[The Rustbelt] Cruel cargo; also, more GM clumsiness

[Marshall Burns]

But in the rustbelt, the horrible thing happens because the player chose to let it, not because you created the situation.

That is entirely true, and one of the reasons I re-constructed the system (the previous system was a lumbering, ponderous monster with Purist for System values; the one before that was even more ponderous and full of spot-rules, and the one before that was a rip-off of the Fallout computer game, and the one before that was heavily abstracted and inspired mostly, oddly enough, by Toon).

I've been thinking about it, and I'm almost certain that, were I playing this with my old group from college (especially the players who pulled the stuff I wrote about in this thread), I would have been able to threaten the kids with anything, for-real, without hesitation.  Heck, I probably could have had Box show up and eat one or two of 'em.  I think this is due to two things:  every person in my college group, myself included, was a fan of fiction that took things to extremes with appropriate atrocities, and that we were all extremely close friends.  Which leads me to think that this is, at least partially, a Social Contract issue.  Maybe in this new group we all just need to build up trust with each other, and then it'll start crackling.

And, while I'm here, I'm kicking around some ideas about the damage system.  See, it's not so hot in practice as it looks on paper.  The idea I'm looking at now is to have all melee and hand-to-hand damage be "Hard" damage, and have a reduction in damage be an applicable Price when attacking.  Guns will still have a Gamble component (speaking of guns, the malfunction table doesn't really work) because the unpredictable nature of Rustbelt guns is an important feature to me.

Since such a change would preclude the "stunt" rules, it would seem some new "stunt" rules are in order, because it just seems like a good idea to give players palpable tokens as a reward for doing cool stuff.  In some of the older versions of the game, I gave out "Cool Points" that were used to increase stats.  But increasing stats isn't an issue anymore.  What I'm thinking is giving out bonus dice that are kept by the player until spent to either provide an extra roll in resolution (like the Traits and Psyche) or to add half a roll (i.e., 1d5) to damage.  And maybe they could use them for other players' sakes.

(Or would he surprise you? maby grow a soul?

Such possibilities are precisely why there's a choice
And, while we're on the subject of Kitt, I do want to point out that he's not boring; oddly enough, he's been excellent comic relief, despite his own lack of a sense of humor.  It's just that he's not a protagonist.  And, in a way, I'm fine with that.  I mean, if a player wants to play a non-protagonist character, or even an antagonist, it sounds fine to me.  But I'm not sure what Courtney is aiming for.

-Marshall

[Knarfy]

It's just that he's not a protagonist.

Hmm...

Thats fair.

I guess when you look at him from that perspective hes fine

I do think he would make a boring protaganist without something horrible in his past, but since hes not a protagonist, thats not an issue

As for the damage system, what seems to be lacking? Are people not doing enough damage? Maby the new stunt system could simply make you do MORE damage, or maby the base damage is hard, and stunts add dice. (throw on some D6's or something, everyone has some )

I dont think I would use a "drama dice" style system, as I think It would detract from the push/give mechanic to give the players bonus dice to spend.

[Marshall Burns]

The trouble with the damage system is that it causes narration to bog down and get tangled up (otherwise it's fine).  I think I want to go with a plain-jane, un-mechanized narration system.  By which I mean there are no rules that say who narrates what, and as for "what is said" versus "what actually happened," the buck stops with whoever the character in question belongs to (constrained by resolution results, of course).  It's just easier to keep track of this way (for me).

Now, this bog-down tangle-up problem is due to the interplay of rolling damage, the current "stunt" system, and narration in general.  If you take out the "stunt" system, there's no bogging down, but there's still the potential for lame, even de-protagonizing rolls, which bugs me.  That's why I'm thinking I'll shift from the rolls to a base-level Hard damage that can be reduced as part of the attacker's Price, or of course increased by paying additional Price as per the current rules.  I just have to decide on what I want those base-levels to be for each Arms Level.

I dont think I would use a "drama dice" style system, as I think It would detract from the push/give mechanic to give the players bonus dice to spend.

