Monsterpunk v1.11 (aka Errata Edition) is now out!

I'm going to wait until January for the physical release to keep making corrections - you know me, I make a lot of typos and often word things in a way that isn't entirely clear. The PDF version can be edited and updated in a matter of hours, so I don't want to delay it any further.

Here's the System Reference Document. Like the BCG one, it's got the whole of the core rules. Unlike the BCG one, it's also got a bunch of alternate rules for character customization, character art and is in full color.

You can get the full version from DTRPG as usual as well.

The physical version will probably go up sometime in mid to late January. I'll take one to two weeks to look for things to fix and then submit it to the printer, then the process should take two or three more weeks after that to be ready for release.

Until then, Gimmick Out.

Monsterpunk v1 Release

Oh right I had a blog.

I was scrambling to keep up with the regular updates on Kickstarter and I uh... Kind of forgot about this for a while.

But heyyy I made a game! Here's the System Reference Document!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/8ifwxvi6kd8i09m/MonsterpunkSRDv1.pdf?dl=0

This is just v1, I'm going to be updating this with errata before the end of the year. During that update I'll also upgrade it to color. Also I'm looking into making a phone-optimized version but I need to do a little bit of research for that and I'm not sure the way the book is laid out is going to make that, well, not be a pain in the ass. So no promises there, but it's something I'm interested in.

So that's that.

Gimmick Out.

The List of Monsterpunk Expansion Character and Monster Classes

Like any good splatbook, Monsterpunk's expansion (tentatively called Monsterpunk Unleashed for now) is going to include more character options. Chief among them will be 8 new Character Classes and 4 new Monster Classes. The PC classes carry unique mechanics that are too complicated for my vision of what should be in MP's core book and the Monsters feature in-built positive and negative traits that give them unique niches compared to the more all-around Monster races in the core book.

Let's start with the class that blurs the line between them the most:

The Pureblood Monster: The Pureblood takes a Monster race of your choice and turns it into a full PC Class. Its unique gimmick is an ability to manipulate Wealth, using pure Orgonium as a resource to generate Orgone Points, heal Vitality for themselves or Humanity for other PCs. They also get access to the Orgone Extraction Trick which is otherwise an NPC exclusive and can acquire additional Wealth from slaying enemies in combat. While the class is meant for humanoid monsters like demons, ghosts or ogres you can also use it to play an intelligent chimera, pegasus or swarm of rats that move and think as one.

The Secret Weapon: The Secret Weapon is a PC that slowly builds up in combat until they explode in a spectacular burst of power. They have extremely powerful Limits that cost multiple Orgone Points to use and the rest of their attack Techs are weaker than normal. Their Limits go from huge blasts that do enough damage to instagib NPCs of Medium tier and below, raising all defeated allies then healing them then making them immune to ailments and the very cool Summon Big Friend which  gives you an overpowered NPC ally that comes to your aid when you're with your back against the wall. The Secret Weapon earns Orgone Points differently from other PCs, picking from various archetypes each with different conditions for doing so. For example the Pacifist must have one of their allies reduced to 0 HP and attempt to Negotiate at least once while the Mastermind must Assess for the highest possible result and inflict at least one ailment in combat. It's a very unique class that plays differently from all others, it is potentially the most powerful of them all but can't do anything without a team that cooperates to enable them.

The Face: The Face is a Negotiation specialist. They have virtually zero proper combat skills and rely on a combination of charisma, renown and trickery to talk opponents down. They're trained in multiple Negotiation techniques, their can combine the effects of multiple Negotiation Skills, negate their downsides, and even Negotiate with multiple Enemies at once.  Against mindless or fanatical enemies The Face takes on a full support role, as they're also great at leading and motivating their own teams, with appropriately named "Techniques" such as Go Get 'Em (one ally of your choice makes an attack) and Pat on the Back (cure all ailments with Range 1). One of my favorites from a conceptual and mechanical level.

The Covenant Caster: A Covenant is a type of contract magic that lets the user create their own Techs by giving them penalties and conditions that they must adhere to. These range from purely mechanical costs (requires a payment in blood that costs 1 Vitality), targeting limitations (can harm monsters but not humans), environmental conditions (can only be used under the direct light of the sun to channel its power) or have roleplaying consequences that affect the rest of the session (having to spend a day of downtime painting on a canvas to recharge your painting-based power). You can create Limits that are not just numerically stronger than anyone else's this way but are also suited perfectly to your own build and are perfect minmaxing material. The drawback is that most of the special conditions will cost you a resource that needs more than one day or session to recover or have conditions that won't be applicable to every combat scene. Most of the expansion classes are meant for experienced players, but of those the Covenant Caster is possibly the trickiest one that needs the most experience with the system.

The Copycat: The Copycat steals or borrows Techs from others. The way they gain those techs depends on the starting feature they pick. You can make a tanky Copycat that learns techs you get hit with them or you can steal them from an enemy that you fully scan (either with Assess or Knowledge is Power) then attack. You can also borrow techs from allies (while still allowing their allies to use them) by granting them a damage buff or a passive regeneration buff. This way the Copycat gets a larger repertoire of Techs than pretty much anyone else including conditional access to Techs that would otherwise be exclusive to NPCs, which not even the Covenant Caster can make. It needs cooperation from your party or a GM that includes more than Minions and Grunts (and also hit you, in the case of the Tank), but that also makes it potentially much more rewarding to play.

The Evoluder: The Evoluder is a variant Summoner Class, but instead of boosting their partner's attacks they grant the monster the ability to Evolve mid-combat. Evolving a partner grants them powerful passive abilities such as giant size or permanent flight and an additional attack as well. Sufficiently powerful Evoluders can Evolve their monsters twice per combat, making them as strong as Elite or even Boss NPCs. Evoluders are very powerful, but they suffer from being even more dependent on their monster partners than other Summoners and taking longer to get going as they need Orgone Points to make their monster Evolve.

The Binder: The Binder is another variant Summoner Class, but this one controls between two and four monsters at any given time. The Binder brings its own party with themselves wherever they go and are one of the most versatile classes in the game as a result. Sustaining multiple monsters as one human is not easy, however, so the whole band has a single HP pool representing the Binder's efforts in holding their miniature army together. As the Binder and its minions take damage, individual members are unsummoned until only the Binder remains. Playing a Binder is tough and not recommended for beginners, you have to manage and control a small army and you have to be very careful of not grouping up too much to avoid blast or wave attacks - they won't hit multiple times, but they'll cause additional damage.

