Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker

[Grek]

As per a few pages back, conjuration is mechanically similar to having a bunch of magical contacts (of varying quality) and the ability to wave your hands around and get one of your magical contacts to show up with magic. It doesn't interact with the E economy at all, much for the same reason as getting your human contacts to show up in a heliocoptor doesn't interact with the $ economy.

[Username17]

Since Conjuration is a whole branch of magic of equal weight to Illusion, it can cover a whole load of different ways to do things. Off the top of my head:

• Contracts are a standing agreement to be able to call a specific spirit (or group of spirits) into the world by exchanging it with specially prepared equivalent mass of materials. These cost É to set up, and some of them cost É with each use. This is most directly equivalent to buying a drone.
• Communions are like Baltar's hallucination cyclons. You have a spirit (or group of spirits) that you can talk to. Some of these cost you É while others gain you É. Communions exist where you basically have a personal reference librarian in Carcossa, and Communions exist where you are personally tormented by demons only you can see.
• Gates are simply ways to transposition stuff. It lets you take specially prepared material and send it away to have... stuff show up. This is primarily for making bodies and other evidence disappear, but it can also be used in a number of ways to make your markers explode, and it can call in monsters that you have no deals with that will then go on rampages. This is equivalent to having a hellhound in a cage or something: you can throw stuff in and that stuff will be destroyed, or you can open it and run like hell is after you because it is.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

As per a few pages back, conjuration is mechanically similar to having a bunch of magical contacts (of varying quality) and the ability to wave your hands around and get one of your magical contacts to show up with magic. It doesn't interact with the E economy at all, much for the same reason as getting your human contacts to show up in a heliocoptor doesn't interact with the $ economy.

Well, yes.
But *allies* are purchased, before play begins, with some $ equivalency that could be cyberware instead, right?
Also, your allies will often want an explicit share in whatever money you make, if they're along for a criminal enterprise. Alternatively, you may have to outfit them yourself.
And then of course money can hire outright mercenaries...

How does conjuration interact with the É economy? When you cast Summon Thing That Man Was Not Meant To Know, are you:

[*] Forcing an unwilling spirit into this world, losing É because you're pissing it off?
[*] Demanding a service from a spirit, losing É because you're paying it for its work?
[*] Creating a spirit out of thin air for the duration of the spell, not doing anything to your É balance?
[*] Summonings are between the caster and the spirit and only open the door for negotiations that probably involve É?
[*] Slapping a spirit around and gaining É for being a badass?
[*] Gaining and losing random amounts of É because the spirit you summoned has allies and enemies that now like or dislike you?

I'm not even sure we should settle on one of those; perhaps different summoning traditions interact differently? A houngan invites friendly spirits into his body and gains É with every summoning, a northwestern forge mage enslaves angry spirits to make his flaming hammers and loses É with every casting, etc?

If, as the case Grek mentioned, you have previously-purchased The Thing as an ally, this doesn't cost you any É at all. Except in that case, which is probably going to be the normal case for the players, not summoning but binding should always cost you É. You should never *get money* by hiring mercenaries, setting up some spiritual perpetual motion machine.

So the options are:
* As a Houngan, you are friends with the spirits who serve a particular Orisha, and they will help you willingly, up to a limit. If you abuse their patience or ask for services beyond what they'd normally be willing to provide, this may cost some É.
* As a Sorcerer, you have wrested the million dread names of the unspeakable from the fiery fist of Maloch. You can force Demons to do your bidding without spending É, but it may cost you É to exceed the terms under which they are intrinsically bound.
* The same Houngan, if he has some É, can bargain with Demons as well. Often you just want the Demon to leave, since it's lowering property values. Houngan commands the Demon to leave, Demon obeys, Houngan loses some É. If he doesn't have some É, then he can still "bargain" with the Demon, which either means he does something for the Demon (and the É economy values of differing services are used to provide a baseline for these barter negotiations,) or, and this is mainly a stylistic difference, he does something for the Demon's main adversaries, or performs some other sacrifice or accepts some other curse, to get enough É to make the Demon go away.
* Likewise, the Sorcerer can summon a Ram Spirit of Shango, and if he's got some É the spirit will just do stuff for him (costing him É.) If not, the Sorcerer can bargain with it, figuring out something that it wants him to do/accept/sacrifice, and it'll provide services of roughly equal value.

