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Double Cross-[Neither Confirm Nor Deny]

MJ12 Commando

MJ12 Commando

Shadow Cabal Barristerminator
Arbitrator
Or: Double Cross-[PROTOTYPE: The Anime: The Game]

The year is 2020, and things have been getting strange for the last 20 years. Inexplicable happenings are everyday. Everyone seemingly knows someone who has seen something paranormal-men who control fire and ice, or can dodge bullets, or turn invisible. Rumors of vampires, werewolves, aliens, and other creatures of the night have left the world of total crackpots-talking about 'supernatural phenomena' has gone increasingly mainstream. "Zombie survival guides" and other nonsense have become increasingly popular as people turn to pop culture to understand what cannot-is not-explained. Governments refuse to confirm anything supernatural is happening, but rumors have spread about special forces belonging to no nation showing up at some of these suspected incidents, and suddenly things go quiet and nobody wants to talk about anything much anymore.

You, of course, know this isn't true. You know that all this is because of the inadvertent spread of the Renegade virus to the world twenty years ago. The vast majority of humans have been infected, and are asymptomatic carriers. For the few who show symptoms, those symptoms are distinctly abnormal, granting superhuman capabilities to its hosts. Making men into gods-or monsters. For some of these symptomatic hosts retain their humanity-Overeds-but others become Gjaum, driven by terrible urges and having lost their humanity.

You work for the UGN-an international group which employs people like you-people with superhuman talents-to contain the virus, to keep it as secret as possible, and bring to justice those who would use it for dangerous aims. Right now, it looks like you're on the side of right. The world in the shadows may well seem to be a simpler world, with ironclad loyalties and clear sides. But everyone has a price. Everyone has a red line. Loyalty is never infinite. And the line between man and monster is never as clear as it looks.

Logistics and House Rules:

Obviously, this is me running a game of Double Cross, which is a Japanese RPG that sums up as, well, [PROTOTYPE]: The Anime: The RPG. If you are interested, DTRPG has the corebook available as a PDF. This is going to be an IRC game, so if you're interested, you should also list when you're available on the weekends so I can work out a time for a game.

Players will be part of a globe-trotting UGN task force sent to provide support to organizations which lack the manpower and institutional knowledge to deal with Overed or Gjaum incidents. (This is largely an excuse to do shenanigans internationally a la Deus Ex's UNATCO). As such, PCs are all UGN agents of some sort.

Use the Construction method of chargen, with two exceptions:
1. If you have a good reason to (like a complete lack of any powers which synergize with it) you can take 7 and add 3 levels to your powers rather than the 4 plus <<Warding>>, <<Resurrect>>, and <<Concentrate>> that default Construction gives you. Note that those powers are actually very useful and versatile so this shouldn't be done lightly.
2. You are allowed to take 2 Simple Powers at Lv1, because simple powers are awesome yet the default chargen doesn't actually incentivize you into buying any of them, which is tragic.
 
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Yess, Double Cross. I knew my physical copy would serve some purpose beyond shelf decoration!

Well, hoped.

I am definitely interested, timing allowing. 10AM - 7PM PST on Sundays is my only availability, unfortunately.
 
Hm, looks interesting. -- Let's try out @Xon's fancy new time tag for this. I can be available to and the same time period twenty-four hours from then.

EDIT: Huh, so that's how that looks. Cool. Could maybe use some more formatting to make it clearly the output of a tag but neat.
 
I'm down, and barring unexpected work interrupts my Saturday availability is to and also to .

Then on Sunday it's just to .

Did you want to use this thread for character sheets?
 
Scribble me down as aggressively interested, with the notable caveat that I can only play on Sundays, but am available all the way through them.
 
Double Cross...?
DOUBLE CROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSS

Yes yes yes, right here, me sir, interested interested interested!

Tuesdays are a no go.

@MJ12 Commando : is the Infinity Code book applicable, for the Ouroboros syndrome?
 
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What sort of genre assumptions are we looking at, by the by? Double Cross is hella anime by nature, but there are you know, degrees between "school students with superpowers employed by extragovernmental organizations" and "international quirky black ops with anime powers."
 
The more soul-scouring, the better, just saying. :V
 
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notthepenguins said:
What sort of genre assumptions are we looking at, by the by? Double Cross is hella anime by nature, but there are you know, degrees between "school students with superpowers employed by extragovernmental organizations" and "international quirky black ops with anime powers."
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On the scale of A Certain Adjective Shounenry and stuff like Psycho-pass/Ghost in the Shell/Metal Gear Solid I'm leaning somewhat more towards the latter than the former.
 
>Sybil System analogue

Oh hey, you could have public encroachment levels monitored that way! Would make it a lot handier for triangulation of rogue Overed or Gjaum activities.
 
Ah, pity. Always wanted to try out one of those variant modules, but they tend to still be untranslated.
 