The Hero with a Thousand Faces: The Hero with a Thousand Faces (also known as the Monomythian) is a variant Tulpamancer with a multitude of Tulpas, called Masks. Each Monomythian has between two and four Masks, each Mask is linked to another PC or important NPC and acts as a manifestation of their relationship with its appearance and powers. Only one Mask can be summoned (or "worn") at a time, but while a Mask is being worn it grants a bonus both to the Monomythian and also to the PC or NPC that it is linked to. The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a versatile class that creates fun party dynamics and encourages teamwork just by passively existing.

I would like to point out that the names are likely not final. Some of them will probably stick (The Binder, for example, has pretty much a perfect name) while others probably won't (The Evoluder is... Not terrible, I think). I had more ideas for classes but they proved much harder to crystalize into proper rules so I'm setting them aside for when after everything else is done (hence the handbooks that will come out after the expansion does). You'll hear about those some other time! Meanwhile, here's the four new Monster Classes:

Flora: Plants and plant hybrid beings from mythology. From carnivorous plants to tree people to Jack o' Lantern, the Pumpkin Man of Halloween fame. Mechanically speaking, they're naturally immobile and need mobility buffs to move at all, but they benefit from superior regeneration abilities as a tradeoff. Their other abilities include long range attacks, burrowing moves (when they can move at all, that is) and turning the light of the sun into healing nourishment or using it to heal. 

Marine: Aquatic critters of all stripes, from merfolk to sea monsters to the bizarre Nuckelavee. They're all naturally suited to moving on water (and can breathe underwater) but they treat land as Difficult Terrain by default and must compensate for it. Fortunately, they do have many ways to compensate, from speed bonuses to the ability to summon pools of water. They're also great trackers, using both echolocation and electrosensitivity to detect and pursue anything that tries to hide from them. Well, anything except the next entry.

Alien: Mysterious beings that come from outer space, other realities or even other times. These include the Chupacabra, the Hounds of Tindalos and little green people with death rays, among others. Their special thing mechanically is that they're very weird and difficult to understand, to the point that they're immune to Tracking which makes them the best stealth enablers in the game. The tradeoff for this ability is that they're so weird that any healing received from others is reduced by 1, because nobody else really understands their biology.

Spirit: Spirits are what the core book currently calls abstract Elementals (that was written before I knew I was going to get the chance to make the expansion, so it'll be updated later). They're embodiments of concepts such as songs, the night and even individual cities. An interesting subcategory of Spirits are Tsukumogami - objects that gained life and powers - Tsukumogami can be anything from animated mirrors to swords and even umbrellas. Mechanically, Spirits are the most versatile of all Monsters with an additional slot to use on a Feature or Support Tech plus the ability to poach Techs from all other races. Their downside is not one to underestimate, it makes them dissipate when they reach 0 HP after which they need a lot of time or an investment of 1 Humanity to reform.

And that's all for now! That'll be the last you hear of the expansion for a good long while, the core book still comes first. Next update will probably be a bunch of art. Until then, 

Gimmick Out.

Monsterpunk Week IV Status Report

Me a week ago: lol kicktraq projects we'll end at like 9k that's dumb it'll probably be something like 7500 before the final 48 hours then another 1k or so during the last 48 hours.

Me now:

I'd feel sillier if it wasn't, like, amazingly good news.

Look at that jump. That was like 3k in 3 days. That's dumb. I jokingly posted some Retroactive Stretch Goals that had already been met (tl;dr more bestiary entries, more maps and 4 new class handbooks after the expansion is delivered) because I felt bad that people were giving me more money when I had no more stretch goals and then they give me even more money?????? What am I even supposed to do with all this, huh???????? Stop being a starving artist cliche???????????

I don't even know why I'm posting these numbers anymore with the campaign already being over. I don't know why I even try to understand them. I don't understand my world right now. I'm just going through the motions. Maybe tomorrow when I wake up I'll be able to process any of what has happened this past month. For now it still feels surreal.

If it sounds like I'm tired it's because I am. I wrote this post like 30 minutes ago then said "Yeah that's good enough" then alt tabbed and forgot to post it until I alt tabbed back and noticed I didn't. I slept 4 hours last night. I could take a nap now that the campaign is over but I don't want to mess up my sleep schedule so I guess I'll be a zombie for a few hours.

See y'all in a later update.

Gimmick Out.

Monsterpunk Week III Status Report

Day 22. It's one minute past noon. Time is a blur. Days and weeks have lost meaning. I almost forgot today was Sunday and I was supposed to write an update here. I've been awake for six hours yet it feels like a Saturday afternoon and the weekend somehow slipped between my fingers.

It's been a weird and busy week. I figured people would stop giving me money when I said there wouldn't be any more stretch goals.

They aren't stopping.

I already wrote an update about the demon race representative, otherwise I'd take the opportunity to do that in celebration of the 666% funding benchmark.

By last week Kickstarter's promotion-boosting algorithm had already surpassed the direct referrals in quantity and total value of pledges, but by this week it's almost doubled it in value and around quadruplued it in quantity. We could leave this thing on autopilot and it would keep going up.

Looking at the graph, weekdays have a constant and stable stream of new backers while weekends seem to hit a slump. Last week's I attributed this to Easter, but it is happening this weekend as well so I guess it's a pattern. The 14th, 22nd and 23rd are the big anomalies with huge influxes of backers making the graph jump up noticeably and stop being a nearly straight line.

With that said my sample size is of two weekends (the first doesn't count because it was during the rush of the initial 48 hours), so maybe I'm just seeing patterns that really aren't there.

So frustratingly close to the lucky 777, yet so far away. Most followers don't convert even at the end but if they do it's going to be ridiculous. I joked above that I expected people to stop giving me money after we met that last stretch goal but they aren't. I really didn't think we'd pick up another thousand and half in the third week, so among all the other things I'm doing I'm also trying to figure out what I can offer as a token extra reward for backers, sort of as a surprise stretch goal retroactively added in after it has already been met.

So far the best I've got is to write some additional classes and release them as PDFs later, giving them for free to all backers, but only after the core book and expansion are finished so they don't threaten to disrupt our schedule. I'll write a campaign update about that later when I've got it figured out.

Until next week, may you be continuously pleasantly surprised.

Gimmick Out.

Monsterpunk Kickstarter Week II Status Report

Second verse, same as the first.

At this point I figure I could tell people that our next stretch goal will be to buy me a skull fortress on a volcanic island for a million dollars and if it happened by next weekend I'd just go "Yeah, that checks out."

It's a shame I have too much integrity to do that. We're not doing more stretch goals, because this is all the work I can safely take on and I'm not looking forward to becoming another Peter Molyneux.

We've still got two weeks to go and we're still going strong though. More funding means more and better art assets. Monster art, landscapes, combat maps, all that good stuff. I figure I could say "Give me 10k and I'll get 3 landscapes plus a bestiary with 50 monsters and a map pack with 20 maps." But I can't 100% promise that with our current schedule, it's a lot of work not just for me but also for the people I'm paying to make these assets. If they get sick for or, you know, life happens at them for a week or two we won't meet the deadlines, so I'd rather just do however much we can with the money we get and leave it at that.

