The Gaming Den

It's amazing how many different stories you can tell with this setting. I mean, we've already got the Lovecraft and the Power Rangers, and the Sailor Moon, and everything else that's just supposed to be there by default. But also almost anything in the style of World of Darkness (or somewhat similar works like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Castelvania, especially the 203X ones but earlier ones could even be managed by keeping things focused on a single, weird Zone) is on the table, iron age and other vaguely D&D-esque adventures are on the table for any part of dream Mars that hasn't been subjugated by the Lemurians (and I think there should be some backwater regions that are still like that, because one-faction regions are boring even when that's the regions' homebase), almost any kind of alien invasion story is on the table, advance the timeline by just a decade or two (possibly after completing a campaign that wraps up existing threats) and you can run standard sci-fi. There's hardly anything that couldn't be squeezed into the setting without invalidating any other parts of it at all. It's like Munchkin except somehow it got here without being a joke.

Given this, I think this game would benefit a lot from being packaged with effective tools to create new monsters and locations. Obviously we can't cover all of this ground and 90% of it isn't the main focus of the game anyway, but if a GM wants to run an adventure where a squad of Sailor Scouts crash lands midway between Neo Tokyo and Angel Grove, land in some backwater zone out in the boonies, and now have to storm Castlevania to get the airports open again, that should be as doable as possible.

It seems like, with Kaiju stage, there should be an option for a "limit form" type of powerup, where you overcharge your powers and they work at kaiju tier and give you kaiju level durability, all despite still being a human-ish sized creature. So, this would be like The Hulk punching out a space whale in The Avengers (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msRaooooyds), and Haruko flying on a guitar and shooting the Medical Mechanica gun-robot with her mega-scaled slingshot (http://youtu.be/ApGnaeTY0nI?t=17m20s).

Edit:
But also of course, Limit Form would be limited in duration some how.

Lokathor wrote:It seems like, with Kaiju stage, there should be an option for a "limit form" type of powerup, where you overcharge your powers and they work at kaiju tier and give you kaiju level durability, all despite still being a human-ish sized creature. So, this would be like The Hulk punching out a space whale in The Avengers (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msRaooooyds), and Haruko flying on a guitar and shooting the Medical Mechanica gun-robot with her mega-scaled slingshot (http://youtu.be/ApGnaeTY0nI?t=17m20s).

Yep.

So we do in fact want five flavors of Majokko, because that is how you make Sentai teams. The old W:tT elements work pretty good for this, as does the spirit animals concept. So being a Majokko, you gain access to enhanced physicals so that you can do ridiculous jumps and get punched through walls by monsters without breaking your spine - but you also get your elemental paths that give you your default special moves, and access to some slightly more "sorcerous" magic that you can learn.

Character	Element	Spirit Animal	Other Magic
Usagi	Blood	Rabbit	Mask of Nyarlothotep
Rei	Fire	Raven	Divination of Flame
Ami	Water	Turtle	Open the Third Eye
Lita	Metal	Dragon	Call Down the Storm
Mina	Earth	Tiger	Cloud Memory
Hotaru	Blood	Owl	Spectral Razor
Setsuna	Earth	Wolf	Forestall Sunrise
Fuu	Metal	Swan	Circle of Protection
Hikaru	Fire	Fox	Release the Shadow Soul
Umi	Water	Serpent	Forestall Sunrise

Now Summoners don't often work in Sentai teams, and we would only make five flavors of them if we felt compelled to have symmetry. However, I would say that since they are Pokemasters at heart, that they need to have at least three options for their starting (and primary) Summon. That's their Pikachu - the monster that stays level appropriate and is used all the time. The minimum here would be to have three choices that roughly speaking correspond to Charizard, Blastoise, and Venusaur. This being a Mythos work, they are Shantak, Byakhee, and Nightgaunt. All three of them fly, and can be used by the Summoner to fly around. We could certainly add starting options like Star Vampire, Dimensional Shambler, and Hunting Horror, but that's optional.

Summoners get new powers Bluemage style, where they beat up monsters and put them into cards. They actually use a "spells readied" system where they can bind themselves a certain number of cards at a time and then they can activate powers from the cards they have bound. So a Summoner that fights lots of different kinds of monsters and spirits has more options for how to outfit themselves for a particular mission, but they don't necessarily have any more powers they can draw upon during a particular fight. Their starting Shantak kun does not change or get swapped out, but it gets more powerful over time.

