Sci-Fi Brainstorming [Dungeon Crusade 2.0]

[fectin]

One nice bit about having a 100-point spread on your stats is that you could give out minor boosts because story, and not even care. "For that week of carousing with Jarl Derpy, you get a permanent +2% to knowledge, because of all the stories." That's cool and rewards non-hobo behavior, without being especially unbalancing or so essential as to requiring that all sages carouse with Derpy.

As a strawman, I'd say when you buy advancements, it's in increments of 10%.

[Koumei]

Let's talk about magic. There will be people in the world at which they arrive who can use magic. Let's call them wizards. There will be magical monsters. There will be magic items. So magic is a thing there.

I want it to be less powerful than the most powerful technology, but able to bring something to the table that they will personally want. So when their purifier runs out, a bottle of endless water is worth an awful lot to them. Likewise flying carpets are great when they don't happen to have their jet-bikes available, and if they run out of ammunition, wands of fireball are nice. Magic will need some pretty hard limits, because we're looking at "weaker than D&D, and more limited in scope as well".

But additionally, how should it be handled in regards to PCs deciding they want to learn its secrets? I see two strong possibilities, each with differing benefits:

• It's due to the innate magical energies in the world itself, and the people and creatures born in this world can be imbued with it - this world produces Sorcerers and Sphinxes, you don't become a Sorcerer just by visiting it.
• This world happens to have produced the secrets (or it's powered by a resource on this world). Anybody can learn it, if they have the resource and the training and so on. Wizards probably try to convince the populace it's a gift you're just born with (and then when they see someone they want to teach, they go "Oh, this child has The Gift!"), so that people love and adore/fear and respect them.

The first option means not needing to worry about how magic works for PCs, just "spells that certain magical things have" and "magic item properties". The second option means more work in setting up a robust system, and how it might work in the skill-based system, but has the benefit of "PCs now have something else they really want to unearth, and can be rewarded for this, and as they have to throw their laser cannons away, they start falling back on their newfound shock bolts."

[RadiantPhoenix]

I favor the latter.

[Username17]

In almost every case, Dune has the correct answer. Magic runs off your own learnable skills and badassery, but in order to have it at all you have to be exposed to a bunch of magic dust in the first place. The player characters have hardened minds and lots of training in badass, but they don't have exposure to pixie dust. So they start with no magic and after they've wandered around in the magic wilderness for a while, their eyes will change to a funny color and they can skip all the apprentice level bullshit and go straight to big hoodoo.

-Username17

[fectin]

What Frank said.

And you can totally have people who are naturally talented at magic without it being a big deal. It's like having a really nice singing voice, only with more fireballs.

[Koumei]

Okay, so character creation would pretty much be:

• Select your Race
  • Note any racial traits
• Select your Training Package
  • Note down the skill ratings it gives you to start with
  • Note down any special traits or abilities gained (some choices involved)
  • Note down any gear you get (some choices involved)
• Take your skill upgrades, +10% each, nothing can start above 80%
• Purchase any optional extra equipment
• Name, age, sex, personality, number of eyes, hat colour, cock length etc.

I'm beginning to think that if 101 is the basic difficulty, defensive values aren't really needed, so attributes won't actually be necessary. The strong aliens can just have "a bonus to melee damage/the roll to knock people about" for instance.

And once everyone has their characters, they get the "random gear" roll. This can include extra medical equipment, water purifiers, extra ammunition and sidearms, armour repair kits, fuel cells and batteries, special mapping and scanning equipment, recording gear, hologram-projectors, drone robots... stuff like that. And potentially, small vehicles or bulky facilities that have to remain on the wreckage site might survive the crash.

