Thursday 1 August 2013

How to Weasel People into Gaming With You or "Sometimes Three's a Crowd"

Wow!  My wife actually playtested Fight Club with me!  All I had to do was convince her it isn't an RPG, just a stand-alone game(which is technically true, though it is also a set of alternate martial arts rules for Cyberpunk 2020).  OK, I'm not sure she believed me entirely, especially when I pulled out the characters sheets and polyhedral dice, but she was a good sport and at the end of the test she told me, sounding quite surprised "That was fun!"

Playtest Results


This was my third playtest of Fight Club.  Since it was my wife's first time with Cyberpunk 2020 combat, I gave her an advantage: I gave my character a Reflex of 5, while hers was 10.  And I got my butt kicked as a result.

Orignial BTM chart
I had added a mechanic for Cool to Fight Club: if your character is knocked down then a Cool test can bring them back into the action. I did this because of a real-life factor in Martial Arts.  Royce Gracie one remarked that he likes to classify a fighter based on 3 factors:

  1. Physical Attributes
  2. Fighting Skill
  3. Spirit
This third one is a real factor.  You can sense when your opponent(or you) have given-up on winning and they just shut-down or go into autopilot.

Anyway, the first two factors are covered by your Ref, Body, and Skills, but I wanted to give a representation to Spirit too, so I decided that would be your Cool score.  But it still ends up being a dump stat since REF and BODY have so much more effect.  So regrettably, I changed the rules so that COOL is not a factor and the cool tests are now standard Stun Tests vs. Body.


To make BODY more important, I'm also changing the Add to Damage and BTM to make them more of a factor(skill can add up to 5 damage to a strike, so Body should too).

Original Add to Damage chart
BodyBody Type ModifierAdd to Damage
100
200
311
411
533
633
733
844
944
1055

Anyway, maybe I'm make a PDF with the summary of these alternate martial arts rules for CP2020.

2 comments:

  1. If I remember right there was some sort of Faceoff rule in CP2020 where before a fight you would make an opposed cool check against your opponent to try to make them back down. If you lost but fought anyway then you would have a penalty to your actions.

    You could also try adding cool checks like morale in D&D. Have specific times and situations where you have to make a cool check. e.g. First time hit, first time hit in head, first time stunned, three consecutive rounds of not hitting the opponent, three consecutive rounds of being hit.

    Of course these would only apply to NPCs. The PCs should be able to make their own decisions. If it was a campaign you might see them being a bit more hesitant than for a test fight.

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    1. Interesting, I think we must have glossed over that CP2020 rule when we played. We did use Cool for morale now and again, though.

      Anyway, Fight Club is meant to be usable together with CP2020, so if you're doing that, you have the Cool stat for those sorts of things. If you are just playing Fight Club stand-alone, so the skills give it a lot of complexity already, I've made peace with there being just two stats.

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