Also, if you have É, random spirits you meet will want to provide services which are consonant with their nature. Thus, demons will want to tempt you into sin, nature spirits will show up and offer to guide you to interesting places, etc.

Again, this is a lot like having *money*.
Some people will do stuff for you for free, but in game terms this is a resource that you have instead of more money.
If you have money, you can just pay people to do things for you.
If not, you can still barter with people and the approximate dollar value of goods and services exchanged is useful to provide a baseline for negotiations.
Also, if you are known to have money, telemarketers will contact you and try to get you to part with it in exchange for whatever services they may have to provide.

[Orion]

Frank, I see a potential problem with your elf solution, but I'm making a lot of assumptions. Please follow along with me and tell me where I messed up.

Design Intent: Stress Management Stress is intended to be the limitation on how cybered or magiced up you can get. Even as $ and E go to infinity, the amount of 'ware and magic the team has doesn't, because they have solid reasons to want to avoid Overstress.

Design Intent: Chrome We want there to be cyborg PCs who are covered in shiny metal, and we want them to be viable at all levels of play. That means that if smart PCs phase out all chrome as $ -> infinity, we failed. Chrome ware is Overt, which makes it strictly worse than Covert ware with the same function. You can make the Covert mod cost more money, but that still means that the rich only use covert mods.

Conclusion: Covert mods must cost more stress than equivalently-effective Overt mods.

Design Intent: Racial Magic. The idea here seems to be that Evocation spells are Covert when a human buys them but Overt when an Asura buys them. At the same time, you've said that human spellcasters look "normal" while the users of Elf Magic and Asura Magic look like crazy monsters.

Corollary: Because Asura Evocation is Overt, it costs less Stress than human evocation.

Design Intent: Stress management: Characters with more stress are supposed to look "more inhuman" and be regarded as "human" by fewer jurisdictions. They're supposed to have greater social penalties and shit.

Contradiction??? Human spellcasters look both more normal and less normal than nonhuman casters, and are both more and less socially acceptable.[/u]

[Grek]

Alternative: Covert mods, both magical and cybernetic, cost Temporary Stress every time they're used but have a lower Permanent Stress cost attached to them. As long as the wizard isn't casting spells right now, he can pass for being a normal person. Overt mods cost only Permanent Stress and thus make it so that it is always obvious that you have them. In exchange, you get to use them whenever you like without paying Temporary Stress and sometimes have the option to "overclock" your mods to get a big temporary benefit in exchange for a large Temporary Stress cost on top of your Permanent Stress for having the item at all.

The "discount" you get for Elf Magic vs. getting Illusion Magic is that if you use Elf Magic for your illusions, you can cast them all day long and use them for everything you do without that ever becoming a problem. If you try the same thing by learning Illusion Magic, your brain snaps from the Stress about after a day of it and you become possessed by demons or something.

An important thing to include is the ability for Asura to learn Evocation spells and cast them like a human would. Being an Asura unlocks the option for you to buy Overt Evocation mods, but does not mandate that you do so.

[Seerow]

I thought the penalty for overstressing wasn't looking weird... I was under the impression that specific penalty was abandoned literally 10 or more pages ago because one of the design goals was to have everybody capable of participating in the stealth minigame. That elf magician would never realistically be able to participate if he is walking around looking like a cross between a human and a giant ant or some shit. Sure he can use magic to make himself invisible sometimes, or use an illusion to cover up... but if those are reliably available then the penalty may as well not exist at all, and it becomes just a tax that every character needs to get these tools.