That number isn't a complete fabrication, by the way, it's the figure I ended up with after doing a lot of math. We might actually make it at this rate. It seems farfetched, but so seemed every stretch goal before. Crazier things have happened. If we do then, well, now you know how much I want to expand that bestiary and map pack, I guess.

Who knows, maybe next week I'll ask for that skull fortress.

Gimmick Out.

Monsterpunk Kickstarter Week I Status Report

Mkay it's been a week so let's check in how we're doing and --

--huhwha?

To say this has blown away all my expectations is an understatement. I genuinely doubted we'd reach the expansion book stretch goal, let alone that we'd reach it in four days. In a little over a week we've not just made more money than BCG did in its whole month but also we got more than double the backers. It's not unrealistic to expect we'll meet the 5k stretch goal before the final 48 hours. Hell, it might happen before the last week.

The numbers even went up again between taking the screenshot and finishing writing this update. Twice.

So how come MP is doing so well even though I've basically done less marketing for it than BCG, which pretty much had none at all?

You see that "external referrers" side of the pie chart? That's word of mouth. That's the people from my Discord that have either pledged themselves or showed the game to other people. For the first 2-3 days of the campaign the direct referrals were the grand majority of the funding and ever since then Kickstarter's algorithm has been promoting the game based on its success to make it catch up.

So the answer to the previous question would be "Turns out cultivating a chill community that upholds basic human decency for a few years without asking for anything in return makes people want to support you." Weird thing, huh.

And I didn't even have to show people any silhouettes of new classes hidden behind a number of retweets or put pictures of boobs front and center to do it!

The majority of pledges occur during the first few days and the last 48 hours. If the people that put this game on 'remind me later' all decide to pitch in for the basic PDF to reap its rewards we'll not just meet the last stretch goal, we'll soar past it for an absurd 777% funding. That's not even a joke. We have $3,669 as of me writing these words and $4,100 would give us $7,769.

That's terrifying.

I am not used to success. I had taken for granted that I would forever continue to barely get the funding needed for these dumb games of pretend that I keep making and to continue subsisting with only the base of Maslow's hierarchy of needs covered.

With success come expectations, notoriety and also stakes. I now not only have to keep a lot more people happy and will get a lot more negative attention my way for no reason, but also I have something to lose. That is a hell of a motivator.

I would continue writing this blog post but I think that I've already said all that needed to be said. Plus I've already written 9 of the expansion book's 12 projected new classes and I would like to finish the other 3 today.

Until next week.

Gimmick Out.

The Monsterpunk Kickstarter is LIVE!

And also it's already funded!? NANI!?

Yes, really, go see for yourself. I've spent like four hours writing personalized thank you messages and also hastily writing the first update and let me tell you it's a great problem to have.

Crazy world.

hello im not dead and im actually making progress yeah i cant believe it either

So I need to kickstart the remainder of Monsterpunk to get it 100% finished, right? Right. For the past few weeks I've been setting that up and I thought I'd get it done by last week, but it has been stuck in bureaucratic hell for a long-ass time and only today (April 1st) it's been fully cleared.

It's technically good news but it feels like I've had a joke sprung on me after being trolled for weeks.

Anyway, I figure I'll launch this Sunday 7, because I do things during Sundays even if it's basically delaying a thing that is weeks overdue by 6 additional days because.... Uhhh... Tradition??? I guess??????????

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ggwp/801073551?ref=780828&token=37bf0a13

Here's a preview of what it's going to look like. This is not live yet. I may not take myself super seriously but even I'm not stupid enough to try and launch a serious project on April 1st. Feel free to tell me I'm a capitalist pig, an idiot who refuses to make money, or to exercise your creativity finding a way to combine the two. Also other constructive feedback would also be cool and good but I hear that's an even rarer commodity than common sense so I understand if y'all don't got any to give away.

Gimmick Out.

Remember The Game I Made Last Year?

You have no idea how hard it was to make blogger display this thing at a reasonable size.

It's been not one nor two or even three months since the first version of Monsterpunk, but a full half year. That means a loooot of things changed, so this post is going to be a very, very long one. First order of business, here's the download links for Monsterpunk v.099 (Dropbox and Mediafire). A long while ago I said the next version would be v0.91, but this is v0.99! That's how much has changed.

Moreover, it could use a few more editing passes, but I'd like to keep it more or less as is until the proper v1 release.

Speaking of v1, here's the plan for the near-to-medium-term future: Later this March or during early April there'll be a kickstarter for Monsterpunk. The game needs art, layout touchups and I'd like to add some premade content for new players. Assuming the game gets funded, it'll come out around October so you can hang out with and fight monsters during the spookiest of months. And after that, I'll put out a SRD just like I did for BCG.

This game is a lot less finnicky than BCG was so with any luck things should go much smoother. Additionally, because it's so much easier to balance, I can make a lot more content for it and it's a lot less difficult to do so, so I'm quite eager to start writing weird classes, monsters and all that other good stuff.

Let's get started with the castle of words that is the changelog - but first, I want to point out is that there's a crapton of new sidebars all over the place. You've got sidebars for playing without your equipment, sidebars for spicing up the narration of limit techs, sidebars for the weight of orgonium coins and the list goes on and on. I would list them all but I forgot to make a note of them while I was writing them... So I don't actually remember which ones are old and which ones are new! Basically, keep an eye out for new sidebars as you read, there might be new stuff in pages that are not mentioned below.

Okay, now let's get to the castle of words!

Oh and by the way I really like how the art is coming along. 

Introduction

•Added a Foreword at the beginning. Not super important but I'm including it here for completion's sake. It's sort of an expanded "what is roleplaying" section but more conversational than explanatory. 
•Expanded the Inspiration section. More and better links to mythology resources plus a list of games and fiction you can use to base your MP games off of.
•Updated the Glossary to new terminology. Just a housekeeping thing.

World of Monsterpunk

•The Demihuman Empire from the game's backstory is now called the Pandemonium Empire. This will make more sense if you read some of the new lore/have read last week's post.
•Added an Abridged History of the Age of Monsters. It is not quite a timeline but sheds considerable light on some things about the setting that weren't explained before.
•Added a section for playing as independent groups. Some of it was moved from faction management, but other parts are rewritten or brand new.
•Orgonetech is now called Magitech. You can now say 'orgone technician' and have it be not confusing as to whether you mean orgone techniques or orgone technology.
•Orgonium coins are now called Biomarks. For clarity's sake, we now have two distinctive terms to separate from pure Orgonium crystals and the coins made out of those.
•Fairy Circles are now Fairy Rings, Living Architecture is now the Hermetic Megalith and Weather Control Towers are Midsummer Maypoles. The rest of the book refers to those three things as Teleportation Circles. Living Architecture Forts, and Weather Control Towers. It was inconsistent of the fairies to give one of their big magitech advantages a fantasy-esque name and the other two very functional and agnostic ones.
•The Fairy Council members now have the title of Prince (gender neutral). The Principality is an aristocracy, but since I never defined the various titles the nobility could have, there were no mentions of princes anywhere, so it was a Prince-less Principality and that's kind of weird.

