Doubt

[echoVanguard]

WEG D6 doesn't do very well separated from some of its supporting mechanics, like force points. It's also a little byzantine for most of its actions, and stat numbers don't have a cap so you can get some pretty serious imbalances with advanced characters. Its damage system is excellent, though.

GURPS Lite is pretty great for melee, but godawful at ranged. Adding in the full ruleset makes melee ultra-complicated extremely quick, however, and oftentimes the damage system is a little too realistic.

A hybrid of these two systems would be best. Here's how I would do it:

1. An attacking character rolls to hit. Let's assume this is 3d6 with no bonuses, or maybe 3d6+weapon skill.
2. The defender rolls to defend, and subtracts whatever they roll from the attacker's attack roll. Assume this is 3d6+weapon skill also. If they reduce the defender's roll to 0 or less, they block or dodge the attack. Otherwise, something bad happens, according to this table:

Remaining points from attack	Result
1-4	Stunned (-2 to next roll)
5-8	Knockdown (knocked prone, must use action to get up)
9-12	Wounded (half speed, -2 to all rolls until healed)
13-17	Incapacitated (unconscious until healed)
18+	Killed

3. Ranged attacks work similarly, except the defender gets no defense roll - defenders have static defenses based on range.

Range	Defense Total
Point-blank	0
Close	4
Medium	10
Far	13
Very Far	15

The Twist:In nondeterministic (ie ranged) combat, the defender rolls the attacker's dice - so the attacker doesn't know whether he missed because his aim was bad, or the bullets had bad trajectory, or his target had mysterious plot shielding, or whatever.

This makes combat fast, easy, and simple - both melee and ranged combat is straightforward, damage is cinematic rather than numeric, and in general combat resolution is a handful of seconds per attack. You would probably want to have a "minimum damage level" on certain types of weapons - for example, guns and knives shouldn't be capable of causing damage less than Wounding (lesser results roll up to Wound), making those weapons very scary.

Doubting Your Powers: It's All In The Cards
The best way to make people unsure of whether their powers actually have effects is to take a deck of regular old playing cards with the jokers removed, and dole out a few cards to each player. Every time a player accomplishes something, dole out a few more cards to that player and one additional card to every other player (since one person's success is everyone's success). Whenever a player would roll dice, they have the option to also play a card. If the action the player was taking is non-deterministic (MC's discretion), the MC could look up the value of the card on a table like the following:

Card	Suit	Roll		Suit	Roll		Suit	Roll		Suit	Roll
2	Spade	4		Club	13		Heart	9		Diamond	12
3	Spade	12		Club	5		Heart	18		Diamond	24
4	Spade	18		Club	3		Heart	8		Diamond	11
5	Spade	6		Club	21		Heart	11		Diamond	7
6	Spade	9		Club	17		Heart	10		Diamond	24
7	Spade	24		Club	10		Heart	13		Diamond	9
9	Spade	7		Club	3		Heart	7		Diamond	18
10	Spade	17		Club	7		Heart	21		Diamond	5
J	Spade	5		Club	15		Heart	5		Diamond	13
Q	Spade	13		Club	24		Heart	6		Diamond	10
K	Spade	21		Club	4		Heart	12		Diamond	15
A	Spade	11		Club	9		Heart	24		Diamond	3

The MC resolves the outcome of the roll using whichever result is more advantageous to the player - so the player literally never knows whether they succeeded because they rolled well, or because they played a sufficiently valuable card. What's more, each player's cards are looked up on a different random table (by powerset, perhaps), so that a 6 of Clubs might be a 17 for player A, but a 4 for Player B. Over time, players get hints which cards most often result in successes for them (and them alone), but they can never be certain, because the MC never discloses the value of a given card or by exactly how much they succeeded (merely telling them which range the total fell into).

echo

edited to remove references to stats and weapon damages

[echoVanguard]

I just realized I didn't discuss skills in any capacity outside of combat.

The best way to work the skills would be to use the same system as the combat (3d6 bell curve) so that the cards can be used in any situation, combat or noncombat.

Now, GURPS uses 3d6 for its skills as well (good) but it's a roll-under system (bad) and the skill list for GURPS is effectively infinite (very bad) with scaling costs and effective caps (good). WEG D6 uses additive dicepools for its skills (additive good, dicepools bad), with a fairly fixed skill list (good) with no caps and linear costs (bad). Sorting these by category, we come up with an additive system using a fixed skill list with either scaling costs or hard skill caps (soft caps would be better if we were using dice pools, but they're too slow). Hard caps is better when you want powers to be strong (because they can go over the cap), so let's go with that.

