To cull from my old OPs, Exigency is both a setting and a homebrew RPG system that's tied to the setting (but could easily become universal with the odd change).
It's a play-by-post project that revolves around 6 core attributes and as few dice rolls as possible- it assumes competency and is far more narrative-driven than anything else, but statistics still play a part.
And the one thing I'm constantly doing is wondering where to take it. I've been known to tweak the rules during a campaign simply because one of the players made a suggestion. It's gone through a fair few playtests but there's always the question of what to do next...
The goal here is to produce a new “release”, so to speak, of the system- and ideally to playtest it later down the line. Maybe that just involves shaking up the balance, maybe that involves starting from scratch. We’ll see, it depends what people think!
Attributes
Challenges and conflicts are resolved through Attribute + 1d20 + speciality + situational modifiers. And that's about it.
Health: Endurance, physical resilience, and resistance to bodily threats such as toxins or diseases. If Health hits zero, the character loses consciousness and is immobilised.
Strength: Raw physical power- influencing feats such as heavy lifting, grappling with an opponent, kicking down a door, or the traditional “break a club over the enemy’s head” technique. Strength can act as a buffer for Health, allowing a character to sacrifice a point of Strength in lieu of having to test their Health.
Agility: Agility determines athletic and gymnastic ability, as well as broader categories like reflexes or speed.
Focus: Focus governs your hand-eye co-ordination, your perception of the world around you and your overall concentration. Focus is essential for marksmen and skill-users, but is also significant for psionic characters.
Willpower: Think of this as “mental armour” to protect a character’s mind. Willpower represents a character’s morale under fire and their ability to push past the pain barrier or overcome their fears. Willpower is very important to psionic characters, or characters that wish to resist psionics.
Intelligence: Intelligence is a catch-all mental stat covering a character’s ability to reason, their capacity for learning and their general knowledge. Like Focus, Intelligence can give bonuses to psionic abilities. If Intelligence hits zero, the character is assumed to have lost their mind.
A human character must have at least one point in both Health and Intelligence- the core physical and mental attributes respectively.
Specialities
This is where it gets a little more complicated. Standardised skills are a main objective here, because in the past specialities that were unique to particular characters complicated matters, as did the various sub-skills.
Should Tech break down into Repair, Sabotage, and Computing? Should Ranged branch off into Handguns, Rifles, and Heavy Weapons? It’s all stuff that needs to be decided!
A few specialities include:
Tech
A character’s technological expertise; a broad speciality that covers the use and abuse of Alpha Sector’s varied devices. Tech includes the repair and sabotage of locked doors and encrypted computers and determines the complexity of the weapons and equipment that a character can use effectively.
Tech is a learned skill. It is usually used in conjunction with Intelligence, but it’s arguable that certain hands-on tasks- such as repair- might involve Focus.
Medic
Knowledge of all things biological- chemistry, genetics, xenobiology. Medic governs a character’s ability to diagnose and treat ailments and enables them to get the most out of healing agents and performance enhancers and the like.
Medic is a learned skill. It is usually used in conjunction with Intelligence, but it’s arguable that certain hands-on tasks- such as surgery- might involve Focus.
Analysis
Analysis is the art of using logical extrapolation to improve your understanding- making sense of a situation or object and getting the most out of knowledge or information that you already hold. Analysis is the “core” Intelligence skill and is important to problem solvers, but it can also boost the amount of experience a character gets during a campaign’s progression.
Analysis is used in conjunction with Intelligence and a range of other specialities. For example, Analysis could be used with Medic to boost the chances of diagnosing a disease.
Sense
Sense is using every means at your disposal to detect foes and threats and hidden presences. While Analysis might let you understand the significance of a tiny shard of glass, Sense is what allowed you to discover it on a beach. Sense determines your observational skill and your ability to tell when something just plain feels wrong.
Sense is used in conjunction with Focus, but some psionic aspects allow the use of Willpower as an alternate base stat. Sense is the opposing speciality to Stealth.
Stealth
The ability to perform actions while avoiding detection. Stealth is invoked whenever you try and perform a task, no matter how simplistic or advanced, without attracting attention to yourself.