Skills should be divided amongst the following categories:

• Social
• Espionage/Scouting
• Technical/Mechanical/Crafting/Repairing
• Combat/Athletics
• Wilderness Survival/Mapping/Mining
• Piloting
• Science/Research

I figure the Space Empire will have a universal language, but every occupation, ship (of a more-or-less permanent crew), satellite etc. has its own language as well, on the grounds that people develop area-specific slang and stuff, and also find it handy to keep others in the dark. You can just have whatever languages, it doesn't matter. As for the locals, they don't have Common, so you have to make the effort to figure stuff out. Which probably involves some mixture of "point to tree and say Tree" and devices that record speech to pick up repeated fragments and tone. Linguistics would be a skill, and it's the skill for actually learning new ones.

[Grek]

The "Random Gear" roll should actually be "Generate a half dozen pods (randomly or by grabbing a default one out of the loot chapter), tell the players the first three items in each pod and let them pick which one they want to escape in."

Then you place the other five pods in the world for the PCs to find later on.

Piloting should not be a whole category of skills. It isn't even something you do once you've landed, unless you find a hover bike. Fold it in with Mining.

[Koumei]

So here are the skills I think we need:
Acrobatics (climbing, jumping, rolling, balancing)
Cartography (mapping in a way that anyone else can understand with accuracy)
Debate (arguing with people or generally convincing them)
Economics (understanding trade and pricing, making a profit)
Electronics (getting your electric gear working, configuring stuff, figuring out a way to redirect lightning into batteries)
Firearms (any form of shooting people in the face)
Herbology ("I can eat this and not die")
Leadership (giving orders in stressful situations, rallying people)
Linguistics (learning languages quickly)
Mechanics (fixing mechanical things - vehicles, weapons etc.)
Medicine (first aid, surgery, application of chemicals and nanites)
Melee (any form of stabbing and/or punching people in the face, includes parrying I guess)
Navigation (could split into "surface" and "subterrainian", but let's just call it one for now)
Perception (seeing, hearing, smelling)
Piloting (one skill fits all)
Psychology (figuring out what's wrong with people, helping the shell-shocked etc. and gaining an advantage in social situations)
Research (knowing where to look)
Stealth (hiding, moving silently, shadowing, camouflage)
Tracking (following trails)
Trapping (setting and disabling traps)

That's twenty. A few more wouldn't hurt, perhaps including more sciences or a variety of local lores (that would basically start at zero) or mining, refining etc?

I could also see making the psychic disciplines (and magic "schools", for locals) into skills, and you need to roll the skill to manifest powers (or skill ratings determining how many powers you can know).

[Meikle641]

Why not change Firearms to Marksmanship? Since the skill already covered all ranged weapons, it'd make more sense.

[Chamomile]

Depending on how Logistcs and Dragons you want to go, longterm stuff like Agricultural Science, Civic Engineering, and whichever field of science involves making sure people don't catch diseases (maybe that's part of Medicine) could be useful. You have a character with a high relevant skill roll it in downtime to teach the locals about crop rotation and then their population goes up so they can make you more stuff and keep your solar generators running. Metallurgy would be a really useful one, as the more you can advance that, the more parts of your plasma gun the locals will be able to replace. Probably they'll never be replacing the fusion reactor that powers the thing, but being able to replace the barrel would at least delay the inevitable.

[fectin]

One possible way to handle piloting might be to have a second list of skills which are just "yes/no." You put one of your skill upgrades into piloting, and suddenly you can just drive jetbikes like it ain't no thang.

Same with various obscure knowledges, craftsmanings, professions, or whatever.

[Koumei]

That's not a bad idea. I mean, languages were already Yes/No (or rather, No/Partial/Yes). So having a bunch of things you can just flat-out do seems certainly reasonable.