Now, you want to cover pretty much everything your characters want to do, but you also want to group them into similar, relatively cinematic categories. FATE does a pretty good job of this, although it makes some skills significantly more useful than others and makes some things skills that really shouldn't be (like Resources or Might). A good idea might be to sort the skills into character archetypes - if this was a movie, what active actions might particular characters be good at? Let's break it down by character:

Character	Area of Expertise
Nerd	Anything to do with computers. Hacking the Gibson. Pop Culture Trivia.
Scientist	Chemistry. Being smart and dispensing factoids. Any kind of predominantly talky or lab-based hard science.
Tough Guy	Punching things. Lifting things. Snarling.
Soldier	Shooting things. Ordering people around. Spotting threats.
Smooth Operator	Sneaking around. Palming objects. Using a coin to unscrew a vent.
Mastermind	Manipulating people. Discerning motivations. Putting clues together.
MacGuyver	Rewiring bombs and security cameras. Rigging booby traps. Other types of improvisational applied science.

There might be more, but I certainly couldn't think of anything that didn't fall into these roles. Going down the list, we come up with seven skills: Computers, Knowledge, Toughness, Armed Force, Stealth Style, Psyops, and Rigging.

There's also a nice amount of overlap - attacking with melee weapons could be either Toughness or Armed Force, depending on the weapon (a baseball bat would probably be Toughness, while a bayonet would be Armed Force), while trying to make home-made napalm could be either Science or Rigging (depending on what kind of materials you have on hand). Best of all, each skill has a different letter (CKTASPR, or ACKPRST if arranged alphabetically), which is aesthetically pleasing.

Now, there are certain things that should not be skills, for very good reasons:

1. Money. In a game like this one about being on the fringe of what society recognizes is real, money should a function of inventory, not a character attribute.
2. Searching. If you search a thing, you should find what's there. Want to spot a sniper? That's Armed Forces. Want to find a secret compartment? Psyops, because you can figure it should be there. 'Being perceptive or thorough' isn't an active enough character trait to be a skill.
3. In fact, you know what, get rid of stats while you're at it. Skills can do the job of anything stats could do in a game like this. And if you can't think of what skill should be appropriate, just roll 3d6. Looking up what actions apply to each skill slows down the game and kills the fragile mood of any game that relies on a particular psychological focus.

As for actually putting points into skills, give characters a fixed point pool of, say, 5 points at creation. Putting 1 point into a skill gives you a +1 with that skill, while putting 2 points into a skill gives you a +2 and 3 points gives you a +3. You don't need more than a +3 on 3d6 to be significantly more effective than an unskilled person if you use a skill chart similar to the one below:

Total Roll	Skill Result
3-6	Horrible Failure. (F)
7-10	So close! (D)
10-12	Just barely. (C)
13-15	A solid success. (B)
16-18	A job well done. (A)
19+	Holy Shit! Did you guys see that? (S)

Basically, character creation would be:
1. Pick a Hook.
2. Spend your skill points.
3. MC either rolls for or selects your Schroedinger's Superpower (if any).
4. Name your duder.
5. Actually play the darn game.

Additional skill points? Why? Solving the mystery should be your goal, not accruing additional pluses. Okay, maybe dole out 1 additional point when major campaign milestones happen, like every few months or so, but generally even the most advanced characters probably shouldn't have more than 10-12 skill points. That way, your party of characters actually has to depend on each other to accomplish goals - a James Bond-type character who has +3 at everything is not going to create any sense of interdependence or tension.

echo

[echoVanguard]

More stuff about cards and skills:

Skills

Accruing bonuses sounds boring, so skills should be arranged by labeled tiers:

Rank	Bonus	Cost
Unskilled	+0	Free
Novice	+1	1 Skill Point
Journeyman	+2	2 Skill Points
Expert	+3	3 Skill Points

As far as skill DCs, the success table above is a good start, but you should also have thresholds.

Skill Difficulty	Success Level Required
Very Easy	Don't roll for this kind of thing, what's wrong with you
Easy	D
Standard	C
Challenging	B
Very Difficult	A
Virtually Impossible	S

As a general rule, any task where a failure wouldn't be interesting to watch in a movie is not worth rolling for. Logging into your email, searching a file cabinet, climbing a ladder - anything that's just assumed to happen in a story.

Cards

Each player starts play with 3 cards. Anytime the group advances the story in any way, however minor, all players receive 1 additional card. Players are also dealt an additional card each time their characters witness anything strange (so if multiple characters witness the event, multiple players receive a card from it). Players can only hold a maximum of 5 cards - if a player would receive a card that puts them over the limit, they must discard one of their existing cards (their choice) to make room. At the end of each session, players record how many cards are in their hand; at the start of the next session, players are dealt that many cards from the deck, so players don't have any incentive to record which specific cards they had (keeping the process of determining card value fuzzy).