Especially strange is this talk of different penalties for overstressing with one type of magic or overstressing with one type of cyber... remember the main breakthrough in the stress mechanic was it became a single universal scale for everything, so someone could have a mix of chrome and magic or just chrome, and be equally powerful because they're drawing from the same stress pool. How do you determine, when someone is using two types of magic and some cyber and some bio, which type of overstress penalty to apply to them when they push it over the limit?

I was under the impression that the penalty for overstressing was going to be more along the lines of you push too far, you fall over dead. Something far more generic and easy to grasp, something along the lines of Shadowrun's drain mechanic, but more streamlined (since it would be an integral part of all subsystems). Not necessarily exactly the same, you might instead of applying stun damage start just applying various penalties the more and longer you use it until you get to the "Your heart explodes" point, rather than a drain test with every use of an ability, but something along those lines. Something generic that applies to everyone the same.


Now I could be completely off on this. There seems to be a lot of contradictory ideas flying around, so if I have a completely wrong impression here, correct me. But the recent trend of discussion seems to be ignoring the point of stress being introduced in the first place was.

[Orion]

So I thought about it more and here's what I came up with: Stress has four downsides:

1: There is a hard cap on how much stress a playable PC can have.
2: Stress penalizes your social skill rolls
3: Too much Stress compromises your legal rights.
4: Stress makes you look unusual, dangerous, or inhuman in ways that cause dicepool penalties to tailing and disguise, and magic tea party social problems.

Now, obviously covert mods have to be exempt from 4, because otherwise they're pointless. They're also half-immune to 3. You can lose your legal rights due to covert 'ware or magic, but if it's not obvious that you have them you will usually be treated like a citizen anyway.

This suggests to me that you should actually have characters track two stats: "Stress" and "Profile." Profile is equal to Stress for someone using only overt mods, and it has to do with how much you stand out in a crowd and how human you look to bystanders. Covert mods should not increase your Profile. The question is whether 2, the die penalties to social skills, should scale with Stress or Profile.

If it scales with Stress, then you have to make some flavor text about how having covert mods is distracting, stressful, or requires attention, and/or pushes you into an uncanny valley. This means that using covert mods makes you more socially *acceptable* -- you can go more places without harassment--but less socially influential. You can get into a fancy party but not be the life of the party. Meanwhile being made of chrome or a extremely mutated Deep One will make you unacceptable in most social contexts, but not hinder you as much when it comes to leadership, intimidation, or negotiation with people who choose to talk to you.

That means that Heavies will go with overt mods, assassins, thieves, and spies will go covert, and faces will avoid mods when possible and probably use non-threatening overt mods if they must use mods at all.

Alternatively, social skill penalties could scale with Profile. This has the advantage that you don't have to explain why having your bones replaced causes you to lose your social skills, and it means that faces will prefer covert mods to overt ones. If you do this, the only characters who use overt mods at all will be characters who intend to operate at the stress hardcap for maximal combat/utility efficiency.

The downside to this setup is that it risks killing the unaugmented face PC. There's essentially no downside to getting covert mods up to the hardcap unless things that can detect covert mods are REALLY common, so there's little incentive for you face not to be a mage-face or bioware assassin. You can get around this by making the stress costs for covert SO HIGH that a fully covert character is virtually unmodded, or by making the risk of detection for covert mods substantial.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Covert mods might just be less effective. The bigger the change, the more obvious it is, whether it's anchor points for cyberlimbs or tics from move-by-wire.

[Orion]

"Covert mods are less effective" is a special case of proposal B, also known as "covert mods cost more stress toward your hardcap but don't otherwise penalize you." Since the relevant question in effectiveness is "how effective is a PC loaded to the hardcap with enhancements?"

[CatharzGodfoot]

That depends on whether covert mods hit the hard cap. Not including drugs, of course.

