Dial0: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 21:21, 13 October 2014

HEAVILY UNDER CONSTRUCTION RIGHT NOW

Back in January 2013, some folks on /tg/ including myself bounced some ideas for a modern setting. It only lasted three threads, didn't get a whole lot of crunch in, and went into the pile of "/tg/ gets shit done but not really if you think about it" stuff. Regardless, the premise is still in my mind to this day, and I wonder if there's other anons who want to tackle this thing too.

If you've got time to read, here's the threads in question:

>Thread 1: http://archive.moe/tg/thread/22571179

>Thread 2: http://archive.moe/tg/thread/22683517

>Thread 3: http://archive.moe/tg/thread/22744323

If not, here's the gist:

>The number of payphones in your city are dwindling.

>The remaining payphones happen to be installed on leylines.

>You got a special calling card that lets you use these phones to commune with spirits.

>You're drawn into a brutal struggle for survival against other callers.

>All of this is orchestrated by the elusive Operator.

>You are most likely playing this game with Unknown Armies.

Fluff

"In April, there were 559 pay phones in the major metropolitan area of Inland Empire. The utility service began removing the least used, unprofitable phones, leaving just 179 phones across at the beginning of this year's Autumn Equinox in September. The city plans to continue taking them out of operation until the last payphone is decommissioned the morning after the Winter Solstice, in late December. In Inland Empire this is the time between early autumn and midwinter is marked as the time between the Harvest Festival and Winterfest, due to the local history of an early harvest to make for way for the planting of winter wheat. This period has always been a time of increased crime, suicides, and the rise of a new annual crop of urban legends; and this year is no different.

"On the morning after the Harvest Festival, the news reported a ritualistic killing and this year's urban legend began to spread, the story about a phantom phone card a friend of a friend's cousin found in his wallet following the previous night's drunken celebration downtown. A card that allows you use to use a pay phone as a conduit for the summoning of spirits into this world. And the rumors seem to have multiple sources, but then again, these things always do.

"There is a secret war about to begin in this city, a red harvest as those possessing the phantom cards use the city's constantly dwindling population of payphones to invoke otherworldly being to strike down their rivals and defend themselves, because only one of them can control the last payphone on the Winter Solstice, where for one night you will be able to speak to god and change fate."

- The first OP's concept.

need to add some antagonist cabals, and some tales from "The Listeners forum.org/2spooky" (a bad MacAttax mailing list sort of knock off; a way to structure the game's rumors as a bunch of payphone nerds and people more in the know sharing creepy pastas about payphones)

Crunch

The game uses Greg Stolze's One Roll Engine (or ORE) system, for simplicity and because it's a d10 dicepool system.

In ORE games, play is broken down into three stage:

Declaration:

Where all the players decide what actions they're gonna take, and they and the GM decide which set of Stats+Skills are being used and thus what each player's dice pool for that turn is. Added to this are modifiers and special dice, such as Mastery Dice, which is a die either added to the roll to be rolled or set to a given number before rolling.

Note that the pool of dice that is rolled never exceeds 10d10 even after the addition of special dice, for strict statistical reasons, but the number of dice in a pool can theoreticall exceed that cap. Such >10 dice pools are taken to indicate greater than human levels of whatever and the GM takes this into account when deciding what the specific effect of a successful roll is, because teh size of the dice pool is always taken into account. So someone with a die pool of

Once all that is sorted out the second phase occurs;

ROLLING:

Where (kel's surprise!) everyone rolls at the same time (or they take turns if there aren't [# of players times 10]d10 available and the results for each roll are just recorded). What a player wants is matched sets of dice from their roll. The number of matching dice is referred to as the "width" of a roll, while the number ON the dice is the "height", and is often referred to in terms of "WxH", so a pair of 3s would be 2x3, or a quint of 8s 5x8. Any matched set is a success unless the difficulty of an action requires a minimum "width" - so someone with 2d10 who gets 2x1 succeeds while someone with 10d10 dicepool but gets no matches at all (so their roll is 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10) fails. But, at the same time the height DOES matter, because it and the size of the dice pool detirmines the quality as well as other elements of the success (for instance, the place an attack hits is detirmined by the height), so 2x2 from a 4die pool is a better success than 2x1 from the same sized pool, and between two players who both got 10x10 successes, the person with the bigger dice pool beyond the 10d10 cap is taken to go first and to have have done more with their success than the other.

