So, as promised, my Quint, Enhancement, and Device Cost rewrite! Credit for the core idea and much of the joint effort goes to
@NonSequtur.
Quintessence and Paradox XP
Every paradigm has its own explanation for quintessence – though all share something of a common theme, deserving of the name "Prime". Iterators and Void Engineers see it as rarefied reality, that which makes one Everett volume more likely, more real, than another. Hermetics see it as raw
vis, power and untapped potential as one. Most Chorister Traditionalists and many Dreamspeakers see it as soulstuff, shed off some great spirit. The Syndicate and the New World Order see it as
utility, an abstract quantum of human interest.
But perhaps those strange Marauders that see all the world as a game have the simplest explanation: as raw potential, as experience points in a brilliant, solid form.
All jokes aside, this rewrite is intended to do three things:
a) Me chanize item creation
b) Through a), finally balance the Enhancement background against simple character growth
c) Make quint intuitively of incredible worth, by making it usable as experience points in some contexts.
This follows on from
@MJ12 Commando's
Mana rewrite.
In general, except in the ways permitted by a character's splat, experience points can only be spent on things that are physically possible for a human to improve. You can learn to think faster, you can be stronger, you can learn new skills and you can grow an iron will – but as far as I know, humans cannot simply decide to grow laser eyes one day. Even among things that can be improved, there are limits – no attribute may rise above five dots, no training or talent above three.
But, Mages being Mages, there are few who willingly respect these limits. To buy the impossible, then, incurs paradox – and thus we have the concept of "Paradox XP," or pxp.
PXP can buy anything – even the impossible – that can be affected by magic. This … again, essentially means anything – Attributes, Abilities, normally derived traits like Initiative or health levels, even Backgrounds – with the exceptions of Sphere, Arete, and Willpower. It does so at the normal xp rates – and as such, entirely replaces the Enhancement background. (Though see the Union Enhancile background below.)
Gathering pxp requires both experience and quintessence, untapped potential both internal and external. One point of quint and four points of experience garners a character eight pxp to spend. Not coincidentally, this is the cost of the fifth Attribute dot under my scaling experience table – as Attribute 6 is probably the single most commonly bought Enhancement. Effects cost 8pxp per point of quint required to forge them into a Device (see rules below) – or in other words, the cost in quintessence is the same, and 4xp is required for every point of quint.
For two points of quint spent, however – or equivalently, for each 16pxp spent – a Paradox Flaw is incurred. Aside from the usual set, there are three "default" Flaws:
- Removable in combat time (applies to one quint's worth of Effect)
- One point of permanent Paradox
- 1 quint/week maintenance cost
- 1 ahl/day
which are incurred in listed order if earlier flaws are all refused. Someone like Piero, for example, is probably so loaded down with Enhancements that he can accept no further Flaws or Paradox without compromising his combat capability (which would make him pointless), and as such requires an absolutely ludicrous amount of quint to run at full combat heat – encouraging things like "keep the supersoldier in stasis until he's necessary", which is definitely cool design space.
Note that this means implantation
just works – a Device is just an Enhancement with a few extra Flaws saying "can be targeted with Corr" and "not actually part of your Pattern"; AKA, a Device is an Enhancement you're holding. Note also that these rules tend to generate quite a few more Paradox Flaws than canon. However, most Enhancements naturally accept "Removable in combat time" - Life magic might cause rejection, a plasma cannon could be amputated, and either of these would naturally result in losing the benefits of the Enhancement. The truly expensive purchases, then, are things like Nanotech Integration, that cannot benefit from these easy Flaws and require more creative purchases.
Due to this mechanic, xp costs for normally unbuyable statistics – primarily those that are normally derived – are now required:
- Health Levels: 6xp, starts at 5hl
- Initiative/Resilience/Defense: 3xp, steps at 6/10/14 etc.
- Soak: 5xp
- Armor: 6xp
- Principles: 7xp
Note that these have stepped rates as usual, though as these traits are derived their steps may be more complex. Health levels, for example, start 5hl from Size before attributes, so your ninth health level costs 12xp and your eleventh costs 18xp; meanwhile the three derived attributes step half as fast as everything else, since you don't run into stepped costs until both attributes hit each step. These are all balanced against the cost of simply raising the underlying the statistics directly.
