Making less-terrible Cthulhutech-esque RPG

[Lokathor]

The other thing to keep in mind is that, again, a Star Spawn, a Goat Spawn, a Human, an APC, a Jet, and a Mobile Suit should all have potentially different lists of hit locations and wound effects.

Now it's easy enough to put every wound effect in a wound pool onto a megalist for reference, like the DnD spell section and their spell lists. Then most body types just reference the common wounds over and over and then the weird bodies have rarely used wounds and stuff.

Or you could have each creature either reference a different "default" bodytype with an additional annotation or two for things specific to that creature, and then weird enough creatures or things would just present their own wound chart from scratch.

[Grek]

Could have a deck-based system. First we decide on how finely grained we want our hit locations to be. A starting list would probably include Arms, Legs, Head, Torso, Wheels, Wings, Tentacle, Flesh, Armour and Machinery. Maybe more, maybe different ones. For each of those hit locations, we create an Injury Deck which lists all the injuries you could get from being hit there. Some decks are bigger than others; there's not a lot of variation when it comes to how bad a head injury is, but there can be a wide variety of flesh wounds. Each creature then gets a number of Hit Locations for each facing. Whenever you get shot at from a given direction, you draw a number of cards from the Injury Decks associated with the hit locations for that facing. Called shots require that you draw from a specific deck if successful, but otherwise the defender picks what deck to draw from. Each Injury Card, in addition to applying some negative condition, counts toward a morale based "Too injured to fight" counter.

[Lokathor]

That would be far far far too many decks if you had one deck per body frame.

[Grek]

The list above would be 10 decks shared between all players. We might want as many as two more decks. Assuming you use poker sized cards, that comes out to a 10 inch by 11 inch area in the middle of the table for all the cards.

[Lokathor]

No, because you need your "Machinery" deck to be at least as complex as your biological deck. It matters if your turret is hurt and took damage or was frozen, compared to your treads being blown off, compared to your crew being stunned for a turn but the vehicle being okay. Anything that can't generate results based off of hit locations that are at least at least as complex as Battletech results doesn't need to be considered.

And also, on top of Tanks and Rotocraft and Jets all having highly distinct bodies, a Mobile Suit and a Humanoid aren't going to suffer the same effects from damage even if they do have the same general set of hit locations, because the Mobile Suit can operate with reduced stats with several shots clean through its torso and an arm missing, but meanwhile the humanoid is possibly suffering the "bleeding out" condition as soon as they get shot even a single time in the chest. It's not even just an armor/soak factor, it's the fact that Mecha and Bio undergo damage differently.

And you'd probably even want the ability as a designer to be able to distinguish between humanoid mecha quality levels by giving some mecha a better hit chart than others get. Penalties show up later or not at all along the damage tracks, because the advanced systems can reroute operations without any problems, or whatever.

[Grek]

The Machinery deck is for misc. internals on a mechanical target, just like the Flesh deck is for misc. blood, guts and stuff on a biological target. Anything that could result from being shot at but which isn't located in any specific body part.

Tanks get Wheels, Body*, Arms**, Armour and Machinery.
Jets/Rotocraft get Wheels, Body*, Arms**, Wings and Machinery, but arranged differently to respect the fact that it is more difficult to shoot the wings off a helicopter than it is to do the same to a jet.

*Renamed from "Torso" because "Torso" doesn't fit for many machines.
**Includes both limb-attached-to-the-shoulder Arms and Armaments. Deck may include puns about getting disarmed.

Mecha have different rules for being repaired than humans have for recovering from wounds. Bleeding out vs. not having blood in the first place can be handled there. As for the Mobile Suit being able to ignore wounds that would incapacitate a human, that seems like it should be a special property of Mecha where they can have a much larger "You can only suffer this many injuries before you give up" limit than a human does.

[RadiantPhoenix]

I would go with tables -- a 1d6x2 table has 36 possible results, but ten of them would consume only, like, a dozen pages (including explanations), and use the same dice you use for everything else.

[Username17]

Abstracting it is better if you're going to allow the death of a thousand papercuts and probably easier to keep track of.

I don't think you want to have death of a thousand paper cuts in a system that is also supposed to work for machines. I for one would be pretty annoyed if I could sink a battleship with a fire ax by running around breaking radar dishes and shit. In genre, you sometimes shoot the tracks of a tank until it is immobilized, and then you leave. You don't keep shooting the tracks until the tank explodes, because it isn't ever going to reach critical existence failure from you continuing to beat on the mangled treading.

Death of a thousand paper cuts is certainly defensible as a design goal for living creatures that like bleed and shit. But it just doesn't make sense as a design goal for tank warfare.

