Been thinking about Shadowdark lately, and about giving my PCs more options for burning off their gold reserves. I didn’t want to violate the core precept about magic items, including expendable ones, being rare, but I wanted some ways for them to craft… after a fashion. Here’s my take on potion brewing.
Continue readingCategory Archives: Mechanics
Point-Buy Character Creation for Twilight: 2000 v2.2
One of my long-standing headaches with Twilight: 2000 v2.2 is the life path character creation system. While it does help build the character biography, I more often find it constraining when I have a concept that doesn’t fit neatly within the limited number of boxes it offers. The random elements also tend to generate parties with widely-varying levels of competence, which means some PCs are more capable than others of making meaningful contributions to party success – both in and out of combat.
My solution to this, which has been kicking around my core rpol.net play-by-post group for several years now, is a point-buy system. Mathematically, this works out to roughly what you’d get out of a well-optimized four- to five-term life path PC with good rolls. This has gone through a few different iterations; this is, I think, the one with which I’m happiest.
Continue readingMad Libs
I just got back from CharCon, an excellent little pocket gaming convention in Charleston, WV. I’ll probably post a more thorough con review later, but the post that’s been stuck in my head for the last couple of days is a con GMing tactic that I encountered on Friday night.
Friday night’s Fallout session, like all good convention games, used pre-generated player characters. What made these different was the GM’s insertion of a Mad Libs-style fill-in-your-own-characterization block in the lower left corner of the sheet:
It’s ridiculously simple, but it made a noticeable difference around the table in terms of player investment in the PCs they’d just received.
Apocalypse World and its Powered by the Apocalypse derivatives all have something similar in their playbooks, of course, but it’s a pre-defined list of choices – and I’d never made the connection between that concept and the need to provide some sort of player input on con one-shot pre-gens. I’ll definitely be stealing this for future demo games I run.
Custom Specialties II (Twilight: 2000 4e House Rules)
A while ago, I posted a few of the custom specialties I’ve thrown together for Kaserne on the Borderlands. Since then, I’ve added a few more at player request – or because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Here’s the most recent full list.
Battle Planner (Command)
Roll Command when you spend a shift or more planning your unit’s actions in an upcoming combat. You get a +1 modifier for each of the following factors that is decisively in your team’s favor, and a -1 modifier (or greater, at the referee’s discretion) for each one that’s decisively stacked against your team: numbers, troop quality, equipment, terrain, weather, intelligence, surprise. During the planned combat and while generally following your plan, each member of your unit may completely re-roll a number of their own rolls equal to the number of successes you received on your Command roll.
Fireteam Leader (Command)
Roll Command as a fast action. If you succeed, choose one PC or allied NPC per success who can hear your voice. Each target immediately becomes unsuppressed.
Folklorist (Persuasion)
When you encounter a phenomenon that appears to be of supernatural origin, roll Persuasion. If you succeed, the GM will tell you something about related folklore or mythology. You’ll generally get more information on folklore that originated from cultures with which you share a language.
Herbal Medicine (Medical Aid)
When you attempt to forage, you may choose to gather medicinal plants rather than edible ones. If you succeed, roll 1d12 on the following table and gain one dose per success of the indicated medicine:
- Pain reliever
- Pain reliever
- Pain reliever
- Anesthetic, local
- Antibiotics
- Antacid
- Anti-diarrheal
- Multivitamins
- Sedative
- Stimulant, mild
- Stimulant, mild
- Stimulant, strong
[Some of these meds are also homebrewed. I’ll eventually post them too.]
Insurgent Leader (Command)
Roll Command when you spend a shift or more interacting with allied NPCs. If you succeed, each affected NPC gains Unit Morale one step lower than your own (to a minimum of D6) while within 5 hexes of you. In abstract mass combat, while within voice or visual range of you, each affected NPC gains one step of troop quality, to a maximum of D12. These effects last for one day per success you rolled.
Jerry-Rig (Tech)
Gives a +1 bonus to Survival when scrounging for parts and a +1 bonus to Tech when repairing or improvising construction of simple machines.
[We’re currently monitoring this one to see if it’s too powerful.]
Medical Examiner (Medical Aid)
Roll Medical Aid when you spend a stretch or more examining a dead body. If you succeed, the Referee should give you some useful information about what happened to your subject and when.
