[Dosdamt]

The modified rolling is essentially in a testable state already - and we've already got a basis for the replacement of Risky Actions.
It'll only take deciding on a default risk for any present risky actions and shifting a few Risky Actions that don't presently have a roll to using one - which is largely movement actions, so I'd expect a draft of things like new climbing, swimming and jumping rules.

Well, and deciding on a new way for Heroic to work too, seeing as I feel the effect on Risky Actions is an important part of the skill - their thrilling heroics wouldn't be very thrilling if they went wrong all the time.

I would really caution against Rules for Everything

Why do you need rules for climbing, swimming and jumping - why can't I GM those?

I would genuinely suggest if you are serious about this, you need to structure things.

There needs to be a decision on what your overall philosophy is - that should include whether you are looking to inject more detail into the system; whether you want more / less / no GM; where you draw the line on Core Rules.

I really think you're jumping straight into the detail without considering the overall vision, which for me when designing anything seems wrong.

[Koval]

The simple reason we're paying attention to climbing, swimming, and jumping rules is because these things currently exist. Swimming's the least important but climbing and jumping have happened in games I've played. Climbing, in particular, was rather key in a game I played back in March.

I doubt they'll require a major change from their current state, though, as in my opinion, the only thing wrong with the movement rules is that their presentation in the rulebook is a bit messy -- they just need dusting off rather than actually changing.

[MarcoSkoll]

Why do you need rules for climbing, swimming and jumping - why can't I GM those?

Such rules already exist - and, even if they didn't, I'd say such common things need standardised rules.
Aside from the inevitable slowdown when GMs are required to contrive rules, it would be a bit problematic for a player if the size of the gaps he could jump was an unknown variable from GM to GM.

The key reason for their replacement is because of the attempt to phase out the very weird mechanism for risky actions - and as that's essentially the only test those movements make at the moment, they need something else instead.

(And on the note of "Rules for Everything", I really would like to see a universal set of Vehicle rules. Unfortunately, the somewhat sloppy way the rules were dealt with back in Exterminatus meant that lots of people went about making up their own...)

There needs to be a decision on what your overall philosophy is

My overall philosophy is to try and reach a compromise between everyone else's overall philosophies.

Unfortunately, I've only had direct feedback from all of seven other people so far, so I'm having to guess from what I know people (and myself) have complained about in the past - and don't necessarily know that the fixes as I have them are what they want.

Without a completely clear view of what the truly overall philosophy is, we are a little restricted to tinkering with details, in the hopes that this might catch the attention of more people.

that should include whether you are looking to inject more detail into the system; whether you want more / less / no GM; where you draw the line on Core Rules.

Personally, I have relatively little interest in introducing further detail to the system - it's already quite a detailed system.
However, the success of the Revised Armoury has shown me that variety is popular, so compromising detail to the point variety cannot exist is not on my list of "good ideas".

Largely, my efforts relate to trying to simplify - or at least streamline - areas to speed up the game.

Injury, I want faster. But, as I've said, I think some form of scaling injury penalty is vital to a PvP "RPG" - simpler systems like hit points or wound only work well in PvE or much numerically larger games*, so I know we have limits here.
*Considering that each character in Inquisitor is the equivalent of entire squads in something like 40K, where the "scaling penalty" comes from simply losing squad members.

I am hoping to integrate some Revised Armoury damage types here (such as the Rending, Trivial, Tearing and Armour Piercing effects) but, once familiarised with, these standardised effects can be put to an endless variety of fast and easy uses - even faster uses in some cases.

Shooting - I'd like to make that quicker too. Aside from what's possible by changing the range table (although I believe it should still contain a decent number of options), I had a discussion with Koval the other day about completely stripping out Placed Shots, which complicate things quite a lot (particularly with Semi-Auto actions), and replacing them with either "location aims" (basically, an aim action that modifies the location roll, not the hit roll) or straight out "Called shots" similar to Dark Heresy.

The only area I'm really insisting on increasing in depth is the close combat section, as almost all close combat fights are a practically identical sequence of actions, unchanged by the characters in it or their surroundings. Sometimes counter-attacks mix things up, but that's it.
It doesn't really matter if it's fast (and it's not, players faffing around with working out their parry chances under the current system is often damn slow), because it's not fulfilling.