Really?  Hm.  But the dice only determine 50% of your effectiveness in resolution (remember, you don't add up your rolls, you take the highest one).  But, then, maybe the bonus dice would send a mixed message, suggesting that the characters don't have enough on their own (which is of course false, because they do).  And it works against the separation between character failure and player failure that I've been trying to make (to encourage people to allow their characters to fail when it's evocative, thematically significant, or otherwise cool).

Yeah, now that I think about it, that's the reason I left out a "reward" system in the first place.  Which isn't to say there's no reward; there is.  It's just not backed up by points.

And, come to think of it, the sort of "stunts" that I'd like to encourage can basically be covered by the narrative effects of Pushing -- that is, by narrating in what way the character pushes, by giving the push an actual presence in the fiction.

[Knarfy]

Perhaps another method for using attack stunts could be to 'force' qualative injuries onto enemies?

Maby you could "buy" special wound effects to add to your attacks by pushing? Like if you push with a few points of sweat you can punch them extra hard right in the guts, debilitating them for a bit, but spraining something in the process?

That would tie the description to the effect pretty strongly, as well as making sure that the qualative injuries get used often. It would also give really brutal attacks an immediate effect above and beyond "He loses some blood, oh noes"

It also means that combat isnt just a bidding war, where one player hits the enemy once and pushes a bunch of points to bleed down the other guy. Making combat more a matter of who is more angry and violent rather than who has more points at the moment.

[Marshall Burns]

That is, in general, a good idea, but I don't want to use it; lemme explain why.
See, when there's combat going down and damage being dealt, here's the breakdown in how it's done: 

1. The attacker's player determines where the attack hits and how many points of "damage" are inflicted (based on his weapon and any Pushing for additional damage, or damage reduction used to Push for a hit).  (Oh, and the defender's player can add to the damage by Pushing to also get a hit in) 

2. The GM offers injuries or possibly damage to equipment to buy off damage.  (Also, anybody can suggest such effects, but the GM is arbiter of how many points they're worth).

3.  The defender's player determines how exactly the "damage" points are allocated.  He can take up to 5 Sweat and the rest on Blood, or he can take the whole she-bang on Blood, or he can take Injuries, or a combination thereof.  It's even possible that all the damage can be bought off in terms of Injury.   You can, in theory, get beat up forever and not hit 20 Blood.  But, on the other hand, taking it all to Blood is a really nice Medea-style "Fuck You," and so can give the fiction that extra charge in the right circumstances.

4.  Somebody narrates the effects of all this into the fiction. This is where the stunt rules got us tripped up, by the way, because you had to describe your attack before rolling damage, and describe the effect a few steps afterward.  Really awkward and clunky.

This arrangement was designed especially with PC vs. PC combat in mind.  I'm sort of surprised that no one has said anything about #3, because (as far as I know) that's pretty darn unusual.  But I decided on this arrangement for a specific reason:  all the players involved are now collaborating on how the defending character is hurt.  It's not "Me vs. You, winner take all" it's "My character vs. Your character, and we all have a say in it."  I figured this would be optimal for keeping combat within the storytelling process and to prevent bickering and resentment over PCs being hurt by PCs.  Hell, I think it's pretty darn innovative and clever, but, then, I've got an ego the size of Texas.  (No, scratch that, Texas is the size of my ego)

[Knarfy]

This arrangement was designed especially with PC vs. PC combat in mind.  I'm sort of surprised that no one has said anything about #3, because (as far as I know) that's pretty darn unusual.  But I decided on this arrangement for a specific reason:  all the players involved are now collaborating on how the defending character is hurt.  It's not "Me vs. You, winner take all" it's "My character vs. Your character, and we all have a say in it."  I figured this would be optimal for keeping combat within the storytelling process and to prevent bickering and resentment over PCs being hurt by PCs.  Hell, I think it's pretty darn innovative and clever, but, then, I've got an ego the size of Texas.  (No, scratch that, Texas is the size of my ego)

I actually like that, and given your reasons for it, I agree.

Somebody narrates the effects of all this into the fiction. This is where the stunt rules got us tripped up, by the way, because you had to describe your attack before rolling damage, and describe the effect a few steps afterward.  Really awkward and clunky.

