We have also started up a sourceforge project for this little tool and we will be working to make the thing a bit more flexible and generalizable. I also want to add several features myself.  Enjoy.

CGL has a response to all of these claims, but at this point its basically “he said, she said” and only the production of documents and testimony at the hearing is going to sort out who is right and who is wrong. So, at the very least, there is a non-trivial probability that CGL will go under, making the debate over the license renewal a moot point. Of course, it will probably take some time for the court case to sort itself out, so the waiting game begins.

I have been silent on this blog about the CGL situation. Some people might have seen a few of my posts on the various forum threads where this crisis is being discussed, and likely have tagged me as “pro-CGL.” That is probably truer than the alternative, but the honest reason why I have remained (mostly) silent is that I am (1) very ambivalent about the whole mess, and (2) I think it is best to withhold judgement in the absence of facts. The rush to judgement by many in the community (particularly the Shadowrun community) has really bothered me, and I can’t help feeling that some level of schadenfreude is involved.

What I find particularly irksome is the tendency of some to declare anyone currently affiliated with Catalyst Game Labs a “bad guy.” It is worth noting two things here. First, the only inappropriate (that’s right, I will not call it “embezzlement”) action here was on the part of Loren Coleman. Second, the people most negatively affected by this action are the other people still at CGL (owners and employees). The only real negative outcomes for fans are publishing delays and the uncertainty associated with the transfer of the license to a new company. The single person most negatively affected by all of this is Randall Bills (because it was his share of the money as a co-owner that Coleman dipped into), and yet he has probably taken more flak on the boards than Coleman himself.

A lot of the hostility is directed at Randall because he is letting Coleman remain with the company rather than canning him. This critique, of course, ignores the fact that Randall can’t get rid of Coleman, because they are co-owners of the company. As I see it, his only real alternative would be to reform a new company without Coleman and compete for the license. But he doesn’t actually have the capital for that does he now? If people would read between the lines here, they would see that Randall is doing his best to save his company in a strategically sensible fashion, moral issues of right and wrong aside.

The bottom line is that, whatever we may think of Coleman’s actions, it is in our best interest (as fans) that CGL survive. I will admit that I have my concerns about the future of CGL with Coleman still at the helm. Even if he has reformed, as Randall claims, CGL’s reputation is sullied as a result of his actions. At the very least, CGL is going to have difficulty acquiring licenses to publish other people’s games after their experience with Wildfire.  And the loss of capital is going to create more delays in getting books published (although if that applies to A Time of War, I can’t say I will be disappointed). On a pragmatic level, however, I am 100% hoping for CGL to recover and prosper in the future, rather than rooting for their demise out of some misplaced sense of honor and justice. I am not an aggrieved party, and neither are any of the fans bitching and moaning on the boards. I don’t know what exactly transpired, I don’t know exactly how it is being resolved, I don’t know whether the Bills family will still send the Coleman family a Christmas card, and frankly its none of my business. What does matter is that (1) CGL has been producing great material for Battletech, (2) they have reinvigorated the brand, (3) they have been supportive of MegaMek, and (4) they will never mistreat the universe because they are its biggest fans. Why would I want to risk all of that on a new company that might give us a new version of clickytech, or worse yet, let the license lie fallow, or even worse yet, send MegaMek a Cease & Desist letter? The answer is that I shouldn’t and you shouldn’t either. Let the parties that were actually affected by this fiasco sort it out themselves, and keep your fingers crossed that CGL comes out of it alright in the end.

It seems that every system handles autofire a little differently and gun nuts tend to complain bitterly about the way it is handled in most systems.  A lot of early systems just made to-hit rolls easier when using burst fire, which isn’t quite right because burst fire actually tends to be quite inaccurate.  Concentrated burst-fire is more about stopping power (i.e. putting a bunch of bullets in the other guy rather than one) and “bullet spraying” is more about suppression than an honest attempt to hit anything. The most common technique in most existing systems is to add some kind of damage bonus for burst fire to simulate the stopping power and then to add on some option for suppressive fire.  The problem with the first approach is that increasing damage artificially improves armor penetration in most systems because you do more damage on a single attack. Now I am by no means a gun nut. I have never even held a real gun, much less fired one. So most of my knowledge here is about what others have said. That having been said, here are my goals for autofire in MW2.MINE:

1. A system that provides players with several tactical options that allow for more interesting gameplay, without adding needless complication.
2. A system with a sense of versimiltude without getting into the nitty-gritty details of real-life modern warfare.
3. Distinguish a full burst that might be fired at multiple targets or a single target, from a short concentrated (typically three-round) burst mode.
4. Integrate double-tap rules into autofire rules.
5. Allow for a suppressive fire option.
6. Make burst fire powerful, but not an auto-kill in most situations.