The Width is what's usually the most important thing about a roll - the player with the widest roll has the initiative and their action goes first, then the next widest, and the next. as previously stated, height then dice pools are used to break ties, though such ties are usually assumed to happen fairly close to the same time anyway so it usually doesn't matter that much. Similarly, the width of a roll also detirmines the degree of success, 2x10 is nice, but 3x5 is just harder, better, stronger, faster, and 4x1 is even better. If a roll has more than one matched set, the player gets to decide which they want to use (very important if you're trying to gimp someone without killing them when you get a roll with both a 4x10, a very nasty head shot, and 2x3, which just hits their left leg, in your roll). Pre-set Mastery Dice, if they match, are taken into account at this point and are treated like any other dice in terms of working out if you've got a success.

Then the second set of special dice called Trump Dice are added to rolls, and Dial Codes are noted if relevent to the roll and Dial Die are subtracted.

Trump Dice are dice that the players note they're using prior to rolling, but which they get to set to any number they like AFTER the roll and basically guaranteed at least a matched pair unless you want to add a specific Dial Code to an already successful roll. Trump Dice often represent supernatural abilities and powers, in Dial 0 these can be used at the expense of a Phonecard's Credits. Like Mastery Dice, these can also be added to a dice pool like a bonus die before the roll to increase the number of dice rolled instead of being set after the roll.

Dial Codes are where ORE's use becomes unique and starts to justify itself - basically with d10 dice pools you can have rolls that match 3+ number phone codes so for instance:

Player 1 rolls a dice pool of 5 to perform a blast attack against a zombie, and gets a 2x11 success and a 9 as one of the other dice, he can if he wants then use up an additional phone credit to apply the 911 Dial Code to the blast, and that means his magical working is given an "accidental" flavor, so instead of a clearly magical blast hittin the zombie, a random out of control car comes down the street and smacks the zombie, clipping it in the right leg and doing 2 blunt damage to its leg.

Need more codes at the moment, only can think up ways to incorporate 958, 555 and 911 into things right now.

Dial Die are another thing unique to Dial 0: here you can "dial a number" over a course of a few rounds, basically how multiple round long rituals are worked out, but also a way to cheapen the credit costs for doing spells; basically while doing magical workings you have to pay a "peak rate" cost in credits from your card, but by subtracting die that have numbers matching ones found in the spell's "emergency number" (each spell your card can do has a "phone number" or something, might make it a single "emergency contact number" found on each card, probably should do the magical crunch first... or not...) from your dice pool (remembering that the overall size of your dice pool does affect the overall strength or quality of the final effect of your roll) you can basically get a discount on the spell's cost equal to the number of dice you remove. And you can remove die from your pools over several rounds to "dial" the full number if you get the right dice, thus either being able to do a freeform magical spell for just 1 credit without having to get more dial die or to perform a multiple round ritual spell at its peak cost.

After the rolling, then comes the final stage of a ORE round:

Results

Where the GM takes all the rolling and stuff that happens and actually puts it into effect in the order decided by the rolling.

more crunch to come, will lay out stats, skills, and the magical system with a rough paradox-esque mechanism too.

