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## Weak Inchoate Gaming System: Eternal Life

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Lago_AM3P
  Duke
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### Weak Inchoate Gaming System: Eternal Life

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Post by Lago_AM3P » Tue Aug 07, 2007 11:42 am

I had a delirious dream and came up with a game system. Ain't that wacky?
I've never wrote a game system before but I was inspired by SAME. Write now, I'm trying to come up with an ability/combat resolution system. I have more, but since I'm getting kicked off of the computer this is what I have so far. Tell me what you think.
Active Slots and Ready Slots- The Active Slots represents a number of activities that The Average can't do on a whim but for some reason they can. The Ready Slots represents a number of activities the character could suddenly reasonably perform with preparation. Depending on the campaign, this might be the ability to wield a gun, prepare to cast a fireball, or operate a vehicle. All cards that can go in active slots have a 'ready' time which represents the minimum amount of time it takes to move it there. Some, such as 'being extremely observant', takes literally zero time. The character just has to be in a position to use it (i.e. not incapacitated). Some, such as using a Personal Firearm card or a Use Vehicle card take a finite amount of time. If the character isn't already doing this then they could be in a lot of trouble, but it is part of the system.
There will usually be a finite pool of abilities that a character can draw from to fill a ready slot. This can represent a large number of reasons, such as one character's poor line of credit, being stripped of equipment and thrown in jail, or being bedridden. It's up to the player and the GM to determine what abilities a player can put into the Ready slot.
There are some pool of activities that are so generic that every PC is assumed to be able to do it, such as walking, noticing something, influencing people, or speaking. These are always Zero-Time abilities and do not require cards.
All abilities have four times associated with it: a preparation time, a use time, a wait time, and an unready time. Preparation represents the amount of time it takes to move an ability from the Ready to Active slot. Unready is the opposite of this. The use time represents the amount of time it takes before the action will take effect. The wait time represents the amount of time you have to take before doing something else.
There are one or more special Active Slots called the Zero-Time Slot. Only abilities that have a preparation and unready time of zero can go in here. You can put abilities that can go into Zero-Time into Active Slots but this may not be optimal--other times, such as talking and walking while shooting at enemies this may be called for.
Characters cannot put abilities into filled slots. They must take the Unready action to leave it empty. Note that, roleplay concerns aside, it sometimes pays to leave one or more slots unfilled.
For the most part, unless an activity is time critical (such as being in combat or disarming a bomb), assume that a character has free access to all abilities that can go in the ready slots.
A character may be unable to move abilities out of the Ready or Active slot without explicit GM fiat. This may be for things such as a priest's ability to open a channel of communication to his deity, which will always be in the Ready slot, or a more extreme example might be an elephant's Large ability which they can never move out of an Active slot. It is not recommended that GMs hand out abilities to PCs that do this unless the character has a very good reason. In any case it's better for game balance to require that all PCs be forced to keep a number of Ready or Active slots fixed.
Character Slots
All characters also have Character slots as well. There's two categories, positive and negative with two subcategories of Story and Game. You are required to keep these filled at all times unless an effect for some reason depletes them. A positive Game slot might be 'influential', which gives a bonus on influence checks and a positive Story slot might be 'well-connected', which means that your character knows a lot of important people in the campaign setting. A negative game slot would be 'weak-willed' which gives a penalty on willpower resistance checks and a negative story slot would be 'hunted by organized crime'.
The idea behind character slots is to force players to add depth to their characters. Game slots are just there for more bonuses you get from being you. Story slots, however, are not designed to influence the determination of a combat. If you have, for example, hated criminal, it might determine how many cops come after you and how hard the GM has them fight you but it doesn't affect your numbers.
Creatures- Eternal Life is a human-centric game. If a GM wants to make creatures that are not human, such as the aforementioned elephant, the GM must:
1) Determine the level of power for the creature. This will give the number of slots the creature has.
2) Determine what qualities the creature has. The GM in this case will look for cards appropriate for what the creature is. An elephant is Huge in size, has a Powerful Melee Attack, and Natural Armor. The GM calculates numbers based on the level he gave it and voila: instant elephant.
For creatures weaker than a human being, such as cockroaches, they get Hard Survivor, Tiny, and the negative quality of Hopeless. This represents the fact that they are extremely easily killed and can't pretty much hurt anything. As amazing as it might seem, the DM might set such weak creatures at a higher level than 1 for things such as spiders to represent the huge variety of things they can accomplish despite being no threat for even suboptimal level 1 creatures.
Buffs- There's no such thing as buffs in this game. Buffs are simply abilities that swap out an active or ready slot with something else in a short period of time. If the buff is voluntary but the character doesn't want to give up the appropriate slot, then they will not be buffed. This means that a spell a well-meaning friend might cast on their martial artist friend to make him or her move at super-speed may actually rob him or her of their ability to perform martial arts if their character level isn't high enough.
Initiative- Eternal Life runs on a rotating initiative system. Every round is divided into 20 initiative counts. Each round represents approximately 10 seconds worth of time. Every situation that requires an initiative starts at count 0; when initiative is rolled, you are determining order. Past that, the amount of time it takes for you to perform actions agains depends on the amount of time it takes for you to use an ability or perform an activity.
Interrupting your own action for particularly long abilities/actions takes as long as it takes to unready it and in any case can't be performed before you pass the 'use' action of the longer. If you unready an action in this case you can still keep it in the active slot.
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rapanui
  Knight
  Posts: 318
  Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

### Re: Weak Inchoate Gaming System: Eternal Life

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Post by rapanui » Wed Aug 08, 2007 4:43 am

Sounds a little like Guild Wars actually. Guild Wars and the open-endedness of Fudge.
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tzor
  Prince
  Posts: 4266
  Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

### Re: Weak Inchoate Gaming System: Eternal Life

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Post by tzor » Wed Aug 08, 2007 1:38 pm

Just an odd thought: Every time I see this thread my mind reads "Weak In Chocolate"
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