Kiero
2008-11-18, 07:44 AM
This is an idea that came to me last night when I was thinking of a crunchier-than-Wushu system for Inquisitorial games. As people are well aware by now, I'm not impressed with Dark Heresy, neither the premise, nor the system.
I like the Cinematic Unisystem, as per Angel. Indeed the Demon Powers creation section gives you a toolbox to handle psykers, mutation and augmetics. I prefer the way it handles things over all the mucking around tracking Essence and such that Classic Unisystem uses. IMO it fits better with the source material to use Cinematic. Source material being Eisenhorn and Ravenor, not the wargame, not old Rogue Trader, not the Inquisitor skirmish game.
Plus in the books characters are blatantly using a meta-resource like Drama Points to avoid some nasty stuff. And you've got the Organisation rules to represent the resources and proclivities of the Inquisitor's operation. Specifically the cell/team the PCs are working in, rather than the Inquisition in general.
Premise
The PCs are Throne Agents, trusted members of the Inquisitor's retinue, with delegated authority from the big cheese. The Inquisitor themselves, for various reasons (age, infirmity, seniority, management style, size of organisation) doesn't get out into the field much. Instead they're trusted to get on with things, operating at arms' length from their boss.
You're the best of the best, or at least highly competent and well-regarded in your chosen field. That's why you're a Throne Agent - if you weren't exceptional you'd never have stood out enough for the Inquisitor to want you on their staff.
The retinue is composed of three types of characters: warriors, specialists and pupils.
Warriors are the primary muscle, ex-Guard vetarans, former hive gangers and bounty chasers, ex-Arbites officers, mercenaries, bodyguards and gladiators. There's countless possible fighting-types.
Specialists aren't primary combatants, but are prized for their skills. Pilots, savants, tech-priests/tech-specialists, psykers, priests, undercover types and sneaky types. And so on and so forth.
Lastly students are a blend of the two, they're senior interrogators being mentored by the Inquisitor. They might be in charge of the team of agents, or they might not. If they do finally prove themselves worthy of elevation, they go off and set up their own retinue.
Characters
Now I'm undecided as to whether or not the three character types need their own Unisystem Character Types, or whether they're just there to channel concepts in particular directions.
The Investigator could work for genuine neophytes, such as the way Bequin and arguable Plyton joined a team. But I'd say most were at least Champions. Maybe even quite a few Veterans; only issue with this one is that personally I think CineUni gets a bit wonky at very high levels of ability. Throne Agents are hyper-competent, but generally still human. Those who were human to begin with, that is!
Appreciate ideas on how to handle Character Types, and whether new ones are needed. Issue with doing one for Warrior, Specialist, Pupil is that they might need a level or two for each one. So Basic Warrior, Experienced Warrior, Veteran Warrior or something. Which might be a little too complicated.
Skills
I don't want to over-complicate the list, personally any skills list that has more than 20 in it is too long, IMO. But I'm not entirely happy with the breakdown we get in CineUni.
Here's the list (with old CineUni skill in parenthesis):
Acrobatics (Acrobatics)
Athletics (Acrobatics/Sports)
Awareness (Notice)
Cogitators (Computers)
Driving (Driving)
Engineseer (Mr Fixit)
Heretical Lore (Occultism)
Intimidation (Influence)
Intrusion (Crime)
Knowledge (Knowledge)
Languages (Languages)
Leadership (Influence)
Medicae (Doctor)
Melee Combat (Getting Medieval)
Piloting (Driving-ish)
Ranged Combat (Gun Fu)
Science (Science)
Subterfuge (Influence)
Unarmed Combat (Kung Fu)
Wild Card (Wild Card)
Do I need an Investigation skill? Covering research, police-work and such? I've tossed Art into Wild Card, same goes psionics. Also wondering if Driving and Piloting are important enough to be split, given the whole potential Netrunner Problem of a PC pilot being kept separate from the rest of the group.
Optional Rule musing. I don't want lots of skills, but I'm considering a White Wolf styled "anything over 3 is a specialism" type thing. Possibly just for academic skills, since there's worlds of specialism out there. Maybe for Combat skills too, though I'm undecided.
What it means is that you buy up the first three ranks of a Skill as normal. But once you go over that, each point spent is on a special area.
