Not house decks, and not auto mechanics. I mean a deck of card and how to integrate that into a system. Follow the flow of logic.
I want Transcendence to be something different. I’ve decided to go with a dice pool system. Still working on the details, but it will have nine attributes, skills and equipment. Roll all those dice and bang! results follow. I found I can buy bulk dice from Chessex and have them customized, so once I get enough funding, I’ll do that. Maybe I’ll order different colors for the three types of dice. I can customize them for $1 a die, so I’ll make one set have an Ω for Xenomega dice. Maybe if I make the system setting generic, I can add other things for other settings. This one seems to work though. For the equipment dice, I’ll have a broken gun or something similar to mean a glitch or malfunctioning weapon or tool. I don’t know about skill dice, maybe I’ll just have them be 1 through 6.
Actually, now that I think of it, all the dice should have something for the 6 side, probably the same symbol. Lets pick colors! Blue for Attribute, Yellow for Skill, Red for Equipment. Roll all of them, add up Ω, subtract Fails, and there you go, that’s how successful you are. The more dice you roll, the better chance for success. But also there’s a chance for failure if the Glitch symbol comes up. Maybe that works.
The math though doesn’t work out. If you roll one die, you have an equal chance of rolling a one or a six. If you roll ten dice, you have the same probability I think. My math may be off. But if you have an equal chance of rolling a one as a six, you don’t have any better reason to roll many dice versus few. So scratch that. Rolls of six are successes, Glitches are bad things that happen with Equipment dice only. No Ω’s, no success. Glitch? You have a problem. The more successes, the better. Attack a foe and subtract their Armor from your total successes. Final count of Ω’s is the amount of damage you do.
Damage is divided into Stun, Wound, and Lethal. Some weapons do only Stun, some do Wound, a few do Lethal. You have a certain amount of each type, though I haven’t figured out how to determine that. Your Toughness allows you to soak damage. So if you have a Vitality of 3, you roll three Attribute dice. Ω’s mean you subtract that from the physical damage. Same with Mental or Soul damage. I think that makes sense. Work in progress, yo.
But then there are the cards! I’m still working on this, and its been a long time getting to this point, kudos to you if you read this far. I want to have a deck of cards, probably a Tarot deck, illustrated by my artist. It’ll have that messed up, beat down, dirty, raw, post-apocalypse look. What does it do? Well that depends. On what, you say? Let us discuss it.
Let’s say you roll your dice (all included, Attribute, Skill and Equipment) and over half of them come up Ω. We’ll call that a Critical Success. If you do this, you draw a card and it reveals something. Something arcane, something mutative, something cool. Or maybe you roll and get over half as ones. We’ll call this a Critical Failure. Draw a card and it reveals something else, something bad. The guidebook for the cards will give suggestions of what can happen, or maybe it can depend on the action used. Fire a gun, Critical Success, draw Death? Instant kill. Fire a gun, Critical Failure, draw Death? You accidentally shot your compatriot. For max damage.
At the same time, Glitches will be simple malfunctions. Nothing major, nothing awful. Maybe it fails to shoot, or the makeshift sword bends or even breaks. Something bad happens, but not something so critical its detrimental to you and your party. A Glitch using a computer may mean the file is corrupted. A Critical Failure with a computer means the bad guys noticed you cracking into their security system and attacked back with a virus.
I will have to get a Tarot deck and go through it to determine what kinds of things can happen with each card. I’ll probably have to get a book and figure out what each of them mean anyway.
Hrm. Maybe I should get rid of Critical Failures and instead have that be what the card means when its upside down. That way, even when you succeed, even when you do something great, the world still screws you over. Nothing is guaranteed in Xenomega. The world is out to kill you and you better damn well be sure you can deal with it.
