Protean Macguffin Systems

[Shiny, Bearer of the Pokystick]

This thread is intended to be a storage and critique vault for the systems hopefully generated by the Protean Macguffin Project, a summary of which is below.

Please Note: Suggestions of genre/setting and character role should be posted in the recruitment thread, linked above, as should proposed characters. This thread is intended for critiques of the system(s) themselves.

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Step One: The good people of the playground, herein posting, select a genre and/or setting they would like to play or play in.
Step Two: The self-same good people, or others who happen to step up, select a role they wish their characters to assume within that setting.
Step Three: I create a simple or appropriately complex character creation system.
Step Four: The characters so created are run through their selected wringers and I adjudicate their travails, once again inventing a system to do so as I go.

The most important aspect of the project, and the reason I say 'systems', plural, is below:

Step Five: The Protean Macguffin is invoked when the demands of the plot require it or when I deem fit.
The entirety of the previously established system, with the exception of one aspect of character creation and one aspect of combat or world adjudication, is scrapped and a new one is created from the void.
Player characters retain the statistic or feature resultant from the single CC rule kept, but all others are re-worked; the precise consequences of their kept statistic may change accordingly.

System 01: Albion Reach Hunters

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The setting is an alternate reality known as Albion Reach a bubble of invasive reality covering present-day Wales, and containing terrifying spectral creatures known as Penangolla.

Confronted with this unexpected attack from within their own borders, Victorian society bonds together in unexpected ways, extending their rule with fiendishly clever devices of iron, brass and steam, and, of course, using these same devices to hunt their otherworldly houseguests.
The characters play a hunting team from Albion Reach, given weapons and equipment, and then told to say goodbye to their families...


Character Creation
First, what each character does not have- abilities, skills, feats, etc.; all people are considered, in broad terms, the same. Being stronger, faster, etc. is considered a matter outside of mechanics.

Talents
Each character has a single unique ability that seperates them from the bulk of humanity.
In more concrete terms, each character has either a talent related to a firing stage- see below- or a unique talent from the following list:

• Shelter Attunement: Prevents entrance of Penangolla to an 'ordered' shelter, usually a specially prepared cube. Requires a coin-flip roll, which the player does not see. Additional heartbeats can be sacrficed (from the character's subsequent combat pool) to make additional attempts. One success suffices to make the shelter impregnable.
• Resist Possession and Keen Senses: These talents work the same way; for the special actions 'resist possession' and 'detect Penangollan', respectively, they allow the character to see his roll and to spend a heartbeat to make an additional roll, taking the better result.
• Tactical Intuition: The character can make a roll as if to sense Penangollan, but instead sense the prescence (or absence) of his particular tactical circumstance. Failure indicates erroneous or incomplete information.

Firing Stage Talents
All Firing Stage Talents negate the need to take a heartbeat for the given stage of firing the first time that stage is invoked in combat. If a character must utilize that stage again- for instance, to aim at a new target- it requires a heartbeat as usual.

• Quick Draw: Draw
• Iron Shoulder: Brace
• Eagle Eye: Aim
• Where it Hurts: Analyze
• Finger to The Wind: Compensate
• Hair Trigger: Fire

Tactical Circumstances
Each character has a tactical circumstance; a particular facet of the environment or the moment that is familiar to them and grants them a tactical advantage. This can be 'the high ground' or 'flanking manuevers' or 'point-blank range'. A tactical circumstance can be virtually any reasonable thing, as long as it can be empirically observed and verified.

When a character has the advantage of their tactical circumstance, they may choose to spend that advantage to negate one heartbeat that would otherwise be required to take an action- but only once for each instance of the circumstance.

For instance, if a character with Tactical Advantage: High Ground gained a hill above their target, they could use that position to negate the heartbeat required to Aim- but if they wished to do so again, they would have to find a new hill.

Combat
Characters attempt to approach cadres or rarely, 'lone wolves' of the Penangolla, by stealth and guile. Once they begin radiating hostile intent, however, their discovery is inevitable- no known force can hide them from the creatures.

Firing
Each character in the party has a number of 'heartbeats'- units of time- dependant on the range to the enemy in which to perform the task of firing his weapon and hitting the target.
The stages are:
1. Draw
2. Brace
3. Aim
4. Analyze
5. Compensate
6. Fire
Drawing one's weapon can be done beforehand, but this generally causes Penangolla in the area to move toward the spill of hostile emanation.
Bracing is necessary in the highest degree, as the recoil of the hunter's weaponry is extreme.
Aiming allows one to hit the target somewhere, at least; poor aim is likely to result in a complete miss, though not necessarily.
Aiming without analysis, however, is almost as useless, since Penangollan anatomy is esoteric. A hit in the wrong place would be no more than an inconvenience.
Compensation is the art of accounting for the hideous, otherworldly mists and storm-winds of Albion Reach in the arc of one's shot, allowing it to fly true.
Finally, the act of tightening one's finger on the trigger requires a certain amount of time.
Each of these stages requires one heartbeat.

