POWERS ARE GOE

[Joose]

Hot piss! The first draft of my RPG, going under the working title of Powers, is ready to rawk. Get it HERE and look at it with your eyes.

One thing that I haven't mentioned in the document itself, but is probably worth pointing out: I wanted the game to be massively flexible, but simple to play. The only way I could think of getting both of those things is to move all the complex bullshit working stuff out bits to the outside of game time: the prep time that you normally spend making characters, advancing characters, chatting to your GM and so on. I figure it doesn't matter how complicated that bit gets (as long as its still understandable) as there is no time limit. This should (hopefully) mean that when it comes to sitting down and playing, everything you will need to know is in front of you on your character sheet, and every roll should basically boil down to "look up number on your sheet, roll that many dice, ask GM if that's enough to win"

Anyway, post feedback here to start with! Yay!

[mrbobbins]

Cool, will have a look through and give it a go

Are you taking feedback on speling and gramer?

[Joose]

My speeling and grammers are bad, so feel free to make corrections. The whole thing is a bit on the rough side at the moment though. A lot of it was written in a manic "must get words done fast before ideas dribble away" style, so its likely to be all over the shop. You might want to save them for later

[Dog Pants]

Pants Feedback Gotiem!

Stuff I like:
Minimalistic stats/equipment etc. Very City of Heroes, allows everyone to be creative and not bound by complicated rules. I'm really impressed at the basics, it feels solid and fast, but because of the lack of numbers it also feels like it can be very detailed if you want it to be.
I love the Fail/Epic Fail example. Smashing someone in the face so hard you knock them into a parallel dimension
Sprinting having to roll vs resilience. Good to see fitness implemented effectively while remaining easy to use. I've been puzzling over it for ages and got nothing close to how eloquent that is.

Stuff I'm a bit meh over:
That SR dice system again. It'll suffer from all the same problems, which I don't need to go over. However, they are used fairly minimally, so I don't outright dislike it.

Stuff I don't like:
Health - in a system with descriptives instead of figures for stuff with natural units of measurement, why put a number on something naturally abstract? An abstract health system could be a real boon here (see below).
Stellar speed should be Taupe, Galactic should be Ludicrous.

General comments:
Power Ratings - I don't quite understand how they dictate what you can do. Don't components and the power description do that? If it's used only for damage etc then people will end up putting allsorts of crazy components on them to up the damage. Also, if it's the same as the system used to buy the powers then you might struggle to balance the points out.
Movement - Doesn't explain that you can choose how many turns to reduce by. I worked it out from the example. Maybe just saying that while sprinting you can reduce the time taken by up to half.
Durations - The difference between Build Up, Build Down and Time is not clear. I think I know what you might be getting at by virtue of what I'd have put in there;
- Charge Up: As with delayed, but character must concentrate on ability each turn until it activates
- Cool Down: As with delayed, but ability goes instantly and can't be used for x turns
- Channel: Same as instant, however effect is continuous during the turn

Alternative damage system:
The great thing about losing hit points and using a more descriptive damage system is that the more damage you take the more you're gambling by staying in combat. If classes of damage can accumulate and have an effect they will reduce combat ability rather then being an on/off switch. How about this for a suggestion:

Amount of hits (damage over resilience) are, instead of just taken as points of damage, are accumulated as damage categories or rolled on an injury class table. For example, you roll an opposed damage of 3, you inflict three moderate wounds which will cause cumulative penalties, or you roll three times on a chart of similar disadvantages.
Using this system you could have the damage classes scale like distance/range/speed. For example: light, lethal, anti-vehicle, anti-tank, battlefield, strategic, cataclysmic, apocalyptic, nova. Lethal damage will be capable of killing humans and harming vehicles, but bounces off tanks. Battlefield scale weapons (artillery, bombs) will be almost guaranteed to kill a tank, will be guaranteed lethal to anything lower, will be likely to destroy, say, a warship or building, and can cause some damage to a hardened building. It will cause no lasting damage to the land or, say, a nuclear bunker. Strategic would be nuke-scale, cataclysmic could wipe out a continent, apocalyptic could destroy a planet, nova could destroy an entire system. And so on.
So you could rack up serious damage from equivalent level weapons, say guns used on humans. Each hit would cause cumulative effects of blood loss, shock and pain in some form, inducing penalties. The penalties could take the form of stun damage, which could be healed with first aid, anticoagulants, pain killers etc, so that you could begin to function again but the damage is still there. I've not quite worked out how the effects could eventually become lethal, but I think there'll be a way of doing it in keeping with the other aspects.

