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The Design of BCS II: The Core Mechanic
🕑 Added 2024-01-14 14:51:19 +0000 UTCThe Core Mechanic
The most important change to how BCS works compared to BCG, along with the mapless play, is the new core mechanic. From Monsterpunk I learned that I strongly prefer degrees of success/failure to binary pass/fail resolution systems. However, BCS is a little bit different compared to other systems with degrees of success/failure.
Because you're rolling 1d10 + a bonus and the results range from 01-05 to 06-10 to 11-15 and to 16-20, while there are four possible outcomes, any given roll can only result in three of them at a time. A low bonus to your roll means you will never get a 16-20, while a high bonus to your roll means you will never get a 01-05.
Let's break down how this affect Skill Tests and Offensive Tests, the most common Tests rolled during Intermission and Operations, respectively.
Skill Tests
Most systems of this kind allow a chance for a complete beginner to outshine an expert in their field. For luck to be a bigger factor than expectations from the narrative and mechanics. While that can make for a fun memorable event the first time it happens, and the occasional player who is always lucky can get a lot of enjoyment out of it, it quickly loses its charm when it repeats often and especially when somebody is particularly unlucky.
More importantly, I don't think that's satisfying at a character building or character development level. Your choices, narrative and mechanical, should be more important than raw luck.
I also think it's much more tense if you know you're bad at something before you attempt it, being aware that daredevilry carries a considerable risk of failure, which in turn makes it that much more rewarding when you do succeed at something that you know was difficult. Similarly, it feels much better to confidently throw your character at the things you built them to do, knowing that you will only fail if there are significant or unforeseen complications, and makes those failures that much more impactful because they're that much more significant.
Even so, it's not entirely deterministic based on your build. Things like situational Advantages still allow room for creative roleplaying to make possible the impossible, while opposing NPCs make things much harder by inflicting the PCs multiple penalties depending on how powerful and trained that NPC is. So it's not as clear-cut as "high stat = pass, low stat = fail".
If I'm being honest I think this latter part could be communicated better. In playtesting I've had both GMs and PCs forget that NPCs inflict penalties, for example. This is something we'll get more into later, as we explore those rules.
Offensive Tests
The choice to only make possible 3 of 4 possible results at a time gets more nuanced here in the combat rules. You can miss with your attacks, but it only happens at low PLs and while Tension is low (or when someone is using Tricks/Defenses to make you miss). This is a lot like BCG, where having moderate Might and/or Tension meant you were never going to miss, barring Enemy buffs to their Defense or debuffs to your attack. Similarly, when Tension and bonuses get sufficiently high, you're going to start critting endlessly. This, too, happened in BCG.
However, despite the similarities, BCS as a combat system is technically more binary than BCG. The reason for this is because the amount of damage you do is much more bounded.
In BCG, if your attack stat matched the enemy defense exactly, then the 1d10 roll would do from 1 to 10 damage. The variance here meant that luck could decide whether you kill a 20 HP enemy in two or six hits, a significant difference (If you're wondering why six Turns is the maximum, it's because Tension makes your minimum Damage increase every Round, so while you're doing 1 Damage on the first attack, by the sixth you're doing 6. 1+2+3+4+5+6=21). Meanwhile, your choice of Weapon was often giving you an extra 2 Damage, sometimes 4 Damage, and very rarely a Tension-based Damage bonus or a bonus effect like destroying the target's current Threshold Level. Your ability to buff yourself and debuff the enemy was a significant factor, but luck was honestly a little too weighty for my tastes.
If I had to rank the various factors affecting your damage output in BCG, they would go: Might stat > Buffs and Debuffs > 1d10 roll > Weapon Choice. A few Weapons do matter more than the 1d10 roll, like the aforementioned Techniques and Level-destroying effects, but in general the difference between a beam saber and a rocket punch is inconsequential compared to Might, luck, etc.
I think that to properly represent mecha fiction, you want a gundam's beam rifle to hit harder than its piddly head vulcans, and for the enemy mothership's main cannon to be much scarier than their defensive turret barrage. So, in BCS, Weapon choice gives you a Damage range of 1-3 for weak Weapons, 2-6 for middle-ground Weapons and 3-9 for strong ones. In addition to this, you have the usual gaggle of bonus effects like piercing defenses, doing bonus damage, etc. This has a big upside, and a noticeable downside.
The big upside is that weapon choice matters a lot more now. Weak weapons are worth using to debuff enemies in ways that counter their game plan or to set them up for your allies to take them down easier, mid-powered weapons are generally good and strong weapons are fantastic, but come with drawbacks that need building or playing around (often both).
