Chapter Two: Game Systems

Character Creation

Chi-Chian uses a fairly straightforward point-buy system in character creation, with players receiving 120 "Chi points" to spend on Stats (of which there are eight), Status, Capabilities, and wealth. Unspent Chi Points go into the character's Chi Pool – more on that in a moment.

The eight stats are Mettle, Brains, Health, Guile, Virtue, Charm, Tech, and Willpower, each with a human range of 1-5. Considering the importance of intelligence, subterfuge, compassion, charisma, technical savvy, and determination in the setting, the overall list feels pretty right to me. However, I'm not as pleased with Mettle, a catchall combat stat, nor with Health, a holistic physical stat. As I've made clear in previous reviews, I dislike holistic physical stats in general – I just can't accept nimble characters being stronger by default, and vice versa. In a game named for a graceful but definitely non-buff heroine, the oddness of such a combination stands out even more. Stranger still, Mettle and Health together segregate all physical activities into combat and non-combat rather than, say, brute force and fine manipulation. Because Mettle covers such things as aiming and reaction time, I'm tempted to treat it as a dexterity/agility stat, leaving Health to cover strength and constitution.

Given a society stratified both literally and figuratively – see below – I heartily approve of a rating for Status. However, I do find it odd that Status is the only aspect of the character creation process serving in a "Drawback/Disadvantage" capacity when taken as a negative score, thus providing more Chi points to spend elsewhere. Characters must take at least two Tragic Flaws but get no points for doing so.

And now to the Capabilities, where things get freaky. Literally.

Capabilities are a bizarre conglomeration of skills, advantages, and Gamma World-style gonzo superpowers. Some of these – primarily the powers – are restricted to one or more sources: Natural (for the species, anyway), Mutation, Implant (like cybernetics), Prototype (unique equipment usable only by the creator), Freak (you're just… well, a freak), and Training. These have no real impact on game mechanics, save for Prototype – in that case, the Capability doesn't cost Chi points to improve so long as the character has the technical know-how and capability to improve it.

As for the scope of Capabilities… wow.

There are relatively few skills, giving the game a very strong bias toward Stats. Among these are the basics, like Martial Arts, Piloting, Streetwise, and Stealth… and the not-so-basic Sexpert. That's right: your character can be damn good in the sack. So good that he or she can get hopeful bedmates to do just about anything.

The weird power Capabilities take up the bulk of the section, and, like the supernatural powers in Angel, provide enough breadth to re-create a number of superheroes in ability, if not power level. Most of the "standard" powers are here, like Armor, Claws, Energy Projection, Flight, Invulnerability, Regeneration, and an array of psionic abilities. But then things get really weird. How would you like your character to constantly excrete a coating of slime, for example? Or exude bioluminescence, or a pheromone that makes him irresistible to the species and sex of his choice? And extra limbs are great, but how about extra heads?

Only one omission stuck out to me: while the selection does include Enhanced Strength to make the character stronger than the Health score would indicate, there's not a corresponding Enhanced Agility. (There's Enhanced Reflexes, but that's for initiative only.)

Playtest: If you want some idea of the kinds of character concepts that both the character creation system and the setting can accommodate, try this one on for size: one of my players wanted to know if he could play a squid. (Regulars at #rpgnet will, no doubt, have a pretty good idea of who said player might be.) The answer was an unequivocal "yes". And thus, after a bit of brainstorming, was born the SquidButler(TM) – an oversized genetically engineered land squid sporting the brain of a butler in an attached metal cylinder and floating about with its own mini-zeppelin. (The creature was a prototype, created before the company realized that nobody wanted a squid for a butler.) Creating the thing with the available Capabilities proved to be relatively easy. The only annoyance was the way tentacles work in the game – a pretty key element in the character concept, obviously. Basically, appendages from the Extra Limbs power can either make the character faster, stronger, or – in the case of something like tentacles – both. In order to have tentacles that could actually let him do more than one thing at once, he'd have had to take the Extra Actions power. That got a little pricey, especially given the fact that taking low Status is the only way to earn extra Chi points.

The chapter includes basic "package deals" for playing robots and cockroaches. (There are intelligent human-sized bipedal Tommy gun-toting cockroaches living beneath the city, you see – generally peaceful creatures who all speak with Russian accents due to having learned English centuries ago from an English language instructional recording for Russian-speakers.) Surprisingly, the cockroach package is the far more expensive of the two, but this is only because robots have less in common with one another and have more room for customization.