All in though, I like what you've done there

[FatherJack]

I like it a lot, but since whether I understood it or not on first reading is probably more useful to you at this stage, I'll just list what I found a bit confusing, rather than offer any particularly helpful alternatives. It reads in the order of the document, so may contain things that get explained later on.

Powers:
Henchmen are mentioned which excited me enormously, but their use in this game is never touched upon. I appreciate they would be probably be a complex Power which would need its own section, but it's the fact you mentioned them that I'm talking about.

Components:
You mention full-on Negative Powers being a possibility (perhaps as punishments), rather than just negative Components. An example would be good here - would it be a Power that could be made good by adding the right Components, or just a kind of joke/roleplaying Power that you had to work around?

Power Rating:
I was a bit unclear about this. Is there a set maximum Power Rating for all Powers, or does each Power have its own max PR? I don't really know what the PR actually means in practice, as it just seems to be an indication of current Power Level, not deterministic of what is possible. To wit, 'Power Level' would probably be a more descriptive name.

Attributes:
Okay, we have STR which determines Physical Attack, RES which determines Physical Defense, AGI is speed/dexterity and HEA is hitpoints. The other two I'm not clear on - WIL defends against Mental attacks, but is there a concept of magic in the game, which WIL would also defend against and if not magical, should it not defend against anything non-physical? The same for INT - does it govern the power of your Mental attacks (as well as possibly any other magical or non-physical attacks) ?

Dice Rolls:
The concept of a Dice Pool is familiar to people who've played Shadowrun, but perhaps needs a little more explanation as it was something it took me a while to get my head around in SR (and the use of the phrase 'Dice Pool' was key in this, as well as actually doing/seeing it real life at Beardbash and finding out just how much fun it was to roll a fistful of dices). It's perhaps worth saying in an Opposed Test that the dice pools are likely not equal - either you or the opponent are likely to have more dice to roll from.
The situational modifier is explained better in the Hitting a Target section, it's a bit confusing here. Prob best to just say "some things may modify the rolls/results" rather than the explicit comment here, then expand on that in the later section.

Fail and Epic Fail:
Are dice pools of only one or two dice very likely? In those cases Fails (and almost equally Epic Fails) are quite likely. I really like the concept and think they are tremendous fun, but worry about how often they might occur at low levels and how infrequently at high ones.
Are the results of a FailTable roll fairly equal in terms of severity - or is there a (say) 1-in-6 chance of getting something really bad on only a normal Fail?
Why is Bob rolling on Mind Shield for Super-Slap, which sounds like a physical attack?
You totally lost me on the PR of Super-Slap and Mind Shield being added - I'd like to see an example with actual values rolled, why adding the PRs is relevant, and how exactly one rolls "for that total".

Contradicting Rules:
Resilience is described as resisting physical damage in its description, not all damage.

Combat:
Basics:
It's worth adding the Initiative bonus to the description for INT as it's probably the first thing people will see when creating a character. A sniper for example might be tempted to pour extra points into his AGI so he always gets to act first, as he's pretty useless after his alpha strike, but neglect to put enough points in his INT to be able to figure out how to use his electronic zoomy scope.
I'm a bit unclear about the roll for Initiative - is it that the sum of AGI+INT(+mods)=dice pool? That could be a bit unwieldy, escpecially if it has to be done for all each round. I'm thinking about physical dice, to avoid everyone waiting while you count them out each turn, you'd have to have sets ready not just for each Power but a special one for Initiative.

Hitting a Target:
To me, this seems to place a very high value on your AGI attribute (plus Accurate+ mods) in that without a decent score in this area you'll pretty much never hit anything. I'm not sure what attributes you could factor in to compensate for it and to still make sense, but as it stands it appears as though a character with low AGI could plod up to within touching distance of enemies and empty a shotgun at them without a chance of ever causing a scratch. I suppose, rather than complicating the Hit/Miss calculation just for this example, Shotgun User (as a Power) could have a built-in Accurate boost at short range (diminishing over distance) that meant only extremely agile opponents could avoid damage at point-blank range.