[A Man In Black]

That depends on whether covert mods hit the hard cap. Not including drugs, of course.

Pushing your stress limit on drugs won't necessarily be covert.

[fectin]

It actually kind of makes sense that growing pointy ears could be a coping mechanism. Loosely: "Am I crazy? No. I really do have pointy ears, so the magic must be real."

[CatharzGodfoot]

That depends on whether covert mods hit the hard cap. Not including drugs, of course.

Pushing your stress limit on drugs won't necessarily be covert.

Right, it most certainly should not be. But drugs raise temporary stress, and are non-obvious when not in use (short of chemical-sniffing cyberdogs).

[Username17]

There are several characters that want to exist:

• The glamoured elf who is magically beautiful, too beautiful to behold and shit.
• The movie star or model who is augmented to be prettier than you could ever be.
• The ogre with metal claws who scares the shit out of people.
• The unaugmented detective.

What this says to me is that having high Stress should not disqualify you from being impressive in social situations. But also that being unaugmented has various sundry advantages regardless.

Just brainstorming here: we're going to have an intrusion minigame that functions kind of like Blackjack. You push things as far as you dare before setting off an alarm. What if that mechanic was reused for some kinds of social tests? You push things as far as you can, and when they go beyond that, the other person realizes that "something is wrong". Having Stress pushes that tally faster.

So the unaugmented person has an easier time fast talking the guards, because he doesn't have a Stress Push on his gambits. Another facet of this would be that if you decided to go Illusionist, you could straight up mind control people, but having more Stress would push their personal alarm faster just as forcing them to do crazy crap would. That could really be a reused mechanic there to: every order you give them is a gambit and when you bust, they bust free.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

First, each chronicle (is that what we're calling them?) will have two stress caps. The following table gives the suggested values of the stress cap for each of the three "chronicle types".

Street Gang: The adventurers are a gang of toughs or low lifes, with relatively limited resources and no exceptional training. Medium Attributes, Low Skills, Low Resources, Low Cap.

Mercenaries: The default, the adventurers are a gang of highly-trained, sophisticated international criminals, with a great deal of resources and training. Medium Attributes, High Skills, Medium Resources, Medium Cap.

Heroes: The adventurers are the chosen ones, every one of them is batman. Expect the heroes to be reincarnated magic ninjas who also have loads of cyberware. High Attributes, High Skills, High Resources, High Cap.

Chronicle Type	Soft Cap	Hard Cap
Street Gang	0	3
Mercenaries	3	6
Heroes	4	8

Now, for each point by which your Stress exceeds Soft Cap, you suffer penalties.
If your Stress exceeds Hard Cap, you have to cede control of your character to the Game Master, although if it's temporary you can maybe roll dice to keep control for a period.

Balancing these penalties is going to take a lot of work, for one thing we're going to have to decide how much raw power there is in one point of stress.

I'm going to assume that 1 stress ~= 1 point of Essence in Shadowrun, and move from there.

Alienation (automatic): For each point of stress above the soft cap, you add a die to your alienation pool. In socially stressful and otherwise emo-tastic situations, roll your alienation pool. When your alienation pool accumulates 4 hits, you enter a fugue state, which we will need to flush out later.

Inhuman Mien (one point per level): For each point of Inhuman Mien, the threshold for all social tests with people other than your close associates increases by 1. I'm going to need to reinterpret some of the text from Ars Magica on how this penalizes you in various situations, but this is meant to be most-like the Gift from Ars Magica.

Cursed (two points per level): Reduce your Edge stat and maximum Edge stat by 1 per level.

Alientation Prone (one point per level): Reduce your threshold for Alienation Fugue by 1 hit; additionally, your Alienation acquires an additional drawback.

Or, rather than choosing penalties, it could be all of those above:
* Chose your fugue type. You roll X dice against a threshold of 5-X to go into fugue.
* Subtract (X/2) from your Edge and Maximum Edge.
* Add X to the threshold of social tests.
* Add X to the threshold of all medical treatments and healing powers?

