Damage and injury prototype

Deathwish development has deliberately been on the back burner for a while now, for the simple reason that I’d rather be playing games than designing them right now.  I had this damage system sketched out a while ago, though, and I think it’s still pretty cool a few months later.  Here we go.

Brief supplemental note: Deathwish uses standard rounding, rather than always rounding down as many games do.  This brings averages of two traits up — a Secondary Attribute based on Attributes of 5 and 6 is 6, for example.

Trauma Tolerance: Trauma Tolerance and wound effects will be discussed elsewhere later, but the basic idea is essential to understanding the damage system.  A character’s Trauma Tolerance is the average of his Body and Strength and may be modified by traits.  So Joe Average with Body 5, Strength 5 has Trauma Tolerance … 5.  A boosterganger with Body 3, Strength 9 has Trauma Tolerance 6, and so on.  This figure is never directly tested or compared — rather, it sets a character’s wound thresholds.

Wound Thresholds: Every character has four Wound Thresholds: Slight, Moderate, Serious, and Critical.  Any injury a character suffers is applied as one of these wounds (and you’ll see how in just a minute) — damage does not accumulate, no “hit points” are lost, and wounds do not “add up” into higher levels.

Slight Wounds are minor injuries, glancing shots, bruises, or flesh wounds that slightly impair a character.  These wounds are definitely noticeable and painful, but they’re not a huge deal and will never immediately incapacitate a character.

Moderate Wounds are significant injuries such as deep cuts, gunshot wounds to nonvital areas, and other grisly affairs that will make most characters seriously rethink the life choices that have led them to this point.  These wounds impair characters significantly, may immediately incapacitate a character, and can deteriorate over time, but not too quickly.  Most characters will call it quits after receiving a mortal wound — this is the kind of thing the military would haul you off the field and give you a hospital bed and a Purple Heart for.

Severe Wounds are serious, life-threatening injuries: bullets that hit major arteries or organs, big explosions, long falls — the kind of high-grade lethality that Deathwish characters inevitably find themselves on both ends of.  Serious Wounds usually immediately incapacitate a character, and even characters who remain active are very ineffective.  Characters with Serious Wounds will almost certainly die within a few hours if they don’t receive medical treatment.

Critical Wounds are injuries that are not usually survivable: rifle bullets to the brain, huge explosions, high-speed head-on car crashes, and the like.  Characters with Critical Wounds are immediately incapacitated and will die in minutes if they are not tended to — and they’ll still probably die later.  Particularly extreme Critical Wounds, such as explosive discorporation or decapitation, can result in instant death, but characters (player characters, at least) generally get to chuck a few dice to cheat death.

Wound effects: The incapacitative effects of injury haven’t been worked out yet, but the effect on character actions is quite simple.  Each wound level makes all tasks a character attempts one level more difficult than normal — a Moderate Wound gives +2 Difficulty, four Slight Wounds give +4 Difficulty, and so on.  Difficulties that reduce target numbers below 1 will be discussed later — but anything that hard is highly unlikely to succeed, to say the least.

Wound Thresholds: Okay, great, but how do you figure out what kind of wound an attack does?  It’s a little like the base mechanic.

- The Slight Wound Threshold is equal to Trauma Tolerance / 4
- The Moderate Wound Threshold is equal to Trauma Tolerance / 2
- The Serious Wound Threshold is equal to Trauma Tolerance
- The Critical Wound Threshold is equal to Trauma Tolerance * 2

So, an average guy with Trauma Tolerance 5 has Slight/Moderate/Serious/Critical 1/3/5/10.

Attacks and injuries do Damage expressed as a number.  The Damage Value is compared to the target’s Wound Thresholds, and the highest threshold it exceeds is the level of wound the character takes.  So, for our average guy, 1- and 2-point wounds are Slight, 3- and 4-point wounds are Moderate, 5-9-point wounds are Serious, and anything higher is Critical.  Note the large gap between Serious and Critical Wounds — it’s hard to kill someone instantly without a big, big weapon (which we’re just about to see, I promise).  Note also that Trauma Tolerance of 6-9 gives a Slight Wound Threshold of 2 – which means 1-point wounds don’t do any damage.  The Slight Wound Threshold is 3 for Trauma Tolerance 10+ characters, but let’s not worry about that madness right now.

Attack Mechanics: Attacks, including weapons, have two stats: Penetration and Lethality.
- Penetration represents the attack’s ability to pass through materials, including cover and characters’ bodies.
- Lethality represents how destructive and injuring the attack is once penetrating.

These values vary all over the place, depending on the type of attack, but higher is better for both.

Doing Damage (The Good Part): Rolling damage works unlike any mechanic I’ve ever seen, in this game or any other.  It’s a compound roll built from the core mechanic (as everything in a tightly designed game should).

To roll damage against a character who’s been hit, start with a number of d10s equal to the attack’s Penetration.  Lose 1 die for each point of Armor (including Cover) the character has on the struck location.  Roll the remaining dice against a target number equal to the attack’s Lethality.  Add up the Values of any Successes to get the Damage Value, and figure the wound the character takes from there.

