MPSI - Genesis

"There is a great threat posed by nuclear weapons, true, and we have built far too many of those monsters. But horrible though they are, they are rational monsters. They explode when they should, and no more. They do not dream, hope, love, or mourn. They do not go mad with drink or lust or grief. If they did, we would all fear for our lives; and so we should."
- Sergei Primakov, 1987

In 1987, Sergei Primakov, an undistinguished Deputy Chairman of the KGB presumed until that point to be another bland cog in that agency's bureaucracy, gave a short speech to the United Nations, directed pointedly at the intelligence communities of the United States and its allies, which caused an international uproar. The crux of Primakov's speech, alluded to above, was that whatever the threat posed to the world by nuclear weapons (a sore point following the US's withdrawal from SALT the previous year), the threat of rogue, crazed or even merely agitated parahumans was far more dire. He followed up this dictum - common sense, of course, but near-blasphemy to the thinkers of the day who saw each side's parahuman resources as an extension of Cold War brinksmanship - with a plea to the collected community to form a bipartisan intelligence agency dedicated to monitoring and countering parahuman threats on a global scale. It is a tribute to the effectiveness of Primakov's speech that the notion was entertained at all - that it was, even guardedly, accepted seems so miraculous that it is often cited as proof that Primakov was himself a latent para.

In addressing the UN, Primakov had made an end-run around the Kremlin, and the halls of power rang with calls for his head. However, Primakov had developed surprisingly strong connections and, more importantly, blackmail dossiers for such a nonentity; combined with his recent international exposure, he could not be easily removed. Fortunately for the lynch mob, it seemed that Primakov's punishment was inherent in his crime: He was made the first director of the USSR side of the Mutual Parahuman Security Initiative, which rapidly became a dumping ground for the unflushable dregs of Communist intelligence. The CIA treated it much the same, and the position of the US director was filled by a constantly revolving series of careerists whose primary interests were getting the hell out of MPSI and back into "real" parahuman intelligence, giving Primakov free reign over his kingdom of dead-enders. The MPSI seemed hopelessly stillborn; distrust cleanly divided the two sides, the primary intelligence agencies refused to share any but the most clearly useless information (though the quantity was as great as the quality was poor; "full participation" in the MPSI was a means of getting international-cooperation brownie points without giving anything away), and the initiative was constantly overshadowed by well-funded mononational organizations from both Dum and Dee. Nevertheless, MPSI managed to rack up a number of small victories, though Primakov was quick to shunt the credit for these onto others, often the revolving US directors or other functionaries seeking to get out. Interested observers, of which there were very few, noted the change from dumping to testing ground; the MPSI almost imperceptibly shifted from a punishment detail to a stop on the careerists' upward trail. However, Primakov's greatest accomplishment was still to come, with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Yeah, more spy games, this time biting with ferocity on a certain agency from a certain out-of-print superhero game. I've been reading a lot of historical supers books for Wild Talents, and the desire to slap together a universe is upon me.

Rules have meaning

Looking over that digression about my personal hack of the ORE rules, it struck me that this is what I mean by the expressive language unique to games. Specifically, that last note about whether or not Will points could be cashed in to cure sanity damage. By including such a rule, I'm making a statement about the way the world - and moreover the human mind - work within the confines of the fictitious world I'm creating. And, of course, by doing so I'm making a statement about either a) how the real world works (In RPG theory terms, this would be the simulationist model) or b) the way the world works in the stories I want to tell with the system. An RPG system is designed to tell a certain kind of story, by design or omission.

By including the rule, I declare that the human mind can recover from trauma through sheer force of will. And, by not including the rule, I declare the opposite: No matter how strong your personality, once you're broken you are very likely to remain broken. Choosing which interpretation best suits the story I'm looking to tell involves both what I think is true in real life, and what I think is best for the story and the enjoyment of the player. When I eventually decided to drop the rule, that decision reflects both my beliefs about real people (that there are a lot of forceful people walking around carrying psychological burdens) and how I want the stories of my Player Characters to play out (I want them to be those forceful people, traumatized and without easy solutions).