These are
explicitly overridden, however, by the Device costs for mechanizing direct emulation of Sphere Effects. The result tends to be that xp costs rise naturally until they hit human maximum, at which point they flatten out – so Enhancements are most useful for the already peak human.
Device Creation
Note that this provides merely a rough overview of Device creation. More elaborate, simulationist rules might be found in
Forged by Dragon's Fire, which are mostly usable and honestly look pretty fun; these rules are simply errata to standardize quint costs, particularly between broad Devices good at many things and focused specialized Devices designed to overwhelm in one narrow field.
In general, a Device's dot rating is equal to the number of points of quint spent in its creation, before optional Flaws.
One quint will buy you, on a permanent Wonder:
- Functionally infinite successes on one-dot Spheres, with the caveat that such Devices can never bypass Wards. There's a sanity limit here somewhere, but it's probably around 50 sux or something equally ridiculous – Dresden's map of Chicago is cool, but with Mages running around hiding things its scrying ability's not worth more than a quint. (Its automatic Chain effect on all Corr magic cast using it as a focus, on the other hand...)
- Eight successes on two-dot Spheres.
- One success on three-dot Spheres. Balanced against Better Body, natch.
- Half a success on a fourth-dot Sphere Effect.
Successes can be split between Effects – so you could have four sux worth of precognition and four sux worth of passive empathy, for example, for one point of quint.
Five-dot Wonders are Artifact N/A, and require individual adjudication. The permanent "Device" that is a bar of Primium, even True Primium is a whole lot cheaper to make than, say, Yinzheng's fancy personnel-sized AT field.
For simplicity, all permanent Wonders are Artifacts/Inventions, with successes bought with unrolled with quint.
One quint will buy you, on a triggered Wonder:
- Your Arete/Enlightenment, imbued into the Wonder
- A relevant Ability Pool, imbued into the Wonder. (In practice, the average number of successes should be calculated and added as a bonus to all casting rolls ahead of time, to avoid slowing play.)
- Functionally infinite one-dot Effects, with the above caveats.
- Two different two-dot Effects
- One three-dot Effect
- Half a four-dot Effect
Again, five-dot Effects require individual adjudication. As a free effect, Talismans and Inventions may add their Arete to rolls made to bleed off Paradox at a Node (see below.)
In the particular case of Talismans and Inventions, a point of permanent Willpower, or a Principle 4-dots or above, may be imbued into the Wonder during creation for the following attributes. Not all of them are strictly beneficial, and others are questionable. Note that doing so
always results in something removable; even something normally abstract like a twist in karma can be shifted once sapience has been imbued.
- Independent action and will on the part of the Wonder. If a Principle is used, the "personality" of the Wonder should match the Principle; otherwise the "personality" should be appropriate for a fragment of the creator's will.
- +1 sux to all rolls made by the Wonder, as if a point of willpower was spent.
- Paradox nullification: the Wonder cancels (Arete) points of Paradox per game session.
- Zero-distance Corr link to or from the creator in all non-pathological paradigms. Depending on the Effect, casting a spell on one might target the other even without Correspondence.
So long as the item is worn the creator retains her point of Willpower or Principle. However, if it ever leaves her person, she loses the imbued trait, and if it is ever destroyed, naturally she loses that trait permanently.
Finally, all Wonders can be enhanced with paradox management or mana/quint storage. One quint buys you:
- 8 points of mana storage
- 2 points of paradox storage – the Wonder takes Paradox instead of you
- 2 points of true quintessence storage
Free with any of the above, and otherwise costing one quint, are various paradox management options:
- Paradox accruing – no special abilities, the Wonder just takes Paradox until it explodes, usually in your hands
- Paradox scattering – On overload, Paradox accumulated are assigned to random mages in a (5 yds)*(Rating) radius. If there is no storage, this simply occurs every time the Wonder would gain Paradox (or the Mage would gain Paradox from its use.)