But that's a fairly severe penalty so 1 Stress would need to be substantially better than 1 Essence worth of 'Ware.

Or, if people do choose weaknesses, What other penalties could people take? The various weaknesses of vampires? That's a cool start to a list of weaknesses. Heroes V has a long list of weaknesses to crib from.

Some of the weaknesses of nWOD Frankenstein's are cool.
The "fog" I thought up for nWOD Leviathans (which only made it into After Sundown as a disadvantage, sigh) would be cool, but is pointless in F'sCFHB because non-humans aren't any kind of secret.

Other than that, we've got a hybrid of what-humanity-loss does in Cyberpunk 2020, with what The Gift does in Ars Magica with what high Power Levels do in nWOD with what Essence Loss does in Shadowrun.

[DrPraetor]

I like the "push" mechanic, although it'd need to be fleshed out and applied consistently. Does having high Stress make just your social pushes riskier, or does it make your pushes riskier in all situations, including combat, computer hacking, etc?

Does it make your "push" riskier when you are talking on the phone?

The question I think we have to ask first, though, is:
People with high Stress:

• are they cursed?
• are they doomed?
• are they somehow less than human, emotionally speaking?
• does their inhuman nature make them somehow vulnerable? Like elves with cold iron or vampires with sunlight? Is that a function of stress or is that a disadvantage that some splats (NPC or otherwise) just have?
• are they emo?

Being emo is one thing that the oWOD Vampire (back in the good old days when Compassion was a stat and you had to roll it!) and the Cyberpunk 2020 cyborg totally had in common.

The parallels are striking:
The lost boys takes place in Santa Cruz, CA, came out in 1988.
While Cyberpunk 2013 takes place just 30 miles away in Watsonville, and came out in 1987!

So, yes, becoming a cyborg and becoming a vampire are clearly the same, in that you get superpowers and really like the Cure.

There are several characters that want to exist:

• The glamoured elf who is magically beautiful, too beautiful to behold and shit.
• The movie star or model who is augmented to be prettier than you could ever be.
• The ogre with metal claws who scares the shit out of people.
• The unaugmented detective.

What this says to me is that having high Stress should not disqualify you from being impressive in social situations. But also that being unaugmented has various sundry advantages regardless.

Just brainstorming here: we're going to have an intrusion minigame that functions kind of like Blackjack. You push things as far as you dare before setting off an alarm. What if that mechanic was reused for some kinds of social tests? You push things as far as you can, and when they go beyond that, the other person realizes that "something is wrong". Having Stress pushes that tally faster.

So the unaugmented person has an easier time fast talking the guards, because he doesn't have a Stress Push on his gambits. Another facet of this would be that if you decided to go Illusionist, you could straight up mind control people, but having more Stress would push their personal alarm faster just as forcing them to do crazy crap would. That could really be a reused mechanic there to: every order you give them is a gambit and when you bust, they bust free.

-Username17

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[A Man In Black]

Especially strange is this talk of different penalties for overstressing with one type of magic or overstressing with one type of cyber... remember the main breakthrough in the stress mechanic was it became a single universal scale for everything, so someone could have a mix of chrome and magic or just chrome, and be equally powerful because they're drawing from the same stress pool. How do you determine, when someone is using two types of magic and some cyber and some bio, which type of overstress penalty to apply to them when they push it over the limit?

Well, if overstressing with tech makes you sick and overstressing with magic makes you crazy, you don't have a problem, because these things are synergistic, even in the real world. Being physically ill makes mental disorders worse, and mental illnesses make recovery from physical malady more difficult.

The things that cause Stress are hard on your body and mind by definition, even if you don't use the tech-body/magic-mind idea. If you focus on one source of Stress, you're more likely to suffer from its corresponding malady, but if you're redlining from lots of different kinds of stress, anything could happen to you up to whatever the setting equivalent of a cerebral aneurysm is.

