1KM1KT Free RPG Community

Okay, so I've decided to go back and redo Orchestra, using a system that I'd been working on for a while.

Here's the short and sweet:

2d20+modifiers capped by a limit as a core mechanic; I want people to be able to play with fewer than six dice for the whole table, which means a couple pairs for the GM and one for any player who's acting.

A standard Attribute/Skill system (Attribute+Skill=limit, Skill=base modifier).

Combat system that includes both Depth and Trauma as a measurement of damage; intended to make combat with psychic powers and firearms more engaging; you could warp someone's face into oblivion, but that's not going to pass their body armor, and choosing firearm loadouts will be an important tactical decision.

Resource-bidding psychics system (technically, Dominance, but I'm using the simple term for discussion's sake), where characters who can use their powers only get a few points a day/session; since willpower is a driving force of this, and psychic powers can be exercised without [spoiler][/spoiler], this serves as an Action Points-styled system with the potential for more specialized uses as well for those trained to do so.

And, of course, my Orchestra canon, drawn from all the sources so far.

Any thoughts?

I love the resource bidding system for psychic powers. That alone makes it work expanding.

I think the canon will be the most interesting part of Orchestra. Let's have a nice little 2-para concept.

One of the things I want to do for the Orchestra reboot is make the flavor text more engaging; some of this is inspired by Shadowrun 5th's informal style, but also because Orchestra really relies upon the fact that each of the factions feels strongly about what they believe in; anarchists demand freedom, corporations want more money, the World League sacrifices everything for security, including any semblance of morality, and any other group wants one of these three things but with a twist (like, for instance, "Let's fix the damage the Cataclysms did and figure out how to undo Dominance" or "Let's end the World League's cover-up of Dominance" or "Our state must follow our religious principles"); for instance, the Swordsmen are anarchist-leaning (technically unaffiliated, but they're most heavily represented by their supporters from that group) and have the explicit goal of removing the corrupt leadership of the World League and transforming it to a true republic, while splinter factions like the Japanese government-in-exile and the India Free State essentially mirror the behavior of the World League but just don't like having someone else in charge.

The narrator is likely going to be more than a little interesting-a former Herald of Pandora (the same people responsible for the First Cataclysm; admittedly most of them didn't know the damage they would cause) who's been a mercenary up until the current game-date of 2063, who falls rather unabashedly in the neo-anarchist camp.

One of the crucial things about Orchestra is that it's often cyberpunk in a shiny world. The World League is actually a "nice" place to live, so long as you aren't a dissident and you're in the system (which, given that they're a totalitarian dictatorship, means that usually only the former is a problem). On the other hand, you have a lot of characters who may be corporate/League operatives that may go into the more gritty (but free) places, such as the anarchist hotbed of New California, and other independent or corporate regions that may have different social norms.

In addition, Orchestra is explicitly heroic cyberpunk, more in the sense that player characters are important in the world, making them more powerful than most other characters.

One of the things that I'm doing to work with these is the creation of three separate health bars; Physical, Mental, and Social, which each have two subtypes that draw from the same meter. On the Physical side, you have nonlethal and lethal damage, on the Mental side you have neurological and psychological damage, and on the Social side you have persona and pariah damage.

Whenever a health bar fills up, you run into an issue; when it fills up of the worse type (lethal/neurological-psychological/pariah) you essentially "lose". Mental health is different, because it is filling up all of *either* that matters. The way health is tracked, you always look at the sum of damage taken; if you've taken 7 points of nonlethal damage and 3 points of lethal, and your Physical health limit is 9, you're unconscious. However, you're not in danger until you take another 6 points of lethal damage, or 2 points of nonlethal damage followed by 6 additional points of either nonlethal or lethal damage. Mental damage of either form is incapacitating, but if you combine them you're incapable of recovery-either is a long term fix (psychological damage, for instance, typically requires steady therapy or has some side-effects on healing to get rid of easily, and neurological damage doesn't naturally heal in adults). Social damage, of course, is highly situational; if you run out of Persona, you drop your face and suffer a distinct disadvantage as you are no longer composed, but running out of pariah damage results in everyone viewing you as an enemy/threat/target.

One of the things that I want to try to do with Orchestra is hybridize a bidding/flat roll system. I've seen a lot of games that lean or blatantly fall into one or another category (for instance, Shadowrun 4/5 is so heavily flat roll based that it hurts, with Edge being an afterthought for most players; I've run a whole campaign where players only use it on the final boss).

In order to do this, I have Resolve. I mentioned earlier that it's styled after Action Points, but that's really only true in a vestigial sense; Resolve are points that can be spent by any of the player characters (so long as they can use Dominance in a pure or traditional form, or are capable of learning to do so) to exert their will upon the universe without necessarily having to worry about consciously using Dominance; they can be applied to push modifiers past limits (both to remove limits and just plain increase modifiers), activate Dominance powers more quickly (especially useful for bulky tradition users), or ignore some of the cost and obvious signatures that accompany Dominance abilities' activations. To really understand how they work with Dominance, I'll have to go into more detail on that, but in short every flexible asset in the game (health, action points, and resolve) can be burnt on Dominance powers from the six "schools" (which correspond to the type of health damage that occurs if the character uses a power too quickly or too powerfully relative to their action point/resolve investment).

