Inspired by System Shock 2, Half-Life 2, and especially They Might Be Giants.

Overview

The following was caused by me playing some System Shock 2 lately, and thinking about the RPG elements – cyber modules and upgrade units and the skill and attribute divisions – as well as playing some Half-Life 2. The thing is, System Shock 2 (and most games made using the DARK engine, like the first two Thief games) is hard to get running under Windows XP. So sometimes I thought to myself about recreating the maps of the Starship Von Braun and UNN Rickenbacker, to play it in another game, so to speak.

While the maps can be recreated, though, the interactivity can’t. In System Shock 2 you can, within some limits, decide what you want to be able to do fairly early on, at the expense of not being able to do other things, especially on the higher difficulty levels. Gordon Freeman, the protagonist of Half-Life, doesn’t have that problem. He can use almost any weapon he finds immediately, and the weapons never jam or break. He can’t research his enemies’ body parts to find their weak points (he’s a theoretical physicist, not a biologist) and he can carry all the weapons he may need at once without having to organize his stuff… and he has no funky magick, psionic, or biological powers, unless you count being a holy-fucking-terror with a crowbar as a superhuman talent.

So if I were to reproduce that side of the SS2 game, I would have to add a whole other something to the Source Engine. For the record, I don’t consider myself that good with code, but I thought about it just the same. The thing is, essentially all the games I’ve played that have a skill and attribute system tend to be built around the necessities of the game itself first, and perhaps on the needs of the world the story takes place in. This means that the only overlap between, say, System Shock 2’s stats and skills and the skills from Deus Ex are going to be the Weapons skills and the computer hacking. Even the fairly comprehensive skill systems used by Bethesda for Morrowind and Oblivion are oriented towards the world of Nirn and its back story.

The thing is, there is nothing I know of that qualifies as a universal RPG skill and stat system that is simple to implement, easy to use, and can fit the widest possible set of circumstances. Of course, there probably is such a thing, and I just never put the right terms into Google. Even so, I feel inclined to take a stab at it. This is the end result.

In case you were wondering, I didn’t put it under the Mods category because it’s technically not a mod of the existing UA rules, but an application and modification of them to an alternate setting; a first person shooter.

To help explain the system, I have employed a sample character, Somebody Q. Everyman.

Statistics

There are four statistics: Body, Speed, Mind, and Soul. Each of them are rated from 1 to 10. Not 1 to 100, just 1 to 10.

Each of the four stats has a Modifier: A clarification of what specifically in that category is that person’s most outstanding feature. This is roughly analogous to a Perk in the Fallout system and also could function as an open ended area for fan-made improvements or modifications. Three sample Modifiers are listed with every Stat here.

BODY: Somebody’s physical strength, endurance, immune system, and appearance are expressed in terms of Body.

WOUND POINTS: Are related to body, but are functionally different. Wound points are calculated as BODY x10.

Possible Modifiers:

-Big and Brawny- Somebody who is big and brawny can move heavier objects without pulling important muscles.

-Helluva Tough- Somebody who is helluva Tough gets more wound points than other people, to the tune of BODY x12.

-Hot Stuff- Somebody who is Hot Stuff is, of course, more attractive physically, and might be able to say or do things that somebody else could not (without getting slapped).

SPEED: Speed covers both how fast Somebody runs and walks, and coordination and reflexes.

Possible Modifiers:

-Quick Draw- Assume for the moment that normal combat requires that the combatant bring out his weapon/get into an appropriate hand-to-hand combat position. Doing so is considered one action on its own. If Somebody is a Quick Draw, then they can basically attack at the same time that they pull their weapons out. If you’ve ever seen a sword fight in a film where some ninja or samurai guts somebody with the same motion that pulls the sword from the scabbard, that would be a great example of a Quick Draw.

-Sprinter- If Somebody is a Sprinter, then running speed will be greater than otherwise. Fairly self-explanatory, really.

-Good with your Hands- With steady and smooth hands, delicate operations like disarming nuclear warheads, performing life-saving surgery, and picking pockets is a considerable deal easier.

MIND: The sum total of all academic knowledge, common sense, logical reasoning, intuition, and perhaps most importantly, the ability to rationalize and organize a chaotic world to keep from going totally insane.

