Hello, hello, hello beautiful gentlepeople once again. I am here, on the last day of the month, just a few hours before the clock announces it is no longer July, here to share an update to the BCGR SRD with you all. Without further ado, here's the download link and here's the changelog:
Rules v1.5 Changelog:
- Everything has flavor text now!
- Added a new functionality to Equipment Tests for canceling penalties to using Skills without Equipment.
- Made Intermission Damage mechanics less lethal.
- Intermission Grunts only have one Plot Armor Layer and do not get to Test Willpower to avoid Defeat.
- Added a narrative rule called The Dramatic Finish at the end of the Operations section.
- Clarified in the Skills section with Skills can carry Disadvantages for using them without Equipment.
- Deceptive Fighter slightly buffed with additional options.
- This is my Battlefield now lasts one Round but lets you change Terrain types per use to compensate.
- Come at Me Bro lasts one Round but now you autoroll 10 on punishment attacks.
- I am a Loose Cannon now halves bonus and self-Damage but the bonus applies to everything, not just a single attack.
- Stake my life on it is Reaction Speed instead of Setup and can be used to make a self-destruct attack now.
- Techniques increase the Tension cap to 20 instead of 10.
- Clarified that Superheavy Machinegun can, in fact, be used to Suppress despite being a Line.
- Living Weapon was rewritten to make sense under the new Deathblow rules.
- Simplified Invasive and Crush the Insect.
- Did you notice Antimatter Shot was missing from the previous version of the SRD? Well, it's back now. Rejoice.
- Magic Bullet's now gains +1 Advantage instead of adding Tension to Damage.
- There's an introductory oneshot scenario at the end of the SRD now. It has two difficulty settings (Tutorial and Challenging) and can be run on either Combat Only or Full Narrative modes. The scenario includes two pages of setting information.
A lot of these are things that I talked about in previous blog posts. Others are corrections on things that changed too far during the previous update. And others are part of the ongoing quest to try and make a bunch of complicated and/or bad options be simple and/or good instead. I figure I can talk about them later during the long wait for the proper, full version of the Remaster. Instead, I want to talk about something else, part of what I am hoping to achieve with this Remaster.
One thing that vanilla BCG doesn't do very well is tell you what playing the game is like, beyond giving a few examples or making anime references and hoping that's enough to grasp what the system is trying to do. That's what I'm trying to correct with the addition of the Dramatic Finish rule and the inclusion of a oneshot introductory scenario.
I'm just going to copy and paste the Dramatic Finish rule here so we both know what I'm talking about:
The Dramatic Finish
When the GM confirms that a PC has Defeated an NPC, and after figuring out whether said NPC flees, ejects, dies, lives or whatever other fate happens to them, the owner of the PC has the right to narrate a Dramatic Finish. This is a spectacular description of the PC finishing that Enemy off.
The description should be appropriate to the result of the Might Test. If the result is the exact number needed to defeat them, then a lucky ricocheting projectile hit the enemy in the back or it collapses from a combination of many small cuts of your blade. If, on the other hand, the Might Test gets a result over 30 and overkills the enemy by 10 Damage, then your mech burns with a bright battle aura and punches a robot into a mountain so hard that the mountain explodes, or you can shoot a beam so powerful
it launches the enemy off-planet and into the sun. If there was no Might Test, judge it based on the Damage dealt.
The appropriateness of a Dramatic Finish depends on the tone of the game. The group should discuss beforehand to decide the levels of realism people can work with.
That's it. It's barely even a rule. It's more of a suggestion. But I think that does a lot for helping make the game feel like a game about cool robots doing cool robot things. This plus having a whole anime episode included in the SRD ready to run with its own prewritten plot (albeit an extremely basic one) is going to do a lot for newer players and GMs to grasp what makes the game work.
Oh yeah. It doesn't have any art right now, but the scenario is going to have art. Like this:
While the power of the imagination is unlimited, having art to sell you on the idea of what the units look like is going to help you get more immersed and invested into the fantasy the game provides with noticeably less effort. Also, I like having art, when I can afford it. So there.
Hopefully I can put up the SRD with all the art sometime August. I'll see you all next post.
Gimmick Out.