Analysis

So three-round bursts and double tap are handled in exactly the same manner. The character makes one attack roll and then rolls on the cluster hit table to determine the number of hits. This is meant to simulate the boardgame rules (RACs in particular). Full bursts, on the other hand, are resolved as a number of separate attacks that can be used against single or multiple targets.

Because each hit is resolved separately in terms of damage, autofire won’t induce an artificial ability to penetrate armor.

How do all these numbers work out? Well, I went ahead and calculated the average number of hits you would expect using each of the modes based on each target number from 2 to 12. Here is what it looks like:

These numbers are worked out assuming a character with STR 4 (so no strength recoil modifiers). The black line represents the expected number of hits when a single shot is fired (which is simply equal to the probability of success for that TN) and serves as a sort of “baseline.”  The basic point here is that full automatic fire is only a viable option when the TN is fairly low. By the time you hit TNs of 5 or higher, you are better off using a three-round burst (if your weapon has that mode) and by the time you hit TNs of 7 or higher, you are better off firing single shots if your weapon doesn’t have three-round bursts.  Of course, you also have the option to attack multiple targets with full automatic fire.

Overall, three round bursts are superior to single shots (although you deplete ammo faster). This superiority declines as the TN increases, as one would expect. You get similar effects for double-tapping although beyond a TN of 8, double-tapping actually becomes slightly less efficient than a single shot.

Now for higher STR characters, the picture changes a bit. Basically for every additional point of STR beyond 4, fully auto fire becomes a more viable option. Three-round bursts and double-tap also get better at STR5, but since their recoil mod is only +1, additional gains to STR don’t help them any further. Graphically, here is the same graph as before, but this time done separately for characters from STR3 to STR8.

At STR3 (recoil mod -1), none of the autofire options are very practical above TNs of 4 or so. At a +1 mod, the expected hits for a three-round burst and double tap jump up at all TNs, but then stay the same for all other mods (because you have effectively reduced the recoil penalty to 0 and can’t go below this).  At each positive level of the recoil mod, full automatic fire becomes a more viable option. At recoil mod 4, there are no recoil penalties at all and the value of each line is simply the probability of hitting at that TN multiplied by the number of shots fired.  Of course, STR8 characters are going to be very rare, but even a STR5 or STR6 character can be much more deadly with an automatic weapon.

Here is a full example I worked out, based on these rules and the damage rules from before. I am including armor and hit locations rules that I have not posted yet, but I will post those in the near future.

Musashi, a DEST operative with a STR of 5 and a base Small Arms TN  of 2 fires his SMG (AP2/BD6) at Gunther, a Steiner soldier with a BOD of 4 and a WIL of 4 wearing a flak jacket with a ballistic AV of 7. Musashi is kneeling behind partial cover and uses a complex action to make three attacks on Gunther (his SMG has a RoF of 3).  Gunther ran this round (+2) and the attack is at medium range (+2). Because Musashi has a STR of 5, his total recoil penalty is +2 (+3 base recoil penalty and -1 for STR of 5). So, the TN for each attack is 8 (2+2[target running)+2[medium range]+2[recoil penalty]).  For his first attack, Musashi rolls a 5, so this attack misses. For his second attack, Musashi rolls a 9, so he hits. Since the margin of success here is 1, Musashi applies a total of 7 damage. This damage is adjusted by Gunther’s armor to 2 (7-(7AV-2AP)). Musashi then rolls a 4 on the hit location table, indicating a hit on the right arm. He divides the damage by 2, resulting in exactly one point of damage.  Gunther must make a KO check, but he has only one point of damage (Lightly Wounded), so this KO check is made with a -3 mod. Given his BOD and WIL, Gunther’s TN is 3 (Base 6 – 3 mod). He rolls a 7, so he is still conscious. Since the attack did less damage than his BOD, Gunther does not have to make a check for bleeding. For Musashi’s final attack, he rolls an 11. Since his margin of success is 3, he applies 9 damage. This time he rolls a 7 for hit location, indicating he hits Gunther in the Torso. After adjusting the result for Armor, he applies 4 points of damage. Gunther has now suffered 5 points of total damage so he is Moderately Wounded and must make a KO check with a -3 mod. His base TN is 5.  Gunther rolls a six, so he just barely stays on his feet.  Since the damage is greater than his BOD score, he must also make a BOD check with a -3 mod to see if he is bleeding. The TN for this check is 5, but Gunther rolls a 4.  He is now bleeding and will suffer 2 more points of damage at the end of each turn until he gets medical attention.  Now it is Gunther’s turn. He wisely hits the deck and calls for a medic.