Okay. I feel like I'm missing something in chargen, I have hard time working out combos, because it seems like the natural thing for a Haruman/Neumann to wind up doing is essentially be the Bard, but I want to make something that's about speed, thinking fast and acting faster. But Sense seems like it's the godstat for combat.

Or I could just go Balor/Neumann and go full "I can kill you with my mind."
MJ12 Commando said:
2. You are allowed to take 2 Simple Powers at Lv1, because simple powers are awesome yet the default chargen doesn't actually incentivize you into buying any of them, which is tragic.
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Worse, default Chargen says "Don't take Simple Powers, they're a wast of points."

Also I'm available pretty much all day Saturdays (for now, might change), but live in GMT-6.
 
If you want help with combos, hit me up on IRC, I have some resources that might assist with their creation and I love to talk about Double Cross.

I've also made an explanation of the dice math, with some charts that I made for FATAL & Friends, if anyone wants to know when adding more dice is better rather than adding a flat bonus, or why Concentrate is good. (Short version, if you have 4+ dice, flat bonus is better unless your CV is hella buff. Concentrate is good because it makes your dice likely to explode.)



Double Cross: What Are These Dice Even Doing

I got Double Cross entirely because of this thread, and I've been doing a few preparations to play and/or run it (depending on my luck). Among those preparations was simulating use of the check system—I wanted to know what kind of results a character could expect to get when rolling something they're good at, and how valuable each of the three types of roll bonus present in Double Cross (dice bonuses, flat bonuses, and critical value reduction) would be in various situations.

So what I'm going to do is start out by talking about something completely different to introduce the sort of graphs I'll be using (made with AnyDice) and provide a point of comparison. For this digression, I'll use what I consider a much more typical check system, that of the New World of Darkness Chronicles of Darkness. (I already labeled my graphs "NWoD", welp.)



In the Chronicles of Darkness, you roll a pool consisting of your stat + skill + any other modifiers. The result is described in terms of the number of successes. 8s, 9s, and 10s all count as one success each, and with 10s you count them as a success then get to reroll them (a rule known as 10-again). The results of that are shown above. In all, it gives a fairly smooth distribution. It's not a bell curve, but for the most part the mode (most common value) is pretty close to the average. That average itself is extremely predictable, too. As shown on the graph legend, the average increases by exactly 1/3rd of a success per die.



Failure is quite common with 1 or 2 dice, with reliability increasing as your dice pool goes up. It's easy to see the exact chance of failure (0 successes) on the normal graph, but there will often be circumstances where you want to check your chances of getting, say, at least 3 successes. I use this viewing mode all the time, because it makes it simple to see that 3 or more successes happen a bit less than 25% of the time on 5 dice, or a bit more than 50% of the time on 8 dice.



Chronicles of Darkness dice have a slight complicating factor, which is that the 10-again rule I mentioned can be modified so that 9s, or even 8s can be rerolled. Fortunately, Chronicles of Darkness lacks many of the dice tricks that other games like Exalted might feature, and also eschews the old World of Darkness's variable target numbers, so the benefit of N-again is known exactly. With 10-again, each die is worth 1/3rd of a success (~0.333). With 9-again each is 3/8ths of a success (0.375), and with 8-again each is 3/7ths of a success (~0.429). As seen above, the benefit certainly exists, but is not huge. Also, it only affects the chances of getting more than one success, because all dice that can be rerolled are already worth 1 success under any of the roll-again rules.

Alright. Let's get into Double Cross. For an example, we'll roll sample character Speeding Bullets using her "Blinding Bullets" combo, she can use after making some guns out of cosmic sand with Hundred Guns. The combo consists of Concentrate (a power that makes her power use better), Miniscule Dust (a power that boosts ranged attacks by improving her perception), Penetrate (a power that makes the attack ignore armor), and Multi-Weapons (a power that lets her use shoot several weapons at once for a damage boost). Mechanically, this attack is quite straightforward, especially since her character sheet has a "Combo" entry adding the bonuses, attack effects, and costs together. The relevant part for us is that for her accuracy check, she rolls 8 dice with a critical value of 8.



Wait, what?

Double Cross's roll system was included in Cyphoderus's writeup, but in the unlikely event that you don't remember the mechanics from a Japanese RPG that had its roll system described in a FATAL & Friends post more than 3 years ago, I'll generously recapitulate.

Explanation time: In Double Cross, you roll a number of d10s determined by your stat, and then add your skill; the result of this calculation is called your "score". Dice bonuses will increase the number of d10s you roll, and score bonuses are simply added at the end along with skill. I'm totally ignoring the existence of flat bonuses for all of these graphs, because they don't change the score distribution, they just shift it to the right; +1 score bonus is always worth exactly +1 score. Much like in CofD, there's a system by which dice at or above a certain number (by default 10) are rerolled. Also like in CofD, the number at which rerolls occur can be reduced. Unlike in CofD, it's totally batshit.