-Username17

For the remainder of this post, I'm going to talk about the power tiers as "Guard", "Scout", and "Kaiju". GlaxoSmithKline will be so happy.

So let's talk about Psychics. Most people with Psychic Powers in source material are like Kotoura-san: they have various ill-defined powers like mind reading, premonitions, or remote viewing, and those powers are rather on the small end, and fairly unreliable. There are lots of examples of Guard Tier psychics, and rather fewer examples of Scout or Kaiju Tier psychics. But they do exist. Our anime source material is Akira, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, and s-CRY-ed.

A major theme of psionics in Anime is how nearly (or completely) uncontrolled they are. While characters can sit around meditating and focusing to produce specific effects, that is usually a lot of work and the results aren't that impressive. Psionic power lashes out all the time, and pretty much all of the uses of psychic power in combat situations are characters just letting their psychic powers zap something spontaneous in some direction or another. Clearly, this is a WoF mechanism. Every combat turn a psychic gets a random assortment of available powers and they can choose which (if any) to unleash.

There are ways to modify that, a psionicist can spend time in psionic focus meditation to narrow their psychic manifestions to a single thing. And they can push themselves to make whatever manifestation they happen to have available even bigger by bleeding from the nose.

The actual things that psychic powers can do fit into roughly three categories:

• ESP - this lets you remote view, have glimmers of the future, read minds, send telepathic communications, track people by emotional vibrations on their teddy bears, and all that stuff. It is invisible, and at the Guard Tier it is pretty much exclusively useful in an information gathering capacity. Higher tiers of it allow you to project illusions into peoples' heads, use mind blasts, and even psychically dominate the weak willed. Kaiju tiered ESPers exist primarily through the expedient of pithing a kaiju and puppeting it around.
• Telekinesis - this lets you move objects with your mind. It exists, but is rare at the Guard tier. Telekinetics at Scout Tier have personal forcefields, can make things explode, and fly. Our default kaiju tiered Telekinetic is of course Tetsuo, so really he gets by with just a better forcefield that is a big enough damage sink that it takes a lot of hammering before kaiju-scale weapons get through and start hitting "all" of his locations.
• Poltergeist - this lets you create a psychic construct that does stuff on your behalf. It would be tempting to make this the same thing as Telekinesis, and if it were D&D we'd probably just do that. But looking at Akira and s-CRY-ed, they are clearly distinct. Psychic constructs are visible, and can take the form of power armor or independently moving creatures. The Kaiju-scale Poltergeist is the Id Monster from Forbidden Planet, being as it is just a Stand that happens to be really big.

A majority of psychics are Changelings, but there are wild-type psychics in the general population. Untrained psychics can be taken over without warning by body jumping Yithians, a fact which creates anti-psychic prejudice in a lot of zones. This is of course maladaptive, as anti-psychic prejudice reduces the number of self-reporting psychics and increases the Yithian recruitment pool.

-Username17

Is shooting beams of fire or lightning with your mind a Telekinesis? Because that needs to be in. Also, Ice and Starstorms. And some sort of fast regeneration technique. Anything in Earthbound should probably be available as a psychic power, even if it's mostly restricted to Scout tier. Psychic elemental attacks largely amount to a Rocket Launcher that you can't be disarmed of.

Guard Tier Telekinesis seems like you'd be able to get "Empire Strikes Back Luke" quality object movement, even if you can't get force fields or make yourself fly.

What does a psychic get out of it in a zone without psi-prejudice when they do report? There needs to be a somewhat good deal, such as access to mental resistance training, or they won't self report even in zones without psi-prejudice.

Lokathor wrote:Is shooting beams of fire or lightning with your mind a Telekinesis? Because that needs to be in. Also, Ice and Starstorms. And some sort of fast regeneration technique. Anything in Earthbound should probably be available as a psychic power, even if it's mostly restricted to Scout tier. Psychic elemental attacks largely amount to a Rocket Launcher that you can't be disarmed of.

Guard Tier Telekinesis seems like you'd be able to get "Empire Strikes Back Luke" quality object movement, even if you can't get force fields or make yourself fly.

What does a psychic get out of it in a zone without psi-prejudice when they do report? There needs to be a somewhat good deal, such as access to mental resistance training, or they won't self report even in zones without psi-prejudice.

