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.

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.