Game Rules

•Formal rules for Group Tests. These were a sidebar suggestion. They were tweaked and made into proper rules now.
•Sanity is now Humanity. Old Humanity deleted. No sanity mechanics. No morality mechanics. Humanity is now lost only as a consequence of twists, through the use of limit breaks or some self-healing tricks.
•Humanity loss transforms you into a monster called a Fiend rather than making you insane. Fiends are either temporary antagonists that can be brought back to PC status with help of the other PCs or left to become long-term antagonists.
•Buffed Wealth Tests. Only lose Wealth on a Twist. May now also purchase a single-use Skill Advantage item. The buff helps make Wealth Tests more relevant and also makes Wealth less of an obvious twist dump stat, especially useful now that Humanity is now only lost strictly as a player choice.
•Rage and Fear are no longer lost when the source becomes Hidden and the afflicted must attempt to locate the source. This a stealth Mentalist buff. Their Invisibility had negative synergy with those effects and I would rather buff the conditions than give them different powers.
•Charm is no longer lost when the source becomes Hidden. See above for the reason.
•Poison and Burn effects are switched. Burn is now 3 Delayed Damage, Poison is 6. Most of the venoms in this game are the kind that should be more lethal than being on fire. It also helps some of the classes using those status conditions needed a bit of rebalancing. I didn't list down all the affected techs so assume that any class that could inflict Burn or Poison has had those Techs tweaked.
•New Combat Action: Limit Break. Trade 1 Humanity for the ability to fight while at 0 HP, making yourself immune to damage and most status conditions until the end of your next turn. Can be done once per Day. PCs can win any fight as long as it is remotely fair (and there aren't multiples per day) but relying on this crutch will eventually transform the whole party into Fiends - a fate much darker than the death of one or two of them. It is possible to 'exploit' this mechanic, but the way to do so involves character development and roleplaying between the party so I'm closer to calling that a feature than a bug.

Character Creation - General Changes

•Character Feats deleted. Other Feats renamed to Features. Character Feats slowed down character creation and forcing everyone to remember them slowed down the flow of combat. The most interesting ones have been absorbed into Class Features or got made into Alternative Features for Chapter 5.
•Role Techs deleted. Role Techs slowed down character creation and were very boring. The Alternative Features in Chapter 5 preserve part of their teamwork function for PCs that want to focus on their role more.
•Levelup bonuses changed. Here is the new table.

The tl;dr is that everyone has +1 Trick, +2 Skill Expertises, +1 Feature, plus some reshuffling of where things happen on the levelup ladder. The loss of Character Feats and Role Techs hurt, the added versatility of the extras here isn't quite as strong but it's more fun and all classes get additional compensation buffs plus Limit Breaks too so it should be fine.
•Gestalts are now called Hybrids. A more agnostic name. Note that Gestalts in-universe are still called that, the name change is just for the rules sections that reference the specific Class type.
•Ubermensch are now Solos. A more agnostic name. Also I got some mentions of people being uncomfortable with the term.
•Hybrids get +5 HP and 1 Monster Trick. Hybrids were already struggling to keep up with the other Classes so they get the best compensation bonus of everyone.
•Riders get +2 Speed (only when riding) and 1 Monster Trick. Pretty obvious compensation for the loss of Character Feats. The riding condition is to further make it clear they should be always riding.
•Summoners get 1 Monster Feature and 1 Monster Trick. Not as much as the other Classes get but Summoners are already very powerful.
•Solos lose -5 HP -2 Speed and gain 1 Feature, 1 Basic Tech, 1 Support Tech and 1 Trick. They can also poach from any Monster Class. This is a complete rework of Solos more or less, because they had many issues: They were repetitive from lack of basic techs, very same-y from lack of monster partners and lastly they couldn't spam support techs from level 1 so they were always 2nd best at their specialization. Now they're the same as everyone else but with slightly worse stats and slightly better versatility.
•Everyone gets +1 Free Language. Monsters no longer give bonus Languages and instead some of them have prerequisite Languages. This is a stealth buff to Solos, giving them an extra Language, while everyone else is basically unaffected. 
•The Linguist Trick has been buffed to let you understand all written and spoken languages. Buff to what was a very weak Trick that didn't really need to make you roll for the benefit.
•Most Techs have had their Ranges halved (rounding up). The old ranges assumed there would be lots of cover (of the half and full cover types both) or that battlefields would be small, either scenario would prevent long range builds from getting a bunch of free attacks in. Without either of those things, sniping and kiting melee fighters is way too easy. This change balances both melee and ranged specialists without forcing the GM to do that through battlefield design. Assume most attack Techs have had some of their values messed with in order to adjust, maybe keeping range but trading damage for it. I won't mention changes to specific Techs unless they're significant.
•All the Status Mastery Features have been changed to to Status Prowess Features. They work on all attacks (not just Limits) and also when an enemy nulls their status too, in exchange they no longer let you add the status to techs that don't have it. The Status Mastery line alternated between doing too much (against enemies who didn't resist or couldn't heal the status) and too little (against enemies who did resist or heal the status). Now they're more generally useful.
•Survival now works with feral monsters too. If you can convince a bear not to eat you, you should be able to convince an owlbear of the same.
•Listening is now called Contact and is explicitly about telepathic connections so strong that you lose your sense of self while experiencing somebody's memories, feelings and thoughts. I'll miss how Listening made enemies pour out their tragic backstories that caused sanity loss but this makes much more sense with Humanity as collateral.
•Understanding has been renamed to Faith and is more or less the same as before. Name has been changed to better differentiate it from Contact.
•Rewrote many obsessions. Mostly at the 0 Humanity level. Some are the same as before but about half of them had large overhauls to make Fiends centered around them into proper antagonists.
•Added several pages for adapting PC concepts to each Faction or to play them as an independent group. I figure this will come in handy.
•Touched up the Example Builds not just to adjust them to rules changes but also to make them play easier wherever possible. Half housekeeping half improvement.