Dice that exceed the Lethality are Failures and so do no damage — it’s entirely possible to hit and do no damage, even with high-powered weapons.  Sometimes the bullets just go right through!  Note also that armor protection is mostly invariant — it stops cold anything with an equal or lower Penetration, and it reduces dice, not damage.

That mechanic’s probably really vague without some weapon examples to see what this means.

Weapons Table

WEAPON PENETRATION LETHALITY AVERAGE DAMAGE

Unarmed attack 1 (Strength) 1.5 (Str 5)

Pistols and submachine guns

Glock 18 (9mm) 2 4 2
Glock 20 (10mm) 2 6 4.2
M1911 (.45 ACP) 2 5 3
Five-seveN (5.7mm) 4 2 1.2
MP7 (4.6mm) 4 2 1.2
S&W 500 (S&W .500) 2 8 7.2

Rifles and machine guns

M16 (5.56mm) 3 6 6.3
AKM (7.62*39mm) 4 5 6
AK-74 (5.45*39mm) 5 4 5
M468 (6.8mm) 4 6 8.4
FN MAG (7.62*51mm) 4 7 11.2
M2HB (.50 BMG) 7 8 25.2 (!)

As you can see, Lethality counts for a lot in those average damage figures – an unarmored person will take more damage from a punch than a Five-seveN! Penetration is a bigger deal than just looking at the table makes it seem, though, because the damage curves change drastically as dice are lost to Armor and Cover – and smart combatants will use as much of both as they can. (For reference, light ballistic vests are Armor 1, military/SWAT vests are Armor 2, and armor with trauma plates (e.g. Interceptor Body Armor) is Armor 3.) That Five-seveN is a lot better for shooting someone with Armor 2 (at least compared to the other handguns – you still won’t do very much damage.)

The way damage is rolled means that any attack, no matter how powerful, can end up doing no damage and that low-Lethality weapons (most handguns, for example) tend to do only incidental damage. This is very much intentional, and there are a few ways to get around it (more on that later).

I’d like to post some examples of the probabilities of inflicting different wound levels on an average character with different weapons, but I’ll need to go write a computer program first. One interesting metric is the chance that a weapon will do 0 damage – a 5.7mm has a 41% chance, a 9mm has a 36% chance, an M16 has a 6.4% chance, an AKM has a 6.25% chance, and a .50-cal has only a 0.01% chance.

Modifying Penetration and Lethality: I haven’t done any real design work on this, but there are two major ways to change a weapon’s Penetration and Lethality: ammunition and hit location. Ammunition can modify either trait in either direction, e.g. hollow-points reduce Penetration and raise Lethality, while armor-piercing rounds do the opposite, in addition to any other effects it has. Hit location directly modifies Lethality – torso hits are resolved at the weapon’s base Lethality, but limb hits reduce it and head and vitals hits raise it. A +2 Lethality bonus (the figure I’ve been eyeballing – and, so far, my eyeballed numbers have been pretty much right on) makes handgun wounds pretty serious. Lethality can’t be lowered below 2 or raised above 8 for any reason.

Fast! Furious! Fun! Deathwish’s New New Direction

Deathwish has been knocking around in my brain as an abstractly defined construct for about three years now.  I’ve always had a pretty strong idea of what the game would play like, what the central elements of gameplay and the setting were, and a repertoire of games to steal bits from.  As I’ve encountered and absorbed more material in my research and discovered and played new games, my direction of the game’s development has changed drastically several times — the system I’ve been posting about recently is the third ground-up reimagining of the very guts of the rules.  Each piece of material I’ve encountered has been an addition to the “codebase” of Deathwish, however; nothing has ever been removed from the library of sources it draws on.

My goal with Deathwish has always been to make the game I’ve always wanted to play with my friends, informed by a decade and a half of experiences with dozens of games and people.  It was, conceptually, an artistically compiled professional mix-down of all the gaming and creative thinking I’d ever done.  Now, the project is actually defined that way: it’s a system consisting of many modules of various types, each of which acts like a programming library to provide contents and functionality to the whole.

The software metaphors used in describing Deathwish to this point have been fully realized.  Previous versions of Deathwish are in the version 0.0.x cycle — alphas that saw some development, but no active testing or release.  A retrospective version summary:

• Version 0.0.1 – July-October 2008: Project initiated.  The game is intended to be a heavily modified and cleaned-up Cyberpunk 2020 with the background of Nine Inch Nails’ concept album Year Zero as the base setting.
• Version 0.0.2 – November 2008: Lifepath-based character generation proposed.  The very core of the CP2020 system is extracted and developed into something harder, first realizing the low-modifier, one-die-one-action principle.  Much fiddling with and analysis of automatic weapons rules begins here.
• Version 0.0.3 – June 2009: The system gets more complex, the idea being that keeping the complex rules in the background and using them to create simple numbers for use on the character sheet is the best way to combine crunch with simplicity, accessibility, playability, and speed.  There was a lot of subtraction of double-digit and negative numbers involved and much pondering of the nature of exploding (or open-ended) dice.
• Version 0.0.4 – September 2010: Development recommences after a long hiatus.  The basic system is torn out and replaced with a prettied-up version of the Twilight 2000 Second Edition rules, which requires rethinking of everything.  This version was the first to see really substantial development and approach playability.
• Version 0.1a – January-February 2011: Alpha development of the current version.  Savage Worlds is discovered to realize Deathwish’s design goals and is selected as a framework to build on — regardless of whether or not it’s the final system, it will provide a foundation known to work with which more advanced concepts can be integrated and tested.