spellcheck's for the weak

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@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
+==HEAVILY UNDER CONSTRUCTION RIGHT NOW==
 Back in January 2013, some folks on /tg/ including myself bounced some ideas for a modern setting. It only lasted three threads, didn't get a whole lot of crunch in, and went into the pile of "/tg/ gets shit done but not really if you think about it" stuff. Regardless, the premise is still in my mind to this day, and I wonder if there's other anons who want to tackle this thing too.
@@ Line 25: / Line 27: @@
 ==Fluff==
-Well the Why, How and Whats of the thing need to be fleshed to be honest - why are the PCs risking their shit to control payphones?
+:"In April, there were 559 pay phones in the major metropolitan area of Inland Empire. The utility service began removing the least used, unprofitable phones, leaving just 179 phones across at the beginning of this year's Autumn Equinox in September. The city plans to continue taking them out of operation until the last payphone is decommissioned the morning after the Winter Solstice, in late December. In Inland Empire this is the time between early autumn and midwinter is marked as the time between the Harvest Festival and Winterfest, due to the local history of an early harvest to make for way for the planting of winter wheat. This period has always been a time of increased crime, suicides, and the rise of a new annual crop of urban legends; and this year is no different.
+:"On the morning after the Harvest Festival, the news reported a ritualistic killing and this year's urban legend began to spread, the story about a phantom phone card a friend of a friend's cousin found in his wallet following the previous night's drunken celebration downtown. A card that allows you use to use a pay phone as a conduit for the summoning of spirits into this world. And the rumors seem to have multiple sources, but then again, these things always do.
+:"There is a secret war about to begin in this city, a red harvest as those possessing the phantom cards use the city's constantly dwindling population of payphones to invoke otherworldly being to strike down their rivals and defend themselves, because only one of them can control the last payphone on the Winter Solstice, where for one night you will be able to speak to god and change fate."
+- The first OP's concept.
-The best two I've come up with so far is that there's a sort of dragon ball style "you get enough of the right phone booths together, you get a wish" type of dealio, loose rules I've come up with so far for that is just that the wish is limited to the area encompassed by the geomagical leylines the phones are on, and you can't do time shit that goes further than the earliest time you controlled the last phone in that network prior to making the wish.
+*need to add some antagonist cabals, and some tales from "The Listeners forum.org/2spooky" (a bad MacAttax mailing list sort of knock off; a way to structure the game's rumors as a bunch of payphone nerds and people more in the know sharing creepy pastas about payphones)
-Another, or possibly tangential, reason for getting mixed up in it is that there are certain pay phones and masts with "bad connections" - basically acting like misery and depression sinks ala the witches from paella madoka magica, but also bubbling over with the vengeful and wrathful dead too boot.
+==Crunch==
-So there's both a noble and selfish reason to get involved in the whole thing - to control the phones with bad connections you have to do some ghost busting, plus you have to fight various, probably more clued in and well prepared diallers.
+The game uses Greg Stolze's One Roll Engine (or ORE) system, for simplicity and because it's a d10 dicepool system.
-Then there's the issue of How: Are PCs directly performing supernatural deeds by spending their phone credits, or are the phone credits actings as batteries for say captured or bound entities, like the ghosts or other telephonemantic entities, and then those entities are doing the shit at our command? Or both?
+In ORE games, play is broken down into three stage:
+*Declaration:
-And then there's the What of what are the PCs doing to earn credits? is it as simple as "go to this place, at this time, and deliver this message to this particular person, then come back to this phone and dial 0" which can lead to shenanigans like "go to this mafiosa meet up and call the godfather of the mob a faget... and survive", but once you have to move items around you bring in other NPCs working for The Operator and the nature of The Operator requires fleshing out beyond "it's a voice on the phone that gives you credits"
+Where all the players decide what actions they're gonna take, and they and the GM decide which set of Stats+Skills are being used and thus what each player's dice pool for that turn is. Added to this are modifiers and special dice, such as Mastery Dice, which is a die either added to the roll to be rolled or set to a given number before rolling.
-==Crunch==
+Note that the pool of dice that is rolled never exceeds 10d10 even after the addition of special dice, for strict statistical reasons, but the number of dice in a pool can theoreticall exceed that cap. Such >10 dice pools are taken to indicate greater than human levels of whatever and the GM takes this into account when deciding what the specific effect of a successful roll is, because teh size of the dice pool is always taken into account. So someone with a die pool of
+Once all that is sorted out the second phase occurs;
+*ROLLING:
+Where (kel's surprise!) everyone rolls at the same time (or they take turns if there aren't [# of players times 10]d10 available and the results for each roll are just recorded). What a player wants is matched sets of dice from their roll. The number of matching dice is referred to as the "width" of a roll, while the number ON the dice is the "height", and is often referred to in terms of "WxH", so a pair of 3s would be 2x3, or a quint of 8s 5x8. Any matched set is a success unless the difficulty of an action requires a minimum "width" - so someone with 2d10 who gets 2x1 succeeds while someone with 10d10 dicepool but gets no matches at all (so their roll is 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10) fails. But, at the same time the height DOES matter, because it and the size of the dice pool detirmines the quality as well as other elements of the success (for instance, the place an attack hits is detirmined by the height), so 2x2 from a 4die pool is a better success than 2x1 from the same sized pool, and between two players who both got 10x10 successes, the person with the bigger dice pool beyond the 10d10 cap is taken to go first and to have have done more with their success than the other.