Character Creation - Class-Specific Changes

Alchemist
•Truth Serum and Amrita buffed. Panacea's effect is now spelled out in the entry. All three Tricks were bad and/or unclear.
•Emergency Care and Surgical Precision reduced from 2 HP to 1. With the addition of an extra Feature at Level 1 (plus another down the line) and the versatility of being able to pick Techs from Monster Classes, it was too easy to negate single-target attacks.

Blood Knight
•Exploit Opening replaced with Offensive Marking: You and all Allies within 3 meters gain an Advantage against targets you’ve Marked. The Blood Knight is primarily a melee class and that doesn't work too well with attacks of opportunity that could originate from 5+ meters away. Offensive Marking benefits them, suits their aggressive personality more, and helps allies focus enemies down.

Changeling
•Fey Analyst can now Track for one question and upgrade it to fully scan an enemy for two questions. Compensation for the loss of the Assess feat line. Also the old Fey Analyst was neat but not powerful enough for its slot.

Chosen
•Slayer's Instinct lets you Track whoever you Mark. Used to be a free Assess, which is now a much worse thing without the Assess Feat line. This also helps compensate the loss of free Tracking on whoever happened to be the party Assess user.
•Martyr's Destiny renamed to Regeneration and loses 1 Humanity when activated. This is so I can give to the Giants as well. Oh and because in this post-sanity future most self-healing tricks include Humanity loss in some way. The name is a lot less cooler but we'll live with it, I guess.

Dragoon
•Rumormonger, Instant Friend & Know Their Price replaced with Fast Recovery, Gang Boss & Base of Operations. The old Tricks were flavorful but they were basically conditional autosuccesses on some social rolls. This was too redundant with Voice of Reason, not to mention kind of underpowered and uninspiring. The new Tricks are much cooler and more generally useful.

Daybreaker
•Retainer replaced with Light of Truth. Retainer is now exclusive to the Dragoon, but the Daybreaker gets a unique Trick with social, exploration and combat applications which is more than fair compensation.
•My Fateful Hour grants +1 HP to Focus Orgone while Wounded. My Fateful Hour was made with the old Healing Factor Character Feat in mind, which, well, was kind of better than most other Feats TBH. With the loss of Character Feats, this seems like a good way to fix this Feature.

Elementalist
•Find Weak Spot can now inflict Vulnerable for one question. Compensation for the loss of the Assess feat line.
•Now Slows instead of Dizzying. The Elementalist was in a unique position where it had easy access to arguably the two strongest status conditions in the game, now that all Hybrids get a big buff in the form of +5 HP, they need to share both status conditions with the rest of the class(es). This change keeps their cold-based techs symmetrical in terms of effects with the fire-based techs. See Graviton Ranger for more info.

Graviton Ranger
•Call Your Weapon replaced with Fast Recovery. The Graviton Ranger was the only tank class without any self-healing Tricks, which is a real bad thing to be especially with the loss of 5 HP. Fast Recovery is not exactly a self-healing Trick, as it needs the help of an ally to be a proper healer, but if you do meet that condition it is arguably even better as it incurs no Humanity loss and doesn't need corpses to feed on or anything like that. 
•Now Dizzies instead of Slowing as a specialty. One of the class's worst aspects was the redundancy of slowing and restraining specializations in the same class. By taking Dizzy from the Elementalist the class should have a much easier time keeping up with the other tanks after the -5 HP reduction.

•Pull of Gravity can now affect any number of targets within the area of effect. This was pretty weak. Between everyone having lower attack ranges and the multitarget capability it is now in a much better place.

•Deleted Slowing Shot and Boosted Charge. They were both very meh, so they've been replaced.
•Dazing Punch is now an Advanced Tech that causes Dizzy. New Basic in its place called Drag and Drop that damages and slides. The new Techs are SO much better!
•New Advanced Tech: Dazing Shot. Dizzies from a long distance but does no damage. Dizzy is very hard to balance. I think this Tech mostly gets it right.

Mentalist
•Read Your Next Attack can now inflict Suppress for one question. Compensation for the loss of the Assess feat line.
•Decoy Technique now endures lethal damage at 1 HP once with a free Invisibility thrown in. Another conditional Disadvantage to attacks that got the axe along with Character Feats. It now happens to be much cooler than it used to be.
•Stab and Flee now moves before the attack but loses Accurate. This is pretty much necessary for the Tech to work as intended if you want to use it while making yourself Invisible in the same Turn.

Predator
•No Escape replaced with Quick Regenerator, +1 HP to Focus Orgone while not Wounded. No Escape didn't do very much for a class that already can Track at least one target per Turn. Fast Regenerator is the >50% HP counterpart to My Fateful Hour, making the Predator a very solid offtank combined with the +5 HP buff.
•Misshappen Camouflage replaced with Chameleonic to autoroll 10. You could argue that many of the Predator's Tricks are just conditional Stealth autosuccesses, might as well give them the real deal in place of the worst of them.
•Great Endurance replaced with Find Your Target. As the game's Tracking specialist, it's kind of weird that they didn't have the closest thing to long-range Tracking. I don't think anyone will miss Great Endurance.
•Spear Arm replaced with Hunter's Pounce, with increased mobility and auto-tracking. The change is to further differentiate it from Grasping Tentacle, as they were kind of redundant (and also Spear Arm's math was wrong).

Raptor
•Scan the Area replaced with Find Your Target. It was more or less the same thing but with more words and a chance of failure. I think of this as a buff at the cost of a tiny bit of uniqueness.
•Slow Falling replaced with Integrated Tools. Integrated Tools is one of the few ways to stack Advantages to Skill Tests, so it's very useful, if not spectacular, which is much better than the completely useless (for a flying specialist) Slow Falling.
•Raptor loses Efficient Aerodynamics and gains Winds of Zephyr, +1 HP while using Focus Orgone while Airborne. Efficient Aerodynamics is pointless when you can perpetually stay Airborne through Support Techs, all of which grant flight. Winds of Zephyr gives the Raptor enough sustain to become one of the game's most flexible and self-reliant classes.

Reanimator
•Lich now costs 1 Humanity to store your soul in or to recharge the philactery. Most self-healing Tricks now make you lose Humanity.
•Reap Soul replaced with Two Heads are Faster than One. Reanimator was the only character class with two self-healing Tricks. Now they get something else instead of that.

Reaper
•To Whom go the Spoils replaced with One With the Shadows, +1 HP to Focus Orgone while Invisible. The inconsistent healing of TWGTS has been replaced with a much more reliable heal bonus, albeit one only for specific builds. With its high speed, invisibility, and regeneration, the Reaper is a terrifying assassin.

Siren
•Halo of Protection Healing reduced from 2 HP to 1. The Siren already had some of the best healing and crowd control techs. With the +5 HP buff, they're the hardest to kill healer in the game outside of maybe Daybreakers perpetually running away from enemies. This nerf, much like the nerf to Alchemist healing Features, is necessary.