The current version is version 0.1 and can be imagined as a computer.  Deathwish itself is the software element, running like an operating system.  It overlays the rest of the systems, passing information in and out, providing rule and setting extensions, and making everything play nice together.  Savage Worlds is the core system ROM, providing all the essential functionality.  Other modules provide supplemental rules, sub-systems, setting, and theme and tone.  This industrial mashup is not at all chaotic, though; each module has a type and a purpose — only certain elements from each are used to avoid conflicts.

Deathwish 0.1 component manifest

Rules module: Savage Worlds provides the core rules, basic character generation, expandable material.

Technology modules: GURPS Ultra-Tech and GURPS Bio-tech provide the catalog of gear available, and Shadowrun, Fourth Edition provides concepts on augmented reality and its effects on society and interaction.

Setting modules: GURPS Cyberworld and GURPS Autoduel provide the details of the geopolitical makeup of the United States and world of Deathwish, including the existence of autoduelling as a sport.  GURPS Cyberpunk and Ex Machina: Tri-Stat Cyberpunk Genre provide general cyberpunk genre atmosphere and conceptual advice.

Tone modules: Cyberpunk 2020 provides its fatalistic atmosphere and use of meta-characters as a tool of stylistic expression.  Interface-Zero, the game that introduced Savage Worlds, serves as a guide to maintaining a dystopian tone in the presence of nanotechnology, sentient AI, and welfare states.  Twilight 2000 captures the chaos and desperation of a modern firefight well.  Shadowrun serves a second role, providing the concept of the professional criminal operative as player-character archetype.  Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero and The Slip and their attendant background materials give the other setting material punch and resonance.

External rules imports: Pyramid’s GURPS rules for computer hacking; Traveller’s lifepath-based character creation; Interface-Zero’s gritty injury rules.

Due to the excellence and ease of use of Savage Worlds, Deathwish development is now proceeding faster and further than ever before and will soon be ready for its first beta test group.  Hopefully, it will be what I’ve always wanted and will provide a fast, furious, and fun night of hellish cyberpunk.  I think it will — and I’m more confident of that now than I ever thought I’d be.

Bullet Bill

Deathwish Character Basics

Deathwish characters are defined by many traits: Attributes, Skills, Qualities, Relationships and Resources.  The most fundamental of all of these, and of any roleplaying game, are the Attributes — the core capabilities of a character.

Deathwish Attributes represent the physical and mental makeup of the character — the hardware.  As such, they serve as the basis and limits of other abilities.  They are also, compared to Skills and other “software” traits, relatively fixed and hard to change, with the very notable exceptions of body modifications and injuries.  They are also arguably less important than in many other game systems, at least in that having a particularly high Attribute isn’t automatically very useful.

Primary Attributes

Primary Attributes represent a character at its most fundamental.  Everything else is rooted in them.  Human-scale Attributes run from 1-10, with an average score being 5.  Most people have Attributes between 3 and 7; scores outside that range are exceptionally good or poor.

Body is a measure of a character’s overall health and physical condition.  It is rolled directly to avoid fatigue, in contests of endurance, and when wounded, and it is also indirectly used to resist damage and in movement.  This is Deathwish‘s “Constitution” attribute.

Strength is a measure of a character’s physical power and physical stature.  It is rarely rolled directly except when performing feats of strength, but has many ancillary uses, including resisting damage and recoil, carrying heavy loads, moving objects, and doing hand-to-hand damage.

Agility is a measure of a character’s quickness, hand-eye coordination, and precision of movement.  It is rolled directly for physical movement or manipulation tasks and is also the base Attribute for many Skills and Secondary Attributes.  Almost all physical actions depend to some degree on Agility.

Intelligence is a measure of a character’s reasoning, cognition, knowledge, and memory.  It is a broad representation of a character’s overall mental acuity and ability to think.  It is rolled directly to correctly draw conclusions or remember information and is also the base Attribute for many Skills and two Secondary Attributes.  Intelligence is also important when a character needs to think quickly in order to do something else or make a decision.

Willpower is a measure of a character’s dedication, resilience, and ability to exercise good judgment.  It is rolled directly to make tough decisions, endure stress, resist coercion, and in similar situations in which a character’s force of will is important or in question.  It is also the base Attribute for some Skills and one Secondary Attribute.  Like Strength, it is most often used passively.

Empathy is a measure of a character’s force of personality, ability to relate to others, and general sociability and likability.  It is rolled directly to gauge others’ mental or emotional states and contributes to a Secondary Attribute.  It is also the basis of most social Skills and is very important to maintaining relationships and getting along in public.  It is also prone to being reduced by dehumanizing influences such as combat, drug abuse, living in squalor, and social isolation.

Perception is a measure of a character’s ability to discern, recognize, and properly interpret sensory stimuli.  It is rolled directly to spot, hear, or smell things, to notice signs, and to search.  It is also the basis of a few Skills and contributes to two Secondary Attributes.  It is most often used passively, but is invaluable in keeping characters out of trouble, or at least in helping them get out of trouble they’re already in.

