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IRE - Inquisitor Revised Edition project

Started by MarcoSkoll, August 23, 2013, 12:15:02 PM

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MarcoSkoll

Quote from: Joble on October 29, 2019, 01:36:12 AM
Hey, I'm new to these forums, new to inquisitor, new to the whole show, as it were.  I was wondering if these rules were still being worked on, and if not, if there are any rules projects being played today for inquisitor-type games?
Well, first of all, the traditional Big Yellow WelcomeTM

WELCOME TO THE CONCLAVE!

As far as the actual question, although the project is a bit sporadic, it is still active, and I have actually been working on it recently. (Particularly as there's been a tentative suggestion of using it for an upcoming event).

There will be a V 0.4 update at some point, but it will be relatively minor from the perspective of the core mechanics. IRE has grown to become a pretty robust system between the experience of the people who've contributed and many long hours carefully working out how to explain those mechanics on the page. Any major hiccups with the core mechanisms have been ironed out at this point, and future changes to the system will be more about fine-tuning modifiers or adding new sections rather than large changes.

Most of the remaining work on the core book is more about filling in those sections that have been largely left to be filled in by the original book, and thus flesh out IRE to a fully self-contained rulebook in its own right.

As a project, it's not yet quite done, but I'm pretty proud of it so far.
S.Sgt Silva Birgen: "Good evening, we're here from the Adeptus Defenestratus."
Captain L. Rollin: "Nonsense. Never heard of it."
Birgen: "Pick a window. I'll demonstrate".

GW's =I= articles

MarcoSkoll

Coming back to IRE's Awareness section... in the Inquisitor games I've played, awareness is one area of the rules that is generally very heavily fudged compared to the original rulebook. Sort of:

Player: "I look around the corner"
GM: "Roll awareness"
Player: "Pass by 42"
GM: "Although they're well concealed enough that you can't make out specific details, you can clearly see that two figures are trying to hide in the woods ahead. However, because of the light mist, you don't manage to see the sniper on the second level of the watch tower"


This is obviously a lot quicker than in the rulebook, where you have to roll for each specific character you might see, working out modifiers for distance, number concealed locations, etc... which is obviously why it usually gets used instead. It is not however something that can really be put down into rules.

I'm wondering if it may be simplest to have a system that plays off degrees of success somehow - for a rough example, Inquisitor Shyloque gets 4 degrees of success. He can "spend" those to work out what he can actually see in front of him.

Tyrus is out in the open, so he doesn't need any DoS spent to actually be aware someone is there, but if Shyloque wants to look more closely and work out who it is, or what he's up to, then each DoS spent gets him more detail.
Because Sgt Stone is some distance away, and also in partial cover, then Shyloque must spend two of his Degrees of Success to become aware someone is there, and more if he wants to work out who specifically.
However, if he wants to see Barbaretta whose entire body is behind smoke in the distance, he'll have to spend all of his DoS and miss out on other details.

Becoming aware of easily visible characters is relatively simple, but actually knowing who they are and what they're doing takes more of your time and attention when trying to quickly glance around a corner.

Thoughts? Alternative suggestions? Etc?
S.Sgt Silva Birgen: "Good evening, we're here from the Adeptus Defenestratus."
Captain L. Rollin: "Nonsense. Never heard of it."
Birgen: "Pick a window. I'll demonstrate".

GW's =I= articles

MarcoSkoll

I'm playing around with whether I can turn the above idea into something viable, and I think I possibly can.

However, possibly radical suggestion: Should characters automatically get a free awareness test at the start of their turn?

Often the GM has to throw in awareness tests anyway because of "Did I see that happen?" (and it feeling odd that a character has to use up actions to actually take in new information, even if they were looking that way when it happened) - and, as it is, one of the things that often holds up the progression of play is characters having to use up their actions failing to see what's going on.

Actively using awareness will remain an option (a free test doesn't guarantee they'll see things, so characters may still spend their time bewildered) but it does solve the question of whether the character is aware of what's happened since their last turn, and may mean more time actually in the action of the game.

(Note that this is a free awareness test, not a free Pause for Breath, so actively using a Pause for Breath still provides those benefits).
S.Sgt Silva Birgen: "Good evening, we're here from the Adeptus Defenestratus."
Captain L. Rollin: "Nonsense. Never heard of it."
Birgen: "Pick a window. I'll demonstrate".