Armor makes a difference. If Gunther had been unarmored, he would have suffered 13 points of total damage rather than 5. This amount of damage would have made him Critically Wounded and thus his KO and bleeding checks would have been significantly more difficult.

I ran into the same problem in my initial post about MW2.MINE.  But I think I may have a solution to the problem. The solution is to change the two linked attributes for Piloting from DEX/RFL (agility) to RFL/ITU (reaction time). I think its reasonable to argue that reaction time is a better measure of natural ability in regards to piloting and driving than is agility.  After making this change, let me present once again a template for the average mechwarrior character:

As I said in the last post, the attributes for this character are at the “good” level because even the run-of-the-mill mechwarrior is the cream of the crop from a large interstellar population.  But now, notice that because piloting is tied to RFL/ITU rather than DEX/RFL, I get the standard 4/5 G/P you would expect from a regular mechwarrior. I can do this and keep both skills at level 2, which is my benchmark for “regular.”

This solution is also internally consistent with the universe.  Gunnery is valued more than piloting in combat, so while potential mechwarriors must have good natural ability in dexterity, reflexes, and intuition, dexterity and reflexes are going to be emphasized in potential recruits more than intuition.

There are also three other nice benefits of this approach.  First, by forcing players to spread points across three attributes in order to produce a good mechwarrior, the system reduces the temptation for munchkinism.  Second, it allows players a little more flexibility in the kinds of mechwarriors they create.  By pumping more points into ITU rather than DEX, you can create a more recon-oriented character whose skills are more oriented toward piloting and sensor operations. Third, while RFL becomes the most important attribute for MW skills (because it is used in both piloting and gunnery), it is much less likely to be used than either DEX or ITU for all other skills, forcing players to make tradeoffs when creating characters.

I am really ecstatic that I found a solution to this vexing problem that doesn’t feel like a hack.

Damage systems are a pretty important component of RPG systems to me. In fact they rank right below the main dice mechanic in terms of importance, because they convey to me the realism of the system. I want the damage rules to convey a sense of danger to the PCs but at the same time still allow them to be the heroes of the story.  That means that there has to be the potential that a single shot or sword thrust can incapacitate and a really good strike might even outright drop somebody dead.

The damage system was actually the main reason that MW2 originally turned me off. The damage system meshed very well with battletech but was built in such a way that the average Joe took about 6 or 7 pistol shots to take down.  Thats where my suspension of disbelief just cracks right in half. What I am trying to do here is develop a system that looks a lot like that MW2 system but feels more gritty. I actually use a lot of ideas from aToW, so the damage system comes out as really a hybrid of the two systems.  First, just like in aToW, there are two kinds of damage, Wounds and Fatigue. Let me handle each in turn.

Wounds

Non-subdual weapons cause potentially lethal damage. As characters take damage from such attacks, they accumulate a wound value (WV). The total WV that a character can have before they drop dead is equal to their BOD*5, but they are likely to be taken out of the action before they reach this point.

There are various wound levels that a character reaches as he/she accumulates WV.  Each level is equal to the BOD of the category. There are five levels altogether:

The TN modifier applies to all skill checks that would reasonably be affected by physical wounds. The movement mod seems self explanatory.

Every time that a character takes damage, he/she must roll a KO check.  The KO check is a BOD+WIL attribute check that is modified by the wound mod shown in the table. The KO check is made after the WV is adjusted for the new damage. A character that fails the KO check falls unconscious. Furthermore, a character that falls unconscious must then make a BOD attribute check using the same wound modifier. If he/she fails this check, then the character is bleeding out (see below).

Any time a character suffers damage equal to or greater than his/her BOD score, the character must make a BOD attribute check modified by the current wound mod.  Failure indicates that the character is bleeding out. Characters who are bleeding out gain 2WV at the end of each turn. If the character is still conscious and this bleeding damage places them in a higher wound level, then they must make a KO check. Once a character is bleeding out, no further bleeding checks need to be made.