Qualities/Drawbacks
Most can be used as-is, just with renaming in places (like Sorcery to Psyker). As above, the demon powers section works well for psionics, mutation and augmetics. Also potentially for xenos characters, though I don't really intend for those to be part of a retinue really.
It's easy enough to make up some Package qualities to represent various archetypes. I reckon Untouchable would be a 3-5 point Quality, or perhaps less given it would be balanced out by negative Charisma or something. I don't think it's a genuine Drawback, though, given how useful they and the ability is in a retinue.
Corruption
I can't be bothered with some mechanical modelling of this, personally. We don't actually see a lot of evidence in the books for any of the Throne Agents slowly building up into crazed, mutated monsters. Not even the psykers, and not even Eisenhorn himself, who dabbles with all kinds of crap. I just don't think it's an important consideration.
Other considerations
A few system-specific tweaks, largely to counter some of the things I'm not so hot about with CineUni.
Dice and Target Numbers
I don't like single-die roll systems. Whether that's rolling a d20, a d10 or a d100, the spread of competence is just too wide for my taste. Unisystem kind of fudges it by having competent characters basically able to succeed before the dice are even rolled, but I'm not happy with that.
I'm thinking of replacing the d10 with 2d6-1. Slightly wider spread, but averaging out at a roll of 6 (ie 7-1). The more mathematically-inclined can tell me what the results of that might be.
But I think it will mean altering target numbers a little. After all getting 9 is very easy indeed. An average character (attribute at 2) with average skill (skill at 2) is going to pass with a 10 most of the time.
Or perhaps it will just need more judicious use of target numbers and difficulty. I don't know, again I'd appreciate the input of the more mathematically-inclined.
The Dex-as-uberstat problem
This is a common complain of both Unisystem and quite a few other games. High Dexterity allows you to end-run the Skill system, since Attributes and Skills are equally important. But Attributes are more useful since they apply to more things.
So firstly, if you have 0 in a skill, you can only use half of your Dex, since it's untrained. Is that fair? Too harsh?
Secondly, your Dex is capped at either your Skill level +1 or possibly double your Skill level. I wonder perhaps if the latter will lead to some min-maxing to get the most out of Dex?
Either way, the aim is to bring Skills back into focus as important.
I like the Cinematic Unisystem, as per Angel. Indeed the Demon Powers creation section gives you a toolbox to handle psykers, mutation and augmetics. I prefer the way it handles things over all the mucking around tracking Essence and such that Classic Unisystem uses. IMO it fits better with the source material to use Cinematic. Source material being Eisenhorn and Ravenor, not the wargame, not old Rogue Trader, not the Inquisitor skirmish game.
Plus in the books characters are blatantly using a meta-resource like Drama Points to avoid some nasty stuff. And you've got the Organisation rules to represent the resources and proclivities of the Inquisitor's operation. Specifically the cell/team the PCs are working in, rather than the Inquisition in general.
Premise
The PCs are Throne Agents, trusted members of the Inquisitor's retinue, with delegated authority from the big cheese. The Inquisitor themselves, for various reasons (age, infirmity, seniority, management style, size of organisation) doesn't get out into the field much. Instead they're trusted to get on with things, operating at arms' length from their boss.
You're the best of the best, or at least highly competent and well-regarded in your chosen field. That's why you're a Throne Agent - if you weren't exceptional you'd never have stood out enough for the Inquisitor to want you on their staff.
The retinue is composed of three types of characters: warriors, specialists and pupils.
Warriors are the primary muscle, ex-Guard vetarans, former hive gangers and bounty chasers, ex-Arbites officers, mercenaries, bodyguards and gladiators. There's countless possible fighting-types.
Specialists aren't primary combatants, but are prized for their skills. Pilots, savants, tech-priests/tech-specialists, psykers, priests, undercover types and sneaky types. And so on and so forth.
Lastly students are a blend of the two, they're senior interrogators being mentored by the Inquisitor. They might be in charge of the team of agents, or they might not. If they do finally prove themselves worthy of elevation, they go off and set up their own retinue.
Characters
Now I'm undecided as to whether or not the three character types need their own Unisystem Character Types, or whether they're just there to channel concepts in particular directions.