When at least one of your dice pool is showing at or above the critical value (default 10), take all those dice and reroll them as a new pool, except you give your final result a +10 bonus. This can happen multiple times, and all of the non-critical dice from the previous pool are ignored.

That's what leads to the discontinuity in the above graph. It's not because Speeding Bullets has a crazy power combo, it's just a consequence of how the critical hit system works. With a critical value of 8, all 8s, 9s, and 10s are rerolled. It adds 10 every time, so the ones digit of the final result cannot be 8, 9, or 0. The dot at 50 score on the above graph is not actually a possible roll, AnyDice just stops rolling there because of the function depth limit I've imposed, so the "chance of a result of 50" on the above graph is really the sum of all chances of >50 results.

(When a crit is rolled, the entire previous pool ceases to matter aside from how many crits it got. Using that to dramatically reduce the number of possibilities AnyDice was searching is the only reason my program executes fast enough to avoid the 5 second timeout limit that site has. Jasper Flick, the maker of AnyDice, helped me with fix that—my original attempt at simulating Double Cross rolls was much more computationally expensive and suffered a timeout failure if I let it reroll more than once.)



Here's the "at least" version of the same graph. I much prefer this, especially with a distribution as wonky as Double Cross's. The legend on the previous graph listed the mean, but here I can actually see that Speeding Bullets rolls single digits on her attack only very rarely. She gets >15 around 75% of the time, and >21 about 50% of the time.

Now that I've mostly finished my explanations, it's time to post more graphs, with a few short summaries of what I think the important points are for players.



Above is a graph with varying dice pools. Increasing the number of dice improves the reliability with which you can hit at least 1 crit substantially, but suffers diminishing returns. At critical value 10, the default (which you'll probably be rolling on most of the time), adding dice improves your average score more until you hit 3 dice. After that, flat score bonuses are equal or better for your average result.



Above is a graph with 8 dice and varying critical values. Decreasing the critical value increases your average score a lot, gives you a much better chance of double crits and above, and each point of critical value reduction is worth more than the last. The Concentrate power, which reduces your critical value by its level when combined with other powers, is very good. I can see why the simplified character generation method forces you to buy it.



As the previous graph, but with 6 dice instead of 8. Those two missing dice are worth more the lower the CV is, and the CV isn't worth as much score with fewer dice.



Using extremely low pool sizes here to demonstrate something, which is that CV gives a greater average score improvement than adding an extra die here, but the extra die is much better for reliably hitting <10 score targets. Score targets in this system for average tasks are around 8, and go up to 14 for very difficult tasks. Anything above that, I suspect you're only likely to see in opposed checks vs other Overeds.



There are a number of powers in Double Cross that give people a +1 critical value penalty. I initially thought they were tres lame, but this graph shows exactly why they aren't. Yeah, critical value can go to 11. And if it does, you straight-up cannot crit. No matter how lucky you are, your roll can't go above 10. Flat bonuses still exist, and your enemies can always roll poorly, but it's a very substantial malus.



Lastly, once you've made your attack using the above weirdo math, you roll damage dice. One d10, plus another for every 10 in your attack score. This results in some rather reasonable and pretty predictable-looking damage values. (Which is very good. Encounter tuning would be literal hell if the damage curves looked like Speeding Bullets's combo attack roll up there.)
 
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samdamandias said:
Okay. I feel like I'm missing something in chargen, I have hard time working out combos, because it seems like the natural thing for a Haruman/Neumann to wind up doing is essentially be the Bard, but I want to make something that's about speed, thinking fast and acting faster. But Sense seems like it's the godstat for combat.

Or I could just go Balor/Neumann and go full "I can kill you with my mind."
Worse, default Chargen says "Don't take Simple Powers, they're a wast of points."

Also I'm available pretty much all day Saturdays (for now, might change), but live in GMT-6.
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Purebreed Neumann is the best party buffer, though, and that particular power still stacks with other bonuses.

That said, might try for either Exile/Angel Halo, a Bram Stoker, or a purebreed Chimera whose combat form resembles a xenomorph (as it should have been on the tg quest).
 
This concept amuses me!

As for my availability, generally speaking, my weekends are sketchy, but tuesday-thursday is usually safe.

Usually, but not always.

I get my new schedule for the next few months on wednesday, I'll have something permanent by then.
 
Sol d'Trauer said:
Purebreed Neumann is the best party buffer, though, and that particular power still stacks with other bonuses.
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Yeah, but I don't want to play the party buffer. I found a Neumann power that let's me roll Mind for Ranged, but I'm not sure how useful the power that gives me a flat bonus to initiative is. On the gripping hand, Haruman has a Simple Power that lets me wallrun all day erry day, so I'm absolutely doing Haruman since we get simple powers for free.

(Also, this game hates letting PCs have gear. Nine stock for an SMG? Six stock for a crappy pistol?)
 
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