Author Archives: Clayton Oliver

Phantom

For Star Wars (any system, but preferably Fantasy Flight’s):

This pitch is for is an R2-series astromech droid starfighter pilot.

Yes, pilot. He flies an X-Wing or Y-Wing from the astromech socket. His organic partner was killed by a cockpit hit. He got the bird back to base at a time when the situation was so desperate that someone in authority let him keep flying. He’s steam-cleaned the gore out of the cockpit but otherwise left it gutted by the turbolaser hit (hey, not running life support means more power budget for shields). The starfighter is now painted in a monochrome version of the standard Rebel Alliance palette to make it look like an unmanned ghost fighter.

While the concept is wholly playable, the droid’s designation is the joke:

R2-F4.

T2k 4e Life Path Math

Elsenet, a colleague recently asked about the likelihood of Twilight: 2000 4e PCs making it to various numbers of lifepath terms before the war kicks off. Assuming a RAW implementation of a 1d8 roll under the number of terms taken thus far, the distribution looks something like this:

… so your “average” 4e PC will four terms of character development before the war breaks out. Anything above 6 terms is a significant outlier (and probably doesn’t have great attributes from all those aging rolls).

(I think I got this right, but my math is not guaranteed. It’s been a minute since I did anything with probabilities, and I somehow managed to get a master’s degree without ever taking a college statistics course.)

Not Really An Annual Report

It’s hard to believe I’ve kept this blog active for a year with at least one post per week. That’s largely attributable to two things:

First, I’ve been using this platform as a means of recycling old material from my defunct LiveJournal account and various forum posts. All of those will eventually go the way of all bits, and while there’s no guarantee my hosting provider here will stay afloat, it’s a centralized repository under my administrative control.

Second, the Kaserne on the Borderlands campaign log generated a ridiculous amount of material (and was a ridiculous amount of work to maintain). The campaign has been on hiatus since late August, but my current intent is to restart it in the spring.

Because I’ve been relying on recycled material, my actual “new” content creation here has definitely not been in the once-a-week model, with the exception of the aforementioned campaign log. I currently have (pause, count) 14 recycled posts scheduled after this one. Once that well is dry, I don’t know that I’ll be able to maintain the once-a-week schedule. I also have some major life changes coming up in the next couple of months that are outside the blog’s scope but which definitely will affect the amount of creative energy I can invest here. The result of all of this is that I expect my posting frequency here to drop off sometime in April.

Because I have comments disabled (all the better to not be spammed with), I can’t tell whether anyone is actually reading this thing on a regular basis. This is strictly a hobby thing, not a revenue-generation attempt, so I’m not advertising the blog. But I hope I have a few semi-regular visitors who are getting some use out of it.

MBT Viability in Twilight: 2000 4e, Part 2

Continuing from the original post here, based on the Juhlin.com forum thread here. I realized I’d never recorded my follow-up thoughts on the blog. Let’s rectify that.

Twilight: 2000 in all its editions is much more post-apoc adventure survival fantasy than excruciatingly-accurate simulation (Apotheosis Saga, anyone?). So treads and lube aren’t usually tracked to the level of tank extinction. But let’s talk about the mechanics of mechanical issues for our hypothetical T-72 owners.

Maintenance

v2

A T-72 requires 14 hours of maintenance per week. Potential breakdowns occur every 8 hours of movement or combat, rolled against the vehicle’s Wear value (10% for like-new, to 100% if it’s on its last legs). If there’s potential for a breakdown, the mechanic who did the last maintenance rolls a Difficult Mechanic check to see if his work prevented the breakdown.

Assuming a well-optimized but not maxed mechanic PC (Strength 8, Mechanic 8), a Difficult Mechanic check has an 80% chance of success.

v4

Every vehicle requires the same amount of maintenance: 6 hours per week in which it was driven at least one hex on the overland map. Maintenance requires a successful Tech roll. Failure reduces Reliability by 1 (with most vehicles maxing out at Reliability 5, so you have some margin for error).

Assuming a well-optimized but not maxed Mechanic PC (Intelligence d10, Tech d10), a Tech roll has a 75% chance of success.