To stop bleeding, a successful MedTech check (complex action) must be made on the character with a modifier equal to the current wound mod. Success indicates that the bleeding has been stopped.

It is not hard to see how this system mirrors pilot damage in battletech. Each wound level is equivalent to a pilot hit and for an average mechwarrior (BOD4, WIL4), the TN for each KO check will be the same as in battletech. Well, except for the Critical wound level. The TN here would be 9 while it is 10 for battletech, but I just couldn’t give up the nice clear progression in the wound mod to put in a +4.

Fatigue

Fatigue works much the way it does in aToW, except the maximum fatigue a character can accumulate before collapsing is equal to (BOD+WIL)*2.  Characters accumulate fatigue points as a result of:

• Physical exertion
• Subdual attacks (including unarmed melee attacks)
• 1 point of fatigue is gained every time a normal attack hits for damage.

When a character has taken more than (BOD+WIL) points of fatigue, they will suffer a +1 TN penalty applied to all skill checks.

Rescaling Weapon Damage

In working out this system, I still want to be able to keep as much of the stats about weapons from aToW as possible to make the system compatible with mine. In order to do this I use a simple scaling of the aToW system to determine damage.  The AP and Base Damage of all weapons is doubled. The BAR of standard armor is also doubled to maintain its effectiveness. For ranged weapons, the total damage delivered is equal to Base Damage + 1* MoS.  For melee weapons, the total damage delivered is equal to Base Damage + 1 * MoS + STR. The amount by which the MoS increases damage can be modified by a few specific circumstances:

• Burst Fire: If using burst-fire, then 2*MoS is added instead of 1*MoS, up to an MoS that is less than or equal to the number of bullets fired. So if the MoS is 4, but only three bullets are fired then the total MoS damage is 6 (2*3).
• Surprise: If the defender is passive and unable to react, then 3*MoS is added instead of 1*MoS. If burst-fire and surprise are in effect, then 4*MoS is used.

Why did I double damage? This might seem strange because I am taking BOD*5 to be the “dead point,” while aToW uses BOD*2, thus suggesting a ratio of 2.5.  One has to remember that the scaling of attributes is slightly different. Average BOD in aToW would be 4 or 5 (although the system is a bit vague on this), while average in MW2.MINE is 3. So the dead point for an average Joe in aToW is between 8 and 10, while in MW2.MINE it is 15. So, if anything, doubling makes MW2.MINE slightly more lethal. And MoS adds more in my system, making it once again more lethal.

Doing it this way, I pass two important tests. First is the “shooting the average Joe” test. What happens when you hit somebody with average BOD (and average WIL) and no armor with an autopistol? Doubling the damage for an autopistol means that it does 8 points of damage. If the MoS was zero, then the target would receive a WV of 8. This would be more than double his BOD (6), but less than triple (9), meaning he would now have Serious wounds. A KO check would be made with a +1 mod. With a BOD and WIL of 3 and the mod, the TN for this check is 9, meaning that there is a 72% chance for this attack to incapacitate the victim and (since the TN for the bleeding check is the same) a 72% chance for this victim to begin bleeding out. Just two points of MoS and the wound level jumps to Critical and there is a 92% chance of a KO and bleeding. The MoS needed for an insta-kill is 7, so it is unlikely that one shot will instantly kill, but fairly likely that one shot will incapacitate the target and without medical attention, he will eventually die. That works for me.

The second test is the throat-slitting test. Can a stealthy character sneak up and dispatch someone in one attack? The increased MoS for surprise attacks makes this possible. Lets say a commando has a STR of 4. That will give him a base damage with a combat knife of 6.  If a typical guard has a BOD of 4, then an MoS of 5 will kill the guard outright and even a lesser MoS is likely to make him fail a KO check.

Is it too lethal?

This all begs the question of whether the system is too lethal and will cause the PCs to avoid combat as if they were playing a game of Call of Cthulhu. I think the best way to combine a lethal damage system with heroics is to allow PCs to use Edge points to “soak” damage ala Savage Worlds.  I haven’t exactly worked out the rules for this, but they will be featured when I discuss how edge will be used in MW2.MINE.

But that is for another post and another time.  In this post, I want to share my analysis of the Framewerk system that is the basis for the Cthulhutech RPG.  I have always had a strong interest in RPG design, particularly in the statistics that underlie dice mechanics.  So I present here a statistical analysis of how the Framewerk RPG actually plays out by the numbers. This may be the first in a series of analyses of some of my favorite (and most hated) game systems.

