"Expendable" was a Ronnies enty last year that I am finally getting around to

Here's the PDF over at 1km1t

Here's the Ronnies thread.

In the latest drafts of the game, I have answered a number of the questions Ron had in the thread above, and fixed some minor mechanical stuff to make it more clear. My largest problem remains with the Guilt, Innocence and Repenetant mechanics.

A quick summary of the current basic rules: Two players roll against one another with a pool of dice. Each finds their highest die. The number of the opponent's dice higher than that is the number of injuries they take. Any rolls that are ties cause injury to BOTH parties. These injuries stick and cannot be removed with Fallout.

After a roll, either player can use a skill point to "Increase the Stakes", shifting the damage to his equipment, the local environment, or bystanders (the process is called "Fallout"). They may then reroll with a penalty. Damaged Equipment may be useless or less useful now (out of power, out of bullets, irreprably damaged, shorted out, intermittently functional, etc.), a damaged Environment places the Fallout in a pool that is used by the gamemaster in various ways, damaged Bystanders cause a loss of Innocence or Repentance.

Scenario design, or more jargon-y, Situation, is what you need to concentrate on now.

You need to be answering the question, "What do the characters do?"

Once you have a solid concept for that, then all sorts of feedback will occur in your brain and the answers to those questions will seem obvious.

Best, Ron

Unlike a number of my other abortive designs, I've known that from the get-go: the characters get dropped off in various super-lethal hot zones full of environmental and biological hazards and attempt to survive long enough to complete their mission while quite probably shooting at each other. There's a number of "color" pieces in the current write-up that are all about what is expected to happen in the game; the movies "Alien" and "Aliens" are primers for the game regarding "what kind of things the characters do", along with a couple of inspiring episodes of "Star Trek: the Next Generation" whose names I don't know.

Ron...you bastard...

See, despite knowing what my game was about, Ron made me go back and look at it again, and look at my mechanics in light of that. He even made me think about changing the Guilt/Innocence thing into a purely social relationship mechanic, and thinking about that made me weep and bang my head against the desk for a bit (because it was a good idea that just didn't work, leaving me stuck again), but despite the agony, something productive arose out of all this. This is why one should always think about whatever design advice this man gives you. This is also why he is a bastard.

So, what's do the characters do and how do (or DO?) these mechanics specifically help implement that?

You can see what they are supposed to do above, and you can see what I wanted the mechanics to do above that. I threw them together into the blender as advised and realized how I could make Guilt and Innocence breed intra-party conflict while making the Guilty both tough and the universe's punching bags.

Here's what I came up with:

Guilt has returned to its design roots and is now tracked as a seperate variable. Guilty and Repentant characters both retain Guilt, only the Innocent are free of it. It starts at either 1 or 0, and it goes up but never goes down.

Each point of Guilt you earn (from performing an Act of Guilt) gives Repentant and Innocent characters an extra die they can add to any rolls against you. The Guilty cannot use another character's pool of Guilt against them.

The Repentant can only use a number of their opponent's Guilt dice equal to the amount of Repentance (earned by performing Acts of Innocence) they have.
The Innocent can use all the Guilt another character has.

Additionally, the Guilty are able to shift all injuries into Fallout when they Increase the Stakes, as long as they have skill points left to do it.
Repentant characters are also able to do this when they Increase the Stakes, but may only shift as many points of injury to Fallout as they have of Repentance.
Innocent characters cannot shift any points to Fallout, though they may still Increase the Stakes.

I'm not sure if I am entirely happy with the mechanics for Innocents -- I worry they might too swiftly end up tenderized -- but I have a workable dynamic right now, and it should be playtested before I try to tweak it any further based on what I think might happen rather than what does actually happen in a game.

I am now moving on to concretizing the rules for Equipment (and attendant the Technology resource I had to add to cover that -- thank you InSpectres!) and Environment. However, I do want to ask before I do that: does anyone have any questions about the above rules, or see any absolute glaring errors I happen to have missed in the implementation?

Here's an observation: the rules you just laid out for Guilt, Repentance and Innocence leave the Innocent at a disadvantage, as you mention. The Innocent get chewed up. Guilt is a quick way to get power, but it's only powerful in the short term. The most powerful position, then, is Repentance. The Repentant are realistic. They've crossed over the line in the past, and they know they can cross again, but they choose not to, right now.

So, before you do something to fix Innocence, you might want to consider: do the rules as they now stand make a statement that you'd agree with?

talysman wrote: Here's an observation: the rules you just laid out for Guilt, Repentance and Innocence leave the Innocent at a disadvantage, as you mention. The Innocent get chewed up. Guilt is a quick way to get power, but it's only powerful in the short term. The most powerful position, then, is Repentance. The Repentant are realistic. They've crossed over the line in the past, and they know they can cross again, but they choose not to, right now.

So, before you do something to fix Innocence, you might want to consider: do the rules as they now stand make a statement that you'd agree with?