Secondary Attributes

Secondary Attributes are based on two Primary Attributes each.  Their beginning values are the average of the two contributing Primary Attributes, but they can be modified independently by events, Traits, body modifications, and experience.

Trauma Tolerance represents a character’s physical resistance to damage and injury.  It is the average of Body and Strength; healthier systems handle trauma better, and greater body mass means there’s more tissue to absorb a blow.  Trauma Tolerance sets a character’s wound thresholds.

Speed is a character’s ability to move quickly.  It is the average of Body and Agility; good physical conditioning and quickness and coordination both contribute to moving fast.  It is rolled directly when moving quickly is important and also determines movement rates.

Reaction is a character’s ability to act quickly.  It is the average of Agility and Perception; the mind must be able to recognize a situation and determine the appropriate response, and the body must be able to execute it quickly.  It is rolled directly to act quickly or before something else happens or someone else acts.  It is also of great use in combat and other life-or-death situations.

Initiative is a character’s ability to quickly assess a situation and decide what to do.  It is the average of Agility and Intelligence; the mind must be able to quickly figure out a plan of action and get the body to execute it.  It differs from Reaction in that it used to determine how quickly a character figures out what to do; Reaction determines how quickly a character actually does it.  It is rolled directly to determine the order of action in combat and to make split-second decisions in other situations.

Nerve is a character’s ability to keep a cool head and act effectively under stress.  It is the average of Intelligence and Willpower; one has to have a good head on their shoulders in the first place, and it has to be kept focused and running.  Nerve is rolled directly to determine how effectively a character may act in combat or other life-or-death situations and to carry on effectively when wounded or frightened.  Fighters with low Nerve will spend a lot more time cowering, taking cover, running, or firing ineffectively than doing anything useful, while those with high Nerve will get to make their own decisions in the middle of hectic firefights; it is perhaps the greatest distinction between good and poor combatants.

Intuition is a character’s ability to draw conclusions not immediately obvious or evident from what is known and to discern something amiss — to get and follow a hunch.  It is the average of Empathy and Perception; one must be able to feel and read other people and to notice subtle cues.  It is rolled directly to detect lies, subtle strangeness, and danger.  It is also used to get around dead ends in adventures by soliciting clues from the gamemaster.

The Deathwish Core Mechanic

Deathwish is really starting to come together!  Of greatest importance, the core mechanic is complete, and I’m quite happy with it.  Without further ado or comment beforehand, here it is:

The Core Mechanic: A task roll (skill check, attribute check, etc.) is made by rolling 1d10 against the actor’s applicable trait value, modified by the Difficulty of the task.  If the die roll is equal to or lower than the target number, the task succeeds with a Value equal to the number on the die.  If the roll is higher than the target number, the task is failed (with a Value of 0 if any mechanic calls for one).   Average tasks are rolled against the base trait value; difficulty levels successively double or halve the base value.  Thus, Easy tasks use twice the trait value, Hard tasks use half, and Very Hard tasks use one-quarter.

Example: Bullet Bill has Computer Operation 4.  For Easy tasks, he rolls against an 8; for Average, a 4; for Hard, a 2; and for Very Hard, a 1.  He’s trying fix a computer that can’t access the Internet.  The GM rules that this is an Easy task, so Bill must roll an 8 or less — an 80% chance of success.  As long as he rolls an 8 or less, he wants to roll as high as he can.  He rolls a 7, and the GM declares that this is sufficiently high that he fixes the computer in ten minutes, just one-third of the time it would normally take.

This idea is the basis of everything else in the game: equipment ratings, damage rolls, initiative, and many other things that are yet to be developed.  This means that, no matter what you’re doing, you always roll the same dice in the same way — essential to a simple, clean game design.  Further, all that messy-looking division is done before play and recorded on the character sheet — next to “Computer Operation: 4,” Bullet Bill has “8/4/2/1″ on his character sheet.  Difficulty modifiers from circumstances, equipment, wounds, etc. just move the target number left or right along that four-number progression, so you never need to do any math to figure out what you need to roll.

An essential component of this mechanic is that the dice are always read as they lie — there are absolutely no modifiers to the dice on the table.  The mechanic borrows from The Price is Right in that you want to roll high, but if you roll higher than your trait value, you fail.  Opposed tests, then, are basically just a roll-off — but the higher-skilled character has more numbers that succeed (and that are higher than their opponent can possibly get).  No counting successes, no figuring margins of success — you just roll, and if you succeed, you beat anyone with a lower number than you.

This mechanic also restricts high levels of success to higher trait values, which reflects that only experts achieve outstanding results under almost all circumstances.  Your trait value (modified by Difficulty) is also the highest Value you can get on a roll — if you need a check Value of 3+ to win that crowd over, hack a computer in time, or punch the crazed ganger in his amped-up adrenaline gland and you’ve got a skill of 2, tough luck.  (Those tasks would also be 20% less likely to succeed for someone who did have a skill of 3+ — they’re quite hard.)

