u/Bubbly_Outcome5016

Been enjoying the system for a few months now and I wanted to share an idea from saving my old Threads/Characters. It's a new random event focus called "Legacy Event", in which like I described either retired storylines or forgotten characters that you thought were dead and buried come back into the story after you crossed them off your list by virtue of rolling on a list.

A good way to handle this is whenever your story veers off course and into the territory where it doesn't really make sense to keep focusing on whatever your characters are doing at the moment you jot them down on a long-form Thread/Character list and tuck it away. Days or even weeks pass and you roll Legacy Event and a character you forgot about/abandoned returns or consequences of a decision made by during a Thread or NOT finishing a thread rear their head again . Make it like a 3% chance on the d100 roll so it is happening very rarely.

It's kind of adjacent to remote event and the opposite of current context, but too my knowledge not something that's been introduced in any of the magazines I've skimmed so there ya go.

I have an idea for a Dragonball TTRPG, now I know there is one but it's famously pretty trash, but I have a simple idea for a base mechanic using a 15x15 rock-paper-scissors Go Fish-type call-system which emulates how fast a DBZ battle plays out. Idea is that it's not too crunchy and more flavored for simplicity rather than like Pathfinder mechanics. This is kinda the Budokai Guessing Minigame extrapolated for story-telling.

We use very vague concepts of moves (I call them Techniques mechanically) that Dragon Ball tends to gravitate towards five categories of moves: Offense, Ki, Defense, Utility and Unique Expression

Offense: Dragon Rush (One Fighter knocks another away and then pursues them while in flight), Blitz (attacking with a flurry of high-speed punches and kicks), Grapple (everything from Goku's Dragon Throw, Freeza drowning Goku, to 16's spiking imperfect Cell into the ground and even Perfect cell pummeling SS1 Gohan one-handed while griping him up like a school bully)

Ki: Ki-Blast Spamming (THAT'S VEGETA'S MOVE), The Beam (self-explanatory), Planet Buster (like Spirit Bomb or Frieza's Death Ball: a big ball of energy that is thrown like a "ki heavy attack")

Defense: Block (Fighters cross their forearms in an "X" shape to absorb the impact of physical strikes or small blasts), Energy Shield (Like that 17 and Cell use but we've seen it from others at times), The Teleport Counter (The Reversal Strike where a fighter uses Afterimage or Instant Transmission to bait an opponent and then counters)

Utility: Vision/Sensory Impairment (Solar Flare etc, Smoke screens), Powering Up (to either both gain ki to improve an attack, reach a transformation AND when it's done to push fighters away with a shockwave, it has UTILITY) and Flight/Landing (This is electing to take flight OR return to earth, usually serves to set-up what comes next)

Expression: This is where you get to express YOUR fighters uniqueness now that the basics are down. Completely up to you but this where say Buu's transfiguration, Piccolo's regeneration, many of Tien's techniques, Cell's self-inflicted pregnancy fall in.

It's R-P-S at heart so some moves are weighted to beat others, but every character has a power level that gets put into consideration and factored into a percentile d100 with Degrees of Success/Failure based on how much you eclipse or fall short on your target roll (not binary you made the roll or didn't, you can make it big or really muck it up). There will also be a power-level mechanic so if your PL is much higher than your opponent it won't really matter that you fight sub-optimally a lot of fights in Dragonball are not even by design. Technique + d100 percentile + Static Power Level decides outcome. That's Pillar 1 of combat.

I intend to watch a bunch of OG/Z/Super and tally what techniques win against each with regularity on screen so the combat feels like it makes sense, but off the top of my head, an Energy Shield Defense should almost always beat a Beam etc. It'll be tough determining how Ki-blast spam should work as it's almost always a desperation move unless you're the Androids but I'll think of something. The idea is taht you can have a laminated chart in front of you and a friend/opponent/oracle-controlled enemy and determine outcomes at a glance. You would play this with your phone for quick-maths, the chart for reference and a tracker to keep track of the next mechanic which is all about ... Momentum.

Pillar 2 is about momentum, in Dragon Ball one opponent has the upper-hand and then that shifts due to narrative, tension or character development related reasons and this is where lik 80% of Toriyama's story-telling takes place. I want to emulate something like Mythic GME's Chaos system to determine that, this one is still in the works, but players should work on winning mechanically through the move-sets BUT also have a secondary system ensuring they have momentum, it's half-catch-up mechanic and half-tension amplifier that keeps fights intense and not one-sided because we are respecting Power levels as a concept. Still cooking this.