[Koumei]

So it looks more like...
Percentage Skills:
Acrobatics (climbing, jumping, rolling, balancing)
Agricultural Science (crop rotation, soil nutrients, irrigation)
Arcane Lore (identify spells, figure out how magic works, use magical devices)
Biology (breeding programs for animals, containing disease, spreading disease, identifying creature traits)
Cartography (mapping in a way that anyone else can understand with accuracy)
Debate (arguing with people or generally convincing them)
Demolitions (making things explode or stopping them from exploding)
Economics (understanding trade and pricing, making a profit)
Electronics (getting your electric gear working, configuring stuff, figuring out a way to redirect lightning into batteries)
Engineering (development of actual devices and structures)
Herbology ("I can eat this and not die")
Leadership (giving orders in stressful situations, rallying people)
Linguistics (learning languages quickly)
Marksmanship (any form of shooting people in the face)
Mechanics (fixing mechanical things - vehicles, weapons etc.)
Medicine (first aid, surgery, application of chemicals and nanites)
Melee (any form of stabbing and/or punching people in the face, includes parrying I guess)
Metallurgy (from blacksmithing to refining ores to mixing metals to casting plates and pipes)
Navigation (could split into "surface" and "subterrainian", but let's just call it one for now)
Perception (seeing, hearing, smelling)
Psychology (figuring out what's wrong with people, helping the shell-shocked etc. and gaining an advantage in social situations)
Research (knowing where to look)
Stealth (hiding, moving silently, shadowing, camouflage)
Tracking (following trails)
Trapping (setting and disabling traps)

Yes/No Skills:
Artistries
Languages
Literacies
Local Knowledges
Piloting
Professions

As for weapons, some of them will pretty much require either psychic users (a laser sword that lasts forever because it uses psychic energy), magical creation (you find an egg that explodes like a grenade... then reforms to be used again!) or weird materials that mean you might start with them but you're mining the hell out of the planet in order to find more (a metal that constantly causes the air around it to burn, allowing for "at will" fire weapons).

So Melee would give us:
Impact: big hammers and lever-powered crushing devices
Sharp: diamond-edge blades, vibro-weapons, monowire blades/garottes
Fire: magic fire swords, sticks that are set on fire, syringes that inject burning phosphorus or acid, blowtorches
Cold: magic ice swords, special metal that sucks heat in?, something that injects a stupidly cold gas, causing the whole body to freeze solid
Electric: electro-shock gloves/spears, polearms with capacitors that you drag along the ground to build a charge up
Radiation: a blade with a short-range gamma ray emittor (so you do a small amount of cutting, then release the gamma radiation inside them)
Laser: LASER SWORDS, FWOOSH FWOOSH
Explosive: hammers with explosives in the heads, bombs on the end of polearms, gauntlets with mini-rockets attached to the knuckles, maybe an at-will variant of the boom-hammer where you use a crank to build pressure up for an explosive release on impact?
Poison: poisoned blades, injectors, ripping the heads off giant snakes and using them as claw weapons, blades made out of metals that are toxic enough that the poison effect is more dangerous than the stabbing effect.

That's just one class of weapon, and provides enough choices to make people happy without even getting into "The Staff of the Seven Kings: deals Fire, Electric and Cold damage, conveys a chance to stun, poison, freeze and ignite the target, banishes the target to a rat-infested hotel in Ipswitch, animals will not attack you". I can see several of the categories having that many choices too. Missiles and Fields are likely to be pretty limited.

[Grek]

What does a field weapon even look like?

[Koumei]

I assume they're forcefield projectors and similar things (so a magnetic field that keeps an aura of tiny blades surrounding you to slice enemies up would count, as would a suit covered in contact-explosives or whatever).

[Koumei]

So combat: I see it looking like this...

It starts when someone decides to do a combat thing, such as attacking, and at that point everyone rolls initiative. If someone is unaware of the presence of another combatant, then they can't target that combatant (so if someone sneaks up amongst the enemies but rolls badly on Initiative, they still don't get attacked until after they attack and alert everyone to their presence). Yes, if you're not aware of any of the enemies, then even if you roll awesomely for initiative, you're still "not fighting" until they attack you.

A round should be 10-15 seconds so that there is actually time for things to happen, and people should have Movement and an Action, which is hardly groundbreaking. Yes you can spend your Action to move faster.

Attacking someone is your relevant attack skill + 1d100, against a TN of 101. Some creatures and characters might specifically modify this TN (very small foes, stealthy foes, massive slow enemies - a stationary building doesn't actually need a roll). At 111, 121 etc you add a measure of success.

