What's in a Class Name?

There are a couple of non-rules things I'm going to be adding or changing along with all the other stuff I mentioned last time. The first of them I want to mention are names, specifically the names of the Ubermensch and Gestalt class types. Not the classes themselves, but the types/categories of them.

Here's the problem: The Rider and Summoner class types are descriptive and to the point. The names tell you what they're about in a fairly obvious fashion. Gestalt and Ubermensch, on the other hand, are more thematic than descriptive. They only allude to what it is they're about and, outside of Monsterpunk's own context, could be used to mean any number of things entirely different from what they mean in it.

This is because both class types draw from the same well of inspiration that led me to use Orgone as the name of magic in the game instead of using mana, prana, ki, chakra or any of the other more well known names for life energy: German Fetishization Science. Gestalts are named like that because they are an integration of two different and separate things into more than the sum of their parts, this is in reference to Gestalt therapy of psychology. Ubermensch are normal humans in a game where all other PCs feed otherwordly beings with their life force in exchange for power, making the Ubermensch the closest to a superman as written in Nietzsche's work.

So you have two names that are simple and self-explanatory, if a little bit prosaic and not particularly inspiring. Then the other two names are fancy, erudite and possibly a tad bit pretentious. Of these four, two were going to have to change, but which two?

The answer didn't take long. Ubermensch is a loaded term that is often associated with, let's say, problematic ideologies. At least two people pointed out to me that the name made them uncomfortable, where the only complaint I've ever received about the other classes was a joke about how the Riders aren't tokusatsu enough. The choice was clear.

As for their new names, Gestalts are going to be called Hybrids. That one is easy enough. It's a functional, descriptive word that lets you know these are the guys and gals that are half-human half-monster. Ez pz. Also I should note that I'm not changing the name of Gestalts in-universe to Hybrids, the lore is still going to call them Gestalts, this change is just on the rules side of things. Ubermensch, meanwhile, were harder to pin down. The options were:

• Techie - all four of them rely on super science or alchemy to gain an edge over the pactmakers. 
• Solo - their single most defining trait is that they don't have a pactmate, after all.
• Boffin - like Techie, but less supersciency and more British and dorky.
• Paragon - it is Ubermensch with slightly less baggage but also only slightly more descriptive.

None of them were super convincing, so I figured I'd pick the one that was least bad. First out was Boffin, because I could not possibly take a class labeled "Boffin Tank" seriously. Second to be struck out was Paragon, because the uncomfortable implications of being superior just because you happen to be privileged are still there. Third up for deletion was Techie, because while it fits the Raptor, Mentalist and Gravranger, it doesn't make a lot of sense for the Alchemist who is more like a middle-ages scientist. That means we're going to call them Solo Classes, which if nothing else definitely gets across that they don't make pacts with monsters at all and their powerset has a different origin.

Next: Probably another small changes post like this.

Gimmick Out.

Never rush things out the door

I had originally planned to have the next version of MP done before the end of the year, specifically before Christmas, more specifically today.

It, uh, isn't going to happen today. For a multitude of reasons. One is that I didn't sit down to work on it as much as I could've, but the other is just that testing takes time because sometimes you don't notice a problem until it's been one for a while.

What was originally going to be an update with just two big changes (class tech/feat overhaul and no humanity/sanity) and maybe sneaking a lesser change here and there is now going to have tons of lesser changes here and there plus the big stuff. Some are the turning of a number up or down, others involve deleting things that just don't work and going back to the drawing board.

Here's a non-comprehensive list:

• Buffed what you can do with Wealth Tests. Now you can buy advantages to skill tests, Twists will cost you Wealth instead of backfiring on you and you get to keep weaker purchases as volatile items. It was always the lesser of the three health tracks by design, and still is, but by making it sliiightly more attractive it's less of a designated dump stat to always sacrifice when you suffer a Twist.
• The Status Mastery line of Archetypes got reworked. With the addition of Limit Breaks you can spam Limits with multiple status conditions nearly every turn. It's too much of a one trick pony build, especially in a world where status immunities are expected. The Status Condition Mastery line has been renamed to Status Prowess, it lets you trade the Status for additional Damage with every attack rather than just Limits, even against enemies that are immune to the Status itself. This makes you more resilient against enemies that would've just hard countered you before.
• Moved Group Tests from a sidebar in the GM section to the Types of Tests section and expanded it to a full page's length. Group Tests were always one of my preferred ways to make everyone pool their skillsets together during playtests but they were never spelled out in the book proper. Now they are.
• The various Archetypes that involve the use of the Assess Action got buffed with the effects of the now missing Assess Feat line. This mostly concerns the Elementalist, Mentalist and Changeling. The Chosen also did some free Action Assessing, which now is so useless that it got replaced with a free Tracking.
• The Gravranger and Dragoon have a new Trick called Fast Recovery. it lets them receive Healing Tests once per Day instead of once per Week and adds Fortitude Advantages to the healer's Test. Tanks are expected to lose 1 or 2 Vitality every fight, so they need more than 1 Healing Test per week if they're going to fight multiple days in a row.
• The Dragoon's unique Tricks are in the middle of an overhaul. The problem with Instant Friend, Know Their Price and Rumormonger is that... You can pull the same effect with a regular social Skill Test and you can also do more with them. I'm going to focus more on their leadership skills instead, one of their new Tricks is called Gang Boss and, well, I'll just let it speak for itself I think.

• Added Alternative Features to the alternative rules section. The loss of character feats isn't huge, but it does affect some of the more interesting character builds negatively. Notably, the builds based on Assessing, Tracking, Marking, defense and mobility got hurt the most. Assess-based builds already got compensated (as noted above), but the others still need more. Alternative Features are essentially powered up versions of the most interesting of the old Character Feats and you can take them in place of one of your Archetypes. For example now Orgone Jump, Marine Adaptation and Spider Climber now also give you a +2 Speed boost to make them worth the Archetype slot. They're going to be niche picks, more than they used to be in some cases, but at least they weren't straight up deleted from the game.
• The Survival Skill now works as a social skill against feral monsters. It already worked on regular animals so might as well buff it and go all the way. One of the examples includes offering a swarm of mothmen a bunch of lamps to distract them. I figured some of you may appreciate it.

There's more, but time is short and I'd rather spend today writing for the game itself than listing and explaining everything, so this will have to do for now. Since the next version is going to take a while I'll probably be sitting down to update y'all on how its coming in the next few weeks until the day comes.

Until then, have a good one.

Gimmick Out.

The Future of Humanity

Today's rather pretentiously named update will be picking up on the rewrite of the Sanity and Humanity rules from last time. Here, let me quote where we last left off:

"The one idea that comes to mind would be writing in again the discarded plot element of humans transforming into Fiends and replacing Sanity with Humanity entirely. This would be, in essence, the deletion of Humanity as it exists and giving Sanity a makeover in terms of what it represents in game. I still don't have any clear rules in mind to represent PCs that have become Fiends and they would also need a page or two of advice telling groups how to handle the going berserk scenario, concluding in how to either bring them back to Humanity 1 or making them antagonists permanently."

It's probably not a surprise that I ended up going more or less with what is quoted above. The changes list proper is as follows:

• Humanity mechanic deleted. For the sake of clarity, the original mechanic will be called oHumanity when it is relevant to the discussion.
• Sanity mechanic renamed to Humanity. Conceptually, Humanity tracks how much in control of your powers you are, losing control and becoming a monster at 0.
• Characters do not lose Humanity from burning down orphanages or kicking puppies. It is not a morality mechanic like oHumanity was.
• Characters do not lose Humanity from traumatic experiences. It is not a madness mechanic like Sanity was.
• Characters lose Humanity as a consequence of Twists, using certain Tricks, Negotiation and using Limit Breaks. In essence, Humanity loss cannot be forced on PCs and is always at the control of the player.
• Characters can now Limit Break to gain Orgone Points during combat. Each Orgone Point gained this way results in a loss of 1 Humanity, from a starting maximum of 10.
• Listening Negotiation Skill renamed to Contact. It represents mentally contacting the target and seeing a glimpse of their life through their eyes.

The gist of it is that now Humanity represents the purity of your orgone field and how much control you have over it. When you mess with it too much, such as by storing parts of it in a philactery, making mental contact with another or pushing it past your body's safe limits, it corrupts. When you fail to purify it regularly and let it corrupt too much, it transforms you into a monster known as a Fiend. Sanity and oHumanity were related to many other rules, so let's do a quick skim of all the other stuff that got affected.

First and most obviously, we no longer have a morality mechanic. I considered keeping the oHumanity mechanic as a Reputation system, but honestly it wasn't that good anyway and it doesn't really seem like a big loss to cut it. The consequence here is that there's less modifiers to Negotiation Tests (which is fine, those are always super dependent on their context anyway) and less ways to lose Sanity Humanity, which is addressed by the rest of the rules. All's fine on this end.

Second is how it affects the Bonus/Twist economy, or rather, how it doesn't. One of my worries with doing significant changes to Sanity was that it would make the lives of PCs much harder by giving them less things they could afford to lose on the events of rolling a bad string of Twists. Humanity fills Sanity's shoes as if Sanity had never left us, so that's a plus. The corruption of your orgone is not as easy to justify as stress making you go crazier and more radical, but it is always a player choice so they can just use it when appropriate. Of note: You can never cure your own Humanity, another PC has to help you.