GW's =I= articles

MarcoSkoll

#198
After a bit of a ramble on Facebook, it's time to look at the issue of blast weapons...

Blast weapons are an issue in Inquisitor. Admittedly, detailed blast weapons are just difficult in general. Partly that is because they're often just slow to resolve, but because the two natural ways to harm them both have odd side effects:

1) Like Inquisitor, you can have a blast weapon doing multiple hits. However, this naturally skews them towards being ineffective versus armour - because they do multiple hits, blast weapons need to do less damage per hit to not be hugely overpowered, and once they do less damage per hit, and armour is applying against each hit, armour easily absorbs a lot of the damage.

Krak grenades in Inquisitor are lethal against light armoured targets, and functionally fairly useless against well armoured targets. Not what they're supposed to be lore-wise.

2) Something like Dark Heresy, where you still only do one hit and thus the weapon can still have similar damage stats... but it's kind of odd having the large blast hit ONLY your arm.

~~~~~

I think IRE needs to stick with the first approach, as neither is a flawless system, and at least this way we're sticking with the established rules.

However, as far as improving on the fact that it's so skewed by armour, I'm struggling for a solution better than having blast weapons automatically halve armour (representing the spray of shrapnel/plasma/etc being likely to find gaps or weaknesses in armour).

That's not necessarily a terrible idea, as theoretically, flak armour could ignore that if not directly hit; that would be in keeping with the lore about it being mostly intended to protect against indirect hits.

Any thoughts?
S.Sgt Silva Birgen: "Good evening, we're here from the Adeptus Defenestratus."
Captain L. Rollin: "Nonsense. Never heard of it."
Birgen: "Pick a window. I'll demonstrate".

GW's =I= articles

Mike712

Quote from: MarcoSkoll on June 02, 2020, 08:08:04 PM
After a bit of a ramble on Facebook, it's time to look at the issue of bast weapons...

Blast weapons are an issue in Inquisitor. Admittedly, detailed blast weapons are just difficult in general. Partly that is because they're often just slow to resolve, but because the two natural ways to harm them both have odd side effects:

1) Like Inquisitor, you can have a blast weapon doing multiple hits. However, this naturally skews them towards being ineffective versus armour - because they do multiple hits, blast weapons need to do less damage per hit to not be hugely overpowered, and once they do less damage per hit, and armour is applying against each hit, armour easily absorbs a lot of the damage.

Krak grenades in Inquisitor are lethal against light armoured targets, and functionally fairly useless against well armoured targets. Not what they're supposed to be lore-wise.

2) Something like Dark Heresy, where you still only do one hit and thus the weapon can still have similar damage stats... but it's kind of odd having the large blast hit ONLY your arm.

~~~~~

I think IRE needs to stick with the first approach, as neither is a flawless system, and at least this way we're sticking with the established rules.

However, as far as improving on the fact that it's so skewed by armour, I'm struggling for a solution better than having blast weapons automatically halve armour (representing the spray of shrapnel/plasma/etc being likely to find gaps or weaknesses in armour).

That's not necessarily a terrible idea, as theoretically, flak armour could ignore that if not directly hit; that would be in keeping with the lore about it being mostly intended to protect against indirect hits.

Any thoughts?

Hi new here, but I thought I'd contribute.

The explosion should get weaker, instead of do less hits as it projects from point of detonation.

It does indeed make sense that multiple locations of the body are hit, so using a blast number to limit number of hits does make some sense, as having all locations hit at once is going to be overwhelming damage for almost any character to sustain.

Personally I would scale the damage numbers, so an explosion is very lethal at the point of detonation, but damage that is likely to only cause a light injury or be mitigated by armour the thinnest of armour as the explosion radiates outwards.

So damage rather than number of hits drops off with range.

Personally I would use another method to work out the number of hits. A roll against an updated blast number with modifiers for smaller locations of the body,  e.g. no modifier for legs, abdomen, chest +1 for arms +2 for head. Could even add an additional +1 in the outer radius of the blast if it needed further balancing.

