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erik
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Post by erik »

So, I haven't posted anything this year on Nexus.

Art has been moving at a glacial pace. A handful of sketches on guns, flex plate armor, exosuit. I'm ashamed at my inability to schedule time to draw. I was going to do more art this weekend when out of town and left my supplies at home. Ugh. But I'll get there. Most of my art was done in the course of 1 or 2 days. I just need to hit a stride and keep at it when I find a regimen that works.

I looked more at my ammo pool rules and I was fucking out of my mind. Rolling a dozen dice and keeping track of them from round to round as 1's get peeled off is a huge time drain and no table is ever going to be able to track those dice reliably.

So I pared it down a bunch at the cost of some granularity. Ammo Threshold and Ammo Pool. The pool is how many dice are rolled, and the threshold is how many 6's need to be rolled to run out of ammo.

The most dice any weapon will roll is 3. Something with an ungodly pile of ammo like a Shatter Cannon gets 3 Ammo Threshold and 3 Ammo Pool. They only run out when all 3 dice show 6's. So 1/216 of running out in any given round.

Basically the odds of running out of ammo in a given round are:
1/3
1/6
1/14
1/36
1/216

Using full auto area spray or a ranged burst at a single target causes one of the Ammo pool to be set aside as an automatic 6. So rail cannon runs out in 1/36 rounds of spraying ammo.

Ion weapons at 1 AT/1 AP (they overheat easily and cannot be sprayed)
Particle and Plasma weapons at 1 AT/2 AP (they overheat very easily)
Flechette type weapons at 2 AT/3 AP (1/14 chance of running out in a given round, 1/3 if spraying)
Laser weapons at 2 AT/2 AP
Railguns and such are at 3 AT/3 AP

I noticed a few typoes that made me sad. Nana-Doc was my 2nd saddest.
Grammar and styling continues to be polished as well.

- updated the first post downloadable pdf with ammo rules and continued fixing typoes and errors. There was one unfortunate reference to some sort of Coalition instead of the Republic. Dunno what that could've been about.
Last edited by erik on Sun Feb 28, 2016 10:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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OgreBattle
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Post by OgreBattle »

Found some websites with creative commons sci fi images, it may be useful for visualizing Nexus pdf's:

http://depositphotos.com/search/cyberpunk.html?7a7tcq=

https://pixabay.com/en/photos/?q=cyberp ... in_height=
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erik
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Post by erik »

I'm pretty much resolved to doing art on my own. I'm going to write out a schedule and just do it like work, and scratch things off my list. I'm gonna retrace my drawings using a tablet since I don't like that my scans of paper are off-white and/or textured for the paper. I was painstakingly editing a scan and decided it would be easier just to retrace via tablet.

As I diddle on art I also expand or tweak on writing some. So a more recent PDF version is on the first post. A few major changes beyond minor tweaking.
• I recast the Templar Knight archetype as "Judge". I felt the Templar name was a bit forced but couldn't come up with anything better until koz brought up Judge Dredd, and it seemed too perfect a name to ignore.
• Added a couple more spells (it still feels like I should have more, but I guess this is enough for a starting core set of spells)
• Added starting backgrounds to let new characters diversify some from their base archetype.
• Added population estimates for some major cities.

I'm tempted to add salary/starting assets for all archetypes since it feels like that missing portion leaves a void. Or if not then at least I'll put in a blurb explaining that adventurers tend to not have a house/apartment as the wandering adventurer lifestyle generally precludes that.
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Post by erik »

I continue to tinker away. So many little changes. Most of it is formatting and rebalancing archetypes...

Just a couple renaming of things
Repair skill -> Engineering
Psy Gunfighter -> Slinger

I changed the format for the Psy power section which shaved some pages off the count. I rebalanced many of the Archetypes since I tabulated their heroism costs and saw the range was like 100-152. Now it is 110 - 123 (114-123 w/o journeyman). A bit more tidy.
ArchetypeHeroism Pts
Ki Master123
Phoenix123
Mentalist122
Robot Horse122
Rune Warrior122
Speedster122
Borg, Merc121
Dragon121
Borg, Combat120
Borg, Magictech120
Mech Pilot120
Mystic120
Slinger120
Mechaniker119
Scion119
Soldier119
Gunfighter118
Judge118
Psy Vampire118
Technomage118
Vampire118
Dog Soldier117
Rune Mage117
Scientist Adventurer117
Super117
Borg, Espionage116
Droid115
Elementalist115
Nano-Doc115
Nexus Mage115
Rewire115
Rift Walker115
Scout115
Witch115
Duelist114
Cyberpunk114
Journeyman110

