Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker

[Seerow]

I doubt the intent is to discourage "extraneous" rolls." Discouraging rolled resolutions rewards out-of-game knowledge and bogs down play. It also fails to discourage extranious actions, only discouraging those that are rolled. So to get in the office, you get to play twenty questions: "Is the door locked? What kind of lock? Are there screws on this side? Are the hinges on this side? Is there a drop ceiling? Is there a ladder nearby? I lift up a tile; do the manager's walls go all the way to the roof? Okay, I go over the wall then."
That's cool if the door is the barrier, but it isn't. The barrier is entirely metagame: what actions need rolls.

Adding extra fault dice is a cure worse than the disease. Take an exaggerated example: you are good at demolitions. Normally you roll 4/2 for exploding open a door (aside: what's the right notation for that?) when you are in a sneaking minigame, you either: take a -/5 penalty for being sneaky and are now suddenly incompetent with explosives, or you take no penalty, and are in the situation I originally described.

Where are you getting a 4 dicepool as being good at anything, or a -5 penalty for being sneaky? Is that just highly exaggerating to make a point or did I miss any sort of concrete numbers being made?

[RiotGearEpsilon]

Normally you roll 4/2 for exploding open a door (aside: what's the right notation for that?)

My understanding is that this is called 'breaching' the door. Explosively breaching?

[Endovior]

It's not very subtle though. Aside from personal specialization (which only ever takes one off the top), the field of explosive seems in general like one where you can't do anything to 'have less penalty dice'; they just keep piling on remorselessly, and the best you can do is be competent enough to 'succeed' anyway. In a situation like the one described, using grenades for anything sounds like an automatic 5 penalty dice, say. That would, accordingly, make explosives always be the unsubtle option, that you never want to use in 'fragile' situations... however powerful, they're simply an inappropriate tool for the situation, and you're likely to wreck your chances at stealth if you try.

[Grek]

With explosives, I suspect that your roll will be dicepool to see how big of a boom you can make and the penalty dice represent the chance for someone to notice you setting the bomb. You don't get penalty dice for setting off a bomb or using a blasting charge to get through a door, you just automatically bust. This encourages the team to do all of the sneaky stuff first, including the demo guy going around setting up bombs, then get into place and have the demo guy push the trigger for all the bombs at once, blowing both your cover and the building to bits.

Taking a demolitions specialization to get less penalty dice means that you can put bombs in places where they're less likely to be discovered before you're ready and that you'll get better explosions per unit bomb once you are ready for them to go off.

[RiotGearEpsilon]

Good thought, Grek.

[fectin]

I made up the numbers entirely, based loosely on expected outcomes, and on Frank's post indicating that a specialty gives you two base penalty dice.

I also made up the B/P notation, because I'm (as usual) posting from my phone, and I really wanted a shorthand. Same with the -/B penalty, since that seemed to indicate what I was going for most clearly and concisely. I have no idea what the cannonically correct notation is.

Fundamentally, the issue is that penalty dice appear to be indicating two things simultaneously: the chance that you will be detected and the chance that you will fail a single, specific task. You either need to penalize both ("your bomb is normally loud and abnormally ineffective") or neither (your bomb has no effect on detection, and is normally effective). Adding the same amount to penalties and bonuses doesn't work either. It boosts your failures and maintains your expected result, but messes with the "swinginess" of the roll. ("we need to succeed on this, but only have 1/3. Quick, play Hide-and-Seek!").

RiotGear: I think "breaching" is the whole act of entry for e.g. a SWAT team. It's often done with explosives, but I think you can also breach a door in that context by kicking it down. "Breach" is also an English language word describing an induced loss of integrity (hull breach, breach of contract, breach of trust), so it would not be incorrect to use it in that context, but I don't think it's necessary.

Edit: Grek's point is interesting, but not how the system works. Penalties explicitly always cancel bonuses, and they generate a single net output. You also count total penalties when Fragile.

[Orion]

Terminology thought: Instead of "fragile test" how about "thin ice.", as in:

Sometimes agents find themselves in precarious situations where more is at stake than the actual task being resolved. In situations where the character needs to not just succeed, but do so without creating commotion or using up resources, they are on "thin ice." This means that all rolled fault (not net faults) are added to an ongoing fault pool. Over several tests, these faults will accumulate until they fault pool "cracks", inflicting an MC-defined penalty.

