I would vote
Genre: SF
Mechanic: d10
 
Complexity: Light(ish)
 
 
Possibly a variant of the AP system could be used in combination with a d10 system (just providing an extra bonus on rolls, rather than being the main core mechanic). However not sure about that either - as Brendan suggests its an extra metagame resource to manage, and that would end up as an extra dice roll as well.

Quote from: MGuy;566345I'm not going to use GNS theory buzzwank in any of my posts because GNS theory is bullshit. Just getting that out the way.
 
As for AP, I think its an interesting idea. It evokes strategy and tactical depth to the game but I don't think this team is going to be to "up" for tactical depth or strategy in the game. I have a good feeling that we're going to be going rules-lite here and that we're going to have interests spread over in more than combat. My primary concern though is the fiddliness of it. Because of the extra step that basically decides what you can do for the turn and that lenthens turns. We're going to want fast and hard resolution mechanic here.
 
Scifi is a good genre to run on so I can handle that. If we're going twith a "D10" mechanic then we're going to have to have a lot of skills and horizontal abilities so we don't suffer from the tiny range. Additionally, it seems like it would be better to make a classless system. Lastly the debate over the "feel" of the game should just be put to a vote or decided upon by the project leader. We all have our tastes, what we need is a focus.

Assuming the d10, yep a skill-based rather than class-based system would probably provide more options for 'horizontal' advancement - i.e. character advancement giving the option to increase various things (skills, attributes, etc) - Savage Worlds is a good example of a mostly horizontal advancement system. I got the impression quick/ rules lite was the favored crunchiness -I've gone back and added that to my vote.

Sorry to triple post but since things have slowed down a bit...

That's probably enough consensus as to genre and core mechanic, then - I think it'd be difficult to beat the existing majority there since the other options for both are open-ended.


Someone did bring up the 'feel' of the system which is a hard question to answer for me. On lethality - If there's the ability to backup character personalities then it doesn't matter so much if the base combat system is a bit deadly, though I'd suggest that perhaps the transfer process isn't 100% effective, or has side effects like losing some points off a 'psyche' type attribute. I do like the idea of PCs and NPCs by default using the same character generation rules.  Another question specifically for an SF game is how hard or soft the science is?

Next question I would normally tackle design-wise might be what attribute scores to include.

After resolving the basic questions how best to proceed with dividing up the rest of the work? Break it up into sections and have one person do Races, another do Equipment, another Skills and another Monsters? Keep brainstorming and create some sort of open document everyone can modify, as well as continuing to discuss things in the thread?

I was away most of yesterday so didn't really chip in. A few ideas on using D10s.

You could generate stats on 2D10 (and point swap 2 for 1 to bring rubbish stats up), skills by point buy or roll (level 1 skill roll 1d10, level 2, 2d10 etc)

Task resolution (roll equal to or under stat + modifiers)

Easy task 1d10
Moderate task 2d10
Hard task 3d10
Extreme task 4d10

Trying two tasks in same round: +1d10 to each task after 1st, so add +2d10 to each task

Example:

Sergeant Vorr'Splung of the third oozing pyle regiment shouted for the guards to fortify the flanks. He then ducked down from the criss crossing laser fire, and returned fire himself.

Actions:

The Sergeant tries three actions (Order the troops to move under fire, dodge incoming fire and shoot back). That's 3 tasks (+2d10)

• 1st action - Moderate

Use his Presence (14) + Command Skill (6) and try to equal/roll under on 4d10 (moderate task and he's trying 3 in the same round)

• 2nd Action - Easy

Use his Agility (9) + Dodge (4) and roll equal/under on 3D10 (easy task, 2nd task in a round). If he succeeds, add his Agility+Dodge to any target number to hit him.

• 3rd Action - Moderate

Use Agility (9) + Laser Rifle (11) and roll equal under on 4D10 to shoot a Xeno at medium range. If he hits, the difference between the roll and the target number is added to damage. Let's say the target number (9+11=20) is rolled under with a roll of 14. That's 6 points of difference to add to damage, so the lower you roll, more accurate you are. Or you can use that to modify a hit location roll (with lower numbers indicating the head, so you'd roll 2D10-6 in this case, and hit the head on say, 3 or less)
[/LIST]

Just brainstorming. From the looks of things people want to keep it simple on 1d10 and low/no math anyway, so the multiple dice might not go down too well. Right, best go to work

Quote from: APN;566681I was away most of yesterday so didn't really chip in. A few ideas on using D10s.

