ADD DEATH STRANDING TO THIS SHAM POLL

that's all i've got

I'm want in

I've been brainstorming for a bit and I think I've nailed down a setting/aesthetic for this game.

The year is 203X. The city is Neo Mechtropolis. The situation is bad. The reason is criminals.

Good men are drained penniless by their insatiable hunger for nanosmack and mobile game cash items. When times get tough, they turn to crime. When the crimes get tough, they turn to black market psuedo augs. The whole city's filled with broken men with broken dreams and even more broken bionic arms and rocket legs. And that's not the worst of it.

Crimelords live it up in their underground digipachinko parlors, where the bitcoins flow freely. Kids are dropping out of school and jacking in to full body neural VR experiences... and they aren't jacking back out. And all the while the 'net-terrorists supercell W.E.B.T.H.U.G.S. threatens to bring the whole goddamn city crashing down.

The only thing standing between NM and total chaos are the brave men and women of the NMPD. That's where you come in. You're part of the most elite criminal investigation unit in the country. You're the best and the brightest. You're the cream of the crop. You are Counterterror Ops and Renegade Neutralizers (C.O.R.N.).

So think Deus Ex meets Ghost in the Shell with some Robocop in there for good measure.

I'm working on sorting out the details for the first few sessions, but in the meantime y'all need to whip up some Player Characters! If you haven't gotten started yet, here's a quick breakdown of the all the major pieces you need:

Name

Level: 1

Character concept- Give us a brief description of the Vibe you're going for with your character. Ex: "Smooth-talking Detective," "Hotshot Hacker," "Virtual Pop Star" etc.

Background (pg. 18) - Your Background a set of Skills that describe the way your character Gets Things Done (out of combat, at least). You're probably going to want to come up with your own (see pg 23), but be sure to check out the examples. Remember that these help define your character, so try to strike a balance between things that you'll be doing a lot (i.e. "Forensics" for the Detective and "Programming" for the Hacker) with more specific things that flesh out your character ("Press For Information" and "Shitposting"). You also choose a Trick, which is a specific use case for one of your Skills where you can spend an Action Point to guarantee success without rolling.

Origin (pg. 25) - While your Background is explains what your character does now, your Origin tells where you came from. This could refer to either your species (in the case of our setting: Human, Cyborg, or Android) or just where you came from (Country Boy, Latchkey Kid, Canadian). Your Origin gives you two relevant Skills as well as a Complication.

A Complication is sort of like the inverse of a Trick. In a situation where you would normally make a Skill Roll, you'd instead invoke your Complication and automatically fail the roll, causing a Twist (something unexpected that changes the situation) and earning yourself 1 Action Point. Ordinarily, in the case of a failed roll the GM chooses the Twist, but if you can justify your Complication, you can influence the scene in a way that's potentially less catastrophic than whatever I had in mind...

Personalize - Add one more Skill, Trick, and Complication. Try to make these more personal to your character than ones gained through your Origin and Background.

Gear - Give your character any tools they need to perform their starting Skills. You can then pick 2 more items that are whatever you want (within reason!). You also all have a C.O.R.N. Badge!

Kits (pg 32)- I've looked into Player Kits  and they seem... pretty cool? But also not something that we necessarily need to have from the get-go. In the interest of streamlining the process a little, let's say that you guys can pick your Kits whenever you first level up.

Relationships (pg 30) - This step is optional for now, but feel free to come up with a few NPCs important to your character that they can call on if they're in trouble (at the cost of 1 Action Point!). By default you all have at least one Relationship: Chris Carmichael, Chief of the Neo Mechtropolis Police Department.

Motivation - Why did your character join C.O.R.N.? What drives them to greatness? The book says this step is Not Optional but frankly if all you've got right now is "Kick ass and take names" that's good enough in my book.

Combat Class/Role (pg.101) - This one's pretty straight forward? I'll go into more detail on each of the classes and roles later if you guys want me to, but this post is already too long as it is!

Feat (pg. 137) - Don't forget to pick a feat! Feats are little bonuses you can pick to help out in battle. Feel free to come up with an original feat that's more in line with your character, but I'll nerf the hell out of it if you get too crazy.