Third is how Limit Breaks affect combat and class balance. The game was actually very well balanced on the PC vs NPC side before this last series of changes (most notably the removal of Character Feats) tilted things towards favoring NPCs quite a bit. The addition of Limit Breaks helps push the PC side of fights quite a bit, to the point where it potentially makes PCs near-invincible if they're willing to burn tons of Humanity. I suspect most combat scenes will end with all PCs losing 1 Vitality, 1 Humanity or both, which is more or less how it was with Sanity before.

Fourth is the Listening Negotiation Skill, which used to trade a point of Sanity for doing a ton of HP Damage. With Humanity this is no longer conceptually feasible, so it's being renamed to Contact and the Humanity damage is represented as a loss of self from becoming someone else for a round of combat. It's not a big change, especially if you're reskinning what the negotiation skills do, but it bears mentioning.

Lastly there's Obsessions and the potential of character retirement. Nearly all Obsessions were rewritten at the low end of the scale to properly represent a transformation into a Fiend (or Majin as the blurb calls them). Fiends are, in essence, serial killers themed around their obsession. The more they indulge the extreme ends of their obsession, the stronger they get, and if they do it while going on a killing spree and feeding on the life energy of their victims they get twice as much. Humans that change into Fiends still look the same and Fiends don't belong to any of the 12 playable Monster races. There's more, obviously (they've a whole page detailing their behavior, how to cure them and a feature of their own as NPCs) but this is getting long enough already. I want to end this bit making it explicitly clear that the default approach to PCs with 0 Humanity is restraining and healing them so that they become human PCs again.

And that about sums it up, I think. The new Humanity rules are much more focused on giving PCs the opportunity to string combos of limit techs and do cool things on the mechanical side while encouraging character development and tight party relationships. I suspect a lot of tough fights will end with a PC breaking the limits of their power level, going berserk, and getting saved by the power of FRIENDSHIP. And I think that's awesome.

Gimmick Out.

From Monsterpunk v0.9 to v0.91

Monsterpunk v0.9 is about one month and half old and I already have a pretty good idea of where to go next with it. Today I'm going to go over what is going to get changed and why. Without further ado, let's get started.

Removing Character Feats & Role Techs

The list of 32 Feats that grant minor combat bonuses and the Limit Techs that Gestalts & Ubermensch get based on their class role are going to be deleted. Because this changes all Character Classes considerably, they're all going to get some small tweaks as follows:

• All Character Classes get an extra Archetype Feat while leveling up. This is slightly weaker than getting 4 Character Feats while leveling up, but the Archetypes are 1) more impactful 2) more unique 3) more fun so it more or less balances out.
• Gestalt Classes get an additional Monster Feat and 5 HP. Gestalts need to compensate for the loss of Role Techs and they were already lagging behind slightly Riders and Ubermensch, so now they get to be the tankiest class type. I think it suits them, conceptually.
• Rider Classes get an additional 2 Speed. Riders were fine for the most part and should still continue to be, since they and Summoners lose the least. They still get a minor bonus to Speed to further distinguish them from others. RIP Fleet of Foot.
• Summoner Classes get an additional Monster Feat. Summoners are powerful but hard to play, very vulnerable to area of effect attacks and rely on Character Feats to improve their survivability and solve their mobility problems. Getting an additional Monster Feat should help fix whichever is the biggest problem for each specific build.
• Ubermensch Classes get an additional Archetype Feat, Basic Tech & Support Tech that can be taken from the list of ANY Character Class (but not Monster Classes) and lose 5 HP and 2 Speed. The biggest problem with Ubermensch is that, while powerful, they lack versatility. Everyone else starts with 2 Basic & Support Techs plus an extra noticeably powerful Feat from their Monster. Ubermensch instead get... bonus HP and Speed. Yawn. This change opens them up to lots of new possible builds and makes them a lot less repetitive to play.

But why am I removing Character Feats & Role Techs from the game entirely? Isn't that a little extreme? To best answer that I should first explain why they exist at all.

Character Feats are easy. See, I like PC customization (big shocker there, I know). At first all the Classes were just a big pile of Techs with Monster Feats tacked on... I feared this would make them boring from a CharOp standpoint and repetitive in terms of viable builds, particularly Ubermensch which didn't have Monsters at all. So I made the 32 Character Feats and allowed everyone to have some, giving Ubermensch an extra four. One of the things I wanted to do with Monsterpunk compared to BCG was get more from the Advantage/Disadvantage tradeoff mechanic, so I wrote in a bunch of Feats that granted conditional Advantages or inflicted conditional Disadvantages. Combined with conditional Advantages/Disadvantages from Terrain or status conditions, players would have to be maneuvering around the battlefield and combining their forces to stack Advantages in such a way that negated defensive Disadvantages and made things more interesting.

Role Techs have a more complex story. Originally Gestalts and Ubermensch could additional Orgone Points in combat if they performed secondary objectives based on their role (marking enemies, causing status conditions, healing allies, etc.), the idea was that these classes had conceptually higher orgone reserves since their energy wasn't divided between two entities. Because this was extremely powerful (consider that a single Orgone Point starts in power as a +5 HP heal and get better the more Limit Techs you have) I had to scrap the idea of bonus Orgone Points entirely. I flipped the idea on its head and, instead of rewarding in-role behavior with a power boost made it so that they had conditional but powerful ways to fulfill their combat role. At the moment, I thought that was a clever solution.

So what is wrong with them? Well, they're both boring. Worse, they're boring and bog things down. Role Techs had flavor, once, but now they just seem like they're tacked on to their classes because they needed something more and, instead of giving them something fun, they got some conditionally useful abilities. Character Feats slow down combat by making people have to calculate the total of Advantages/Disadvantages constantly and there's so many of them that players often forget one or more of them. While this is something I did have in mind when I made it so that they could be traded for a +1 or -1 to the result post-roll should someone forget them, they're still annoying to track.

This leads to the next problem, one that is partly shared with Role Techs, that they could be fun instead of annoying, but they aren't. That's because there's too many of them and they're, for the most part, on the weaker side of things. Role Techs don't suffer the complexity problem, but they do suffer from being marginally useful. Also, they're the worst part of character creation and leveling up. Picking your Techs? Fun. Picking your Archetype and Monster Feats? That's a big factor deciding what kind of character you'll make. Picking Character Feats & Role Techs? Gets old halfway through. Add all these things together and both Character Feats and Role Techs take more from the game than they add to it, so I'm deleting them from the character creation process.

By doing away with the tons of weak abilities and giving everyone more of the strong abilities, the loss of customization and power is minimized and PCs get to have more cool stuff and the game flows faster. I may make some additional tweaks to the class changes posted above, but I think you get the idea of the direction I want to take them in.

Rewriting or removing the Sanity & Humanity rules.

Okay so... This one is a bit more complex to explain. Let's start with what Sanity & Humanity are supposed to represent. A big theme of the game is the difference between humans and monsters and what it means to be human. As a mechanical reinforcement of this theme, Sanity & Humanity give PCs have an arc about going bad and getting better. Loss of Humanity wasn't just supposed to end in the PC turning evil, but in an actual transformation into a monster.

Yes, all packmakers (including Gestalts) could transform into a different kind of monster (much like Demons can transform into Angels) by turning into a Fiend, a kind of monster utterly possessed by a singular obsession that it pursues with psychopathic glee. The idea was that PCs could slowly warp over time into such a being and either do some course correction before it was too late or go berserk until the party pacified them, depending on what would serve the story better.

The problem here was that I couldn't come up with any good rules for this berserk mode transformation and it seemed like the kind of rule that needed a lot of story baggage to support it, so I ditched the Fiend bits and figured maybe I could come back to it later in an expansion or something if there was interest in it. I kept the Sanity & Humanity rules because Sanity is part of the Vitality/Sanity/Wealth trifecta that keeps the Twist/Success system going and Humanity plays into the game's focus on Negotiation as a thing, so I figured they'd do more good than bad.

I, uh, have had some passionate discussions on the subject as of late that have led me to change my opinion on the matter.

Y'see, my experience with mechanics like this has been mostly a good one, because I've always used them and seen them used as roleplaying incentives, so I tend to underestimate the potential for things to go wrong with them. Unfortunately, we live in a world where paladins falling for bullshit reasons is so frequent that it is a meme, so I can't really just throw these rules at people and expect them to use them in a way that is fun for everyone. Iy mind, while permanent retirement from Sanity & Humanity are options, they're better used to tell stories of human weakness and redemption. It is a temporary retirement until the party heals the PC from the brink of total assholery... Or, failing that, about allies that turn into antagonists.

I guess I could've communicated that better. Whoops!

Point is, something must be done about Sanity & Humanity. But what, exactly? Well, Humanity isn't a big loss as it is disconnected from most other rules, but Sanity loss/restoration is a common twist/success result and something would need to replace their loss in gameplay terms.

The one idea that comes to mind would be writing in again the discarded plot element of humans transforming into Fiends and replacing Sanity with Humanity entirely. This would be, in essence, the deletion of Humanity as it exists and giving Sanity a makeover in terms of what it represents in game. I still don't have any clear rules in mind to represent PCs that have become Fiends and they would also need a page or two of advice telling groups how to handle the going berserk scenario, concluding in how to either bring them back to Humanity 1 or making them antagonists permanently.

I guess I could just... Not have special rules for this and just write advice instead. That works, I suppose. It's quite a bit of work but the idea is conceptually cool enough that I'm willing to go there. I'm a lot less sure about this one so, while feedback is always appreciated, it is most valued here.

Coming this Christmas

And that's what's going to be worked on next. If things go well this'll be done right before the end of the year. We're approaching the time of the year where hardware around me starts to explode so fingers crossed that all goes to plan.

Gimmick Out.