So, yes, becoming a cyborg and becoming a vampire are clearly the same, in that you get superpowers and really like the Cure.

This strikes me as a balanced advantage/disadvantage set.

[DrPraetor]

Let's talk game balance. In the standard "Mercenary Grade" adventuring group, we want the following characters to be viable:

Merci d'Auber - Merci has a DNI and that's it, which is stress 0.01. She doesn't *need* any other 'ware because she has an army of drones, which mostly run autonomously, and other than that she attends cocktail parties in a cocktail dress. She can always attend and is never targeted on the first round of combat because everyone's target designation says "that is someone's arm candy, threat level 0."

Ki Watanabe - Ki Watanabe has a stress of 1.5. He's got some minor cosmetic stuff from being an Elf, so he's super-effective in the "face" minigame, and he's got enough combat cyberware that he can pummel a stress 0 gangbanger with ease, and he's not a liability when ninjas attack. But, his stress level is not high enough to significantly penalize the face minigame, although it is high enough to set off enemy targeting computers.

Dr. Arroyo - Dr. Arroyo has a stress of 3.0, which is mostly combat 'ware. This means that he can go toe to toe, at least for a while, with street samurai, but he doesn't have enough 'ware to seem like a killer robot pretending to be human, so he doesn't have to play the social minigame all the time to explain what he's doing, walking down the street obviously planning to kill someone. Since his stress is high enough to penalize him socially, but not so high that he has to explain himself all the time, he can get away with ignoring social skills, and he does. Doc would set off targeting computers even if his stress were 0, because he likes to attend parties in glistening blue full environmental combat armor.

Marionette - Marionette has a stress of 4.5, which is mostly magic and some light combat cyberware. So Marionette is a "combat mage", which should be basically unfair, and it is. In addition to being a sexy killing machine, she invests in enough social skills to talk her way past the inevitable trouble with the cops, but she's not as social as either Ki or Chun, because she doesn't have to be.

Chun the Unavoidable - Chun is a combination Rigger/Conjurer, with a stress of 6.0, which is the limit. He's stunningly beautiful, which is of some help in talking his way out of trouble but no help in not being noticed, and his tendency to have kidnap victims fall in love with him, or to have black-cloaked supervillains decide that he is their nemesis, drives the plot. His social skills are good, but that's still not enough to keep him out of trouble.

In order to make these characters viable, we need to think of the bonus provided by not maxing out your stress! That is, we need to take the penalty that stress applies to you, and make sure that each of these characters can take viable advantage of the stress that they are not using. Merci obviously benefits just from not-being-a-target. Ki benefits from being the only person who can use his social skills reliably. Dr. Arroyo benefits from not being *forced* to use social skills which he doesn't have. Marionette benefits from retaining some ability to escape being the center of attention. Chun has maxed out his stress, and benefits from the corresponding raw power; he'd be better off with less stress because he wouldn't be a target, but who wants less power? Is this workable?

For starters, high stress makes the socialization minigame more risky; but it also forces you to play it. Thus, people with high stress need a lot of Charisma and social skills to smooth over the problems they invariably cause. This means that if you want to be an austistic killing machine, you are strongly encouraged to keep your stress moderate (as Dr. Arroyo does.) If you want to be a face, you want to keep you stress low. If you want to be a partial non-combatant, you want to keep your stress near zero.

[Endovior]

Is that enough? I'm not sure that it is. It feels like an elegant solution, but gamer intuition suggests that the kind of player who generally wants to be an autistic killing machine generally wants to max out his power stats too. This is the kind of player who sees social skills as a nice 'dump stat' ripe for taking penalties; and generally wants to deal with any social penalties thus incurred by murdering anyone who disapproves of him. Or, perhaps, by murdering anyone who disapproves of all the murdering he's doing. Now, you can slant the game design in a direction to oppose this tendency, but the fact remains that this kind of player will be playing the game, and you need to frame the rules in such a way as though it doesn't seem like you're simply presenting a choice between 'have social penalties' and 'have less power'.

