Tell me about your Heartbreaker

[Chamomile]

I will now stop threadshitting my own thread.

Isn't this kind of discussion pretty much the point of the thread?

[Foxwarrior]

I think I see what you're getting at there Dean. Yeah, maintaining the whole grungy feel and aesthetic does help keep the game feeling "punk".

[phlapjackage]

I guess my flavor of cool cyberware is more Riddick, where you pay a doctor in a basement 20 menthol Kools to do a surgical shinejob on your eyeballs. My assumption is that cyberware is the same as those assault rifles and RPG's. You're not having your operations done in a surgical theater in a Manhattan hospital for 2 million dollars, you're having a weapons rig installed into your arm by a disgraced German surgeon for 18 grand and a promise to get rid of a problem for him.

If I can use the word "thematically" here, doesn't it fit thematically for both? Molly Millions works as a prostitute to save up the huge amount of nuyen to go to Chiba to get the very best cyberware? Then afterwards she doesn't retire but still works as muscle/bodyguard on runs.

So I don't see why either "back-alley-disgraced-surgeon-used-cyberware" or "state-of-the-art-chiba-shiny-cyberware" are at odds in any kind of cyberpunk story.

[Stubbazubba]

For the longest time my heartbreaker was primarily D&D but drawing heavily from The One Ring with fixed base weapon damage and active, rolled armor vs. critical hits; weapon skills, magic skills, and adventuring skills; basic systems for chases, social, stealth, overland travel, etc. Combat was zone-based, with traditional initiative.

For the last year or so it's been a somewhat more ambitious project combining that previous heartbreaker with Games Workshop's Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game, which appears to be just a tweak on old Warhammer rules. The pillars of this new more tactical wargame-y combat are:

• No individual turns, just combat phases: Move (move/engage in melee), Shoot (ranged attacks, most spells), Fight (resolve melee engagements), End (resolve ongoing effects).
• Simple team initiative: Players roll for initiative, enemies just have a static initiative; if more than half of the players beat the enemy initiative, players go first, if not, then the enemies go first. Still deciding how multiple enemy groups work. Either way, initiative is re-rolled ("seized") each round, because it gives a significant advantage. No need to write anything down.
• Melee stickiness: entering a creature's threat range engages you in melee, preventing movement except closing the distance to your engaged enemy. Once a creature is engaged in a melee, it no longer threatens that area (w/o special abilities, at least).
• Melee movement: Both sides of each melee roll their attacks simultaneously in the Fight phase; the team with the single highest attack wins the melee and forces their opponents to retreat out of their threat range. If they cannot do so (because cornered, flanked, etc.), all the successful hits are automatically criticals.
• Cornering foes is therefore a critical goal of your round-to-round tactics, which is much easier to do if you won initiative for the round and moved first: thus, advantage in battle swings back and forth as initiative is seized back and forth each round.

It's still in the early stages, but the idea is that this is a facelift for the often slog-like D&D combat engine: it should be more dynamic with initiative and its advantages potentially switching each round and melee positioning changing every round, while actually taking less time overall because a lot of movement and attacks are all resolved simultaneously instead of one on one turn and the other on another turn.

[Chamomile]

Since timelines and dung age stasis got brought up: I think just about any setting is drastically improved by having technological progression in its backstory. The setting I'm working with right now moves clearly through stone, bronze, iron, high medieval, and early Renaissance eras, and having the era of dragon-kings ruling over terrorized city states be bronze age instead of medieval helps make that era more distinct and avoid that thing where fantasy histories tend to be an interminably dull filler where the author pads time for eight thousand years because they feel like their timeline has to be at least eight thousand years long. You can still totally end up with that even if your history has distinct tech levels, but that sense of change and progression is a step firmly in the right direction.

[Foxwarrior]

Yeah, having there be no technological progress for thousands of years tends to make me speculate about what malevolent Force might be keeping things in stasis, like in Warhammer 40k or Star Wars.

[Iduno]

The millions in peoples swiss bank account is a way of squaring the fact that thematically Shadowrun always wants you to look deeply poor but no one would get shot at for a living if you could live just as well working for the local wal-mart. So your character is technically worth millions but still eats take out chinese in a shitty apartment and that only stops being true when the player decides their character goes off into the sun to spend the rest of their life on a beach in Tahiti.