Possible Modifiers:

-Well Read- If Somebody were to spend a great deal of time reading a wide variety of books, manuals, pamphlets and so on, then odds are good some of it will stick. Later on, when confronting an unusual situation, Somebody who is well read may know a little bit of info that makes the situation go a lot smoother. (Could also be called “Movie Buff” for the type who doesn’t like to spend a Saturday at the Library.)

-Hairy Eyeball- Giving the Other Guy the hairy eyeball before or during a fight would let Somebody figure out what the Other Guy’s strong and weak points are.

-Cloud Cuckoolander- Normal people who encounter cars that growl and move on their own have four options. They can snap and try to wreck the car. They can snap and run away from the car. They can snap and stand like a deer in the headlights, literally. Or they can try to cope as best they can. Cloud Cuckoolanders have another option; giving the car a dog biscuit and going on their way. Cloud Cuckoolanders are a lot more receptive, even friendly, with the Unnatural and unsettling and are less likely to fail some madness checks.

SOUL: The soul is the source of all personal charisma and magnetism, willpower, and the wellspring of mystic skill.

-Magnetic- Somebody who has a magnetic personality can take charge of a social situation and gain the trust of others, even when they might otherwise be suspicious. This makes it easier to lie, persuade, or bargain with other people, though if somebody is already mad enough to pull out the guns this probably won’t help.

-Unremarkable- Being unremarkable isn’t exactly like being invisible. People can still see, they just don’t care that much. Something about the unremarkable makes them very unimportant compared to the other things people could be thinking about. Security guards are liable to see Somebody in a restricted area, keep walking, do a double take, and then come back to ask questions. Being picked out of a police lineup will probably never happen.

-Aura Sight- While this isn’t a prerequisite to being a mage, it can make it a little bit easier. Somebody with aura sight can see magickal energy, residue, and effects, as well as notice unnatural creatures easier than people who have to rely on plain old 20/20 vision.

Skills

Using skills in an FPS game usually means adding some sort of statistical modifier that runs automatically whenever the player does something. In some cases, enough skill on the player’s part can compensate for inexperience on the character’s part, like in Deus Ex, while in other games everything is based on the math. For our purposes here, skills that are very dependent on player action, like combat and movement, will be based largely on player action, with skills functioning like modifiers. For skills that work automatically, like fixing things, first aid, or magick, the skill function itself is everything.

Skills are rated from 1 to 10, just as stats are. Because applying the fuzzy logic system to many different elements in a computer game can be both complicated and, if different mappers work on different areas that should be similar, arbitrary, not all the same skills will work the same way. Skills that are “automatic” will function much like the standard skill roll in UA, working against adjustable attributes that will be set as part of the environment and set pieces.

For example, there will exist a table of injuries that the character can end up with, each with a certain difficulty level according to its severity. When using the first aid skill, rolling under the target difficulty treats the injury, while rolling over does not. Similarly, any usable computer can have a set of qualities assigned to it for use, and using a skill like Hack will try to overcome the difficulties of those qualities.

In order to make the system as consistent as possible, ALL difficulty modifiers will be expressed in terms of one or more messages which the player will receive when using a skill. (This will probably be in the form of an Internal Monologue; more on that later.) The mappers and programmers will have using those messages as an option, for deciding how their maps are to work. Functionally, if “This doesn’t look like any operating system I’ve ever used.” is the same difficulty as “Password protection is on. Maybe I can guess it…?” then ultimately there is no difference. But if only one message is used for each difficulty level, it can get monotonous if the same skill needs to be used over and over, and the player’s immersion in the game is broken.

Skills based on player movement and action, however, will treat related skills like bonuses and penalties. If you’re not trained in sneaking around, you have to move very slow to keep from making noise, but over time and with instruction, you learn how to move faster without causing a racket. So a neophyte sneaker would have to crouch down behind cover and move a bit at a time to get past a patrolling guard, while an ex-Navy Skill or honest-to-dog ninja could sprint right by the guy and he’d never know, as long as he was looking the other way.

UA doesn’t come with a skill list, only sample skills, but for application to a PC game, it would have to have a skill list and probably one not much bigger than the sample skills listed in UA2. For the moment, here are the skills and the stats they go under.

Note that Somebody Q. Everyman is on strike for better pay, so I’ll be doing the examples and descriptions from here on out in the second person.

BODY:

General Athletics – While Speed covers actual walking and running speed, General Athletics would dictate how fast you can climb and swim, and how far you jump.

