Kitting Monitors, part 6: martial stuff

This is obviously a sequel to this post, this other post about how non-weapon equipment and its mechanics can influence a game, and this third, fourth and fifth post about distribution of tech amongst the general population.

Martial equipment

I can't entirely avoid talking about this stuff again, but it's a different angle.

Weapons!

What kind of weapons are commonly available to civilians is a huge deal. There's a complex mixture of legality, opportunity and culture here, but I don't claim to understand that.

One factor is the typical discrepancy between a civilian and a ne'erdowell. If armed civilians tend to carry the same level of weaponry as a criminal, it's more likely civilians will tackle criminals. This also makes it harder to pick out a likely threat from a crowd, be they would-be assassins or the police you're trying to avoid; you can't simply scan to see who's armed and focus on them.

Kitting Monitors, part 5 (stuff people have, part 3)

This is obviously a sequel to this post, this other post about how non-weapon equipment and its mechanics can influence a game, and more immediately, this third and this fourth post about distribution of tech amongst the general population.

As a reminder, we're looking more or less at this list:

• Does game-mechanical equipment exist at all?
• What equipment exists?
• What is treated as Equipment rather than just stuff you have?
• How do you get Equipment in the first place? How easy is it to get more, both in the long term and the short term?
• Maintenance? Breakages? Upkeep costs? Do these things exist, and if so, how do they work?
• How reliable is equipment?
• Is equipment assumed and subtractive from, or optional and additive to die rolls?
• How crucial is the possession or otherwise of specific equipment to success? Are activities, or even missions, allowed to fail because PCs don't have particular items?
• What technology is assumed to exist, to be available to PCs, and to be available to common NPCs?
• What is assumed normal equipment for a PC? How useful is it compared to what NPCs have? How much and how often does it affect the basic resolution mechanics? (are you adding bonuses to every roll? etc.)
• What non-mechanical capabilities can equipment provide?
• How vulnerable is a PC without their equipment?
• How, if at all, is equipment limited?

We're still looking at types of technology that the population and the PCs have available. This should be the penultimate installment, thank goodness.

Making stuff

A fairly common sci-fi trope, which is just starting to creep into real life, is manufacturing on demand. It's very common for settings to feature food, clothes, furniture or other basics being assembled from raw matter or nutrient sludge, produced on demand by some machine in the corner. This rarely creeps into more complex items like machinery, although I'm sure I've seen at least one instance where blasters could be synthesised. The real-world 3D printers aren't yet up to this kind of thing, but we can slowly make replacement bones, artificial limbs, and crude foodstuffs.

Makers are essentially just another way to Get Stuff, not that different from shopping. However, they do allow a couple of get-arounds. They can be used to obtain stuff you wouldn't be able to buy, even if makers record all transactions, require security clearance for dangerous items, or have only a limited set of templates. PCs can hack into makers, steal or spoof the ID of someone with the right clearance, upload their own templates, and so on. Another point is that a maker allows you access to far more than you can reasonably carry, picking it up on the spot rather than toting it around. You're not limited to times when shops are open, and rare items can be obtained without waiting days for delivery.

Operation: ANTIQUARIAN, part two

Our broadcast this evening is a dramatised reading from the archives of the Special Operations Executive. The mission identified as ANTIQUARIAN is being reconstructed from archival materials by Arthur at a dedicated website. Selected highlights will be presented here for the interest of the general public.

For convenience, a brief summary of prior events is presented here. For the detailed account, please visit the archive.

Skip to the link.

The mission begins

Network N was a branch of the Special Operations Executive, dedicated to the extraordinary. In the war against the Hun, no stone could be left unturned. Uncanny events must be investigated, strange rumours put to rest, and Jerry's obsession with the occult exploited at every turn. Their commanding officer, known only as N, recruited agents with unusual talents from all sections of society.

The primary agents of Operation: ANTIQUARIAN are Emile Dubois, a French inventor; Patricia Wilberforce, a professional medium; and Douglas Hemsbrook, military doctor. All are experienced in mundane and paranormal operations.

Having established themselves in the occupied village of Saint-Cerneuf-du-Bois, the agents have discovered strange forces present in the local woods. In particular, a strange sonic and gravitational phenomenon presents a recurring mystery.

An airdrop is arranged for the night of June the 9th, bringing Agent Benson of the SOE alongside supplies for the Resistance, but the phenomenon manifests once more with disastrous results. The plane's engines are destroyed, causing it to crash in the woods, while the supplies and Benson are driven off-course and land in the village itself. They recover both with some difficulty, but attract considerable suspicion in the process. ANTIQUARIAN are forced to lie low and repair their cover for several days, until a meeting is called by the partisans.

You can listen to the second episode here.

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The series theme is The British Grenadiers (Go Mad), remixed for the occasion by Librarians and Leviathans.

Kitting Monitors, part 4 (stuff people have, part 2)

This is obviously a sequel to this post, this other post about how non-weapon equipment and its mechanics can influence a game, and more immediately, this third post about distribution of tech amongst the general population.

As a reminder, we're looking more or less at this list:

• Does game-mechanical equipment exist at all?
• What equipment exists?
• What is treated as Equipment rather than just stuff you have?
• How do you get Equipment in the first place? How easy is it to get more, both in the long term and the short term?
• Maintenance? Breakages? Upkeep costs? Do these things exist, and if so, how do they work?
• How reliable is equipment?
• Is equipment assumed and subtractive from, or optional and additive to die rolls?
• How crucial is the possession or otherwise of specific equipment to success? Are activities, or even missions, allowed to fail because PCs don't have particular items?
• What technology is assumed to exist, to be available to PCs, and to be available to common NPCs?
• What is assumed normal equipment for a PC? How useful is it compared to what NPCs have? How much and how often does it affect the basic resolution mechanics? (are you adding bonuses to every roll? etc.)
• What non-mechanical capabilities can equipment provide?
• How vulnerable is a PC without their equipment?
• How, if at all, is equipment limited?