Parts and Repair

v2

A well-buried rule indicates that parts need to come from a vehicle identical to the one being repaired. Furthermore, there’s some text indicating that parts are also component-specific (engine, main gun, radio, etc.). There are no explicit rules for scrounging or buying parts.

No roll is required to cannibalize a donor vehicle’s component for parts. However, if the component is damaged, there’s a 30% chance that the part is useless.

A character who’s a capable machinist (or gunsmith, for ordnance repair) may also fabricate mechanical parts with a successful skill check andaccess to a machine shop.

Most repairs require 1d10 parts (1d5 for minor breakdowns).

Damage is tracked by vehicle component, with most components having two states: OK or inoperable/destroyed. A few have an intermediate damaged-but-still-partially-functional state.

v4

“Vehicle parts” are generic – when needed, a bolt, brake cable, or turbocharger materializes out of the quantum foam of your mechanic’s spares box.

A successful Tech roll when scavenging a vehicle yields one part per success rolled, -1 for a destroyed vehicle. Parts are considered to be “common,” which means a 67% chance of availability in a typical settlement.

Only one part is needed to repair a destroyed item, though each repair only restores 1 Reliability per success, so thorough work will likely consume more than one part. Restoring reduced Reliability on an item that wasn’t fully destroyed doesn’t consume any parts.

A vehicle’s Reliability score covers its overall structural integrity, its transmission, and its engine. Weapons, radios, and other subsystems either have their own Reliability tracks or have OK/inoperable states.

Ammunition

v2

2nd edition provides varying availability levels for different ammo types.

125mm HE is common (80% chance of being available in cities, 70% in towns, 30% in villages).

125mm HEAT is scarce (60% in cities, 40% in towns, 20% in villages).

125mm sabot is rare (20% in cities, 10% in towns).

12.7mm and 7.62x54mm for the MGs are both common.

v4

As a broad category, all non-guided heavy weapon ammo is scarce (33% chance of availability in any settlement).

All small arms ammo is common (67% chance of availability in any settlement).

In both cases, chance of availability is for the broad category of item. The referee decides whether a specific sought-after model/type/caliber from that category is available. The West Possum Trot Trading Post may be fresh out of 125mm HEAT, but surely 122mm howitzer mustard agent shells are close enough for government work, right?

(Really, that last paragraph captures it. Ammo availability, perhaps more than any other resource, will be subject to referee judgement and fiat, even with strict adherence to the framework of the rules.)

To close it out, here’s a price comparison for main gun ammo:

Twilight: 2000 4e Conversion: NM-116

Continuing my fascination with new-to-me Nordic light tanks (see also the Ikv 91), today’s Christmas leftovers offering comes to us from Norway. The NM-116 Panserjager was a Norwegian upgrade of the WWII-vintage M24 Chaffee that served until 1993. Rather than reiterate the excellent Online Tank Museum article, I’ll just link it here. You’re only here for the 4e stats anyway, right?

Because the NM-116 was in real-world service until after the Cold War’s end, we can reasonably assume it would have served in the Twilight War. For those who are using a 1e or 2e alternate history, NM-116s would have been in combat as early as December 1996, when the Soviets made their unsuccessful play for a quick victory in Norway. By mid-2000, surviving examples could have been found anywhere in the Nordic countries. A few might also be floating around the Polish-German coast after being “requisitioned” by American units that fought in Norway and later redeployed across the Baltic (6th Infantry Division and 2nd Marine Division). The sticking point in keeping one operational would be obtaining an ammo supply for the up-gunned 90mm.

Number-crunching on this is pretty basic. Just for fun, I also threw in a stat line for the NM-130, the armored recovery vehicle variant (with all of four built).

If you’re looking for v2/v2.2 stats, Paul Mulcahy, of course, has the NM-116 as a tracked light combat vehicle.

Technically, the coaxial is an M3, but stats should identical to those of the M2HB for game purposes. The 90mm gun is a French low-pressure model (the D/925) also used on some obsolete-by-the-1990s French AFVs. Its ammo selection is limited to HE, HEAT, and smoke, so it’s not going to be punching that far above its weight:

Favoritism

Last week’s post on go-to game systems got me thinking about the settings I love and why I love them.