Yea, thats pretty much the universal stumbling block for stunts in any system. Its really hard to describe what your doing accurately before you actually determine the results. It sucks when you describe some awesome stunt that depends on you hitting, and then miss. (especially when its the first in a chain of attacks)

Im trying to think of a way to 'stunt' the full interaction AFTER the resolution... but Im beginning to see your difficulties first hand

Its just weird to try and have it modify the resolution after the fact, and yet I like the idea of having the stunt system. Perhaps a particularly brutal offensve could grant you a combat advantage? Maby a bonus to hit with a follow up attack? Perhaps it becomes more difficult for the other guy to do things other than defend? Or maby it becomes harder to defend himself?

I dunno. Maby they could win back some tears or something for violent 'venting'.

Ooo! I got it!

If the description is good, they can win back a few of the points they used to push for extra damage! That way they still get a mechanical benifit for an awesome, in-character stunt, and you can complete the resolution before the full description

[jag]

Marshall,

Here's a thought, take it or leave it.  But it seems to me some of the numerics behind your Blood/Sweat/Tears/Injury are rooted in the older, crunchier version of Rustbelt, and don't flow as naturally with the new goals.

Currently, you can take up to 20 points of Blood/Sweat/Tears, and then bad things happen... where's the dramatic power in having 15/20 Sweat or Blood?  How does that add to the gritty, tooth-crunching combat and psychological trauma that you're going for?  It seems almost to fall into the same problem as D&D: "Ok, that sword hit me and i took 13 damage, but that's ok, I still have 10 HP left..."  You want every blow (psychological, physical, whatever) to _hurt_.  But being able to absorb up to 20 points in whatever category shields people from the hurt.

I thought briefly about a replacement, but it might not capture what you want.  Also, as i read your play descriptions and think about how i'd like the system to flow, i keep yearning for a dice-pool sort of mechanic, so I'm going to intentionally ditch your 20-point scale for something less defined.

First, Blood/Sweat/Tears is much more thematic than Blood/Sweat/Tears/Injury.  So I propose _only_ having Blood, Sweat, and Tears.  However, each of those _only_ contains "injuries".  Every bit of damage counts, every bit of damage is felt.  The health of my character could be described as (explanation of the numbers to follow):

Blood
----
(2) Broken Jaw
(1) Cracked Rib
(4) Permanent Limp

Sweat
----
(1) Sucking Air
(3) Long-Term Exhaustion

Tears
----
(4) Saw brother die
(1) Revolted and puking

Each injury has a value showing it's severity/persistence.  I'll arbitrarily choose may favourite 5-point scale:
(1) Short term, inconvenient
(2) Significant or lasting
(3) Debilitating but transient, significant but lasting
(4) Permanent but significant, Debilitating and lasting
(5) Debilitating and permanent

When you are going to take a certain amount of 'damage' in any category, the players/gm throw out suggestions of injuries and values (most of the time it'll be pretty clear from the description of the attack), and decide on enough to satisfy the damage.  When you've taken "too many" damage in a given category, you become useless/incapacitated: broken and dying, unconscious, catatonic and sitting in the corner, etc.

At the risk of rambling, this also fits well with a dice-pool mechanic.  The number of successes indicate the damage, and if you Push for N dice, you have to take N points of injury.  You could even have it as follows:
1. When you push, you roll N dice and take N damage.
2. If that succeeds, you are done.
3. If not, you can push again, when you roll M dice and take M+1 damage.
4. Repeat, where after K pushes, you take an extra K damage in addition to the dice you use.

This would mean you can try to push a little for less effect, or a lot for a great effect -- but you can still keep pushing to victory, at ever steeper cost.

This post turned out longer than i'd anticipated.  Whoops...  But it does seem to me that your current numerics don't add to the atmosphere that you want, so it might be worth pondering alternatives.

james

[Marshall Burns]

James,

Well, it's a good thought, a working thought, and I appreciate it, but I'm gonna have to leave it.  But I'll explain why.