Reactions are, although something I would love to see included, far more up in the air. I don't know if they'll work.
They might slow things down too much - but alternatively, increasing either speed or chance on each action die and then introducing the play-off between actions and reactions may actually speed up games by letting characters get through the non-interactive parts of them faster.
They're here as a proposal, not a firm suggestion.

As for GMs... not really planning on changing things much. I know some people want to remove the GM from Inquisitor, but I feel their "director" role is an important part of the system.

[TheNephew]

As someone who's only really learning rules solo so far, I'd say simplify the core mechanics as far as you can, and leave room for the GM to cover gaps.
I don't necessarily mean eliminate rules covering all the things, but have them working as similarly as possible.
Stuff like the range table, and a few other points, are way less intuitive than they could be, and it's a little trickier to get a handle on the game with different methods for working through specific occurrences.

But, to be clear, this opinion is based on an extremely low level of familiarity with the rules in a game context.

[Nymie_the_Pooh]

I think it's awesome that you are opening this up for discussion. I like that you also have a centralized vision as it lessons the chance of getting bogged down due to design by committee.

This may sound like an odd question, but what exactly is staying? It might be easier for people to weigh in if they knew exactly what you considered core and therefore not up for change then build everything else up around that. Right now it reads a bit like everything but the theme is up for a possible change. Are there any aspects of the game that you consider immutable?

[Koval]

Marco and I found ourselves butting heads a few times over this -- I'm in favour of a "modular" system whereby, much like with fan-made Necromunda supplements, you can pick and mix different elements to slot into the rulebook as appropriate (thus allowing us to retain the rulebook and, ultimately, have two different GMs -- one wanting to just use the rulebook, one wanting to use lots of Revised elements -- still be able to play the same game). Marco... well, I'm less sure about how he wants to present it.

As we're likely to introduce new mechanics one step at a time, however (with some playtesting set to happen at the Autumn Conclave), it's fair to say that mixing and matching individual elements will probably happen naturally anyway.

[MarcoSkoll]

This may sound like an odd question, but what exactly is staying?  Are there any aspects of the game that you consider immutable?

It's hard to define that. I'm looking at at almost nothing as utterly sacrosanct, although there are some things I do not believe need adjustment and am only likely to adjust if someone comes up with a brilliant alternative.

A large part of what I'm proposing is more alterations than replacements - the action system will not be that different (although the introduction of a reaction system will have an effect on turn sequence), movement won't be much changed (really only needing an adjustment to ditch Risky Actions), shooting is really just trying to simplify and/or improve modifiers (except for a plan to fix the uselessness of full auto fire).

Beyond that, things can expect more work.

That is to say... close combat is utter pants, injury is sluggish and has itself tied in knots and psychic powers have never felt an iconic part of the game.
I can look at the action or injury systems (despite the latter being clunky) and "see" them as Inquisitor. The element of uncertainty thrown in by actions and the scaling damage is what makes the game's PvP play work.