Choosing from a pool of wound effects based on hit-location and damage level is problematic in that we have to create a pool of wound effects based on hit-location and damage level and balance them all and find a way to choose what wound effect is applied in cases where multiple ones are available. Furthermore, we'd have to create unique wound tables for nearly every monster, because a think with two hands on each wrist isn't going to be incapacitated by a single broken hand.

I agree with most of these, save that I don't actually think they have to be balanced. I'm totally OK if damaging the rotor of a helicopter is effectively an instant win (because they fall out of the sky), just as I'm OK with some monsters having hit locations that are essentially ablative armor. Heck, I'm even OK with some locations being highly non-standard. For example: I could see a location that had reduced numbers of autohit soak and then a compensatory gap in the damage effects after an initial offering. So the bunker could have a relatively low number of autohits, a first wound effect of "satellite dish knocked out (no repeats)", then a gap of several points before "wall breached".

The thing where every chassis has its own hit location and wound charts is a feature. Just as it's a feature in Battletech. When you're fighting giant monsters or mecha, disabling the left leg heat sink with a laser blast is part of the charm. It's a little RuneQuesty to do that sort of thing when stabbing ordinary humans, but it's a small price to pay for having the mechs and humans fight with the same rules.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

Abstracting it is better if you're going to allow the death of a thousand papercuts and probably easier to keep track of.

I don't think you want to have death of a thousand paper cuts in a system that is also supposed to work for machines. I for one would be pretty annoyed if I could sink a battleship with a fire ax by running around breaking radar dishes and shit. In genre, you sometimes shoot the tracks of a tank until it is immobilized, and then you leave. You don't keep shooting the tracks until the tank explodes, because it isn't ever going to reach critical existence failure from you continuing to beat on the mangled treading.

Hitting a battleship to death with a fireaxe is going to be impossible due to autohits, anyway. The difference between a mobility kill and and in a tank and a crew kill is determined by the fact that the treads and the body are different hit locations, and the treads have much less armor.
The death of a thousand papercuts isn't necessarily enough to kill the whole vehicle, but it can kill a component. For a battleship, the radar dishes and the magazines will also be different hit locations, with different levels of armor.

Death of a thousand paper cuts is certainly defensible as a design goal for living creatures that like bleed and shit. But it just doesn't make sense as a design goal for tank warfare.

I'm thinking more of cumulative damage from an Avenger rotary cannon, one sullet might be survivable but several will utterly gut a tank.

Choosing from a pool of wound effects based on hit-location and damage level is problematic in that we have to create a pool of wound effects based on hit-location and damage level and balance them all and find a way to choose what wound effect is applied in cases where multiple ones are available. Furthermore, we'd have to create unique wound tables for nearly every monster, because a think with two hands on each wrist isn't going to be incapacitated by a single broken hand.

I agree with most of these, save that I don't actually think they have to be balanced. I'm totally OK if damaging the rotor of a helicopter is effectively an instant win (because they fall out of the sky), just as I'm OK with some monsters having hit locations that are essentially ablative armor. Heck, I'm even OK with some locations being highly non-standard. For example: I could see a location that had reduced numbers of autohit soak and then a compensatory gap in the damage effects after an initial offering. So the bunker could have a relatively low number of autohits, a first wound effect of "satellite dish knocked out (no repeats)", then a gap of several points before "wall breached".

You could probably accomplish that with injured/damaged/destroyed abstract system, just by taking out the "damaged" effect.
If we want things to be scalable, then bunkers and battleships are made out of hit locations and have a fuckton of them.

The thing where every chassis has its own hit location and wound charts is a feature. Just as it's a feature in Battletech. When you're fighting giant monsters or mecha, disabling the left leg heat sink with a laser blast is part of the charm. It's a little RuneQuesty to do that sort of thing when stabbing ordinary humans, but it's a small price to pay for having the mechs and humans fight with the same rules.

-Username17

That I agree with. I just think it can be done more consistently and with less work using an abstract scale, especially since we're already using proportional damage, which is fairly abstract. We can even give hit-locations crit slots that correspond with certain wound boxes.

[name_here]

I'm not too sure about proportional damage scales for Mythos monsters, although I guess the right overflow rules and giving them a ton of "amorphous mass of tentacles" hit locations could simulate them pretty well. But the thing is the Mythos is absolutely packed with things the size of tanks or larger that bleed and can reasonably be given the death of a thousand cuts.

[Username17]

Normally, I'm a big fan of proportional damage, but I don't think it works with hit locations. Once you have variable numbers of hit locations with their own damage tracks, you don't have proportional damage anymore anyway.