From Megaten to Monsterpunk

The process of figuring out what to take and what to discard from Monsterpunk's chief inspiration was much more interesting than it was with BCG. Combat in tabletop RPGs is basically playing a multiplayer co-op tactics game where each player controls a single unit. It was a matter of figuring out which mechanics were worth keeping, which ones needed some massaging for an adaptation and which ones to discard. Compared to what I had to do for Monsterpunk, BCG was basically designing on autopilot. This is primarly for two reasons.

First is that the franchise is a lot more experimental with its mechanics. Digital Devil Saga is like a traditional jrpg without demon negotiation or fusion, Persona is a dating sim with simplified SMT mechanics bolted on top and the Raidou games throw real time action into the mix. Even the mainline games have radically different mechanics from title to title, with Nocturne being radically different from SMT 1+2 and IV+Apocalypse being radically different from Nocturne. You could probably take any of those titles and adapt any one of them, but you can't really adapt all of them at once without taking some creative liberties.

Second is that the mechanics that are common to most series are extremely videogamey or simply unfeasible in a co-op multiplayer environment. Press turns are a great JRPG turn-based system but only really work when one player = one team and having 4+ teams running around, each using press turns, would be a huge mess. Demon fusion is flat out impossible to translate in a way that doesn't involve tons of charts and spreadsheets while still retaining what makes it interesting. Giving all PCs a rotating roster of demons that constantly changes as the result of negotiation, fusion and plot means having a ton of insignificant NPCs running around instead of a handful of meaningful ones. Point here is that it's not just that most mechanics are different from game to game, but the ones that tend to stick between games aren't the kind of thing you actually want in a tabletop game.

Do note that I already knew this was going to be a system where most PCs would control and fight with monsters, which was already very difficult to adapt to the tabletop RPG experience while keeping it elegant. Having a system like that that wasn't Pokemon was the entire reason that I set out to make the game in the first place, but I certainly didn't need to make it more complicated than it already was.

What about instead designing around the aesthetics, worldbuilding and general tone of the franchise? Those also change a lot from game to game (purists still argue that Persona is not a 'real' SMT game, after all), but if I cherry-picked a handful of them I could adapt them to a pen and paper RPG, which is more than I could do for the mechanics.

Here's the List of SMT Things That I Decided To Focus Around:

1) Mythology Kitchen Sink
The games feature tons of mythological characters in it, ranging from the well-known to the obscure, but they're not just window-dressing. You can reasonably expect accurate lore from them, which the plot is written around. Satan is a different character from and enemy of Lucifer, Shiva is a god of destruction and rebirth rather than a lady with ice powers, Loki is a trickster instrumental in the fall of the otherwise invincible and immortal Baldur. Mixing so many contradictory mythologies together means sacrificing some fidelity, yes, but so does telling a good story where the PCs get to do anything of relevance and the plot isn't already written in stone. I wanted to cram as much mythology into the game as possible, so I figured I'd go for five factions instead of two or three, which leads us right to...

2) Moral Extremism
In SMT the factions are extremist assholes. The demons, too, are extremist assholes. Even your friends are extremist assholes! The commonly agreed best ending in most games is not allying with anyone but murdering all of them, because most of the people vying for power in these games are up to nothing good. Usually the conflict is between Law (aka God) and Chaos (aka Lucifer), but if you've ever played D&D you know that the Law/Chaos divide isn't a particularly consistent one, so I would have factions focusing on more concrete goals. I have the WAR! faction the SCIENCE! faction the NATURE! faction the ROBOTS! faction and the FUCK DINOSAURS MONSTERS faction! I also added Obsessions to mirror how people who might start out reasonable sometimes take deep swerves into loontown, a SMT staple.

3) Grimcamp Edgebright Tone
The games head into pretty dark territory. It doesn't stop at killing as a way to solve problems, it usually involves brainwashing, slavery and flat out genocide as things that players have to stop or can choose to support. Still, there's moments of levity, from dancing with Mr. Thriller in hell to Charon telling you to go take a number and whining about the queue when you get a game over. The shifts in tone can be very quick: one moment you're watching a teenager try to kill herself to escape a sex offender and the other you're fighting a giant penis demon. First you're dramatically shooting yourself in the head to summon a demon, later you're putting a shock collar on a dog so he can do the same. The tone is only consistent in its inconsistency. Between snarky commentary from named NPCs in most sections and completely ridiculous shit being treated with stone cold seriousness (such as everything about Orgone), I think I've got the tone right.

4) Negotiation Matters
Demon Negotiation is one of the highlights of these games, the quirky conversations you can have with demons (or that your demons can have with other demons) are a big draw into the setting, but the inherent randomness in the system is often a turn off. It is also one of the most frustrating things about the franchise, because you have a bunch of games where talking to others is an actual game mechanic, yet significant enemies simply refuse to do so. I wanted to make Negotiations a big deal in Monsterpunk, so I figured that instead of making one PC the dedicated face of the team everyone would have a Talky PC Skill they could use. Negotiations are relevant in combat not just as a way to finish things but also as a way to weaken enemies, they're a thing that anyone can do but that still feels unique for each PC. I'm quite proud of how this one turned out.

5) Making Pacts for Power
Many of the games begin with the main character signing a contract with an entity, this usually saves their lives when they're in danger thus ending the tutorial. Monsterpunk pretty much takes it for granted that this is going to be the origin story of most PCs. I decided there would be some pure human classes focusing on technology instead of making pacts with monsters early on to add some variety, but otherwise this is the heart of the game and the thing that makes most of its PCs stand out. It being last in the list does not mean it being least in importance.

And I think that's all. What started as making a Megaten RPG ended up being a Megaten-flavored RPG that is better described as "Devilman meets Fallout" instead. BCG is clearly and blatantly SRW, but Monsterpunk is not Megaten. Is that better? Worse? That's not for me to decide.

Next: Changes! What things I'm thinking of putting on the chopping block.

Gimmick Out.

From Point-Buy to Class/Level

There are some very obvious similarities between BCG and Monsterpunk, such as both systems being effects-based, the use of advantages/disadvantages and being blatant videogame ripoffs inspired by cult videogame franchises. But there are also very striking differences, and of these the most important one is that one system is point-buy while the other is class/level.

I'm a point-buy guy. Most of the time when I play games with classes and levels I don't like them. The classes are too restrictive in flavor or mechanics while the levels are the game's fun police telling you that you're not tall enough to do the cool things that you're playing the game to do.

So why would I make a class and level game, then? Because I think it works best for the kind of game that Monsterpunk is. That and because I tried to make it point-buy and it just wasn't working out. You can read more about how that happened here.

Classes and Levels: The Good

There are two primary benefits to going with a class/level system:

It is easier to balance. When you have to make sure that every single power, weapon or what have you works well not just with each other but also doesn't accidentally break the game's balance (or, worse, make it stop functioning altogether) then you spend a lot of time fine-tuning all the numbers and hunting down unintended interactions that could spell the game's doom if left unchecked. BCG and BCZ (particularly the latter) have had quite a few hiccups with powerful synergies that spiraled out of control. In a class-based game you don't have to worry about how dangerous the A+B combo is if I keep option A to the classes that don't get option B. Similarily, if the class with option A is weaker than the class with option B then I can simply make it stronger without worrying about how much that might make the class with option B even stronger.

It is easier to grok characters and make them with. Character creation takes time. This is especially true when you have to do math, such as in point-buy, instead of just going through a checklist which is what you often do with class/level systems. Creating PCs and NPCs alike in BCG is much faster than in any edition of D&D, but it doesn't seem that way because you have to do quite a bit of math, while in D&D you can just pick the guy that swings the sword, choose his kind of sword, pick some feats that make you swing swords better and call it a day. Monsterpunk characters are very easy and fast to make, and in a game like this where most PCs are actually two characters that wouldn't be possible without a class/level system.

Classes and Levels: The Bad

Now there are also some problems present in class/level systems but I think I've managed to sidestep nearly if not all of them. Point-buy systems offer freedom at the cost of complexity while class/level systems offer simplicity at the cost of freedom. Here's how:

Classes don't restrict you from playing the character concept you like. While Monsterpunk classes are more interesting and less generic than "guy with a sword" or "lady that heals", they're still broad enough that you can tweak them to your liking. Furthermore, the game is trivially easy to reskin, so this is not a problem.

Classes don't restrict you mechanically. In addition to having a good 2-3 obvious ways to build any of the classes, you can mix and match them with different monsters to get many more combinations of abilities and allowing you to combine nearly all of them to give your PC whatever you want. The caveat here is that this doesn't apply to Ubermensch classes, which, well, I admit am not super happy about... But 12 out of 16 is a pretty good total! Oh right, also there's dual and custom class systems in the back of the book, so yeah.

The level system doesn't gate you out of anything. Levels make PCs stronger over time, yes, and high level PCs play fundamentally differently from low level PCs (having two Advanced Techs or starting with an Orgone Point is a world of difference) but it doesn't dangle all the cool and fun abilities like a carrot in front of you and tell you that you don't get to use them until you've reached some arbitrary benchmark. It's more like being at the candy store and being told you can get anything but not everything.

Classes and Levels: The Ugly Conclusion

I've written at length about BCG's many issues and of those the ones I dislike the most are how difficult it is to start playing if you're not a mechanically oriented type of player. There's a lot of emphasis in what makes things easier for groups that are picking up the game for the first time, which I think is one of the big draws of having classes. However, Monsterpunk is also an experiment in trying to use a class/level while doing away with all the things I dislike about class/level systems.