You could generate stats on 2D10 (and point swap 2 for 1 to bring rubbish stats up), skills by point buy or roll (level 1 skill roll 1d10, level 2, 2d10 etc)

Task resolution (roll equal to or under stat + modifiers)

Easy task 1d10
Moderate task 2d10
Hard task 3d10
Extreme task 4d10

Trying two tasks in same round: +1d10 to each task after 1st, so add +2d10 to each task

Example:

Sergeant Vorr'Splung of the third oozing pyle regiment shouted for the guards to fortify the flanks. He then ducked down from the criss crossing laser fire, and returned fire himself.

Actions:

The Sergeant tries three actions (Order the troops to move under fire, dodge incoming fire and shoot back). That's 3 tasks (+2d10)

• 1st action - Moderate

Use his Presence (14) + Command Skill (6) and try to equal/roll under on 4d10 (moderate task and he's trying 3 in the same round)

• 2nd Action - Easy

Use his Agility (9) + Dodge (4) and roll equal/under on 3D10 (easy task, 2nd task in a round). If he succeeds, add his Agility+Dodge to any target number to hit him.

• 3rd Action - Moderate

Use Agility (9) + Laser Rifle (11) and roll equal under on 4D10 to shoot a Xeno at medium range. If he hits, the difference between the roll and the target number is added to damage. Let's say the target number (9+11=20) is rolled under with a roll of 14. That's 6 points of difference to add to damage, so the lower you roll, more accurate you are. Or you can use that to modify a hit location roll (with lower numbers indicating the head, so you'd roll 2D10-6 in this case, and hit the head on say, 3 or less)
[/LIST]

Just brainstorming. From the looks of things people want to keep it simple on 1d10 and low/no math anyway, so the multiple dice might not go down too well. Right, best go to work

I think that does get a bit more complex than the general concensus. If we can extract some of the ideas and pare them down we can feed them back in.  I think threshold values and effect numbers generated by overhitting a target number are a cruchy mechanic that add a lot of head math that some people aren't keen on.

You could use part of the idea. How about a set target number but you get to roll more dice depending on difficulty, rather than adjusting the target number.
So for a hard task you get 1d10, -> 4d10 for an easy task. You take the highest value dice each time. Mathematically I am not sure what that does but it feels like its a suitable hike in success.
You could feed it back into the copmbat mechanic with an option to aim adding a d10 or even an option to spend from an AP pool to add more dice. Just an idea.

On races I vote for everything being vat grown hybrids. So both sides in the 'War' used genetic spicing to develop super soldiers. The PC side the 'goodies' went down animal hybrids (just so we can use Dog Soldiers, Leonine colonels and wolverines ) the badies just chucked everything into the mix to produce abonimations.

Now the downside is this is a pretty specific setting however it means that you can build creatures in a random way and its logical within the setting.

The Rules engine can still be SciFi generic but this model means we don't need to worry at this point about space travel, FTL and all that stuff we are bound to a single planet. You can hint at the universe beyond and maybe there are races and space ships and all sorts but we can keep this component tight and focused.

So rather than races you have abonination generators and the PCs take a template/archetype hybrid then randomly generate the 'FLESH' portion of their PCs.

Then they need to generate the skills portion. Here I say 2 options. Random/lifepath and pointbuy. Random Lifepath is you have a bunch of occupation tables and you get to randomly roll skilsl on that table.
Point buy is for the Charop guys but they get less skills, but can specialise.

Means that my Dog Soldier rolls say 10 skills.
Opts to take the 'Commando' skill table rolls

Stealth - 2
Rifle - 2
Handgun
Martial Arts
Athletics
Observation - 2
Survival

The Point buy guy gets 8 points to spend from the general skill list.

Chooses

Explosives - 5
Stealth
Observation
Rifle

So the Point buy guy is more focused but less overall

We stick up a dozen careers but cross reference 30 skills.

Numbers of skills and maybe a base skill list for each career (commandos always get 1 rank in stealth, medics get 1 rank in First Aid etc etc ) can all be finished off later.

Was thinking rather than degrade with each transfer there should be a chance of developing a psychosis and a threshold level. I think its interesting to not punish players for individual deaths as it creates an unusual dynamic. You sacrifice becuase we plan to cath a live bad guy to swap you into . Of course you build your PC round the robust Elephantine artilerist Flesh body and now you are going to be in a flying abomination or something.

Generic, Sci fi, future war, rules-lite single d10 (+attribute + skill) game. I think if we're going to do future war I'd like to know clearly if its just soldiers or not. I also need to know if we're talking a single planet (I assume we are).

If its single planet (still assuming it is) I motion for just humans. Additional races don't seem necessary to me in a generic, rules lite game.

Moving on, Attributes, we need a set. I suggest keeping a low number of them (say 4 Brawn, Wits, Agility, and Endurance).

