[Nevercast] - Mechanics Reference
johnthedm7000:
Firstly, I wanted to say I really like what I've seen of Nevercast's rules and systems, but then again I liked the rules for your dark fantasy game, and it seems that both sets are pretty similar.
For clarity I think it might be better if bonuses and penalties are phrased as "+1 Dice Rank" or "-1 Dice Rank", with +1 Dice Rank moving you down one die size and -1 Dice Rank moving you up by one. It might be more intuitive to new players than figuring out what "a -1 bonus" is.
Ar Kayon:
Nevercast originally had its own unique system, but I had gotten overwhelmed by the amount of crunch I had to work on. In essence, the system used for the fantasy game was a prototype to see how I could improve upon the system, which ended up diverging into its own game because I liked it so much. So I decided to restyle Nevercast's system altogether using the fantasy game's model, which is much more streamlined than its original set of mechanics.
In relation to the dice rank effects, I had a difficult time wrestling with how I would present the model. It made more sense to me to represent smaller dice values as lower dice ranks, and in turn to measure bonuses as negative numbers to represent the scale moving downwards. This, I believed, would help players to memorize the scale quickly (I personally memorized the scale very easily this way as opposed to the other layouts, but I cannot be sure if others will). Furthermore, I may reverse the progression of weapon attribute values in order to follow suit with this logic. If it doesn't do well in playtesting, then I will take your advice and alter the progression logic.
Ar Kayon:
Grappling with Firearms Crunch
When I started work again on Nevercast, I realized that there was a big problem with handling firearms: it's a pain in the ass to account for every combatant's ammunition. So, in order to avoid book keeping as much as possible while maintaining the integrity of combat, I've devised an idea to abstract weapon capacity. This only made sense, as the system is intended to represent general tactics in combat rather than individual maneuvers; the fine details are simply narrative color. Unfortunately, I will have to add another element to the system, but it is in my opinion that handling time overall will be reduced.
The concept is thus: each weapon has an abstract capacity value. An assault rifle with a 20 round clip, for instance, may have a capacity value of 3. The weapon will also have a capacity die per attack. This means that single shot (i.e. firing shots one at a time rather than just 1 round for a full attack), burst fire and full automatic will have dice assigned to them. So, when you attack in combat, you roll your attack die and your capacity die at the same time. In the case of the assault rifle, the single shot may have dice rank 0 (1d4-1), DR 1 for the burst (1d4), and DR 5 for full auto (1d12). When you score a success (roll of 1-3), your remaining capacity value is not reduced, but will be reduced by 1 if you fail and possibly by 2 for a critical failure. Finally, I may have it so that a high weapon skill will increase your weapon's total capacity in order to represent your character's ability to conserve ammo better.
johnthedm7000:
I know exactly what you mean regarding the difficulty of figuring out how to handle ammunition for firearms. When you're dealing with weapons that can only fire 12 "rounds" a minute like a Longbow, or "fire, spend 3 minutes reloading fire" weapons like breach-loading muskets then it's easy. But semi-automatic and automatic weapons? Not so much-I've run into that very same problem working on my own game. Right now I'm sticking with the "shadowrun solution" of charging a set number of bullets per target for short and long bursts, with a cost in ammo per unit of area covered for covering fire but I'm somewhat unsatisfied with it, as it doesn't capture the chaos of combat all that well.
As for your system for keeping track of ammunition, I think the only problem might lie with immersion-breaking flukes of the dice. If Tsu the mercenary is stranded in the middle of nowhere with diminishing supplies and he's harassed by a numerically superior but poorly equipped force of raiders, who he repeatedly rakes with burst fire from his assault rifle then my first question as a player (and probably Tsu's first question) would be "how many bullets do I have left?" and abstracting it makes it difficult to answer that question in a way that preserves immersion. Of course you can always just say that "you have a handful of bullets left" to emphasize the scarcity of ammo that Tsu's facing, but what if that ammo miraculously holds out despite the odds? It might be jarring to players for someone's character who has been established as having only a certain amount of ammo to be able to continue such a sustained rate of fire because the dice decree it.
To make a comparison, it's like the first time you realized that by 5th level a Fighter in D&D can run around drenched in the fantasy equivalent of Napalm for minutes (with no penalties to actions taken while burning alive) before finally succumbing to the flames. It's like realizing that by 3rd level or so, a Rogue or Bard can with only a slight degree of optimization make a hated enemy stop in their tracks and say "You know what? I don't really care that you killed my family." with a single Diplomacy check. They're corner cases to be sure, but when something like them comes up immersion is broken. Just my experience though.
One thing I'd be really interested in hearing about is how you've decided to handle Abilities, the non-combat counterparts to Maneuvers. There are a lot of games out there that pay an inordinate amount of attention to combat without acknowledging that there are in fact ways of making other activities just as compelling and deep to play through. I'm really glad that you're exploring this design space, and I'd love to hear more about individual abilities for your various "non combat" skills.
Ar Kayon:
Hopefully I can calibrate the dice to make it seem like you're burning through magazines at a believable rate without actually having to account for the rounds. In order to prevent ridiculous occurences of ammo conservation, the capacity values are generally low (value of 1 for a .45, for instance; you fuck up your roll, that's it - you managed to expend 7 rounds in the space of about 5 seconds), and the dice will almost always betray you in an appropriate range of elapsed time. For example, your 20 round assault rifle has a capacity of 3. The capacity die for full auto is 1d12, and since rolling 1-3 translates to 25% - or 1-in-4 - that means there's a decent chance you won't conserve any ammo at all and use all of your ammunition in 3 turns. And then even if you get lucky a few times, there's also the chance to score a critical failure (expend more capacity than usual); a counterweight which should prevent characters from getting any abnormal amount of longetivity from their weapons.
On a side note, capacity will likely not be directly related to how many rounds the weapon has - this is to prevent large numbers, which leads to the book keeping I was trying to avoid in the first place. If you have a weapon that holds a large quantity but also has a very high rate of fire, then the actual capacity value may be similar to a weapon with a much smaller magazine.
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