The numerics of Blood/Sweat/Tears (Injury has been jettisoned as a resource pool, now represented only by effects that apply increased difficulty to applicable tasks) are indeed rooted in the older, crunchier mechanics.  I've broken away from the Purist for System values of the old system, but not from "modeling" in its entirety.  I know that Sorcerer doesn't model anything, and neither does InSpectres, and, hell, neither does Super Action Now!; I know that it's a viable way to design things.  But, for this game, I want to keep it.

Now, there's a reason for this, and it's due in part to my own proclivities and abilities as a GM.  See, without enough mechanical "meat" to guide me, I start having trouble.  I've tried running InSpectres twice and I can't do it right.  I've thought about it, and I think I've identified the reason:  as far as I can tell, the InSpectres GM has no mechanics-based presence except for when the players fail a roll.  When they fail a roll, I really seize the heck out of it.  But, other than that, what am I to do?  I know that the PCs need adversity, but I have no mechanical "handles" to throw it at them.  This has two problems for me:  one is a dearth of creative constraint, and the other is that it causes me to REstrain myself.  Without some kind of mechanics to justify it, I feel guilty for throwing stuff at the players, so I restrain myself, and then nothing interesting happens.

The system of The Rustbelt as it currently stands is designed so that this problem never arises.  It's a personal problem, I know, but this is also MY game, so it has to be a game that I can actually run and play.  Now, in some of the older versions, nearly everything the GM did had to be justified mechanically.  Not so much now; I've shot for a balance between the two.

Blood, Sweat, and Tears have absolutely no concrete fictional effect until they hit 20, and being able to absorb up to 20 points does shield people.  However, it doesn't do so for long.  They add up quick.  So, what do you do?  You save them for when it's really important.  Maybe you even hoard them.  Good.  That means you'll be stacking up effect-based consequences like crazy.

Now, I have a bunch of red, white, and blue poker chips that I bought for my game Witch Trails but have since found a way to use in nearly every game.  In The Rustbelt, I give the players stacks of 20:  red for Blood, white for Sweat, and blue for Tears.  Where's the drama when those start running low?  In-game, in the fiction, there is none.  But when the player fails a roll and I ask "Do you Push or do you Give?" and he reaches instinctively for his chips but realizes, SEES, that there's only five left, that hand falters, and he gets nervous, and he starts asking what Injuries or whatever he can take instead.  It's not there in-game, but it's there at the table, and, well, I don't think it ever will be in the game if it's not at the table first.

So, there's actually three reasons for them:  as part of a modeling system to springboard and provide creative constraint; as buffers against terrible consequences when it really, really counts; as part of a somewhat sinister reverse-psychology ploy to get people to have their characters suffer terrible consequences.

(I wanted to note that your injury under Tears "Saw my brother die" is covered by the Woe component of the Psyche mechanic, and that whenever Woe is triggered (somebody says something about your brother, f'rinstance) the character either takes a hit to Tears or has an emotional outburst of some kind.  As we all know from being people, emotional outbursts can cause all kinds of problems on their own.)

Now, the system you suggested would probably work, and it would probably take care of all the problems I talked about, but I shudder at the thought of dice pools in this game.  They work great in Super Action Now!, but their results can be a bit arbitrary for a gritty game like The Rustbelt.  Say a scrawny guy with a Tough of 1 is in a fist-fight with a burly miner at Tough 8; if that scrawny guy rolls better than the miner, I'd frankly be disgusted (however, if his roll is worse and he wins anyway through Pushing, that's fine with me).  The system has to produce results that are within the range of the players' expectations.  The results have to be plausible.  This is why Fortune only produces half of the Performance value.

In SAN!, everything is plausible; Brawn 1 wins vs. Brawn 5 (Tweety Bird beans Sylvester over the head with an enormous mallet) all the time.  In The Rustbelt, Tough 1 winning vs. Tough 8 just isn't plausible, although any score winning through sheer willpower vs. any score is.

I want to point out that I don't think that Stamina 1 vs. Stamina 6 or whatever in Sorcerer is at all the same thing; for one thing, characters in Sorcerer are, as a baseline, competent.  Not everybody in The Rustbelt is competent, at least not before willpower comes into play.