Meteorologist (Survival)
Roll Survival when you spend a stretch or more making weather observations. If you succeed, the Referee should tell you the upcoming weather trend for a number of days equal to the successes you rolled.
Pharmacist (Medical Aid)
Gain a +1 to Tech rolls for creating medications, and to Medical Aid rolls to use medications or identify and treat poisons.
Prepared Packer (Survival)
Once per session, roll Survival. If you succeed, you may declare that one common item was “in your pack all along.” Add the item to your inventory. The item may not have a weight greater than the number of successes you rolled, may not exceed your available encumbrance, and must plausibly fit inside your backpack or pockets. If you use this specialty to produce a common firearm or limited-use item, it comes with 1d3 reloads or uses.
[Some of us are Night’s Black Agents fans.]
Storyteller (Persuasion)
Once per shift, roll Persuasion when you spend a stretch (5-10 minutes) telling a moving or inspirational story. For each success, choose one audience member who may remove 1 stress.
[We’re also monitoring this one to see if it’s calibrated appropriately.]
Infiltration and Awareness (Twilight: 2000 4e House Rules)
First draft. This is something I want to try using in tonight’s session if it becomes relevant. Adapted from Spectre Operations, 3rd Edition.
When the PCs are trying to do sneaky stuff around an enemy force (or just someone they don’t want to see them), the force starts at one of four levels of awareness. The starting level is dictated by the narrative.
Complacent (1): The NPCs have no reason to expect that anyone is sneaking around their neighborhood and have no particular motivation to be alert. PC Recon checks for stealth are not opposed.
Casual (2): The NPCs may be keeping watch or patrolling their perimeter, but they are not aware of any specific threat. They will investigate anomalous activity, but unless it’s obviously something dangerous or hostile, their general approach will be curious rather than confrontational. PC Recon checks for stealth are opposed normally.
Suspicious (3): The NPCs have reason to suspect hostile activity. Watchkeeping and patrol discipline are tightened up. Sentries will call for backup before investigating anomalous activity, and will move in expecting hostile contact. NPCs receive a +1 modifier when opposing PC Recon checks for stealth.
Alerted (4): The NPCs are actively looking for hostile activity. Anything that gets their attention will trigger a general alert. NPCs receive a +2 modifier when opposing PC Recon checks for stealth.
PCs make Recon checks for stealth normally (i.e., it’s a group check using the lowest base dice in the affected group). Each failure, whether through a natural roll or an opposed check, increases the NPCs’ awareness level by 1 and inflicts 1 Stress on each involved PC.
At the referee’s discretion, if the PCs eliminate all witnesses before they can communicate back to the rest of their group, they may temporarily forestall the increased awareness level. Sooner or later, though, someone is going to find a body or bloodstain or realize Igor isn’t at his post.
Kaserne on the Borderlands: House Rules Recap
I’m preparing to resume running Kaserne on the Borderlands in the near future. I figured it might be useful for my three hypothetical readers to summarize the house rules my group currently uses. In no particular order:
Character creation strikes a balance between the book’s template-based player control and life path power level.
A PC starts with a C (d8) in each attribute. The player gets three increases to apply. If the player reduces one attribute to D (d6), they get a fourth increase.
The player chooses one skill at B (d10), two at C, and three at D.
The player chooses three specialties, one of which must be attached to the PC’s B skill.
The player chooses the PC’s starting Coolness Under Fire (as appropriate to the concept), then rolls that die. The die result is the PC’s starting permanent rads.
I assign starting equipment according to the situation in which the new PC enters play. As the game’s economy is largely driven by salvage and looting, this hasn’t been particularly unbalancing.
Character advancement occurs more-or-less normally (but see Coolness Under Fire changes, below). However, because we’re doing troupe play in which all but one of the players currently have two PCs each, XP is pooled at the player level and can be spent on any PC that player controls.
Coolness Under Fire changes occur at the end of each session in which combat occurred. For each PC who participated in combat, the player rolls their CUF die.
If die comes up its maximum value, CUF increases by one step.
If the die comes up a 1 and the PC took a critical hit or was incapacitated from stress, CUF decreases by one step.