Close to Death:
Can people be healed/stabilised? Is death permanent?

Move:
Why is RES used for sprinting, but not AGI? I assume AGI just makes their base speed higher, so it needs to be stressed this is them actively pushing themselves to move faster than they normally would. Edit: I've read DP's comments and it makes a lot more sense now, perhaps a note should be added in the Attributes section to make it clear that RES determines a character's fitness.
Wheeled could apply to regular car/bike wheels, to caterpillar tracks on a tank or everything inbetween - what's impassable to one isn't necessarily to the other.
Is there a facility for teleporting as a movement option?

Range:
How does targeting over huge distances work? I note the 'No LoS' modifier is there, but that seems at odds with the method explained in the Combat section for calculating accuracy, other than hit/miss.

Duration:
Is there an activation or sustained-use cost for anything not Always-On or Instant or Timed? Do Powers use up energy at all? If not, there doesn't seem to be much penalty to activating your Powers willy-nilly just in case of a battle. You mention a Concentration roll, but don't say what that's based off or how it's calculated.

Damage:
Why is there no negative damage, you could for example have a character who is healed by fire? You could counter this by making them take small amounts of damage when they are not on fire.
I think Sound as described is a bit weak and should either include shockwave or be omitted and bundled with Bashing. As it is it looks a bit of a cheap way to get extra Component points by nerfing yourself to Sound attacks. A shockwave (as you don't explicity name Air or Gravity as attack types) kind of falls under the umbrella of Sound - one could argue that Microwaves are a physical attack which produces heat as a side effect, so I'm guessing the general idea is not to be too technical here.
There's no mention of Phantom damage - does it apply to all non-physical damage, or just mental specifically?

Resistance:
Stun damage has me confused. How is Stun damage different to normal damage if the effect is the same, other than that it has to be resisted against separately? I can see a clear difference with Phantom resistance, in that resisting against it makes it go away entirely, but why bother to track Stun damage independently unless you can/have to heal it differently?


Other stuff that I though of while reading, pertaining to the non-physical/physical damage stuff was whether there was room to create non-corporeal characters (ghosts) who would be resistant to physical damage (and microwaves) but highy susceptible to other forms of damage, especially mental? Or perhaps invisible characters, which would be very difficult to target (and immune to lasers) but would have to be naked and have no armour at all.


Hope this is useful, you asked for noob's views after all. I'll say again, after a wall of criticism, that I really like what you've done and am excite.

[Joose]

All good stuff so far guys, this is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for! Thanks, and keep it coming. I'll reply properly tomorrow when I'm less tired and full of beer and curry

[Joose]

Right, I'll do my best to answer everything people bring up, but I probably wont do it all in one go. Don't worry though, it will all be got to in some way or another.

First, as you have both mentioned it, Power Ratings: I probably haven't explained that well enough, and I think that might be because I haven't really covered how levelling works properly either. Power Ratings are basically just a gauge of how "good" or "powerful" a Power is. In other words, someone's ability to punch quite hard, but within normal human levels would have quite a low (small number) Power Rating, whereas someone's ability to tear planets in half with their mind would have a high power rating. Its worked out by adding all the Components that have a positive cost because otherwise something that was world shatteringly awesome could have a low power rating because its also likely to kill the user.

PR's are for a few things. Firstly, they limit your powers according to your level, which I'll explain in a second. Secondly, they give you a handy gauge of how much whack something has: rather than looking through the detailed description of some shiny thing the GM has given you, you can just look at its PR and go "oo, awesome" or "meh, that's not super amazing". Not that you shouldn't check through the description too, its just handy for a quick reference. Thirdly, its used for the Fail tables: there are a handful of different tables for different power ranges. Low PR powers roll on a table that has results like "you accidentally hit an ally instead" and "you fell over", high PR powers roll on a table that has "you tore a hole in space time" and "you have attracted the attention of Elder Gods" on it. There are a couple of other uses for some of the more complex components like Imbue, but I'll leave explaining that till ive released them.