Swarm Master
•Spider Net buffed to prevent enemy movement rather than halving speed. It was very weak. Now it's noticeably more useful.

Undead
•Intimidating Gaze replaced with Vanishing Act. This is mostly for lore reasons, as ghostly undead should have the ability to turn invisible. Intimidating Gaze, while useful, was the weakest link in the chain.

Giant
•Two Heads are Faster than One replaced with Regeneration. Giants couldn't keep Two Heads are Faster than One, even if it was flavorful, because that would allow Solos to poach it, causing the universe to divide by 0. More seriously, most Giant Tricks were on the underpowered side and this is both powerful and a flavorful fit, so there you go.

Elementalist and Elemental
•Rise from the Ashes loses 1 Humanity when activated. Same reasoning as Lich and Regeneration.
•Elemental lore rewritten. Now a lot less vague and make more explicit about their role in the world.

Mentalist, Siren and Horror
•Suggestion clarified that it does not work against enemies in combat. Rectifying a preeeetty important oversight in the old version.

Predator and Undead
•Ghoul's Hunger loses 1 Humanity when used. Another self-healing Tricks that loses Humanity.

The Genre Master

•A whole bunch of housekeeping. Nothing too mechanically important beyond the changes to the Poison and Burn Techs in the NPC Creation section. 
•A section with several pages of ideas for running games using all the factions as allies or enemies as well as fully independent games. There's like 50 of those in there. You're bound to find something you'll like.
•Instinctive Action can now be used for a Basic Tech OR to remove a single Arcane, Mind, Bind or Delayed Damage Status Condition. It wasn't intended for the Dizzy status to block Instinctive Actions and this change is more interesting than just making the attack go through Dizzy just "because". If Dizzy and Silence get the Boss to stop making extra attacks to heal the condition, they're still doing their job.

Alternative Systems

•Added 16 Alternative Features themed around the 4 roles. These can be taken in place of the regular Character/Monster Features. This is how you can hybridize into two roles now that character feats and role techs are gone.
•Faction Trick purchases are kept as volatile items instead of having a duration of one Week. This is a very big buff, allowing you to trade Wealth for Tricks that don't have a set expiration date. I actually kinda want to expand on this idea and make more Tricks purchaseable in a marketplace outside the faction rules but that's probably OPAF so for now they'll just stay here.
•Translator Implant languages are kept as long as you keep the volatile item in question. It's a slight nerf necessary to keep PCs from learning every language forever with the temporary purchase of a single Translator Implant.
•Secret Projects renamed to Magitech Projects. It's a better name. Not an amazing one, but it works.
•War Atrocity does 2 Vitality and 5 Humanity damage to PCs in the area. Housekeeping mostly. Please don't nuke your friends thanks.
•Adjusted Dual Classes, Custom Classes and Level 0 Classes to the new class kits. Housekeeping mostly. This might need tweaking in the future, as some combinations are even more exploitable than before and giving all Solos the ability to poach from Monsters makes the Custom Solos lose a lot of their luster. For now I guess it's ok since the rules are already for groups experimenting with extreme optimization, but I'll keep an eye on it.

I blame blogger for any transparency issues.

And that, I believe, is all. I find myself without words after having typed all that, so uh... Closing Statement Goes Here! Exclamation Points for Excitement!

I'll be back in a couple weeks with a crowdfunding campaign. Until then,

Gimmick Out.

Lore Updates

I was going to upload the updated pdf out this week but life pulled me away from home for the weekend so instead I'll talk about some upcoming content. Usually I would write about mechanics, but this time I figured I would do something I rarely do here: Lore. More specifically, changes to current lore.

World History

One of the new sections added is an abridged timeline of the post-apocalypse. In this, I go over how humans and monsters have changed and why over the hundred+ years since the end of human sovereignty. The era is divided into four periods of the new Anno Monstrum (AM) calendar:

The Apocalypse (001-010 AM): Monsters! Monsters everywhere! This is the one that needs the least explanation because it's basically a huge mess from which the five big factions emerge. But one of those five is a little bit different...

The Pandemonium War (011-025 AM): Here's the big 'change' in this section. The Demihuman Empire, which used to be the strongest of the five factions in the game's backstory, is now called The Pandemonium. Pandemonium is the name of not just the capital of hell in Paradise Lost but also my erudite omnilingual sources tell me means "All Them Demons", which I think most will agree is a much better name. Whereas every other faction is about some kind of ideological extremism, Pandemonium was basically demons going "hey, this capitalism thing ain't half bad" and keeping human power structures as they found them, but with them at the top. While everyone else still refused to acknowledge the benefits of human progress, the demons of Pandemonium pioneered orgone research and made everyone else have to catch up to them. This was their golden age.

...At least until humans betrayed the demons, killed them and ate their corpses for power, a civil war erupted and all the other factions teamed up to crush their last remnants. The Magnasapiens would be the living legacy of Pandemonium, but their real heritage to the world at large would be in teaching the angels, fairies and dragons the pragmatism of human politics, commerce and technology.

Emergence of the Hellscape (026-093 AM): The first of many Psychic Storms begins in this era and the world slowly but surely transforms into a wasteland everywhere that is close to a ley line. The monster factions lose huge swaths of territory and suffer the scarcity that comes with it. Angels, fairies and dragons finally comprehend the benefits of setting their ideals aside to conserve their power, switching to defensive and long-term strategies.

The Pactmaking Revolution (094-112 AM): Gaians start to encourage their people to make pacts and, when this works out much better than anyone would've expected, the other factions follow. Arcadians come up with the idea of using pactmakers and other powered humans as the offensive end of their forces, creating the first Strike Teams. As before, the rest of the factions adapt this idea to their own ends.

The lines separating humans and monsters blur more than ever before, with genuine hybrids (the Gestalts) becoming a known, if rare, quantity all over the world. Things are slowly becoming better for humans, but they shouldn't forget that the oldest monsters still see them as servants or food and they are the ones making the rules.

Terminology Changes

Orgonetech is now Magitech. The shortened form of Orgone Technology could be confused for Orgone Technique, so that term is no more and a new one is taking its place. Easy.

Orgonium coins are now Biomarks. Also called Bios for short. Orgonium is still the name for the physical form of orgone, it's just that the coins have a name of their own now.

Fairy Circles are now Fairy Rings, Living Architecture is now the Hermetic Megalith and Weather Control Towers are Midsummer Maypoles. It was inconsistent of the fairies to give one of their big magitech advantages a fantasy-esque name and the other two very functional and agnostic ones. Now they all have evocative ones. They also get slightly more description text to make sure everyone understands what they are and how they work. However, everyone else (including most of the book) refers to those three things as Teleportation Circles. Living Architecture Forts, and Weather Control Towers. Case in point, the glossary now lists them under their agnostic name.