Close Combat – The use of fists, feet, knives, Chia pets, and other objects to hit somebody with. A better skill means you hit more vulnerable spots, and recover for the next hit sooner.

SPEED:

Dodge – Dodge is an automatic skill that can negate or reduce the damage from some attacks. Whenever somebody attacks you and make contact, this skill is rolled. Depending on what type of weapon they used and how well they used it, you might end up taking full damage, half damage, one solitary wound point, or nothing at all. For attacks with blunt or sharp objects or martial arts, this means either moving with the attack or out of the way, so the actual difference between the velocity of your body and the velocity of the weapon is much less and carries less force. (If you move backwards with the same speed as the punch coming at you, the fist will be exactly stationary in space relative to you and will never actually make contact with you. This is one of the foundations of one form of Judo. Try it at home!) For attacks with guns, or thrown objects, it usually means exposing a part of your body that is less critical if hit, or moving faster than the gunman’s hand-to-eye coordination can track you.

Gunplay – If it has a trigger and makes a noise when that trigger is pulled, it is governed by this skill. At lower skill levels, the actually direction the gun is aimed in wanders a little due to unsteady hands, and wanders a lot when you move around. Practice and/or instruction can alleviate this, and lets you hit more important areas with greater ease.

MIND:

Hack – Hacking is an automatic skill that represents your character’s collective knowledge of mechanics, electronics, the most popular passwords, security holes, and physics. Not just computers, Hacking is essentially making any technological device do something it wasn’t originally built to do. You can hack a computer to let you use it even if the firewall was supposed to keep you out. You can hack a six-volt lantern battery to get a number of smaller batteries on the inside. And you can hack a booby trap to keep it from doing what it was supposed to do, namely shoot you in the ass. While some may think it’s an oversimplification to have everything from disarming traps to picking locks to spoofing passwords under one skill… well, they have a point. But dividing all of those skills up separately can result in have three or four skills that will be at a lower level than one higher skill, and each of which might be only used once or twice in any given game, depending on how the map/mission/scenario/campaign is designed. (Perhaps it could be divided into low-tech and high tech hacking?)

Hiding – Hiding is the art of staying unseen, keeping objects undiscovered, and finding the objects of others. It’s an actively used skill that comes into play when the player has the initiative to jump behind a chair or push a bookcase out of the way. When used on normal people’s homes, you’re liable to not find something terribly interesting… maybe some cash, pornographic magazines, or the like. On the other hand, when used in the homes of Occult Undergrounders, it can really pay to check the medicine cabinet for a false back. Of course, it also pays to look carefully for booby traps.

SOUL:

Lying – There are a couple of different ways to lie. One is to tell the truth in a way that nobody believes you. Another is to tell the truth, just not all of it. Assuming that dialog options are used, the Player’s knowledge of lying and psychology will probably go into it, though mappers may have a different idea of what is an effective lie. So Lying will mostly be an automatic skill that makes whatever dialog option is used more plausible to the NPC.

Magick – Assuming that the magick system is more or less the same as in normal UA, every school will have a set of spells to use. These will be treated largely like guns, with charges as a sort of universal ammo. This will be mostly obvious with the blast. To this end, just as combat is expressed on screen as holding the weapon at the ready, magick will be expressed as holding one or both hands, or an item related to the magick, and the spells will go off with some related action with the hands or the held magickal object. Spells will probably follow line-of-sight, with special, plot-related and triggered opportunities to use long range blasts, magickal tracking, or some sort of divination.

There will probably not be custom spells. There may be a form of random magick, though, where a number of charges are literally thrown into the environment and randomly make changes in various conditions. It could cause an escaping car to stall… or it could cause that car to fly. With no control. Crashing into some third story window. In broad daylight. Causing a riot. (This would be what is known as a “Nonstandard Game Over” to those who think about such things.)

Madness and Sanity

When you encounter certain situations, like being outnumbered by guys with better guns, having everyone look at you weird, losing your job, or hearing dogs talk on the street, your Mind stat is rolled, literally against itself. Some people can handle anything, and some people freak out at only mild weirdness… while this isn’t intelligence in the classic sense, the ability to make connections and rationalize and ACCEPT the different is covered under Mind. This is where being a Cloud Cuckoolander comes in: If you fail the first Mind check, you get a second try. So the higher your Mind, the more likely it is that you won’t freak out. As for freaking out, that depends a lot on your character’s personality and triggers, to be covered later.