Mental Resistance training is standard and non-negotiable. You either get it or you go to jail. This is for your own safety as much as everyone's.
This isn't a terrible deal, since it means you probably won't be bodyjacked by aliens from the distant past who are losing a war with flying polyps in their own time, which is good.

After that, you get options. If you want to work for the government, there are plenty of jobs open. At the Guard Tier, ESPers are incredibly useful. They're used to augment background checks, to assist in investigations, to interview witnesses and interrogate suspects. Court ESPers, who do nothing but scan witnesses to make sure they're not lying, get paid really well. In a controlled environment like an interrogation room, ESPers are incredibly boss and their paychecks reflect their rarity.

Outside the government, a registered, trained, and certified ESPer can get a position with any major corporation, monitoring business negotiations, screening executives, and that sort of thing. If they're willing to bend the law, they can even do some corporate espionage. They get paid even better than their government counterparts and are worth every penny.

Guard Tier Telekinetics are extremely useful in fields where direct manipulation of objects is impossible or hazardous. While their power level is low, they can perform fine manipulations of very tiny objects with the aid of a microscope, and are thus extremely useful in certain research and R&D fields. They're likely to be given educations and well-paying jobs, too.


Guard Tier Poltergeists, I'm not sure what they'd bring to the table or even that there should be any. We can hammer that out when we spell out their powers.


Basically, being born a psychic is exactly like being born with a rare and indispensable ability that can make you a fuckton of money. Being a registered psychic means that you can actually apply for jobs that have "psychic powers" as a requirement.

At Scout Tier things are a bit different, because once you hit that point you become a strategic resource. Being a strategic resource means that the government treats you like a rock star, but it also means that you might be drafted to fight monsters with your mind. If you're a patriot or a hero type, this isn't a problem. If you aren't, then the risk still isn't that great and the potential rewards are huge because you can still get civilian employment if you do the reserve forces thing.

Scout Tier Espers will mostly be doing interrogation and remote viewing work, just at a higher level. They sit safe in a bunker all day and get paid well for their time. Some of them might be brainwashing people. A rare few will be doing real James Bond style field work.

TKs and Poltergeists will be more likely to be deployed in the field.


Kaiju Tier isn't that much different than Scout Tier, but refusal to register is more likely to end with the phrase "blaze of glory" than not. It's kind of hard to hide a giant id monster rampaging though downtown LA, and the Sailor Scouts won't hesitate to rainbow heart beam you to death in order to stop it.

Lore-wise, is there a divide between what is psychic and what is magical?


The Scout/Ranger transformation class, would it also be the same class for Guyvers and Kamenriders, or is there a separate class planned for that.

This also seems like it'd be solid for a Shin Megami Tensei RPG, with magic using humans, demi-fiends, stand users, and zoanoid morphers.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8lvDXZzzKQ
SMT: Digital Devil Saga is about guys in an eternal warzone who suddenly get transformed into demons from a lotus falling from the sky.

Psychic powers are inherent to the person with the powers. You either have them, or you don't and generally speaking, you cannot gain them if you do not already have them.

Magic works by contacting things from beyond that have psychic powers and either compelling them to serve you (if you're a summoner) or by convincing them to imbue you with powers (if you're a Majokko).

OB wrote:Lore-wise, is there a divide between what is psychic and what is magical?

That depends on the source material. In the anime source material, very much yes. Psychic powers are the things that happen to you whether you want them to or not - and if you don't learn to control them, they will control you; meanwhile magic is stuff pretty much anyone could pick up and use but if you don't happen to have great mental fortitude and you aren't the reincarnation of a fairy princess or anything - it is going to go bad for you and you're going to end up eaten or raped or both by a demon. In actual Lovecraft, psionics and magic are exactly the same thing, and indeed you use any magic simply by psychically contacting aliens whose own psychic powers do amazing things (and your sanity breaks when this happens because finding out about observer effects in physics melts your brain). But in many other Mythos writings, such as Lumley, there is a psionics/magic divide.

We're definitely going for a psionics/magic divide. It doesn't contradict Lovecraft that much, and is a major point in a bunch of other source material we're using. Also because in the post-quantum mechanics world we live in, the story that Newtonian physics is wrong and actually everything works the way it does because it is being stared at by a nigh-all-powerful godlike being in the center of the universe is a fairy story people like Deepak Chopra tells to people to make them feel better. Because actual physics is even more horrible and incomprehensible than that. Frankly, Lumley's spells are a lot cooler than Lovecraft's spells, because Lovecraft mostly left the spells unnamed (which is why so many spells in the CoC RPG have shitty placeholder names like "Dominate"), while Lumley gave spells names like "The Soul Sealing of Naath-Tith", which is way better.

