[Exemplar] thinking of doing a total redesign.

[Jeph]

First off, if you haven't looked at the original, you might want to check it out. Otherwise, a good portion of this post will be gibberish. The link is in my .sig file. Signature. Whatever.

So, what makes me want to do a redesign? The system works well enough. Every game I've played has been fun. BUT, it is lacking in some areas. Peter, The Guy I Always Game With, has a big complaint about it, being that it's a bit too good at emulating back-and-forth style conflicts: it's got total lockout, it doesn't let anything else in. And there are a couple of concepts that the game touches on (namely, player influence and character driven story) but I would like it to go further into. And I want the superhuman badasses to be more human, sometimes... picture the scene in The Matrix in which a bunch of cops kick Morpheus until he stops twitching.

Also, Legends of Middle Earth and Dragonfly took the Exemplar system and, you know, one-upped it. They're more elegant and less granular. Time for something new; I've pretty much got that idea down.

And there's a lot that I want to add to the setting material.

Lastly, there's a huge "in retrospect, that was sort of goofy" element that I want to get rid of with a few grams of antimatter.

:::

So, what changes to I want to make? First off, nix the core mechanic, and the 10-50 in 5 point increments scale. Nix the Styles, Insight, Willpower, and Nemesis division, and instead have 10 or so Core Ranks (sounds cool, neh?). Give 'em ratings from 0-2.

Create a list of 30-50 Skills; coming up with Talents has never been a smoothe process, especially for Wits and Stealth. Skills get 0-2 ratings, too.

Keep Techniques, kinda--make it so they've all got 0-2 ranks. Some are cool new abilities, some make you awesome at stuff that you can already do. A lot of Techniques will have a lasting minor benefit that can be kicked up a notch when required.

Then add Microtech Enhancements (including bioengineering on the microscopic level and nanotech) and Macrotech Enhancements (including larger genemods and bulkier cybertech), also rated 0-2, which let you do cool shit like breather underwater or have cyberneticd wings.

Nix Favored Moves. Replace with new, improved Favored Moves, which there will be a list of. They will pretty much amount to what Favored Moveds used to be, but more formalized and less confusing. Again with the 0-2 thingies.

Call all of those secondary 0-2 scores Side Ranks. Add Spiritual Attributes, but call them Personal Ranks, cause we wouldn't want to break the mold now would we? Character creation will go something like "Divide 12 dice among your Core Ranks. Divide 24 dice among your Side Ranks. Divide 3 dice among your Personal Ranks. Kick ass."

Top it all of with a pool of points for whatever (call it Energy or something) and a few derivatives. I'm thinking Psi Capacity (limits the number of Techniques that may be active at once or in a single round of combat), Hit Capacity (injury metric), and Action Capacity (initiative and base defense), just to go with a theme. They'll all be in the 0-20 range, likely.

:::

Mechanic. Get some d6, equal to the summed value of all relevant ranks (some may require Energy to be spent if you want them to work). Roll 'em, with sixes exploding. Total. Compare to adversary's total or to TN:

5 Standard
10 Difficult
15 Very Difficult
20 Heroic
25 Wuxia
30 Really Damn Hard

Combat would be a sort of dynamic reverse countdown I've been toying with for a few months. I've used in a few abortive projects that were never finished, but all the combats I've run with it have been exhillarating. It works something like this...

Everyone's got an Initiative, equal to Acap. The GM counts up from 0. Characters may Step In (SI) to act at any time, but they must have acted by the time the count reaches their Initiative or they lose their turn. The first time a character acts, they decide whether they are taking 1 or 2 actions in the round. If 2, then rolls related to both actions will suffer a one die penalty. Some actions cause a character's Initiative on the next round to be altered. All actions declared on the same count are resolved simultaneously, although characters with a higher Initiative always have a chance to declare actions before those with a lower Initiative. You may not take two actions on a count, although you can take an action and a reaction. A character can "take back" an action once per round, before it is resolved, by succeeding at a TN 10 test, with failure meaning that the action is lost.

If the target does not declare an action for defense, the TN for an attack is the target's Action Capacity. If they do, the TN is eithe the result of their roll or their Acap, whichever is better.

Injury is a margin of success + weapon - armor deal. Exceed Hitcap, target goes down. Fail to exceed Hitcap, and target takes a Bruise. Each bruise decreases Hitcap by 1 until it is healed. There will be called shots. There will be damage to objects. There will be wound penalties that only kick in after the fight. All in all, a more realistic cinematic combat system.

There will be special actions, called Stances, that characters can take. Stances cannot be taken when a character splits their action, and must be declared on the first count. They include things like full defense (active defense against every attack), aiming, flat out running, and Other Cool Shit. After a round in which a character takes a Stance, their Initiative returns to normal. If a character keeps taking Initiative-lowering actions without taking a Stance, their Initiative will just keep getting lower and lower, until it gets to 0, at which point they are forced to take a Stance.

Every physical action that a character takes may have an analagous psychic action overlayed upon it.

Dogfighting and fleet scale battle rules will be built along similar lines.

:::

Whenever a character uses a Personal Rank in a set piece, they gain a point of Momentum. Mementum may be spent to perform a Unaris-style hack, add a die to any roll, double any Capacity until the end of the round, or act like a point of Energy. Once spent, a point of Momentum becomes a point of History, which may be spent on new dice. The first die in a Side Rank costs 5 points, the second 8 points. Core Ranks cost double. You can rearrange your Personal Ranks with 1 point of History.

:::

Well, it's 1:01 in the morning, and I'm growing incoherant. More in the morning, including poignant questions. In the meantime, any and all advice is appreviated.

Thanks for reading!
--Jeff

[Andy Kitkowski]

Wow, man, good luck with that.  The thing I loved about Exemplar was that it was tight and focused without being an "Everyman SF" game.  Sure, there were bits that I had to add myself to play it smoothly, but overall it was solid- It was like a "Chronicles of Riddick" game before the movie even came out. :)

Having said that:

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Lastly, there's a huge "in retrospect, that was sort of goofy" element that I want to get rid of with a few grams of antimatter.
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Advancement via Blowing Shit Up?
Yeah, it's cool to SEE it, but when you actually play, it means that you can't have anything other than a cheesy violence play.
"I return the prized poodle to the Emporer."
"The Emporer grants you titles and harems."
"....Can I increase my Styles now?"
"Sorry, dude, nothing blew up."
"Uh..... Oh, wait, before I returned the poodle, right, I fed her an antimatter grenade..."

Also, I REALLY LIKED the fact that there weren't dozens of skills, that you could do everything with the tightly focused Attributes- How you had Steath and Piloting (two things thought of as "skills" in most games) next to Willpower and other "Attribute-like" things.  It really kept the game easy to whip out and run in a second.

I agree that Favored Moves needed an overhaul- I could never quite understand those...

I REALLY liked Nemesis. I'm not sure how you're adjusting or replacing that, but that was one of the other ("The OTHER other other") things that I liked about the game: You can draw on it, but use it too much and you're screwed.  It sounds like possibly the Momentum will replace that, but I hope that you keep that effect around somehow.  Sure, you can make the Exemplar more human and the like, but that whole "Short Term Gain over Long Term Risk" really spoke to me.

Anyway, good luck on it.  If you want someone to give it a read-through and let you know the places that need work or cleaning up, let me know.  I've been a closet Exemplar fan since we played it at NC Gameday that one time.

-Andy