Ive just realised reading through Pants' comment on PR that their name may be slightly confusing, as some components also have ratings. I probably need to change one or the other. The PR and the component rating are not the same thing, so the PR isnt related to how much damage something does. Well, not directly. Its not the cause of how much damage something does...ok, im getting a bit muddled up here, so lets go with an example:

Lets say you have the rest of a Power worked out (range, other components) and its PR currently comes to (completely arbitrary numbers here) 100. Now you come to adding a damage component to it, and want it to do some bog standard Bashing damage. Lets say Bashing damage is costed at 10 points per rating of damage, and you want to do 5 points of damage, so you select Bashing Damage (5) for 50 points. This means the PR is now 150, and when you hit people the damage rating you use for the roll is 5.

Like I say, all those numbers are plucked out of my ass, as I haven't worked out how to cost things yet, but you get the idea.

Now for more specific questions:

Health - in a system with descriptives instead of figures for stuff with natural units of measurement, why put a number on something naturally abstract? An abstract health system could be a real boon here

The reason I went with abstract for ranges, but actual numbers for damage is the ease of play thing. Ranges tend not to change according to a dice roll, and exact accuracy in where people are doesnt tend to be much of an issue, so making it abstract and vague makes things simpler during play. However, health as an abstract makes things more complicated in play. Taking your example of a possible system (which I actually quite like the idea of in general) and comparing it to the current system, you have a lot of stuff that is down to interpretation and the judgment of the GM, tables to look up results on, a number of different kinds of injuries and damage to keep track of (like blood loss, shock etc) and the effects thereof. Or, you have "you got hit, take off 5 hit points". Hit points might not be very realistic, but they are simple, easy to use and everyone tends to understand them with hardly any explanation.

on that note...

Can people be healed/stabilised? Is death permanent?

Yep/yep, and sort of.

Healing can be done through a power, like everything else. There is a cheaper healing option (which I think I missed off that release, I'll make sure its in the next one) that just brings people back up to 0 hit points, effectively stabilising them. What im not 100% sure on yet is when the character can get back up and about. I'm thinking that once the character gets back over 0 hit points, they make another resilience roll, with maybe the amount over 0 as a positive modifier. I'm not sure what would determine a target number for that though. Thoughts?

As for death: its as permanent as the GM wants it to be, and should probably be decided on in advance with the players for each group. All the rules say is that when you go past 0 hit points, you make the Close to Death rolls, and if you fail a CtD, you die. What happens then is up to you: you could take a comic book approach and maybe run a game with the character in the afterlife struggling to get back, the GM could just bring the character back but with some horrible negative effect power to reflect that "death has changed them!", or you could run a more gritty campaign by having death be final. I am planning on components to do resurrections and the like, but they are just at the idea stage at the moment.

Components:
You mention full-on Negative Powers being a possibility (perhaps as punishments), rather than just negative Components. An example would be good here - would it be a Power that could be made good by adding the right Components, or just a kind of joke/roleplaying Power that you had to work around?

You are right about the examples, im going to try and get more of those in generally for the next version. I always find them helpful for understanding rules, so im going to be using them *a lot*, I just havent got around to it for everything yet.

Negative Powers could work in both ways, even at the same time if you wanted. Negatively costed components can be included to bring the cost of a single power down, or you can make a Power that has more bad than good, resulting in a negative PR, in order to give yourself more points to work with elsewhere. Its a bit like negative qualities in SR or SLA. So you could have a power that is rubbish to start with, but you can spend points on to make less rubbish, or it could just be a complete downside that, like you say, you have to work around.

Stuff like this is mostly up to the player and the GM to work out. On the one hand, the player should be allowed to do what they want within reason. If they want a character with no downsides, thats fine. If they want to get some extra power at the expense of some disadvantage, thats fine too. If they want a disadvantage for RP reasons, brilliant. Obviously though, the GM needs to approve it, and keep an eye out for powergaming, as I imagine it would be dead easy to intentionally break this system for stupidly overpowered characters, if you so wished.