Cumulative freak outs – failures – can apply penalties to certain skills under certain conditions, distort the audio/video, or even cause some controls to not respond correctly, though this will probably be closer to the extremes, because players HATE having control taken from them when things are going bad. Contrariwise, succeeding at enough Mind checks will also change how you perceive the environments, probably subtly altering the appearances and sounds of certain objects and NPCs, or adding more humorous Internal Monologues, to make them look like less serious threats.

Character Personalities

A character’s personality will be determined by three things: Obsession, Zodiac Sign, and Triggers. Obsession is a tag given to a certain skill which gives bonuses whenever used: Combat skills do more damage, movement skill penalties are much lower if they exist at all, and an automatic skill can be re-rolled after one failure. Magick ability is an obsession skill by default.

Every Zodiac Sign comes with modifiers that can improve or impair social relations with NPCs, depending on if your Sign is compatible with theirs, and will probably affect some dialog options.

Each of the three triggers governing Rage, Fear and Nobility will be associated with some general or specific situation or condition, selected from lists. Note that the Rage and Fear lists will probably overlap a lot. When these triggers are encountered in the map, they will cause some changes in the interface:

Rage will cause the screen to gradually go red, and any weapon or spell used against the object of the rage will do a lot more damage. However, you will no longer be able to accurately determine how healthy you are and your dodge skill won’t work because you can’t concentrate.

Fear will drastically increase running speed, with the downside of adding massive penalties to weapon accuracy and speed – thanks to shaking – and some slow down on general athletics because your movement will be too panicky to actually negotiate the obstacle well.

Nobility is almost invariably something good. Even if you’re a jerk, you may be really good to animals. Or you may steal stuff, but you are equally generous with what you get from your fence. If you follow your noble stimulus, you actually get the chance to rebuild your identity and sanity, removing failed mind checks. Every good thing you do that is core to who you are is a stab against all the forces that make the world seem dark, pointless, or insane. Contrariwise, turning away from your noble stimulus without even trying will cause another mind check as your own identity seems to dissolve. To sum up, your key to retaining your sanity in this instance would be to remain good… however and however loosely you define what good means.

Character Creation

Your name will probably be the first option. Either typed in letter by letter, or selected from an exhaustive list of first, last, and middle names. Or maybe just the first and last.

Sex and/or gender will be the next option.

Stats and skills range from 1 to 10, with the average stat being at 5 and the average skill being at 3. You have 24 points to balance between your four stats. Once the stat numerical values are set, you get to choose modifiers for each stat.

Once all stats and modifiers are chosen, skill and wound points are calculated. You then select what skills you want for each stat and then assign skill points to them – the number of points in the stat is equal to the skill points to use for skills under that stat. You also have three skill points to put anywhere you want. Skills can’t go above their stat, of course.

With the character itself generated, you get to select a trigger event and background. These are mostly for flavor, but will dictate what clothing, weapons, and supplies you start with. It also determines if you have a job, transportation, or a residence, and if so how good it is.

Character Growth

Every time you beat some major obstacle, be it a person, an unnatural creature, or a cunning plan, you get an XP. You can use it to improve a skill immediately, or wait until you have two and use them to improve one of your stats by one. Of course, the key word is “major”.

If you’re not yet up to taking on the local corrupt sheriff, you can still practice your skills; for a certain amount of money, you can get a membership at a target range, dojo, gym, library, or skill development workshop, and go there for a certain amount of time each day for a few days to improve your skills with guns, martial arts, physical fitness, knowledge, or what have you. Given enough time, you can build up enough XP to improve both skills and stats, but be forewarned; this takes both a lot of money and a lot of time. Actually going out and making a name for yourself in the Underground is risky, but they say the best way to learn to swim is to just jump in the water.

Player Interface

First things first: The Internal Monologue. This is the interplay between the character and the player, and serves some of the functions of a GM. Think of it as the connection between the conscious and sub-conscious mind of the character, if you so wish. Probably just a scrolling marquee across the top or bottom of the screen, with the scroll speed adjustable in the game options. Or maybe it fades in and out. Half Life and Half Life 2 already have an existing system used to mark the beginnings of new chapters of the game; a similar thing might be made to work on demand according to repeatable environmental stimuli and/or player prompting.