Lokathor wrote:Is shooting beams of fire or lightning with your mind a Telekinesis? Because that needs to be in. Also, Ice and Starstorms.

Fire and Lightning yes. Ice maybe, but I think probably not. Starstorms absolutely not. Let's remind ourselves what Starstorms look like:



Yeah, no. If you want to have a bunch of Stars of David come and seal enemies, that is a magic spell.

But yes of the fire and lightning. As a Scout Tier Psion, you're basically a Sith. So if you want Force Lightning or Carrie style pyromancy, that's appropriate.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:Carrie style pyromancy

I'm feeling the heat

So let's say we want to make a Majokko. The first thing we do is make a character who the Majokko template can apply to: Human, Changeling, Ghoul, or Deep One (? I'm not sure if Deep Ones can be mahou senshi or not, I could see that going either way). Then we start applying the Majokko template and we pick what power Nyarlothotep has inflicted on us: we choose the Yellow Sign of Hastur, which now appears on our forehead whenever we are in highly stressful circumstances or transformed into our monster fighting form. Because we have the Yellow Sign going, we get to pick our basic elemental halos off the Earth list:

Consuming Earth

• Dust to Dust:
  Weight of Aeons:
  Stilling the Voice:

Nurturing Earth

• Avalanche of Stone:
  Rain into the Sky:
  Hideous Aegis:

Grasping Earth

• Century's Briars:
  Crushing Root and Trunk:
  Thorns of Agony:

We now pick a spirit animal, which is primarily of import because it shows up during our attacks, but also provides SR style Totem Bonuses. Our choices are Tiger, Ox, Rat, and Wolf. We get the spirit animal boosts all the time, and even more physical boosts when we switch to monster hunter form.

But that's not all. We also get to learn a bit of high magic that comes straight to us in dreams. We get to thumb through the spell list and grab whatever we want. Currently, the spell list looks like this:

Call Down the Storm: Change the weather.
Cloud Memory: Alter, remove, or enhance memories of an event.
Divination of Flame: See visions of distant locations or future events in fire.
Dread Curse of Azathoth: Creates a palpable doom.
Flesh Ward: Protects living creatures by transforming physical anguish into nightmares.
Forestall Sunrise: Manipulate the flow of time to your advantage.
Mask of Nyarlothotep: Assume the visage of another person or creature of roughly your size.
Open the Third Eye: Pierce illusions and see through concealment.
Release the Shadow Soul: Create a duplicate with a portion of your soul.
Sixth Sathlattae: Opens a gateway between the Dreamlands and the waking world.
Soul Sealing of Naath-Tith: Create a protective ward that can be used to keep creatures out or in.
Spectral Razor: Disrupt other dimensions, causing great damage to extradimensional creatures.
Zoan Chant: Counters and reverses magical effects.

---

I think we're going to want more than 13 spells obviously, but I think 9 elemental halos per element is likely to be plenty.

-Username17

Deep Ones should be able to take the Majokko template. Mechanically, they're just humans with the Amphibious and Ageless traits who look like fish-frog-human hybrids. The Ageless trait doesn't prevent them from burning out, so no 10,000 year old majokko, it only kicks in at 30.

Majokko should probably get the "Batman can breath in Space" trait as part of their passive powerset. We can call that the Breathless trait, or something. So being a Deep One doesn't give any significant mechanical advantage to a Majokko. It's only an issue of flavor.


And as for flavor, I'd go so far as to argue that pubescent Mi-Go princesses can be mahou senshi, just to mind-screw people.

When the elemental halos were going to be for a nWoD splat, they were arranged into a series of basic, advanced, expert progressions. But for this, I think they should just be grab bags. The collection into mini-groups is for ease of memorization primarily, and should probably just refer to collections of abilities that run off the same attribute/skill combinations or whatever. If you decide to go for a Cleansing Fire power, you know that the way you spec your character is going to synergize with the other Cleansing Fire powers.

