Character generation for MechWarrior, Transformers, or Star Trek (part 1)

Multiple characters per player. The player has 10 points to divide between the Individual Fields of his characters; another 10 points to divide between the Shared Skills of his characters; another 10 for Background; another 10 for Resources. The points each character spreads across Individual Fields, Shared Skills, Background and Resources must combine to the same total as each other character. If four characters, then each character must total 10 points; if five characters, then each must total 8 points; if six characters, then four must total 7 points and the others must total 6 points.


Using "Falco" as an example:

Individual Fields describe a broad area of expertise. Central tasks (e.g., Gunnery, Piloting, Sensor Operation) are made as trained rolls with full skill bonus. Fringe tasks normally associated with other skills (paperwork, repairs) are made as trained rolls but without any skill bonus. Field tasks which somehow relate to the character's Shared Skill (e.g., firing a 'Mech weapon carried like a giant pistol) receive the Shared Skill bonus as an additional bonus.

Shared Skills are basic training common to every character on the sheet (e.g., all four characters "Drive" as a 2-point trained roll). They also indicate the strongest attributes of each individual character. Any untrained roll which relies on the same attributes as one of that individual's Shared Skills receives the Shared Skill's points as a bonus (e.g., Small Arms requires steady hands and good eyes, so "Falco" gets a 2-point bonus when catching a thrown object, which also relies on steady hands and good eyes).

Background skills represent the characters' upbringing, affiliations, hobbies, or other specialized fields of knowledge. Social class or geography/climate indicate familiarity with associated culture and survival skills; affiliation skills represent knowledge of culture, language, and specific social hierarchy. Ridiculous future sports, future pop media genres, and specialized careers (gastroenterology, archaeology) are background too.

Resources indicate the quality of equipment all characters receive for any Shared Skill any character has, and the quality of equipment individual characters receive for their own Individual Fields. (E.g., all four characters receive a 1 point medkit and 1 point survival kit; "Falco" alone receives a 4 point 'Mech.)

2 points of skill is equivalent to "Green" MechWarrior skill.
4 points of skill is equivalent to "Regular" MechWarrior skill.
6 points of skill is equivalent to "Veteran" MechWarrior skill.
8 points of skill is equivalent to "Elite" MechWarrior skill.

[Edit: "Advanced Field" and "Basic Skills" renamed to "Individual Fields" and "Shared Skills," respectively.]

Apropos of Nothing

I have bunches of .txt files containing notes for writing an RPG, in the (increasingly hypothetical) event I should want to write an RPG. Those notes can be divided into certain broad categories. I wonder if the proportion of notes I have on each topic corresponds to the proportion of pages I would want an RPG book to devote to those topics. 

(Crunch week for me, so have some stream-of-consciousness.)

Instead of Vanilla 2d6

My work back here rolling "lower of two dice" made me wonder if I could emulate a 2d6 curve that way. " 7 + (lower of 2d8) -- (lower of 2d8) " turns out to be almost indistinguishable from a 2d6 curve! Were I actually using this die mechanic for something, I'd be tempted to have results of 0 and 14 "explode" with further "lower of 2d8" rolls.

Tabletop play seems to have a tension between providing interesting results (usually means increasing numbers of dice) vs. keeping record keeping reasonable (means keeping pip totals small). World of Darkness and Shadowrun solve this by rolling lots of dice and counting each die as a pip; Betrayal at House on the Hill is similar, in that its dice are numbered from 0 to 2. ...I guess my personal holy grail here would be a simple, manual die mechanic that'll produce a smooth 1/x curve.

2d6 is really easy to use on the tabletop. It does have some problems--cannot roll higher than 12 or lower than 2, "lucky" streaks are pretty common, and "unlikely" results may be more or less common than players think appropriate.

My first thought is that I can break "lucky" streaks by rolling lots of times and discounting all results until a given value has been discounted a certain number of times. (The quota for each value would be proportionate to the chance of rolling that value.) This would be terrible to execute manually but could work with a computerized die roller.