Tests

The basic game mechanic at the core of Framewerk is a test system that will be fairly familiar to most RPGers. On any test, the player must beat (or tie) a given difficulty number in order to succeed. The basic structure is:

(attribute) + (skill) >= difficulty

The book provides guidance on the various difficulty levels. Easy is an 8, while incredibly hard is a 28. Attributes range from 1-10 (at least for humans).  Skills are the interesting part. Skills range from 1 (student) to 5 (master) but rather than a flat number, the level indicates the number of 10-sided dice to roll. So a skill at novice (level 2) would provide 2 dice.  These dice are not summed up, but rather various patterns are looked for to determine the ultimate value.  There are three possible values you can take from your dice roll:

• The highest number
• sum of multiple values (pairs, three of a kind, etc.)
• sum of straights (of at least three dice)

So, for example, if I had an Intellect of 7 and an expert (4 dice) level in Occult, then I would roll four dice. Lets say I get 4,6,7,8.  The 6,7,8 form a straight so I would add these up to get 21 which I would then add my intellect to for a total value of 28.  Thats a pretty good roll.

One nice thing about the system is that it creates a sort of poker mini-game around the dice rolling that makes this process exciting and somewhat unpredictable, while at the same time keeping it fairly simple and unobtrusive.  My interest is in what the distribution of these various dice rolls looks like. Its fairly difficult to calculate exactly because of the vast number of possible outcomes. The easiest way to figure out what these distributions look like is to run Monte Carlo simulations. With enough dice rolls (or simulated dice rolls on the computer in my case), you will begin to see the underlying distribution.  In my case, I performed 10,000 rolls for each dice level from 1d10 to 7d10 (characters can specialize in skills which gives them an additional 2 dice, thus you can really roll up to 7 dice if you have mastery of the skill and a specialization in the particular area being tested). Here is a summary of the distribution for each level:

The increase in means for each increment in skill levels hovers around two. The distributions underlying these means however can change dramatically with the skill level. Here are histograms of each distribution:

The 1d10 is just a uniform distribution (duh), but after that funny things begin to happen. First, between 1 and 10, the distributions look like half of an increasingly steep bell curve as the results become more and more likely to be high within this range as you add more dice.  Second, the frequency of values begins to increase outside of the 1 to 10 range as you begin to hit multiples and straights.  This is gradual at first but by the time you get to the 5 to 7 dice distributions you start to see the emergence of a second modal point at 18.  In fact, by 7d10, the modal point of 18 is more likely than 10 itself.  There is also some interesting bumpiness in the post-10 part of the distribution.  Prime numbers above the 1-10 range, for example, have zero probability of occurring and certain other values seem to be more likely.  For example, 34 is much more likely to occur than 33 or 35.  So underlying that mean increase of 2 are what I can only describe as some freaky distributions.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Well, on the plus side, it creates a lot of excitement and suspense because you have the possibility of hitting some pretty wacky numbers. On the other hand, it creates a good deal of randomness.  While everyone (almost) wants some randomness in their game, its never a good thing for random variability in the dice mechanic to completely swamp things like attributes and skill levels.  So lets take a look at success rates under various situations.

Tests against static difficulty

First, lets look at the success rates of different skill levels against different difficulty levels.  For this example, I am going to look at these success rates at three different attribute levels: 4, 6, and 8.  These attribute levels capture the range you are likely to see in most human characters.  Here are the resulting success percentages.

Attribute Score 4:

Attribute Score 6:

Attribute Score 8:

There are a few things worth noting here. First the differences across difficulty levels are huge here. As an example, someone with an adept skill and an ability score of 8 has a 75.6% chance of succeeding at a challenging task, but only a 14.6% chance of succeeding at a hard task.  In general once you move into the Challenging difficulty and beyond the sequential differences in degrees of difficulty are very large, although the exact placement of the big drop varies by skill level.  So for someone rolling 7 dice the big drop is from Hard to Incredibly Hard, while for someone rolling 2 dice, the big drop is from Average to Challenging.

Second, atrributes are important here. I was initially worried that the variance of the dice mechanic would swamp attribute differences, but you actually see a nice progression here.  Attributes seem to matter a bit more at lower skill levels, but that makes sense to me.