Success Values are mostly used in opposed checks, to get a quantitative value from a task roll (for example, how much progress was made), for improved effects for good rolls (e.g. increased damage, reduced time taken), for tasks of such a nature that only someone qualified has a chance of success (ones that aren’t necessarily difficult, per se — difficulty shifts do their own thing and can be combined with Success Values — but are sensitive or complicated), and in damage rolls.  In most checks, they aren’t necessary but are nice to have.  Difficulty levels rate the chance of simply succeeding — and note that, since everything in Deathwish runs on a 0-10 scale, even expert characters have trouble performing hard tasks, including many rolls in combat.  On the other hand, they rock at the easy stuff.

So that’s it — the basis from which all things Deathwish stem.  There’s lots more — what Difficulty levels represent, what trait levels mean, how traits get modified by equipment and circumstances, how serial actions work — but that will come.  As a test of this concept’s grokability, I’ll sum in up in a sentence:

“Roll a d10 and try to get as high as you can, but not above that number on your character sheet.”

I like it.  I hope you do, too.

Sampling: An Epiphany

My attitude toward game design is very heavily rooted in industrial music — not merely in its themes and tropes, but in the methods of producing it. It is said that all the best artists steal, and industrial takes that maxim as far as it can. Since I started amassing my game collection, I have been mining games for data and ideas and sampling rules and thoughts for my own use, modifying heavily to make it all fit. The theory is that I can build the game I want to out of parts of all the other games out there. Free software development uses the same methodology.

At any rate, I was doing some of my game research and found a lightning-bolt epiphany in a very strange place: GDW’s Twilight 2000. I’d looked at the game long ago, but I slagged off its stodgy wargame approach and often cumbersome system. Looking at it with a fresh eye and informed by all the ideas and goals I’d developed in two years, I found elegant solutions lurking in all that staid text.

For now, suffice it to say that the core game system just got scrapped for a new design. Firefights are going to be intense — and FUN — in Deathwish.

I’ll write much more later about the system, GDW, and my own background in these things.

-Bullet Bill

I’m not dead, I’ve just been thinking.

It’s been a very long time since anything was last posted here, and there’s a very good reason for that: development hadn’t been happening.

The past tense there is very important.  I got distracted from the game by a lot of things — mostly just living and focusing more on running games and putting together a solid group.  But the ideas never stopped coming, and my brain was always chewing on the project in the background.  Now, with my motivation back and an appreciative and enthusiastic group of players to work on the game for, development is back in full swing.  Ideas are being put down and worked on in tangible form.

So, without further ado, here’s a summary of what’s going on with Cyberpunk 0000:

Presentation

–Name Change: The final title of the game is undecided, and Cyberpunk 0000 was always intended as a working title.  That title has been replaced, however, and the game is now known as Deathwish. This almost certainly won’t be the final title, but it captures the player-character ethos of the setting in development and the spirit of my players — they have absolutely no qualms about taking on great risks and obviously self-destructive endeavors.  Cyberpunk 0000 also tied the game to R. Talsorian’s venerable Cyberpunk line, which was intentional (as the core game system draws heavily on its mechanics) but also pigeonholes the game.  Deathwish is much more than a re-imagining of CP2020, and it would also be inappropriate to piggyback on the success of another game.

–Point of View in the Rules: One of the axioms of Deathwish’s development is that players are generally not interested in rulebooks; they are intended for gamemasters, who then explain, interpret, and apply the rules at the table.  The Deathwish rules will be highly modular and separated into sections throughout.  Most sections will be intended for GMs and will contain the full “source code” of the rules, showing exactly what’s involved with a mechanic and what influences it.  The others will provide explanation and interpretation or advice on applying the rule in play — how to play and run the game, how to modify rules (and what consequences that might have), and rules options and alternate ways of doing things.  The player sections will only explain the rules of the game in the simplest, most concise, and most intuitive way possible, helping players to read only what they want to know.  The other sections will always be there for the reader who wishes to know more, but they should not be an obstacle to understanding how to play the game.  An example of this principle is illustrated in the next section.

–Presentation of Game Mechanics: One of the core goals of Deathwish is simple, intuitive play with easily applied rules.  The game is intended to be complex, but this complexity will live in the writing of the rules and the ways they interact in the background — it will not make itself felt by requiring tedious calculations or making fundamental play cumbersome and laborious.  To this end, rules mechanics will be explained in the simplest possible terms and made as concrete and direct as possible.  In the player sections, the purpose and method of the rules will be explained, but briefly, allowing readers to absorb the concepts (which will be simple) and move on to the next.  Part of this simplicity is adopting a set of standard forms and notations for expressing mechanics.  Verbal instructions and descriptions are to be avoided; they are hard to find within a page and prone to misunderstanding.

The best example of this principle is how skill checks work versus how they are presented.  As is explained in more detail below, skill checks are made by rolling 1d10 and adding a character’s applicable attribute and skill values to obtain a value which is compared to the check’s Difficulty.  That’s the core engine of the game — if it were a program, that’s how the code would work.  That operation involves adding three numbers together from different parts of the character sheet and then working with two-digit numbers, and it also requires that one do the arithmetic for every roll since the rule gives no indication what one needs to roll to succeed.  Using the same rule, however, a much more aesthetically pleasing solution is possible — essentially, we use algebra to simplify the calculation as far as possible.  An example is in order.