My second  thought is to replace 2d6 with 4d6 / 2. This makes middling results more likely and extreme results much less likely.

I'm not sure I'd want to use any of these as a straight replacement for 2d6 rolls in (say) BattleTech, but I think it might be interesting to designate individual pilots as cautious (4d6/2) or swingy (quotas).
(I'd like to eventually do my own computerization of BattleTech, and I have some thoughts on how I'd modify specific BattleTech mechanics, but that's not a project I can start soon.)

Time War

Somebody's collected all the Time War references from New Doctor Who.

(It wasn't super cafe, obviously.)

Season 1
Season 2
Season 3
Season 4
Season 5
Season 6
Season 7

Last Day
Night of

Would you believe I forgot how silly and melodramatic Doctor Who can be?

Peter Capaldi returns in autumn. No firm air dates though.

Dejarik Holochess

Such a gorgeous game! But phantasmic as well as phantasmagoric. Non-existence makes the heart grow fonder?

art by PJ McQuade

What Do I Play?

Two irregular campaigns, both on break for the holidays. Not sure if/when they'll resume.

One is a New World of Darkness mish-mash with the same 5-7 players meeting biweekly. We blunder into lots of little evil plots which we always (mistakenly) dismiss as unrelated and unimportant. This lead naturally to my Frankenstein and friend's Wolfman getting themselves killed just before Thanksgiving.

Necromancers are behind everything in that game so I need to optimize my next character for hunting necromancers. I know little of Mage: The Ascension Awakening and would welcome suggestions.

The other is fantasy adventures in a West End Games D6-derivative. (I designed my character for big parties and he feels flat with small ones; I didn't expect him to survive so long. I know what kind of character I want next, though, so I think I'll just start tacking those skills and persona onto him.) This group happens anytime any 4-9 of about 15 people are in town. We play weekly when we're lucky, quarterly when we're not, and whoever has a quest idea gets to run that day's game.

I'm not active on any RPG forums or social media sites, so instead of actually discussing RPG design, for the last few years I've been finding good blogs to read through from beginning to end. Anything interesting gets either paraphrased into a .txt file or bookmarked, depending on its length and complexity:

Jeff's Gameblog had ~1.98 irreducible posts per month
RPGPundit had ~1.73 irreducible posts per month
LotFP had ~1.23 irreducible posts per month
Zak S has ~8.71 irreducible posts per month (I'm only up to May 2010)

Those four happen to focus on old D&D, which I haven't played. I have tried D&D3.X; it's a bit too fiddly for me, and I tend to forget modifiers. BRP Cthulhu I've played even less but like much more (I'm very curious to see how Raiders of R'lyeh turns out).

What I'd really like is to run or play in a MechWarrior campaign. Problem is there's no good way to step the level of detail up or down during combat. So instead I might try running a game of TRANSFORMERS CTHULHU. I originally envisioned the players as humans and the robots as Lovecraftian horrors, but prospective players all want to play as the robots. I can work with that. It puts all the action on the same scale as MechWarrior while being more flexible.

Clue Variant: Death Clue

Have I mentioned Death Clue before? I feel like I have.

In regular Clue, you set three cards aside at the beginning of the game, and the players try to deduce what those three cards are by figuring out what cards are in each others' hands.

In Death Clue, each player is dealt three cards and the name of ANOTHER player, tries to deduce what THAT player is holding in their hand, and is required to lie (pass) when THAT player asks for clues. Goal is to "kill" THAT player by guessing their hand, but you can also "kill" whoever's hunting you. Everybody (usually) survives to the endgame and the endgame is pretty quick.

"Resistance: Avalon" is my Sunday group's go-to game. It's fast, easy, a little bit of strategy and lots of persuasion. For us (~5 or 6 players) it tends to be one-sided, and I'm pondering how to change that.

Current notion is to hybridize it with Death Clue while preserving the talky/cooperative aspects. (Don't know how. Might not be possible.)