Also, willpower is and always has been the most important character component in The Rustbelt (going all the way back to the first version when it was a stat called "Resilience").  Everything else is meaningless in comparison to it.  The catch is when and how it comes into play; the rest of the system is there to determine this.  The important bit is, willpower solves anything.  So I'd be incredibly uncomfortable with leaving its influence up to dice; there's not a chance that it will work, it just WORKS, and then you pay for it.  That's a sticking point for me.


Knarfy,
Sorry, but I'm just not feelin' it.  I think I'm just scrapping the "stunt" system altogether and leaving it up to "people will do cool things because they're cool."

That's the underlying property of all Narrativist play, anyway, right?  That players gain the greatest reward from the goals they create themselves?

-Marshall

[Marshall Burns]

Erm, I want to clarify that I'm not knocking InSpectres.  I think it's very cool.  It's just -- well, to take it to metaphor, it's a different instrument.  If you hand a pianist a piece of music written for guitar, well, there's not much he can do with it besides butcher it.  Let's say I'm that pianist; InSpectres is written for guitar, and The Rustbelt is written for piano.  And that metaphor won't go any further'n you kin throw it, so please nobody try to extend it.

And, James, I want to re-iterate that I appreciate your thoughts, even if it looks like I was arguing them away -- your idea was good, I mean that. It's just that it doesn't mesh with my design goals and priorities.  Which is exactly why I appreciate you posting it:  the more I clarify those goals and priorities, the more I understand them myself.

See, I've figured out that the Karma and Resource heavy mechanics are there because they provide Hard Facts.  In a full-on Fortune system, there are no Hard Facts.  Which is fantastic in the right place, but not what I want here.  See, in Rustbelt stories, there comes a time when it's "Them's the breaks, kid.  You gotta take a broad, general view of things."  Let's say that, for example, there's a guy racing across town in his car to rescue his kidnapped daughter.  In most fiction, he makes it there, after a lot of near-misses with traffic, or maybe even a minor crash or two.  In the Rustbelt, sometimes he gets hit by a bus and dies bleeding.  Them's the breaks, kid.  Things that should be possible are indeed possible.  Things that should be insurmountable, like being hit by a bus, are indeed insurmountable (rather than chance determining whether X is insurmountable today).  Until willpower kicks in, anyway, and he crawls out of the flaming wreck, hijacks the bus, and crashes it through the building his daughter is held in, snaps the chains holding her to the chair, and strangles her captors with them.

Which brings me to something else that I haven't really mentioned:  a Push needs to look like something in the fiction.  Here's a fairly extreme example of what a Push might look like for someone trying to break down a door with his shoulder, with the Price being a broken arm:

He rammed the door with his full strength, but it didn't budge.  So he did it again.  And again.  And again.  When the bone snapped, something deep inside him snapped too.  He took one last charge at the door, and it was like passing through a sheet of water.

The thing that I love about this whole system so much is that it maps so cleanly to the stories I've written about the Rustbelt, even in many areas that I hadn't planned for.  I can go through the stories and, for nearly every moment, I can figure out what system inputs and outputs would create that same eventuality--and they're all as probable as I would like them to be.  It's a bit more than I dreamed it could be.

[Marshall Burns]

Heh, I'm such a dork; the solution to the "stunt" issue is so simple.  All you have to do is give the full description of your attack when declaring your intent.  It might not work out the way you said it, but them's the breaks, and that's why there's dice involved anyway.  That is, you could say, "I grab a corkscrew out of the drawer and gouge his eye out with it!" but the other guy's eye might stay in his head, or even stay unharmed.  Heck, depending on what else happens ("As he reaches for the corkscrew, I smash his wrist with this cast-iron skillet!"), you might not even get the corkscrew. 

I think this method of stating intents would be more likely to get the hype up too, edge those players toward the boiling point.  Much better than the rather dry method shown in the rules.

Now, here's a question:  should I stick with the "Hardening damage" method, or should some other reward be in order?  Extra dice, like the Traits, that could be applied to Performance or Damage at player discretion?  Or maybe points that could be added directly to Performance or Damage values?