Player: Netcat drops over the fence and approaches the door. Can I hack the padlock?
MC: Sure, but you're on thin ice.

Note that you can also use the "thin ice" mechanic on attack rolls to determine when an improvised weapon breaks or a shooter exhausts their ammo.

[Username17]

For legwork fragile tests, the incentives run towards every player doing the legwork sections that they have the least Penalty Dice on. For group tests, the incentives run towards attempting to infiltrate with the smallest available number of tests distributed amongst the players who can roll the lowest number of penalty dice on those tests.

That's a little different from the Skill Challenge thing, where you have a fixed number of rolls and you are trying to funnel as many of those rolls to the player with the largest bonus as possible. For one thing, it is very likely that more than one player character will be able to provide a two die Penalty Pool for different tasks, so the idea would be to get things done according to the plan. The fragility and threat of busting is primarily there to give individual tasks the weight of suspense even when there is no actual chance of failure (let's face it: you can take 20 on Open Locks), but it also serves to prevent mission creep.

There are a number of ways to encourage people to mix things up within fragile tests to keep it from being a minigame where the Hacker hacks it again. The most obvious one is to hand out additional Penalty Dice for repeat actions within the same fragile test. But I'm not sure that is necessary, considering that most teams are going to have people specialized in various different stuff. Probably it will.

-Username17

[fectin]

Okay. Accepting and embracing the issues makes sense.

I'm not smart on 4E, except by proxy. That said, I hear people try not only to funnel trials toward the guy with high skills, but also to use crazily inappropriate skills for that test. Two dice is apparently not that hard, but if someone drops to none or one, it might be worth finding some way into bluffing/climbing/shooting/cooking their way past every single obstacle.

Adding additional penalty dice to actions you've done before doesn't make a lot of sense. Or rather, it makes sense in that it makes the game more interesting, but not in why you would be less able to climb the same wall the second time than the first time.

[Grek]

fectin: As I'm sure you noticed, when you do a fragile test, there are two outputs you care about, not just one. Your success/failure is determined by the difference between faults and hits, while your chance of being noticed is based soley on your faults. And that is robust enough to handle both the cases you brought up:

-A bomb which is substandard in the sense that it is bad at blowing things up increases the treshhold for success by 1. Your dicepool is the same, so no effect on the penalty counter, but you're less likely to succeed.
-A bomb which is extremely obvious and/or large decreases the disaster treshhold by one. You are no more likely to screw up just because you used a different bomb, you've just given yourself a much smaller margin of error.
-Stress penalties and getting wounded (if we use wound penalties) gives you more fault dice. Because you're stressed/hurt, you are both less able to be stealthy and less able actually get the bomb set up right.
-Being hasty also gives you more penalty dice. This is because it is easier to screw up when trying to rush yourself.

In general, circumstances that effect the character effect the dicepool, while circumstances that effect the world effect the threshholds. I know that it's weird that equipment changes the treshhold rather than your dicepool, and that many games don't do it that way, but it does work.

[Endovior]

Okay. Accepting and embracing the issues makes sense.

I'm not smart on 4E, except by proxy. That said, I hear people try not only to funnel trials toward the guy with high skills, but also to use crazily inappropriate skills for that test. Two dice is apparently not that hard, but if someone drops to none or one, it might be worth finding some way into bluffing/climbing/shooting/cooking their way past every single obstacle.

Adding additional penalty dice to actions you've done before doesn't make a lot of sense. Or rather, it makes sense in that it makes the game more interesting, but not in why you would be less able to climb the same wall the second time than the first time.

(Emphasis mine)
Where are you getting that someone can drop it to none or one? The only method of decreasing penalty dice that has been mentioned thus far has been personal specialization. You're going on complaining about how terrible it'd be for game balance if that number could be dropped any lower, and I totally agree; that'd be terrible. That's why we probably won't include any other ways of lowering penalty dice. Accordingly, a competent professional, specialized in a given area, working in a reasonably safe area with good lighting, with all of the appropriate tools for the task at hand, who is presently in his right mind, uninjured, and under no serious time pressure, achieves the perfect minimum of two fault dice. Under likely mission conditions, there will usually be more fault dice then that.

