A Splinter in Your Mind - Matrix Quest

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◉ CODA ◉​

Alice Lovelace
​
Resolve
3/3​
Detachment
2​
Skill
6​
Gear
6/10​

Paths​
Path of Resistance
Level 1
When you Fight.exe.
When you gratuitously blow something up as an act of resistance.
The first time in a session you tell an authority to go fuck itself.
XP: ◉◉◉◉◎
You may spend Resistance XP to add or subtract Harm you give or take, 1-1.​
Path of Truth
Level 1
When you Prompt.exe.
When you follow your curiosity in a way that doesn't advance the mission.
The first time in a session you discover something new about the Matrix.
XP: ◉◉◉◎◎
You may spend Truth XP to reroll dice when you Charge or Refresh, 1-1d6.​
Path of Enlightenment
Level 1
When you Disconnect.exe.
When you refuse to back down or run away from impossible odds.
The first time you run out of Resolve in a session.
XP: ◉◉◎◎◎
You may spend Enlightenment XP as if they were Detachment, 1-1.​
Moves
Beginning to Believe: You gain +1 Detachment the first time you Charge.
Stop Trying to Hit Me: You take -1 Harm when on the Defensive in Fights.
Mine Now: Spend a Full Hit in Fight to disarm an enemy of their weapon. If you then shoot them with it, take +1.
Try Again: When you attempt a Disconnect you failed before and have not yet succeeded at, you may input one 6 as a True Hit.
Bit of Help: When you spend Detachment on any move other than Disconnect, you get two +1s. They can be applied to the same die or different ones.

Stunts
Jump Impossible Distances Lvl 2*
Hit with Implausible Force Lvl 1
Dodge Implausible Ways Lvl 1
Act with Implausible Slight of Hand Lvl 1

​


CW: Very 90s.

Also, this is going to be a seriously fucked up quest. I'm going to be doing my damndest to channel an appropriately edgy, teen-rage vibe. Expect violence, drugs, sex, etc.

There's also going to be some Pretty Uncomfortable Dysphoria-ing, trans readers be warned.​
 
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Oh, uh, you actually automatically recharge when you run out of dice, and get an Advance for it! The danger of doing that reset is potentially getting into danger/deeper into a fight without knowing what the next pool is going to look like.

So the question is mostly, do you want to have that 6 for something you're going to do, or spend it and refresh the whole pool running?

(sorry, i know its a new system i haven't posted all of yet, im working on assembling it together in the background. i've mentioned this before but its easy to forget)
 
So, the benefit to Refreshing is to remove the harm (and maybe spending a partial to run and saving the six for something later...)

The benefit to spending all the dice and Charging is that we get to mark an advance and to roll an extra die thanks to the will upgrade, so the pool will be a little better than average.
 
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Oh right, well let's get that advance then. I think I actually knew that was the rule, then forgot about it. 😅

And much as @The Laurent opined, I actually do have the (old) PDF sitting open, so I really have no excuse!

[X] Use that Six and run for the exit!

Refreshing the whole pool running seems safe enough to me, I don't think whatever is waiting at the Exit (if anything) is likely to be so dangerous that we will need to save a six just to face it. There may well be nothing waiting.
 
Karlito said:
So, the benefit to Refreshing is to remove the harm (and maybe spending a partial to run and saving the six for something later...)

The benefit to spending all the dice and Charging is that we get to mark an advance and to roll an extra die thanks to the will upgrade, so the pool will be a little better than average.
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Hmm... you know, this made me realize a cool thing, so after this I'm going to try and get the full rules together with perhaps some adjustments to balance it out better.
 
[X] Use that Six and run for the exit

Let's book it! Pump those legs!
 
[X] Use that Six and run for the exit!
yeah let's not get greedy, I'm happy to take an Advance for now
 
open_sketch said:
Hmm... you know, this made me realize a cool thing, so after this I'm going to try and get the full rules together with perhaps some adjustments to balance it out better.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

While you're at it, fighting with the Defensive Stance seems a bit under-powered?

Flexible seems to be just objectively a far better method of Harm reduction most of the time. (Which is maybe the intent and feels fitting given the wuxia aesthetic of combat, but then I think Grit needs to be really good at one specific thing, like absorbing spike damage from an Agent punching you through a wall. Although I know that kind of overlaps with Spoof, but you get my drift.) For that matter, I think Force could do with an upgrade; +1 Harm per two hits is not a huge amount when you look at the Harm that say, a sword does on two hits. Perhaps something for both which gives you a better narrative effect, as with Flexible.

