[Codename: Sardonyx] Teaser the Second

Open Development, Scion, Trinity Continuum

Greetings, true believers!

Last week, we showed you how one builds a dice pool in Sardonyx and how one generates and stores Momentum. This week’s update is courtesy of Lauren Roy and Danielle Harper: Attributes and Skills, the nuts and bolts of those dice pools. Again, go easy on us – it’s feature complete, but still pretty beta. We’ve run a few tests with stuff like Momentum expenditures, but it hasn’t met with serious playtesting yet. Soon.

A lot of you liked Momentum from last week, and a few were on the fence about it. Momentum rewards punctuation in performance, simulates rising tension, and requires skilled players to bide their time. As Malcolm is fond of saying, it’s a mechanical version of the gambler’s fallacy: certain results have to eventually stop happening, because they happened before. It’s less about failing forward (although Consolation is a form of that) and more about failing sideways. Momentum makes the fallacy true – your ship will come in – but how big the ship is depends on the risks you’re willing to take and how often you’re willing to fail. Gamble unwisely, and you might lose it all.

Such a mechanic might seem at odds with the diegetic focus of the game and the legacy systems, but we felt it important to create the atmosphere and style of play. Styles of play are deeply important to the system, as you’ll see up front in the teaser document: the three modes of play for Sardonyx we created during the alpha slice. I’ve trimmed out the specific subsystems for our little teaser, but you’ll see everything eventually.

One of the things that never sat precisely well with me in previous systems was dice pools and Attributes and Abilities never precisely lined up. At one point during the Sardonyx drafts, we had total dice pool as an indicator of professional capability, but over time it largely defaulted to the more conservative legacy model. Still, we tried to innovate a bit on the classics, which might take a little getting used to. Dice pools are generally more free-form than you might be used to, and abilities a bit more fluid. It helps if you think of Attributes and Arenas as how you’re trying to use the Skills – through Physical Force, or Mental Control.

Some of the Skills have Skill Tricks, something you might remember from a little nWoD book called Mirrors. For my money, Mirrors was the best system book for nWoD, and you’ll see a lot of that book’s DNA in Sardonyx proper. Skill Tricks are meant to be extensions of a Skill, a perk for the expert. If the Tricks here don’t whet your appetite, pull Mirrors off the shelf and check those out.

Most of the Skills referencing a social grouping also reference something called a Path, a system topic which we’ll detail more fully later. One of my mainline directives going into Sardonyx was to create hooks into specific settings (namely, the Trinity Continuum of Trinity and the World of Scion), even if the system itself was setting-agnostic. It was very important to the team to allow you to create characters who didn’t exist in a vacuum, but lived, breathed, and interacted with the setting even before you created them*. Even a character without explicit Contacts will know people in the gun trade if they’ve got a high Aim – you don’t hit up that many gun shops and firing ranges without seeing a few familiar faces. Dramatic Editing even allows you to define and redefine a bit of that past you might not have set in stone during character creation.

Ian’s got a little bit of Trinity to show you later this week, and I’ll be back next week to detail out those three areas of play a bit more.

Music: Evil Friends (Jake One Remix Feat. Danny Brown) by Portugal. The Man.

* except for a certain type of Scion…but that’s another blog post.