The costs are just a rough measure especially since I counted equipment items towards the total, and obviously not all things are equal.
Each 100k of gear/cyber as 2 pt, civ vehicles as 4 pts, mil vehicle as 8 pts and mechs/power armor as 14 pts. Heavy armor as 2 pts, medium armor or stealth armor as 1 pt. Heavy-ish weapons as 2 pts. In the process I changed how starting cybernetics/gear are gathered, now giving budgets instead of selections + freebies with skills.
Ki Master was a surprise at #1, but I couldn't justify taking anything away since they're rather weak, possibly one of the worst. Just goes to illustrate that it takes more crap to make an unarmed melee guy quasi viable. On the other end mages are probably under estimated... but maybe not. Maybe they do need a couple more spells each.
Journeyman is the worst because that's what it's supposed to be.

I would have begun playtesting but a friend started a 3e D&D campaign and I can't say no to that, plus our schedules do not align currently for more play opportunities.

I have done more art, but scanning is a pain in the butt with my laptop on life support.
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OgreBattle
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Post by OgreBattle »

I was not expecting robot horse to place above dragon, combat cyborg, and everyone else
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erik
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Post by erik »

In certain other nexus like games, robots, especially large ones, are pretty boss. I do admit that some archetypes were included in core here because players in my gang enjoyed them previously in other systems (robot horse, phoenix, magic borg).

Robot horse is pretty much droid++, so i expect it to be on the top end. Also making it more expensive, having 8 health is pretty expensive and arguably one of the weakest returns per expenditure (considering 8 pts can make you nigh immortal).


[edit] oops, and I noticed that I forgot to include Unnatural Hunger (Electricity) under Robot Horse as I gave it to Droids. That's -3 which puts them at 119 pts. Update noted for next version.

I may tweak the costs of cybernetic upgrades to provide more interesting options with budgets in varying 100k increments, mostly to get a couple more of them under 100k. Then again, maybe not. Mostly I'm satisfied with how it works out. I should put in a qualifier that the Disguise mod package includes Skin overlay tho.

One of the changes was that I added various unnatural hunger (blood, mana) disadvantages to make things like Vampires and Psy Vampires more modular and to flesh out the mechanics for drinking blood or sending mana off to your witch patron, etc. Speaking of disadvantages, I think a lot of the disadvantages are probably not so bad that you'd even want to pay them off. So that is another thing that muddies the balancing of archetype heroism pt costs. Thankfully I'm not super concerned with balance. I got them within striking distance of each other and that's enough.

I think my favorite archetypes are Rewire, Mechaniker, Elementalist, Scion, Psy Vampire, Scientist Adventurer, and Espionage Borg. Oh, and Technomage. Goddammit, i can't even keep it under 7 favorites. Least favorite is hands-down the Duelist. It was hard making it not a redundant jedi to the Judge. Maybe I need to make a buckler version of Power Shield armor for them to parry with, but I doubt equipment alone can save a weak concept.

Archetype I've been tempted to add is Spy, basically a more combat oriented Scientist Adventurer or non-cybernetic Espionage Borg with more skills, since so far the options fail the "Can I recreate the main cast of burn notice?" test. Archetypes like mutant, druids and sky pirate would be for an expansion book. Probably including spy/ninja too.
Last edited by erik on Wed Aug 17, 2016 4:15 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by OgreBattle »

Duelist seems more like a particular faction of Ki Masters that you can mention in world building than a mechanically distinct archtype.
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Post by erik »

OgreBattle wrote:Duelist seems more like a particular faction of Ki Masters that you can mention in world building than a mechanically distinct archtype.
Yeah. I wanted them to be Lightsaber dudes without force powers but that's not much of an archetype. I could give them 1 Psy (any) perhaps and maybe. Otherwise I could see skunking them and possibly putting spy or something else or nothing else in their place. 36 core archetypes is still a fair number.

[edit:
BAH!
I was reading through my latest upload and noticed previous version pages were used in some sections (especially Combat and Conditions/Hazards where I was still using Fight for saves instead of Health saves) and saw some glaring typoes that happened while my lappy was fritzing before I disabled its internal keyboard. I uploaded a new copy of 1.0.9 and changed the link. Since I finished toying with a Spy class and tweaking on the Duelist I included those changes in the new copy.
Last edited by erik on Sat Aug 20, 2016 3:13 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by erik »

So, I'm pretty blah on Psy Vampire as a name and was expecting I'd come up with something better by now. Psychophage, Manaphage, Spiritphage, Manatroph, Pneumatroph. Hrm. I was waffling on just calling them Blues but that's racist and not descriptive enough. Psychophage is my current leader but I'm not sold on it yet. It does have in its favor that I don't have to move it alphabetically and that gets a couple laziness points.
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OgreBattle
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Post by OgreBattle »

How about "Psyphon"
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erik
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Post by erik »

Psyphon isn't bad for this genre, but Psychophage continues to grow on me. I pitched Psychophage name to some gaming friends and it was well liked as an improvement.