[Chamomile]

There should probably be something hard-coded in for breaking the soft cap. That way you're not relying on a GM, who may or may not have particular interest in running social encounters, to make the drawbacks of the high Stress scores show up in play.

[Username17]

Dice Pools
“Roll a d6.
Repeat.”

In Asymmetric Threat, success or failure of an action is determined by rolling dice. Specifically, rolling several six sided dice. When making a test, a player rolls a number of six sided dice, which is collectively called your “dice pool”. There are two kinds of dice in the dice pool: Bonus Dice and Penalty Dice. Bonus Dice always count for you or nothing, Penalty Dice always count against you or nothing. There is never a time when you would be advantaged by having more Penalty Dice or disadvantaged by having more Bonus Dice. It's faster to roll a separate color of dice for Bonus Dice and Penalty Dice, but if all your dice are the same color you can roll Penalty Dice separately, either into another area or at a different time.

If something says to “add dice to the dice pool” it means to add Bonus Dice. If a modifier adds Penalty Dice, it will always specify that. If the type of dice are not specified, such as “+2 dice” or “one more die” or whatever, that always means Bonus Dice. Most actions will have a base dice pool of Bonus Dice based on your character's attributes and skills. Bonus Dice count for nothing on a 1-3, and count for you on a 4-6. When a Bonus Die gets in the 4-6 range, it is called a “hit”. In addition to Bonus Dice, most die rolls involve Penalty Dice. These dice count against you on a 1-3 and count nothing on a 4-6. When a Penalty Die generates a negative hit, it is called a “fault”.

The base number of Penalty Dice to be rolled on any test is 3. If no modifiers to the Penalty Dice apply, you roll three of them. If there are negative circumstances (such as trying to climb while it is slippery, trying to shoot someone when it is dark, or trying to resist a bullet when you are small because you are a frog), you may be asked to roll extra Penalty Dice. Some enhancements will reduce or eliminate the Penalty Dice from specific circumstances. For example: gyro-compensation will reduce the number of Penalty Dice to shooting from moving. Effects that reduce the number of Penalty Dice generally are rare, the most common being Skill Specialization, which reduces the number of total Penalty Dice by 1 in addition to granting an extra Bonus Die.

Basic Tests: Getting Stuff Done
“Do I succeed?”

The most common die roll is performed simply to determine how well or poorly a character performed on an action. Because this is the most common, this is called the “basic test”. Basic tests are called for whenever it is important to what degree the character succeeds or fails on the task. The MC should not call upon players to roll dice for trivially easy tasks, nor should dice be rolled for tasks that could be attempted over and over again until successful, or for tasks whose outcome makes little difference. Players should not be called upon to make a basic test to throw a burrito in the garbage unless it's a burrito with a grenade in it that is being thrown many meters or something.

On a basic test, each fault counts as one less hit. If there are more faults than hits, the number of total hits is considered to be negative. The number of hits left over after subtracting faults are your “net hits” (if there are more faults than hits, you can talk about “negative net hits” or “net faults” – it's mathematically the same thing). Some people like to pair off hits and faults and only count the excess of whichever there was more of. Other people like to count the hits and faults separately and subtract the faults from the hits. Do whichever is faster for you. The more hits are achieved, the more effective the character was. A normal task requires one net hit to succeed. Very difficult tasks may require more than one net hit to achieve success, while very easy tasks may succeed even with net faults. The number of net hits required to succeed at the task is the “success threshold”. Characters will often roll more or less net hits than the success threshold. The number of hits the test succeeded or failed by is called the “margin of success (or margin of failure)”.

Fragile Tests: Pushing Your Luck
“I don't think I want any more.”