I'll do some more responses to what youve said later, my fingers are aching

[Dog Pants]

Crikey, no wonder your fingers are hurting. I think I understand Power Ratings better now. They don't actually affect anything in-game (like by dictating damage), they're more of a rank. Correct?

a number of different kinds of injuries and damage to keep track of (like blood loss, shock etc)

Not quite what I meant, I was suggesting something as simple as SR's damage tracks. I can see where you picked that up though because blood loss and shock are the only two damage types in my system. Sticking with hit points is cool though, I just have a sort of mission to think of a better way.

[Joose]

Not quite what I meant, I was suggesting something as simple as SR's damage tracks.

Trouble is, SR's damage tracks are just hit points with a funny name. Ive seen a couple of systems try and get away from hit points, but they always seem to end up with stuff that's just obfuscated hit points in the end. I cant remember the system itself, but I remember one that had statuses, like Unhurt, hurt, seriously hurt, dead. Which sounds great until you realise its basically the same as having 4 hit points for everyone, its just "1 hit point" has been renamed to seriously hurt, "2 hit points" renamed to hurt, etc.

Don't get me wrong, I would love an simple alternative system that works and isn't just renamed hit points, but I'm fucked if I know what that system would be, so for now lets stick with hit points.

[Dog Pants]

Still not what I meant, but I don't want to pointlessly hijack this thread so I'll drop it.

[Joose]

Ive been doing a bit more on this over the last couple of days, so I thought I would give you some updates/more answers to questions.

Firstly, ive gone through all the bits that you both said needed some clarification, and hopefully ive clarified them. We'll see how ive done when the next release is ready
On a similar note, im adding in examples all over the shop. Examples are fucking win, they make it a lot easier to explain stuff, so im going to be using them *a lot*.
Im going to attempt to start putting numbers to stuff for the next release too, so you should be able to start actually making doods. I've failed utterly to come up with a scientific way of costing things, so im going to go for slapping numbers that sound about right on and see how it goes. Expect shitloads of tweaking to greater or lesser degrees as we find I have massively under/overestimated how good a Component is, or fucked up the scales on attributes so that normal humans are bumbling idiots or something.

As far as costs go, ive got three basic patterns for the costs of components at the moment:

Straight Cost. For example, 10 points. This is for stuff that doesnt have a scale, you either have it or you dont. Its also for stuff that is more useful at lower character levels than at higher levels. For instance, the ability to ignore cover modifiers: whether a guy is obscured by a rock might halve the chance of a normal dood shooting him with a gun, but if both guys are replaced by godlike beings shooting each other with god powers, whether or not they are behind a rock is less relevant, so the ability to ignore the rock is less useful. Im not sure ive explained that right. Does it make sense?

Cost per Rank. For example, 5 points per rank. Pretty self explanitory really.

Cost Multiplier. For example, X2. This is for stuff that drastically improves a power, and will improve better powers more than lesser powers. Basically, it takes the cost of the rest of the power and multiplies it by a number, rather than adding to the number. It does mean that having more than one of these types of components will make things costly fast, but thats the idea.

Any other kinds of costs you think might be applicable?

Now, on to more replies to your feedback:

I love the Fail/Epic Fail example. Smashing someone in the face so hard you knock them into a parallel dimension

The Fail/Epic Fail idea is one of my favourite bits of this, actually I'd like it if you guys could come up with ideas for this too, but I will start another thread for that so this one doesn't get derailed.

Whilst im on the Fail subject:

Are dice pools of only one or two dice very likely? In those cases Fails (and almost equally Epic Fails) are quite likely. I really like the concept and think they are tremendous fun, but worry about how often they might occur at low levels and how infrequently at high ones.
Are the results of a FailTable roll fairly equal in terms of severity - or is there a (say) 1-in-6 chance of getting something really bad on only a normal Fail?

Dice pools of one or two are fairly extremely unlikely, for a couple of reasons. One being that ordinary, everyday things (opening a door, driving a car in a normal way, checking your email) dont need a roll at all. The other reason is that most rolls are either an attribute itself, or a power that uses an attribute as part of it. Seeing as normal human ranges of attributes are (at the moment at least) 1-10, I would expect most dice pools to be at least 5-6 dice big. That still means that its more likely to fail with low powers than high, but thats taken into account too: its why one of a handful of different fail tables are rolled on depending on how powerful the power is. Low power fails are things like tripping over, or your gun jamming. High power fails are breaking space/time and angering the gods. The lower ones happen more often, but are less of a big deal. The high ones happen less often, but will generally make the gaming group stop for a second and say "oooooooooh, shit".

