Skeleton of the System

I've been away for a while, but I'm still alive, I still exist, and I'm still thinking of things.

Some people have been wondering what sort of progress I'm making on the system and how far I've gotten. So here's an overview of the decisions that I've made so far and some of the decisions that I still need to make on this project.

Attributes

A character will have 8 Attributes: Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Speed, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charm and Savvy, rated on a scale of 1-30. Players can roll 3d10 8 times to generate them, though I think a point buy method should also be available.

Skills & Milestones

Starting characters will start with 10-15 skill picks. Each pick gives a 10% bonus to a skill. Skills are based directly on stats now, so putting a pick into a skill means you start with stat + 10% in the skill. You can put multiple picks into a single skill.

Skills improve by being used. Every time you fail a skill roll, you get a skill point. 5 skill points raise your skill by 1%. So skills will grow quickly, then reach a plateau.

I don't have a skill list in mind, because a lot of how things will work will depend on how nicely it plays with the milestone system. You see, every time you gain 10% in a skill, you get a milestone, which is basically a D&D-style feat. (Even the first 10%, so a starting character will get a milestone with each skill pick they put into a skill.) So every skill needs hooks for milestones; It needs somewhere to go. Skills that don't go anyplace will usually find themselves merged with other skills until there are enough milestones to make it interesting.

There will probably be quite a few combat skills, because there are lots of places to go with combat. but science skills will probably be squished into relatively few skills, with specialties being represented by milestones.

One of the challenges of designing the milestones is that I want to keep things from being too artificial. I want players to be able to say "I want to do X" and not have the GM point to some milestone and says "You can't, you don't have the milestone." In some cases that's appropriate. For things like magic and stuff. But if a character wants to try something wacky and difficult, but physically possible, let them try. Maybe put in milestones to make things easier, but avoid creating the idea that "you must be this tall to ride this ride" where it doesn't belong.

Magic & Psionics

I've mentioned before that I want magic to be specialized, while psionics will be crude and powerful. Here's how I plan on implementing that.

Lets say you have the Telekinesis skill. The basic power would be, let's say, spend 1 Magic Point (As I've explained earlier, magic and psionics are the same force with different applications) to lift 1 pound for 1 turn. The next time you pick a milestone, you can increase the amount you can lift or the duration, or some other factor. A maxed out telekinetic might be able to lift tons, carry the weight all day, or make 10 objects dance around each other and pick your pocket without looking. Or some combination of this.

The typical magical skill is a "spellbook"; A list of thematically linked spells. A character can cast every spell in a spellbook they know using that spellbook's skill. Depending on the complexity of the spell, this roll will have a penalty (a Light spell might have a -10% penalty, but a bigger spell might have a -50% or even more). The default milestone will allow you to buy off this penalty for specific spells, so even if two casters have the same spellbook, they can be focused in different spells (Not sure if this will also give you more Magic Points, or if that will be a separate milestone). If you put an extra 10% penalty cancellation (it never turns into a bonus) the spell can be cast with no roll at all. (Since spells in Palladium are cast without a roll, I wanted that as an option, but it still had to engage with the advancement mechanic in order to, you know, advance.)

Combat

Most of my thoughts on the mechanics of combat are here. The big wrinkles to sort out are armor and damage scaling (AKA Mega-Damage).

One of the few mechanics that I genuinely like from the Palladium system is how SDC works for armor. It not only added a dose of realism to the system (as compared to D&D anyway) in that armor will not last indefinitely. Attacks that don't beat your armor's AR are held against your armor's SDC until it is gone. Puny little goblins who keep attacking your armor are eventually going to get through to the creamy nougat center that is your hit points. This also made for interesting decisions on the part of a player. "I know this attack isn't going to get through my armor, but should I try to parry or dodge in order to protect my armor's SDC?"

The problem that comes with Rifts is that there's no longer the choice between hit points and armor. Unless you're a Juicer, your hit points will never survive a MD hit. So your armor is your life. So once you hit MDC scale, it seems like your character's gear matters more than the character does. Unless your character picks the right race or class to become innately MDC, at which point it becomes a slightly different arms race, but still an arms race.

Technology and Setting

One of the main things I want out of both the setting and the technology is that they be livable. Rifts Earth as it stands is designed for the convenience of wandering adventurers. The GM trying to run a "stationary" campaign, where the characters have jobs, obligations and roots has their work cut out for them. I want a setting that not only allows for, but encourages a number of approaches.

In terms of technology, I'd like to do a little more extrapolation regarding how the various cool technologies interact with the world. Atomic Ray guns and jet packs are cool, but what about atomic toasters? One of the things that I feel is important in a sci-fi setting is defining what "normal" means. That's how you measure exactly how awesome something really is. If everyone in the setting dressed like they were in an '80's hair metal band, it's Mr Suit who is shockingly different.

I know I've made some posts about a Magical Space setting, and I am planning on using it, but the universe is a pretty big place. Do I put my focus on space itself, making it a fantasy space opera? Or focus on a frontier world with a more Old West feel? Or do I go to one of the homeworlds of one of the races, humans elves, or whatever else I come up with?

Micro-Mega-Damage

While I mentioned the use of an armor divisor system to represent mega-damage in my first post, an idea that would save me some math has recently occurred to me, though it does have something of a catch.

The catch is, you'd have to give up all of your polyhedral dice and rely solely on the d10.