And here's another thing:  in the last session, Brown Jenkins was involved in a car crash.  There was a scene early on where Mule Ear Joe told him how to cut brake lines on cars (so that he could sabotage a shady character who showed up), and much, much later he was taken prisoner at gunpoint by some NPCs.  Stephen had him escape from their grasp and roll under the car, and at first he was a loss as to what should happen next, then he said, "Oh!  He cuts the brake line.  That is, if it's in the same place on this car as it was on the last one," to which I could only respond, "It is NOW!"  So, Jenkins plays it off like rolling under the car was a dumb desperation move, and now he's ready to go quietly.  When they all get in the car, he puts on his seatbelt.  All these seedy, grizzled, unsavory types in the car, and one guy puts on his seatbelt; I dunno, it struck me as very funny.  Especially because they were mocking him and telling him about how they were going to torture him to death, and he just puts his seatbelt on and tries to keep a straight face because he knows something they don't know.

And then, of course, they can't stop at a red light and they are hit by a truck.  Jenkins was miraculously unharmed (a successful Uncanny roll).  Thing was, I gave him a bonus to that roll because he put on the seatbelt.  Not to reperesent the seatbelt protecting him, but because I loved that action.  It was just cool.  I think this ties into the "stunt" stuff, and I think I need more general rules for this sort of thing.  Single-point bonuses are sounding good to me right now (I don't want the players to be able to rely on having their bacon saved by the bonuses), and what if other players can give them out too?  But I need to think about it more.

[jag]

In the spirit of pushing you so that you think about your mechanics and the reasons behind them more, I'm going to argue against a couple points of your post.  BUT, i'm not doing it to push my particular proposal -- I really like your description, and it's persuaded me about your mechanic.  My goal is to be helpfully pedantic.

Now, there's a reason for this, and it's due in part to my own proclivities and abilities as a GM.  See, without enough mechanical "meat" to guide me, I start having trouble.  I've tried running InSpectres twice and I can't do it right.  I've thought about it, and I think I've identified the reason:  as far as I can tell, the InSpectres GM has no mechanics-based presence except for when the players fail a roll.  When they fail a roll, I really seize the heck out of it.  But, other than that, what am I to do?  I know that the PCs need adversity, but I have no mechanical "handles" to throw it at them.  This has two problems for me:  one is a dearth of creative constraint, and the other is that it causes me to REstrain myself.  Without some kind of mechanics to justify it, I feel guilty for throwing stuff at the players, so I restrain myself, and then nothing interesting happens.

The system of The Rustbelt as it currently stands is designed so that this problem never arises.  It's a personal problem, I know, but this is also MY game, so it has to be a game that I can actually run and play.  Now, in some of the older versions, nearly everything the GM did had to be justified mechanically.  Not so much now; I've shot for a balance between the two.

These paragraphs make me wonder if I described my proposal correctly.  I wasn't suggesting a loosening of the mechanics at all, just a streamlining/symmetrizing of them.  My understanding of your mechanics are, roughy,

1. You take a certain amount of 'damage', which is divided (based on fiction, character choice, etc) into three categories, Blood, Sweat, and Tears.
2. You can 'ignore' the damage by taking an injury.  The conversion between damage and injury is decided spontaneously by the GM/players.
3. Damage over 20 to Tears goes to Sweat, Damage over 20 to Sweat goes to Blood, damage of 20 to Blood kills the character.

My proposal was.
1. You take a certain amount of damage, which is divided (based on fiction, character choice, etc), into three categories, Blood, Sweat, Tears.
2. Every bit of damage causes an injury appropriate for the category.  Calibration of damage and injury is decided spontaneously by the GM/players.
3. Damage over 20 (or whatever the scale is) in any category incapacitates the character, in a manner consistent with the category (death for Blood, mental breakdown for Tears, etc).

I don't think it's less mechanics, so much as fewer mechanics.

Blood, Sweat, and Tears have absolutely no concrete fictional effect until they hit 20, and being able to absorb up to 20 points does shield people.  However, it doesn't do so for long.  They add up quick.  So, what do you do?  You save them for when it's really important.  Maybe you even hoard them.  Good.  That means you'll be stacking up effect-based consequences like crazy.