We're still looking at types of technology that the population and the PCs have available.

Communications

In my view, one of the biggest technologies humanity has is communication tools. We can do things with these that would be staggering to ancestors only a few measly thousand years ago. We can preserve information accurately for long periods (writing). We can convey information to other people without actually contacting them (also writing). We can give information to other people in secret (encryption), and even do so while appearing not to (hidden encryption). We can talk to members of other groups who have their own languages (translation). We can communicate with people increasingly great distances away, increasingly fast, with increasingly complex information (writing, telegraph, telephone, the internet). These have offered enormous advantages. Knowledge is disseminated quickly, trade is facilitated, safety increased, cultural understanding improved, personal life enhanced, and perhaps it even makes the world more peaceful.

Special Collections: A dream of the hills and the hills

I've just stuck up the third of this sporadic series on my YSDC blog, discussing some slightly unusual tomes. This one deals with realia - things that are not book nor journal, but miscellaneous artefacts. You can read it here.

Kitting Monitors, part 3 (stuff people have, part 1)

This is obviously a sequel to this post and this other post about how non-weapon equipment and its mechanics can influence a game.

As a reminder, we're looking more or less at this list:

• Does game-mechanical equipment exist at all?
• What equipment exists?
• What is treated as Equipment rather than just stuff you have?
• How do you get Equipment in the first place? How easy is it to get more, both in the long term and the short term?
• Maintenance? Breakages? Upkeep costs? Do these things exist, and if so, how do they work?
• How reliable is equipment?
• Is equipment assumed and subtractive from, or optional and additive to die rolls?
• How crucial is the possession or otherwise of specific equipment to success? Are activities, or even missions, allowed to fail because PCs don't have particular items?
• What technology is assumed to exist, to be available to PCs, and to be available to common NPCs?
• What is assumed normal equipment for a PC? How useful is it compared to what NPCs have? How much and how often does it affect the basic resolution mechanics? (are you adding bonuses to every roll? etc.)
• What non-mechanical capabilities can equipment provide?
• How vulnerable is a PC without their equipment?
• How, if at all, is equipment limited?

What stuff do people have?

I've posited Monitors as a shiny future setting, but there's a pretty wide variety of these available. They've been offered for about a century, and each incarnation typically features basically the same technology and society as the writer, except better. Also, flying cars. That's a little unfair, but you get the gist: I can set a wide range of technologies as the baseline for civilians, simply by assuming the better stuff is too expensive/inconvenient/unfashionable/illegal.

I think you can probably break down important technology into some very broad groups. There are others that will shape societies in powerful ways (horse collar, anyone?) but I'm nowhere near clever enough to discuss those, even though this is the kind of history that is absolutely fascinating. I'm going to think mostly about things likely to affect games.

At this point I wrote out a swathe of text discussing some specific technologies, then realised that most of it would be more appropriate to a discussion on setting, rather than one on the role of equipment in establishing the feel of a game. So I'm moving it, and starting again.

In the Darkness FATE Them

So I started wondering, could you play IDFT under FATE?

I think you more-or-less can.

Characters have a high concept and four Aspects. It’s a good idea to make sure that, overall, they offer both advantages and weaknesses for your character so you can regain FATE points.

Characters begin with four FATE points.

You don’t need any skills, although you can still use them; a small number may help define characters mechanically and will change the difficulty of the game. Most skill rolls are assumed to have a difficulty of 0. Easy tasks have a negative difficulty. Similarly, there's probably no reason to include stunts.

There are four Stress tracks: Stamina, Nerve, Luck and Time. Each has ten stress boxes. Stamina and Nerve also have 2-point, 4-point and 6-point consequences.

Whenever a situation is physically exhausting, unnerving, time-consuming* or a matter of chance, roll the Fudge dice and apply any appropriate consequences or Aspects. If the result is negative, apply it as Stress to the appropriate track. Otherwise, the number represents one Tick’s progress towards the difficulty of the task set by the GM.

*Exception: the Time pool is never rolled during confrontations, when other pools are used instead.

A PC may make skill rolls to accomplish various things, including as a supplement to a Stress roll. It is up to the group to determine the mechanics of the outcome. For example, a character may attempt to scramble over a wall when using Stamina to flee a monster. This skill roll takes no additional time, and a success will create an advantage that assists with the Stamina roll. In another situation, succeeding (or failing) at the roll might change the narrative sufficiently that it makes no sense to continue with the current set of Stress rolls.

When the PC is resting, they can regain one Stress box in each of Stamina, Nerve and Luck. However, this consumes one Tick of time and requires a Time roll.

Consequences, as usually, cannot be healed directly. It is possible to mitigate the effects of certain consequences by taking suitable actions (locating and using medical kits, resting, finding crutches, staunching blood flow and so on) and making skill rolls.

Many tasks, such as searching a room, reading a book, repairing something or having an argument, may call for both skill rolls and a Time roll. Sometimes Time is consumed simply by delay, when a character waits.

When the Time pool is exhausted, problems arise again and the characters must move on or confront them.

The lighting properties of both rooms and light sources are modelled using Aspects. Any light source has a Fuel stress track, and a stress roll is made when the GM deems it appropriate. Of course, Aspects may help with this roll.

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Did I miss anything? I don't think it's as thorough, but it's meant to be a workable hack rather than a full game.