I would like you guys to "reskin" your abilities in combat to be more in line with the Narrative. If you'd rather bother that kind of minor detail, just let me know how you imagine your character fighting and I'll handle the flavor text. That said, we're going off of Metal Gear rules here, so if you can't think of a way to justify whatever outlandish ability your character is capable of, I've got two words for you: nanomachines, son.

There actually aren't healer type classes in the game. I think it'd be easy enough to write someone out of the game for a session, I'll just need to be careful about story hooks that only make sense if a certain person is present.

TTRPGs are really cool! It's fun to go on dumb adventures and beat up goblins and orcs and kobolds. That said: I'm a little tired of D&D! I've played a whole bunch of it. I want to mix things up! I want to have new-ass adventures that don't start with players escorting a wagon and ending inside a dungeon. I want to tell new stories and I want you guys to help tell them! What I'm saying is, let's create some fiction in an interactive manner.

I picked out a couple of TTRPG systems that have caught my eye recently! They all have different strong points and depending on what gets picked we could end up with wildly different kinds of games. Let me know which systems sound the coolest but more importantly let me know what kinds of adventures you want to have!

EXALTED
shit. let's be goku

Exalted is basically Shounen Anime: The RPG. In D&D, characters start out as strong guys who do odd jobs for assholes and end up fighting gods and single-handedly toppling empires. Exalted jumps straight to the good shit: Player characters are all but demigods right from the start, and only get stronger from there. Exalted's all about telling large-scale stories and larger-than-life conflicts.

ADVENTURE IDEAS:
*A desperate king wrangles together a rag-tag team of wayward assholes to turn the tides in a dire war
*A bunch of super-powered jerks team up to take over and/or destroy the world. And those jerks are You.
*Literally Just One Piece

PROS:
+ANIME
+Open-ended character design! No more knights, wizards, and monks! Use that crazy imagination of yours!!
+THERE IS A SUBSYSTEM CALLED "STUNTING"

CONS:
-More of a storytelling game than a tactical RPG (is this really a negative?)


WARHAMMER 40k: ROGUE TRADER
to boldly go and get that space paper

Warhammer is a very traditional table top series, and Rogue Trader is as traditional as this list gets, with one minor exception: It's in Space! Space battles, highly disposable crew members, horrifying aliens await your team of Explorers on their way to vast space riches.

ADVENTURE IDEAS:
*Be Space Pirates! Travel the galaxy, loot planets, terrorize and exploit the local populace for your own gain!
*Be Space Explorers! Travel the galaxy, loot planets, terrorize and exploit the local populace for the good of the Empire
*Star Trek? What if we just did star trek

PROS:
+SPACE ADVENTURES
+Starship battles! Take command of The Enterprise Your Very Own Colony-Sized Ship _{And All The Disposable Resources Therein}
+There is a SHIT TON of prefab material for me to pull from. Not just in terms of actual campaigns, but also world-building.

CONS:
-There can only be one Captain
-Mechanically dense, easily the least beginner-friendly of list


STRIKE!
this one's just 4e lite

I like D&D 4e a lot. It's a damn good tactical combat simulator. But I'm sick of low fantasy, and I know some of you are sick of 2-3 hour sessions where we spend an hour an a half on one fight. Strike! takes the best parts of 4e (THE COMBAT) and streamlines it, while making changes to the rest of the system to allow for more flexible storytelling, both in terms of setting and the moment-to-moment dice rolls. Strike's website explains this pretty succinctly:

Instead of the Success/Failure dichotomy, where Success is generally interesting and Failure is only sometimes interesting, the primary dichotomy of the game is between Success and Twists - if you don't succeed, there's a twist and the game moves forward. Maybe you get what you want, maybe you don't, but either way something interesting that changes the situation must happen.

Non-binary resolution. Despite the simplicity, there are a range of possible results on every roll. Instead of a result indicating Success or Failure, there are four or five different possible results for each roll.

PROS:
+Streamlined, grid-based tactical combat a la D&D 4e! I'm talking 30 minutes per fight, tops!
+Modular setting and simple math means making encounters and enemies is really easy! That's good for me, which means it is also good for you.
+Super Simple! Every roll is a d6.

CONS:
-New, smalltime indie game so way less prefab stuff than other systems.