The Investigator could work for genuine neophytes, such as the way Bequin and arguable Plyton joined a team. But I'd say most were at least Champions. Maybe even quite a few Veterans; only issue with this one is that personally I think CineUni gets a bit wonky at very high levels of ability. Throne Agents are hyper-competent, but generally still human. Those who were human to begin with, that is!
Appreciate ideas on how to handle Character Types, and whether new ones are needed. Issue with doing one for Warrior, Specialist, Pupil is that they might need a level or two for each one. So Basic Warrior, Experienced Warrior, Veteran Warrior or something. Which might be a little too complicated.
Skills
I don't want to over-complicate the list, personally any skills list that has more than 20 in it is too long, IMO. But I'm not entirely happy with the breakdown we get in CineUni.
Here's the list (with old CineUni skill in parenthesis):
Acrobatics (Acrobatics)
Athletics (Acrobatics/Sports)
Awareness (Notice)
Cogitators (Computers)
Driving (Driving)
Engineseer (Mr Fixit)
Heretical Lore (Occultism)
Intimidation (Influence)
Intrusion (Crime)
Knowledge (Knowledge)
Languages (Languages)
Leadership (Influence)
Medicae (Doctor)
Melee Combat (Getting Medieval)
Piloting (Driving-ish)
Ranged Combat (Gun Fu)
Science (Science)
Subterfuge (Influence)
Unarmed Combat (Kung Fu)
Wild Card (Wild Card)
Do I need an Investigation skill? Covering research, police-work and such? I've tossed Art into Wild Card, same goes psionics. Also wondering if Driving and Piloting are important enough to be split, given the whole potential Netrunner Problem of a PC pilot being kept separate from the rest of the group.
Optional Rule musing. I don't want lots of skills, but I'm considering a White Wolf styled "anything over 3 is a specialism" type thing. Possibly just for academic skills, since there's worlds of specialism out there. Maybe for Combat skills too, though I'm undecided.
What it means is that you buy up the first three ranks of a Skill as normal. But once you go over that, each point spent is on a special area.
Qualities/Drawbacks
Most can be used as-is, just with renaming in places (like Sorcery to Psyker). As above, the demon powers section works well for psionics, mutation and augmetics. Also potentially for xenos characters, though I don't really intend for those to be part of a retinue really.
It's easy enough to make up some Package qualities to represent various archetypes. I reckon Untouchable would be a 3-5 point Quality, or perhaps less given it would be balanced out by negative Charisma or something. I don't think it's a genuine Drawback, though, given how useful they and the ability is in a retinue.
Corruption
I can't be bothered with some mechanical modelling of this, personally. We don't actually see a lot of evidence in the books for any of the Throne Agents slowly building up into crazed, mutated monsters. Not even the psykers, and not even Eisenhorn himself, who dabbles with all kinds of crap. I just don't think it's an important consideration.
Other considerations
A few system-specific tweaks, largely to counter some of the things I'm not so hot about with CineUni.
Dice and Target Numbers
I don't like single-die roll systems. Whether that's rolling a d20, a d10 or a d100, the spread of competence is just too wide for my taste. Unisystem kind of fudges it by having competent characters basically able to succeed before the dice are even rolled, but I'm not happy with that.
I'm thinking of replacing the d10 with 2d6-1. Slightly wider spread, but averaging out at a roll of 6 (ie 7-1). The more mathematically-inclined can tell me what the results of that might be.
But I think it will mean altering target numbers a little. After all getting 9 is very easy indeed. An average character (attribute at 2) with average skill (skill at 2) is going to pass with a 10 most of the time.
Or perhaps it will just need more judicious use of target numbers and difficulty. I don't know, again I'd appreciate the input of the more mathematically-inclined.
The Dex-as-uberstat problem
This is a common complain of both Unisystem and quite a few other games. High Dexterity allows you to end-run the Skill system, since Attributes and Skills are equally important. But Attributes are more useful since they apply to more things.
So firstly, if you have 0 in a skill, you can only use half of your Dex, since it's untrained. Is that fair? Too harsh?
Secondly, your Dex is capped at either your Skill level +1 or possibly double your Skill level. I wonder perhaps if the latter will lead to some min-maxing to get the most out of Dex?
Either way, the aim is to bring Skills back into focus as important.