Elemental Lore

Elementals were very vague and alien, lacking in detailed descriptions for the sake of making them weird and mysterious. They felt a bit like horrors where their otherworldliness made them stand out, but unlike Horrors where that is 100% the intent, elementals are a key element to Arcadian dominance and thus should have more information about them available.

Nearly the whole page has been rewritten to make them feel more like they're part of the world. Here's a summary:

Elementals are naturally born from Psychic Storms when chaotic orgone energies give life to a substance, a force or the remnants of psychic energy left behind by something else. Their bodies don't offer much to study - think of them as living balloons held together by an orgone field. When enough pressure is applied to the field, it pops and they deflate, leaving behind trace amounts of energy or inert matter. Arcadians cause controlled storms to create elementals artificially. Gaians also have the knowledge, but it is limited to the creation of Myconians, the recycling fungus elementals featured in one of the lore intermissions.

Elementals are roughly divided into three categories: Those made of energy, those made of solid materials and those that represent abstract concepts. The first two categories look more or less like you'd expect, animals or humanoids made of lightning or diamonds or what have you. The third depend on the psyche of the living being they're made from, so a time elemental will probably look like a living being made of ticking clocks, a growth elemental will be made of flowers that are perpetually blooming and a rage elemental is just a big red-hot angry face.

Personalitywise, most elementals are childlike or animalistic. They're mostly interested in their own needs and easily entertained. Abstract elementals are aloof like the old versions and care primarily about the concept they represent. A song elemental wants to fill the world with music, a sword elemental wants to get in fights and a beauty elemental wants to make things pretty.

Powers are very obvious for the more common types. Fire elementals can set things on fire and ice elementals can freeze things, simple enough. The abstract ones are more unpredictable. Take the sword elemental example from before, you can safely assume it can cut through metal, sure. But if it's powerful enough it might be able to cut through a body of water, parting the seas for safe passage or even puncture through spacetime to create portals. The strongest of elementals will stretch the limits of their concept.

That's all for now

Those are the biggest changes. There's a couple more things here and there but they're pretty minor compared to those. Assuming nothing goes terribly wrong, there'll be a huge post next week with the next version and the plans for monsterpunk in the future.

Changes in Tone

Perhaps the most subtle yet far-reaching consequence of changing Sanity for Humanity (while also making Humanity no longer about morality but instead about self-control) is how much it changes Monsterpunk's tone.

The introduction section describes Monsterpunk as a game set in a world of gray morality, unsuited to simple "us vs them" dichotomies. A game where many classes are naturally suited for murder, brainwashing, necromancy and other distasteful activities... But doing most of those things slowly makes you more monster than human (and thus an NPC), makes you less trustworthy and also literally drives your party members insane. The idea was to make PCs balance their own personal values with those of their community or their team and how much this changed them as people, for better or worse. This ties into how humans are still adjusting to their new role in monster society and also becoming more like the monsters themselves.

With the rewrite to Humanity and the deletion of Sanity, this is no longer the case. Or rather, the themes are still there, but the emphasis has shifted. Characters are no longer penalized for their dirty deeds and while some of them come with a cost to Humanity, that's more of a balance mechanism than a mood-setting mechanic (though it still serves that purpose, I won't deny that). In fact the primary way to lose Humanity is through Limit Breaks, which power up your character. Arguably, the rules encourage you to treat your Humanity points more as a resource that goes up and down than as a life bar. You do get penalized for losing all your Humanity by transforming into a Fiend, but the rules make it explicit that the intended way to resolve that scenario is by talking sense into the Fiend and make them human once more.

This comes at the same time that I expanded the section for playing as independent groups, making it much easier to play games where PCs don't have to belong to any of the major factions in the hellscape. I also added an abridged timeline and delved more into the way that monsters have adapted to the stalemate they're caught in and how Gestalts in particular blur the lines further between species, it is not just that humans are turning into monsters but that the monsters are turning into humans.

The result is a game that still has moral ambiguity, party conflict and involves looking for humanity's new place in the world, but makes it much easier to solve those issues and play it like an anime action game with post-apoc or weird fantasy vibes.

It's still in many ways the same game. Even if you use Monsterpunk for post-apoc pokemon but with more murder, you still play a PC who toes the line between human and monster, doing whatever it takes to live another day as part of a tight-knit group of survivors finding their place in this absurd, harsh world. It's just that flipping the tone and mood is a lot easier than it used to be.

And I think that's a good thing, because roleplaying is many things to many people. In the end, I'm just a guy who wants to give players toys and a playground to do whatever they want with them. Flexibility is a good thing, in my mind, but it would be dishonest of me if I failed to mention the rules of the game are a lot less strict than they used to be.

Which is not to say that the game has gotten easier. Oh no, that is not the case at all. In fact, it has gotten harder. PCs get their shit kicked by NPCs around a lot more. The thing that keeps the game playable is that Limit Breaks allow any PC to turn a fight around at the cost of Humanity, which sounds awesome until you're out of points and you're forced to play super safe. If a campaign goes sufficiently long, all the PCs may end up turning into Fiends with no one to help them change back. That's dark. Much darker than a TPK or sanity loss, at least from where I'm standing.

Anyway, that's all for now. I got some feedback from people trying out the game that has been immensely useful. As soon as things here settle down and I don't have to deal with being 2-3 days of any given week without electricity I'll write a castle of words with a summary of all changes and put the pdf up.

Gimmick Out.

January's Progress Report

Much to my frustration, I am a month late. I would have really liked to finish the MP update this month but it's obviously not going to happen.

The main reason is that it blew out of proportion as I noticed more and more things that I would like to change. It was originally going to be Humanity + Fiends rework and the removal of Character Feats/Role Techs. Now nearly every class has had some fun/balance issues fixed, I've added more alternate rules to compensate for the loss of customization with the removal of Character Feats, I've written a bunch of advice for players and GMs alike... It's honestly kind of ridiculous but I'm really happy with how it has turned out for the most part. I don't plan to add any more content, so we're on the final stretch in this regard. I've got a couple pages of advice left to write and then there'll be a lot of reviewing to go through it all looking for mistakes but that's all.

Also it's summer and it's always a miserable experience full of nothing but bad news so maybe it could've been possible to finish things up last week or the one before that but the random events table for this season is the worst.

I'm gonna have to talk about all the mechanical changes at some point, but for now I just want to share some of the advice I've been writing. First, Chapter 1 is getting the "Going Independent" section that was at the back end of the book after the introduction of all the factions. Second, at the end of Chapter 2 I'm adding a page of advice for playing PCs of each faction (including independent ones). Third, I'm adding campaign ideas for each faction using them as either protagonists or antagonists in the GM section between the survival rules and NPC creation.

