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?

The Hit Point

As I've mentioned at other points on this blog, the Palladium system is an advancement and refinement of old school D&D. One of those advancements was in the field of hit points. You see, before the 3rd edition of D&D all hit dice were rolled, even the first one. Which meant that if you were unlucky, it was possible to enter the dungeon with only one hit point.

Palladium starts you off with hit points equal to your P.E. score +1d6. Then gives you physical skills that can improve P.E., offer S.D.C. upgrades, and so on. Then armor provides its own pool of SDC (or MDC) to protect you. This means that your character has a better chance of surviving first level, which is good. But it also means that characters can very quickly wind up with unrealistic amounts of durability.

Stories circulate around the Palladium community of players exploiting this superhuman durability in interesting ways. Shooting themselves with assault weapons to intimidate a foe. Leaping on a grenade and expecting to walk away with only a small portion of their SDC gone. If you've got a fun story to share, feel free to drop it in the comments.

The important thing to remember is that, in D&D, hit points are an abstraction. They don't represent actual injury. D&D characters really only have one hit point (their last) and all their other hit points represent the character's ability to defend the one that matters. A friend of mine gave this concept a very clever name: "Ablative Awesomeness." When you make a successful attack, you're not hacking away at the other guy's spleen. You're hacking away at his ability to defend his spleen from later attacks. This is why experience (generally gained from fighting) grants more hit points.

The Palladium system doesn't seem to believe in Ablative Awesomeness even as it looks for ways to add more. The description of SDC in the main Rifts book describes a character taking an injury, but shrugging it off. The justification for increasing hit points as the character levels is that the character actually got tougher. Taking a hit in combat is apparently all about being a manly badass.

But with characters having all of these hit points and damage absorbing resources, the things that are supposed to kill them suddenly aren't scary enough. So you make up new stuff that is scary. In Palladium Fantasy, this is magic weapons, going all the way up to rune weapons. In Rifts, this is MDC.

But MDC adds a new wrinkle to this arms race. In Rifts, your MDC armor is your hit points. Without it, you are a 1 hit point mook. So as the weapons get scarier, you look to buy more powerful armor. Once you get more powerful armor, the GM has to look for tougher monsters and tougher weapons to fight you with. Leading to a little thing we like to call "power creep."

My current plan for BTR does include the potential for increasing hit points but nowhere near to the generous levels that Palladium provides. They will be available as a milestone attached to a character's combat skills. This should provide a balance, as there will be many other combat milestones to acquire as well. Playtesting will tell.

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?

A System Worth Fighting For!

Now we get into the nitty gritty of the combat system, what makes it tick, what we want to keep and what we want to get rid of.

Initiative and Actions

Nothing is wrong with the initiative system as written. The main change that is going to come here is from the movement to a d10/percentile system.

Clarity and intuitiveness is a goal as well. I've heard stories of things going horribly awry due to misunderstandings of the rules. In one story, each player takes all of their actions at once, so Player 1 takes their 3-5 attacks, then Player 2 attacks 3-5 times, etc. until the last player in the initiative gets so mad at having to wait so long and having most of the enemies defeated already that he uses his 3-5 actions to attack the other PCs!

Probably the simplest way to set up an initiative order is to make a die roll and add it to an attribute (probably whatever I use to represent speed). 1 or 2d10 for granularity and interest. Not too much more or randomness will overwhelm character ability. I definitely want character ability to matter much more than it does in the current iteration of Rifts.

One possible solution to the action situation is to implement "initiative passes." I saw this in at least one version of Shadowrun. Initiative is rolled and everyone takes one action in initiative order. Then 10 is subtracted from everyone's initiative and anyone who still have an initiative above 0 can act again. This cycle continues until no one has a positive initiative total anymore. Then initiative is rerolled for the next round.

Another option is "tick-based" initiative, which has notably appeared in the second edition of Exalted and the Feng Shui RPG. Every action that a character has a cost which generally reflects how long the action takes to complete. Small quick actions may be taken multiple times while another character who takes more involved actions must wait much longer until they can act again.

I'm not firmly decided on which option to use quite yet.

Combat Movement

One thing that definitely needs clearing up is combat movement. In Rifts, movement is governed by the Speed attribute, but it is not well explained. There is a table detailing running speed in miles and kilometers per hour, but no real explanation of how it governs movement over a combat round. While some gamers are content to play out battles using only their imaginations, or simple sketch-maps, there are those who cry for the minis and gridded battle mat when fights break out.

Also very important, it should work for both descriptive combat and gridded combat. One thing that I hated about Savage Worlds is their use of the "Savage Worlds inch." You are assumed to be mapping everything out, so all measurements are given in inches (representing 1 inch on the tabletop). This wouldn't be so bad, but this "inch" translates into two yards. Meaning that when my players asked about distances, I had to take the time to convert 1 inch into 2 yards. Usually just a doubling or a halving, depending on which way the conversion was going, but it still took away from my valuable game time. D&D's 5 foot square or GURPS' 1 yard hexes are far more intuitive.

Attack and Defense

Now we get into the actual dice rolling. Combat will be resolved with percentile rolls, just like every other die roll in the system. Attack and defense will be a pair of "blackjack" rolls (roll as high as you can as long as it's below your skill %). So if the attack is successful with a result of 48, the defender must roll higher than 48 but less than their defending skill % in order to avoid the attack.

This does a pretty good job of mapping the Palladium combat dice flow to a percentile system. It will also serve as a model for opposed actions outside of combat, a mechanic that Palladium has been sorely lacking. The recent addition of the Perception roll makes this all the more obvious. Especially since the rolls it opposes are percentile rolls (like Prowl) and the Perception check is made on a d20.

The Airwolf Missile Rule - explained!

Some of you may have heard of this or run across it: Up to 3 missiles may be dodged, but any salvo of 4 or more missiles hits automatically.

This has become known as the "Airwolf missile rule" after the '80's adventure show Airwolf. In one episode, much is made of a weapons system that fired 4 missiles at once, because "nobody could dodge 4 missiles." Of course, the Airwolf helicopter winds up dodging all four missiles. So why can't you?

The answer: Playability. Since each missile requires an attack roll, then a dodge roll, then a damage roll, a large salvo of missiles has the astonishing ability to bog down play. So while this rule feels like a wallbanger (and is), it does have a reason to exist.

Lesson learned: BTR will need to have a mature and playable set of autofire rules for quickly and easily resolving multiple-projectile attacks.