I really don't see what keeping track of damage points adds to anything. It's an extra thing to track, and it provides no benefit I can see. If we want to open up the possibility of whittling living beings down with a death from a thousand paper cuts, we can put in a "Shock Threshold" for living creatures where they collapse if they take a certain number of wounds (even if those wounds are individually bullshit).

If we want things to be scalable, then bunkers and battleships are made out of hit locations and have a fuckton of them.

That presents a problem, and that problem is "explosions". While it is sort of elegant in a Contra sort of way to have battleships be made out of a lot of separate locations that can be broken individually to shut down individual guns, sensors, and what have you, there are going to be times when you're going to be hitting a lot of those locations with a single attack. Like you shoot a warp missile into them or something. And I for one don't want to roll 30 different soak rolls for 30 locations. So do they just do a group soak test? We need some sort of shortcut for when an AoE hits a bunch of hit locations at once. It's basically fine to roll three soaks for getting a hellfire shotgun to the chest, arm, and face - but that's about the limit and I could easily foresee situations which are involving a lot more hit locations than that.

Let's go through how I envision this working:

Lloigor

So we have our Lloigor, and it has a hit location chart for whether it is being shot at from the front, flank, rear, above, or below. It probably has armor modifiers for its different facings, but we're going to skip all that. We're going to skip to the damage chart, where

Unsoaked Damage	Head	Front Arm	Middle Limb	Rear Leg	Neck	Body	Tail
1	Teeth Broken	Claw Injured	Claw Injured	Limp	Neck Armor Damage	Body Armor Damage	Tail Armor Damage
2	Dazed	Claw Injured	Limp	Limp	Neck Armor Damage	Chest Wound	Balance Upset
3	Unconscious	Crippled Limb	Crippled Limb	Crippled Limb	Back Injury	Evisceration	Severed Tail
4	Dead	Severed Limb	Severed Limb	Severed Limb	Dead	Back Injury	Severed Tail Overflow to Chest
5	Dead	Severed Limb Overflow to Chest	Severed Limb Overflow to Chest	Severed Limb Overflow to Chest	Dead	Dead	Severed Tail Overflow to Chest
6+	Dead	Severed Limb Overflow to Chest	Severed Limb Overflow to Chest	Severed Limb Overflow to Chest	Dead	Dead	Severed Tail Overflow to Chest

And yeah, you'd have to write a table for every chassis. And some chasses would have weird injury results like "Broken Hooks" or "Detached Starfish". And that's OK. Hell, that's awesome. I want to look at a damage chart and report that my target has acquired a "Detached Starfish Injury". I see no downside to that.

In the Lloigor example, you can dish out some armor damage and do better with a hit to the same location next time. Or you can do them a fatal blow somewhere along their spine. Or you can hit them so hard in one of their disposable limbs that overflow damage carries into their Chest. Or you can give them enough wound cards to max out their system shock limit and have them just collapse. I suspect Lloigors have a system shock limit that is lower than their morale limit, so you won't normally be able to chase them off.

-Username17

[Hadanelith]

In this example, are those unsoaked wounds cumulative over time, or rechecked on a per-hit basis?

[Username17]

In this example, are those unsoaked wounds cumulative over time, or rechecked on a per-hit basis?

Rechecked on a per-hit basis. Although the basic wound effect of "armor damage" reduces the Lloigor's soak at that location, which means that the Lloigor will probably suffer a bigger wound effect if struck in the same location a second time. Things like "evisceration" also reduce soak, as well as causing additional limitations.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

If we want things to be scalable, then bunkers and battleships are made out of hit locations and have a fuckton of them.

That presents a problem, and that problem is "explosions". While it is sort of elegant in a Contra sort of way to have battleships be made out of a lot of separate locations that can be broken individually to shut down individual guns, sensors, and what have you, there are going to be times when you're going to be hitting a lot of those locations with a single attack. Like you shoot a warp missile into them or something. And I for one don't want to roll 30 different soak rolls for 30 locations. So do they just do a group soak test? We need some sort of shortcut for when an AoE hits a bunch of hit locations at once. It's basically fine to roll three soaks for getting a hellfire shotgun to the chest, arm, and face - but that's about the limit and I could easily foresee situations which are involving a lot more hit locations than that.

Yeah, you roll a single soak using your body/toughness/constitution/stamina/the Juggernaut Bitch stat or and then you subtract variable autohits from armor as you go down the line applying damage. Unless it's a mook battleship, of course, then you could just write all the hit locations off without rolling, like you would if 30 mook people were caught in the explosion.