Damage is a stationary number from the weapon plus any measures of success. Maybe a random variable could be added there (or the weapon damage could be partially variable)? I feel the "sometimes a weapon just does more or less than you expect" aspect is largely covered by the measures of success, but it's a possibility. All targets have some kind of Toughness rating, which varies based on being massive creatures with lots of scales and stuff. Wearing armour adds a bonus to this.

The Armour + Toughness result is subtracted from the Damage, and that determines whether you're Unscathed (0 HP gone), Scratched (1 HP gone), Injured (3 HP gone), Maimed (6 HP gone), Mutilated (10 HP gone and dying or dead) or ~DESTROYED~ (all HP gone and dead). Again, this part is not groundbreaking.

There should probably be some variety of stunts and special combat actions I guess, to encourage people to weave between cover as it gets blown to pieces, to smash up the surrounding cover of enemies, to leap off high things to tackle foes to the ground, to shove enemies off cliffs and so on. But that's not as important as "making sure people can shoot and kill each other at all when fighting starts".

When people argue with each other, it's still round-by-round, but there will be two things to keep track of: convincing your opponent (which is typically harder), and convincing an audience (which is easier, but can sway back and forth). Basically, when Fry and Widdecombe debate religion, they're not trying to actually convince each other, because that's not happening. What they're actually doing is convincing the audience there (the end result being to sway more people away from organised religion in that case, so more useful than just convincing Ann). On the other hand, if you're trying to haggle with a shopkeeper, they're the person you need to convince, not the onlookers.

At either rate, it will probably borrow more than a little from After Sundown, because Frank is actually good at debating and convincing people of things, so his rules regarding such are better, and it covers a variety of options as well. There might be something related to being able to erode people's values or determination in various things (similar to eroding/forming Intimacies and chipping away at people's Virtue Channels and Willpower in a certain other game that gives itself a social system).

I'll also be spending time looking at and thinking about various ways of getting good mining, crafting and economic minigames in place.

[Grek]

A TN of 100 is a better choice than a TN of 101, because that way the Measures of Success for a roll is always equal to the tens place of the result.

For the same reason, you should probably not vary the TN based on difficulty. Just give people bonuses or penalties on their roll for being very big or very small or very fast.

Is there any reason why having armour on doesn't just add to your Toughness directly?

That's probably as good a base for a socialization minigame as you're going to get.

[violence in the media]

Can damage staging work in the other direction, or is a miss a total miss? Specifically, does a Lascannon need spot-on precision, or can "close enough", grazing hits, and near misses still cause severe burns and injury? Can people compensate for low weapon abilities by using flamethrowers and plasma cannons?

[Koumei]

Grek: you're right there, yes. TN 100, always, with modifiers being to the roll.

As for Armour directly increasing Toughness, sometimes people will inhale toxic gas, and I don't think their ceramic breastplate should give a bonus to that. That being said, "having thick scales" was going to just be a bonus to Toughness, which would lead to "why do all scaled creatures have particularly resistant immune systems?"

vitm: I think anything where you specifically have to shoot them is "base damage if you hit, it scales up. If you miss at all, then you miss, they're lucky". But flamethrowers, bombs and such should be "you designate the target area, and everyone in that area takes the damage without a roll on your part. They get to make a Press-X-to-Not-Die skill check (Athletics) to scale the damage down". I'm aware that means area weapons are inversely valuable to the skill levels of everyone in the area (guns get more accurate, flamers get less accurate), but maybe that's okay?

[Koumei]

I'm going to start sketching out what the starting packages will look like.