Now, from a purely mechanical point of view, "Will" and "Sanity" are merely game resources, and whether or not they are inter-exchangeable is a soulless question. This is where we get malarkey like the belief that a game's rules cannot be art, because they're simply mathematical interplays which may bear "meaningful" labels. In RPGs, this can be counter-argued by the point that in-game values are a guide to imagination, and have as much meaning as the players apply to them. But even in games which lack the collaborative storytelling element, rules carry meaning. In chess. the rules and their interplay posit that pawns are intrinsically less valuable than other pieces - but losing too many of them will limit your options. One could, if they wanted, spin this into a "moral" about not cavalierly sacrificing apparently useless followers to advance one's larger schemes. An anti-games-as-artist (Man, I need a catchier name for that) might claim that this is a reach, but it can be derived from the rules as written and played, involving no greater leap than any given interpretation of Waiting for Godot. Tetris, a profoundly abstract game, presents "completeness" as a nebulous goal and "incompleteness" as something to be desperately avoided. In this, it speaks to a human belief so deeply held and intuitive that articulation in a traditional manner would be pointless. Whether that accounts for the game's constant popularity is anyone's guess.

The laws of a nation, the rules of its real games, are a narrative out of order, a belief system describing how the world should work according to thousands of authors, self-contradictory at times and starkly clear on a few basic points. The rules of a game, likewise, reflect the world the author hopes to create, if only for the purposes of illustrative fiction.

One Roll Engine - Mutation

One of the things that most appealed to me about the One Roll Engine is the sheer variety of rules tweaks it offered. As an amateur game designer (like pretty much any gamer) I couldn't possibly resist the lure of a sleek system with a bunch of optional rules allowing me to customize exactly to what I'm going for in my own game.

At the moment, I'm trying to stat out characters for my "Wizard" setting - currently just Delta Green/Generic Monster Hunters with a Frank L. Baum theme and the serial numbers filed off, but I'm hoping to make it more unique as time goes on. At the moment, my goals for the game are:

• A horror game, using the Madness Meters to help players confront both the monstrous things that are out there and the monstrous things they'll do to fight them.
• But a more heroic game than, say, Call of Cthulhu or basic Nemesis. The characters are significantly competent, and their willpower of the characters in the face of Awful Things From Somewhere Else is enough to give them the edge to, if not destroy, certainly foil the plans of their foes; There's a much stronger "We can fix this" vibe, as opposed to CoC's "All we can do is prolong the inevitable". Mind you, none of this means that they're guaranteed to succeed, merely that success is a possibility.
  
• The villains the PCs will be fighting are mainly human or at least humanoid. In addition to letting me work with the standard damage silhouette, there should be the constant threat of slipping too far and becoming a lunatic servant of darkness or a demonhost or something equally unsavoury. (Villains and set dressing being an eclectic mix of Mage, Vampire, Unknown Armies, Conspiracy X and Kult)
  
• Players should be encouraged to set scenes, make up background material, and generally fuss about with the way stuff works. A no-brainer, IMHO.

The current mutation is mostly based on the Dark ORE system as presented in Nemesis, but with the following rules tweaks and patches:

• Stats cost 5d each (I'm almost certain this was a typo in the version of Nemesis I looked at, anyway). Source: Pretty much every other ORE game.
  
• Body above 2 now gives extra wound boxes: +1 in the body location at 3, +1 in each arm at 4, and +1 in each leg at 5. (Source: Godlike)
• Mind and Sense, added together, equal Initiative in combat: In the event of a tie, the higher Sense goes first. (Source: ORE Toolkit, slightly tweaked)
• Command and Empathy, added together, equal Will, which works a lot like it does in Godlike/Wild Talents, albeit with a few changes to reflect the gritty-but-still-adventurous tone I'm going for. You can spend Will to:

Add 1 die to any die roll before rolling, or buy off the cost for multiple actions, called shots, etc. A maximum of 2 dice may be added or bought off in this way per roll.