I expanded on some of the location fluff and keep adjusting prose since I'm always finding better more ways to say things. On the crunch side of fluff I'm giving a hair more detail on power structures/struggles and who the dissidents are and why for various republic arks.

I've struggled with what to name the iconic leader of the republic, and have settled on Horace Kurt Wolf-Hunt. And there is a heresy about Horace deposing the previous self-proclaimed emperor of mankind a while back.

A big format change is that I rearranged some of the pages, bringing the fluff ahead of character creation. I think it is more useful there. The big annoyance is that it will change all the page numbers in the ToC each time I expand it another page. I did update the ToC to make it table-based so I don't need those annoying . . . . . 's to space things out.

Making this whole thing in 30+ separate documents in LibreOffice on a dying macbook has been an ordeal. I'll probably be buckling down and getting a new mac lappy in the quasi-near future, and then I'll play with Pages to see if I can make this look like a legit product.

I changed a few of the taglines for archetypes that I was less satisfied with (psychophage started it, then scientist and rune warrior too since I was sucked into a vortex of anne rice quotes), and included credits for sources. As I understand it fair use permits this kind of usage, but I figure it's nice to know where it came from, at least roughly.

I was kinda tired last night. I hope I didn't introduce more typoes than I corrected with this update.

[edit: For latest version update, 1.0.12, I went through all 32 documents with spellchecker individually, and also tidied up a bunch of the tables since I realized I could format to center them vertically rather than spacing via carriage returns. Also added a few more backgrounds, and I could add another half-page of background without increasing page count, so I probably will sometime.

I'm excited that I may have caught most of the typoes currently existing with this run, and I got rid of the stupid spacing periods in the table of contents by turning it into a table with two columns. Dunno why I didn't think to do that before. I went wild and converted a couple more text blocks into tables for Attributes and such at the start. Now they look nicer if a bit bland. Clearly I'm not a layout design guy.

I plan to put in a simple reputation system. I've written up a dozen or so quick adventure outlines and the intent is that you get reputation or infamy (mechanically, negative rep) with various groups depending upon outcomes. Reputation will basically be a non-skill way to be pulling rank within certain circles (be they towns, organizations, sports fans, scientists, mages, etc). Some backgrounds would be updated to reflect this.
Last edited by erik on Sat Sep 03, 2016 2:59 am, edited 1 time in total.
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erik
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Post by erik »

So, on and off over the years (I can't believe I started this almost 5 years ago and did 90% of the work in the first few months) I have made little tweaks, fixing typoes and such. On the page layout front I finally converted from having 35 different files that I would compile into a single pdf over into using Pages on a macbook to make a single file with much more consistent formatting.

I've left some blank spots for art, especially on the archetypes, and if I wind up home-bound during this coronavirus pandemic I expect that will be one of my free time goals to finally get the art done.

I updated the link on the first post with a latest version if anyone wants to download a 1.7 Mb pdf and peruse it. I remain pretty pleased with this effort and just wish I could get motivated to make it prettier.
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OgreBattle
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Post by OgreBattle »

Cool, what kind of art you gonna make
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erik
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Post by erik »

OgreBattle wrote:Cool, what kind of art you gonna make
Sorry I was slow to notice this. I got called back into work about a week after my last post there so art projects got derailed, of course. Only thing I completed was a birthday drawing for a coworker friend who is a big Beauty and the Beast fan.
This was it still in progress, but I was pretty happy with it, and much happier when I finished.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/ ... image0.jpg
The plan is for adding of various flavor images, to have images for each archetype (there's 38), and images for armors and weapons similar to the spreads that DnD 3e had. I left a side-gap in each archetype's page where I can insert the art, ideally evoking something similar to this:
Image
Though there's a lot less information to convey since Nexus characters can be created in like <5 min so I don't have microfonts. The level of detail would be pretty similar to the one of my friend. So B/W sketches that may get inked at the end. And my layout-fu is novice level at best. I'm envious of the fancy fonts and boxing and backgrounds in the Shadowrun example.

Here's a sketch in progress of a Space Madness scene that I was working on before I got called back to working.
Image

I want to do a few similar compositions where I ink it once I'm happy. The space madness one I'll probably finish with some red-tinted sepia since it's set on Mars.

The current pdf version has a few images taken from community commons thingies now to spice if up a bit. Needs a lot more though. The size of the PDF is going to grow I reckon as I add art, but right now it's only 4 Mb, so that's fine.
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