My lifetime achievement award for an intricately-detailed, internally-consistent, hugely-expansive setting has rested with Blue Planet ever since I first encountered it in the early 2000s. It’s worldbuilding at its finest, a sci-fi frontier setting that supports a broad spectrum of campaign styles. Its fatal flaw, if there is one, is that it has no default campaign. Without a clear vision of “we’re playing to do these things,” it seems very easy for a campaign to drown in options. But hot damn, the options.

Shadowrun (at least through the end of the 3e run) is every bit as detailed as Blue Planet, and benefits from an immensely-greater number of supplements. The FASA authors and developers crafted a fantastic world that could range from noir to gonzo while remaining internally-consistent. Moreover, the setting writing is a joy to read. I’ll still go back to 1e sourcebooks just to watch the in-setting conversations reveal another slice of the world’s secrets.

For big ideas and sweeping four-color generalizations, I adore the original 7th Sea. My elevator pitch for it has always been “the coolest parts of early Renaissance Europe filtered through the lens of Disney’s The Three Musketeers.” Every nation its its own unique setting that supports a different style of play. Theah as a whole is somehow stitched together in a way that feels cohesive rather than the half-assed patchwork that could easily result from a less-skilled attempt at putting together a kitchen sink setting.

The setting in which I’d most want to be a player character is Trinity. It’s not quite utopian sci-fi – the setting has plenty of dark places and rough edges, and there are ample reminders that when we went out into the stars, the monsters we brought with us were just as bad as the ones we found. But the overall tone is hopeful. It’s a setting in which humanity is striving toward a common goal but not united, in which the world is better but has been through some really bad times within living memory, and in which PCs can fundamentally make a difference on scales from human to interstellar. (Plus, I was an intern at the Wolf while the initial development cycle was under way, so it’ll always have a place in my heart for its proximity even though I had zero involvement with it.)

The setting in which I’ve spent the most time immersed is a toss-up, but I’d have to say that Twilight: 2000 wins by a nose over the (Old) World of Darkness. I’ve spent at least an order of magnitude more time playing the WoD line. Most of my closest, longest-lasting friendships came out of those gaming groups. It’s the foundation of my body of freelance work. But T2k is the dark future of the ’80s that I found the most compelling when I was a young gamer, and I keep coming back to it over and over again. It offers me a broken world whose fires are still smoldering, where memory of the world-that-was is still alive, and in which there is a faint hope of stabilizing the downward slide and starting the generations-long recovery process. Taken to the extreme, it’s the gaming counterpart to the calling that is my second career, and the same urge to bring order from chaos is what draws me to both of them.

Like the Back of Someone Else’s Hand

This morning (that being the morning I’m writing this, not the morning of its scheduled posting), I was scrolling through the Pathfinder 2e subreddit over breakfast and ran across a post asking why readers prefer PF2 over rules-light systems. Several someones made the point which I would have made if I were going to comment: that different game systems are different tools for achieving different storytelling experiences and outcomes.

The comment thread that prompted this post, however, was this one, in which the OP expressed surprise that someone could be capable of running more than one game system without getting rules crossed up.

I had a bit of an “oh, sweet summer child” reaction to that. It never had occurred to me that this might be a problem. I’ve been collecting accumulating TTRPGs since my childhood in the early ’80s and studying and running them semi-regularly since the early ’90s. Each one still occupies a measurable amount of my brain. While I can’t claim to be able to run anything 100% off-book, the RPGs for which I could play or run tomorrow without much fumbling, unfamiliarity, or pre-session review are, off the top of my head:

  • 7th Sea (original)
  • Dungeons & Dragons (5e, 3e as a stretch)
  • Feng Shui (either edition)
  • Legend of the Five Rings (original through 4th)
  • Shadowrun (2e and 3e)
  • Spycraft (original and 2.0, including Stargate SG-1 as an intermediate member of that line)
  • Trinity (original)
  • Twilight: 2000 (v2.2 and v4)
  • Vampire: The Masquerade (original through Revised and 20th Anniversary)

At one time or another, I’ve spent enough time at the table for each of these to develop a decent familiarity with the mechanics. I can make a spontaneous rules call at the table and be fairly confident that my off-the-cuff decision will be consistent with the game as written. Of equal importance, I also know each of the settings (or genre assumptions, in the case of setting-less games like Spycraft) well enough to improvise plot and the world’s responses to the PCs’ actions.