Oh, and no, they are not equal even on the same table. Its not a smooth gradient of badness, but in general a high roll on the table means a worse fuckup. That doesn't mean the street level people will get god level fails, mind. Well, not unless a god level person is involved too.

Stuff I'm a bit meh over:
That SR dice system again. It'll suffer from all the same problems, which I don't need to go over. However, they are used fairly minimally, so I don't outright dislike it.

I have managed to streamline it a bit from the standard SR style dice pool system, mind. For instance, there are no arbitrarily linked attributes to confuse you with, as you decide what attribute to link a power to, if any. Also, the number of dice you roll doesn't change because its raining, or whatever. If you roll 15 dice for your shooty power, you *always* roll 15 dice. Modifiers are applied to the result, not the dice pool.

Having said that, I'm totally happy with swapping it for another system, if you have something else in mind. The reason I settled on a dice pool system is that its infinitely flexible (just keep adding more dice) whilst not being hard to understand. Stat/rating = number of dice to roll, and higher number = better. A "roll xDx and add stat/rating" system is easier for people to understand and use, sure, but its not flexible enough (eventually, the number rolled on the dice becomes irrelevant compared to the number you are adding to it). Not without using a mix of different multi-sided dice, at which point it stops being easy to understand again. I tried a bunch of things and couldn't come up with anything that wasn't just less flexible *and* less easy.

Powers:
Henchmen are mentioned which excited me enormously, but their use in this game is never touched upon. I appreciate they would be probably be a complex Power which would need its own section, but it's the fact you mentioned them that I'm talking about.

You've answered your own question there: they are a more complex power, which ive not finished polishing yet. I keep finding really obvious loopholes with the component that lets you do henchmen/clones/etc. It'll come though, dont worry!

To wit, 'Power Level' would probably be a more descriptive name.

You are not wrong, I might go with that.

I'm a bit unclear about the roll for Initiative - is it that the sum of AGI+INT(+mods)=dice pool? That could be a bit unwieldy, escpecially if it has to be done for all each round. I'm thinking about physical dice, to avoid everyone waiting while you count them out each turn, you'd have to have sets ready not just for each Power but a special one for Initiative.

Yeah, it is the sum like you say, and thinking about it, it could get quite unwieldy. I hadn't given it much thought as it is essentially how SR does initiative. Now I think about it more, SR gets away with it more due to the fact that most people will have a couple of "goes" between init rolls due to extra initiative passes and the like. Even then, initiative in SR can be a bit of a faff.

What do you lot think about making initiative a static thing? ie: there is no roll, its just adding that sum together, highest goes first. Maybe make it a roll when surprise is a factor, to determine the first go. I'm thinking through fights in RPG's I've played in the past, and I'm struggling to think of a time where rolling for initiative actually made a definite difference to the fight. Most of the time, people who are fast are so much faster than other people that they always go first anyway. Seems like it might be needless rolling for the sake of it.

To me, this seems to place a very high value on your AGI attribute (plus Accurate+ mods) in that without a decent score in this area you'll pretty much never hit anything. I'm not sure what attributes you could factor in to compensate for it and to still make sense, but as it stands it appears as though a character with low AGI could plod up to within touching distance of enemies and empty a shotgun at them without a chance of ever causing a scratch. I suppose, rather than complicating the Hit/Miss calculation just for this example, Shotgun User (as a Power) could have a built-in Accurate boost at short range (diminishing over distance) that meant only extremely agile opponents could avoid damage at point-blank range.

It sort of does place a high value on AGI, yes. But dont forget that if you dont have a high AGI, thats because you have spent those points elsewhere. What im hoping for is something like the difference between a shotgun and a sniper rifle. You are more likely to hit with a shotty, but if you do hit you will do more damage with the sniper. In other words, a low AGI player is less likely to hit, but on the occasion it does hit he will do more damage.

For example, your low AGI guy might only hit once for every 10 hits the high AGI guy makes, but that one hit is 10 times more powerful. That's the theory anyway, we'll see if it works later.