A typical blast number could range from 4-6, a D6 result higher than the blast number plus modifiers, that location avoids being hit.

This does give the possibility for all locations to potentially be hit, but it would be rare event.

I would rework the blast radius of some explosives too.

Happy to set aside some time to mathhammer/playtest if you wanted any assistance.

MarcoSkoll

Apologies for the slightly slow reply and welcome - I've been somewhat occupied of late, including an unplanned computer reinstall after it went wibbly last week.

Quote from: Mike712 on September 27, 2020, 10:44:24 PMThe explosion should get weaker, instead of do less hits as it projects from point of detonation.
It has some potential as an idea, depending on exactly how it's handled.

I'm wary of having blast weapons continue to do a large number of hits at all radii, as working out multiple hits is time consuming; the falling off on the number of hits does at least naturally limit that.

(I once had a discussion to this effect with PrecinctOmega about the auto fire rules in his version of Inquisitor 2 - although the rolling to hit was much faster, you then were likely to get many more hits than the existing rules, and working out the damage for that could make the whole process much slower as a result. That said, I did use something similar for IRE's flame weapon rules, but with different underlying numbers, so it didn't result in quite so many hits).

Still, a mechanism that resulted in fewer hits on average, but scaling the damage instead could potentially be an approach to go with; working out a damage modifier only needs to be done once for each character, but each additional hit is multiplicative.

QuotePersonally I would use another method to work out the number of hits. A roll against an updated blast number with modifiers for smaller locations of the body,  e.g. no modifier for legs, abdomen, chest +1 for arms +2 for head. Could even add an additional +1 in the outer radius of the blast if it needed further balancing.
Hmm. If I'm interpreting you right, that immediately calls for eight rolls (2x legs, 2x arms, chest, abdomen, groin, head) with varying modifiers each time a character is hit, and the order is important, so they can't just be rolled as one. Even if they're just D6 rolls, that's still going to be somewhat time consuming. Of course, the trade off is that does remove any need for location rolls, so possibly it's even on time.

The fact that it creates an exception within the rules with a unique way of choosing hit location, I'm a bit less happy about; IRE has tried to remove such "special cases" where possible (for example, "Close up" and "Arm's Reach" are gone from IRE's melee rules, as the new way Reach works naturally represents those).

The other concern I have is that I want to maximise compatibility with first edition; I don't want having to maintain more than one character sheet to be a barrier to IRE. (As is, although IRE has added a couple of melee weapon characteristics and Psy Rating, IRE character sheets are mostly back compatible into 1stE, and with a couple of exceptions like psychic powers, a 1stE character sheet is usually quick to update).

However, complaints aside, I do see potential in the idea. My first thought is that if possible, I'd want to preserve the existing profiles, instead trying to see if it was feasible to choose modifiers that had you rolling under existing blast values. (Rather than over an updated one).

I'll need to do some numbers and tests to see how well it can be made to work, but I'll take a look at those as suggestions. I suspect I may also still need to do something about the way blast interacts with armour for the reasons noted above, but we'll see what the numbers say...
S.Sgt Silva Birgen: "Good evening, we're here from the Adeptus Defenestratus."
Captain L. Rollin: "Nonsense. Never heard of it."
Birgen: "Pick a window. I'll demonstrate".

GW's =I= articles

Mentirius

I'm afraid I'm far too rusty on the original rules to contribute anything useful here, and ad-hoc house rules were rife in my old gaming group, but I'd be in favour of the free awareness test.  I also like the sound of a melee rework - one day when people can safely congregate again, I think I'd enjoy trying out your Revised Edition.  It seems like a monumental amount of work must have gone into it over the years.

MarcoSkoll

Right, I've slowly over the last week or three been trying to write up something regarding Awareness tests.

The "Simple" awareness test is intended to be broadly equivalent to the fudged tests most GMs use for events. "Yeah, that's a decent roll, you see X, Y and Z".
The "Detailed" awareness test tries to provide more structure for when it's necessary, but without rolling independently for any given thing a character might see or a complete list of complicated modifiers. (For the most part, a minor complicating or easing factor affects the difficulty of spotting a character by one level, a major factor by two levels, so the difficulty of spotting a character can usually be ballparked in a second or two).