But really, I'd like to do the super robot thing where the Rook jumps on a battleship, grabs a turret, rips it off, and uses it as a club to defeat the battleship in detail.

Of course, I also want to do the super-robot thing where the Rook uses a main battle tank as a football and punts it a couple of kilometers between two skyscrapers for a score.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Ripping your enemy's limbs off and beating them to death with them should probably be an emergent result of an improvised weapon being better at getting damage to overall lethality than your rook's "bare" (armored) hands, but still being able to get "limb severed" results. (Probably more common on stiff enemies such as battleships than on stretchy enemies like shoggoths)

Punting is something that should be able to happen when you're dealing with something a lot smaller than you. (like, two orders of magnitude less volume)

Both of these should be part of a robust grappling system.

[Lokathor]

And tonight's theme is... Themes: What Good Are They?

Ryleh Rangers (working title) is a game that takes Mythos and smashes it into Anime and then picks apart the good bits left over from the explosion. The thing is, there's a lot of anime. Now, we're not using all of the Mythos stuff, and we're not using anything you've ever seen in an anime either. A lot of it is contradictory, and a lot of it doesn't fit in thematically even if you could make it all fit in the same setting.

Ryleh Rangers proposes a world where the majority of play is focused around playing as a member of the Union governmental forces, Humanity's last line of defense against the myriad cosmic entities. The year is 2097, and that means that for 170 years the world has been in direct or indirect conflict with Deep Ones, Mi Go, Moon Beasts, and so on. Unlike in the real world, Earth has at least a few tricks up its sleeve, the Union might even make it until 2100. Might.

With the stage set, this brings us to the idea of Themes. What thoughts and emotions do the player options, mechanics, and setting try to keep us coming back to? Well, we're pulling in material from a lot of places, and so they're dragging in many themes with them. This is good because it keeps things interesting and lets players appreciate the game for different reasons. This is bad because if things are allowed to get too jumbled up it becomes kinda shitty and breaks WSOD.

So here's what we're trying to cram in so far:

• Mythos - both the Lovecraft stuff and some other stuff
• Magical Girls - Sailor Moon, Madoka, Cardcaptor Sakura, etc.
• Evangelion - So weird it gets its own line.
• "Real" Robots - Gundam, Macross, Full Metal Panic
• Super Sentai Series - better known as Power Rangers outside of Japan.
• Detective Stories - either as part of a police unit, or a loner P.I.
• John Carter of Mars - Swords and sorcery, but on Mars!

Now I'm just a simple country doctor, but here's my take on some of these things, in terms of ideas we can use in a cooperative RPG based on the source material. I'm sure you all know some or all of it already, but it often helps to have it stated "aloud" (so to speak)

Cosmicism
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

The core of the Mythos, and of this game, is that the universe is vast. So vast that the more your brain comes to truly understand the vastness, the more insane you go.

The part about the universe being vast isn't fictional, but the part about going insane if you try to touch the vastness, that part is. The ancient world uses "a thousand" as a poetic form of "unlimited", because human brains just don't work with big numbers. Actually, they don't even work for numbers above 4 or 5 without counting or guessing. This limit isn't a thing that you can just advance yourself past societally, or educate yourself past personally, it's a hard limit of how Earth animal brains function. But extraterrestrial brains might not function like that. One or more of the non-human types can probably "touch the vast" and not even be unsettled by it, much less develop phobias or maniacal triggers. The fact that their brains are so different and follow different thought patterns is part of what makes them so alien and other.

Because the other part of the coin here is that the universe is full of life, and almost none of it cares about humans. The Mi Go understand the basic difference between a human that is alive and a human that is dead: humans that are dead don't mess with their stuff. That's about the only reason that they want humans dead, they want to use places and resources on the Earth without outside interference. They attack locations that are strategically valuable to them and ignore the rest. They might even have a sense of honor about it, but if they do it would be Mi Go honor. That could mean anything at all from a setting standpoint, but from a game design standpoint it means that there's a slight free pass if mechanical and play constraints arrange themselves such that the Mi Go have to do something "illogical" as part of their standard operations for the players (and Earth) to be able to last. Similar to how magical limitations prevent Rita from sending 20 kaiju at once to destroy Angel Grove once and for all. For a while, European warfare consisted of marching blocks of guys straight at each other across open fields while shooting. That is an absolutely insane way to conduct a battle from a modern standpoint, but they did it anyway, and those guys were human. Non-humans can seriously think that just about anything at all is rational.

