"Expendable" was a Ronnies enty last year. Here's the PDF over at 1km1t, which is very Alpha at this point. Here's the Ronnies thread.

With the basic mechanics of Guilt and Innocence out of the way, I am turning towards the system of Attributes and Skills in the draft version of the game, based on consideration of Ron's comments about this subject in the original feedback thread.

I did not really want to do a Hero Wars-ish sort of "Define your character's Things He Gets To Roll", though as I began to consider it, I began to swing in that direction. Here's what I am thinking currently for that, in part: choose three things that define your character, some kind of occupation or talent or historically important moment. Assign X dice to those things (optimal number to be determined by playtesting).

When you roll and lose, you lose dice from whatever you rolled in proportion to the number of successes your opponent recieved against you. And I like that, because it is the basic system as it stands, as was written for the Ronnies, RIGHT NOW -- just without Attributes and Skills, and I can tack the current Innocence/Guilt mechanics on to that fairly easily.

At the same time, I don't like it because I created some very, very interesting mechanical things that line up with the original Attributes. I may just mash the above and the below together in some fashion, but this is where I am at right now: I have been thinking about what the players have their characters actually DO in play, and when considering that, one of my guiding principles -- "Only roll when something violent is going to happen" -- went out the window as I considered some various very cool options for play with Attribute use. (The guiding principle did not completely fall away, however; nearly all the additional rolls will still be related in some way in helping a character to do violence.)

Here's the text:

Attributes

Attributes allow you to affect the game’s environment in various ways, from injuring your opponent, to altering the game environment. Attributes are rated in number of dice, from 1 to 5 and do not necessarily define your character's mental or physical abilities, though they may serve as a guideline.

You get to assign one attribute 1, one attribute 2, one attribute 3, one attribute 4 and one attribute 5 [ed: or something like this]. Any time you roll, one of these applies.

Movement: Getting away from stuff, running, used for withdrawal tactics and so forth. Roll to dodge and escape from conflicts.

Clarity: Keeps you from being confused, outtalked, outmaneuvered, and terrified. Roll to avoid environment penalties.

Tech: Your familiarity with technology, computers and computer systems, robots, weaponry, and jury-rigging solutions. Roll to gain or fix tech.

Smarts: The brainiac category; used for tactical planning and repeating sections of the Encyclopedia Galactica. Roll to state a fact about the game world.

Stamina: Strength, phyiscal wherewithal, overall buffness -- how much time you spent in the pen's weight room. Roll to injure others.

You know me and my hatred of skill lists (some exceptions, but, in general).  Anyway, I must say this: I like it, I get it, I even enjoy all living hell from it... except Tech.  I'm shaky on tech.  Possibly because I read tech and realize it is about getting dirty and stuff, and I'm not on that boat, but also because it seems this odd lil tack-on.  What I mean by that is that Tech, in general, will be used to injure others, escape conflict, avoid environmental penalties, or what-have-you.  Tech seems just a cosmetic vehicle for the other Attributes.  I'd suggest rolling Tech into the other Attributes.  I mean, if I can state a fact about the game world, that could easily be something about the Tech all about me -- or I could use that as my description for how I go about using the other attributes.

That's all.

Dav

I very much like the explicit conception of "Tech" and "Smarts"* being things your character uses to let you as player narrate advantageous facts into existence. I'd actually suggest that "Tech" and "Smarts" would do better compounded into a single stat that lets you invent situational modifiers -- with exactly what the situational modifier is (be it equipment for you, weaknesses for enemies, or convenient terrain) being defined by a descriptor, e.g. "tech money," "ex-military," "human encyclopedia," "Sherlock Holmes," whatever.

Whether I say "my character knows there's a shortcut through the medlab because he's worked there!" or "my character deduces there must be a shortcut through the medlab beacuse all these ships are designed that way" is just pure Color; likewise "the aliens must be vulnerable to fire - lucky I found a blowtorch!" vs. "I've built a blowtorch out of my cigarette lighter -- lucky the aliens are vulnerable to fire!"

I am also very pleased by the concept of "Clarity" as, basically, your psychological armor class.