In a pinch, I also could do passably-good GM work with the rest of the original World of Darkness (strongest in Wraith: The Oblivion, weakest in Changeling: The Dreaming), Dark Conspiracy, Earthdawn, Star Wars (WEG or FFG), and a good cross-section of the Powered by the Apocalypse family.

Through the Gate

Last month, someone elsenet started a thread about people’s most memorable experiences involving gaming with strangers. Here’s my contribution.

At GenCon… ’03, I think… I was on the AEG team. I was primarily there to run demo sessions of Stargate SG-1, which was so new that the AEG warehouse had to unload the books from the truck and overnight them to our hotel to get them to the booth for sales. It was late on Sunday and I’d already run five sessions plus a Spycraft LARP (the less said about that, the better). I was at the booth for the last couple of hours when a group of five or six guys wandered in hoping there was a chance of an off-schedule Stargate demo game. I was utterly exhausted and going through Ricola like it was powdered sugar at a Miami Vice LARP, but they were so earnest and so hopeful. Yeah, sure, I can do one more, just pour a Mountain Dew into me and I’ll be good to go…

… and that was the best table I’d run all weekend. Genre-savvy, well-coordinated, and willing to lean into the plot hard. Better, and this was a high bar, than the group that included three players whose real-world doctorates or career specialties matched the ones on my pre-gen PCs. That Sunday afternoon group turned out to be a college gaming group who’d split to all corners of the country after graduation. They’d mostly fallen out of TTRPGs due to jobs, families, other commitments… but for nearly twenty years, they’d been coming to GenCon to get in one weekend a year of gaming together. Felt good to facilitate that for a few hours.

Measuring Cyberhand

Idle thought while messing around in the basement workshop: a cyberhand mounting a set of dedicated measuring tools. This is inspired by the concept of a cybernetic tool hand (Cyberpunk 2020 and Cyberpunk Red) and by Adam Savage’s measuring tattoo.

A measuring cyberhand (or metrology hand for the highbrow ‘punk), as the name suggests, is equipped with an array of sensors and tools:

  • The thumb and forefinger function as calipers, with retractable articulated jaws at the tips for particularly small or inner-distance measurements.
  • The middle and ring fingers mount retractable probes for a multimeter.
  • The little finger contains an infrared thermometer and a low-powered infrared laser rangefinder/tape measure, with both devices emitting through a dual-lensed aperture in the fingertip.
  • The palm contains a digital inclinometer, enabling measurement of a surface’s angle when the hand is placed flat and palm-down on it.
  • The hand can measure a held object’s weight, using pressure sensors in the palm for small items and strain gauges in the joints for larger or heavier objects.

All data can be displayed in a digital readout on the back of the hand or sent to a cyberoptic.

Cyberpunk 2020: negligible surgery (assuming mounting to a cyberarm); cost 300eb; Humanity loss 3.

Cyberpunk Red: install at clinic; cost 500eb (expensive); Humanity loss 3 (1d6).

Shadowrun 1e/2e/3e: This is a modification to an existing cyberhand. Due to the internal volume consumed by the various sensors, no other modifications can be installed in this hand. Cost ¥1,200; no Essence loss. The optional metrology datalink (data routed to any other cyberware for display or storage) costs ¥300 and costs 0.1 Essence. A measuring cyberhand is legal with Street Index 1.5 and Availability 3/24 hours.

If using the concealment and equipment capacity rules from SR3’s Man and Machine (p. 35), a measuring cyberhand has an ECU of 0.9 and a concealment modifier of -4. The metrology datalink adds 0.1 ECU. If, at the time of installation, the user chooses to omit the digital data readout and rely entirely on the metrology datalink to receive results, this reduces the concealment modifier to -2.