Example: Bionic Bob has an Intelligence of 4 and a Computer Operation skill of 4.  Computer Operation is linked to Intelligence, so Bob rolls 1d10 + 4 + 4 for tasks such as setting up a machine, installing software, writing scripts, etc.  On Bob’s character sheet, we compute this sum in advance next to Computer Operation in his skill list (where the values of 4 for INT and Computer Operation are already listed).  That’s saved one operation — now we’re only adding two numbers (1d10+8) instead of three, but that’s nothing special.  We keep track of one other value in the skill list, though: Base Target Number — the minimum value needed on the d10 roll to succeed in a task of basic difficulty.  Basic tasks have a Difficulty of 10, and simple algebra or gamer’s intuition shows that, with a +8, Bob needs to roll a 2 to succeed at a basic task — a 90% chance of success, which is appropriate given his average scores.  This Base Target Number is calculated in the same way — 10 – (Attribute + Skill) for every skill.  We now consider basic tasks to have a Difficulty of 0, not 10, and we find the final target number for any task by simply adding the Difficulty of the task to the Base Target Number.  Thus, if Bob finds himself trying to set up a computer network for a resistance cell base (an average task, Difficulty 4), he needs to roll (2+4): 6 — a 50% chance of success.

This keeps the numbers used small and reduces even the most complex skill check to a matter of modifying Difficulty, then adding it to the Base Target Number.  All modifiers to tasks will act directly on the Difficulty, and no task will ever be lower that Difficulty 0.  The only pitfall I see with this system is that, for above-average attribute and skill values, the BTN is negative.  This doesn’t pose a mathematical problem, but negative numbers can be off-putting, as can the idea of lower numbers being better.  I don’t think it will be that big a deal, though, as it’s a minor quirk in a procedure I think is quite slick and the arithmetic is still quite simple — just subtract the BTN from the Difficulty if it’s negative.  [Afterthought: I actually like the semantics behind that -- high skills essentially reduce the difficulty.]

Other types of rolls would be similarly reduced to the easiest way to understand them.  Other mechanics will use standardized, unambiguous notation, and I’m considering calling out mechanical bits from the main text by separating them a line from any explanatory text.  This is an idea taken from textbook layout, but I think game books could learn a lot about communicating information from them.

Mechanics and System

–Core Mechanic: The core mechanic was decided upon long ago, and lots of testing and consideration have shown it does exactly what is desired.  Every roll in Deathwish is a 1d10 roll (except for ad-hoc randomization rolls, but those aren’t part of the game system) — skill checks, attribute saves, damage rolls, everything.  These rolls might not all use the same form, but skill checks — the most fundamental part of gameplay and what are used to accomplish all tasks — are set in stone.  To make a skill check: Roll 1d10 and add the applicable attribute score and skill level.  If this sum equals or exceeds the assigned Difficulty of the check, the character succeeds; otherwise, they fail. If a natural 10 is rolled, roll a second d10 and add its result to the check total. There will be some embellishments and expansions for different applications and situations, but that’s the core mechanic.  The “exploding” d10 allows for small odds of success to exist in the system, which means there is almost always a small chance of success against a high Difficulty.  The d10 base die means that all probabilities are easily understood as multiples of 10%, except for those long shots, which break down into 1% increments.  With the high Difficulties commonly encountered in firefights (for example, the Difficulty to hit a target at medium range is 18), characters will almost always miss much more than they hit, which means the game system will portray firefights as intended — desperate affairs in which most shots miss.

The terminology needs to be cleaned up, but that’s a matter of presentation and development and will come with time.  More worrying is that there is a bug in the exploding d10.  Since it’s impossible to roll less than a 1 on any die, adding the second d10 means adding at least one point to a skill check total.  This means that it’s impossible to roll a natural 10 — one will immediately add the second die to it — which means that target numbers of 10 and 11 are essentially the same.  This means that there’s a point for any check at which changing a difficulty by one point has no effect on the probability of success.  I’m not sure how to deal with this, or if it’s even a big deal — Shadowrun got along with a similar problem with exploding d6s for three editions.  The solutions I’ve considered are: not doing anything and accepting it as a quirk of the system, treating a roll of 10 on the first die as 9 and adding the second d10, and reading the “0″ on the second d10 as a “0″ instead of the normal “10.”  The second of these is workable, but violates the intuitive nature of reading the dice as they lie.  The third changes the way dice are read in a more severe manner.  Both solutions shorten the range of possible rolls by making the maximum possible die roll 19 instead of 20.  (The second d10 does not explode, putting some tasks out of reach.)

Other things worth pointing out about the core system:

• There are no rules for critical success, nor will there likely be rules for exceptionally good rolls (rolling significantly higher than the Difficulty) conferring additional benefits — one either succeeds or fails.  Certain skills, pieces of equipment, and situations may impose their own special effects on certain natural rolls, however.  High skills are rewarded by allowing more frequent success and by allowing more difficult variants of tasks (such as called shots) to be undertaken — although there may be an optional rule allowing voluntarily increasing Difficulty after a roll is made.
• There will undoubtedly be variants on this basic skill check, including opposed rolls (for beating another character at something) and long, involved tasks (such as doing legwork or designing a piece of hardware).  These tasks, regardless of how success is determined, will all use the Check Value = Attribute + Skill + 1d10 model.
• External modifiers to the Check Value are to be avoided — the Difficulty will instead be modified.  This makes rolling skill checks at the table a much simpler affair, especially because of how skill checks will be expressed.