Machine guns don’t suffer Reliability loss or jams from 1s on ammo dice – only base dice. We’ve found that this tweak makes belt-fed automatic weapons much more effective at laying down suppressive fire for multiple turns. They jam much less than assault rifles – but when they do, the party definitely feels their absence.
Initiative occurs each round in three phases:
- Fast PCs
- NPCs
- Slow PCs
At the beginning of each round, each player rolls Coolness Under Fire. As usual, they add Unit Morale to this roll if their PC can see or hear at least one ally. If they succeed, the PC acts in the fast phase. If they fail, the PC acts in the slow phase.
During each PC phase, characters in that phase act in whatever order the table deems appropriate. During the NPCs phase, NPCs act in the order in which I deem appropriate.
(If friendly NPCs are in the fight, the NPC phase is split into friendly and hostile NPCs. GM fiat determines which group goes first. Usually, I give precedence to the side that has the greater in-narrative combination of volume of fire, position, numbers, morale, and effective command.)
Bullpup rifles are treated as carbines, getting a – 1 penalty (rather than -2) for attacks in the same hex and a -2 penalty (rather than -3) for one-handed attacks. However, they always reload as a slow action. This hasn’t come up much in play yet, as I don’t think any PCs have picked up the AUG I included in an early loot allocation, but it feels like a good fit for the handling advantages and disadvantages of the bullpup layout.
Patrolling is a sometimes-used downtime activity documented in this post. It’s basically wandering around an already-explored hex looking for details and trouble.
The Cook specialty has additional functionality if the PC is supervising large-scale mass feeding. Each day that the PC spends a shift on this work, the player makes a Survival check. Each success reduces the community’s total food consumption for that day by 5%. This represents increased efficiency in the communal kitchens – basically, the same effect as the specialization’s as-written function, but scaled up.
A few custom specialties are on offer. They’re documented in this post.
Command, as written, doesn’t do a whole lot, and neither does the vehicle commander crew position. We tinkered with making both of them a bit more relevant as discussed in this post, but we’re currently looking at a broader adaptation of the way the Aliens RPG handles it. Stay tuned.
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.)
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:
Expanded Hunting Results (Twilight: 2000 House Rule)
Although Kaserne on the Borderlands is on vacation right now, I still have campaign thoughts. One of them is that the default in 4e is to separate non-threatening-but-edible animal encounters (hunting results) and dangerous animal encounters (card draw results), and I mislike that. I’ve been wanting something a bit more in-depth for both random encounters and Pettimore’s hunting expeditions. Here’s a first stab at it, informed by Wikipedia’s inventory of Polish wildlife:
Yeah, that’s a percentile table. Don’t judge me. Right-click it and select “open image in new tab” to embiggenate.
Custom Specialties (Twilight: 2000 4e House Rules)
I’ve thrown together a few custom specialties over the last few months. Some fill gaps in the 4e character model that my group has identified. Others are just there to add flavor (but should still be worth the 10xp investment). The following are currently in play on PCs or allied NPCs.
Herbal Medicine (Medical Aid)
When you attempt to forage, you may choose to gather medicinal plants rather than edible ones. If you succeed, roll 1d12 on the following table and gain one dose per success of the indicated medicine:
- Pain reliever
- Pain reliever
- Pain reliever
- Anesthetic, local
- Antibiotics
- Antacid
- Anti-diarrheal
- Multivitamins
- Sedative
- Stimulant, mild
- Stimulant, mild
- Stimulant, strong
[Some of these meds are also homebrewed. I’ll eventually post them too.]
Jerry-Rig (Tech)
Gives a +1 bonus to SURVIVAL when scrounging for parts and a +1 bonus to TECH when repairing or improvising construction of simple machines.
[We’re currently monitoring this one to see if it’s too powerful.]
Meteorologist (Survival)
Roll SURVIVAL when you spend a stretch or more making weather observations. If you succeed, the Referee should tell you the upcoming weather trend for a number of days equal to the successes you rolled.
Storyteller (Persuasion)
Once per shift, roll Persuasion when you spend a stretch (5-10 minutes) telling a moving or inspirational story. For each success, choose one audience member who may remove 1 stress.
[We’re also monitoring this one to see if it’s calibrated appropriately.]