Now, I have a bunch of red, white, and blue poker chips that I bought for my game Witch Trails but have since found a way to use in nearly every game.  In The Rustbelt, I give the players stacks of 20:  red for Blood, white for Sweat, and blue for Tears.  Where's the drama when those start running low?  In-game, in the fiction, there is none.  But when the player fails a roll and I ask "Do you Push or do you Give?" and he reaches instinctively for his chips but realizes, SEES, that there's only five left, that hand falters, and he gets nervous, and he starts asking what Injuries or whatever he can take instead.  It's not there in-game, but it's there at the table, and, well, I don't think it ever will be in the game if it's not at the table first.

So, there's actually three reasons for them:  as part of a modeling system to springboard and provide creative constraint; as buffers against terrible consequences when it really, really counts; as part of a somewhat sinister reverse-psychology ploy to get people to have their characters suffer terrible consequences.

I love the mental image of the poker chips, and the agony of deciding whether to spend them now and avoid ill-effects, or suffer ill-effects as a hedge for the future.  Spending chips is playing higher stakes, while taking an injury is the "safe" route.  I tried to find a way to combine my suggestion and this, and the only ones i came up with (moving chips to an injury pile...) didn't have the same physical mechanical impact.  So yeah, i like yours.

Now, the system you suggested would probably work, and it would probably take care of all the problems I talked about, but I shudder at the thought of dice pools in this game.  They work great in Super Action Now!, but their results can be a bit arbitrary for a gritty game like The Rustbelt.  Say a scrawny guy with a Tough of 1 is in a fist-fight with a burly miner at Tough 8; if that scrawny guy rolls better than the miner, I'd frankly be disgusted (however, if his roll is worse and he wins anyway through Pushing, that's fine with me).  The system has to produce results that are within the range of the players' expectations.  The results have to be plausible.  This is why Fortune only produces half of the Performance value.

In SAN!, everything is plausible; Brawn 1 wins vs. Brawn 5 (Tweety Bird beans Sylvester over the head with an enormous mallet) all the time.  In The Rustbelt, Tough 1 winning vs. Tough 8 just isn't plausible, although any score winning through sheer willpower vs. any score is.

I don't think your assumption that dice-pools increase randomness is necessarily correct.  In the case of the sorcerer mechanic (roll N dice, choose the highest), it is true that a Tough 1 guy has a decent chance of beating a Tough 8 guy (still not great, tho).  However, if you take a "# of dice above a threshold", where the threshold is reasonable, there's basically no chance that a low Toughness guy could beat a high Toughness guy.  To throw a random number out, if your threshold is such that 50% of the dice are successes, then a Tough 1 character has a 1/2*(1/2)^8 = 1/512 probability of beating a Tough 8 character.  Them's pretty small odds.

james

[Marshall Burns]

James,

All right, sounds good, I'm game.

All that about modeling and whatnot wasn't really directed at your points; it was a sorta pre(r)amble regarding design goals in general.  As I said, the system you proposed would probably take care of those issues just as well.  Also, your assessment of the system is nominally correct.  What I balked at in your post was removing the "damage" pools and the switch to dice pools from die + stat.

Here's another good reason for the damage pools.  Well, er, not really another one, more like an explication of one that I sorta-kinda pointed out:  they are a safety catch of sorts.  For one, they prevent the GM from laying down specific Prices as fiat, as there's always at least one default option.  I don't anticipate that would really be a problem, but that's something.  Also, I expect that there are times when you really just can't afford to lose an arm (or eye or whatever) -- when the only applicable effects-based Prices are things that you can't afford to lose at the moment because they would mess up what you're trying to do with your character in a de-protagonizing sortof way, you can substitute Blood, Sweat, or Tears.

All of that is to say that I see it the other way around from what you've posted:  Injuries (and other effects-based Prices) don't enable you to ignore Blood/Sweat/Tears so much as B/S/T enables you to ignore Injuries.  Although I didn't have that in mind initially, it has worked that way in play.