That’s far from all there is to say about Deathwish right now, but this is long and I’m running out of time.  Next post, I’ll discuss attributes, the structure of the system, initiative, some musings on combat, and character generation.

–Bullet Bill

I have a vision.

I know I have a vision of what this setting will be. Every thought I have, no matter the time of day or the activity, turns toward the world I contemplate for this game. I watch Robot Chicken and see it as a mincing of pop culture — a distillation of everything ever on television, the medium in its essential form. I think of returning to college to study the deepest workings of computers and I think of working for a corporation, unknowingly keeping vital engines of society running. I wonder what that job will be like in twenty years and imagine talking over IT security procedures with a security professional in full military armour bearing a rifle. He is the most junior member of the security platoon.

Genre films have grown up in the last few years. Science fiction and superhero films are indistinguishable from mainstream drams and action films. Special effects used to require a deal of imagination from the viewer, as no set was filled out to anything near realism and no effect was really convincing. Our films are now completely believable — we know what see cannot happen, but we accept the depiction as real anyway. The ham of Logan’s Run has become the dirt and rancid sweat of Children of Men.

These films now tell better stories. They are no longer cartoons, symbols of a feature portrayed by romantic stage actors. They are documentaries, dramas, artists’ renderings. Their characters are real people — or at least much so as the characters in mainstream films we idolize and emulate (but that’s a topic for another day). We see cities, planets, minds presented as if they truly exist. Our future visions have grown up — from ideas and abstractions they have have become visions and tangible things.

That is the tenor I have in mind for this future — the adult, live-action version of cyberpunk. The abstractions presaged by the progenitors of these thoughts have proven true; the future is here, along with future shock and its complications. The way they’ve been realized is essentially a special effect, albeit one vital to verisimilitude. Everything in this game will feel real.

Cyberpunk 0000 is film noir with a soundtrack by Front Line Assembly, Skinny Puppy, Nine Inch Nails, and ADULT., and you’re in control.

In more practical news, I’ve been mulling over, in roughly descending order of devotion: the task resolution system (regarding probabilities of single successes from multiple rolls, the vagaries of exploding dice, the definition of the core mechanic and whether positive or negative modifiers should be beneficial, and the idea of secondary “confounding circumstances” rolls — uncontrollable limitations to success); damage, armour, and injury; the structure of the combat system; and the nature of semi-random character generation.

Sometimes I wish my aesthetic visions were as clearly defined as my mechanistic ones.

Cyberpunk v3.0 — yes, I bought it.

I’ve always been an avid game collector.  I have piles of games I’ve never played and never will simply because they make for good reading and inspiration.  They also constitute a gaming research library — before writing rules, I often consult as many as ten games to see how others have covered similar ground before me.  There are a lot of gems buried in forgotten games.

I’ve said that the primary inspiration, ruleswise, for CP0000 is Cyberpunk 2020, and that’s true.  But there was a third edition of Cyberpunk released a few years ago.  It departs significantly from the theme and setting of 2020, following very different transhuman themes and presenting a very implausible future.  It features a lot of rehashed and half-baked ideas.  It’s an eyesore (with action-figure art).  And it was publicly reviled upon its release.

But I bought it anyway.

I’m adding the game to my library purely for research purposes.  I want to see what the designers did with their own system after a decade of evolution, and I want to see how they’ve made it suit a different setting.  Beyond that, I know there are some innovations in v3.0 that interest me — the greatest of these being the introduction of meta-characters.

Meta-characters are entities other than individuals that act in the game — organizations, corporations, gangs, etc.  They’ve got attributes, abilities, and descriptions, and they use characters to perform their functions — both as “troops” and as the meta-character’s “hands.”  It seems, on my first glance, that they serve as a concrete, game mechanic-based way to represent more nebulous entities that are nonetheless vital to the game and the setting.

And I’ve yearned, for a long time unknowingly, for some sort of mechanic like this for a long time.  It would be much easier to use groups and to have them play a meaningful role in a background if there were some ground rules for them, rather than playing out the visible, important actions they take through their characters and narrating the rest.  And it’s a vital part of the cyberpunk genre — I now wonder how it is that we got as far as we did without ever coming up with real rules for the behaviour of those great giants, the corporations.

I was already thinking of making rules for this sort of thing when I remembered that v3.0 tried to cover it, as well.  As I’ve not read the game yet, I can’t speak to how well the rules work.  It could be that they’re unworkable or silly.  Even if they are, I’m sure I’ll find something I can use and some ideas I can mine — and, after all, that’s the point of having a research library.

Next up: thoughts on core mechanics and character generation — real stuff about the guts of the game!

