HiBRiD Things for your Game #7: Traceblaze

Introduction

I grew up with AD&D Psionics, first and second edition. From there, I bounced from system to system over the years, always comparing “psionics” rules systems to these classics and realized that I hated how mental powers were handled in most games. While I love systems as much as any other geek, in practice, I find the majority of them unnecessarily mechanistic, complex, and crunchy. In my years of directing, I have figured out that, to quote a friend of mine, "Rules are only required for those that need them." and that a good storywriter and director should be able to design (or selectively choose to run) scenarios that automatically maintain game balance, so the mechanics of play do not have to. In essence, an inexperienced director or one who just wants to tinker and wallow in the glory of complex game systems might require or even desire such complex systems. I, however, do not.

Limiting Mentalics

If a genre is well-defined, it should be able to naturally account for the balances in any game scenario that would inherently arise if such abilities exist. It is within these natural balances of the genre that the context of a mentalics-based game can truly shine. Instead, many game systems I have found that incorporate mentalics either err in a touchy-feely, highly interpretive system that gives the director and players free reign with few, subjective, ill-defined limitations or err in the other direction of defining abilities in mechanistic terms of bonuses, task rolls, specific feats, et cetera. This was one of the main reasons for my decision for writing HiBRiD rather than continuing to just add house rules to the games I was running. I wanted a mentalics (yet another term I hate…”psionics”) system that was:

• Simple to play and run using the exact same mechanic as every other action in the game
• Rooted in basic neuroanatomy rather than mechanics-no small trick when considering the complexity of the human brain-but shelter players and directors from the science
• Intuitive, with effects defined in terms of real-world effects rather than in terms of game mechanics
• Without inherent limitations made by mechanics solely for ensuring game balance but for creating a certain feeling that reflects the genre of the game. 

Unlimiting HiBRiD Mentalics

Mentalics are not magic. Otherwise, they’d be magic.

Mentalic abilities are the remote, subtle, perception and temporary rerouting of mental traces in different portions of the brain. Directors wishing to add a level of mysticism and overcome the physical barriers of what this would entail (such as being able to use these abilities in the presence of electromagnetic fields or from inside an insulated room) can choose to integrate them with the plane of Ite’ to allow extra heroic abilities that defy explanation by science. In these scenarios, causality does not need to be explained; indeed, researching the causality could even be a plot point in a paranormal investigation scenario.

An Example

As an example, I would like to share and offer free of charge and licensing fees (under GPL2) one of the standard mentalic abilities defined in the HiBRiD Game: Traceblaze.

Using traceblaze is an involved action; no other action can be conducted in the action round. If a character moves or is damaged while using (also known as asserting) it, an opposed WILL-based task roll by the asserter against the attacker's task roll is required to prevent its disruption. The character asserting this aspect must be within within 10 meters of the character and have a direct line of sight.

There are no other limitations on this aspect; no points to spend, damage to take, et cetera; just complete concentration on asserting it. This means that any modifiers for reflexes, quickness, dexterity, et cetera are not applied whenever an asserting character is physically attacked.

Traceblaze begins with a grade of 1 when initially taken by the player for a character. In level-based systems, if a character class is based on it, the grade increases by 1 per 3 character levels. If a standalone ability, it can be upgraded for 8000 experiences points per grade. It is never a feat, because feats go against the very concept of HiBRiD.

Traceblaze

Initiation: Activated

Grading: G

Modes: Dreams, Drives, Emotions, Memories, Movements, Perceptions, Thoughts

Cost: 8 

This assertive mentalic aspect enables a character to directly attack a target and attempt to disrupt the type of mental pattern specified by the mode, and forcefully lay a new pattern of the same type.

A successful task roll inflicts 1d10 (5) points of STUN damage per grade and immediately hinders the target as if affected by incapacitating poison with an intensity equal to the grade. After a character has been reduced to 0 points of STUN, the asserting character may place one mental trace within the defender’s mind of the sort specified by the mode. This trace becomes the driving force for everything in the defender’s life from that point on, from motivations to behaviors.

The hindrance effect of this aspect lasts one hour per grade. Additional blazed traces after the first disrupt previous ones so only on blazed trace can exist in a target at one time. A critical success on the assertion task roll completely reduces the defender’s STUN to zero and blazes the trace immediately. A critical failure on the assertion task roll renders the asserting character unable to use this aspect for one hour. A trace can be removed by Mentalic Surgery.

Game Release Update: A Change in Design: Modularity and Simplicity

While prepping the final edit of the character creation book, I have been forced to realize a number of things which will deprecate previous posts. The good news is that I am getting close to the final peer edit and the layout is roughly 80% finished in Scribus! The bad news, is that these realizations have forced me to reorganize the text before final layout.

Modularity

Originally, as blogged earlier, I had planned to have a basic, and advanced system in order to mirror the classic D&D schema and a 10 step system for creating characters.