EDIT: Now, it's totally possible that there will be other types of skills and advantages and cyberware or whatever that allow you to ignore fault dice from external sources (for example, cybereyes with infrared capability allow you to ignore extra fault dice caused by darkness), but there shouldn't ever be anything that allows you to reduce fault dice outright other then professional specialization.

[DrPraetor]

Dice Pools
“Roll a d6.
Repeat.”

In Asymmetric Threat,

Hey, whoah, you can't use that name!

That's going to be the name of my Massively Multiplayer Terror Simulator (MMTS) which takes place in a living, breathing, fully simulated New York City. You and other members of your cell have to take out as many civilians as possible before you're inevitably gunned down by the police.

I am a pretty pretty elf princess

I am still worried that Social penalties are not big enough to discourage people from maxing out their Stress.

How about this:
* Every 2 points of stress increases your "stress penalty" by 1.
* Your stress penalty adds to the number of penalty dice rolled for social tests.
* Every point of stress above soft cap requires you to choose a curse from the following list. You also take extra penalty dice (equal to half your total stress) to such tests:
* Gremlins. Your stress penalty is applied to Operations and Technology tests.
* Blindsided. Your stress penalty is applied to Initiative tests, and to Perception tests required to detect threats.

Thus, *generalists* will be encouraged to keep their stress low, enabling them to do lots of different things?

This isn't an entirely satisfactory resolution either, I'm thinking.

[Username17]

For the bombs thing: increasing the bigness of the bomb increases the Penalty Dice by 1 for every reduction of success threshold by 1. If you're willing to roll 25 penalty dice for a huge explosion, you can set off the alarm and be pretty sure the door is coming down. You're now in the chase minigame. If you want to make a micro-explosion that takes out just the lock, you can except a relatively high threshold for relatively few Penalty Dice.

I am still worried that Social penalties are not big enough to discourage people from maxing out their Stress.

Probably they aren't. But there are also temporary Stress things that require you to have an open Stress Reserve to use. The goal is to support High, Low, and Medium Stress characters. As long as Sam Spade, Bane, and Cyborg all playable characters, that is achieved. It is possible to carve out additional niches for low- and mid-Stressed characters by adding additional limits to High-Stress characters, but I'm somewhat ambivalent about it.

-Username17

[Lokathor]

So for notation on dice pools, since it wasn't really talked about much, I'm going to second the use of notation of "primary/fault", so 4/2 or 15/3 or whatever. That's your dice pool for an action of a particular type in general, like Combat(Rifles), or something. Then if there's a specific kind of case being discussed that has a threshold then we put that in parentheses after the pool value, such as either "Agility + Combat [Rifles] (2)" or "15/3 (2)".

Dice pool modifiers are notated either as a single number (+3) for a modifier to only the primary pool, or as two numbers separated by a slash for a modifier to fault dice (+3/+1). Specialization's effect is notated +1/-1, for example. You always place the first number even if it's zero. A chameleon suit gives you +0/-1 on your stealth checks and running gives you +0/+2 to your stealth checks, and so on.

Changes to the success threshold are a more special event and probably shouldn't be notated into a dicepool change or they can be missed. If it really must be notated into an expression then put the modifier (always with the sign) in parens like you would for an expression after the dicepool modifier value, such as "+2/+2 (-2)".

[A Man In Black]

For the bombs thing: increasing the bigness of the bomb increases the Penalty Dice by 1 for every reduction of success threshold by 1. If you're willing to roll 25 penalty dice for a huge explosion, you can set off the alarm and be pretty sure the door is coming down. You're now in the chase minigame.

Now I'm lost.

If you're just blowing shit up to blow shit up with no "Fragile" risk, fault dice are penalties, so a big bomb will either not blow up whatever it is you need to blow up, or blow up in your face, or whatever happens when you've got a hit total in the deep negatives.

But if there's an alarm, the worst thing that happens is you set off the alarm?