What I'm proposing is a damage-scaling system (sort of like how MDC works, but smaller so it's not as cheesy) where the next tier up isn't 100 points of damage, but only 5. And the reason that you'd have to leave all your other dice behind is that the average roll of a d10 is 5 (5.5 for those detail minded folks out there), so a 1d10 damage die could simply be averaged to 5 points of damage, or 1 point of damage on the vehicle scale. And rolling 5d10 damage against a vehicle and then dividing by 5 could be simplified to rolling 1d10 vehicle scale damage.

So this scaling mechanic has the ability to save us from the "buckets o' dice" problem of human-scale weaponry vs. heavy vehicles. It also grants the armor-like property of mega-damage to things that probably should have it.

For example, in the Rifts system, a car has about 200 SDC. An untrained mook does 1d4 damage (average roll 2.5) with a punch and has 2 attacks per melee. So at an average 5 damage per 15 seconds (I'll let someone with stronger math skills factor in the 15% miss chance due to the fact that he could miss his roll to hit), that car is useless after about 10 minutes of some guy (nobody special) punching it. A combat trained character could do it faster.

Under a x5 scaling system, the car has only about 40 vehicle scale hp, but it takes 5 points of human-scale damage to cause 1 hp. If an untrained human still does only an average of 2.5 damage per hit, that converts to 1d10-3 (it gives a larger range, 0-7, but retains the same average). Since only results of 5,6, and 7 (8,9, and 10 on the die) would damage the car at all, that's about a 30% chance of doing 1 point of damage on a successful hit. That feels a bit more realistic to me.

So here's the question, guys: This feels a lot cleaner than the current MDC system and seems to produce more realistic results. Is it worth giving up all of those funny little dice?

Bonus question: Am I doing my math right? Do I only think this works like I say it does?

Mega-Damage is Broken!

Thank you for tuning in to the first post on the Project BTR blog. In case you haven't figured it out, BTR stands for Better Than Rifts. If you don't know what Rifts is, you suck. If you do know what Rifts is, you know how much of an overhaul the system needs. This blog will detail my thoughts and progress toward designing an upgraded system.

To avoid legal snafus, note that Better Than Rifts is a preliminary name that serves as a convenient descriptor of my design goals. The final product will have a different name, though finding a way to keep the BTR acronym would be fun.

The easiest thing to point out as broken in the current iteration of the Rifts RPG is the concept of Mega-Damage. Each point of Mega-Damage represents 100 points of regular (SDC) damage. When this was introduced in Palladium's Robotech RPG, it made a degree of sense. It was a clean way to delineate personal combat from mecha-scale combat. When a mecha-scale attack came at little ol' you, you're toast and a human-scale attack had to be huge in order to even dent one of the giant robots.

Rifts didn't really keep with that split (and some say it didn't work too well even in Robotech). Personal weapons and armor appeared that interacted on the Mega-scale. Meaning that anyone had the ability to wield a weapon of mass destruction and survive attacks from same.

While this does the job of separating heroes and villains (with MDC weapons and armor) from the average joe (who operates solely on the SDC scale), the break between the two scales is too extreme to hold up believably for any extended period. If everything worthwhile is MDC, why waste skill selections to max out your SDC potential? Why does the SDC scale even exist?

One solution used by some Rifts gamers is to reduce the MDC scale to 10xSDC rather than 100xSDC. This still allows for MDC characters to be a cut above, but not to the point that it's ridiculous. It makes SDC much more viable, as a normal PC will often have 20-30 total hit points (counting innate SDC) along with whatever is provided by SDC-scale armor. This translates to 2-3 MDC hit points. Better than 1, certainly.

My proposed solution: Armor Divisors. This does mean stepping away from the traditional Palladium conceit of "armor takes damage for you" and into the idea of "armor stops damage" that is prevalent in many other RPGs. While it might be fun to incorporate an armor damage mechanic, it would have to require minimal bookkeeping (and be another post, anyway).

The idea is that super-powered weapons are more likely to penetrate armor rather than simply render the wearer into chunky salsa. It also helps control the "buckets o' dice" that tend to come out with very large damages. Here's how it works: Say you have some armor that stops 10 damage. Now we take a pistol that does 1d10 damage. That's not scary at all, is it. The armor is going to stop that attack every time. Now let's take that 1d10 pistol and give it an armor divisor of 2, so that any armor it goes up against is divided in half. Now your 10 armor points will only stop 5 points of damage. Gets a little scarier, doesn't it? If we upgrade the armor divisor to 10, that armor is only going to stop 1 point of damage from that pistol. See how it works? And we're not radically increasing the amount of damage done, but we are affecting how the hypothetical player would respond to the attack.

Another component of the problem is that weapon damages (especially Mega-damages) are assigned by pure whim. While this works from a given perspective (the designer says "I need a weapon that's about this scary"), each designer winds up using their own contradictory formulas or notions, making the whole thing even less logical. Any attempt to create consistency from all of this just muddies the waters even more, as exception after exception pile up.

My proposed solution: Guns Guns Guns! A publication of BTRC, it is designed as a generic weapon creation system, with a focus on detail and realism. While a setting like Rifts has all kinds of wacky technologies, having a solid, consistent base to draw from can make the wackiness that much more believable.

See you next month for more fun taking Rifts apart and making it truly awesome!