Excellent point. I guess under my plan you'd have to go with the normal corporate route of suggesting that taking shit jobs now means they'll get preferential status for future jobs that pay enough that you can eat real food and maybe own something someday.

[erik]

Perhaps in Shadowrun the wealth accumulated is tied to an identity and a working runner who wants to tap into that identity puts it at risk of being outed and assets frozen. Best to grow that identity and fade into wealthy obscurity just once when you are out.

[Krusk]

Since we are posting heartbreakers, here are mine.

"Finished" - IE playable and I've actually convince people to play.
1 - Europa of Jupiter - Sci fi set in our solar systems in the year 2500. Its rules light, and relatively realistic sci fi. You play as traders between earth and europa.
2 - Simple RPG - a dumbed down+fixed 4e. Built for my wife, an inexperienced player, to run for some kids (8-13) she nannied while we were in college. Very positive feedback.
3 - steam run - just a steampunk shadowrun mod for 4e shadowrun. Its almost a find and replace "Cyber" for "Steam" and because its Ye Olde, I dropped the matrix all together. There is a little more to it, but not much.

One day Ill get around to finishing
1 - Paranoia Investigators - an investigative rules light rpg that scales from scooby doo to into buffy, and then dr. strange. focused on finding clues and solving mysteries.
2 - K20 - my take at a 3.75. "fixing all the problems of 3.5". Its as big in scope as that sounds. includes mechanics and core setting.
3 - Trek RPG - a star trek rpg where you play the command crew from the ship the whole time. (mostly)

[Dogbert]

I've been very sparsely creating something or other for years now. I don't have a lot of free time or rest so I tend to work on it only during vacations during the year. That being said part of the elevator pitch includes the fact that I intend on making use of downtime similarly to how it's done in some Japanese games, namely Persona. Hopefully it'll get to a point where it can work in pretty much any setting under any assumptions about what the characters are going to be up to.

Funny you mention anime games, the fantasy heartbreaker I'm currently playtesting (first meatspace table in over a decade btw) does a form of horizontal growth modelled after Danganronpa Ultra Despair Girls.

No, by no means I'm working on The Big Game I Want To See (I already have M&M), I just want a game I can turn to when I get the occasional d&d-esque cravings. And no, I'm not writing this to be "great" because people no longer care about things like quality or game design principles or even editorial design. As a matter of fact, as soon as the writeup is done I'm considering a (doomed to fail from the start) GoFundMe in order to fund 1) A professional artist, most likely Genzoman and 2) A BLATANT PAYOLA CAMPAIGN just to see how far I can take things "The Mearls Way" (a youtuber show doing a fake, scripted campaign, buying favorable reviews, the works).

In a nutshell:
*No classplosion
*No stats
*No numbers inflation (they don't go up, horizontal growth)
*20 minutes chargen tops (Minimal decision making: pick 3 abilities, 2 lvl 1 enhancements, buy your equipment, you're done)
*Bounded accuracy
*Weeabo fightan magic (I took things from Disgaea)
*Scripted Professions (no "dumb uneducated fighters")
*Abilities focused on granting role-oriented tasks automatic success (to keep bounded accuracy in check and let Willow do his stupid disappearing pig trick).
*GM has total control over character growth: XP and levels are automatic, but enhancements and abilities/spells must be found in game, which means the GM either decides fully on their own how much the party grows and when, or leaves it up to randumb rolling it as loot.

[Mask_De_H]

I've been very sparsely creating something or other for years now. I don't have a lot of free time or rest so I tend to work on it only during vacations during the year. That being said part of the elevator pitch includes the fact that I intend on making use of downtime similarly to how it's done in some Japanese games, namely Persona. Hopefully it'll get to a point where it can work in pretty much any setting under any assumptions about what the characters are going to be up to.

Funny you mention anime games, the fantasy heartbreaker I'm currently playtesting (first meatspace table in over a decade btw) does a form of horizontal growth modelled after Danganronpa Ultra Despair Girls.

How does that even work?