Whether I've succeeded or not is up to you all to decide. Ultimately, this is an open beta, and I'm well aware that I'll probably have to change a bunch of things. I don't think I'm going to change the class/level system, but I do think I might have to work more on the custom class system if there's enough clamor for a point-buy alternative.

That's all for today! This and more were originally going to be part of last week's post but I was out of energy like half a paragraph into the class/level chat so I decided to leave that for next week. Not really sure what the next post is going to tackle, it's probably going to be more first impression stuff, I imagine.

Until then, Gimmick Out.

I Made Another Game

I almost missed making an update this month, but I actually managed to pull it off. More importantly, I've got something to show for all I've been doing this entire time.

Here There Be Links:

Monsterpunk v09 Beta
Monsterpunk Character Sheets
Monsterpunk Tech Cards and Feat Sheet

I'll save up the big posts about the game for a later time and just get this out the door ASAP. Right now I need to do something that doesn't involve writing, proofreading or math.

...That leaves surprisingly little, actually.

GLHF.

Next: A lot of writing, proofreading and math... Probably.

Gimmick Out.

The Battle Century Errata, Troubleshooting & Balance Changes Documents

Monsterpunk is on the horizon, but before I fully reveal it to the world I want to do one last thing for BCG. That's these three documents here:

Errata

This is the most important document and the one that will could get integrated into the books proper. Most of it are fixes editorial mistakes, clarifying complex rules text or rewrites to rules that just plain didn't work properly. There are a couple of mechanical changes, but they're the kind that address multiple issues with the game rather than being pure balance changes. It saves me time to change a general rule as errata here instead of adding a bunch of balance change suggestions in its place for the documents below.

Troubleshooting

This section is too large to add it to the books, so it's going to stay as a google document. As the name says, it is basically a FAQ, mostly involving quirky rules interactions. Most of the questions come from the comments section and the discord server. Some of the answers may contradict things I've said in the past, and if they do, you should consider what is in this document to be my final word on the subject.

Balance Changes

Last, but not least, a bunch of suggestions to improve your BCG + BCZ experience. They're just that, though, suggestions. Most of them are strict improvements to the rules, but if there's something you don't like in them, you can just pick and choose what to use what to leave in there. Want to nerf Absolute Barrier but don't want to cap Tension? Cool, that's why this is a google doc of suggestions only.

And now a quick FAQ:

Are you going to make more content for BCG?
No. Consider these documents a parting gift to the game, at least until I decide it is time to rebuild the whole system for a second edition.

What if the errata needs its own errata?
The documents are open to comments, so if you spot a typo, are confused about a ruling or have a suggestion about a balance change, leave it there.

So you will be updating these documents?
I'll probably do a round of typo fixes later at the least and continue to answer more questions for eternity. Mmmaybe I'll add some additional suggestions or tweak existing ones later, but no promises there. If I do it, don't expect it to be a regular thing.

I found another typo, can you add it to the errata doc?
Leave it in the errata document as a comment somewhere and I will get to it eventually.

When can we expect the PDFs to be errataed?
Probably by the end of the year. I want this to be the last errata update, so I'll wait to make sure that we won't need future errata fixes.

That's it! I may do the rest of BCZ as a Retrospective at some point, but the next thing I want to talk about is my new game. With any luck, the next post will be about Monsterpunk's open beta.

Until then!

Gimmick Out.

BCZ Retrospective XXVI: New Boss Capstones

BCG games where the whole PC Squad takes on a solo Superboss ended up being way more common than I expected, and Capstones are the only mechanic that lets Bosses keep up with 3+ PCs of a PL higher than 1 right out of the gate. They still need a little bit of help from things like additional Grunts, going for PLs 6 and above, or Component Rivals to combine with, but of these three options the only one that doesn't involve the creation of additional NPCs is going for a higher PL and granting them more Capstones.

With only 6 Capstones in the core rules, that's going to get repetitive fast. Fight a Boss with Energy Drain or Possession once and it's a challenging, different encounter from the norm. Fight a Boss with Energy Drain and Possession every Operation... And it's going to cross the line into being an annoying experience.

In BCZ I tried to add just enough Capstones to improve variety while including more GM advice and premade Grunt/Rival builds meant for accompanying Bosses without stealing the spotlight from them.

While the system is clearly not meant for a constant stream of 4v1 boss fights (or 3v1, 5v1, etc), I think that all the additions should be enough to run 10-15 operations that manage to stay fresh the whole way. What if you want more than 20? Probably not going to happen. The system is clearly not meant for Boss rushes and it can only be stretched so much.

Anyway, on to the capstones themselves!

All Becomes Dust
This ability is meant to represent some kind of entropic energy-draining aura, so in hindsight it should've also created Anti-Air versions of the Withering and Extreme Terrain to go with the default Anti-Ground ones. That would've made it way more powerful, yes, but it costs a ton of Energy to hit multiple PCs and touching a sniper with it is just plain unrealistic. Maybe I could tweak the Energy cost to rebalance the stronger version around it. Anyway, other than that slight flavor fail, I think it's a pretty solid Capstone that forces PCs to stay away or get wrecked, which is how I think close quarters Capstones should work.

My Final Masterpiece
The best and most known example I can think of for this ability is the third Lavos fight from Crono Trigger, but I'm sure you've seen this idea executed in other games as well. One interesting difference from the way this kind of Boss usually goes in BCG from videogames is that, while you'd think that the ability encourages aggressive Bosses protected by a tanky Grunt, it actually works better if you create a glass cannon Grunt and use the Boss to buff and heal them constantly. Without even trying to get creative, it is trivial to make a unit with Might 10 that spams a Hyper Launcher with You are in my Sights and gets resurrected every time you bring it down. If you focus the Boss, the Grunt gets more buffs and if you focus the Grunt it gets revived anyway! I think it makes more sense in-world for the big bad to beef up their pet and let it do the carrying, even if that isn't how the trope usually goes.

The Ultimate Shield
Grunts and Rivals are expected to have Active Defenses, but Bosses don't have those. This can end up making builds that rely on abilities that ignore Active Defenses (instead of attack bonuses) weaker than usual, so I opted to make Boss Upgrades like Adaptive Morphology and Afterimages count as Active Defenses. As I've already said, one of the problems with the Active Defenses that Bosses get is that they're only active after they've already taken a beating... And they're only at their best when they're near death. The Ultimate Shield solves this problem by being a Capstone and thus being active for the entire fight, making barrier-piercing attacks that much more valuable. I may have gone overboard, honestly, because +10 Defense is kind of a lot to punch through the old fashioned way. It's one of the most effective and easy to use Capstones in the game, forcing PCs to either ignore barriers or cause direct Damage if they want to win.

Tyrant of Lost Souls
Lastly, we have I Accept your Offering but as a passive ability. Usually the best way to deal with a Boss and its minions is to ignore the tanky Boss until you've dealt with the massed firepower of its allies. This punishes PCs that ignore the Boss with a bunch of free Damage. It is also one of the few abilities in the game that references Power Ratings directly, as it is the one variable that gives me (and GMs) the most control over how hard PCs get punished for ignoring the Boss. You set the number down and it never changes, no matter what happens in the middle of the Operation.

How effective is it, though? Well, assuming a Squad of 4 PCs of PL5, with two of them being equivalent to a Boss, that leaves a Power Rating of 24 to be distributed around other Grunts, Rivals and Bosses. Does 24 free Damage hurt a PL5 PC? Yes, but it's probably not punishing enough to force all of them to change their strategy, and a single PC with Threshold 7 can facetank it. Should the effect be 2x Power Rating? Power Rating + Tension? Well, either of these risks making the Boss undefeatable unless the PCs focus fire them immediately... But that's kind of the point, isn't it? And yet, arguably the ability is better off being too weak than too strong. See, a version that is too strong would force PCs to play exactly one way to beat the Boss, while the current and weaker version gives them a choice, and helps preserve a sense of agency. It's a complicated issue, basically, so I'm not going to call it a success but I don't think it is a total failure either.

And That's All For Now

And that's it, not just for Bosses but also all of Chapter 1! Woo! I hope that was enlightening. It certainly helped me take notice of a few issues that I hadn't noticed before. They say that you don't really understand something until you can explain it, and that is something I agree with.

I'm going to take a break from the weekly posts for a while. I may do Chapter 2 later, but I want to talk about some other things first. I'll be back with something substantial in the near future, hopefully before the end of the month.

Gimmick Out

BCZ Retrospective XXV: New Boss Weapons

One of the problems with Boss Weapons in BCG was repetitiveness. Between having a small armory, many Boss Weapons being engineered for very specific purposes and being unmaimable, most Bosses would stick to spamming the same attacks over and over. BCZ obviously expands the armory and adds a few general use Weapons that can slot into most Boss builds, but it is the addition of the Slow drawback that really changes everything.

Slow Weapons encourage Bosses to change things up, (or take turns off defending and the like, I guess) but also they're even stronger than regular Boss Weapons, which means that PCs have to play around them to avoid getting blasted to bits. So let's see how good they are:

Terrifying Attack
The more Units on your side, the more Tension bonuses you get, and the stronger your team will be the longer the battle goes. Terrifying Attack helps Bosses keep up with PCs by both denying Tension for one of them and doing extra Damage based on the current Tension, making it sort of like a Technique. It's very strong but needs to pass the Might Test in order to do anything, so it should be paired up with Caustic Touch.

Whirling Death
Tentacle Lash was already one of the better Boss Weapons. This is Tentacle Lash but better, making it arguably the best Boss Weapon in BCZ. Combining both of the Long Range Melee Bursts with Caustic Touch is like the most braindead easy way to make a threatening Boss and I don't think that is a bad thing. Sometimes you need to have stuff in your game that any GM can use to challenge their PCs with.