Failure to draw has obvious consequences. Failure to brace, aim, or compensate means that one d% is rolled, for a 50/50 chance of hitting the target, with an additional chance to fail for each missed stage; even a single failure means a miss. Failure to analyze means that a d% is rolled to determine if the target is brought down.

The problem arises in that characters seldom if ever have six full heartbeats before they are overwhelmed.

Tactical circumstances and unique gifts both reduce the time required by a particular stage of firing if they apply to that stage. In addition, characters gain a heartbeat of breathing room for each Penangollan they destroy or disable during an encounter, which can be spent at any time they wish.

Special Actions
Fleeing, attempting to hide, and attempting to shake off possession are all special actions that require one heartbeat to initiate. Success or failure on these actions is a coin-flip d% roll; 1-49% indicates success, 50-100% indicates failure. A heartbeat can be spent to increase this chance by 10%, but only during combat. These actions can be initiated outside of combat, but they then take a heartbeat from the pool of the next subsequent combat.

Attempting to sense the prescence of non-obvious Penangolla is an action that does not require a heartbeat, and a straight coin-flip roll.

Possession
Once a character has made contact with a Penangollan, that character is possessed. There is no-one known to be psychically resistant enough to avoid this fate, at least initially.
The only saving grace is that the character's flesh, while possessed, is sublimed into the same energy that forms his erstwhile foe, and that the Penangollan disdain the use of weapons. They do, however, possess the tooth and claw for which nature is famed.

Possessed characters remain under the control of their players.

A possessed character immediately begins attacking his comrades as if he were another Penangollan, and can be attacked as if he were one.
He remains possessed until the possessing spirit is killed; thus, if a possessed hunter is not destroyed, he leaves the party to join what are now his own kind.

A possessed character attacks with his natural armaments, in the following stages:
1. Seek
2. Analyze
3. Strike
To whit, selecting a target, determining what will do the most damage, and reaving.
Failure to seek or strike means they lash out wildly; a d% is rolled. Falure to analyze means the target may not fall, as with hunters.

After a number of heartbeats equal to those during which they attempted to engage their possessor have passed, a character may spend a number of heartbeats also equal to that number attempting to throw off their possessor; see above regarding special actions.

Success indicates the Penangolla is ejected and stunned and the character is similarly ejected and stunned (though unharmed by the attacks of his allies).

Rewards
A character able to sucessfully harvest the remains of a Penangolla and return it to greater England is frequently rewarded with noble titles, riches, and prestige.
In addition, characters frequently require the income such 'pelts' grant simply to repair and replenish their supplies of ammunition and their arms.

The precise nature of these rewards is tailored to the characters involved.

[Zeta Kai]

Uh, what?

I'm not sure if I understand this right, so let me paraphrase (roughly). We (the forum members) choose a setting, & then make a character within that setting. You then create statistics for that character, based on a system that your making up on the fly for each one. Do I have that right?

[alexeduardo]

I vote for a pre-oil Saudi Arabia setting!

[Kaihaku]

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((OoC: Alright... It sounds like it might get messy but I'll take the risk...

Name: Alfred Lewis
Gender: Male
Race: Human, duh.
Age: Late Fifties
Desc: An older man with brown hair speckled with slivers of gray. He has a severe expression most times and never seems to relax save for after he's had a few hours at the pub.
Talent: Keen Senses

Need anything else?))

^Edited.

[Shiny, Bearer of the Pokystick]

The recruitment thread for the actual game is the link in the first post, Kaihaku- and I should clarify that Keen Senses and Resist Possession are two seperate talents that work the same way mechanically.

Alexduardo, second verse, same as the first- follow the link in the first post to the recruitment thread.

Zeta, you've almost got it.
You, the forum members, suggest a setting and within that setting, define the role your characters plays, i.e. 'investigators', 'mercenaries', or 'hunters'.
I then design a character creation and combat/encounter adjudication system to fit the core principles implicit in that setting and role, and players create characters using that newly formed system.

This thread is designed to be a repository for the systems as I create them; I am primarily soliciting critiques on the first system resulting from the thread, as well as applications to play within that system. I'll clarify.