But anyway, let's talk a bit about the character types who are constitutively Scout Tier: the Goat Spawn and the Oni. In either case, you get to play a "demon highschool girl" or "demon career soldier" or whatever. And in either case when Hounds of Tindalos start rampaging in the street you can fight it out right then and there. Backstory wise, the Goat Spawn are tieflings whose demonic ancestors are working for the Abyss while the Oni are displaced outsiders who simply happen to look like slightly demonic humans. But with a little bit of work I think they could feel more different than Tieflings and Succubi do in D&D.

First, the Goat Spawn. They vary in how human and how goatish they look. So you can be like this or like this, or perhaps in between. In any case, you have shape shifting powers and can shift all the way from looking like a beautiful normal human to the Full Broo. They don't have wings, and if they really demon out, it is by sprouting fibrous black tentacles.

Second, the Oni. Our source material is large Urusei Yatsura and Disgaea, so our Oni don't get outrageous goat horns or sprout rapey tentacles. So you get to look like this, this, or this, which is to say that I guess we're talking about the Succubus from Castlevania. We're talking about having big ears like an Elf from Lodoss Wars or characters from Disgaea. Also: they have wings. Big, black, bat wings, and despite absurd weight ratios they can use them to fly.

The Goat Spawn in actual Mythos fiction are generally pretty underwhelming. People totally allow themselves to get tentacle molested by Dark Young in order to get transformed into giant goat hybrids, and much is made of the Real Ultimate Power that one has for being an evil, lusty half goat. But I can't really recall them actually doing much. I mean, they rape people, and they drive people to suicide and stuff, but when people Baphomet-out into Gof'nn hupadgh (or just start Baphometized as a Goat Spawn), and they are described as "full of dark power", they really ought to be capable of more than just overpowering some random person and impregnating them. This actually gives us a lot of leeway as to what they can actually do from a powers standpoint. In the Mythos, all the powers of Goat Spawn that the players care about are used off camera. So we can write in whatever we want.

Now, I feel that the Oni are on much Firmer Ground as to what they can do. They make fire explosions (which may or may not be homing orbs of exploding fire), they make temporary duplicates of themselves, and they gate in stuff. At the Kaiju Tier they can gate in really big stuff. This seems like a viable and scalable character.

-Username17

So brainstorming things for the Goat Spawn splat to do. You come to the table and say "I'm playing a Goat Spawn", and that means something to the other players. In the same way that saying that you're playing a Werewolf or a Baali has meaning to players in a game of After Sundown. Here are some things it could mean:

Melee Monster

• The Goat Spawn are like four generations removed from actual kaiju, and they are just really tough. When they hulk out and sprout tentacles, they can rip things to shreds.

Item Master

• Between their great strength, their extra manipulative tendrils, and their all-important ability to wield crazy crap like the sword of y'ha talla without technically touching it, Goat Spawn can use more and better weapons than other characters, and are expected to Doc Ock their way into a bunch of gadgets and artifacts in battle.

Assassin

• They can turn into ordinary looking humans, they can blend in shadows, they can turn invisible, and they can evoke feelings of sympathy in humans and tentacle monsters with their Abyssian magics. Essentially they can travel most battlefields unimpeded, and set up kill shots and sneak attacks before they go back into hiding.

Sorcerer

• Having Abyssian heritage, Goat Spawn grow up knowing a great deal of magic and can utilize it without suffering massive problems. Heck, even physical corruption from using the nastier curses can just be shapeshifted away.

Decoy

• Goat Spawn can draw attention to themselves. The same abilities that they are supposed to use to inflame lust in potential mates can be used to taunt invading monsters into attacking them. Meanwhile, they are tough as trees and regenerate, meaning that attacking a Goat Spawn is probably the least effective thing an invading Hunting Horror could be doing with its rampage time.

We don't have to have them doing all or even most of those things, but I think the flavor text for any of those splat concepts mostly writes itself.

-Username17

I'm still trying to think of a way to fit Oni into the timeline. Obviously, having them displaced by the Lemurians doesn't work, because the Lemurians were basically founded by the KKK and can't have displaced anyone who is scout-tier by default. They needed time and ancient alien artifacts to set up their civilization as it was.

I'm sort of wondering if Elder Things would work as our Oni. Obviously, they're barrel shaped plant people with five eyes on stalks instead of big-breasted succubi, but at least they've got the wings.


However, since Elder Thing reproduction is slow as crap, and they don't have a viable gene pool left, anyway, we could have them bioengineer children who look humanoid, but are really elder-things, biologically. Thus when your bat-winged teenage girlfriend introduces you to her dad, he's a giant barrel-shaped winged plant super-scientist with a starfish shaped head. This also limits their population, since the first generation of Oni will only be reaching maturity recently.