Corrosive Sting
I think this is the only Systems debuff in the entire game that you can inflict on someone else. The other Systems debuffs in the game are all negative effects from abilities that the PCs choose for themselves, such as Power Suit. Anyway, it doesn't hit super hard and only targets one PC with each attack, but it neuters many of the game's most powerful builds when it does connect. Works well with Boss builds that like to duel with (or Duel with, as in the rules term) one PC at a time.

Sonic Blades
The Threshold destruction effect is very hard to be on the receiving end of, and because this Weapon is a Beam it is going to land more often than most other Weapons of its ilk. Costs a lot of Energy, though. It's kind of crazy with Power of Despair and, if ignored in favor of other Enemies, the Boss might end up cleaving through the PCs and become unstoppable once the combo gets going.

Shadow Fist
The evil version of Radiant Fist! If Radiant Fist is the Shining Finger, then this is the Darkness Finger. A Darkness Finger that upgrades to Darkness Finger Sekiha Tenkyoken when Boosted, at that. It is absurdly powerful, so it is also Slow. I think this was only Slow when Boosted at first, but that made the unboosted version too good, so now there's more of a choice to using it. You will want to spend the 4 Energy the majority of the time, but not always, and not doing so doesn't make the Weapon useless because it still ignores Active Defenses. Probably my favorite in this batch.

Antimatter Shot
I needed a Slow non-Beam Shooting Weapon and was struggling to think of a buff that went well with Caustic Touch but wasn't overpowering. I settled on a gun that autorolled 10 because it technically doesn't increase the maximum Damage all that much, it only adds +2 or +4 (depending on how many Advantages are now being converted to Might bonuses) and removes the element of chance. Playtesting showed that it was okay, but didn't feel as good to use as other Slow Weapons, so it gained the bonus Damage. It might be a little too strong now, honestly, but it only attacks single targets and the range isn't that great, so it's not overpowering.

Magic Bullet
The way it is currently written, it is basically a worse Burst. On the plus side, because it is a worse Burst, I don't have to give it any drawbacks! With that said, I think this could have been a little bit stronger. Maybe just a bonus Advantage or Tension as a bonus to Damage or something. In flavor terms, this is directly taken from Hellsing. Is it in-genre? No, but it is cool. Little bit of trivia: The Clarke Foundation mini-setting was going to a lot more obviously based on Hellsing until I realized that it didn't have enough giant robots to justify doing that.

Gravity Blast
Ugh, this is so badly written that it has confused me when giving out rulings about how it is supposed to work. It is supposed to be a Blast with an effect like Ensnaring Trap, but you could interpret the text to say that it only affects abilities that grant flight for one Round which... It's just Antigravity, you goof! Also the spacing in the first sentence after the comma is wrong. Gah! This makes me mad! Which sucks because it's a pretty nifty ability otherwise. Good concept, bad templating.

Ultrabeam Cannon
Lines are cool, but what if you could make them... Wider? This Weapon behaves more like a Blast, because it will probably hit most (if not all) of the PCs. I've grown fond of these Wide Lines, I think they capture the feeling of something like a wave motion cannon or dragon breath better than Lines or Blasts do. It's strong, doesn't cost too much Energy and feels pretty cool, so I quite like it.

Assimilation Sweep
The last one of the ten to get made, because I had a really hard time trying to think of a big effect that deserved a high Energy cost and Slow without just doing tons of Damage from very far away. Could I have ignored one, two or all three of those tenets? Kinda. I wanted a gun that could be paired with Shadow Fist, I wanted Bosses to be able to alternate between one and the other, which meant making it Slow and the same Boost cost. Shadow Fist was already very strong though! Hence my apprehension at making a gun that was just "Shadow Fist but from 10+ Zones away." The idea I came up with was a healing effect, something that is fairly rare in the game (even for Bosses) and a debuff that would make it much harder for PCs to focus fire down the Boss. I wish I could remember the flavor inspiration, though.

The problem of repetitiveness was a big deal for Bosses in BCG, so while Powers and Upgrades only had six new abilities each (and Capstones only get four), the Boss Armory got doubled in size with ten new Weapons in total. Overall I'm very happy with how much the BCZ Boss Weapons add to the game.

Next: New Boss Capstones

Gimmick Out

BCZ Retrospective XXIV: New Boss Upgrades

BCG's Boss Upgrades were a good way to make fights more dynamic than the usual TRPG fashion where people blow their best powers at the beginning then clean up from there. At least on paper, mostly. The execution of Boss Upgrades had some issues. In particular, many of them could only trigger their effects after getting a Turn when they had already lost at least one Level of Threshold. Depending on the Initiative order and the rest of their kit, they may or may not explode violently without ever getting to use the defensive abilities that are supposed to keep them alive.

To help alleviate this issue, BCZ has Boss Upgrades with more instantaneous effects and offensive buffs, guaranteeing that Bosses will at least take out one of the PCs even if they can't withstand the focus fire of 2+ units targeting them. The last time I did this, I kept count of the number of defensive abilities that could come online too late to matter (The total was 5). I'll do the same this time. Let's jump in!

Aura of Dark Majesty
This amounts to autocasting 6 Genre Powers. Of these 6, 5 can do Damage to PCs, and Your Fate is Sealed stops healing to potentially doom the targeted PC to an imminent explosive fate. The Upgrade needs a decent amount of Systems (because it uses Die for Me!) and the effects only happen once, so it's not very good against Squads with long-term survivability. Fortunately, the allure of glass cannons is so strong in the system that this won't be the case for most GMs, making it a fairly effective Upgrade. Fun Fact: Your Fate is Sealed was Crush the Insect once upon a time. Looking back, I still think that it is a lot more fitting... Just a lot less fair to play against too.

Caustic Touch
PCs get tons of Upgrades that encourage them to build around the use of specific Weapons. Bosses didn't really have that... Not until the expansion, at least. I tried to pick effects that would be universally useful and were more interesting than a simple bonus to Might/extra Damage. If the effects were also things that Boss Weapons in BCG couldn't already do, that was a bonus. This Upgrade was co-designed at the same time as the Boss Weapons in BCZ to help make them compatible with each other. The effects are very powerful and getting hit by something like Tentacle Lash or Magic Bullet when this is at Level 4 will wreck multiple PCs. All in all, it's pretty great!

Overheating Field
The least harmful part of Electromagnetic Detonator, but weaponized in an area so large that it is potentially devastating. The passive Damage is in the PC's control, and they could simply choose to not spend any Energy, but if they do then it is going to add up fast. I think this went straight from its first version to print without any changes. It's... Largely okay, really. Not a lot more to say about it.

Portable Battlefield
It is a somewhat common trope that the heroes sometimes fight a monster that draws them into a zone that is under their control. At first its area of effect also counted as Extreme Terrain... But that was way too good, so it got nerfed to Difficult + Defensive Terrain only instead. The end result is that it is kind of weak. Flavorful - but weak. Now don't get me wrong, a +4 to Defense to the Boss and all of its Grunt buddies at Level 4 can be brutally effective... Except for the part where all the NPCs must bunch up and make themselves super vulnerable to Blasts and Bursts. Delayed Defensive Upgrade Count: 1. On top of all its problems, its likely that the Grunts will die long before the Boss hits Level 3-4. Sheesh, I should've put more thought into this one.

Power of Despair
The Beam-based counterpart to Caustic Touch. The idea with this one is that it lets the Boss mix and match Beam Weapons of different Boost values however they see fit, plus it also provides a viable sink for Behold my True Power. The first Turn or two (or however long until you hit Threshold Level 2) may be a little awkward as you're probably going to have trouble utilizing your Weapons and Powers effectively, but after that the Boss is a total murderbeast. Delayed Defensive Upgrade Count: 2. The Defense bonus counts as an Active Defense, so there's plenty of counterplay options against this, but because it's half an offensive buff and half a defensive buff it does not suffer from coming online in the middle of battle like Adaptive Morphology or Afterimages do.

Rules of Nature
The last of the six Boss Upgrades in BCZ is specifically designed for single-target specialists that overpower the PCs taking them out one at a time. The debuff + buff combo is strong, and the autodamage + healing even gives the Boss an element of inevitability that makes it trivial to overpower PCs in a 1v1 situation. Delayed Defensive Upgrade Count: 3. Much like Power of Despair, this isn't entirely a defensive Upgrade, so there's a lower risk of a single round of focus fire removing most of the value this Upgrade could grant.

So while BCG has 5 Upgrades that are supposedly there to help Bosses survive attacks from the PCs, BCZ has 3. None of these three of them are purely defensive. Also, except for Portable Battlefield, all of BCZ's Boss Upgrades have very direct and impactful effects. I'd say that 5 of 6 is a good score and that BCZ makes it a lot easier for Bosses to keep up with 2 PCs.

Next: New Boss Weapons.

Gimmick Out

BCZ Retrospective XXIII: New Boss Powers.

The Boss Powers in BCG are primarily defensive, with some Powers that do Direct Damage for offensive purposes. I largely tried to avoid direct attack and defense buffs, because Bosses could end up being unbeatable when you stack those with the buffs they can get at Threshold Levels 3 and 4. In BCZ the PCs have many more ways to buff themselve and also have access to all sorts of new utility powers, upgrades and weapons... So I figured I would give Bosses the same utility toolset plus the simple attack and defense buffs that BCG didn't give them.

Much like I did for the original set of BCG Boss Powers, I'll be grading these on how much they let you ham it up as GM by calling them out loud. Without further ado, let's begin!