Fast I think is roughly balanced already, as it is... kind of situational, but very powerful in the situations where it applies? (Massive damage multiplier on shooting people in the fucking face is pretty sweet, when you're in a "shooting people in the fucking face" kind of mood.)
 
open_sketch said:
"Not… quite? A lot of it doesn't exist," Chrysalis said. "Remember, the machines want efficiency in the simulation. They prefer cities and other areas of high density, so they have to cache and render less area. Most rural areas don't exist past major highways and train lines connecting places and immediate landscape around them, and that landscape is usually pretty fake. There's a bunch of smaller towns and cities, but maybe only one in ten of the ones that actually existed or which you could see on a map. Properly rural areas are blank and are only loaded in when needed."
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Bit late, but this kind of optimization allows you to justify all kinds of interesting things.

Consider object Culling.
If we run the simulation on our brain, and the simulation has to be efficient, then there's no point to render all the stuff we're not looking at. This is useful, because it means it can rearrange things when we're not looking, but it also can be turned against it.
If we gather enough sixes, we can totally argue that by closing our eyes and no longer observing the agents, they don't need to be rendered, and can thus remain frozen in the simulation as long as no one else looks.
 
10ebbor10 said:
Bit late, but this kind of optimization allows you to justify all kinds of interesting things.

Consider object Culling.
If we run the simulation on our brain, and the simulation has to be efficient, then there's no point to render all the stuff we're not looking at. This is useful, because it means it can rearrange things when we're not looking, but it also can be turned against it.
If we gather enough sixes, we can totally argue that by closing our eyes and no longer observing the agents, they don't need to be rendered, and can thus remain frozen in the simulation as long as no one else looks.
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...did you just make a mirror-universe, bizarro Weeping Angel?
 
The Laurent said:
It was obviously a mistake because it started a fight with and distracted other Redpills. If we'd chosen other options last vote, we might still be fighting them when the cops arrive.
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Just to pick up a point, like - "It was obviously a mistake because it [caused bad thing]" is an ethos that fundamentally does not work in anything vaguely PbtA, as Artificial Worlds is. The default assumption of basically any action is that it will cause some form of problem. It is a very fail-forwards system, and as such it is a very failure-prone system.

There is no getting away clean without running into problems. You don't win by avoiding friction. Rather, the win is in controlling (or at least influencing) what kinds of friction you run into. It's a similar deal to how one of the lesser-known problems with flaw systems in games is that taking any kind of 'nemesis' or 'grudge mark' flaw that says a character or a group out there is out to get you... Is actually an advantage, when you get down to it. The GM is gonna throw you into confrontations, and now that 'flaw' lets you weight the odds for what kind of enemies you can expect to face in those confrontations, and tailor your character to suit. If I'm playing a fantasy game and I take, "I pissed off a necromancer and now he's out for my head" as a 'flaw', then now I know ahead of time that a greater proportion of the enemies and threats and general Complications I'm gonna run into are likely to be undead-flavoured, so I can prepare for that ahead of time.

The nature of a PbtA system is that you are going to cause problems for yourself. That doesn't mean you did anything wrong, that's just how the game is played. Problems are good things to have. They're dramatic, they're interesting, they're fun, and people will benefit from assessing votes from that perspective: assume that all options will cause trouble, and think about what sorts of trouble you're best equipped to deal with, or most interested in reading about.
 
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I mean, I didn't find these problems particularly fun, honestly? But eh.

This is a Quest, and the option I actually wanted got outvoted by a single vote leading to things that I was considerably less interested in.
 
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Alright, alright, that's quite enough. My name is Salty, I'm supposed to be the master of/maximum repository of salt around here.
 
I admit that I was in fact literally over it, at least enough to move on after realizing that I was on tilt and needed to take a breather, until someone wrote a multi-paragraph reply about how I was engaging in this Quest wrong hours and hours after the matter had already been settled down.
 
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Honestly, your post was just the most recent, and therefore convenient, example to pick up of a trend I saw throughout the thread. I could've made it clearer, but that particular vote and how you felt about it was kind of uh... incidental to the point, I guess?

The point was aimed more at incidences of the general trend of SV's questing forum to be, among other things, very invested in playing it safe and frictionless, so that suffering any setbacks is evidence of making the wrong decision, because The Right Decision is the Perfect/Safe Decision. It's a trend I've seen a lot, this thread is just one example, but as I laid out above, it's a trend that works especially badly in a PbtA game.
 
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