QuoteThere are two versions of the awareness test - the Simple test, and the Detailed test.

As throughout the course of a game, characters will end up testing awareness dozens of times between them, it is recommended that the Gamesmaster normally have them make the simple test in order to maintain the momentum of the game, and reserve the detailed test when it is important to more carefully define what the character may have seen.

SIMPLE TEST
To make a simple awareness test, a character simply rolls Initiative. The GM then narrates exactly what the character becomes aware of in front of them.

On a straight success, the testing character should become aware of characters ahead of them that are nearby and in the open.
On two degrees of success, the character should notice more details or things that are less obvious, such as that such as that the character in front of them is wearing Arbites armour or that there is a silhouette skulking in the shadows of the building ahead.
On four degrees of success, the character should get a strong grasp of the scene ahead, excepting extremely obscure details - the shape skulking in the shadows moves in accordance with Imperial guard scouting doctrine.
On six or more degrees of success, the character will probably spot nearly anything, such as the sniper on the nearby rooftop who thought he was hidden by his chameleoline cloak...

On a failure, then the character may still notice some things, but the worse their failure, the more they will miss.
On a straight failure, they might miscount the number of characters they think they saw.
On two degrees of failure, they might become fixated on only the most obvious character and miss everything else.
On four degrees of failure, they may not work out what they've seen at all, or even misinterpret it completely.

DETAILED TEST
If a character needs to make a detailed awareness test, then they instead spend their degrees of success to spot things in front of them.

By default, spotting another character (or similarly sized object of interest) nearby and in the open has a Difficulty of 0, and can be spotted for no cost. However, by default, this only provides vague details - that there is someone/something there and roughly how they are moving; the character has seen something, but they have not closely examined it.

However, not every character is equally easy to spot.

a)   If a character is lightly concealed (with at least three locations hidden) spotting them is at +1 Difficulty. A character who is heavily concealed (no more than two locations visible) instead has +2 Difficulty.
Note that if a character is fully concealed, they cannot usually be spotted by sight.

b)   A character who is further away is harder to notice. Each full 10 yards over 20 yards adds +1 Difficulty.

c)   Dim lighting conditions will increase the difficulty by +1, but dark conditions may add +2 Difficulty or more.

d)   A small object or character (servo skull sized or similar) is also at +1 Difficulty. (Ratlings and Cybermastiffs are not small enough to have this penalty).

e)   Objects outside the character's front 90 degree arc, but still within their 180 degree peripheral vision, are at +1 Difficulty.

Some situations may instead make a character easier to spot. Note, however that these will never reduce the Difficulty below zero - spotting a character is never so easy to award additional degrees of success.

f)   A walking character is at -1 difficulty to be spotted. A character that is weaving, running, sprinting or fighting in melee is at -2 difficulty. The GM may choose to reduce this further in the event something is moving even faster (such as a fast moving vehicle or flying character).

g)   A larger character or object is easier to spot. An subject that is Space Marine sized is at -1 Difficulty, an Ogryn sized one is at -2, and correspondingly more for larger subjects; a Sentinel walker might be -3, and a Chimera -4.
Note that buildings are usually sufficiently large that their overall difficulty will be 0 under almost all circumstances and therefore characters will usually not need to spend degrees of success to become aware of the approximate layout of the area in front of them.

h)   If there's other reasons it would be hard to miss something (such as a ganger noisily emptying a heavy stubber on full-auto) the GM may choose to further reduce the difficulty as appropriate.

More detail:
Once they've spent degrees of success sufficient to spot something, the testing character may spend additional degrees of success to become aware of additional information about what they have spotted, such as a basic description of who/what they have seen, working out exactly what they are doing, how they are armed, and the like. Generally, for each new piece of information the character would like, one additional degree of success must be spent.

Note that even if the testing character has spotted something with a previous test, to get more information about it, the base difficulty must first be spent out of the current test; working out what exact weapon someone fifty metres away is carrying is hard even if you've previously spotted them.

Focusing:
A character may elect to focus their attention more specifically. They may nominate an area which has their attention. If they choose an 8 yard diameter, they gain one bonus degree of success against each individual target within, or if they choose a 4 yard diameter, they gain two bonus degrees of success against each target.
These degrees may be spent on either initially spotting and/or further scrutinising a target (and may be spent differently for each target).