Another type of test is the “fragile test”. Fragile tests are done when there is a specific disaster that characters are attempting to avoid while going about their business. A fragile test differs from a basic test in that the faults (actual literal faults, not net faults) are added to a running tally – a “fault pool”. The specific disaster that threatens will have a fault threshold, and if the total faults in the fault pool ever equal or exceed the fault threshold, then disaster strikes. When that happens, the fragile test is considered to have “busted”. Yes, like in Blackjack.

• Example: Merci and Ki are infiltrating A/V warehouse to take pictures of the contents. A/V has a security system in place, and they are trying to not set it off. When Merci picks the lock, she is making a fragile test – while she succeeds, two of her penalty dice came up faults, putting two faults into the fault pool. Fortunately, the fault threshold is higher than that. But if she had busted the test, the alarm would have gone off. Later when she sees the locked door to the manager's office, Merci has to contend with the fact that she already put two faults into the fault pool with her last lockpicking attempt, and has to decide whether to leave it alone or risk the alarm.

Some fragile tests have individual fault thresholds, and some tests have group fault thresholds. For individual fault thresholds, each participating player has a separate fault pool and busts individually. For group fault thresholds, every player is adding faults to the same fault pool, and the group busts or not as one. Most legwork tasks have individual fault thresholds. Most alarm risks have group fault thresholds.

[Username17]

So here's where fragile tests fit in to Stress (note: if you have a better name than fragile tests, I'm all ears):

When you have higher Stress, you have Penalty Dice on a bunch of tests that are important for legwork. This means that you bust way faster. So even if you're a gloriously beautiful elven noble woman or something and can expect to roll a crap tonne of dice on a convincing people to do stuff test, Mr. Spade can still do way more things during the legwork section without busting and prelerting the opposition.

-Username17

[fectin]

Cool. I was a little confused at the start about why you were advocating a two-pool system, but the results make it make sense.

Fragile tests seem a little like Skill Challenges: you're going to optimize by using whatever action makes you roll fewer penalty dice, without regard to sense. Continuing your example, Merci isn't going to lockpick the safe, Ki's goiing to use gyrocompensated grenades to blow them open, and (because he has a specialty there) only roll 1 penalty die. I think you're either going to need to embrace that, or to spill more ink on how to avoid it.

[A Man In Black]

Fragile tests seem a little like Skill Challenges: you're going to optimize by using whatever action makes you roll fewer penalty dice, without regard to sense. Continuing your example, Merci isn't going to lockpick the safe, Ki's goiing to use gyrocompensated grenades to blow them open, and (because he has a specialty there) only roll 1 penalty die. I think you're either going to need to embrace that, or to spill more ink on how to avoid it.

For one, it seems like the intent is to have a cumulative margin for error, not to encourage everyone to work together on a single task. If the intent is to discourage extraneous rolls, then this works just fine.

Also, blowing shit up is going to involve some extra fault dice when it comes to trying not to be noticed. Since the goals aren't abstract and the mechanic encourages you to make no actions whatsoever unless forced, you don't have any problem with nonsensical actions.

[fectin]

I doubt the intent is to discourage "extraneous" rolls." Discouraging rolled resolutions rewards out-of-game knowledge and bogs down play. It also fails to discourage extranious actions, only discouraging those that are rolled. So to get in the office, you get to play twenty questions: "Is the door locked? What kind of lock? Are there screws on this side? Are the hinges on this side? Is there a drop ceiling? Is there a ladder nearby? I lift up a tile; do the manager's walls go all the way to the roof? Okay, I go over the wall then."
That's cool if the door is the barrier, but it isn't. The barrier is entirely metagame: what actions need rolls.

Adding extra fault dice is a cure worse than the disease. Take an exaggerated example: you are good at demolitions. Normally you roll 4/2 for exploding open a door (aside: what's the right notation for that?) when you are in a sneaking minigame, you either: take a -/5 penalty for being sneaky and are now suddenly incompetent with explosives, or you take no penalty, and are in the situation I originally described.