On a related note, the game meets my personal definition of a "supers" game precisely because such packages aren't required for superhuman abilities. Sure, characters can have special abilities stemming from their species, but players are entirely capable of creating characters who are not just powered, but uniquely powered – in origin, if not in kind.

Gear

The chapter offers a respectable array of weaponry, from swords and bows on up to plasma weapons, throwing in oddities like the acid mine launcher and the pest control atomizer along the way. Vehicles are mostly limited to various models of small personal aircraft called pods, although stats for light and heavy "taximechs" – as the name implies, giant robots serving as taxis that literally fight over fares – appear as well.

And then there are the exxos: power armors that on the low end serve as protection from unhealthy environments – of which there are plenty in the city – and on the high end offer a variety of fancy gadgetry and weapons. I particularly like the Rabbit, Rat, Tiger, and Dragon exxos – examples of a line of armors based on the Chinese zodiac, each with thematic equipment and capabilities.

I also like the fact that both vehicles and exxos come with a list of options for purchase, and that both have a Style rating bonus in addition to their other stats. Naturally, being seen in the right model of pod or exxo in such a status-obsessed setting makes a person more attractive and desirable!

There's really not much in the way of non-weapon, non-vehicular equipment – only four examples, in fact. Two of them, the Com system and the datapad, are the future's equivalent of desktop and portable computers. The other two, the breaker box and the K-seg buffer, are pretty setting-specific, so I'll deal with them in just a moment.

Game Mechanics

As you can probably guess from the quantity of my reviews, I've tried out a whole lot of RPG systems. And in all honesty, this is one of the odder ones I've seen.

The game almost universally uses a roll of 2d10 vs. a target number. At first glance, you might think that the 2d10 roll adds to the Stat or Capability rating in question. Good guess, but nope. The only thing that ever gets added to the 2d10 roll is another 2d10 roll when the first roll comes up doubles. In that case, the roll continues to open-end so long as doubles keep coming up. Divide the roll by the difficulty – or, preferably, refer to the handy chart provided – to get the number of Success the roll generates.

Okay, so what effect do ability scores have? Well, here's where things start getting a little odd. If a character's score is higher than the difficulty, the difference between the character's score and the difficulty is the number of times the player gets to re-roll. Not roll-and-add, mind you – re-roll as in "try again," taking the best roll. For example, if your stat is 4 and the Difficulty is 2, you'd get to roll 2d10 two extra times and take the highest of the three rolls. So, higher ability scores don't directly translate into higher rolls; instead, they just make them more likely on average.

Players can also re-roll by spending as many Chi points as they like at a cost of one re-roll per point. That's a pretty weak "Drama Point" mechanic, especially considering that characters are unlikely to start the game with more than five of them. I would suggest allowing players to treat a spent Chi point like a doubles roll, thus ensuring that they get at least a little bang for their buck.

All of this means that players will have to keep track of multiple rolls, including any ones that happen to open-end due to rolling doubles. For actions with a wide margin between the ability score and the target number, that could be a serious pain. (The book actually includes an example of the GM having to do 376 re-rolls to calculate the damage from falling off a skyscraper – an extreme case, admittedly, but the very fact that such a situation is possible makes me shudder.)

So what about scores that are lower than the target number? In that case, the player makes one 2d10 roll, subtracting the difference between the target number and the ability score from the number of Successes. In other words, having a lower score than the Difficulty doesn't make your roll itself less likely to succeed, but rather reduces or eliminates the Successes that a successful roll generates.

Playtest: Going in, I had a pretty good idea that I wasn't going to like this core mechanic. I was right, but not so much for the reason I thought. I figured that keeping track of the multiple rolls would be the big issue. As it turned out, the typical number of re-rolls was fairly low, and not having to worry about modifiers to the 2d10 roll actually kept results nicely transparent. Granted, I didn't run into a situation in which I'd have to make a lot of those rolls in quick succession. No, the biggest annoyance I encountered was the fact that there is simply no way to hide a target number from a player – after all, the player has to know whether he'll be doing multiple rolls or if he'll be making one roll and subtracting from his Successes. Oh, sure, you could roll for the player and keep the results a secret, but then there's the matter of giving the player a chance to spend Chi points to get a better roll. And speaking of spending Chi points, the mechanic can sucker players into needlessly blowing them on relatively unimportant rolls. Consider the ever-popular "spot hidden" roll, for example. In the included adventure, there's a chance for characters to find something valuable but not vital, and doing so has a pretty high target number. I had to tell the players the target number in order for them to roll, and the high number made the roll seem pretty important, tempting the players to fritter away their Chi points on re-rolls. On the other hand, my players rarely saw much point in spending Chi points when faced with high target numbers. Doing so just seemed like buying more chances to fail.