Additionally, as has been said, the military of the Mi Go empire could put a ship in orbit for every human on Earth if they wanted, and then level the entire planet in about two minutes. They don't because Earth is a useless fringe planet on the unfashionable west end of a tiny galaxy in their backwaters. Mi Go "invaders" are essentially civilian merchants and colonists, and the Empire itself seems to have a "clean up the local wildlife yourself, we're busy" attitude towards it all.

Love and Justice
"I am Sailor Moon, the champion of justice. In the name of the moon, I will right wrong and triumph over evil... and that means you!"

This section was actually the hardest to write. See, Magical Girl Anime, as a genre, is pretty feminist. Everything is centralized around the idea that it's a girl hero that's doing all the evil fighting. It's a girl that's using her girl powers to defeat monsters that society says she can't take on. Most importantly, at no point does she have to give up being a girl to also be the hero. It's hard to be more feminist than that.

And in a world where the Union's foes are uncaring aliens, monsters that will eat you, and genocidal humans with fanatical notions of racial purity, the Union is quite literally fighting to protect the notions of Love and Justice.

But it's hard to give advice on how to actually put any of that into effect without sounding really preachy. I suppose the simplest way to put it would be to try and avoid having all the major NPCs in the fluff be caucasian males. It's that easy, which makes it almost seem stupid to bring up.

Whatever you do, also try to avoid making blanket statements about particular groups being the best or the worst, especially any real world groups. For example, Beyond The Walls Of Sleep is a Lovecraft story about a guy that works at a mental hospital and is investigating the dream world. It's alright from the perspective of the ideas of the dreamworld and tapping into it and stuff, but Lovecraft goes on and on about how people from the south are the most ignorant hicks possible, essentially just cave people who don't live in caves. The second paragraph ends with "Among these odd folk, who correspond exactly to the decadent element of “white trash” in the South, law and morals are non-existent; and their general mental status is probably below that of any other section of the native American people." I don't even think I need to explain to anyone here why that's offensive and how easy it is to avoid by just not being an asshole, so I'll just end the section.

Life Is Pain
"I mustn't run away... I mustn't run away... I mustn't run away..."

Evangelion can be hard to get into for western audiences. It was written by a very depressed Japanese man. The combination of the author being from another culture and also having a severe mental condition can make the whole thing come off as just a giant bundle of crazy. And let's be clear, even after you pick out all the meanings and symbolism, there's still a whole lot of crazy left over. There's no shortage of weird stuff here.

At the basic level, it's a science fiction story about a trio of kids who have to pilot giant armored clone-monsters to save humanity from other giant monsters that want to break into a military base and get a treasure at its core that will let them destroy the world. And that's... exactly the kind of game we want to be making actually. Which makes this the perfect anime to grep for ideas. There's giant robot, but they're scarce and valuable, and they need very specific pilots to make them operate at all, much less be combat effective. NERV is the only thing that can fight the monsters and keep the planet alive, but the base commander is still chewed out by his superiors when things cost too much money, because the public is never happy. At the same time, because these operations are literally Fate Of The World level events, if they have the time to prepare for it, NERV can do completely absurd shit like drawing upon all of the power that all of Japan can generate within 4 minutes at once just to fire a single laser shot. And they just had that sort of super weapon sitting around, because that's the kind of thing they prepare for. Ramiel probably has the most raw personal power out of all the angels (Sahaquiel doesn't count, anyone can do a Colony Drop attack), and its death beam melts through hillsides with each shot. It's a game design "constraint" that the game will deal with, that combats will have to be able to scale up to at least that sort of power level, but it's also totally flipping sweet when it happens, so whatever.

Parallel to that, Eva is the story of three abused children being used by the adults around them as weapons to prevent the end of the world. They have smaller thresholds for Terror and Despair, and they blitz out constantly. For in-setting reasons they're the only ones who can be used in this fight, but that doesn't make them any better at fighting. That doesn't make them any better at coping. It feeds back into some of the Mythos themes above: the whole world being bigger than you are, the whole world being out to get you, no one caring about you for you and instead just using you as yet another tool for the benefit of others around you.

Further, it brings to mind the fact that if you try to inspire someone by telling them that everyone is counting on them, that the whole world is counting on them, then it might give them a big Morale bonus for a fight, or it might just do some Despair damage instead. It could even do both at the same time. Given that these things affect different people so differently, the Despair and Terror mechanics should probably use some sort of damage/soak system just like the game's physical damage system.

War Never Changes
"You can be a Captain or a nobody, when your luck runs out you die, thats how war is."

