I was just watching an episode of Mission: Impossible which hinged around a high stakes poker game. It occurred to me that such an occasion might arise in a modern role playing game, such as ACTION X (whenever I finish it), so it might be worthwhile to come up with a little in-game system to simulate a game of poker. Note – this is not a step-by-step simulation of poker, and it is completely untested and probably stupid.

Step one for the player (or players) involved is to roll on the following table to discover the strength of their hand. Essentially, this would be their final hand – there’s no drawing of new cards in this simulation. For our purposes, we just want to get a relative idea of what the player has to work with. Each hand carries with it a modifier that will be used later in the simulation.

The player now nominates how much money he is risking on his hand. This will be matched or nearly matched by his opponents (see below)

Next, the player makes a Gambling task check against each opponent in the game. A gambling task check is a Charisma check in ACTION X, which uses the same task resolution system as Blood & Treasure. The player adds his hand modifier to the roll, and subtracts his opponent’s Wisdom modifier. If his opponent has a knack at gambling, the player suffers a -2 penalty to his roll. If his opponent is skilled at gambling, the player suffers a -4 penalty to his roll.

Each time the player makes a successful task check, that opponent folds and leaves the game. Each person who folds deposits half the amount of money the player chose to risk into the pot.

Each opponent that survives these Gambling checks now reveals his or her hand – roll randomly on the table above to find out what they have. Each of these participants will put risk as much money as the player. The participant in the game with the best hand takes the pot.

You never know where inspiration will originate. A few days ago, my daughter and I were watching an old commercial on PubDHub, and the name of the product, Sugarcane99, struck me as a great name for a sexy ’60s spy. As we continued to watch the commercial, it revealed itself as a wonderful little preview for a spy movie …

First, we have the spy boss, in his thick-framed glasses …

Then we have Sugarcane, Agent 99, on the beach, awaiting instructions …

Then the villain of the piece, complete with obligatory white cat.

Finally, the villain’s accomplice, a wealthy femme fatale who uses her cover as a member of society to disguise her malevolent hobby, and the victim, a hapless diplomat drinking drugged coffee …

Hopefully, you’ll be able to catch the whole crew (and much more) in ACTION X, my take on modern role-playing. I’m about 75% finished with the game, and hopefully will start playtesting soon.

I’ve been sick the last week and had some extra time to devote to Action X. Even though the game is based, at least loosely, on the Modern SRD, it’s been tough going. Blood & Treasure was actually pretty easy, since it was essentially a tribute to various versions of D&D that have been published over the year. I wasn’t attempting to re-think the game – if D&D had rangers at some point, B&T was going to have rangers.

Action X, on the other hand, isn’t really based on a game with much history. d20 Modern wasn’t a terribly successful system, in part, I think, because it didn’t have much spirit. Charismatic Heroes and Strong Heroes might be a rational way to design character classes, but they aren’t exactly concepts to conjure with, and the special abilities read more like a technical read-out than something plucked from fiction or movies – lots of skill bonuses or spending action points. As such, most of my labor so far has gone into making Action X something that might spark a person’s imagination as well as being something easy to play and run.

In the past week, I’ve put most of my efforts into the Character Creation chapter, and in particular character classes. At this point, I’ve actually strained the character classes into only four classes, though a couple of those classes have what I call “sub-classes”. These aren’t sub-classes in the sense of 1st edition AD&D, but rather a choice of special abilities made by a member of the class. The current classes are as follows:

Adept – This is the spell casting class. The adept can use occult rituals (take some time and involve arcane tools) and psychic phenomena (only require some sort of focus and concentration). The adept starts with a few rituals or powers in their repertoire, and adds additional powers at every level. To use these rituals and powers, the adept has to make what is essentially a skill check, with various consequences for failure. In essence, I’ll be using a modified version of the system in Pars Fortuna for this. Vancian magic would have been easier, but I don’t think it fits well with how the supernatural is usually portrayed in modern films and books. Adepts roll d6 for hit points (with firearms in the game, it makes sense to allow for more hit points for characters), has one good save (Will), crappy attack rolls, two skills and four knacks and two starting weapon proficiencies.

Expert – The expert is the skill class. All experts have something called “skill mastery” – this allows them to pick one of their skills and, when rolling task checks, roll two d20, taking the better of the two rolls. There are three expert sub-classes – the daredevil can use adrenaline surges, the face can fascinate crowds (somewhat like a bard) and the infiltrator can make sneak attacks (i.e. back stab). The expert rolls d8 for hit points, has three good saves, mediocre attack rolls, six skills and four knacks and four starting weapon proficiencies.