[Endovior]

What you're missing is that fault dice are BOTH penalties and can cause dangerous things to happen. So not only does a big dangerous bomb pose big dangerous risks (ie: penalties) to the demolitionist, but it ALSO makes you likely to fail at whatever else it is you're doing, in the sense that a huge building-leveling explosion is often inconvenient.

[A Man In Black]

What you're missing is that fault dice are BOTH penalties and can cause dangerous things to happen. So not only does a big dangerous bomb pose big dangerous risks (ie: penalties) to the demolitionist, but it ALSO makes you likely to fail at whatever else it is you're doing, in the sense that a huge building-leveling explosion is often inconvenient.

So doing things which are loud but effective gives +large number/+ proportionally small number modifiers? Opening locked doors with a battering ram, looking for leads Batman-style by storming into bars and beating everyone up, etc.

So Ki and Mercy can choose between going quiet and suffering their naturally smaller dicepools for not having augments, but can go loud when they really don't care who hears them breaching doors with two sticks of dynamite. Chun has to go loud all the time, just because he can't turn it off, and will tend to favor two sticks of dynamite as the solution to every problem. The offset to this is that Ki and Mercy get fewer superpowers, and some situations don't have a non-augment "go loud" option.

Is this about the shape of it?

Also, is there a collective term for Stress-causing superpowers? I've just been using augment lately because it's what Deus Ex uses.

[fectin]

Okay. Changing threshold makes that all work. I hadn't realized that was variable too.

On low numbers of penalty dice: Frank says that effects which reduce numbers of penalty dice (phrasing which is distinct from the "ignore penalty dice" that he uses for gyrostabilizers) are "rare" (meaning that they exist) and says that the "most common" is specialization (meaning that there are others). Taken together, that says that circumstances exist where you could drop to a single base penalty die.

[fectin]

Separate point: would it be better to look for 4-6 on penalty dice as well? I get the thematics, but looking for all instances of 4-6 is easier than looking for 4-6 and red or 1-3 and black (or whatever color your dice are).

[DrPraetor]

How's about this:
Penalties from Stress:

• Add Stress Mod to the Penalty Dice rolled for the following tests:
• All Social challenges.
• All Healing tests, and tests done by others to treat your injuries.
• Some Resistance tests, when the effect you resist is identified as Transformation or Mind-Effecting.
• Substract Stress Mod from the number of penalty dice which are removed when you spend Edge.[/b]
• Add Stress Mod to the penalty dice which apply from any of your Flaws. This includes any Flaws you take at character generation, any Flaws which you take from high Stress, and any additional Flaws that are inflicted as side-effects of some source of Temporary Stress.

By default, when you spend an Edge, you gain +Edge dice, and you remove -Edge penalty dice. This makes Edge twice as big, basically, unless you have lots of stress. If your Stress Mod is higher than your Edge (which is basically impossible for Edge 3 heroes) than you actually roll more penalty dice when spending Edge.

Stress	Effects	Caps
<0.51	None	Cap to be considered "Normal".
0.51-1.5	Stress Mod 1.	n/a
1.51-2.5	Stress Mod 1, 1 Flaw	n/a
2.51-3.5	Stress Mod 2, 1 Flaw	3.0 is Hard Cap[/i] in Gritty games.
3.51-4.5	Stress Mod 2, 2 Flaws	n/a
4.51-5.5	Stress Mod 3, 2 Flaws	n/a
5.51-6.5	Stress Mod 3, 3 Flaws	6.0 is Hard Cap[/i] in Standard games.
6.51-7.5	Stress Mod 4, 3 Flaws	n/a
7.51-8	Stress Mod 4, 4 Flaws	6.0 is Hard Cap[/i] in Heroic games.

The number of Flaws is NOT CUMULATIVE. That is, Stress 6 gives you 3 total Flaws. These Flaws are not counterbalanced with additional advantages.
There are a number of Flaws which are "intended" for high-Stress characters, such as Cyber-Zombie Disassociation and Demon Magnet.
Temporary sources of stress raise your Stress Mod, but do not force additional Flaws from the table above. They generally have specific side-effects that kick in (giving you Flaws).