Real Robot anime is usually pretty gritty compared to the rest of this stuff. Usually there's a sci-fi explanation for how the robot is operating (Lambda Driver), or why it's being used at all (Minovsky Particle), or something like that, but then the rest of the action tries to stay fairly "grounded" in the real world. Hell, the possibility that a main character's mecha can be damaged then not be ready to fight later is a big departure from most of the super robot stuff.

More than that though, it's not just the robots that are "real", it's the people piloting them, and repairing them, and their operational support officers. These are "actual people" and not super heros. They break down, their Despair track fills up just because they're constantly in a war zone. When they're recalled, if they're recalled, their Despair doesn't go back down for a long, long time. Even when it does, it doesn't go down much on its own.

And this gives us the kind of genre appropriate things that we want to have included in the game: Old Generals that have come to accept the way of things but are constantly saddened by it, wanting to stay out of conflicts whenever possible. Younger Generals who shot through officer school quickly and climbed up the ranks almost faster than it seemed possible, full of fire and wanting to take the fight to the enemy whenever possible. Base Commanders who sometimes go crazy and launch a super weapon on their own (see: Dr Strangelove). Droves and droves of enlisted soldiers who leave the force with PTSD. A constant need for new recruits even when actual conflict stays at relatively light levels, leading to posters with Dagon at the front of the troops, Star Cannon in hand, and a tagline that declares "He can't do it Alone! Enlist!"

Who Dares, Wins
"Isn't the smallest chance of victory enough of a reason for us to keep on fighting? The world needs us, Rangers."

Mecha anime can be depressing when you get down to it. Know what's not? Sentai shows. They're all about the power of courage and friendship. It's pretty similar to the Magical Girl stuff really, so much so that there was a Super Sentai version of Sailor Moon that they made.

In terms of special powers that a Sentai has, generally the Transformation Sequence will automatically equip the Sentai with appropriate weapons, the same as a Magical Girl unlocks sorcery attacks when she transforms. Laser guns and power axes and stuff. Most of the sorts of stuff you'd find in Warhammer 40k, now that I think about it. I'd also suggest that the transformation give out a huge boost to both Terror Soak and Despair Soak, because once they've gone into combat mode then usually the heros are pretty damn resolute; even if they might break down later, or fall victim to a sneak psychic attack beforehand.

The biggest difference between a Sentai and a Magical Girl is mostly one of fluff. A Sentai's Kaiju Tier powerup is almost always a giant robot while a Magical Girl's Kaiju is almost always a giant magical guardian beast. This is great because it can make for a little role distinction. Sentai are a lot better at doing stuff in outer space, but Magical Girls are a lot better at doing stuff in the Dreamlands.

Burnouts in Suits
"Are you a policeman, or what?"
"I used to be. Now I'm a what."

We start with Detectives. Detectives work for the police forces, but instead of just walking a beat, they perform the special investigations required to fight crime. Remember that crimes aren't deterred the the severity of the punishment, but by the assuredness of that punishment. Even though society can bring enough force against pretty much any individual, they have to find you first. That's what Detectives do. Instead of playing a lot in the combat minigame, they play a lot in the investigation minigame. Their "special power" is that they don't have to draw much attention to themselves to get it done. It can be slow, it can be dangerous, but it can be pretty damn secretive. The jobs that a detective does and the jobs that a spy do are actually pretty similar. The difference is that a spy has to focus more on the "stay unknown" side of things, and so an investigation might go much slower and it might even become impossible without compromising secrecy. As a detective has access to more resources, they're able to get better tools that allow for quicker investigations and increase the level of information that they're able to gather without compromising secrecy.

All that detective stuff is well and good, but it's for folks who haven't really lived yet, you know? The people full of stars in their eyes. Then there's the Private Investigators. How are they different? Well, it's a whole different way of life. It's about having no one to count on but yourself and your sidearm. It's about looking into the places that no one else will cause you don't give a damn. It's about being hardboiled against all the things life can throw at you and lasting as long as you can. Sometimes it's about crawling into a bottle and not coming out until it's empty. It's about putting on Tom Waits and letting the whole evening melt away while you sit in that bottle. It's about having nothing left to lose.

So in other words, the other power of a Detective is that when their Despair caps out, they don't always suffer a break and become useless or join Team Monster or anything like that. If they have an Edge score, then they just become Hardboiled instead. A Hardboiled Detective leaves whatever organization they're part of, resetting their Despair track to half in the process. They strike out on their own, but every so often they're still driven to look into all the trouble that they shouldn't; it's an itch they can never fully scratch.

Row, Row, Fight The Power
"Are the gods going to help?"
"No."
"Well, then tell them to stay out of the way."

