other 'innate' advantages, such as noble birth or being left handed or some stupid shit like that, again for 'costs'.  It does seem like balancing off the cost of skills works well for many such advantages, so I'm not sweating that too much, as compared to the wildly expensive costs of most GURPS advantages.

And, of course, what we're here to talk about today: Being More Than Human.

Now, I've previously mentioned the idea of using the Benefits and Complications mechanic to 'rate' how alien an alien is, and I should try to work that back into this system some how, but at this exact moment all my ideas seem like bad ones.

Now, I WAS thinking I don't need to balance my powers against the rest of the system, as this would be/could be a closed system, but I am seeing that I'm completely wrong now.  They absolutely are balanced against the rest of the options already mentioned.

Note: while having higher, or lower, attributes is clearly a 'feature' of being alien, you wouldn't use this part of the system to change your racial stats... that's done half a step above, using the same customization points we're using here.  What you change in designing your 'racial package' if you will, is the RANGE of your stats, among other things. The actual stat points (if any) are bought as normal, but could/would be included in a bundle.

I suppose I could encourage players to build whole bundles rather than just free-form spend, to make more coherent/cohesive characters, but writing that as a rule strikes me as obnoxious and unenforcable if I give them the raw tools.

Ok, I'm spinning wheels here, so lets try another tack.

Let's... build a 'bundle' for an alien race, and if you've been following the setting build thread at all, we'll do the Xichui.  Now, I would normally start with a ten point 'bundle' as that was a default from the previous thread, but the Xichui aren't suffiently weird to justify that, so we'll say that the Xichui wind up with a... arbitrary number time... six point bundle.

Xichui have a rating of Alien 1, which is very human. Most of their complications/benefits come from things like gender politics and dealing with bugs or large bodies of water. Remember: This is not a penalty, the Xichui would count that benefit for as many rolls as they would complications.

So what are the Xichui like, racially?

Well, they are smaller than humans, which means a penalty to size. Let's say a 2 point penalty, though I think it should be much bigger. Size is a bit odd as a stat, because I see being 'big' as being as much a problem in certain circumstances as being 'small', but given the dangerous lives adventurer types lead, lets just assume its a penalty. So, in theory should a Xichui get points back?  Lets assume not, and instead they can simply move another attribute up the same way...  Now, the Xichui are more flexible than humans, and they are remarkably durable for little buggers, so we'll be uncool and split up the advantage between Dex and End.  

Now, this should be mentioned, especially in light of the variable cost of stats. When we raise or lower the values of a stat we are raising and lowering all of its values. So in our case, the starting point for Size of a Xichui is 6, instead of 8, and the 'break point' where they pay double is 13 instead of 15, and their cap is 18, not 20. This isn't very 'neat' mechanically, but it has an advantage of allowing us to retroactively apply the change to the stats without creating headaches.  So a Xuchui has a starting Dex and End of 9, and subsequently can raise those stats to 16 without having to double (or.. rather, 16 is when they double? Well I don't think I've pinned that down yet, but you get the picture).

So we've already made a significant change to the Xichui without spending any of their 'bundle' points, and in theory I could  stop here and be reasonably happy with the little bastards, but that wouldn't serve my purpose in this little exercise, would it?  Now.. I COULD link Alien ratings to changes to the core stats, but I think that would be a bad idea but its something to keep in mind for later.

Another thing I could so is simply spend bundle points on actual stat points and skills, and I probably would if this wasn't an 'example' to help me 'fix' the system up....



....


Ok, so I could go backwards a bit, and presume a bundle of six (or whatever) for the Xichui, then break that bundle down into a racial package and 'the rest of it', lets assume then that I HAVE done that, and we're working out the racial package part of the Xichui bundle... which we could put back up at ten (six being the racial part?)...  Gah, this is just as ugly as I feared it would be. Not... hard... exactly, but a bit of a mess.

So how do Xichui differ from humanity? Well, they are hairy little bastards, flexible and they can use their feet like crappy hands. I don't think egg laying or detachable 'hair' counts for anything here, but being desert creatures we could give them some sort of bonuses based on consumption of water and temperature.

So... if we were doing this as GURPS I'd give them a crude manipulator appendage power, though really... what is that truly worth? Its not 'extra attacks' level cool, its just sort of... there?

Lets call it a one point power: Handy Feet, which can give them bonuses to climbing and doing stuff with their feet IF they aren't wearing shoes.

Now being furry is probably another cheap ass 1 point power, giving them bonuses to survival checks or something... if we don't just wipe it and call it a special effect.  Lets do that and call it a day on being hairy.

That leaves flexible. Now, I may have never handled an Otter, but I have handled ferrets, and those little bastards are like slinkies, and I did think the Xichui did retain a lot of that sort of flexibility and mobility. That gives me a few interesting choices.

So lets say we've got an alien power of 'living slinky', and we'll assign it a three point value. Xichui can count their size as half whenever advantageous (even when calculating secondary stats), which will let them be sneaky little shits among other things. Maybe I'll give them some other bonuses for this ability, like a bonus to (defensive) grappling checks or some shit.

Now, thats only four of our six points that I set aside at the front of this, so I could grab bag a few other minor bonuses (like a bonus to sense of smell?), but I don't really think the Xichui call for all that, so we can recalculate their 'alien race' bundle as costign 4 points, and the Xichui bundle as a whole would be filled with racial bonuses to stats and skills and other advantages, just as any character would have.



Now I haven't addressed the idea that some traits should provide a sort of 'alien' rating, so I may need to rethink that idea. But a human heavy worlder (with bonuses to Strength etc) might still need to have an alien rating to cover how different life is for him in 'normal' gravity situations.  

Now, mind you that I don't really have to hone this all down to a hard system and give it to players as a 'get your grubby mitts all in my design' feature. I can more or less reserve this very loose system for myself, and use it to guide me through creating all the notable alien races and genetic clades... but that won't excuse me from stiffening it up a bit more, will it? I mean: What's the relative value of being a heavy worlder (native or genetically adapted) vs. being a squirmy space otter?  I, at least, have to have an idea, right?  

And annoying as it is, I think that's the right thing to do at this point.  The downside is more work for me up front (I'm LAZY) but the upside is its much easier to worry about balance and it lets me tie the system to the setting up front through the racial bundles.  THat's two strong advantages to one morally weak disadvantage.  Bah. I LIKE giving more tools to the players, damnit... not just because lazy, but as a general principle.  Well... that gives me incentives to make a better system down the line, dunnit?