FrankTrollman wrote:(? I'm not sure if Deep Ones can be mahou senshi or not, I could see that going either way).

Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch, such as it is, is a decent reason for them to be able to do so.

The obvious way to stick the Oni in is to have them move to Earth from L'gy'hx (Uranus) and to originally be from Shaggai. They are moving from world to world, fleeing the doom that came to Shaggai (the planet destroyer Ghroth).

-Username17

Chamomile wrote:It's amazing how many different stories you can tell with this setting.

It's a game where THIS is possible:

A playable form of RIFTS has finally dawned. Nobody tell K.S

... speaking of which, are the mechanical foundations down? Is this pretty much using the After Sundown rules?

OB wrote:... speaking of which, are the mechanical foundations down? Is this pretty much using the After Sundown rules?

Both hyzmarca and myself are quite familiar with writing in a dicepool system, so that would probably be the base, yes. The core action resolution would be After Sundown, with probably some mildly different inputs like having a different skill list. Also having different playable races with different starting attribute caps. We might switch over to TN4 to help keep dice pool size down.

The big difference is going to be combat, which is going to figure much more heavily in the game and take elements from Warp Cult and Battletech. You're going to have facing, hit locations, and location-based wound effects. This is so that the game can scale up to ripping the arms off of giant monsters and robots. Also for scaling purposes, characters get a lot more automatic hits on soak tests.

The big question is whether to put characters on square bases (where your front, rear, and flanks are equal sized) or hex bases (where your front is bigger than your flanks). Tanks and quadrupeds would of course get special bases regardless.

-Username17

A bit more on changing the target number base.

A higher target number makes attacks more deadly by the expedient of making both attack rolls and soak rolls more prone to spit out results that are higher or lower than expected. And since you explode and die because of a higher than expected damage output or a lower expected soak, those higher chances of extreme results translate directly to larger chances of critical injuries and deaths.

To see how this works, let's look at the circumstance where you are rolling a pile of dice whose average output is 2 hits:
[mroll]Target Number[/td][td]# of Dice[/td][td]Chance of Zero Hits[/td][td]Maximum Critical Result [/td][/tr]

3	3	3.7%	+1
4	4	6.25%	+2
5	6	8.78%	+4

The higher target numbers require more dice to be rolled and give swingier outputs. Now personally, I think TN3 is likely not swingy enough. But TN4 looks pretty good, and of course TN5 has demonstrated that it does work.

In any case, we'd probably be keeping the "Edge" mechanic, whereby you can buy some dice and also unlock exploding 6s.

-Username17

I'm still not sure that we can do the scaling justice on a dice pool system, even with autohits, but I'll roll with it.

At TN 4, our average stat value will be 2 and our trained professional skill value will probably be 1 or 2. Untrained get a -1 die and thus an average untrained character can expect half a hit. In a gunfight, that means 50% accuracy, which is a hell of a lot better than real people do.

A standard guard tier mook will be rolling three dice and expecting 1.5 hits per roll and a 12.5% chance of failure, thus will miss 1/8th of the time in open field combat.

Depending on our skill list, we might also want to have a category called basic skills, or simple skills, or whatever that can be used untrained without penalty, so that people with a stat of 1 don't automatically fail to tie their shoelaces, but that's a given.

The big problem with smaller dice pools is the loss of granularity, especially at the low end. You can mitigate that with by using TNs but higher thresholds and dice pools, but that just gets absurd at the high end.

Okay, since we're using hit-locations, all weapons have a fixed proportional damage code and all locations have a 10 point bar of proportional damage.
Extra hits do not increase damage, but instead allow you to modify your hit location roll. More skill means more precision.

There are four Damage Levels, Light, Medium, Serious, and Deadly.

Each weapon us assigned a tier (Guard, Scout, Kaiju). Scout tier is roughly equivalent to armored vehicles, ranging from light APCs to main battle tanks. Attacks against targets of a higher tier do -2 damage levels to a minimum of 0 (A Serious HMG does Light damage to a Scout and no damage to a Kaiju). Attacks against Targets of a lower tier they do +2 damage levels and may hit multiple locations. A Light Mech Rifle does Deadly +1 to a Guard and hits all his locations, so he's literally a fine red mist.