However, anything outside this area has its difficulty increased by a corresponding amount; the more a character focuses their attention in one place, the more they are likely to miss other things.

Note that a character chooses whether they will focus after making their test.

Designer's Notes:
The first edition of Inquisitor required that a character had a specific justification to focus in a given area. This requirement has been removed from IRE; Most characters in Inquisitor have years, decades or even centuries of experience, so it's reasonable that they can make judgements about the most likely angles of attack, which direction an escaping heretic is likely to be running or sometimes simply have their attention grabbed by that cloaked figure who's skulking around in the shadows for no good reason.

This is balanced out in the IRE rules by enacting a drawback to choosing to focus a character's attention.


Failure:
Even if a character fails their awareness test, they may still become aware of some things, but it will become much more limited in nature. If they fail their test, and for each additional degree of failure, the Difficulty of spotting anything becomes one level higher.

Obviously, they have no base degrees of success to spend, but may still be able to spot more obvious targets, such as those that are moving, or choose to focus on a specific area in order to gain enough degrees of success to spot something.
S.Sgt Silva Birgen: "Good evening, we're here from the Adeptus Defenestratus."
Captain L. Rollin: "Nonsense. Never heard of it."
Birgen: "Pick a window. I'll demonstrate".

GW's =I= articles

Inquisitor_Snarf

NEAT!

What is the timeframe for integrating these rules into the revised edition?

MarcoSkoll

People can obviously start to make use of them whenever they like, but as far as them becoming "official", that's going to depend on things like what feedback I get from the community and ideally some playtesting.
S.Sgt Silva Birgen: "Good evening, we're here from the Adeptus Defenestratus."
Captain L. Rollin: "Nonsense. Never heard of it."
Birgen: "Pick a window. I'll demonstrate".

GW's =I= articles

Manny Calavera

Congratulations on the work done over the years in creating IRE.
I am still a novice with Inquisitor, but after quickly browsing through the rules of IRE, I would like to give it a try. I noticed that the latest version dates back about 5 years ago, and that V0.3.1 still has parts to be edited and integrated (various traits and ranged weapons).
While browsing the forum, I also discovered the "Revised Armoury".

I would like to know which version is currently the most "complete" and "updated" to fill in the missing parts of IRE in order to play it. Would V0.3.1 + Revised Armoury be a good compromise? Additionally, are there any other parts that I might have missed and need to be integrated, and if so, how?


MarcoSkoll

The Revised Edition and Revised Armoury are separate, and by no means mandatory to use together - although they certainly can be.

The intention is that IRE is something like 95% compatible with first edition character sheets, and most of the changes that do need to be made are very minor; first edition ranged weapons will certainly *work* in IRE, the main thing is that I may want to rebalance some of them (The armoury proper in IRE will be slightly less extensive than RIA, as I don't want to burden the core rules with quite that much detail, but there are some weapons that need to be made more interesting - either with buffs, or drawbacks that stop them being too obvious a choice).

Melee weapons will need a bit more tweaking, but that section is definitely complete enough to act as a guide for people on how to update their sheets for IRE.
S.Sgt Silva Birgen: "Good evening, we're here from the Adeptus Defenestratus."
Captain L. Rollin: "Nonsense. Never heard of it."
Birgen: "Pick a window. I'll demonstrate".

GW's =I= articles

Manny Calavera

Quote from: MarcoSkoll on July 16, 2023, 06:09:41 AMThe Revised Edition and Revised Armoury are separate, and by no means mandatory to use together - although they certainly can be.

The intention is that IRE is something like 95% compatible with first edition character sheets, and most of the changes that do need to be made are very minor; first edition ranged weapons will certainly *work* in IRE, the main thing is that I may want to rebalance some of them (The armoury proper in IRE will be slightly less extensive than RIA, as I don't want to burden the core rules with quite that much detail, but there are some weapons that need to be made more interesting - either with buffs, or drawbacks that stop them being too obvious a choice).

Melee weapons will need a bit more tweaking, but that section is definitely complete enough to act as a guide for people on how to update their sheets for IRE.

Thank you Marco, me and my group will definitely try IRE before summer ends.