What I consider immutable is more intangible - the game needs to keep its style of play. If you play the 2nd edition, it has to feel like Inquisitor - tearing down dodgy parts of a house and rebuilding them is a fix; tearing the whole thing down and then building a swimming pool there instead is not.
Streamlining is one thing, but this is not a project to make Inquisitor more mainstream; it's an attempt to fill the niche it has better.

~~~~~

On the note of what Koval said, unless I get a really wild idea for psychic powers, I'm not really looking to do anything that will be wildly incompatible with the 1st edition.
For the most part, I'm hoping it should be possible to swap between 1st or 2nd edition games relatively easily; I actually think this is going to be fairly important for actually getting traction with the 2nd edition - given the small community, it doesn't take many people unwilling to give it a try before everyone is more or less forced to ignore it.

[Nymie_the_Pooh]

Where are you thinking in terms of scale? Will it support both 54mm and 32mm scale out of the box, just one, or will there be an attempt to make the same measurements work in both? Is this one of those things that would be a potential add-on that players can socket into place later if they want like what Koval was suggesting?

What sort of power level do you have in mind? Are Space Marines going to be available, or are they a force that should not be present on the table in the basic rules? Are you thinking of adjusting the rules to where lower stats are a little more effective than they are now so something like thirty might be closer to average so you have room for genetically modified super soldiers and still keep them under one hundred in all stats?

If I understand you correctly, you want an injury system, but not the current one and combat is to be completely reworked. Do you still want hit locations? Would a system where there are stages of injury be more desirable than a hit points system, or would you like to see them layered? On combat, if everybody is to get some sort of defensive roll for a dodge, parry, or similar, then should they also affect the roll the attacker performs to hit them? I mean, realistically they probably should, but mathematically that could be worked into the defensive roll. Do you want to keep weapon reaches as they are, or is that something to be ripped out or completely reworked as well? Do you feel reach could work with some small changes?

I like the idea of bringing some ideas of other games into it. You see circling in melee quite a bit in the Privateer Press games as an example. Generally not all the way around to get a hit on the model one is circling, but it can and does happen. The reason people feel free to circle in that game is it's just like moving as normal until you try to leave the reach of the weapon of the circled model at which point they get a free swing, but the mechanic it triggers could be altered to taste.

We've been using FATE style aspects off and on in Inquisitor to let players do things like tagging some barrels somebody is hiding behind with the Promethium aspect in addition to using them on characters which can make for some fun. Yeah, we could let players manipulate the table in similar ways before, but I like the idea of the players swapping a resource to add the tag in addition to convincing both the other player and myself it would add to the game to do so. We have one pool for each party instead of each character which makes tracking easier. I've been toying with the idea of introducing an environment hazard pool like the Doom Pool from the latest Marvel RPG (a Cortex game), but haven't gotten around to it yet. I'm thinking more like an escalating global modifier to perform actions that test against the environment instead of other players, but with options to lessen it through play. That might be more scenario dependent however.

Infinity is great with its reaction system, but as pointed out it might not be desirable to allow everybody to react to all actions at any time. It's been interesting reading some of the proposals around that. Dust Warfare has a reaction system as well. A unit may perform up to two actions per turn. Any unit may react similar to Infinity, but it removes one of their two actions from the following turn. They may also only perform one reaction each turn. I think limiting reactions to one per turn could work if you want to have it take away from the number of actions the character may perform the next time it acts. Then again, it does mean actions such as overwatch have no purpose unless you change it to a bonus on a shooting reaction, a free shooting reaction (paid for ahead of time instead of in the following turn) or something similar.

The basic dice mechanic for Infinity reminds me quite a bit of Alternity, but they don't have a reaction system in that game. Alternity also uses a modifier die in addition to a d20, but that's a separate discussion. Instead, Alternity split the turn into four phases. Depending on how well you roll determines which of those four phases you may act in. You may act in up to two phases, but only once per phase. If you fail at the action roll you may only act in that last phase of four. You don't have to act in a phase when it comes to your turn. You can hold your action until a later phase to see what slower characters will do first. So, Let's say a character ducks behind cover and takes a shot in the first action phase. That character can then hold their action in the second phase if they want to wait to see what everybody else does before acting. They can still use that action in the third or fourth phase if the player wants to. Any unused actions at the end of the turn are discarded. This meant that characters who failed their test only get one action that turn. Alternity was made by TSR between AD&D 2nd and D&D 3rd shortly before Wizards bought the company and used a similar move/free action/action system to those so that should give you some idea of what sort of actions happened during a phase, but used a d20 modified by a polyhedral based on outside factors with the goal being to roll under the stat of the character. I don't know if any of that helps, but the Infinity dice mechanic almost always makes me think of Alternity.

Thank you for taking the time both to read this and for the hard work you are putting in. I really love the concept of Inquisitor even though I think it falls down in places in its execution. I can't wait to see what you come up with and will definitely make certain to check back in to read up on the results of the Autumn Conclave.