Catch me if you Can
This gives Bosses access to something that they would otherwise not be able to do: Teleport. It's not amazing, but if your Boss depends a lot on positioning and already has most of its kit, then this is a pretty decent pick. Ham Rating: Medium. The name fits pretty well and it's a pretty okay taunt, but it's the least bombastic thing in the world.

Crush the Insect
This is a very, very nasty surprise to pull on PCs with low Systems. Everything I said about Invasive in the BCG Retrospective applies to this Power: It's a cheap trick that can be very frustrating and unfun, so it more than does its job but it should be used sparingly... Or with parties that are ready for and expect Plot Armor Damage. Ham Rating: Good. This really should've been called "Crush you like an Insect", then it would've been Great.

I Can Read Your Every Move
I set out to adapt Combat Profiling, specifically by making the rules as similar as possible, and the results are... Mixed. On one hand, it's pretty simple and flavorful. On the other hand, it doesn't really do a lot. The buff only occurs during your next Turn, and the PC has control over whether it happens or not. Arguably, this could've been better as a pseudo mind control power, where the Boss 'predicts' what is going to happen and/or sets up a trap and forces the PC into it. My other problem with it is that the buff is only relevant to Bosses that specialize in direct combat, and this is the kind of power that you give to NPC tricksters and tacticians who should have Systems higher than Might. Ham Rating: Great. The callout is very flavorful and threatening, so at least we end on a high note!

Marked for Death
This is one of those straightforward attack and defense buffs I mentioned... And it's a pretty good one! +4 Attack and Defense, even if it is only against a single target, shoudl let you down a PC in 3 attacks instead of 4 and possibly negate some debuffs that need to meet your Defense to have an effect. Probably my favorite of this whole bunch, in mechanical terms, because it goes on so many builds. Ham Rating: Medium. A simple change like "Mark you for Death" would increase the rating to Good. It's easy enough to make the change and make yourself understood, so it's not bad.

Souls Bound by Gravity
I don't remember what came first, the idea of naming a power after Char's phrase or making a debuff that removes Flight. Whatever the case, the result is inarguably flavorful. It originally didn't have a range limit, which made it kind of bullshit as all Extreme Terrain anywhere forever would wreck your shit until the Boss died. At least now the Boss has to be close to the PCs and can't spend its Turns running away while forcing them to suffer Extreme + Difficult + Withering Terrain hell combos. Ham Rating: Meh. This depends entirely on whether you get the reference or not and, even then, it's not a particularly menacing line. Bump this to Great if you're Shuuichi Ikeda.

You are in my Sights
Aiming is a pretty good and simple buff, but it's too good to make it easily accessible to PCs without jumping through a hoop por two. With that said, there's no reason that Bosses can't have it, and if I'm going to do that then might as well let them use it to buff Grunts and Rivals as well. Ham Rating: Good, but would be Great if it was "Sniping the Targets" or even "I've Got you in my Sights."

So I think the BCZ Boss Powers average out to good, if not spectacular. Two are solid, two are conditional, one is meh and the last one is PTSD-inducing on munchkins without systems. I'm a little disappointed that I didn't pick out better names for them, but from a mechanical standpoint there's only one dud among them. And, er, that's it! I really don't have much more to say here. There's no big essay or profound realization to be had here. Sometimes stuff is just okay and that's fine!

Next: New Boss Upgrades

Gimmick Out

BCZ Retrospective XXII: New Beam Weapons.

If Melee Weapons needed more utility/aoe potential and Shooting Weapons needed more generalist tools, then Beam Weapons needed to complement existing builds using similar Energy costs. This may seem like a sort of OCD-ish quirk, more than a legitimate requirement concerning game balance, but it doesn't matter how powerful your gun is if it's too expensive or its drawbacks are too impractical for your build. Likewise, if it is too weak and cheap, then it won't slot into builds that are already made with higher costs in mind. So I deliberately looked for abilities that could make sense at costs 2, 3 and 4. My original idea was to focus primarily on 2 and 3, but most of the ideas I could think of were too powerful and thus leaning towards 4. Here's how it all ended up:

Boost 1: 2 Weapons.
Boost 2: 6 Weapons.
Boost 3: 4 Weapons.
Boost 4: 8 Weapons.

I'm not super happy with the Boost 4 glut there, but it's sort of how things turned out. I think that if I'd had the opportunity to do all 20 Beam Weapons at once (instead of doing them in two waves for two books), I could've figured out a way to make half the Boost 4 Weapons into Boost 3 and reshuffled some other abilities to make them more consistent. Unfortunately, that was not the case, and I had to keep the new Weapons balanced not just with each other but also with the older options. With this in mind, their Boost cost will be an important metric for my judging.

And about that balance... Well, I guess it's time to get started on the individual entries:

Magneburst
It's a Weapon that works as a Defense, and is better than Maneuvering if your Systems/Speed are super low. This used to be able to gain Long Range and it was ridiculous. It is still kind of obnoxious, specially since a ton of Grunts can spam this to make a Rival or Boss immune to everything but AoEs. While we could argue whether this is balanced or not, I'll just say that creating a cloud of Interference Terrain is not a Boost 2 effect.

Burnout Edge
A handy debuff, but suffers from not having an effect that lasts a whole Round. This way, they still refresh their Energy, so all it really does is stop Active Defenses and possibly Boost Powers. This would've been better as a Boost 2.

Fangs
Fangs are the only Remotes optimized for tanking. The idea is that you use them to Engage while staying away, that's why they have a Guard of 10. With some Active Defenses like Shielding Aura, they can pull off the feat of fully dodging some Weapons and only being weak to automatic Damage and lucky rolls of 8+. I think this merits its Boost 3.

Gravity Knuckle
Gravity Knuckle used to push for 5 Zones doing an added 5 bonus Damage. That was kind of insane, so I toned that down to 3 Zones and 3 bonus Damage. It's an okay utility Weapon for Melee or Beam specialists, but the Boost 4 really hurts. It's a decent pick, but you rarely want to spend that much Energy on anything but a finisher, so I wonder if I could've tweaked with the numbers until making it balanced for Boost 3.

Ground Zero
It is with a deep and heavy sigh that I admit I screwed up with this one. Ground Zero is worth using without Boosting, and if you do Boost it, then it probably murders the fuck out of the battlefield. This used to gain Long Range when Boosted, which was the most insane thing ever and allowed optimized glass cannons to make a 21x21 square of absolute death that didn't hurt allies. The only easy fix I can think of would be a flavor fail: It would be only an aoe, without a longer Range than 1, when Boosted. Then it would be good, but not as ridiculous as it currently is. It's definitely a Boost 4 Weapon, I got that part right at least.

Graviton Gun
A pure utility gun. It's not a big effect though. At first it pushed or pulled the target towards either end of the line, but that was a little bit much when it sent multiple baddies crashing in one direction. It's handy, but not super exciting, so I guess it is okay at Boost 2. Not super proud of it but at least it isn't awful.

Point Singularity Projector
This was a commission from the Kickstarter. The idea was to have a Weapon that wants to be used withthe Assist Action much like other Weapons want to be used with Aim or Suppress. It's got a good rate on Advantages to Energy spent, encourages teamwork and brings a new kind of build to the game. It's really good! It was, in fact, so good that I completely forgot I was supposed to get back to the creator about it because all the other commissions were so much harder to get right. After like a year of our last contact, I got back to them again and things were fine. Boost 2 is maybe a bit too generous but it's not a noticeable balance concern.

Bits
Ah, Funnels Dragoons Aerods Flying Shooty Things Bits, a Mecha staple. Now, at last, people can actually use them as a Weapon and not as a Support Upgrade. You can either protect them with a combination of Range, Crippling and Active Defenses or just send it to the other end of the battlefield so that Enemies won't be able to blast it and you at the same time. Boost 3 is perfect.

Lux Cannon
This was a Weapon that I tried out in BCG but it was too good. So what changed? Well, now there's more ways to build shooty beam dudes than to make them glass cannons and there's more ways to build tanky characters meant to withstand punishment than to hope your Absolute Barrier holds. It's still quite strong, so it's worth the Boost 4.

Oblivion Buster
It's the strongest single-target Weapon in the game, and it shows. While the ability to destroy Threshold Levels instantly is great for keeping super tanky PC/Rival builds in line, this Weapon shows how much of a problem it can be when Bosses are vulnerable to it. Bosses are at their most threatening for a very brief window of like 1 Turn, which Oblivion Buster can bypass. Even if you give them things like Oldtype, it's taking out at least 2 Levels. Buff it enough, and it's going to be 3. It's appropriate, but probably a bit much, and shows that destroying Levels as a Weapon effect is a worse idea than just bypassing Active Defenses. Definitely earns that Boost 4, though, and all its other drawbacks too.

So, Beam Weapons. Some are good, some are meh, and some are exceedingly exploitable. I'm a lot less happy about them than I am about the rest of the armory. I also think I screwed up with the Boost costs in general but that would've needed a rework of a bunch of BCG Weapons to do it properly, so it's not as much of a problem to me on a personal level.

But that's just me being a perfectionist! Feel free to tell me how wrong I am, how much the 'meh' Weapons are really cool and good, how the exploitable guns are fine and I'm just an overreacting whiny baby. I'd make a poll but it looks like Blogger removed the option to add those for some reason. What the crap, Blogger.

Next: Boss Powers.

Gimmick Out.