Third, there is always room for suspense because at the higher difficulty levels even the most skilled and gifted characters will face a challenge. Overall, I like the look of these success rates. Next, I move onto contests (i.e. opposed rolls).

Opposed rolls

Opposed rolls are called contests in Framewerk and they work much like they do in other systems. Each character makes a test based on some skill (i.e. Observation vs. Stealth) and the person with the higher roll wins the contest.  Opposed rolls are a critical component of all game systems.  You want to create variability in your system but you also want to have enough regularity that better skilled and gifted contestants win more often than not.  How does the Framewerk mechanic stack up?

First, I will make a comparison of a contest between two different characters who have the same attribute level but different skill levels. This allows me to isolate the influence of skill levels on contests. Once again I run 10,000 contests between each dice level from one to seven and calculate the percentage of times that the more skilled opponent won.  I should note that I ignore ties here as the core rulebook is ambiguous about what to do with them.

In order to read this table, choose a value on the row and then find the corresponding entry on the column. The percentage value is the percent of the time the skill on the row will beat the skill on the column. For example, a character rolling 5 dice will beat a character rolling 2 dice 81.4% of the time.

Overall, I think the skill progression generates probabilities that most people will find reasonable.  Myself, I find the probabilities a little on the low side, although still acceptable. For example, I would like a master of a skill to beat a novice virtually every time, rather than only 81.4%  of the time.

You also get some interesting information if you read along the diagonal. Each diagonal give the probabilities associated with winning if you are X steps higher. So the first diagonal is the probability of winning when you are one step higher (64.5, 59.9, 57.3, 56.8, 54.7, 52.3) while the next diagonal is the probability of winning if you are two steps higher (77.3, 72, 69.2, 66.6, 62.3). It can be shown that these probabilities decline across all the diagonals. What does that mean? It means that skill differences at lower overall skill levels matter more than skill differences at overall high skill levels. So the difference between a student and a novice is greater than the difference between an expert and a master.  Whether this is a good thing or not is subjective.  I tend to like it as it encourages characters to spread around skills more rather than trying to max out a few.

For my second comparison, I take two characters with the same skill level but different attributes in order to determine how important attributes are to opposed rolls. Once again I run 10,000 contests for each skill level and for a margin of attribute difference ranging from 1 to 8. The percentages reported are the percent of times that the character with the higher attribute won.

There is a lot going on here, so it might be worthwhile to also show this graphically:

There are a couple of trends worth noting. First, the clearest pattern here is that attribute differences matter more at lower skill levels than at higher skill levels. You can see this in the graph both in the higher overall value of the lower dice lines and in their greater slopes. So a difference in attributes will play more of a role in differentiating students than say masters. Second, there is a caveat to that rule for 2 and 3 dice vs. 1 dice where attributes actually matter more for two and three dice in terms of the level but not the slope.

Overall, these results show a pretty consistent pattern and attributes do make substantial differences in the success rate. I would personally like to see attributes matter more, but its not a huge gripe. In most cases, you are unlikely to see attribute differences of much more than 3 or 4 and these values give a range of 83% to 62% success depending on the skill level.

So far my analysis of the Framewerk system is fairly positive. It has an exciting dice mechanic that can produce unpredictable results, but those unpredictable results don’t really swamp skills and attributes, and actually create some interesting patterns that one could argue are beneficial (like skill differences at the lower end mattering more than at the higher end). but now we come to the one really boneheaded mistake in Framewerk.

Critical Failures are a critical failure

Critical failures in Framewerk occur when half (rounding up) or more of the dice come up with one’s. My prior analysis has ignored the issue of critical failures and treated them just as another dice result. Now I will take up the issue. Unlike the dice mechanic overall, the probability of critical failures is easy to determine by using the formula for the binomial distribution. Here are the relevant probabilities:

1 die: 10%

2 dice: 19%

3 dice: 2.8%

4 dice: 5.2%

5 dice: 0.9%

6 dice: 1.6%

7 dice: 0.3%

A quick glance at these numbers will reveal a couple of obvious and deadly flaws. First, the probability of a critical failure does not necessarily go down with skill level. Rather, all even number dice pools have a higher probability of a critical failure than the immediately prior odd dice pool. This results from the issue with rounding up. Both a 3 dice and a 4 dice pool require at least two one’s but the 4 dice pool has one more die to produce those two snake-eyes thus giving it a higher probability overall. The second problem is the ridiculously high probability of critical failure for 2 dice. at 19%, novices are going to critically fail about one in five tests.  That is very clearly ridiculous and suggests strongly to me that the critical failure system was not well-thought out.