[MarcoSkoll]

Addressing that mostly as bullet points:

Where are you thinking in terms of scale?

- The game will continue to use "yards" as measurements that players can define their own ground scale to. However, that section will probably include recommendations for both 32mm and 54mm ground scales.

What sort of power level do you have in mind?

- Power level is expected to remain similar to "Conclave Standard", as it's how most contributors to this project play.

- Astartes will remain an option, but their presence should remain justifiable. I am not expecting to change from Dark Magenta's current rules.

- I'm not sure how I'd adjust the rules to "boost" lower stats without a colossal rebuild, and don't particularly see the need for it. Super soldiers can be better represented with special rules (again, see Dark Magenta's Marine rules) rather than trying to represent them just with stats.

If I understand you correctly, you want an injury system, but not the current one and combat is to be completely reworked.

- Without a clear alternative I like, my current plan is attempting to streamline or adapt the current rules, but I am trying to find new alternatives if possible.

- Both offensive and defensive rolls in close combat will oppose each other.

- Weapon reach may possibly take cues from what I think I understood of Precinct Omega's INQ2.0, but I think the present system is functional.

We've been using FATE style aspects off and on in Inquisitor to let players do things like tagging some barrels somebody is hiding behind with the Promethium aspect in addition to using them on characters which can make for some fun.

- This is a potentially interesting of FATE, but formalising it to specific rules may be more suited to an expansion.

I'm quite happy to, for general purposes, leave it to the GM to to answer the question of what's in those barrels based on his gut and whether that would improve or detract from the overall story rather than specific rules - although I can certainly imagine that some groups might like the feeling of control of their character's "luck".

Infinity is great with its reaction system, but as pointed out it might not be desirable to allow everybody to react to all actions at any time.

... yes, well, I'm struggling with a wording to appropriately restrict who can respond to what, but I'll probably find it. For the upcoming play test (if I get the draft finished), I'm expecting to adjudicate according to rough guidelines of reserved reactions only being between the active character and the reactive character, but more flexible possibilities for readied reactions.

Crude definitions (both "Reserved" and "Readied" are working names, and may not stick, given they're confusingly similar words, both starting and ending with "Re--ed")
Reserved reactions are action points that have been set aside - you'd reserve a reaction point, and would choose how to spend them later on. For example, if someone shoots at you, you could choose to spend a point to try and dodge. (Dodging will be a more general reaction where having the skill is not a requisite but improves your chances, like in Dark Heresy)
Readied reactions are pre-declared actions that have been delayed until certain conditions are met. An easy example is the Overwatch action, where you've essentially declared "I will be ready to shoot if someone moves into this area".

The basic dice mechanic for Infinity reminds me quite a bit of Alternity, but they don't have a reaction system in that game.

I'm not familiar with Alternity, but that description is very intriguing... I'll have to look it up and think about all of that!

Thank you for taking the time both to read this and for the hard work you are putting in. I really love the concept of Inquisitor even though I think it falls down in places in its execution.

No problem!

[Nymie_the_Pooh]

Basically, the Alternity phase sequence translated as directly as possible over to Inquisitor would have each character perform an Initiative test. Those that fail can't act until the fourth phase. Those that pass may act in phase three or later. If you pass by rolling under half your Initiative then you can act in phase two.  Anybody that rolled under a quarter of their Initiative could act in the first phase. It's been a while since I have played, but if I remember the characters then would act in the order of their Initiative value from lowest to highest in each phase, but the actions are considered to be simultaneous in any given phase. The character sheets actually had a place for you to mark each value so you didn't have to do the math each time a character acted. You would need some sort of system for tracking when all the characters could act as it changes with each turn. It's probably a little easier in a roleplaying game where the players each only have once character each to keep track of while the GM might have four piles of markers to remind her who acts when. There are some interesting ideas in that game, but there's a lot of clunky stuff too and some of the ideas while good were pulled out of the oven a little early.

Maybe try something like Prepared action in place of Readied action. I can see what you mean by the two terms possibly getting switched about in people's heads.

[MarcoSkoll]

Ladles and Jellyspoons,

For your delectation, this is Alpha V0.1.2, which is largely what Koval and I are planning on hijacking a game to test at the weekend (although I may have made a few more adjustments by then!)
It's highly incomplete and many of the rules are only to test game-play concepts rather than the actual rules, but this is only really prepared for an Alpha test*.

* The colour formatting is something I currently use for Alpha versions of the Revised Armoury. A lot of you are probably familiar with the red text for things changed from the previous edition, but the green text is for things marked as for likely revision and the blue text for alternative notes**.
** And having said this, neither the green or blue text are exhaustive. Don't consider anything not in green to be fixed, or any suggestions not in blue to have been disregarded.

We'll probably be using Asandrea and Astrid for the test.
I'm a little bit divided on whether I want to try and hunt down a third play tester to join us, as an extra person to give feedback would be good, but having only a few characters on the table is also a plus when testing unfamiliar rules!