These mechanics reinforce the mood you're trying to create - characters confronted with strange things find themselves tainted and drawn in by the strangeness. They can't hoard cards, but can never be sure if the cards they're expending actually have any value. Over time, a player can develop hunches about how best to use their cards (learning, for example, that a 7 of Diamonds can be good in situations where gunfire is involved), but they can never be sure - for all they know, the gunfire was totally irrelevant, and the card was meaningful because it was Tuesday.

echo

[virgil]

This isn't touching on much of the thread's history, but still relevant. What kind of adventures are the players expected to engage in? What is their motivation to stick together and fight that which cannot be observed? The very premise hinders legitimate & visible advancement of their character's powers, possessions, and even mundane social network; which itself hinders long-term investment in the game.

This makes me think of the same issue that Call of Cthulhu has; it encourages one-shots because it's difficult to sustain the narrative momentum for a full-on campaign.

[Username17]

This isn't touching on much of the thread's history, but still relevant. What kind of adventures are the players expected to engage in? What is their motivation to stick together and fight that which cannot be observed? The very premise hinders legitimate & visible advancement of their character's powers, possessions, and even mundane social network; which itself hinders long-term investment in the game.

This makes me think of the same issue that Call of Cthulhu has; it encourages one-shots because it's difficult to sustain the narrative momentum for a full-on campaign.

It scales up a bit better than Call of Cthulhu because there is The Conspiracy. As discussed in GURPS Illuminati, you can pick at the corners of conspiracies for an arbitrarily long time, peeling back an unlimited number of onion layers and being diverted by however many false leads the players will put up with.

While you could do it as a one shot in the manner of Dark City or The Matrix, where the players uncover the Big Lie and solve everything, you could also do it X-Files style, where you have a series of investigations that put together a corpus of weird shit until the players either decide to buy a vowel or get bored of the game.

-Username17

[Orion]

Why does this game even need a robust combat system anyway? That honestly seems pretty unrelated to the themes, and likely to create the most problems for magic ambiguity.

[TheFlatline]

Why does this game even need a robust combat system anyway? That honestly seems pretty unrelated to the themes, and likely to create the most problems for magic ambiguity.

Well eventually you're going to want conflict resolution. And since the magic system is *really* good at coincidental shit like "you missed shooting at the guy" that means that people who know the power you have if they want to stop you physically are going to punch you or stab you or something similar.

It may be anti-thematic, but it does need to be addressed.

[Username17]

Having a combat system doesn't necessarily mean that you keep track of 2 meter hexes and zones of control and shit. Combat could, and probably should, be a lot more abstract than a game like D&D or Champions offers.

A Fate style combat system where environmental elements are "invoked" for advantages would seem more in keeping with theme. I mean, you'd want it to be over and done with in a lot less rolls and time than Spirit of the Century, but that's easily done.

-Username17

[Orion]

Why does a system like that need "melee?"

[TheFlatline]

Why does a system like that need "melee?"

It doesn't look like it is in the OP but one of the original conceits of the magic system is that the more coincidental that the magic you're invoking is, the more readily it works.

Trained police officers can, and have, shot at someone at less than 15 feet range upwards of 100 times and missed. Most people in a firefight already can't hit shit and think they're aiming just fine. Even hardcore trained professionals and SWAT and shit who practice CQB miss.

So Doubt's magic means that shooting someone with a gun stands an excellent chance of missing the Doubter. Maybe they missed to begin with, maybe the Doubter moved the trajectory of the bullet. Even the doubter doesn't know if it was luck, ineptitude, or their abilities.

However, if I grab the Doubter and start stabbing them with a knife, it's absurd to think that all 30 stabs are going to miss. If I throw a punch square into their face and they don't dodge, there are *very* few situations where I won't connect. Same with a sword. If I swing an arc and you don't jump out of the way, I'm going to connect. Doubters' magic fails in those situations because it's too obvious you're using an ability. So fights tend to concentrate on melee.

I guess archery would work too since you could track the flight of the arrow, but it still might veer off at an angle or something, and be somewhere in the middle.

[Orion]

Sure, but that doesn't actually mean you need a fancy system for melee positioning and maneuvers and whatnot. You can seriously just have knives get an attack bonus vs. magic.

[TheFlatline]

Sure, but that doesn't actually mean you need a fancy system for melee positioning and maneuvers and whatnot. You can seriously just have knives get an attack bonus vs. magic.

That's... basically what Frank said that prompted your question.

I'm lost.

[Whipstitch]

Well, oftentimes fancy maneuvers and such are there to provide alternatives to murder rather than just serving as the rock to your opponent's scissors. However, coming up with satisfying snatch 'n' grab, feigned surrender and capture mechanics is a huge pain in the ass, and that's a real bummer in the conspiracy thriller genre.