Pricing Devices
Devices are priced in pxp, as usual. However, the many free Flaws that come simply out of a "being a non-integrated Device" tend to drastically reduce its cost.
In addition to the mandatory Flaws required for all Wonders, a character can take extra Flaws to decrease the pxp cost of the Wonder. No more than (Rating/2) (round down) such Flaws may be taken. Optional Flaws decrease the quint cost, but do not decrease the Rating of the Wonder. Each Flaw reduces the pxp cost by 14pxp. Not coincidentally, this means that a Wonder with as many Flaws as possible will have a cost of 1xp per Rating dot, which ends up being roughly identical to the old Device cost.
So, a few examples!
Exomuscle
Ah, the infamous exomuscle, beloved by space commandos everywhere. Exomuscle is actually not a terrific place to start, as it gives different bonuses to Strength and Dexterity, which are of course one Attribute in my rewrite. As it's rather popular, though, it's just about required that this be balanced. So: the altered version of Exomuscle grants the following benefits:
- +2 Physique, +2 Endurance
- +2 Armor
- 1d countermagic
- +6 hl
- Soak agg
One complication arises: in this model of Enhancements, the cost of an Enhancement depends partially on the character adopting them. (Though, note that above five dots, the cost of Attributes flatten, as at that point it's cheaper to get Better Body emulation instead. This is intentional.) In this case, we'll assume a starting character tanky exojock: he's spent fp on pushing himself up to Physique 4, Endurance 4 base, and all his social points are in Poise so he has Poise 4 too. This means that he has 9hl before enhancement.
Statistics will cost him (8pxp)*4 = 32pxp; armor will cost him 12pxp. Soaking agg requires one success on a Life 3 Better Body; countermagic seems to require one success on Prime 3 Antimagic; that's another 16pxp. Health levels are more complicated: assuming that three sux gets you 2hl on a Better Body roll (which seems reasonable, as you could just as easily spend two sux to get 1hl through raising your Resilience manually), then 1hl costs 1.5 quint = 12pxp. So the health levels are all the same – 12pxp each, for a total of 72 pxp. In total, 132pxp, or 66xp and 17 quint.
Exomuscle is entirely removable, so all mandatory Paradox Flaws are immediately compensated for. We then take "Take +1 agg from Life damaging effects" twice, representing the usual cybernetics flaw, and three points of Permanent Paradox, for a 70pxp discount. To get down to the canonical cost, we'll have to come up with three more Flaws – let's say "too heavy to swim", "greatly increased appetite," and "diminished immune response to plastics in general" – to max out our Flaw allotment, bringing us to a 98pxp discount. 34 pxp converts to 17 xp and 5 quint – still a bit more expensive than usual, but then again that's to be expected given how incredibly undercosted it was originally. 17 xp for four attribute dots and nearly doubling your health levels is a pretty solid deal.
Implant Plasma Cannon
Ah, another old favorite. This one's activated and has its own Arete, though it's not invested with Willpower. As I've mentioned, it's a little strange that it uses Forces 3, but doing so does guarantee that it can activate under any condition, so it's not entirely worthless. Using Forces 3 creation incurs a Prime 2 conjunctional effect and a 1 mana/shot surcharge.
There's a soft cost here that isn't reflected in the rules: the plasma cannon is made at Enlightenment 6 or 8, but any degree of Enlightenment costs the same. In general, I'd suggest that you can freely choose Enlightenment up to 5 due to the sheer size of the Union, but any Enlightenment above 5 must be either very general or a duplicate of a particular Device of a particular senior Technocrat per '99 – you can't usually get specialized high-Arete gear.
At any rate, the canonical Cannon has a 30-quint tank, which converts directly to a 30-mana tank that costs 4 quint. Pay one additional quint for its own Arete and one additional Quint for the Forces 3/Prime 2 Rote (which is counted as just one Rote since it's just one effect). The original version didn't include an Ability pool, but Ability augments were also not nearly as important to successfully casting Rotes at all in canon, so in order to maintain a reasonable damage rate I'll include a twelve-dice pool with another quint. That's 5 quint, or 40pxp, before Flaws. The cannon is, of course, entirely removable (as anyone who's ever had their arm forcibly removed by Akashic ninjas can attest), which accounts for mandatory Flaws. The usual cybernetic flaw gives us a 28pxp discount, bringing us down to 12pxp, or 6xp and 3 quint. Appropriately cheap, for such a mass-produced staple of the Union.