Mastermind – Best described as a MacGyver or as the Professor from Gilligan’s Island, the mastermind is the go-to guy or gal for answering all sorts of questions, souping up devices and building machines, electronics or brewing up chemical formulas. The Game Master can decide how far out these devices and formula can be. Masterminds roll d6 for hit points, have one good saving throw (Will), crappy attack rolls, four skills and four knacks and two starting weapon proficiencies.

Warrior – These are the front line fighters of the game. They all gain multiple attacks as they rise in level (as the fighter in B&T). There are four warrior sub-classes in the game – the bruiser can go into a frenzy (like a B&T barbarian), the gunslinger can sacrifice attacks for extra damage, the martial artist gets some monk-style abilities and the soldier can improve the performance of other combatants (think Captain America barking out orders to his crew). The warriors rolls d10 for hit points, has one good saving throw (Fort), good attack rolls, two skills and four knacks and eight starting weapon proficiencies.

Characters can be further modified with feats, the kinds of weapons they become proficient with and, of course, by giving them personalities. Alignments at the moment are pretty simple – Hero, Anti-Hero and Villain – but do have an impact on the game. In place of experience points, characters advance by completing missions successfully. This made sense to me since Action X isn’t really an exploration-plunder sort of game like Blood & Treasure.  A hero is your typical white hat. Anti-heroes are like neutrals – they are focused on doing what’s best for themselves, but not to the point of robbing or committing murder. Most film noir protagonists would be considered anti-heroes. Villains are not typically appropriate as characters, though a villain-based game is not out of the question. Heroes have to watch their p’s and q’s, but the bonus they get is that they can consider a mission completed successfully if they manage to protect or save innocent people during the mission, even if their main goal in the mission is not accomplished.

Now that I have the classes more or less figured out, I can focus on the task checks, combat (especially gun combat) and then put some work into the adventure chapter, which will cover a few potential eras of game play – Victorian, Pulp, Cold War and Modern – adding little sub-rules where necessary, throwing in some fun random charts, talking about some “famous villains” of the era, and equipment available in the era.

It will still take a long while to get the game finished – maybe middle of 2013 if I’m lucky – but at least I’ve made some progress.

For those who have been interested in the gun posts, and my attempt to wrap my head around firearms, I’ve uploaded my database to Google Drive. It is still a work in progress, with many empty fields to be filled (I maintain a massive commercial real estate database at work, so believe me, empty fields are a hateful thing to me).

The database is not a collection of every firearm that has ever existed – I’ve mostly focused on firearms from the “great powers” with a few other interesting specimens thrown in for good measure. It also doesn’t attempt to categorize every variation on these firearms – I’m using it for a game, so I don’t need to be that thorough.

A few explanations:

Nation might refer to the nation or origin or the nation most associated with the weapon – it’s a mishmash at the moment

Era is broken down into Pre-Modern (i.e. before the main scope of the game), Victorian (1860-1901), Pulp (1910’s to 1950’s), Cold War (1960’s to 1980’s) and Modern (1990’s to present).

Type is the general classification of the weapon. At the moment, I’m classifying anti-materiel weapons as sniper rifles.

Caliber is in inches.

Muzzle velocity is in feet/second. When italicized, it is a value I found for the ammunition, not the weapon – beggars can’t be choosers.

Bullet weight is in grains; originally, I was using place holders here originally, so some of the values might be off for the type of ammunition indicated. I’ll clean this up later.

TKOF is a calculated field – The Knock Out Factor – a useful abstraction for coming up with damage ranges.

Rate of fire is in rounds per minute.

Range is in yards, and (hopefully) represents the weapon’s effective range, not maximum, though data sources are not always clear.

Ammo refers to the weapon’s ammunition loading mechanism (or whatever the heck you want to call it).

Damage is a calculated field (essentially dividing TKOF by 20). For now, the damage values I’m going to use, based on the Modern SRD and different from previous posts, are as follows:

0 = 2d4
1 = 2d6
2 = 2d8
3 = 2d10
4 = 2d12

5 and beyond, I’m not sure yet, but 0-4 should take in most of the personal firearms, which is what I’m primarily interested in at the moment.

