Nuclear Beasts

Claws & Teeth

The critical hit bonuses for claws should be your choice of 1) a little extra damage or 2) grabbing on and getting +2 to hit with a bite attack.

A bite should be -1 to hit and +2 to damage, compared to a claw attack. The critical hit bonuses should be 1) extra damage, 2) holding on (possibly to continue gnawing next round).

Then stuff like Rabbits and Squirrels could legitimately get just Bite, which makes them sucky combatants since the best way to do it is to claw until you can grab, then bite.

Talislanta-Style Damage

Another possibility would be to handle damage a bit like Talislanta. Then it would work a bit like this...

Your base damage would be your Muscles size plus a bonus for your weapon (generally an even number). On a tie you do 1/2 damage. On a success you do full damage. On a crit, you do full damage and the target must roll a Survival Test vs the damage done or be incapacitated/killed. On an extra, you do +4 damage and they still have to make a Survival Test.

If you run someone out of hit points, they just fall down, but a skilled hit can take them out much earlier.

Damages might range something like:

• Punch: Muscles -2
• Claws: Muscles
• Shortsword: Muscles+2
• Longsword: Muscles+4
• 2H Sword: Muscles+6
• Humongo-Sword: Muscles+8

Stuff like guns would be balanced about the same way, but would ignore your strength... say 8 points for a light handgun to 14 for a heavy rifle round.

I'm not sure I like the Survival Test being vs the damage done... that means that beyond 12 points, it becomes really, really lethal. And that 14 point rifle hit would be almost certain incapacitation and quite probably death. I'd probably have to replace it with some sort of randomized value... or a weapon-dependent hard-coded value... or just a flat target number.

Damage Multipliers

Okay, here's a thought on balancing out weapons and keeping the damage system relatively simple.

Use a hit point system (armor subtracts from damage) and give each weapon a Multiplier.

Basically, when you hit someone, you do a base amount of damage plus a bonus. That bonus is equal to how many points you hit them by, times the multiplier.

So, just to throw out some numbers...

Flamethrower: d12, x1/4
2H Sword: d10, x1/2
Small sword: d8, x1
Dagger: d6, x2
Claws: d4, x3

Okay, that doesn't really work, balance-wise, but it demonstrates the idea. If you score a hit with a flamethrower, you'll do +1 damage for every 4 points you hit by. This would replace the whole crit/extra thing for attack rolls.

So if you hit by 4 points, say, the flamethrower will do d12+1 (ave 7.5). A two-handed sword would do d10+2 (ave 7.5), a small sword d8+4 (8.5), a dagger would do d6+8 (11.5) and claws would do d4+12 (14.5). That probably makes the smaller weapons too deadly, since a "typical" hit will probably be by 2 points but you could hit by 8+.

I'd probably have to narrow the range a bit... maybe x1/2, x3/4, x1, x1.5, x2? I'll have to think about it.

Damage Brainstorming

So, I'm back to brainstorming about damage systems. On one level, how you keep track of injuries and such is a critical element of the game, because it can change what people do and what the setting is like so much... on the other hand, unless you're really interested in the "game-within-a-game" of fighting out combats in detail, any damage system will work, as long as it fits the setting well.

So, a few random goals:

• Simple: I'm not interested in a really detailed or intricate system. It should work without much effort or memorization on anyone's part.
• Some Element of Chance: I want stuff like "if this hits, the target WILL go down" to be rare. I'm willing to add another roll if necessary to ensure that there's some excitement and unpredictability involved. Sometimes the brick goes down from a lucky hit, sometimes the wimp just won't die.
• Tradeoffs: ideally, it should support some tradeoffs between different weapons and actions, so that you won't always want to do the same thing.
• Fits In: the basic system should be as similar as possible to the normal task resolution system, so that folks don't have to spend a lot of time learning it. It should be an intuitive extension of the regular rules.
• Lightly Gritty: not so lethal that combat is suicidal, not so cinematic that the PCs are never in danger.
• Fast: it can't take a lot of time to resolve. That's always been my personal gripe about Ironclaw's system... it takes too long. We don't want too many steps or compared rolls.
• Not Frustrating: the typical result of a hit should not be "bounce". We couldn't stand the way that very tough critters worked in Savage Worlds, where you had to keep pounding on them harmlessly until you got lucky.