Don't forget also that although high agi on average beats low agi, you only have to look at the SR thread to see that sometimes you can roll 20 dice and get 1 hit, and other times you can roll 5 dice and get 4 sixes.

Is there a facility for teleporting as a movement option?

Sort of. TP is a component that will be available, but as it has more in common with a ranged power than a way of moving around, im separating it from movement. Like the henchman stuff, it'll be added later.

I've had my train of thought derailed by proper paying work. Bum. More later!

[Dog Pants]

I'll avoid quoting to prevent one of those horrible quote-chain threads, but:

Costs: You could use exponential too; cost doubles for each increment, or is the sum of the new and the old value, for example. Don't know what, if anything, you'd use that for but it's another option for you.

Fails: Presumably it's outright impossible for mundane things to cause Epic Fails, or else every now and again you'd get car accidents or fist fights which would summon demons and other such weird shit. Although something like an Epic Fail at CERN doing that would be a great plot element. Also, have you considered modifiers to the Epic/Fails? A simple one could be the amount of 1s you roll adding to your fail roll, a more colourful example could be increasing the chance for experimental science or magic.

Dice: I'm happy to go with the dice system, I trust you on it. You're right, most of the complication of SR comes from inconsistencies in how many are rolled. The only real issue I can see is the perception of having bad rolls due to, on average, only 1/3 of your dice being 'hits'.

Initiative: I like the suggestion of only rolling for ambushes and stuff. You're right, it just adds complication for little real effect.


By the way, I've already got a raft of character ideas just waiting to exploit your rules.

[Joose]

Good idea on the exponential costs. Might be a good fit for things like ranges, as they get exponentially bigger too.

Fails: pretty much, yeah. The basic idea is that you add the Power Levels of everything involved, and the total of that tells you what table to roll on. So a mundane fist fight wont summon Cthulhu no matter how wrong things go, but a if a regular person punches a god, and the god epic fails on a resistance test, then bad shit could go down. Ok, that's a bad example to emphasise the point, as a god probably wouldn't have to roll to resist a regular punch, but you get the idea. Oh, actually, that does bring up a point I need to add to the rules that I only thought of earlier: You only add Power Levels of things lower than the roll that failed. So, in the above example, the power levels are added because the gods resistance would be bigger than the regular dudes fists. If it was the punch that failed, the gods resistance wouldn't be added.

I would say that CERNs Large Hardon Colander would have a pretty meaty power level, so I would have it rolling on the big boys tables

[Joose]

Aww yeah, version 0.2 bitches! Its actually something you can do something with this time as well! Wooo!

Ok, there's still a few things to be worked out, like the number of points you should start the game with for character creation, and there's still only the basic components, and I haven't finished the Fail table yet....

But on the plus side, I've fixed a bunch of things, added more examples, and given everything costs. The costs have been calculated using the extremely scientific method of throwing numbers at it and seeing what sticks, and I've already made myself a few notes of things that need changing (for example, I think I've made "Always On" faaaar too cheap), but its a start. I imagine costs will be shooting around all over the place as they get looked at more closely, which is why I haven't got the start points sorted yet: I don't want to say "You start with 500 points" only to discover that is barely enough to make a normal human.

Finally: I've kind of lost track of what things are in this, what things are in my rough notes, and what things are floating about in my brainmeat, so if there are things that seem to be missing thats probably because they are. Feel free to point out anything that isn't explained or that you just think should be included but isn't.

Play about, put some powers together, tell me where the costing is (inevitably) massively wonky. Its not quite the really fun bit yet, but its getting there!

[Dog Pants]

*Immediately sets to work recreating CoH characters*

[Dog Pants]

Okay, here's a first attempt at a villain I once played;

Stellamander - Alien War Criminal
Description - Tall, slender reptilian humanoid, green skinned with orange eyes and a stump of a tail. He wears close fitting black powered armour and carries a rifle-sized weapon of clearly alien origin. One eye is covered by an electronic HUD monocle, fixed to the skin of his head and incorporating an earpiece. Stellamander uses his kinetic rifle for general combat, but for targets of note he will combine the illegal under-barrel mounted cryothrower to freeze his enemy, then hit them with a blast of flame using his racially innate ability of pyrokinesis. If done correctly, the attack causes the victim to shatter. Using this technique on prisoners of war has led to him being wanted by allied interplanetary police horses, which he avoids by hiding on Earth.