Too tired to think of more right now. I'll be more involved on Wednesday. Work and lack of sleep is keeping me brain from workin' good.

How about a twist to the game? Have two sections in the rules, one for playing and running aliens, along with all the various different types, motivations and equipment they might use ("the Gelatinous Quarb'Snaggles of planet Slurm clearly would have no use for magno sticks or plas rifles...") and have one for Humans and their genetically enhanced/bionic offshoots.

If an average stat for a human adult is 2, average roll on D10 is 5 (or 5.5 but I see no halves on a D10) that'd make a 'moderate' task somewhere around 7 or 8 Target number, yeah? Going on from there:



Target numbers modified for poor light, weather, being wounded, under fire, rushed etc

I'm not suggesting or talking about an encyclopaedic tome you can stop bullets with here. One page of  rules, another for special situation handling, a few for character creation, couple for equipment, then fluff - a few pages for that, then a sample (3 page incl map?) adventure - journey to the heart of an alien jungle behind enemy lines to retrieve a crashed ships flight recorder, facing enemies, natives, the environment, and one or two surprises or dilemmas along the way. For example, taking shelter in a cave, there's evidence of an ancient civilisation with advanced technology or psychic powers. Stick to the mission or investigate?

Just sat on my train, throwing thoughts/ideas out there. Next stage might be to get an contents list written up and start each section so as not to look at the whole, feel overwhelmed, and not get anything done.

e.g.

Contents
=======

• Introduction
• Game History/Background
• Character Creation
• Skills, Talents and Powers
• Equipment
• Rules
• Combat
• Special Situations
• After the adventure
• GMs section - Campaign/Adventure ideas
• Monsters/Aliens/Enemies
• Vehicles and Vehicle combat
• Inspiration/Appendix N

Some of those might be a few pages, others just small sections. Start small, throw ideas out, get a group agreement, write it down, next section...

Oh, and whilst I'm sat on my train, I'm not driving it or moving or anything, so no lives were endangered in the making of this post (that comes later when I fire it up and start shunting about)

If it is skill based with stats then the roll will be d10 +sta +skill. Five possible ranks in each give us up to 1d10+10 is we have situational/environmental modifiers alter TN rather than the roll as APN suggests. This keeps modifiers nice and tight (otherwise you would be deaing with something like d10 up to +15 and I think 10 or less is much faster and contained in practice.

This means an unskilled person with no natural talent cannot hit an 11 without some favorable conditions so 11 needs to called out as a major difficulty breaking point in my opinion. A person with the most possible skill/training but no natural talent (or vice versa) can never reach 16 or more without favorable conditions (though that is only because those conditions lower the TN) so that should be another breaking point. 20 is only possible if you have max skill and attribute. So i think we need to consider these when we address setting TNs, and we should keep this in mind as we decide how combat works.

We could always do an exploding d10, whoch would make a result of 20 possible (if unlikely) for even the least gifted and skilled. But that is an added complication to the core mechanic.

Breaking this into sections since a few different things to address here.
 
On core mechanics: d10+stat+skill still seems best to me.
For the multiple dice additive roll-under system - I'm not sure what advantages there are to such a system (I do like the flavour of the examples though ).
The other variant where you roll 3d10 or 4d10, take highest, my feeling after running some numbers very briefly is that the system isn't random enough - you'd nearly always roll 7-10 (on 4 dice the chance of your roll being a "10" is 34%, and its a "9" another 25% of the time). I wouldn't mind occasional rerolls or take-highest as some sort of special situation/ability, though.
 
On settings: I guess I think a variety of alien races over multiple planets might be more interesting, and I like the idea of being able to play aliens, although it would be a harder task to design than a humans-only or anthropomorphs vs. abominations game (a bit like Vance's Dragon Masters? - not that I've read that). A multiple races game might need more explanation around the idea of infantry being effective if there are space ships ...perhaps most of the space travel is via star gates or something like that. You could still have anthropomorphs as one race option and body swapping though..
oh and I like the option of random-roll skills since its handy for quick/fair NPC creation as well, though vat-creatures you might not expect to really have "lifepaths" since they're just bred as soldiers and then trained in a few appropriate skills.
 
On attributes...random roll attributes/type may work fairly well in a body switching game since its easy to replace the random rolls with a new set, but mental stats are a bit problematic - if there's one mental stat, its the only stat thats really important for min/maxing since all the others can be replaced... (and now I'm having flashbacks to this GURPS Supers game I ran where someone took the Horseclans body-switching advantage and eventually transferred into the body of the planet's Superman equivalent.. I should've read the fine print on how the target needed to be unconscious ...).
 
