Ok so I had a burst of inspiration the other day (kicked off by this reddit post: http://www.reddit.com/r/Warhammer/comments/3526i7/a_drug_fueled_murder_machine_meet_my_eversor/ “A drug fueled murder machine”)



The idea is that everybody plays as a Juicer, a crazy assassin who is capable of incredible feats thanks to a myriad of dangerous but effective drugs.

Characters start with a few basic stats which are all pretty low (the typical st dx int, health type stuff). Lets say the all start at 1. With a stat at 1 you automatically succeed at anything whose difficulty is equivalent to a 1 and fail at anything whose difficulty is higher than that.

So how do you succeed at difficult tasks? That’s where the juicin’ comes in. At any time (as long as you’ve got the right drugs) you can “juice” by rolling a d6 and adding that value to the stat you are juicin’. You keep the die on the number that was rolled on your character sheet.

Now any time you perform an action not involving that stat (not feeding into the juice) the die is reduced by one. So lets say I want to break down a heavy door. I juice my strength and roll a 5 so i’ve got 6 now. I break down the door no problem. Now a crazy dude is flying at me with swords-a-whirling so I want to get the hell out the way. That’s dx, lets say i’ve got enough dx to dodge it but in doing so I’m not feeding into my strength juice so now the bonus gets reduced to a 4, for a total of 5 strength.

If a juice die gets reduced to 0 then I will suffer drawbacks relevant to the stat. So if I perform a non-strength action when my strength juice is at a 1 I might take a point of damage.

Now I can juice one stat multiple times, adding more and more dice and more and more stats. The most recent dice is the only one that will be reduced when i perform an action that doesn’t feed into it, HOWEVER the amount the die is reduced by is equivalent to the number of dice i’m at. So if i’ve juiced twice on strength i will lose 2 points every time I don’t feed into my strength juices. The penalties of drawbacks also increase depending on the number of dice.

I think theres a lot of cool and interesting things that could be done with this mechanic.

For a long time I’ve had this idea of a space assassin/mercenary game so I decided to incorporate the mechanic into this setting, because it fits so well. So there’d be different aliens with different starting stats and maybe tolerances to drugs etc. The game would be formatted around different jobs and in the downtime between jobs you’d be able to safely reduce your Juice levels (without receiving any drawbacks) for a fee.

I think progression would mainly be based around money, buying new types of juice and equipment/personal modifications that improve you in some way.

I especially like this idea because it feels pretty complete, just have to work out the specifics of how combat would work (I’m not going to use a separate resolution system i don’t think but it still requires some thinking about) and then I could probably start writing it up and playtesting.