I wanna come back to the comparison to D&D hitpoints real quick.  I think that the main reason that hitpoints don't really count for much is that they're too easy to get back.  I mean, all you gotta do is have the cleric hit you with a Cure Moderate Wounds after the fight, and you're good as new.  Laaaame.  In The Rustbelt, they ain't so easy to get back.  Blood comes back at 1 per (fictional) week, faster if you're receiving treatment.  You get back half of your Sweat everytime you have a chance to rest (which, due to the nature of this game's fiction, is not too often; there's always somewhere you gotta get or someone else you gotta kill right now).  Tears come back at 1 a week, or they can be purged through emotional outbursts (ones that get you in to trouble work the best).  While you can technically reverse damage through magic, it's considered "high magic," meaning that it's highly dangerous and/or costly for the magician.

(Here's a thought:  what if Blood and Sweat had "purge" options linked to story-driving narrative actions like Tears does? Hmm.)

As for the dice pools...  Well, to be honest, the only reason that dice are used at all in the game is so that I wouldn't have to come up with the tons of situational modifiers necessary for Karma-only.  Instead, I figure I can just throw a d10 to abstractly simulate that sort of thing. 

It's not so much that I consider pure Fortune to be too random; it's the arbitrarity that bugs me.  Er, well, that's semantics; lemme rephrase that.  With dice pools, it's "he wins because he rolled better" more than it is "he wins because he's bigger than you."   When arbitrary is good (as in SAN!) then dice pools are fine.  Or when a failed roll can mean inconvenience rather than straight-up failure, dice pools sound fine.  In The Rustbelt, however, I want a failed roll to mean plain-vanilla failure, in order to emphasize the Push.

The arbitrarity of dice pools is good in that it is consistently able to deliver dramatic upsets -- but, again, that's not something I want in this game.  It's a good source of protagonism, but not the sort that I'm looking for.  Protagonism in this game is intended to emerge from two sources:  sheer in-your-face tenacity and will, and making a moral stand at one of the three big nodes -- Good, Bad*, or Ugly.  Due to the nature of the setting, both of these are intrinsically linked with a great deal of suffering as circumstances demand that you prove whether or not you really mean it.  Which is where the Push comes in:  it makes sure that the suffering means something, every time, because it's the suffering you chose, whether you Pushed or Gave.  However, using dice pools, there is the chance (however slim) of succeeding consistently without having to Push -- which would seem to carry the danger of devaluing the Push and the reliable protag-engine.  That bugs me.

*Can you be Bad and still be a protagonist?  I think so.  Consider American Psycho or Clive Barker's Mr. B. Gone; the protagonists are terrible -- HORRIBLE -- but for some reason we are interested in them.  We want them to get what they want, to be happy, so that they can maybe have a turnaround; we really, really want them to not be as bad as they seem.  Then there's the sharper edge:  choosing Bad as a cut-to-the-bone criticism of "Good."  Have I mentioned that I like fiction that makes it hurt?

(As a side note, that stuff about protagonism and morality has given me an idea for a tagline:  "Tales of tenacity, depravity, and hope.")

Speaking of devaluing the Push -- I was wrong to give out that bonus on Jenkins' roll.  It devalued the Push.  So would, I think, any reward mechanic integrated with resolution, including "stunt" rules.  Thank you for making me think about this enough to catch that!

(But, then again, given what I wrote about protagonism above, could the Push be considered a reward mechanic?  That's gonna bear some thinking about.) 

One final thing is that a switch to dicepools requires a completely new currency.  Which is not really a good reason; it's just that I'm growing fond of this currency.  I'm currently tightening it up a bit and working out the phrasing to make it explicit in the rules.  I'm calling it the "Rule of 20."  Basically, 20 points of anything is something serious.  20 points of Blood puts you in shock; 20 points of damage can kill you or break a major bone, which imposes a 20-point penalty; a sword deals 20 damage, small guns deal a median of 20 damage, and big guns have a baseline of 20 damage (only gun damage is randomized now); 20 points of Challenge is the upper limit of human capability -- that is, only someone with a score of 10 (freakish) who rolled a 10 (10% chance without Traits) can do it without Pushing.  (Pushing can be considered to be beyond human capability).  By the way, I picked 20 for no good reason other than it's a nice, round number with easily understood fractions.  The previous version of the system was based around the number 100; I went down to 20 because 1% increments seemed unnecessarily granular.

-Marshall