Metal Gear Rising: Tactical Cooperative Action

[DrBones]

War has changed.


The year is 2018. It has been four years since the SOP system collapsed. With it went the five largest PMCs in the world. The war economy waned like a full moon, diminished but not gone. These three events are clearly linked, but the exact correlation is cloaked in mystery. All the public knows is that, when SOP was destroyed, a miraculous golden age of technological advancement began.


Cybernetic augmentation and gene therapy became affordable to most nations and companies, sparking a new leg of the constant arms race plaguing humanity. Though ID control and weapon control are a thing of the past, private military companies found a new way to control their soldiers: cybernetics. People swapped their organs and limbs out for company-sponsored cyborg parts, literally linking their lives to their company's.


Many PMCs chose to invest heavily in cybernetic augmentation and rose to fill the gap that Outer Heaven left. Wasp Sting is but one of them, and it is with them that you have found employment. You, alongside many others, have replaced your body and your mind with company property; try not to disappoint your superiors.


Rules

1. Join a squad to go on missions. Squads should have 5 people within them, but may receive support from NPCs on-site.
   
2. Understand the intricacies of the FUDGE dice system. A complex walkthrough of how the system works is here: http://www.sonic.net/~rknop/big/Omar/fudge/FudgeSRD.pdf
   
3. Try not to be generic. This is Metal Gear, the sky's the limit!
   
4. When creating a character, try to keep things balanced. It's no fun for the GM and your comrades if you clear out any area within a single round.
   
5. Rounds last for either a day or until every unit involved has moved, whichever comes first. If you haven't posted what you're doing this round by midnight, you will be treated as if you had abstained from acting.
   
6. Be willing to accept failure. Your success depends on the dice and your tactics, not how powerful you write your character to be.
   

A post explaining how FUDGE and the setting's custom mechanics is forthcoming.

 

[DrBones]

What is FUDGE?


FUDGE (Freeform Universal Do-it-yourself Gaming Engine) is the end-all be-all for rules-light roleplaying. While other systems would have you carry dozens of different dice with many, many sides, FUDGE uses nothing but quartets of 3-sided dice.


Each die can land on -1, 0, or 1 (1, 2, or 3 respectively), meaning that all rolls can range from -3 to 3. The only difficult math comes from applying bonuses to your rolls and comparing that to the enemy's rolls.


How does combat work?


Combat is a simple comparison game. You roll your dice, the enemy rolls their dice, each of you applies their bonuses, and then you compare them. If the attacker's roll ends up positive, they deal damage equal to that number. For every 3 points of damage inflicted on a character, they are dealt a Wound.


What are Wounds?


Wounds work as your hit points. The average player has 6 Wounds, but their condition will degrade as they suffer more Wounds. At 6 to 5 Wounds, the player is Scratched, and feels perfectly fine. At 4 to 3 Wounds, the player is Hurt, and all their rolls will be penalized one point. At 2 to 1 Wounds, the player is Very Hurt, and their rolls are penalized 2 points. At 0 Wounds, the player is Incapacitated, and is incapable to doing nearly anything. Below that, and the player will die. Fortunately, since this is Metal Gear Rising and you are playing as cyborgs, your character can be revived just as easily as any robot can be rebuilt.


How many actions can my character take in a single turn?


Typically, your character can only act once per turn. However, if you perform a Speed skill check, you can take additional actions. The Speed check difficulty starts at a difficulty of 1, and increases by a point of difficulty for each subsequent action. As such, attempting to stab an enemy five times in one round requires you to pass a Speed check of 1, then 2, then 3, then 4, then 5 in order to act quick enough to stab them.


In addition, Speed (among other skills, depending on the situation) factors into figuring out which characters go first when combat begins.


Example of combat in action


You are fighting an enemy in close combat. You swing your sword at him, and he attempts to block it using his armor. Your sword has +3 to your Damage rolls, his armor is worth +3 to his defense rolls.


You roll a 3 for your damage roll, he rolls a 0 for his defense roll. 3+3 adds up to a cumulative 6 for your damage, and 3+0 adds up to a cumulative +3 for his defense roll. 6-3 is 3, resulting in you dealing a total of 3 Damage. The Orc loses a Wound, and is brought down to 5 Wounds.


For non-combat instances, skill checks are either opposed or unopposed. Opposed checks force you to meet a minimum value, otherwise you fail. The more points under (or over) the minimum value you go for certain checks, the harder you fail (or succeed). Unopposed checks have no minimum value, merely varying degrees of success.


 
An excellent explanation of how the damage and armor system work together (thanks Zaskille!)

Basically think of it as Cyborgs having a racial bonus to their armor that other armor stacks with.
Toughness determines how hard you are to wound. Basically the way things work is that attacks deal wounds equal to [(ATK+MOD)-(DEF+MOD)]/(TGH). By default Cyborgs have a base of 3 in each stat, making the calculation [(ATK+3)-(DEF+3)]/(3)


Toughness, outside of specific circumstances like being a boss fight, cannot be raised, so its value will always be 3 for your purposes.


So basically:


if a default cyborg hits an unarmored human (0 DEF 3 TGH), he needs a final modifier of at least 0 to deal one wound and 3 to deal two


if a default cyborg hits another default cyborg (3 DEF 3 TGH), he needs a final modifier of at least 3 to deal one wound and 6 to deal two


if a default cyborg hits Red Hummingbird (4 DEF 3 TGH), he needs a final modifier of at least 4 to deal 1 wound and 7 to deal 2


if a default cyborg hits an elite cyborg (3 DEF 4 TGH), he needs a final modifier of at least 4 to deal 1 wound and 8 to deal 2


This make sense?