Okay, here are some questions that have to be answered.

• How is the damage from an attack determined? How does your Muscles rating influence it?
• How do we determine how much damage the target can bounce off? Similarly, how does armor work?
• How does cumulative damage affect the target? Do we have cumulative damage at all?

Since I'm just brainstorming, let's assume that the damage roll is your Muscles die combined with whatever Damage Dice your weapon contributes. It's just a standard "roll-and-take-the-highest" check, like everything else. This would normally give a result from 1 to 12, with the possibility of bonuses or penalties to adjust it further.

An easy way to include bonuses is to say that how well you hit adds significant boosts to your damage. Like +2, +4, +8, etc.. An Extraordinary hit should inflict pretty impressive damage even with a dagger.

We could compare that to some sort of Soak roll (making it an Opposed Test) and handle the results accordingly. This would give us the usual set of results: Extra Failure, Crit Failure, Failure, Tie, Success, Crit Success, Extra Success. The high end results should include stuff like outright death.

Let's see... Damage vs Soak (Muscles & Weapon Damage vs Muscles & Guts & Armor).

• Extraordinary Failure: not even a scratch; weapon may break (GM option).
• Critical Failure: not even a scratch
• Failure: target takes no real damage, just scratches.
• Tie: no real damage, but target is -1 (cumulative) to all defense rolls until they spend a turn resting.
• Success: actual damage. Target gets a -1 to all defense rolls that can't be gotten rid of without medical attention.
• Critical Success: as Success, but target is incapacitated and must make a Survival Check next round
• Extraordinary Success: make that Survival Check at -4.

Brainslugs

If I've got demented, psychotic factory A.I.s making killer robots, there's really no reason for there not to be the occasional bioweapon, too. Sure, there can be lethal bioweapons like black flake, but would those really satisfy an insane A.I.?

I'd assume that the vast majority of vat-grown monsters would die out, often without even a second generation, but you could get the occasional "success". Screechers, Leucrottas, Wraiths... these things [i]may[/i] predate the fall of Man, or they might be relatively recent creations.

One possibility was the old "Brainweaver" critter I had in the first version of Nuclear Beasts. A fairly stupid idea that really doesn't work in anything short of a "wacky nonsense is encouraged!" Gamma World style. But I could see some sort of parasite that takes over the host, a la the brainslugs in Futurama. Just not as silly.

It might not even be intelligent as such... just a festering, bulbous infection that grows through the host's body and drives it towards infecting others... probably by biting them with a mouth filled with gooey paste instead of proper saliva. Remember the zombie-crewmen in System Shock II who would get lines like "Hurry! Run!" and "I'm sorry!" as they rushed up to kill you? I could see an infected Beast with a mammoth, pus-filled swelling on his back telling you to run away, if you get any closer he'll be compelled to attack you.

Potential Skills

Agility (Speed): covers acts like jumping, climbing, dodging attacks, tumbling and general feats of acrobatics.
Narrow (Minor) Versions: Acrobatics, Climbing, Dodge, Jumping

Animals (Brains): knowledge of animal species and how to raise, train and domesticate them.
Narrow (Minor) Versions: Animal Lore (general knowledge only), Animal Handling.

Awareness (Perception): covers all sensory tasks such as seeing, hearing or smelling something. Unless you have Radiation Blindness, this skill and the Minor versions (except for Listen) can also be used to detect the presence of radioactivity.
Narrow (Minor) Versions: Listen, Smell/Taste, Spot.

Persuasion (Charm): covers friendly social interaction such as making friends and being chummy, convincing folks of your truthfulness or persuading others to see something your way.
Narrow (Minor) Versions: Fellowship (making friends and gossiping with folks), Fast-talk (convincing someone of your truthfulness), Diplomacy, Seduction.