~~~~~

Anyway, due credit to lots of people, but Adeptus Noob (over on Ammobunker) gets special mention because I butchered large amounts of his text into the draft close combat rules.

[Cortez]

Looking good so far.

Couple of things though:

You need to include in the rules what trivial and rending damage are. Not everyone is familiar with the revised armoury.

Also I don't see why the thrust cc attack would only do trivial damage, sticking a sword in someone's knee or armpit is unlikely to be trivial. I would probably also change it to ignore d6 points of armour rather than a straight 4 points.

[MarcoSkoll]

Fair points, but this is an Alpha ruleset and we're a long way off the more robust Beta versions yet.

Describing damage types will eventually be essential and ignoring a random amount of armour is not unlikely (I may well have changed it to something based on the attacker's margin of success by Saturday) - however, both current Alpha testers know the Revised Armoury well, and the rules are still testing concepts rather than specifics.

As for why it's Trivial damage, it's either
a) a penalty in the rules to make it a trade-off. A hit penalty is another alternative, but I'm not sure I want to stack too many different hit modifiers by giving one to every last attack!
or
b) a name. It doesn't inherently mean the damage is of no importance, but it's the best term that came to mind when I first needed "anti-rending". I may eventually change the name to something like "Minor" or "Slight", which are probably more appropriate, but the rules don't actually care what I called them - they'd be the same whether they were called Apple damage or Orange damage...

[Necris]

Something we've tried for number of actions in a few of the games ive played at my LGS is introducing a character state we first started by having characters being passive and active and have since expanded this to include a reckless, passive and active state

Explaining further

A character in a reckless state passes his actions test on a 2+ representing that they are rushing headlong into the situation, there are however draw backs to being in a reckless state, characters are unable to aim or move at less than a walk, they are not able to use their abilities unless they pass an initiative test and suffer a -20 to all rolls.

A character in a passive state is acting in a less cautious manner as such they pass tests on a 3+ (as if acting in a normal situation) for example approaching a combat zone, they cannot not evade or crawl but can freely use their abilities, aiming only provides a + 10 bonus and all actions are at -10

An active character is behaving cautiously as if in a combat sitauation or a situation that demands more attention and judgement  actions are passed on a 4+ and the character acts as normal.

We allow players to set the state of the characters at the start of the turn but had to include an ability for reckless characters that allowed them to use the reckless state, (we found it worked well for Arco's and fanatic style characters and those with low speeds and allowed them to get into games more effectively)

In summary we found that allowed the initial turns to move more smoothly and prevented the drag of low speed characters only getting 1 action per turn and ending up sitting out most of the games, but when the nitty and gritty of thing kicked off they at least got some activity

[MarcoSkoll]

Right. Well, as it happened, this last weekend we had some brief chance to test some Inquisi2r rules.

We had originally planned to test at 28mm, although this was abandoned at short notice - we had the chance to get PrecinctOmega involved and get an extra playtester, but he only had 54mm characters with him. It was a bit of a negative to not get a chance to use those characters some more, but the additional feedback was fairly invaluable.

I'm glad to say, while rough around the edges, the results were generally positive.

I think, with some adjustment from our draft rules, the idea of introducing a greater degree of reactive mechanics into Inquisitor is feasible - that is to say, it doesn't have to dramatically inflict on the speed of play.

This, in itself, will fix several oddities of the system. Two-way interactions are very chopped up at the moment - things like a "freeze or I'll shoot" ultimatum are fairly meaningless in the official rules (due to an inability to act out of turn) and actually having a conversation in the normal turn order is a nightmare. Common consensuses on rule bending have improved such things, but it'd be nice to make a more fluid turn order intrinsic to the game.

Similarly, the close combat rules were a bit messy, but it was strongly due to poor organisation of the draft rule document and trying to explain things to Robey at short notice. Neatened up, I think they should prove a huge improvement over the current rules.

I've also been sent Robey's original INQ2 rules now, so I'll be trying to digest those. I'm not certain what I will and won't want to take away from it yet*, but it should prove useful input for the project.

*Given that Inquisi2r seems perhaps to have a slightly different end objective to Robey's INQ2.

~~~~~

@Necris: I've probably said as much previously (I can't remember, it's past three in the morning), but I do similar things to start games.
Until there's interaction between the players, I tend to tell them to roll their actions on a 3+, which gets the opening turns out of the way more promptly.