Pillar 3: Resource economy is important in Dragonball, physical fatigue, ki reserves, this is where narratively, a technique like the Kaioken is something Goku will do to equalize a fight but with a draw-back and it's a deliberate and concerted CHOICE the player must make with pay-offs and draw backs. Items qualify, like Senzu Beans. It's the simplest system but also the one with the most player agency since the main pillars operate somewhat on weighted probability and the concept of narrative ping-pong. I haven't really ironed this out yet but it needs to be the one in which you get to express tactical control and are heavily rewarded for doing the "mechanically sound and correct" thing at the given moment...

Tl;dr: So Pillar 1 is the combat system using a 15x15 grid (9x9 was too limiting), then a d100 percentile roll and a static Power Level to determine the victor, Pillar 2 I have decided will be a Momentum-based pendulum where fighters gain dominance over one another by getting WINNING outcomes on the 15x15 grid and serves as a Chaos, tension amplifier AND a catch-up mechanic of sorts that rewards the losing player for taking initiative back and Pillar 3 should be some sort of resource economy other games use so players can be very active and control outcomes. What do you think, too simple, too crunchy... done before?

Context: Been playing out the old-school RT supplements in Owlcat's vision of the Koronus Expanse(same plot and characters as a baseline) solo using Mythic GM 2e and a bunch of other solo-tools mostly to test both the RT d100 system and some solo tools like Story Engine that I've been interested in learning to use and by some crazy series of dice rolls... Kunrad was absolutely out-played by some dickhead low-rent hood excuse of a Rogue Trader named Krawkin Feckward (yeah some goofy names in old 40k) and was left as a corpse for my party to find after the two had been collaborating to capture my MC and Kunrad just outlived his usefulness.

So this may be a huge divergence point in the plot of Owlcat's Rogue Trader... or it might not be since the CotFD was just a red herring at the end of the day. Simply stated, what happens to the main story if Kunrad just gets offed in Act 2, obviously it has implications for Euphrates II, but would anything else really be different?

Useable Idira

You can also pair it with the Denial of Nightmare Charms which makes the psyker immune to Horrors to begin with to effectively remove the downside.

She's still cooky but it feels like I have a means to prevent Blue and Pink Horror Hell in the early game

Lot of different weapon marks in the Imperium, can't be certain...

This and Jae's guns throw me for a loop since they're not the ones in her load-out and look like custom autopistols instead of an Aeldari/Drukhai pistol combo

The backstory for the game is very intricate from Theodora finding the Necrons on Vheabos and being led to Epitath, Amarnat's role in creating the tech-blight, the Eschaton and finally a part for the Yoke that Calcazar had blackmailed them into helping with (I believe it was just one part of the Yoke), all the way to the Abelard/Idira mindwipe that fucked Idira's head up and her death at Argenta's hands.

But what would you say is the missing piece of the puzzle that Owlcat didn't explore or just hand-waved somewhat unsatisfactorily?

To get us started, examples

1.) A specific reason Theodora chose to use Crudarach as a testing ground for the Tech-blight (I know the answer is yolo but sometimes that doesn't feel like enough)

2.) ..some of Kunrad's actions (I know he purposefully allowed a plot to develop in Theodora's retinue, who were Inquisitorial spies to foment all to get brownie points for exposing them at the last possible second in a bid to get Theodora to see he should be heir and it blew up in his face, but then why deface the Warrant of Trade at the beginning of the game. How does that help him get what he wants?)

3.) The Lenses, maybe it's enough that we just know that Theodora is a deeply corrupt Rogue Trader and just delves deeply into Chaos, but what was the plan and how was the whole cloning potential of the device gonna aid her?

Stuff like that. I want to know what you think can be explored in DLC 3 and 4

• So much Reactivity to my character's unique background as a Bounty Hunter with the Wanted Trait and the fact that I was the Mantis when the base game fails to acknowledge them on a consistent enough basis for it to matter.
• The Call backs to Vectera and finding the Artifact creating book-ends for the plot, in general just far better environmental story telling than anything else in the game via the use of the trippy chemical gas.
• Tackles the theme of frontier/punitive justice and the corruption of true justice by bureaucratic government entities far better than the Freestar's whole length at like 1/5 of the runtime as a bonus.
• Linear Game design that actually feels... designed, asking the player to navigate, deal with hazards and illusions, solve puzzles and not simply following our Lord and Savior the Blue Pentagon of Progress with brain half off through combat arena 1 ,2 and 3.
• Final combat encounter that doesn't consist of one-tapping a woefully undermatched opponent with the sum total of 200 hours of grinded gear and perks
• I AM the Mantis!

Played the Freestar questline (meh), most of the side-quests again and finished Terran Armada (big meh )on this second playthrough and felt just.. .whelmed, but the Tracker's Alliance quests. All of them, were collectively just as good as the UC faction quests which were the only other missions I found to be great as well.