BCZ Retrospective XXI: Shooting Weapons

Shooting Weapons have a higher power ceiling than Melee Weapons and they can also attack from longer distances. BCG had, in my opinion, too many niche or utility Shooting Weapons and not enough generalist options. This led to the creation of a metagame where most of the optimized Shooting specialist builds were of the glass cannon variety, built around using one or two specific guns and sacrificing everything else. My goal with BCZ was to add some variety and make it easier for more generalist builds to compete with the specialists. So let's see how they turned out, on with the show!

Anti-Mecha Cannon
Crippling is a pretty good debuff and with Long Range you could potentially 1v1 harass someone the entire fight with impunity. I considered making this Slow instead of One Shot, but it was still too good. As a One Shot you can build around it (and other One Shots) to keep the most dangerous threat Crippled every turn while you shoot from safety. It's not something you can pull off at low PLs though, so this is a niche weapon with secondary use as an utility/finisher.

Hyper Launcher
Blast 3 is HUGE and Unreliable doesn't hurt artillery builds as much as other drawbacks like Slow and One Shot. You can use this any turn, every turn, to wipe low Threshold Grunts with all but the worst of rolls. It lacks Long Range, but it's a great pick if you want to spam Blasts without having to perform shenaniganry with Slows and One Shots.

Lockdown Missile
Would you believe me if I told you that this used to be a Support Upgrade? The original idea simply surrounded one zone with barriers and let you lock out someone out of the battle forever, unless they had the appropriate Upgrades or enough friends to beat you up and stop trolling them. This was waaaay too good as a 5 MP Support and still uncomfortably griefy as a 10 MP Support, so it became a One Shot Weapon with a decent Blast radius instead. With a way to resupply One Shots you can still murder someone while keeping them out of the fight the entire time, but you have to be close to them and have to be careful about not trapping yourself in there too... And they could still fly over or teleport through your barriers, so it's not as easy to abuse. Still good though. Just make sure you're not making the GM/CoPCs miserable while you're laughing your way to victory.

Macrowave Cannon
A commissioned Weapon. It was inspired by an old design from when this game was called GGG, which only survived to BCG in the form of a Boss Weapon. It may read as a Beam Weapon, but it's just plain Shooting. Which is good for it, because otherwise it'd be even more difficult to use properly. Because it is so strong and has such a huge aoe, the recharging time isn't as much of a  drawback as you may think, since it is likely to end or make unloseable the battle when you use it with some buffs.

Mounted Blaster
A long, long while ago, Shooting Weapons granted an Advantage for standing still while using them, rather than granting two for Aiming with them. While I think the current version of the Shooting Keyword plays a lot better, the simplicity of having a guaranteed Advantage that you could gain just by losing some mobility was nice to have. This is a callback to those days, allowing most types  of gunners to trade in the Movement that they may or may not even be using for attack parity with Meleeists.

Radiation Bomb
This is Bombardment's evil twin. Or, well, eviler twin. While Bombardment is a ruthless, efficient killer. Radiation Bomb will either tickle you or hurt you way more than Bombardment could, making it the cruel sadist of the relationship. While Bombardment is a great Weapon, it does feel like a flavor miss sometimes when you try to use it to represent particularly nasty weaponry like napalm, nerve agents or, well, radiation bombs. So I made Radiation Bomb because there clearly just weren't enough ways to create huge explosions and destroy everything everywhere forever in this game already.

Rapidfire Machinecannon
Another simple gun. Shooting Weapons in BCG had more roles to cover (short range, long range, area, debuff, etc....) than Melee ones, so as a consequence they were generally more complicated and had more drawbacks to use. This is why there's so many more Shooting Weapons that just grant one Advantage (or inflict a Disadvantage) in a specific sitaution in BCZ.

Sentry Turret
It's the only non-Beam Remote! The flavor is that you're planting down an aimbot that has a wide reach and hits hard but is fragile and immobile. In a previous version, it got an automatic roll of 10 to the Might Test. In another, it was Crippling. The autorolling 10 was weird because it arguably did reduced Damage compared to weaker guns when they rolled highly, which led to some moments where it felt bad to use. Crippling from Long Range is, as I have already said, way too good. The final version is nothing amazing, but if you shield it with your body and Engage baddies that would snipe it then it will provide a reliable source of damage every Turn.

Torpedoes
This Weapon is so niche that it's way more likely to be used by specialized NPCs than by most PCs. But it also serves another function in that it is an example of how homebrewers might want to balance their own custom Weapons. This might not seem like a big reason, but given that I wasn't sure whether I was going to end up making a Custom Weapons system or not (and I didn't) I wanted to put it in BCZ to at least provide a little guidance by example.

Tracer Rifle
It's a focus fire Weapon that, while weak, grants a +2 to every other friendly that coordinates with you. This makes it very powerful, particularly if you've got a low Might build and don't really care all that much about doing Damage yourself. It is a very nice side gun for support oriented builds.

Other than the griefing potential of the Lockdown Missile (Which has been described ''legitimately the funniest thing i've seen in a game" by one of its live witnesses and as "the full spicy meme experience" by another, so I think of it as more of a feature than a bug) I don't have any significant issues with most of these. Even the ones that look difficult to use properly, like the Anti-Mecha and Macrowave Cannons have a unique role that works for them, without being overpowered. All in all, a very nice set.

Next is... Oh, it's Beam Weapons. :sweating_emoji: Oooh boy.

Gimmick Out.

BCZ Retrospective XX: Melee Weapons

Before we get to Melee Weapons proper, I should probably spare a few words on the expansions' only new Weapon keyword: Remote. Originally I had planned for things like the funnels from gundam or other attack drone-esque weapons to be represented by Support Upgrades, but players reported back that it wasn't scratching their Remote Weapons itch. The game needed to have Remote Weapons that used your Might stat and could be shot down to disable them. So I did just that. There's not much else of a story to them, really, I gave them fairly low defensive stats to compensate for the fact that disabling them requires one enemy to spend a turn not actually shooting you. Like I said back when I wrote about "Go, Funnels!", these don't have a passive Upgrade for balance reasons... But in hindsight I suppose I could've given them an Advantage to attacks and some other bonus, it didn't have to be an extra attack each turn.

So, Melee Weapons! I said a long while ago that what the Melee Weapons in BCG lacked wasn't attack power but versatility and utility value. My goal with BCZ's Melee armory was to add a few options for raw damage while trying to make viable options for attacking at range, crowd control or niche options for specialized builds.

Assassin Blade
Assassin Blade is one of the straightforward damage options, though it is best suited to groups with multiple meleeists rather than a single dedicated duelist. It's also quite effective in the hands of Grunt swarms focus firing a single PC. It draws inspiration from the flanking and sneak attack mechanics found in D&D and other RPGs that encourage having multiple PCs ganging up on the same target.

Countersword
This is a Technique for tanks. With a Pulling Field build, it is somewhat tricky to use but is very rewarding when you do pull it off. It can lead to wasted turns the rest of the time, however, and that's what makes this a very conditional and meta-dependent Weapon... Unless you take I Am Your Opponent, in which case you can force an Enemy to trigger your Countersword, swinging with a fairly strong attack that can potentially Maim or even destroy the offending Enemy before they get to finish their own attack. It's not a straightforward Weapon, but I think it fulfills its purpose.

Great Crusher
This is our first new area of effect Melee Weapon, it either murders tightly packed Grunt squads or debuffs them to the point where they pose much less of a threat. The Range isn't particularly amazing, though. Great Crusher draws an obvious inspiration from the Goldion Crusher of GaoGaiGar, though less on the whole "reducing things to light with a planet-sized weapon" part and more on the way it usually appears in videogames.

Hook Launcher
Positioning-based strategies, particularly those using Guardian of Steel, can be very hard to defeat. That's why BCZ includes more forced movement to disrupt those strategies and add an element of counterplay. It is not a hard counter, because it is a One Shot, so you have to focus fire the hooked target or you'll barely get any value out of it. The forced Dueling can buy you some time to help with this, assuming the target doesn't have Slippery Chassis.

Kamaitachi
Another area of effect Melee Weapon. This one needs a sizable Systems investment to reliably hit more than one Enemy, but it doesn't suffer from in-built drawbacks like Slow or One Shot. You could even use it without any Systems as a counter against enemies with an Active Defense like ECS. One of the best of this bunch.

Magnet Rod
Remember when I mentioned Weapons for niche builds? This one is for PCs with low Energy. You can get by at low PLs without an Energy of 1 or 2, making it a solid pick. And at high PLs, nearly everybody has 5+ Energy so this will always trigger if you choose to stay at 3-4 Energy. It's not amazing, because Energy is kind of a really important stat, but if it's a low priority for you then this is worth taking.

Pressure Point Attack
It's a Resonance Cannon but even more flavorful. It trades Range and repeatability for Crippling and, um, non-Unreliability. It's a solid pick for Duelist builds that need a finisher but don't want to use Techniques.

Rocket Sword
A secondary Weapon for the Boosted Lance builds that are, otherwise, really bad at dealing with mobs and have little reason to do anything but spam Boosted Lance every single bloody Turn (and maybe use Lightspeed Assault once). It's basically Bombardment for Melee PCs, otherwise. Good stuff.

Shocking Swordwhip
This used to be a ranged tanking Weapon, penalizing attacks that didn't target you. After the change, it simply has Crippling (which is a much more effective and straightforward debuff) but is Unreliable so you need to stack Advantages or get lucky to make it hit. It is handy for the right build, if not spectacular.

Stumbling Fists Style
Very flavorful. The combination of keywords makes perfect sense given the name and what the Weapon does. It's very good for Support PCs with 0 in Might, assuming they don't have Unarmed. If you want to make a battlemage build with Tacticool Approach, this is a great primary Weapon to use while building up to Electro-Sapper Pods.