It used to be the optimal play for many builds to take 1 or 2 Weapons only and to spend the rest on stats. Now, while you can still do that, the lack of a Might stat and the greater variety of Weapon effects means taking 3-4 Weapons instead is a much more competitive choice.
The noticeable downside is that it's a lot easier to calculate how a fight is going to pan out once all the information is revealed. Because variance matters a lot less and luck won't be a deciding factor compared to build and action choice, it can make combat feel like a math problem that can be "solved", making fights effectively won or lost in Round 1 or 2 at the strategic level with Rounds 3-5 being merely performative.
To counterbalance this, while the game still has ways to reveal enemy stats, it's harder to totally figure out an enemy's statblock now, and new enemies or enemy abilities are intended to be revealed during combat using grunt waves and boss forms to keep experienced PCs from getting too comfortable.
Ultimately, I'm not too worried about this problem because the combat math is balanced much more tightly than in BCG, and if a GM wants to pressure and make PCs lose some resources they can do so without much trouble.
Twists and Bonuses
Moving on to the extreme results of Skill Tests, we have Twists and Bonuses. One thing I improved in BCS from how Monsterpunk uses those is providing more, and better examples of what you can do with them mechanically, along with a better explanation of how to use them to improve the story.
We optimizers always have a mind goblin telling us to try and minmax the narrative so that things like Twists and Bonuses always help us more than hinder us. Doing this to a limited degree is fine, but too much will make the game less interesting, having optimized the drama out of the story. I can't fully make people leave their gamer brain instincts aside when playing, but I can write better suggestions of how to use those instincts in a way that is fun for everyone.
Other than that, it's basically the same section from Monsterpunk. Honestly the biggest change here is introduced in the next section, which is...
Consequences of Conflict
The addition of long-term resources makes tactical TRPGs much more fun, IMHO, because you can make any given fight an ultra-difficult challenge that defeats one or more PCs knowing that their owners don't have to make a new PC afterwards. Also, resource management is fun, because making numbers go up feels good, and figuring out how to minimize your losses is engaging.
We have three base long-term resources that every PC will use. Health Points, to threaten PCs out of the cockpit in a way that is overall a major improvement to the old Plot Armor rules. Wealth Points, to better represent that part of what the old Resources Attribute was doing (it was doing too many things at once). Finally, Structure Points add stakes to Operations to in a system that has Live Another Day.
But that's not all! In addition to those three, there's Training Points, Intel Points and Crafting Points. These last three resources are opt-in, with PCs starting at zero (instead of starting maxed) and they are primarily gained during Downtime, but can also be gained and lost from Bonuses and Twists during Intermissions respectively, giving PCs and GMs more knobs to turn to make for an interesting game that has consequences that matter both mechanically and narratively. As their names imply, these points can be used to: train Skills (temporarily), ask the GM questions about the campaign world, or to build things that help your PC in a variety of ways.
We'll cover each Resource more in detail when we get to the Downtime rules, as that's the section that explains how their points are lost, spent, gained or recovered.
Advantages and Disadvantages
The last item on the slate for today are Advantages and Disadvantages. These work a lot like they do in BCGR, partly because I wrote this version first then copied the text to BCGR later and edited it. The main thing worth pointing out for BCG veterans about this chunk of text is that it states that, no matter how many bonuses or penalties you add, the minimum result is always 1 and the maximum result is always 20.
I briefly considered having two additional slots in the table for results of 0 or lower and 21 or greater, for superbad and supergood results, but I think it's more elegant this way. These two additional results could be an optional rule added to the book later, but it does mean that I need to patch custom results for every action or ability that has a custom table effect, so I'm not sure if I'll do it. Probably too much trouble for something that, let's be real, is mostly going to be used by a handful of superoptimizers fishing for that 20+ result.
At the Heart of the Matter
The core mechanic is the most important rule in any TRPG. A good core mechanic makes it much easier for the rest of the system to be the same. A bad core mechanic means that, in the best case scenario, your rules don't get in the way of roleplaying. Much more likely, a bad core mechanic results in a game that is kind of a mess to actually play as written and you end up houseruling to hell and back to make playable.
BCG's core mechanic was... Acceptable. It was the rest of the game mechanics that pulled it along, but that would not have been possible if the mechanic were, say, using a d20 with the same bonuses.
That's all for today. Last time I forgot to mention that I have the rest of the review all plotted out. Part III is going to cover the rest of the general rules overview, IV is going to cover the Intermission rules, V and VI will cover the Operation rules and VII will cover the Downtime rules. The full manual is going to take slightly under 40 updates to cover, so we're going to be here for a while.
Gimmick Out.