Tech & Inventing

With a setting overflowing with weird science, it only makes sense for the rules to include mechanics for creating and repairing devices. It's pretty simple, really, with the equivalent Chi point cost of a new device to be created or the Tech rating of an existing device to be repaired serving as the Difficulty of the attempt, which in turn also determines the cost and creation/repair time involved. Assistants and good labs or workshops provide a boost to the relevant Capability (Scientist or Technician), and characters may choose to take longer in order to lower the Difficulty.

The mechanics allow for various components to be created separately and then assembled – a must when creating a robot or new life form. What I didn't understand was how to determine the Chi cost of things like basic human sight and hearing, which the book says are to be treated as separate components.

Combat

In terms of the overall mechanic, combat, like inventing, is relatively simple. The sum of a character's Mettle and Brains – the OOMF Rating ("Oo! Oo! Me First!") – adds to a roll of 1d10 to determine Initiative, an exception to the otherwise universal 2d10 roll. Both melee and ranged attacks pit Mettle rolls by the attacker against a Difficulty equal to the Mettle of the defender, with range penalties for the latter taking the form of reduced Successes.

Note that just as a character can be especially strong (via Enhanced Strength) but not especially nimble, a character can be especially skilled in melee combat (via the Martial Arts Capability) but not especially skilled at ranged combat. Why, I have no idea.

Given the number of rolls already involved, I was glad to see that combat doesn't require opposed rolls; however, I found it odd that it's impossible for a character to be especially good at dodging, either. Declaring a dodge simply involves forfeiting attacks in favor of imposing a two-Success penalty on the attacker, perpetuating the system's strange bias against agile characters.

The damage mechanic includes some disturbing (for me) echoes of the one found in Shadowrun's first edition. Base damage is the number of Successes of the attack. All weapons have an Attack Strength, which is the Difficulty for the defender's Health roll to reduce those Successes. (In other words, if an attacker gets three Successes using a weapon with an Attack Strength of 4, the defender must make a Health roll against a Difficulty of 4 to earn Successes to counter those of the attacker. If the defender gets three or more successes, the attack does no damage.) Some – but not all – weapons also have a Damage Bonus, which adds to the attacker's Successes before the Damage Reduction roll.

Characters can withstand ten Damage Levels before death, taking a one-Success penalty to all rolls for every two Damage Levels and falling unconscious at eight Damage Levels.

Playtest: The only fair way to judge a game is in terms of how well it succeeds at what it sets out to do. (Well, and in terms of whether what it sets out to do is worthwhile, I suppose, but this game's already on solid ground with me in that regard.) Chi-Chian starts out this chapter by saying that the rules "are meant to reflect the epic, heroic nature of the stories within its setting" and to "evoke the spirit of fairy tales, comic books, and pulp fiction." Well, based upon my experience with the game's combat system, I'd have to say that it fails in this regard. First of all, the scale magnifies even minor differences in ability levels, and the steep death spiral from the damage mechanic only compounds the problem. The best fighter in our group had a Mettle score of 5, for example, and she got her clock cleaned by an opponent with a Mettle score of 6. And once again, Chi did little to alleviate the situation. Chi points can't directly counter damage – they can just allow re-rolls of Damage Reduction attempts. Furthermore, while the heavy influence of Successes on damage suits a swashbuckling action/adventure theme, the Attack Strength mechanic renders even devastating weaponry relatively feeble in the hands of low-Mettle characters. One of the characters in our game sported the powerful Dragon exxo, for example, which includes a flame projector: Attack Strength 6, Damage Bonus 0. Because she had a relatively low Mettle score as compared to her opponent, her hits with this theoretically deadly weapon ended up as little more than intense suntans. The Attack Strength helped hold her Successes, but she couldn't get that many of them in the first place. Basically, a sense of hopelessness set in quickly – not a good thing in most games, but especially bad in a game wanting to simulate high-flying adventure in the face of heavy odds.

Fortunately, if you want to dump the mechanics, the game shares the same basic scale as several popular systems, including Storyteller and Unisystem. Heck, if you want to cut down on the dice rolling but keep the brutal death spiral, you could import Deep7's XPG or DEEP systems – reviewed by yours truly in Mean Streets and Arrowflight, respectively – again, with the same basic attribute scale. I really don't think the system would be all that hard to tweak to your satisfaction, either, although I wouldn't factor this in as a selling point. More work = less value.