Cost is in dollars at the time the weapon was introduced – and this column is about 99% blank at this point. Ultimately, costs in the game are going to relate to how effective the weapon is – I just wanted a little info here on which to base my later calculations.

Rate of Fire – a calculated field showing rounds per 10-second round.

Ammunition is the type of ammunition used in some of the other fields (bullet weight, etc.). Many of these are blank because I didn’t initially keep track of this data, so I’ll need to go back through and fill these in.

Notes are just what you would think – notes.

The second Year column was just a convenience for me, so I could organize the weapons either alphabetically or by year introduced.

Since this isn’t my only copy of the database, I’m going to open it to the public for editing. Be gentle with it. My one request – if you add or change data, please highlight the cell that you changed, as well as the cell containing the weapon’s name, in yellow. It will make it easier for me to track down new information and put it into my other copy of the database. Please only make changes if you have a reliable source of data to work with, and please make a note of that source of data in the Notes field.

You can access the file HERE

Enjoy!

A week or so ago I wrote about gun in Action X. Here’s my first crack at taking the data and making it usable – a collection of “Victorian” revolvers and pistols. What I’m still playing with is the column headed “APR” – or attacks per round. When the machine guns show up, that’s going to get tricky. I’ll probably look to d20 Modern SRD for inspiration there.

For now, though, check out what I’ve got …

Of course, the main goal here, as with Blood & Treasure, is to keep it simple and playable and not get hung up on the intricacies. At the same time, though, you want gun fights to have a special flare, since they’ll be a big part of any modern game.

You’ll note that at the top, I have “generic revolver”. That’s for people who don’t want to bother with the individual firearms, or maybe for a Referee who wants to keep it simple with the NPCs. The generic version basically averages the data I have for all the weapons from the same time period and type, including weapons that do not appear in the table above.

The feed column: C stands for “Cylinder”, as in revolvers. M stands for “magazine” – a very generic term including clips, boxes, drums, etc. I’ll also use B for “belt” when the belt-fed machine guns show up. Reloading a magazine or belt should be fairly quick – maybe you can do it in place of an attack or move during a round. Cylinders would take maybe a full round, or one could take a 1/2 round to load 1d4 shots – something like that.

Anyhow – it’s a start, and I’m sure there will be many changes before I’m finished writing the game.

Do you feel lucky punk? Well, then roll for initiative …

I’m not exactly a gun nut. I’ve fired a gun, once, at a Christmas outing, but other than that I’ve never had much of a fetish for the things. Yet, now I find myself working on Action X and needing to educate myself about the things.

The Modern SRD, on which I’m loosely basing Action X, has gun stats, of course, but I need a bit more. I plan on including in Action X a variety of “eras” in which to game – Victorian, Pulp, Atomic, etc. That means I need to chart guns from the 1860’s or so to the modern game, and therefore need a system, of sorts, to figure out what’s what with these things.

One way to go would be to simplify it – pistols, rifles, battle rifles, sub machine guns, light machine guns, medium machine guns, heavy machine guns, with damage following suit: Pistols do 1d6, rifles do 1d8, battle rifles 1d10, etc. I think, though, that many folks who are attracted to modern gaming like the idea of different guns – Bond’s Walther PPK, Dirty Harry’s S&W Model 29 .44 Magnum, etc. So, again, I need a system.

My solution (at the moment, anyhow) is to base damage on two factors – calibre and muzzle velocity. In other words, how much mass is hitting the target and at what speed. Rate of fire I think I’ll handle with an abstract “burst” mechanism – probably handled as a burst multiple that can either count as multiple damage on a single target or can spread among multiple targets, with the traditional penalty to hit multiple targets. So, a gun with a burst factor of “x3” could either be used to score triple damage on a single target, or used to score normal damage on up to 3 targets.

Anyhow – here’s my little matrix for gun damage. I’m beginning the damage at d6, and dropping damage by one dice size for balls vs. bullets.

Calibre is rounded off, and muzzle velocity is in feet per second. Using these numbers, Bond’s Walther PPK does 1d6+1 points of damage, while Dirty Harry’s .44 magnum (Smith & Wesson Model 29) does 1d8+1 points of damage.

Currently, I’ve been gathering data from Wikipedia on various guns – have a little database of 416 so far, with quite a few more to go and plenty of missing pieces of data – and should be able to put together some decent gun lists for each era of the game. And yes, I’ll be putting the database up on Google Docs for folks to download at some point.