Back to Resolve, it's gained incredibly quickly through play, and intended to be spent just as quickly. It allows the players to boost their Defense quite handily, meaning that they can dodge bullets with it, though if they're trading shots 1:1 they'll still go down pretty quickly (Orchestra will run on a very lethal damage system that can be customized, a la L5R, by simply multiplying the amount of health characters have). Every foe vanquished (lethally or nonlethally) restores a point of Resolve, as does completing any task crucial to a mission, and Resolve refills entirely between sessions and over decent amounts of time, so it's meant to be used and used often.

One key tenet of Resolve is that it also allows one to reroll failed Dominance rolls; mundane rolls can't be undone except through other potential methods (like cyberware), but Resolve allows one to reroll Dominance and take the better result; this doesn't necessarily apply to all Dominance powers, but one of the powers I'm considering involves allowing the user to possess surveillance technology for clairvoyance; they must, however, crack into the networks with a psychic assault, and they have to hop between wi-fi hotspots, essentially. Failure boots them back to their meat, which means that they have every desire to reroll a failed roll and keep going rather than have to start over (with the time and expense). It never has to be spent, but there are times where it should be used.

Of course, one of the things about Resolve is that it can allow you to do some pretty puerile "Nuh-uh, you didn't shoot me, I dodged the bullet" things, and that's okay. Were Orchestra to be compared to a video game, Resolve functions a lot like the energy in Crysis does; you can set it up to work a certain way and then just burn it (you'll pretty much always want to use it to dodge, since it's cheaper than a bullet to the face).

Another gameplay concept that I'm going to integrate in Orchestra is a "Degree" system; which essentially is a modifier to all actions' results. This is in part to help simplify the system; rather than modeling automatic gunfire on a per-bullet basis as I had been planning to do, degrees allow a quick change-up to the system that also allows more of an element of success.

Basically, degrees are compared for every five points of advantage/disadvantage; a handgun may do 8 damage but have a degree of 2; this means that it's not very damaging, but can scale up to about double its damage on a good (and slightly lucky) hit should the difference between attacker's roll and the defender's evasion be 20 points. On the other hand, something like a shotgun would do 12 or 16 damage, but only scale a little because of the fact that the weapon is going to spray pellets downrange no matter how on-target it is. Automatic fire increases degrees, but may lower limits or modifiers on the shots.

Degrees are also core to integrating Dominance powers; unlike normal attacks, Dominance powers succeed whenever they work (i.e. the user succeeds on a roll), but the (self-explanatory) Schrodinger effect may play a role in keeping them from having any impact-it reduces the degrees for hostile or neutral latent psychic witnesses to the manifestations (friendly witnesses may choose to help themselves, but don't introduce a penalty). This only applies to people who would object to the outcome; a mob that hates you and another person won't have an impact on you teleporting half of him six feet away from the other half of him, but it'd be pretty mad at you attacking them. This is also the justification for why Dominance is kept somewhat secret, since it can't manifest in public without a massively powerful user (the Schrodinger effect caps at 8 degrees, but successful activation is worth ~3 for most powers and that means you have to beat the challenge by 25 points!). Of course, you can buy this off by taking damage (damage buys a degree) or burning more AP for a modifier, but both are somewhat harmful to survivability.

Well, right now I'm on to character creation. It's not super duper original, but I'm using a point-buy system with differentiated pools (essentially you get to spend X on attributes, Y on skills, and Z on gear), intended to complement the fact that since Orchestra has more or less identical mechanics for most things I don't have to differentiate that much between different character archetypes; a combat cyborg may need more money than his teammates, but the team leader will choose her character's stats and skills pretty similarly to all the other characters; unlike, say, Shadowrun, most characters in Orchestra (at least outside of the Cyberpunk level, which is brutally "sustenance farming" styled) will have some sort of augmentation outside of Dominance, be able to manifest awesome powers, and have certain other useful abilities.

I'm aiming for a quasinarrative character creation system, with the idea being that the majority of a character's skills will come from their background, something that was inspired by my own reflections on creating a character within narrative (which were in and of themselves augmented by a variety of other sources), being somewhat similar to a "lifepath" system as seen in Traveller, BattleTech, or Eclipse Phase: Transhuman as well as a variety of other things (I just like Transhuman's more than a lot of other ones, for some reason) but without requiring players to necessarily fit within the context of a character's "mundane" life; a character may have Dominance abilities because of a breach with a Cascade Generator (i.e. the things responsible for the Cataclysms), and have gained skills related to using his abilities in a happy fun psychic trauma, but others may have never had an incident in their life and trained their experiences under the tutelage of a careful guide.

These "foundations" aren't a lifepath style thing; yes, characters are required to have certain ones, but they don't reflect a certain string of circumstances, rather being a basic package of things that characters would have; this includes knowledge skills and general "average person" things. For instance, if you come from a lower-middle class up background, you'll know how to drive a car, unless you're so far up in the elite that you've never had to drive one. They're explicitly "generalizations"; for instance, Medical Training, which can reflect either taking first aid classes or just having learned how to treat wounds from TV and first-hand experience. Some foundations also come in tiers; for instance, Medical Training 1 is first aid level stuff (patch up a wound to stop some of the bleeding until the real doctors get a look at it) while Medical Training 3 is medical school doctorate degree level things (trauma surgery, installation of augmentations). The only real restriction is that foundations have to be taken in tiers. In addition, foundations, unlike most lifepaths, are explicitly restricted to determining a character's skills, without any impact on other statistics.