A Medium Bazooka (St) does Medium Damage against a Scout, kills a guard, and bounces off a Kaiju.

Actually, you don't even need to have weapon tiers. You can just let weapons do deadly+X damage and give higher tier characters even more autosoak.

hyzmarca wrote:At TN 4, our average stat value will be 2 and our trained professional skill value will probably be 1 or 2. Untrained get a -1 die and thus an average untrained character can expect half a hit. In a gunfight, that means 50% accuracy, which is a hell of a lot better than real people do.

Alternately, we have the threshold to hit something be range based (simple example: 1 for Short, 2 for medium, 3 for Long) and then untrained people need to take aim actions to have a chance in hell of hitting a man sized target at medium range. That starts looking a lot more realistic. If Mr. Untrained spends an action aiming to hit a target one time in four with his next shot, that seems plausible.

When you're on fixed target number, you scale up difficulty for things by increasing the required threshold to succeed.

hyzmarca wrote:Actually, you don't even need to have weapon tiers. You can just let weapons do deadly+X damage and give higher tier characters even more autosoak.

Exactly. An autosoak that is 4 higher would bounce what would have been a deadly wound. So if a bigger tier thingy has like 3 points of autosoak and 2 more soak dice, it's almost completely out of your league.

hyzmarca wrote:The big problem with smaller dice pools is the loss of granularity, especially at the low end.

To a certain degree we don't care all that much. While many characters are highschoolers, I think it's OK if Shinji is simply literally incapable of accomplishing anything by throwing punches at a magic martial artist. That seems like an acceptable result.

hyzmarca wrote:You can mitigate that with by using TNs but higher thresholds and dice pools, but that just gets absurd at the high end.

I think you oversell this problem. By setting the basic threshold of a modestly difficult action to 2, and giving people with a poor prognosis 2 dice to do it, we've given them a 1 in 4 chance of success. That's slightly worse than the basic 1 in 3 chance you have on a minimum 1-die test in Shadowrun. That puts some upward pressure on Extraordinary Success, but only by one hit. So the basic extraordinary success roll is 6 hits instead of 5. But at TN4, that's still 12 nominal dice to SR4's 15. So I don't think we're going overboard here.

hyzmarca wrote:Depending on our skill list, we might also want to have a category called basic skills, or simple skills, or whatever that can be used untrained without penalty, so that people with a stat of 1 don't automatically fail to tie their shoelaces, but that's a given.

A definite advantage to giving people a 2 die buy-in for being an untrained schlub and setting the basic threshold to 2 hits is that we can then lower the threshold to 1 hit for bullshit tasks and then untrained schlubs will succeed most of the time (75%). Heck, that's better odds than you get with 3 dice against the easiest task that SR4 can model (70.4%). And untrained schlubs don't even have 3 dice to rub together in SR4.

hyzmarca wrote:Extra hits do not increase damage, but instead allow you to modify your hit location roll. More skill means more precision.

Agreed. But I wouldn't be adversed to having a critical success on an attack roll also knock up damage by a level.

hyzmarca wrote:There are four Damage Levels, Light, Medium, Serious, and Deadly.

Genuine question: might it be easier to have a series of damage results for each hit rather than tracking damage levels on each limb? I mean, you get the level 2 Arm Injury and it gives you:


And then you don't have to track damage points. Neither by limb or total. You just keep going with whatever wound effects you have on you until one of them comes up that says you are knocked out or killed. You could even have a morale level that would determine how many wound cards you could take before you had to fuck off (and mooks would have a morale of like 1 or 2).

I'm not sure whether that would be easier or more difficult than filling in bubbles on a stick figure like in BattleTech.

-Username17

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

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.

The Death of a Thousand papercuts is the biggest problem. If a light wound to the hand breaks a finger, then the players have to keep track of how many broken fingers they have on both hands and we have to decide how many broken fingers equals a broken hand. Likewise with ribs and torsos.

Not to mention the fact that we have to decide how a forearm is mechanically different from a broken hand is mechanically different from a dislocated shoulder.

It might give more realism, but it's a lot more work on both sides of the table.


So instead we assign an effects and penalties to wound levels. Say a 3 boxes of arm damage reduces range of motion and lifting capacity, a 6 boxes renders the hand useless, 10 destroys the limb. That's easier to keep track of. Or just use abstract modifiers, which is easier, but less realistic.