Bump yourself one back in the initiative queue (that is, declare as if your initiative were just slightly better than whoever would be acting before you)

Remain conscious: Remove one point of shock damage - Like the name suggests, you would generally only use this to remain conscious when you really should be K.O.'d.

Ignore pain: Ordinarily, getting hit at all makes you lose a die from your highest set. Spend a point of Will, no problem.

Remain sane: After failing a Madness check, the character generally wigs out and behaves badly. Spending Will allows you to continue acting normally. This doesn't make the Failed notch go away, or prevent any disorder the player may get from the failure: It just allows the character to act normally rather than flipping out.

The magic system definitely runs on Will, although the exact mechanics of that still need to be hammered out.

• Running out of Will, however, is a Very Bad Thing. All the character's dice pools are halved until they regain at least 1 point of Will. Thus, a player with 1 Will remaining who fails a Madness check may be forced to decide between acting crazily but effectively, or else remaining calm at the cost of the last of their willpower.
  
• Still trying to sort out the mechanics of when to gain or lose Will, although the "Natural 10" and being awesome suggestions from Godlike seem good. Making a character lose half their Will on a failed Madness check seems pretty damn cruel, considering the game penalties that already exist for such failures, but it is arguably in keeping with the general flavour of the Will-Madness relationship I'm trying to bolt together here (especially Self checks, which are more or less by definition about the betrayal of who you thought you were). Also, players will have damn good reason to spend Will on Madness checks, making them much more likely to be have Hardened notches than Failed - Not necessarily a bad thing, as it leads to our badass monster hunters blurring the line between "badass" and "psychopath". As for magical characters, losing half their Will on a failed magic check seems like a good limiting factor. Play with fire, you get burned.
  
• The critical failure and critical success rules from Wild Talents seem like a gas: A roll with no successful sets in which no dice are above 5 counts as a critical failure, a roll with at least one successful set and all the dice above 5 is a critical success. These don't have any set mechanical effect, they're just there because they're one of those bits of old-school rules cruelty I have a fondness for. In general, a critical success should carry its set over as bonus dice to another roll (as in a critical success on a Madness check giving a bump to an attack on the monster that caused it) - Failing that, a critical success can squish/squash a roll, or maybe just flat-out add 1 to the roll's Width. Critical failures, as usual, are left to the GM's tender mercies.
  
• Adding another player-control mechanic, this one outside the ambit of the PCs' personal/psychological abilities, seems like it might be overwhelming or confusing for newbies (and yeah, also for me), but dammit, I love Whimsy Cards, so they're in.
• Speaking of stuff I love (and chances for players to be cool), Reign's Ridicule mechanic is awesome. The idea is that the character makes up a one-liner or comeback for a given line or situation, and the GM tries to ensure that the trigger line or situation comes about, giving the player a chance to crack wise action-hero style. I think this would work extremely well with the setting (after all, the characters are basically action heroes - and making light of the seriousness of their situation is very much in genre). Only trouble is, I can't think of a Nemesis skill that would map well onto it. Oh well, I can always just go the Reign route and make it a separate skill entirely for players who want to be smartasses.
• Idea I'm toying with: Will and Madness: If a character is already at maximum Will and is entitled to an extra point, for instance from a natural 10 or excellent roleplaying, they may experience a breakthrough, removing a Failed or Hardened notch. I'm not sure how I feel about this - ruleswise, it implies that characters can simply will themselves sane or unviolent. I'd probably want to limit it to thematically appropriate times, if I end up using it at all. There's also the question of whether to charge Will for it - A character losing half his Will to bump off a notch seems would be a reasonable trade of a renewable resource for a permanent injury in a non-stressful cases (and might be a component of the Counseling skill in this mutation), but in the field it turns what was a pure bonus one Will point lower into a mixed blessing. Maybe give the player the chance to decide whether their character has an epiphany or not.
  

That's the current set of ideas, but obviously there's a ways to go on this. Any suggestions, tweaks or glaring errors?