PS the Contents plan looks pretty good I think.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;566721If it is skill based with stats then the roll will be d10 +sta +skill. Five possible ranks in each give us up to 1d10+10 is we have situational/environmental modifiers alter TN rather than the roll as APN suggests. This keeps modifiers nice and tight (otherwise you would be deaing with something like d10 up to +15 and I think 10 or less is much faster and contained in practice.

This means an unskilled person with no natural talent cannot hit an 11 without some favorable conditions so 11 needs to called out as a major difficulty breaking point in my opinion. A person with the most possible skill/training but no natural talent (or vice versa) can never reach 16 or more without favorable conditions (though that is only because those conditions lower the TN) so that should be another breaking point. 20 is only possible if you have max skill and attribute. So i think we need to consider these when we address setting TNs, and we should keep this in mind as we decide how combat works.

We could always do an exploding d10, whoch would make a result of 20 possible (if unlikely) for even the least gifted and skilled. But that is an added complication to the core mechanic.

You need to be careful that skill use doesn't end up too easy. If you make a target number say an 8 then a skilled PC with some talent might have skill +2 Talent +3  so they will get an 80% chance of success.

We need to decide a whole host of stuff round skills. includingbut not limited to
i) can non-skilled folk try all skills or a subset
ii) what is a reasonable degree of sucess on differnet difficulties
iii) do we want opposed rolls eg detectvr stelath etc

Quote from: jibbajibba;566727You need to be careful that skill use doesn't end up too easy. If you make a target number say an 8 then a skilled PC with some talent might have skill +2 Talent +3  so they will get an 80% chance of success.

We need to decide a whole host of stuff round skills. includingbut not limited to
i) can non-skilled folk try all skills or a subset
ii) what is a reasonable degree of sucess on differnet difficulties
iii) do we want opposed rolls eg detectvr stelath etc

I think whether this is good or not depends on what we envision tn 8 as and how hard in general we want skill checks to be.

1) i think this depends on the skill. Everyone should be able to try to jump even if they are unskilled, but not everyone should be able to try to navigate and land a commercial airliner. For the later you need skill.

2) do we want degrees of success?

3) i can go either way on opposed rolls. If you don't have them for detect v stealth, one of those needs to be a passive defense of some kind. This will also impact combat. If people have a dodge skill that is rolled, that can bog down combat in my opinion. So we may want to look at having static defenses.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;566745I think whether this is good or not depends on what we envision tn 8 as and how hard in general we want skill checks to be.

1) i think this depends on the skill. Everyone should be able to try to jump even if they are unskilled, but not everyone should be able to try to navigate and land a commercial airliner. For the later you need skill.

2) do we want degrees of success?

3) i can go either way on opposed rolls. If you don't have them for detect v stealth, one of those needs to be a passive defense of some kind. This will also impact combat. If people have a dodge skill that is rolled, that can bog down combat in my opinion. So we may want to look at having static defenses.

by degrees of sucess I was being unclear me bad. I meant what % sucess do we want for the different difficultly slots. 50% sucess for easy? etc

I agree with the rest.

Combat wise I like a defense score that becomes a target number cuts down on multiple roles.

Optional Hit locations ? Wound system with a death spiral? Armour absorbs?

I like degrees of success for some things. It may be that its something that's considered on a case-by-case basis; some skills or situations will benefit from a high roll (such as a good hit roll increasing damage?), others won't.
Opposed rolls are a useful mechanic as well, though passive defenses are probably a good idea for combat (and a couple of other cases like Perception). Perhaps have a default passive defense that's fairly low i.e. gives better than a 50/50 chance of an attacker of the same skill hitting, but also give the option of spending an action to make an 'active defense' (opposed roll to parry or dodge) if the defender wants ?
I think whether skills can be used untrained will vary from skill to skill. As an aside I don't think 'Jump' should be a skill - perhaps just a function of Strength.
 
On APNs task difficulties table note that APN was assuming an average human attribute was 2 (so by default a normal character would get a +2 bonus). What scale to go for is a good question I think - a 2 average maybe doesn't leave much room for representing low attributes (e.g. small creatures with low Strength, or animal-Int creatures) unless creatures can have negative stats...
The original idea of a 1-10 scale (Cyberpunk) does look like it might be a bit too extreme, unless using modifiers rather than adding the score to the roll directly which is a bit cumbersome.

Quote from: jibbajibba;566749Optional Hit locations ? Wound system with a death spiral? Armour absorbs?

I like hit locations. On damage - in an SF game, I guess the bad guys are probably going to packing really nasty weapons that you'd expect to vapourize an unarmoured target, or at least really mess them up. Maybe armour absorbs from damage, or even armour having its own built-in Hit Points (a la Rifts) probably wouldn't be unreasonable.