Musing about Don't Rest Your Head and Spirit of the Century

[Fatespinner]

Hi,

important things first, I really love your games.
Now to the content of this post. While musing about my problems with SotC and HQ, how to do cyberware with SotC and reviving my Cyberpunk on Speed thread on rpg.net, I noticed what I like about your games and what I would add or change.

I came up with a mixture of DRYH and SotC and would like to hear your opinons about it and if it would be to complex, to easy or just unnessecary work.

Dice Mechanics:
The dice mechanics of DRYH are really simple and easy. Personally I like them better then the SotC mechanics, even when I don't like dice pools. So I think I will take those machanics as a basis for my further ideas. I am not sure about limiting the dice pool to a maximum. If I limit it, you would get an automatic success for every two dice of more then nine. This would certainly cause problems, when you include mechanics like the dminating dice pools from DRYH. There are so many cool things that you can do with dice pools, just look at madness and exhaustion talents!

Aspects as madness talents:
They are a great way to model things that are in traditinal games powers, advantages, disadvanages, edges and so on. One think that I don't like about them is that they give you a flat +2 bonust a roll. It would be nice if it is possible to tag an aspect more then once for a greater bonus. When you use the Dice Mechanics of DRYH, madness talents and my cyperware rules you notice that aspects work a bit like Madness talents. So it could be really interessting to use ascepts similar to madness talents in a game. It would give you greater flexibility and makes them more interesting.
There are two ways about how to use aspects in that way. The first is to use fate points like in SotC and each fate point is translated into one diciplin dice for your roll. The other possibility is to use them as madness. This would add a new interessting twist, but it might be better not to call them madness but maybe fate. When they dominate the char doesn't have to go mad, but maybe the GM gets some game advantage or the char has to take a consequence. It might also be very interessting to use Aspects as something like exhaustion talents and save madnesss for evil things like bad magic.

Skills and Attributes:
I like a few things from other games and would include them in my modification of DRYH. One thing are self-defined skills from unknown armies and the other thing are basic abilities for sozial, phsical and mental tasks from Tri-Stat. So basicly you have three attributes that show how good you are in these three basic categories. Skills will then be added to these attributes and are specialisations. This works a bit like attributes and skills in the old star wars d6.
In the moment I am really uncertain about the range of the attributes and skills.

Damage and consequences:
The damage rules from SotC are just great and I would include them in a game. I know a few players who really like hit locations. So maybe there is sme possibility to include them in the die role. It could be something like the number of rolled '6's or '1's or something completly different. I have in the moment no idea how to include hit location in any of the two games.

Teaming up:
The team rules in DRYH are just sweet.

Difficulity levels:
If the characters are in a conflict against the environment or do a task against a static difficulity, I would include a guideline for GM's

So now that I have written all this down and look at it, it sounds more like a homebrew then just some ideas and houserules for DRYH or SotC.
Still I am interessted into your opinions and what you think what might work and what not.

As a final word: Thanks for the dice mechanics in DRYH and the Aspects in SotC!

[Fatespinner]

So I just wanted to sleep and some thoughts crept into my mind. I want to write them down before I forgot them. Hopefully my grammar and word error rate will not be so high.

Cyberpunk on Speed Revised:

My ideas focus on a Cyberpunk setting for DRYH.

First we start with the five questions.

1. Who are you?

2. Who were you?

3. Who will you be?

4. What drives you?

5. How does it start?

I think these questions are self explaining. Now to the new parts.

Discipline in this setting called Edge. You don't have a fixed edge of 3, but a more detailed list what you can do. I think this is good for a cyberpunk setting, because there it is more about what the characters can do.
Edge is devided into three sub-disciplines: Act (covers all physical tasks), Think (Covers all mental tasks), Talk (Covers all social tasks). Now you give one sub-discipline a rating of 1, another gets a rating of 2 and the last gets a rating of 3.
In addition you have now 7 points to spent on skills. The maximum value that you can have is 5 and the starting value for a skill is the rating of the sub-discipline to which the skill belongs. There is no skill list, so you can take any skills. Only one skill at the rate of 5 is allowed.

What do the numbers mean?

1 = Below Human average
2 = Human average
3 = Talented
4 = Expert
5 = Human peak

Next comes your Madness, which is here called Chrome. Chrome talents represent your modifications and cyberware. You can choose up to 10 chrome talents, which work exectly like madness talents and have a rating from 1 to 6. You may divide a maximum of 10 points on all chrome talents. Note, that you don't have to use all 10 points or have any at all.
Because chrome is not madness, you don't have your typical reponces, instead chrome does have a rating from 0 to 10. It increases every time when your chrome dominates. Chrome makes you feel better, you start to think that you are better and you get addicted to your new powers. When you reach 10 in chrome you snap.

I am not sure about exhaustion. It would be stress in a cyberpunk game. Stress might be every interesting in a cyberpunk or futur shock game. I have to think about it a bit more. After all exhaustion in DRYH makes you much more powerfull. I would recommended in Cyberpunk on Speed. There are no stress talents, because of the changed discipline/edge rules.

To include wounds into the game I would take the damage/conflict resolution rules from SotC. They will work in the same way, because the success levels are similar. Note that there is no endurence or resolve, so all characters can take a maximum stress of 5.

Thats it. What do you think?

[iago]

DRYH has a lot of moving parts, with interactions between those parts that can be surprising.  (For example, the way that the dominance probabilities for other pools increase significantly when you decrease the number of discipline dice, making Permanent Madness in the original game particularly insidious.)

You're making a lot of changes here, so it's a little difficult to anticipate their success.  I say, get them to your gaming table and give them a whirl -- there's a lot that could work very well here, but I want to hear about the "field testing".

[Fatespinner]

Yes I want to see it in action as well. Hopefull I can get a chance to try it with my group in two weeks. The interaction between the different dice pools and mechanics is quite interessting and I did a bit calculation about chances of success and so. I think it will work very similar to DRYH. But I have to try it in the field and compare it with my pure DRYH experiences.

[Fatespinner]

I have thought a bit more and will make the system closer to DRYH.

Edge will just be at 3 as normal.

You still have 7 points to spent on skills, which will range from 1 (trained) to 3 (master). For each point in a skill you may reroll any die in any of your pools in your roll.

Another thing is that you can't use chrome in the same way as madness before to get extra dice. You have to use your chrome-talents to get extra dice. For that reason it would make sense to give you up to 10 chrome talents with a rating of 1-6 in each.

Next friday will be my game where I test the changes, I will report how they worked.

[Fatespinner]

So yesterday I had my play testing and it got mixed feelings.

I used mostly unmodified DRYH rules, just added skills that allowed you to reroll 1-2 dice.

I had three players and most of them had a lot of problems with the mechanics. They were fixed upon task resolution and had to get used to the fact that you can describe with one roll more then no simple action.

We just tried it and most of the time they succeeded and sometimes pain dominated. Sometimes dominated Madness and never Exhaustion. Actually the players never used Exhaustion and only used madness all the time.

We all had a lot of fun and one player said that he liked it a lot that all started at the same power level and that there was none who was much more powerful in an area then the other one.

Another thing that just comes to my mind is the problem of combats in DRYH. The characters never got in real danger of dying and risked a lot and shoot most of the opponents they encountered.

MAybe I had just bad luck with my dice and they had luck with their dice...