FUBAR

FUBAR

Now in it's competition pre-release version.

There should be some updates made to it before the game is due for entry in the Cyberpunk Revival project at the end of the month.

Comments

Sheikh Jahbooty said…
Wow! This looks nice. I especially like the thematic unity of using photos of crumpled up paper as text fields and crumpling up character sheets. I haven't finished reading it yet.

Thank goodness you had to slap together this disappointing entry ;-)

If you had time to do what you wanted I'm assuming nobody else would have a chance at the prize.

I wonder if the GM ever needs to pick up the dice at all. Couldn't the player roll, and the GM (or whoever originally wrote the rogue, in order to earn tokens) point out the rogue's useful traits to act as penalty dice to the player's roll?

Oh and a thought occurred to me. Is each surviving penalty die potentially another consequence or potentially more fallout? Or do you only count the highest die in each category, once they are assigned?

Love love love the endgame rules. Definitely deserve more attention. Could we do an X-Files game with secret tokens, potential open ends and lingering questions at the end of the adventure? Could it work for a classic noir game, or would it need to be tweaked?
Vulpinoid said…
Hmmm...

I don't think the game could be run GM-less, not without an experienced group who have a strong visual unity about their intended story. But it wouldn't take much to tweak it so that a GM would never need to touch dice at all.

At the moment, I'm rewriting some of the rules for how you allocate dice and providing some play examples to help clarify things.

The basic gist is...

You roll a minimum of 3 dice.
You may add more dice to this if you have relevant traits on your character sheet (this is your core dice pool).
You also add more dice if you have bonus traits OR penalty traits linked to the task at hand. If you have both bonuses and penalties, these cancel one another out on a one-for-one basis until only one type is left (or they negate one another entirely).
With your dice pool you roll the lot, then assign a minimum of 1 die each to "Success", "Sacrifice" and "Fallout". If you had dice from bonus traits, you may assign an extra die to a "Success". If you had dice from penalty traits, you must assign an extra die to a "Sacrifice". Any unassigned dice are discarded after the roll.

If you've assigned two dice to "Success", and they're both above 5 then you get two positive outcomes from your action (maybe you apply an extra penalty on your victim, or gain an extra bonus trait for yourself). If one of your dice allocated to "Success" is a 3-4 then you might get a chance at a follow up roll (if you want to take that risk).

If you've assigned two dice to "Sacrifice", then you suffer the penalties from both of them. This could end up really nasty. If injuries have been inflicted on you, then the GM/Oracle decides how you've been hurt (how badly and for how long, by moving up/across the penalty chart).

Yes, the end game rules probably need a bit of work, and that's something else I'm playing with as I discuss it with a few people. There needs to be a good way to ensure the Oracle keeps spending their secrets, to the point that a game can resolve the necessary issues at its conclusion. It's worked reasonably well in the test I've run so far, but only ongoing testing will refine it properly.

Running a game with secret tokens is definitely a possibility, and this might be useful to add as a play variant. In this regard, I'm also trying to work out a better experience system for playing out games over a number of sessions, and introducing new rogues in later stories/episodes.

I think it would work reasonably well for a classic noir setting without any real modifications, after all the noir aspect of cyberpunk was my aim with this project. Just change a protagonist's available edges to suit the setting (rather than some of the deliberately cyberpunk options provided).
Sheikh Jahbooty said…
I thought the oracle's "pile of secrets" was a dish of tokens.

When I suggested that a lowlife point out a rogue's useful traits, I was imagining the kind of scene where the player remembers a thing or two about the character because it's the character that the player wrote or rejected, so the player can role play, in character, stuff like, "Be careful of the monowhip in his right thumb!" or even, "I've heard of that guy. He's supposed to be some badass sniper."

I wasn't suggesting GM-less, just the kind of cool thing that happens in crime dramas that the some of the lowlifes have heard of the rogues, and vice versa.
Vulpinoid said…
Having the player who wrote the rogue point out benefits is actually a good idea. I see what you mean now.

I might have to find a way to incorporate it into the rules.

As for the "dish of tokens"; yes, that's exactly what it is. But I obviously need to clarify this.

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