Death Worlder:
Probably give an actual name to this human meta-type based on the planet used for the first successful "populate a death-world and come back in ten generations to see what happened" project.
-Low Light Vision
-One advance to Stealth
-One advance to Tracking
-Endurance (fine in anything from 0-50C, can go up to 20C beyond that in either direction for hours at a time without ill effects, needs only 3-4 hours sleep, takes ages to starve/dehydrate, can hold breath for ten minutes at a time)

Imperial Myrmidon (Templar)
Because they have ant-themed power armour
-Skills: Demolitions, Leadership, Marksmanship, Melee, Perception
-Gear: myrmidon carapace with comm-link, (two melee weapons), (two ranged weapons), (X clips/batteries), 1 pack of ration tablets, 3 concussion grenades, 3 flare grenades, bomb disposal kit

Bastion (Guardian)
Yes, they're generally used to protect important people or in groups on the field - they get to go first, because bullets won't get through them to the people behind.
-Skills: Acrobatics, Electronics, Melee, Perception, Psychology
-Gear: field carapace with kinetic shield generator, mask with oxygen supply, 1 field medikit, 1 pack of ration tablets, (three melee weapons), 3 concussion grenades, 3 flare grenades, 6 gas grenades, comm. bead

Shaman (Dancer)
Yes, the fact is that the people of these worlds had enough time to start talking about spirits and things and creating "quaint tribal folklore" for other people to be condescending at. People stop laughing when they find that being a religious leader and community leader is exactly the kind of mental strength it takes to learn the physical psychic arts and the manipulation of untamed energy used for brightblades.
-Skills: Acrobatics, Arcane Lore, Herbology, Melee, Navigation
-Special: 3 powers with the Telekinesis, Telepathy or Divination tag.
-Gear: 1 satchel of old spice, 3 satchels of new spice, psi-reactive visor, brightblade

Hunt-Master (Shade)
They're good at hiding and making sneak attacks normally. Now let them actually turn invisible, and it just gets better. In their homeworlds, being stealthy is usually seen as a great thing, because of how big a survival trait it is, so this is like becoming a rock star to them.
-Skills: Marksmanship, Perception Stealth, Tracking, Trapping
-Gear: trapping kit, phantomsuit, (2 ranged weapons), (X clips/batteries), 100m of razorsnare, 10m of monosnare, multispectrum goggles, 3 packets of ration tablets, medikit, locator beacon, comm. bead, signal jammer

Destroyer (Weird)
Needless to say, people are scared of them back on their home worlds, and so they're gladly handed over to the Empire to be trained into soldiers. Their sturdy frames help handle the drugs and the stress of forcing this power through their bodies.
-Skills: Arcane Lore, Herbology, Medicine, Marksmanship, Perception
-Special: 5 powers with the Telekinesis, Psychokinesis, Entropy or Biomanipulation tag
-Gear: field carapace, 1 satchel of old spice, 5 satchels of new spice, 3 stimm-packs, 1 packet of ration tablets, (1 firearm), (X clips/batteries), amplifier helmet, injector harness, 3 doses of psi-active concentrate

Warrior Race
They'll definitely have their own name for what they are, and that's the one the Galactic Empire can use. Obviously the first said "AH, LIZARD PEOPLE!" but that was deemed offensive when the lizard people were accepted as part of the empire. They're tall, powerful, resilient, scaled, have tails that provide balance, and they have an exceptionally good sense of direction. Their hearing isn't so great, because evolution decided they would be able to swallow things bigger than their own heads rather than developing ears, and apparently you only get one choice there.
-Superior resiliency (+1 Toughness)
-Great muscles, dense bones and such increase melee weapon damage by 1
-One advance to Navigation
-One advance to Acrobatics
-Penalty of -10 to all hearing-based Perception/Tracking checks, made up for by +10 to all scent-based ones.

Champion (Templar)
Someone had the bright idea of getting strong people and putting them in armour that made them even stronger. That worked, so they started working on bigger armour, on the grounds that that couldn't possibly go wrong. It hasn't. Yet. These guys are officers, and people do what they say. One way or another.
-Skills: Debate, Electronics, Marksmanship, Melee, Perception
-Gear: champion carapace with comm-link and multispectrum visor, (inbuilt melee weapons), (two ranged weapons), (X clips/batteries), 1 pack of ration tablets, 3 plasma grenades, medikit, field repair kit