Stealth is a learned skill. It is used in conjunction with Agility and a range of other specialities. Stealth is the opposing speciality to Sense.
Social
Knowledge of and adeptness with social norms and psychology. Understanding Alpha Sector’s endless cultures and modes of etiquette and knowing how to push peoples’ buttons- everything from persuasion to business to outright lies and threats.
Social is usually used in conjunction with Intelligence, but this depends on the interaction required. Willpower might be used for a passionate appeal or Strength might be used for intimidation.
Melee
A character’s skill in hand-to-hand combat. Their ability to hit and damage an opponent up close, whether armed or otherwise. Unlike Ranged, Melee combat is more skill-centric and less reliant on the statistics of equipment.
Melee is used in conjunction with Strength, but some styles also benefit from Agility and Focus.
Ranged
Marksmanship in all forms of ranged attacks- firearms, thrown projectiles, even psionic discharges. Ranged can give damage bonuses to weapons as well as improving a character’s chance to hit their target, whereas Focus only impacts accuracy. A master with a cheap pistol is a greater threat than an amateur with an assault rifle.
Ranged is used in conjunction with Focus, although non-standard weapons may also require certain values in Strength or Tech.
Combat
From the outset, Exigency hasn’t really featured movement or distance through design. The main advantage to melee combat is the increased damaged potential- melee uses a single role for both accuracy and damage, whereas ranged attacks involve rolling to hit and then using the weapon’s damage statistic.
In a setting full of super-strong and super-resilient entities, melee combat remains viable. Ranged weapons deal damage more easily and don’t require their user to have such close proximity to their target, but melee attacks usually have the higher overall damage potential
Again, everything boils down to opposed rolls- attempt to negate or reduce the damage with Evasion or Block, or face a Health check and the chance of losing a point or two. In the current iteration, every action lets the opponent roll their response. The character who makes the highest Focus roll begins the attack order, and every turn (post in the thread) will consist of the participants dodging the incoming attack and then initiating an outgoing attack of their own.
Guns etc. tend to have a base damage that they will always inflict on a hit, even if the target aces their Health check. All damage reduces a character’s Health and thus reduces the addition made to their future checks. It’s hard, but not impossible, for a high Health character to die.
Damage comes down to temporary (T) and normal (N). Temp damage is recovered directly after combat during recovery phases, whereas normal damage requires medical attention and time to address. While damage is usually directed towards the Health attribute, certain special abilities and scenarios call for temporarily- or permanently- reducing the other stats.
New features:
Some currently-being-tested-and-not-quite-certain-about-them combat stuff-
1) Giving every ranged weapon a Damage Capacity- the value used to challenge a target’s Health/Armour- and in some cases a Repeat Requirement- a value that determines if the user can make additional attacks. If your attack roll was 20, you could shoot an RR10 weapon twice. If you rolled ten or less, you’d only be able to attack with it once.
2) Letting melee attacks be “split”- that is, allowing the players to, say, divide an attack roll of 20 into two power-10 attacks depending on their weapon/technique, circumstances, stats and opponent.
Example weapon:
Photon assault rifle
Automatic photon weapon of an unknown make
Single shot fire mode:
Damage Capacity 15
Repeat Requirement 10
Minimum damage 1T
Full-auto fire mode:
Damage Capacity 20
Single attack
Minimum damage 1N
Special: The modes can be switched between without penalty, but not directly after firing.
Due to recoil, accuracy rolls for the full-auto fire mode are only allowed Focus or Marksmanship bonuses if the player’s Strength is of an equal amount. That is, even with Focus and Marksmanship 5 + 4 (9), a player would only be allowed a + 6 total bonus if they had 6 Strength.
An attack made with the full-auto fire mode will indiscriminately target everything within the character’s line of sight, but each target- up to three in total- must have a separate accuracy roll.
And I can and will add to all this depending on interest- there’s a lot of other stuff I’m considering in order to make this all more absorbing and above all fun for the players.
So what does everyone think? Is this the kind of group-brainstorming project people feel they could get behind?