There will be a passage of time, probably in real time, unless the game engine simply can’t handle changing ambient light conditions, in which case the game will probably be divided into distinct time periods as well as maps, with a quick fade to black and the light being different in the next area.

There will probably not be a numerical health indicator of Wound Points, but there has to be SOME way of letting the player know how fucked up he is. This will probably be expressed in terms of color. Damage will be perceived as a red haze around the edge of the screen, with fast growing surges of red from whatever direction the damage is coming from, just like in Half-Life. With the Aura Sight Modifier, the character’s own aura should be visible around the hands, and could work as a sort of health meter based on color. Perhaps the closer it is to the red end of the spectrum, the worse off it is.

There may or may not be a cross-hair in the center of the screen… it’s so common in FPS games that it might as well be default.

To keep track of things, there will probably be something like a PDA, or a spiral notebook, depending on player or background choice. In the case of the notebook, it would bring up a mode where the keyboard could be used to type directly onto the paper, with noises of scribbling. Backspacing would create a similar, rubbing out with an eraser sound.

Things like the stuff in first aid kits and ammo left in guns would normally have to be checked to be sure what was left, but there might be other ways to handle it without breaking the suspension of disbelief. Money in the wallet could be treated the same way.

Jobs, I think, should consist of actually doing the tasks you get paid for in real time. This serves two purposes. The first is to make the time where you get to actually go out and do things that you want to feel all more valuable. Second, it will probably be really monotonous to the average gamer… and that is exactly how an undergrounder would view anything not related to his obsession or the Underground in general.

There are other ways to make money, such as selling things you find or steal, mugging people, or mugging the people who mug people, but of course those have their own problems and risks.

Magick and Magick Schools

Some schools will be easier to implement than others, that goes without saying. It will probably be a good idea to make most charging actions ritual actions. This means that you have to be in a certain place and/or have a certain type of object. Taboos would be some sort of tag on other situations, objects, or actions that would drain all charges, assuming the engine can be made to subtract a certain specific type of ammo while leaving the weapons.

An alternative would be a drastically modified magick system that focussed less on individual schools and more on the power of Paradox itself, but that’s another post entirely. And that one WILL go in the Mods section.

Dipsomancy would be the easiest, with alcohol being literal ammo. Of course, drinking alcohol would cause audio/video/control distortions, so there’s a limit to how charged up you can get at any given time and still be able to use magick effectively.

Entropomancers would probably get charges from certain areas, or using certain tools. Going into a rowdy bar and using certain dialog options could mean a significant charge or two… if you survive. The same could be said for playing Russian Roulette, though that could easily lead to a non-standard game over. Perhaps Fred Mundy’s knife toss exercise from Godwalker would be a good method.

Epideromancers, since they can’t get medical help from somebody else, would need to concentrate on the ritual part. An Epideromancer would have to have a place set up, or maybe a kit, where they could do some self-mutilation and first aid quick. Also, there would need to be a way to keep the healing abilities from being used to repair charging injuries… probably a separate health meter hidden in the background. Alternatively, the healing spell could be replaced with a spell to temporarily make the body far tougher, like a slightly more powerful but non-permanent form of body of iron, to COMPENSATE for the injury. Those magickal wound points would be treated just like HL2 treats armor/shield energy, in that you can’t heal them but you can lose them in combat.

Mechanomancers don’t have spells, only gadgets, and they need time to make them. Thus, mechanomancers may very well be the mages easiest to implement; when you’re at your workbench or garage or whatever, you get to bring up a variation of the character creation interface. Provided you have materials and tools enough, the screen goes black and when it comes back it’s several hours later, you have no idea what’s happened recently and there’s a metal creature waiting for you to make use of it. It could be anything from a grappling hook gun to a metal sidekick to a very weird looking cannon.

Plutomancers would have to have better jobs than most to be able to fuel their magick. Other than that, it seems fairly straightforward. Of course, I’m now typing this so late at night that it’s early next morning. I may be missing some things I would otherwise point out.

For similar reasons, I can no longer think of anything to add to any other element, although I’m sure there are a million and eight things I should be thinking of. That means this thing is done and I’m going to go get some sleep. If my disturbingly symbolic dreams of late will let me.

Any commentary or criticism is welcome. Suggestions and ideas to add to what I have here would be EXTREMELY welcome.