Those are very good points, thank you both for making them. Not sure what I will end up deciding on that score -- whether or not to drop Tech and just meld it into the other Attributes -- but it has given me something to seriously think about.

(BTW, a tangent for your amusement: Tech actually came before I had the idea for the other stats; I developed the idea of what Smarts and Clarity could do from it!)

The only points against taking the advice right now are that Tech is used to for equipment. Equipment is basically a number of dice that modify various rolls (mostly combat). Equipment can also take damage instead of you if you declare Fallout on it, or by being targeted by someone else's attack (ie: "I kick the gun out of Tenson's hands! That should even the odds!").

Given those properties, it would seem I need a way to measure and control the gain and loss of it that rolling it into the other stats may not allow. On the other hand, it may not be a problem at all.

The second argument against is that a character might be smart or cunning, but have no ability with or easy access to technology (but that is a fairly weak argument, even to me).

It might be better to move the current mechanical bits of Tech into Smarts, but keep the character element as a spendable Resource rather than an ability. Not quite certain how I might make that work, though.

Well, just me thinking out loud. Again, thanks for pointing this out, guys! I'm going to keep my mental processes churning away on this.

Tech = equipment, gotcha.

The thing is, both in fiction and in real life, your ability to start with cool equipment has very little to do with your ability to introduce new equipment at the exact right time:
- The Marines from Aliens are nearly pure example of the former: They begin the "game" with world-beating hardware, but it's a non-renewable resource and they manage to lose, break, or expend almost all of it before the movie's halfway done.
- Macgyver from the unwatchable TV show of the same name is a nearly pure example of the latter: He almost never shows up with any cool stuff in hand, but somehow he manages to improvize the exact right thing at the crucial moment. Doctor Who is
- Scottie, LaForge, & other Star Trek engineers are good examples of characters with high scores in both: They start every story with amazing stuff, but it usually gets taken away by omnipotent godlike aliens/blocked by a form of radiation like any we've ever seen before; but then they can also produce new amazing stuff exactly suited to the current problem in the last 15 minutes of the episode.

More important, the first kind of tech is "hey, somebody gave me this": It doesn't say much about the character. The second kind of tech is "look what I did!": It totally says something about the character (inventive, adaptable, etc.).

So it might be fun to differentiate these: Give characters a pool of points to buy non-renewable ("ablative") tech at the beginning of the scenario, but also give them a stat they can roll to manifest new tech as needed -- which, mechanically, could be just a different way of describing the same "pull rabbit out of hat" ability as "hey, I know where that door leads!" (= "having downloaded the schematics from the computer, I know where that door leads!") or "hey, these aliens must be allergic to sugar!" (= "I just brewed up a special alien-poisoning powder!")

Yes! Precisely. You've pinned down exactly what I've been struggling with regarding the Equipment rules. Your starting Equipment was never meant to indicate your technical expertise: it's what you've been given/start out with, while Tech is representative of how much control over character add-ons you have in-game (as with your examples above). In fact, that's the difference I've been trying to verbalize/rationalize between Smarts and Tech. Smarts is environmental, while Tech is personal.

I also did not yet have a way to determine what a character recieved as starting equipment, but as I was writing the above I thought of this: perhaps standardized equipment packages based on Skill choice? That is, choose a particular skill and get a particular piece of standard equipment. That way, your starting equipment is based on the reason you were picked for this particular mission given your skills. Yeah, I like that. Beyond that, "Skills" have no mechanical effect, they're just narrative Color.

Bam. Cool. Thanks!

That does sound good. It's a big step beyond my suggestion, which is excellent and the entire point of such discussion. I like this whole dynamic of "A says something smart, which stimulates B to say something even smarter, which triggers A to say something still smarter yet," upwards and around indefinitely. The Forge as a forum and Forge-influenced games both seem to be awfully good at facillitating that collaborative cycle.

Sydney wrote: That does sound good. It's a big step beyond my suggestion, which is excellent and the entire point of such discussion. I like this whole dynamic of "A says something smart, which stimulates B to say something even smarter, which triggers A to say something still smarter yet," upwards and around indefinitely. The Forge as a forum and Forge-influenced games both seem to be awfully good at facillitating that collaborative cycle.