The Curse of Achilles
For our last example, something that breaks the mold in two ways. First, Enhancement through obvious, Traditional magic – the Curse of Achilles requires the burning of its victim in ichor, godsblood; second, the expense of a powerful Enhancement that unlike the previous examples cannot be removed without countermagic and time.
Achilles' invulnerability can be quite neatly represented with a Forces 4 Effect, that makes you invulnerable to any Forces 3 effect and applies its successes as countermagic against Forces 4 effects. (This version of the Curse can still be overwhelmed by, say, attempting to facetank coordinated bunker-buster fire.)
Buying four successes on Forces 4 – one immunity, three countermagic – costs eight quint. Luckily, that's all there is to it. So we have 128 pxp, or 64 xp and 8 quint.
We have four mandatory paradox flaws to come up with, and none of them can be "this curse can be removed." Legend provides us with the first few: a single missing patch upon the left heel, which leads naturally into the curse not applying against explosions that cause shrapnel without some sort of defense for that weak point, and a damage bonus to all attacks that strike that weakpoint. To remain in line with myth, let's give our Enhancile here a -1 penalty to all rolls to resist poison.
We can eke out one more easy Flaw – let's give our Enhancile a version of the bioengineering flaw, +1 agg to all Life direct damage attacks – but at that point we're going to start stretching the themes. That leaves us with 114pxp → 57xp and 7 quint, which is a
whole lot of xp! Things like the Curse, or equivalently things like Nanotech Integration, are either extremely expensive or extremely paradoxical, forcing large numbers of meaningful, serious flaws to compensate for being truly "part of the character" in a way that can't be easily removed even putting plot armor for xp expenditures aside. (Nanotech Integration I won't go into here, but it comes out to about 32 pxp after all "natural" flaws.)
Union Enhancile
The final point to hit here. The Technocratic Union is winning, and given its vast infrastructure, wealth, and super-human resources, Technocrats have
much easier access to Enhancements than a Traditions member ever will... so long as they're willing to sell their body and mind to the Union. (And it's a good thing they don't acknowledge the existence of the soul, or they'd ask for that too!)
Union Enhancile replaces the Enhancements background in functionality. It is a double cost Background that provides the character with twice Rating points of true quintessence, for the purpose of spending on Enhancements - meaning a character only needs to provide the xp half of the cost. It retains all the usual soft costs of Enhancement - high Conditioning, the need to be in good graces with the Union, and the fact that the Union now likely owns your body and mind.
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Closing notes:
- The rules for creating Devices entirely replace the rules for permanent Effects. Permanent Effects require quintessence to create and maintain as if they were a Device.
- Prime 5 allows a character to directly convert unspent xp to quintessence or Tass, depending on paradigm. Theoretically it may be possible to do this to other characters, but in general most characters should be assumed to have very little xp simply lying around. Even the most un-heroic of mortals will spend their experience points on "Mario Kart Expert 3" if they can.
- Prime 1 allows a character to sacrifice access to spent xp for quintessence - sacrificing Resources dots, health levels, or even Attributes and Abilities. Spheres, Willpower, and Arete cannot be sacrificed this way, though as an optional rule an ST may allow it with a Prime 5/Spirit 5 ritual or equivalent. Round down. One quintessence point's worth of dots return per week. Note that sacrificing most Traits count xp in reverse of the usual tiering; sacrificing your first health level only gets you 6xp -> 1 quint, even if you just spent 12xp on your tenth. The only exception I can think of off the top of my head is Resources, and theoretically Spheres if such is allowed. Doing this to other people requires Prime 5.
Well. How is it? Oddly enough the purple paradigm actually has some trouble explaining this mechanic - why should perfectly Consensual results incur permanent Paradox even if the methods were vulgar? - compared to more paradigm-realist views.