It's been said that the Dreamlands should operate on the Rule of Cool. I agree with that, and I think that it has some fun implications. The big one is that the Dreamlands becomes a Tome-like DnD land to an extent. There aren't standing armies for war, there's just standing armies for keeping the populace under control. A Dreamlands "war" involves the higher level characters wandering around and trying to get the drop and kill each other. The king at the end is king because there's no one left that both can and wants to fight about it, and they stay king as long as that's true. When a powerful Luminary goes up against an army, they can take on dozens or hundreds of normal troops. The only way to fight them is with other Luminaries.

This is good for the Union, because it means that their conventional forces don't need to be diverted into the Dreamlands to hold Dreamlands territory. This lets them have a use for even the individuals who would otherwise be useless on the battlefield because they're too reckless and cause too much collateral damage. They just send them off to the Dreamlands and let them go wild.

It's also bad for the Union, because it takes a lot more time to get a new badass than it does to have a factory spit out 100 more tanks and get 200 guys to push the buttons. When the Union does suffer a Dreamlands loss because one of their Luminaries goes down or goes rogue, it's a big loss.

Basically, the entire Dreamlands front becomes something like DnD would be if people actually glowed more often when they powered up, like in Gurren Lagann, and that's totally sweet.

[Username17]

For common injuries, we can and should reuse the names and effects. We definitely don't want to run a system where one chassis gets "Chest Wound" and it does one thing, and another chassis gets "Rib Broken" and it does the same thing, and still another chassis gets "Chest Wound" and it does something else entirely. We're doing a system similar to 2nd Edition WH40K Tank Damage rules, but we don't want to fall into the traps that made that particular system shitty.

Another thing is that no location should ever be a "fridge" of unlimited protection from death from high powered weapons. That shit was really annoying in WH40K. Every location that doesn't have a "kill" result should have a "destroyed/severed" result (which removes the location from the hit chart) or a "pass through" result (which has the hit get recalculated against another location at -1 base damage) or both.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

I'm still not sure how the match on that one is supposed to work.
I know how I want it to work with cumulative damage, but I honestly can't wrap my head around a good way to do it without cumulative damage. But I will reserve judgement until I see actual numbers.

The biggest potential problem I can think of with fixed damage codes (except on a critical), a soak roll + autosoak from armor, and non-cumulative damage is that the results aren't fiddly enough. That is to say, all the damage codes need to be high relative to the damage that we want them to do and the difference between a one-hit kill and completely useless is quite small. Soak rolls provide some variance, but I'm not sure if it is enough.

That being said, I am much better at fluff than at major. I haven't ever actually written any major mechanics, other than my Toxic Shaman overhaul (Because Rabid Dog was stupid and toxic spirits were incoherent) , and that was relatively small and simple and didn't require any fiddly bits.

[Username17]

How variant damage is in a dicepool system depends entirely on how many dice are rolled. Not on how many times dice are rolled, but merely the total number of dice rolled.

Let's say you had a damage roll of 2 dice and a soak roll of 4 dice. That would on average deal base damage plus 1 and soak up an average of base armor plus 2. If the attack rolled max and the soak rolled minimum, you'd do base damage plus 2 and soak only base soak. If the attack rolled min and the soak rolled maximum, you do base damage against the target's base soak plus 4. So from the expected damage versus soak comparison, the high end is 3 more unsoaked damage and the low end is 3 less. And both extreme results happen 1/64 hits.

But you could just put all 6 dice onto the defender's side of the board and adjust the base damage and soak values accordingly. The average value would be base damage versus soak +3, with maximum soak being +6 and minimum soak being +0. Both extreme results would still happen 1/64 hits.

Dice are simply completely fungible, and once we decide how many are required to get damage to be as variant as we want it to be, then all of those dice can be rolled by one person in order to speed up play.

Personally, I'm thinking that 4-6 soak dice is probably plenty.

Edit: Note that at TN 5 it actually matters which side of the table various dice are, because black swan "up" spikes are twice as large and half as common as black swan "down" spikes. But at TN 4 it makes no difference.

-Username17

[Korwin]

Edit: Note that at TN 5 it actually matters which side of the table various dice are, because black swan "up" spikes are twice as large and half as common as black swan "down" spikes. But at TN 4 it makes no difference.

-Username17

you lost me. What are you talking about here?
It does sound like I want to know...

[RadiantPhoenix]

Edit: Note that at TN 5 it actually matters which side of the table various dice are, because black swan "up" spikes are twice as large and half as common as black swan "down" spikes. But at TN 4 it makes no difference.

-Username17

you lost me. What are you talking about here?
It does sound like I want to know...