As I progressed through editing and began combining electronic and physical paper files, however, I realized that over the years, I have used several different systems for each of the steps of character creation, depending on the game I was playing and my audience. I used a fully detailed system for my home game, a modified version that for my GenCon games, a simplified version for playing with my kids, and an even simpler version for conventions or impromptu games. As a result, several years ago, I  switched gears and planned on a Black, A White, and a Silver system of books to fit these different levels of complexity.

As I have been racing toward completion, however, I realized I want to also capture a connection between the level of complexity and the genre of the game people want to play.

Players who want a gritty game often want realism and crunch so that they can face threats on many sophisticated levels and have many tools and well-defined abilities. Heroic storytelling players often want to gloss over these details and just start playing as quickly as possible. Kids that play love to tinker with rules but still love to play freely want just enough detail to manipulate in neat ways.

Similarly, directors often have different intents when the run games. Some might want to reflect a world from a book, a movie or a video game world. Some want to create or play a fully-developed, rich game world either published or spun from whole cloth. At the same time, I felt that regardless of complexity, game directors need to have as few tethers and rules as possible to run the game freely and quickly, regardless of the compleity of the game they are running; they too, often want to reflect a certain level of simplicity or complexity in the games they run.

To accommodate both players and directors to this end, I have decided on my final strategy for the format of game books. There will still be three core game books, but they will be shorter and organized differently. This organization will allow gaming groups to swap the level of complexity in and out as they please without adding rulesets on top of rulesets.

The first book will be called the Character Generation Guidebook. The book will describe the 8 basic steps for character creation and present a default method for each of these 8 steps of a middle level of complexity.

The second book will be called the Player Spielbook. It will describe all of the rules for how to play the game and give players and directors the tools they need to play a game regardless of the level of omplexity the director chooses. This book will also act as a resource to reflect the real world in terms of game mechanics quickly, cleanly, and simply.

Finally, there will be a third book called Director’s Field Manual. This book that will help game directors create the game they want with as much or as little complexity and detail as they want. The Field Manual will have a chapter that reflects a number of optional methods for each of the 8 steps of character creation, a chapter that describes how to create a game world rich enough to play in, and a chapter with how to use the rules to run a game as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Simplicity

The second major realization was that I still have had too much complexity in the aspect section. I had a number of notes from playtesting where players didn’t like a number of ways the aspects worked and thought they were too complex. Originally, I had ignored them, but as I have playtested with my kids and kept them in mind, I realized that many of the complexities were either unnecessary or could be reflected in other ways. Further, I realized that many of these abilities existed as simply limits imposed by the game system from which they were inspired to help maintain mechanical game balance. 

Examples include:

·         Microscopic Vision: I originally had a graded aspect for microscopic vision. As they increased, the power increased. From a balance standpoint, it worked. From a player standpoint, who cares if I can see 25 nanometers or 250 nanometers. Can I see a virus? A bacteria? A molecule? I settled on a middle of the road cell organelle size as the limit and changed it to a constant aspect, which simplified it massively in terms of play. In terms of rules, however, while it eliminated only a few lines of text for that one aspect, applying the same logical method to the rest of the aspects enabled me to eliminate another 11 pages of rules!

·         Mental Blast: Most games have some sort of mental attack. But I had originally based my entire mentalic scheme on a specific game world I had created that featured a race of mentalic humans that could read anyone without any problems at all. To balance this, I needed a level of defense and had to design 4 multmoded aspects around it. After playing at several GenCons, however, I realized this simply did not work. Additionally, a player of mine resented having to spend aspect points just to protect his character. The final fix was to eliminate the whole system, treat mentalics like any other attack, and give it a neat effect based on a feature of neuroanatomy (specifially on a phenomenon called long term potentiation), somewhat novel from a game system point of view. The resulting change eliminated 5 aspects and 1 page of text

·         Telekinesis: The original system had two separate aspects for blast and fine control of telekinetic powers. This limited the usefulness of the aspect in terms of heroic storytelling and slowed down play whenever a player had both and had to remember which one was used for what type of action, which one required a task roll, et cetera. By combining these two aspects, I was able to save a column of text, but more importantly, make telekinetic abilities and actions much more accessible and much more able to reflect the types of heroic actions players were wanting to take.

These were not the only changes but among the biggest. I also combined a number of aspects, cut down their costs to make them a bit easier to upgrade, and increased the scope of others. Because the rules are compact and agile enough to reflect an unlimited number of actions, many of the aspects and their limits were no longer needed and were shredded. The addition of the Scale System I presented elsewhere in this blog into the core rules was the final piece that really aided in cleaning up and simplifying the aspect system.

Conclusion

The final result of all of these changes, as my second round of editing has closed, has been the elimination over 25 pages of complexity that added nothing but crunch where it was not needed. Additionally, as I read through them, I am kind of excited to realize I have pretty much swept away many of the old aspects and made the standard aspects of the game uniquely my own.