I'm going to post some of those now, they range from the classic "save the world" epics...

The Order is preparing to launch a satellite called the Angelsong. This satellite is a mass brainwashing device powered by countless human brains. The siren’s call of the Angelsong will convert humans into fervent believers, instantly winning the war wherever it strikes. The PCs must attack the various facilities that are key to the completion of the Angelsong. This includes the factory producing the satellite parts, the brain extraction facilities, the brainwashing program control station and perhaps the launch base itself. The climax is a large-scale battle between the PC’s faction and the Order’s forces in which the Strike Team must self-destruct the Angelsong from the inside to destroy it once and for all.

...to the gameplay gimmicks...

The Valkyrie Unit, a stealth airship with a couple dozen Raptor suits, is staging hit and run attacks on the PC’s home base. The PCs are part of a response team designed specifically to catch these enemies that a large force would struggle to keep up with. Can they predict where the enemy will show up and successfully whittle them down until landing a killing blow? And how will they deal with the Valkyrie Unit when they in turn adapt and start setting up traps of their own to bait the PCs? What if the Valkyries decide to prioritize eliminating the PCs and attempt to assassinate them by blowing up their sleeping quarters? This one is a bit tough since the players must design their team in a way that they can all deal with long-range flying threats, but that’s what makes it an interesting departure from the norm.

...to the just plain ridiculous.

The earth rumbles as the mountain-sized terapede DaiOhMukade stirs in its sleep. The creature is largely harmless outside of causing tremors every few weeks or so, as it has spent most of its life preserving its strength in stasis, like a dormant volcano who could erupt any moment but most people now take for granted it won’t. The PCs are tasked with protecting the massive arthropod and keeping others from disturbing it, less it cause a cataclysm when it wakes up. The problem lately is that a lot of Gaian teams are coming around to try and not just wake it up but also bring it to their side of the war. DaiOhMukade has no intelligence whatsoever and is probably impossible to communicate meaningfully with. Its awakening would probably destroy not just the PC’s home but also doom the rousing Gaians themselves. Stop these deluded fools by whatever means necessary.

There's something for everyone here and I'm glad that I took the extra time to write them, because it's either gonna come in handy or be an interesting read at the very least.

Until next time, Gimmick Out.

Monsterpunk has Skill Challenges now

Today I want to talk about what is one of my favorite low-key mechanics in Monsterpunk: Group Tests. One of the things I'm doing is upgrading them from a sidebar suggestion to a proper full page of rules.

The idea is basically as follows: Multiple PCs cooperate to resolve a sufficiently complex task using Skills and Techs, with success and failure being determined not by individual performances but rather the performance of the group as a whole.

Mechanically, each PC participating in a Group Test contributes with a certain amount of Progress, with each task requiring a specific amount to solve it. The most basic form of contribution is through Skill Tests, as follows:

Note that you can't substract Progress by rolling badly. You can opt out of rolling a Skill Test, but there's no point to doing so since the worst you can do is not add any Progress at all. Also a single PC can contribute with only one Skill per Group Test... Unless they fail and try again using a different Skill, but even then they're still rolling once per attempt. Point is, no one can roll multiple Skills at the same time and everyone should be rolling their most applicable Skill here.

PCs can also contribute 'passively' through Features, Support or Trick Techs that apply without having to roll anything. These add +1 Progress each and, in truly exceptional cases where your Techs can cover for multiple PCs, +2 Progress each. For example: The PCs must infiltrate an enemy facility and reach the VIP area without raising an alarm. Making yourself invisible is an automatic +1 Progress, but the ability to make yourself and all the other PCs invisible would be +2 Progress instead and you can still roll Stealth, Electronics, Negotiation or whatever other suitable Skills you've got on top of that.

Comparing both ways to contribute: Skill Tests are available to everyone, they have a lower ceiling and a higher floor, but are random. Features and Techs are more reliable, but there's less of them and they are individually more niche in use, so you can't always count on having an applicable one around.

Between Skill training, Features, Techs and just plain being lucky, you can assume that most groups will get at least 1 Progress per PC and half of them will get 2. This means that the average PC contributes 1.5 Progress to any given Group Test. So how far does that get them? Well, there are three difficulty settings for Group Tests, but on average the results are as follows:

Progress Lower than the Number of PCs: As a Twist.
Progress Exactly the Number of PCs: As a Success with Twist.
Progress Over the Number of PCs: As a Success.
Double or More Progress than the Number of PCs: As a Success with Bonus.

The regular Skill Test rules lean towards Success with Twist being the most common result, with regular Successes and then Twists behind (remember that Advantages twist the odds towards higher numbers). Group Tests however lean towards Success being the most common result, not just because 1.5 Progress per PC means you'll land solidly there on average, but also because Success with Twist is really unlikely to happen, even less so than a pure Twist. Interestingly, Success with Bonus is much more likely in regular Skill Tests, thanks to a combination of Advantage stacking and Tricks that let you autoroll 10 once per day, but in Group Tests getting a Success with Bonus requires multiple people to be very lucky or having so many applicable Features and Techs that it should be obvious at a glance there's no real chance of failure here and you shouldn't even bother rolling dice.

This means you could arguably powergame the narrative rules by getting the group to work in tandem most of the time, so that you're always rolling Group Tests and minimizing chances of failure. It's exploitable, but is that a bad thing? Not really. Or at least not meaningfully. Consider that this kind of exploit is one that requires involving everyone in the story and working together, rather than making one person hog the spotlight constantly. Sure, it might make the game too easy, but if your problem is that the PCs are always cooperating and using their special talents to help each other out all the time... Well, that's a great problem to have, honestly. Even then you can always just use the provided rules to make Group Tests harder so it's not a super huge deal.

It is also preferable to what happened in old versions of these rules: They were much harder, leaning towards Success with Twist and making it possible to take away from the group's Progress with bad rolls. The end result of this subsystem was that people would rather sit out than risk undoing everyone else's work and that really sucks considering that the entire point of Group Tests is to make all the PCs participate in advancing the story.

And I think they serve a very important function in doing that. We've all been in games where one or two PCs end up doing more than the others just because they speak up more, their skillsets can solve most problems, or the GM just doesn't know how to make challenges that involve everyone. Group Tests are a formalized, simple and effective way to guarantee that - at least for one Scene - everyone does something of relevance. Or makes the attempt and fails, I guess, but, er, at least they tried?

I really like Group Tests. I've found myself using them more and more in playtesting and fine-tuning them until they became a core part of the rules. They're not flashy or fancy but they're fun and facilitate cooperative storytelling. And hey, those are two of my favorite things!

I really can't wait to get them out the door so that others can start playing with them.

Gimmick Out.