I can’t claim to be the first person to notice this glaring problem, as many people have complained about this issue on the forums. Solutions seem harder to come by. Some people suggest rounding down the number of ones needed rather than rounding up, but that doesn’t fix the problem it just reverses it so that every odd numbered dice pool is significantly higher than the prior even-numbered dice pool. It also doesn’t make the 2 dice problem go away and creates an even worse problem for the 3 dice case which would then have a 27.1% probability of critical failure!

One solution would be to make critical failures symmetric with critical successes so that failing by 10 or more results in a critical failure.  This would have the side effect of making the probability of a critical failure vary by the difficulty level (i.e. the more difficult the task, the more likely a critical failure becomes).  I actually kind of like that set up.  Another solution would be to require snake-eyes on all dice, but this makes critical failures virtually non-existent beyond the student and novice level.

Overall Impression

I have yet to take Framewerk for a true test-drive, but these diagnostics bode well. So long as you can figure out a house rule for the boneheaded Critical Failure problem, then the system seems to offer an exciting and suspenseful dice mechanic at a minimum of complexity.

So, as a thought experiment, I decided to hack together my own improvement to the MW2 system. In doing so I incorporated a lot of elements from MW3 and aToW, but the core structure is still recognizable as MW2. I was actually quite pleased with the initial results and thought I would share them. I might even try using this system. I am going to start with the basic mechanics, attributes and skills.

Basic Mechanic

The basic dice mechanic used for action resolution is the same mechanic used in Battletech:

2d6>=(target number)

How those target numbers get determined depends on what type of action is being performed (i.e. attribute vs. skill) as I will discuss below.  I like keeping the system here the same as in bTech. Algebraically, this system is no different than aToW, its just that the mods end up subtracting from target number rather than adding to the dice. but why switch the aesthetics of the system if you want tighter integration with bTech? No math is required in this system to determine piloting and gunnery skills.

Attributes

Probably the biggest problem with MW2 is that the small number of attributes and the overvaluation of Intuition led to characters that all just sort of seemed the same.  MW3 improved on this by adding more attributes for variety. I am going to keep that same idea, but the attributes I will use are slightly different. There are eight attributes organized into four “canonical” pairs.

BUILD

• Strength (STR): Raw muscle power
• Body (BOD): Physical stamina and health

I was hoping for something more like the Savage Worlds system, where you could quickly generate an interesting character and gameplay (particularly combat) would play quick while at the same time having decent tactical complexity. That would allow the RPG to better fit the bill of being the new version of Battletroops. It would also make it easier to use RPG stats for pilots and support staff for those running units in a more Battletech-centric game. In essence, I felt that the previous system (MW3) needed a lot of the fat trimmed out.

To Herb’s credit, he did trim a lot of fat. The skill list has been reduced considerably with a lot of silly redundancies taken out, one of the attributes has been taken out, and the damage system in combat has been simplified considerably. I haven’t tried the new damage system, but based on my reading of it, I think it will play very nice. All of this fat-trimming aside, however, I think the designers were still a little too wedded to some of the concepts and scaling from MW3 and weren’t radical enough in their revision. Here are my big gripes:

1. Attributes still don’t matter. In fact, I think attributes matter less. It is nice that you get a bonus to skill rolls for very high linked attributes (7+) or a penalty for low linked attributes (<4), but based on the chargen rules, that is going to have a minimal effect on most PCs, unless you get a min-max munchkin who puts everything in RFL and DEX. In MW3, at least your attributes determined your skill progression, but in aToW, attributes have no affect on how easy it is to acquire skills. This seems like a missed opportunity given that skills and attributes are on the same scale. I kind of feel like I am playing 1st/2nd edition D&D where it really didn’t matter if your character had 14 strength or 9 strength, it was basically just “fluff.”
2. -3/-3 G/P? One of the strangest decisions seems to have been that despite changing the dice roll mechanic from 2d10 to 2d6, the skill levels remained on a scale from +0 to +10.  And with the now simpler method of converting from the RPG to the boardgame, you just subtract your skill from 7 to get your battletech skill level. Its like a munchkin’s wet dream and we all know that it really is no fun to play the boardgame anymore when you even get to 0/0 much less -3/-3.  Of course, we are also told that negative skills are “optional” in the translation, which means that under standard rules, putting more into your gunnery and piloting skills beyond +7 is just for fluff. Nice. Herb’s defense of this decision on the forums has been “we decided not to try to stop munchkins” which is a total red herring.  Why design a system with skill levels that you clearly don’t want people to reach?
3. Induced negative correlation in chargen. Try making a noble-born character who owns his own mech with the given chargen rules.  He will be a complete weakling with a glass jaw, no titles or properties and a light mech at best.  This is in some ways a problem of any point-based chargen system: you induce strange negative correlations by trying to “balance” the character. So you want to be a kick-ass mechwarrior ace? Fine, but all you get is this lousy mech? You want to be the noble-born first son of a FedSuns count? Ok, but you have to make consciousness checks against spitballs.  The problem is that this system (and really all the previous systems)  create way too many opportunities for this sort of thing with out-of-whack and unnecessary costs. Most of the traits should be seriously reduced in their costs and the TP should be reduced. There really shouldn’t need to be wealth scaling of 1 to 10.  Three levels would suffice (well-off, wealthy, and ludicrously wealthy).  You shouldn’t have to take 10TP of disadvantages and turn your character into a delusional, madman with split-personality disorder just to get a fraking assault mech.

Here are the new tables:

Luckily, as a result of careful record-keeping, I was able to retcon my team without too much difficulty.

So I got a hold of some data awhile back that has extensive first and last name lists for 32 “ethnic” groups. Since then I have had this little idea in the back of my head to figure out a way to combine these namesets together in a way that makes sense for the battletech universe. Today, I finally decided to give it a go and banged out a very rough perl program that will produce a set of random names. Currently, there are only two factions, (General and Draconis Combine) but adding more shouldn’t be too difficult now that I have the logic down. These two factions also probably need some tweaking. You can access the name generator here.

Each faction has two files associated with it.  The first file give the relative frequency of surnames in the given faction. This distribution should reflect the known cultural heritage of each nation (i.e. more German last names in the Lyran Alliance, more English and French in the Federated Suns, more Japanese in the Draconis Combine).  As an example, here is the file for the “General” faction:

1,U.S.,10
2,English,5
3,Scottish,3
4,Irish,3
5,German,5
6,Dutch,2
7,Scandanavian,3
8,French,3
9,Italian,3
10,Hispanic,5
11,Portugese,2
12,Russian,3
13,Slavic,4
14,Polish,2
15,Romanian,1
16,Finnish,1
17,Albanian,1
18,Serbian,1
19,Greek,1
20,Turkish,1
21,Armenian,1
22,Arabic,4
23,African,5
24,Pakistani,3
25,Indian,3
26,Japanese,5
27,Korean,3
28,Chinese,5
29,Vietnamese,2
30,Indonesian,2
31,Polynesian,1
32,Filipino,2

First, you might be wondering why I chose these particular namesets. The short answer is that I didn’t. These are the namesets I had available to me. They are not comprehensive, but they do give a pretty good coverage of the world’s language groups (with some notable absences). I should note that the “U.S” group is largely Anglo/European surnames.

The third column is the relative frequency column. So for example the 5 on German and the 1 on Greek means that on average German surnames will be randomly picked five times more frequently than Greek surnames. The numbers here are very rough and probably will need to be tweaked considerably.

You might notice an ethnocentric tendency here in that Anglo names seemed to be overrepresented, at least relative to their current share among the world’s populations. I built this in largely because, it reflects that ethnocentric naming bias that you find in virtually all Battletech novels, sourcebooks, and scenario packs. There are simply too many Anglos and far too few of certain ethnic groups that currently make up large chunks of the world’s population (most notably Africans and Latinos, IMO). Even the biased weighting here produces considerable more diversity in surnames than you will find in most Battletech products.

The second file that defines a faction is a first name/last name correspondence matrix. This matrix is also made up of relative weights that indicate for a given surname type what is the relatively likelihood of having a first name from a particular ethnic group. I set up the baseline matrix by assigning a 50 to the diagonal (first name/surname from the same ethnic group) and a 1 everywhere else. Then I go through and try to identify cross-ethnic correspondence. I also give Anglo names a boost here, since English is the lingua franca of the Inner Sphere. I could show you one of these matrices but the labels have been stripped so it wouldn’t make much sense. This also could use some tweaking.

In any case, I will be tweaking and adding to this name generator in the future so your comments are appreciated. Enjoy!