Thresholds: [table]

Hits:	Awesomeness
-3:	Disastrous. Spouting abusive expletives at school children apropos of nothing, cutting your thumb off while chopping vegetables.
-2:	Embarassing. Spontaneous pratfalls while walking down the street, failing to load a gun.
-1:	Not Awesome. Tying shoes, climbing stairs.
0:	Completely Pedestrian. Driving a car, Throwing Darts.
1:	Professional
2:	Hard.
3:	Extreme.
4:	Crazy Extreme.
5:	Super Human.

[/td][/tr][/table]

[Username17]

Separate point: would it be better to look for 4-6 on penalty dice as well? I get the thematics, but looking for all instances of 4-6 is easier than looking for 4-6 and red or 1-3 and black (or whatever color your dice are).

That would have a certain ease - you count all the 4-6s and then do it again. But I still think it is easier if 1-3 is "bad" and 4-6 is "good" in all instances.

So Ki and Mercy can choose between going quiet and suffering their naturally smaller dicepools for not having augments, but can go loud when they really don't care who hears them breaching doors with two sticks of dynamite. Chun has to go loud all the time, just because he can't turn it off, and will tend to favor two sticks of dynamite as the solution to every problem. The offset to this is that Ki and Mercy get fewer superpowers, and some situations don't have a non-augment "go loud" option.

Sort of like augmentations themselves, people have options that are Covert, Subtle, and Blatant for many tasks. Having Stress penalizes your subtle choices, so you don't do them. Chun is not going to attempt to walk by the guards with clipboard immunity, because his distinct noticeability makes that essentially impossible (or at least: saddles him with enough fault dice that it is a shitty plan). He could try to blast his way through (blatant), or he could try to creep by under the cover of darkness (covert).

The issue then is to have Subtle solutions available for most minigames so that unaugmented characters have a thing to do.

What you're missing is that fault dice are BOTH penalties and can cause dangerous things to happen. So not only does a big dangerous bomb pose big dangerous risks (ie: penalties) to the demolitionist, but it ALSO makes you likely to fail at whatever else it is you're doing, in the sense that a huge building-leveling explosion is often inconvenient.

Yeah. Also, I think the threshold reduction with extra penalty dice could be a normal mechanic. Like for autofire and stuff. You reduce the success threshold by 1 and get an extra penalty die (it could even be a worse exchange rate, like 2 points of reduced threshold and 3). So it's more likely that you'll succeed, and by the same amount as if you got more Bonus Dice - but it's also more likely that you'll have net faults. So it's more likely that you'll hit bystanders and stuff. Let loose with a machine gun or something and you could even get a success margin and still have net faults - causing you to hit your target and also hit bystanders in the area.

All Healing tests, and tests done by others to treat your injuries.

That's very Shadowrun, but actually I think that fast healing should be encouraged. Healing slowly is something that happens to real people when they take a lot of combat drugs, and it's very genre appropriate, but it's boring as fuck at the table. In general, players should not be told that they can't play their characters for an extra few weeks.

Some Resistance tests, when the effect you resist is identified as Transformation or Mind-Effecting.

And even go the other way too. Your Stress modifier should make other people snap out of your mind control tricks faster. Makes the mind hacker and the mind controller into a defensible medium-Stress build.

-Username17

[Orion]

Frank, your game supposedly supports "roll and match" layers who want to physically line up their hits with their faults. When you're hunting two piles of dice for matched pairs, isn't it more intuitive to match a blue 4 to a red 4 than to match a blue 5 to a red 2?

[fectin]

Separate point: would it be better to look for 4-6 on penalty dice as well? I get the thematics, but looking for all instances of 4-6 is easier than looking for 4-6 and red or 1-3 and black (or whatever color your dice are).

That would have a certain ease - you count all the 4-6s and then do it again. But I still think it is easier if 1-3 is "bad" and 4-6 is "good" in all instances.

I agree with that reasoning, but that's not what you set up. 1-3 is sometimes bad and sometimes neutral; 4-6 is sometimes neutral and sometimes good.

I'd probably do it different, but I'd also probably find a bunch of tarnished and a bunch of new pennies, and flip them instead.

[Orion]

pennies and dimes, duh

[Orion]

pennies and dimes, duh