Why it’s called Cyberpunk … and why that may be misleading.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the fundamental rules for this game lately.  The original assumption for this project, back when it was intended simply to be a fun short campaign, was that I would use the Cyberpunk 2020 rules, appropriately kludged, with the setting of Year Zero.  I’d never played or run CP2020 before, and I’d always like the rules, flawed as they are, so I wanted to take the book and run with it, beat it into submission, make it my game.

And I still think there’s a good game behind those rules.  The trouble is just that, however: the CP2020 rulebook reads like notes for a game, a way for someone knowledgable of the process behind it to reconstruct the thing in play.  The game hides from its players.  And as I’ve been thinking more about this project, I’ve realized I do want to write my own rules — this goes beyond creating a setting for an existing game.  Roleplaying games have always been at their best when the system and setting are closely integrated, and that’s a goal of this project.  In writing rules, I don’t care whether or not a rule is universal; I care about whether or not it works for this game and this setting.  I want to make a game in which everything works.

This isn’t an original goal, and it certainly isn’t one that’s never been realized before.  Burning Wheel, one of my favourite games, exemplifies this approach — every rule exists for a reason, and it makes the game as a whole work the way it does.  Putting this into practice can be more difficult, but I think it’s mostly a matter of approaching things with the right mindset.  Making the game fun and elegant is paramount. CP2020, while fun, was not particularly elegant, however.  It had loads of kludges, wonky rules, revisions, and retcons.  It also came with enough GM advice to force the thing to do what you wanted to anyway.  That’s the kind of thing I’d like to avoid.

So I’m writing the rules from the ground up.  CP2020 will serve as a guide and model — and a go-to for figuring out how to resolve a particular problem.  There will certainly be similarities, but I intend to bring the weight of experience and perspective to my system and create something that works well and is fun.

It can’t be that hard, right?

Data intrudes on the real world.

Real development work — not just endless thought circles, banter with friends, and scribbled notes — is finally beginning.  As such, expect things to be a little muddled before things start to coalesce.

I do not exaggerate when I say this project has been in my thoughts more or less constantly for over six months now — and the original seeds were planted over a year and a half ago.

Though I’ve been a gamer for more than half my life — twelve years — I never really got into cyberpunk gaming.  A few of my friends played Cyberpunk 2020 or Shadowrun, and I even made characters for a few games, but I somehow never got involved with the genre.  It always interested me on some level, probably in no small part because of the role RoboCop played in my childhood, but I was perfectly content to stick to medieval fantasy and space opera.  Even later, when I was into GURPS and lots of science-fiction roleplaying, I passively refused to run a straight cyberpunk game; instead, I pushed every other game I ran as close to it as I could.  I had cyborgs and neural interfaces in Traveller, feudal lords hiring out kill teams in D&D (though that’s not much of a stretch …), and governmental conspiracies and megacorporations in my GURPS Black Ops game.  Perhaps it was an instance of me refusing to do something I like … or maybe I was trying to get my head around the concepts and feel of the genre.

I certainly did develop an intense love affair with cyberpunk, though.  Neuromancer has been my favourite book since I first read it, and I relentlessly pursue cyberpunk films, anime, literature, and music.  Yes, music.  Cyberpunk is necessarily a multimedia genre; no one medium can convey everything it’s about, and that makes it a unique development in fiction and expression.

So if you’re looking at a box filled with my influences for this project, you’ll find the collected works of William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Neal Stephenson; the Ghost in the Shell films and RoboCop; Shadowrun, Cyberpunk 2020, and GURPS Cyberworld; Transmetropolitan, and tons of albums by bands like Front Line Assembly, Front 242, Ministry, and Venetian Snares.  Music is what got me into this in the first place.

I’d been into industrial music for a while (and Nine Inch Nails for a very long time) when Year Zero came out in 2007.  I was blown away — here was this immersive, engaging sound painting an entirely original — and eminently plausible — world, and the album was bigger than the box!  All over the Internet, bit by bit, websites detailing the background of the album’s setting popped up.  All of the material was wonderfully descriptive and ominously suggestive, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was perfect campaign setting material — just direct your players to the sites and you’re done!

That was when I finally started running cyberpunk games.  I finally started experimenting with systems besides GURPS and started fleshing out a real setting to play in.  I even had a pretty decent campaign with the Shadowrun rules and a fusion of Year Zero and GURPS Cyberworld.  But I never sat down and really created a setting — it was all kludge on the fly, and I never found a rules system I really liked.

Except I’d still never played Cyberpunk 2020, even though I’d been in love with the book for years.  For everything brilliant in it, there’s so much else that’s broken or just wonky — the book reads like notes for a game.  But the basics are pretty close to what I want in a system, and I realized that a patched-up, updated, and improved Cyberpunk 2020 was just about exactly what I wanted to play.

So I started thinking about it.  And ideas came constantly.  And they fit together pretty well.

So that’s where I’m coming from.  I don’t know where this project’s going.  Simply hacking the CP2020 rules together with the Year Zero setting isn’t just unoriginal and probably six kinds of illegal — it’s also not even the goal.  I’ve created enough stuff on top of those influences that the product will be scarcely recognizable as those when it’s done.  I seek to create, not to imitate.  And cyberpunk has a lot of life left in it — what most see as its heyday was really just its infancy.

But that’s a thought for another day.