Thievery (Speed): covers such actions as pick-pocketing, picking locks and dealing with other criminals.
Narrow (Minor) Versions: Pick lock, Pickpocket, Streetwise.

Skill List

I'm going to have to do a new skill list soon, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to write it up.

The biggest change is probably going to be the whole Major/Minor/Trivial split. I'll start with the Major skills and list off possible narrow specialties (Minor versions) of them. Skills where you have to choose a particular specialty will be marked in []. Then I'll probably just give some examples of Trivial skills.

I want to keep the list small. There probably shouldn't be more than 4 major skills for each stat... maybe 24 in total. I'm aiming for a small list, more like Savage Worlds than Ironclaw. There's a nice, minimal set in Mythweaver (another free RPG available online) that I want to look at again.

Risk Applications

One of the main things that I want to accomplish with the risk rules is to be able to balance stuff without crippling the chance of success.

Sadly, a -1 penalty is a pretty decent-sized penalty in this system. A -4 is crippling, reducing the best folks rolling max down to the point where an average roll by a similarly competent foe would beat them.

Risk should allow me to add minor penalties.

For weapons, I'm thinking of something like this:

• Natural weapons, simple hand-held weapons: risk 1.
• Oversized weapons, two-handed weapons and awkward ones (like flails). Also single-shot guns: risk 2.
• Weapons that are both awkward and oversized and full-auto firearms: risk 3.
• Taking a particularly slow and cautious action: -1 risk.
• Trying something dangerous like firing into melee (without hitting a friendly): +1 risk.
• Making two attacks in one round: -1 to your roll, +1 to risk.

That last one is an example of a mixed penalty... rather than giving a crippling penalty to your roll, we give a minor penalty and an increased risk. Unfortunately, it'll probably take a lot of playtesting to work the correct values out, but I like the basic idea.

Alternative Resolution System

One thing that I've been considering lately is changing how critical successes are determined. The new Albedo inspired this, but I've been toying with this sort of thing for awhile.

Basically, rather than scoring a crit when you beat the target's roll by 4, you'd score a crit when two of your dice beat their highest roll.

I'd probably write it like this:

Compare your dice to your opponent's highest number rolled (or the difficulty, if it's a flat value). Every die that beat the target number scores 1 success. Every two dice that tied the target number also score 1 success. Hm. Is that tie effect desirable? It might be better to just say which dice beat the difficulty.

I dunno. This has the advantage that you can't score crits without having multiple dice to roll (and an Extra would require at least 3 dice, since you'd have to score 3 successes to get one). On the other hand, that means that adding more dice into a pool does increase the "maximum" result... crits and extras become that much more likely.

In an opposed test, you'd have to first figure out who won (highest roll) then see how many successes they got. This would, unfortunately, require you to keep all of the dice exposed until you knew who got best. You couldn't roll 2d8 for 3 different villains and then have the PCs roll against 7, 4 and 8. You wouldn't be able to tell how many successes each foe got that way.

New Rules Blog

I've started up a new Rules Blog for Nuclear Beasts. So far it's going quite well. I do like the editing support of MovableType and it's easy to make it read in the correct order (the reverse of the normal blog order), something that I could never do with Blogger. I mean, I was midway through writing my own PHP script to reverse the blog myself... it's rather nice not having to hack that sort of thing together myself.

Of course, I'm a bit more of a "power user" than a lot of folks. While the defaults for MovableType work just fine, it doesn't offer the simplified interface and your choice of a bunch of pre-designed templates that Blogger has, so Blogger might be better for HTML novices and non-technical folks. But I'm thinking that MovableType is going to be more my speed in general.

Nuclear Beasts Reborn

I recently stumbled across another free blog service, Movable Type. Their blog software offers several features that I wasn't getting from Blogger, so I want to try their code out for a bit. See whether or not I like it better.

Anyway, I may end up converting the old blogs to this service, or (more likely) just switch over and abandon the old ones. This service already offers stuff like comments, archives by date, search capability, etc.. Pretty sweet. We'll see how well it works in practice.