+The Width is what's usually the most important thing about a roll - the player with the widest roll has the initiative and their action goes first, then the next widest, and the next. as previously stated, height then dice pools are used to break ties, though such ties are usually assumed to happen fairly close to the same time anyway so it usually doesn't matter that much. Similarly, the width of a roll also detirmines the degree of success, 2x10 is nice, but 3x5 is just harder, better, stronger, faster, and 4x1 is even better. If a roll has more than one matched set, the player gets to decide which they want to use (very important if you're trying to gimp someone without killing them when you get a roll with both a 4x10, a very nasty head shot, and 2x3, which just hits their left leg, in your roll). Pre-set Mastery Dice, if they match, are taken into account at this point and are treated like any other dice in terms of working out if you've got a success.
+Then the second set of special dice called Trump Dice are added to rolls, and Dial Codes are noted if relevent to the roll and Dial Die are subtracted.
+Trump Dice are dice that the players note they're using prior to rolling, but which they get to set to any number they like AFTER the roll and basically guaranteed at least a matched pair unless you want to add a specific Dial Code to an already successful roll. Trump Dice often represent supernatural abilities and powers, in Dial 0 these can be used at the expense of a Phonecard's Credits. Like Mastery Dice, these can also be added to a dice pool like a bonus die before the roll to increase the number of dice rolled instead of being set after the roll.
+Dial Codes are where ORE's use becomes unique and starts to justify itself - basically with d10 dice pools you can have rolls that match 3+ number phone codes so for instance:
+Player 1 rolls a dice pool of 5 to perform a blast attack against a zombie, and gets a 2x11 success and a 9 as one of the other dice, he can if he wants then use up an additional phone credit to apply the 911 Dial Code to the blast, and that means his magical working is given an "accidental" flavor, so instead of a clearly magical blast hittin the zombie, a random out of control car comes down the street and smacks the zombie, clipping it in the right leg and doing 2 blunt damage to its leg.
-Modest suggestion: We use ORE a the system for 2 good reasons:
+Need more codes at the moment, only can think up ways to incorporate 958, 555 and 911 into things right now.
-(1) it's a damn good system, I'll drop a Nemesis PDF into the first reply to this thread for everyone to looksy at.
+Dial Die are another thing unique to Dial 0: here you can "dial a number" over a course of a few rounds, basically how multiple round long rituals are worked out, but also a way to cheapen the credit costs for doing spells; basically while doing magical workings you have to pay a "peak rate" cost in credits from your card, but by subtracting die that have numbers matching ones found in the  spell's "emergency number" (each spell your card can do has a "phone number" or something, might make it a single "emergency contact number" found on each card, probably should do the magical crunch first... or not...) from your dice pool (remembering that the overall size of your dice pool does affect the overall strength or quality of the final effect of your roll) you can basically get a discount on the spell's cost equal to the number of dice you remove. And you can remove die from your pools over several rounds to "dial" the full number if you get the right dice, thus either being able to do a freeform magical spell for just 1 credit without having to get more dial die or to perform a multiple round ritual spell at its peak cost.
-And (2) it's a d10 dice pool based system, which means you can roll phone numbers, and indeed because stats are generally between 1 and 10 you can even use phone numbers as stat lines.
-Currently the two mechanisms I'm thinking of in reference to 2 are "code dice" where you succeed by getting a "code", like say 555 or 958, and that code adding something related to that code to the action the PC rolled to do. So in the case of 555, the general pre-fix for a fake phone number in hollywood and TV movies, you could add some illusionary thingie to your action, or in the case of the 958 (a test code for many payphones, often used for verifying repairs) you can find out information about a target or add a trump die to a healing rolls.
+After the rolling, then comes the final stage of a ORE round:
+*Results
-The other mechanism I'm thinking about involves building up phone numbers, say you make a "dial" roll and you take die from that roll that correspond to a declared number you're trying to dial and put them aside and can build up a "number" (basically some kind of spell or effect or a particular entity) that way over the course of several rolls as a way to mechanically handle more prolonged ritual rolls (though I'm fucked how that'd work IC - why does it take so long to dial a fucking number?) - maybe have that be a passive thing phone card weilders can do around payphones and geomagical cell towers, and even have the PCs be able to spend these "dial dice" as mastery dice while they're trying to dial the full number.
+Where the GM takes all the rolling and stuff that happens and actually puts it into effect in the order decided by the rolling.
+*more crunch to come, will lay out stats, skills, and the magical system with a rough paradox-esque mechanism too.
+===spellcheck's for the weak===
 ===This is a lower header===

Dial0: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 21:21, 13 October 2014

Contents

HEAVILY UNDER CONSTRUCTION RIGHT NOW

Fluff

Crunch

spellcheck's for the weak

This is a lower header

See Also

External Links

Gallery

Navigation menu

Dial0: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 21:21, 13 October 2014

HEAVILY UNDER CONSTRUCTION RIGHT NOW

Fluff

Crunch

spellcheck's for the weak

This is a lower header

See Also

External Links

Gallery

Navigation menu

Search