If TN = 4 on d6s, then exceptionally good and exceptionally bad results are just as likely, so giving me +1 and you +2d is equivalent to giving me +2d and you +1 -- assuming we were already equal, you have the same change in the odds of beating me either way -- 25% chance of rolling less than I get, 25% chance of rolling more. (I'm not sure if it's equal if one of us is already better, that's more complicated probability)

If TN > 4 on d6s, then exceptionally good results are less likely, but are a larger deviation from expectations. e.g., if TN = 5, giving me +1 and you +3d is not equivalent to giving me +3d and you +1 -- the person rolling has about a 30% chance of rolling less, and a 26% chance of rolling more.

[Username17]

Edit: Note that at TN 5 it actually matters which side of the table various dice are, because black swan "up" spikes are twice as large and half as common as black swan "down" spikes. But at TN 4 it makes no difference.

-Username17

you lost me. What are you talking about here?
It does sound like I want to know...

Spike results are results that are far from the mean. Black Swan events are results that are considerably rarer than other results.

So on a flat RNG like a d20, there are lots of spike results, but literally no Black Swans. All numbers are equally likely, and the very high and very low numbers are just as equally likely as the mid-range ones.

If your Target Number is 4, then high and low results are equally likely. The more dice you roll, the rarer your black swans can get. But because a +1 result is equally likely as a -1 result, adding two dice to one side and a free hit to the other produces the same curve as adding one die to both sides.

If your Target Number is 5, then rolling low results is more common than rolling high results. 3 dice averages one hit, but they roll less than average 8/27 times and more than average only 7/27 times. This is made up for on average by the fact that you can roll 2 hits more than average on three TN5 dice, but the worst result is only 1 below average. That means that TN5 dice on the attack don't behave the same as TN5 dice on the defense, and it thus actually matters where you put them.

As it happens, the way TN5 dice are different on the attack and defense actually makes random character death more likely both ways (albeit in different ways). Because for Defense dice, the increased chance of rolling below average is bad for your ability to stay alive. And for Attack dice, the increased ability to have black swan events that do substantially more damage than expected is bad for your ability to stay alive.

By the way, how would people feel about having Psychological Profiles that determined how the character went crazy from stress? It could basically work exactly like a mech chassis with different "locations" for things like fear and abandonment and a series of increasingly worse psychological effects for getting "hit harder" in one of them.

That way, Shinji freaks the fuck out and either runs away or goes berserk, while Asuka just gives up, and absolutely no one rolls on the random phobia table and decides that they are afraid of Snakes now or some shit.

-Username17

[Korwin]

Like the Psy. Profiles. Fuck the random shit.

[Hadanelith]

Yeah, that sounds pretty awesome as an implementation of insanity.

[hyzmarca]

Yeah. Random derangement tables are absolute crap. If we're going to have that happen, it has to be organic to the character. Psych Profiles work for that, I guess.

The Task Force

A task force is an ad-hock unit, usually temporary, formed from elements of other units for the purpose of performing a specific task. Task forces draw together members who would not normally work together under the same command to provide the skills and abilities necessary to perform the task for which they were created. Why are Shinji Ikari, Usagi Tsukino, Tommy Oliver, Alex Murphy, Lamont Cranston, Yugi Moto, and Leona Ozaki solving crimes and fighting cults together? They're part of a task force.

Task Forces serve much the same role as D&D Adventuring Parties and Shadowrunner teams. They provide an excuse for thematically disparate PCs to work together.

Stables
[Insert Name] has three distinct and disparate levels of play as well as an optional high school setting that potentially constitutes a fourth level of play; it also supports a wide variety of character archetypes. It is a simple fact not all character concepts are thematically suitable for every level of play. While Tommy Oliver is equally functional as a detective, a martial artist, and a Zord pilot, Shinji Ikari is useless in any situation that can be made worse by berserk giant cyborgs and the Tank Police are impotent against Godzilla. It is inevitable that some players will want to play Shinji instead of Tommy in spite of the fact that Shjni is literally worse than useless during two thirds of the game They aren't wrong.

Because some characters will be unplayable during major parts of the game, [Insert Name] assumes that players will control a Stable of PCs rather than a single character.

A Stable consists of at least two Protagonists and a number of Supporters.

Protagonists are your standard PCs, just like the ones in every other RPG. We mostly just call them PCs and only use the term Protagonist to differentiate them from player-controlled Support characters.

Supporters are essentially player-controlled NPCs. They're the characters who are necessary to keep the Protagonists fighting, logistics officers, mechanics, secretaries, etc.