And that's it. I have very little negative to say about most of these, which shows how much of a better handle I've got on the power level of Melee Weapons as a whole. If I absolutely had to tear them down, I'd say that Shocking Swordwhip, Great Crusher and Hook Launcher could take more trouble setting up than they're worth, and that you need to be PL2 or 3 at least for them to be viable, but that's it really.

Next: New Shooting Weapons.

Gimmick Out.

BCZ Retrospective XIX: Features

We're almost to the end of the PC section, with the last set of Upgrades in this update. Most of the Features in BCZ were the result of months of me playing BCG, watching giant robot anime or playing videogames and going "You know, that's something that BCG doesn't have. I wonder if I can adapt it..."Sadly, my notes are lost to time, but I believe one or two of them were actually commissioned by Kickstarter backers.

Oldtype

Oldtype was designed as a sort of balance patch for Bosses and Rivals that were having trouble staying alive against PCs optimized for offense. It was so effective that I ended up taking the defensive ability and making it a General Upgrade. That's right, first came Oldtype then Internal Fortification, not the other way around! BCZ goes at length about the utility value of Oldtype and how it is a very powerful buff 90% of the time with a negligible drawback, so I don't have much else to say about it mechanically. I'll just note that I really like how it basically turns your Bosses and Rivals into the tabletop equivalent of videogame damage sponges with tons more HP than the PCs who have only a tiny fraction of their skillset. Easily one of my favorite additions to the rules in this entire book.

Omnienvironmental

This is a commission, and it was originally going to be a Mobility Upgrade, but giving it an activation cost made it basically "Like most Mobility Upgrades except better" so it ended up becoming a Feature. I'm not 100% happy with it, because if you use it for its intended purpose it is a very harsh penalty to Energy just so you can ignore a handful of Terrain penalties that may or may not ever happen in your game (when was the last time you fought underwater? RIP Getter-3.) but if you attach it to one of your Transformations then it is a very efficient way to give most Terrain in the game a middle finger while you don't have to suffer the penalties the rest of the time. Still, it is worth taking, and that's a victory.

Remora Frame

Oh boy, this one is kind of busted. Docking makes you very hard to kill, and you can optimize towards aggression then latch on to the party tank. Throw Dispersion Aura on top and it becomes kind of gross. Oh, and remember how I said Miniature Model was messed up by the rules-as-written because of the order of operations from the core book? That also applies to Remora Frame. Overall Rating: Yuck.

Sibling Model

Sibling Model is what happens when I sit down and try to boil down the gimmick of units that specialize in team attacks to a simple mechanic. Do you want a party of coordinated units with great teamwork? Everyone gets Sibling Model and when it happens it's a guaranteed 30+ Damage attack once per Operation. Do you want two or three units with a specific team attack that only they can pull off? Give them Sibling Model. Finding a buff to it that wasn't overwhelmingly powerful was the toughest part, and I think it was tweaked a handful of times until I went with the smallest possible numerical increase. It's okay, but not all that exciting. I wonder if I should've instead gone with something flashier, like "It turns your Synchro Attack into a Technique" or something along those lines.

Unstable Reactor

I genuinely can't remember if Unstable Reactor was a commission or my own idea, and that sucks, because I really want to take credit for it but I can't do so with a honest conscience. Unstable Reactor is probably the most flavorful Feature in the expansion, if not the whole game, and it is extremely powerful to boot. Originally all it did was turn your mech into a bomb. That is to say, it didn't give an Energy bonus, it simply made you explode when defeated. The Energy bonus was added later for flavor reasons. Yes, dear readers, I actually made this extremely powerful Feature even stronger just for flavor! Originally, the explosion was supposed to be both the good and the bad thing about the Feature. The idea is that, to most optimizers, the explosion isn't even a negative, because they either don't care about what happens after they've already lost or plan to never actually let that happen. No, the real negative isn't for them, but for their teammates and the GM that now has to deal with a potential teamwipe where everyone dies horribly. All Features are subject to GM approval, but Unstable Reactor gets its own sidebar explaining when and when not to allow it. Even then, I still sometimes get questions about how to deal with PCs that picked it from GMs that weren't ready to deal with the walking nuclear bomb PC. C'est la vie. My official stance is that Unstable Reactor is so much fun and causes so much drama when it goes off that it is worth all of the unintentional headaches it can invite.

And that's all for Upgrades... At least for PCs. We still have a bunch of NPC Upgrades to do after we do PC Weapons. This thing isn't ending yet!

Next: Melee Weapons.

Gimmick Out.

BCZ Retrospective XVIII: Design Flaws

Flaws, Drawbacks, Negative Traits, whatever you want to call them, point-buy systems usually include negative abilities to go with the positive ones, which give extra XP instead of having a XP cost. There are two reasons that I didn't do them until BCZ:

1) Most of the time, the builds that take these builds are the ones that don't care about the penalty. This is the equivalent of putting all your points in Might and dumping Systems to 0, except you're doing it multiple times per PC instead of just once. While I think that BCG is a game that encourages a degree of system mastery, I didn't want to give people 60+ points of free stuff by handing out half a dozen easily ignorable drawbacks.

2) The other type of character that takes negative traits are the ones who want to use them for roleplaying, usually for plot or social drawbacks like being hunted down by ninjas or having to take care of a little brother. I do not like this approach, because getting your own subplot about having to deal with assassins or your baby brother isn't a drawback, it is a reward. Every character is supposed to have personal subplots, one or two of them shouldn't be getting free XP for them. For these characters we already have Genre Themes. This way, everybody gets GP from actually roleplaying those so-called flaws, instead of free XP that is only as much of a problem as the GM is willing to make it.

For those reasons, I decided not to have any negative abilities until BCZ, where I could add a sidebar explaining when and where to allow them. By hiding Design Flaws behind these two layers (putting it in an expansion + the aforementioned sidebar), instead of putting them in the core book, it minimizes the odds of them ruining games having one or two characters that are leaps and bounds more powerful than all the others.

Even then, there are only six of them. Turns out that writing Design Flaws that aren't 100% free points is pretty hard! Let' see how well they turned out:

Unarmed
...Okay, this isn't the best start. Unarmed is almost free points for one kind of PC: Full Support builds that don't care about Weapons and Might Tests. For everyone else, it is a serious building challenge. The only problem that the Full Support builds suffer is they can't contribute to Synchro Attacks, which is probably worth 5 MP, not 10, but it's better than nothing. Still, it is only fair that Full Support builds get one Design Flaw they can work with when Meleeists get their own.

Berserker
I quite like Berserker, as it presents difficult tactical circumstances on you, which you can play around by carefully choosing your Weapons and mobility options. This is easier for a GM to exploit by deliberately placing annoying damage sponges in front of the Berserker, which I consider a good thing as otherwise it is basically free 10 MP when you're a Duelist build. Arguably, this could be worth +100 MP because it lets the GM place the closest enemy unit behind fifty instances of Extreme Terrain, but then the Berserker's problem isn't the Flaw, but the dickishly murderous GM.

Miniature Model
There are two issues with Miniature Model. The first ist that, like with Berserker, if you carefully balance your mobility and range options, this is a free +20 MP. I think 10 MP is a small enough amount that I can afford to give it to people willing to jump through some hoops. But 20? That's a little too much. In hindsight, this shouldn't round up the Weapon Ranges. The second issue is that Page 8 of BCG says that, when you have to do multiple operations on the same statistic, you should always first halve then add or substract further modifiers. This means that Miniature Model doesn't affect the extra movement from Overbooster or the extra range from Long Range. Note to self: In the future, always halve at the end instead of at the beginning.

Limited Battery Time
This is a common mecha genre convention, which is good for it because it went through like 5-6 different versions and I would have scrapped it if the trope wasn't so ubiquitous. Some of the versions include: Rolling Systems or taking Damage equal to Tension, spending Energy equal to Tension or taking that much Damage and deactivating after a fixed Tension number. They were all very wordy, super unfun to play with, and some of them could be easily built around to give free 20 MP. This version is much harder to exploit, as Tension is a very significant bonus after Turns 1-2 and losing a fixed Level of Threshold each Turn is simply brutal. It makes you want to try really hard to use those 20 MP to end battles ASAP, but it is hard to blitz enemies without using Tension buffs, so it provides a decent buildaround challenge.

Precious Snowflake
According to some, this is 30 Free MP, because you don't need Antimaims to play the game. Others would say that this is a trap because there's no way 30 MP can compensate for the inherent randomness in losing all your important stuff by Turn 2. Perhaps the truth lies... Somewhere in the middle. *Jumps down a chasm*

Walking Coffin
Would you believe me if I said this used to grant 60 MP? The reasoning was that, even if you you could spend all of it on Defense/Threshold, you would only be a very strong unit at low PLs but you'd still be very vulnerable at high PLs. To be fair, it didn't have the Active Defenses clause at the time, so not even Absolute Barrier could save you. At some point one of my playtesters made me see reason and this was a terrible enabler for glass cannons with a billion ways to kill everything and everyone in Turn 1. The final version of Walking Coffin is a lot better at representing the type of unit that it is named after (ATs from Votoms), because you have to bust your butt to avoid taking Damage basically ever.

I started writing this thinking I'd be a lot more down on these, but I actually rather like them. There's only one real dud (Miniature Model) and arguably Unarmed could be a little bit harsher, but I think all the others are in a pretty good place where you have to get creative to play around the drawbacks and even if you do success is not guaranteed.

Next: New Features

Gimmick Out.