Attributes:
Strength - 7
Resilience - 6
Intelligence - 9
Willpower - 8
Agility - 8
Health - 7

Points: 1350

Powers:

Armour - Alien Mercenary Powered Armour
Resistance - All (10)
Always On

Points: 2100

Weapon - Modified Alien Assault Rifle
Damage - Piercing (8)
Range - Medium

Underbarrel Mounted Cryothrower
Damage - Cold (10)
Range - Short

Points: 215

Psionic Ability - Pyrokinesis
Damage - Fire (5)
Range - Extreme (line of sight)

Points: 150

Total points: 3815

[Grimmie]

First check-over at lunch..

There's no explosive damage type, which seems like it could be good for practical purposes as well as roleplay - creating distractions etc. Should this be a mix of piercing and crushing, or something different?

Typo: "lightening" should be "lightning"

Complex costs need to be explained for morons. I can't figure out how fireball totals 255 points.
Medium range = 20pts
5 Fire damage = 50pts (DOT3 = x3, 15pts)

50 + 45 x 3 = 285
50 + 15 x 3 = 195
50 x 3 + 45 = 195
50 x 3 + 15 = 165

Hnngh. Same goes for the healing touch power.

[Joose]

There's no explosive damage type, which seems like it could be good for practical purposes as well as roleplay - creating distractions etc. Should this be a mix of piercing and crushing, or something different?

Im not sure "explosion" really makes sense as a separate damage type. If you think about it, explosions either damage things because of the heat (Fire damage), the horse of the explosion itself (bashing), shrapnel (piercing), the noise (sound), or a combination of those things. The blast area would be down to the powers AoE...which I now realise isn't in this release. I'll make sure to add that to the next one then!

Complex costs need to be explained for morons. I can't figure out how fireball totals 255 points.
Medium range = 20pts
5 Fire damage = 50pts (DOT3 = x3, 15pts)

50 + 45 x 3 = 285
50 + 15 x 3 = 195
50 x 3 + 45 = 195
50 x 3 + 15 = 165

Hnngh. Same goes for the healing touch power.

Ok, yeah, I thought that might need more explanation. Its actually something im thinking about changing too, but currently it works like this:

1) Add up all the straight costs (the bits that are just numbers) for all the powers components and options.
2) Multiply the result of 1) by all of the multipliers.

So for Fireball, it goes like this:

1) 20 + 50 + 15 = 85
2) 85 x 3 = 255

and for Healing Touch:

1) 5 + 300 + 50 + 50 = 405
2) 405 x 3 = 1215

Make sense?

The other option I'm considering is making you work out components first (same as above, but treating each component as their own separate entity), then the power as a whole. So Fireball would then be:

Medium Range (20 Points) = 20 points
5 Fire Damage (50 points) – DoT (Rank 3) (x3, 15 Points) = 195
Total = 215

I think that could end up with costs making more sense, but its a bit more complicated. What do you think?

[Dog Pants]

Something I noticed while generating that test character was that stats are far cheaper and more powerful than abilities. Having resistance 10 armour to everything is far more expensive than having 10 resilience, which would do the same thing. In fact, that armour cost more than all the stats combined. The idea is sound, but (as I'm sure you already know) the figures need balancing.

[Joose]

Something I noticed while generating that test character was that stats are far cheaper and more powerful than abilities. Having resistance 10 armour to everything is far more expensive than having 10 resilience, which would do the same thing. In fact, that armour cost more than all the stats combined. The idea is sound, but (as I'm sure you already know) the figures need balancing.

Ive been looking at this today. What do people think of making the stats costs exponential, like in SLA? So 10*new level, and you have to buy them a level at a time. So if they start at level 1 for free, going up to level 4 would cost 90 points (20+30+40 = 90), and then going from there to level 5 would cost 50 points, and from 5 to 7 would cost 130 points, etc. Is that enough do you think, or should the jump be bigger (maybe 20*new level)?