Hey Man, well this is Babylon

Lately I’ve been heavily musing over what each of the four core Gun Characteristics should mechanically bring to the table. Like with Cannibal Contagion, Billions and Billions of Bullets will give each character four core numerical attributes, called Characteristics. Unlike CC, in which the characteristic scores are manually assigned by the player at the time of character creations, in B&BoB these numbers will be determined by the Guns the players pick (or better yet, randomly draw).

I’ve settled on the names I want to assign to them: Caliber, Chrome, Clip, and Casing. Caliber and Chrome will function very much like the Kill and Savvy characteristics in CC, directly affecting the number of cards drawn during in-game conflicts. Clip and Casing, however, are giving me a bit more difficulty.

Since the mechanics are very heavily based on the same core principles of the previous game, it was pretty obvious from the get-go that the Kill and Savvy roles would need to be ported over. Whereas the zombie game was focused primarily on characters’ actions being based on two core instincts, in this bullet-drama game the mathematics of the action-template are the same, only substituting the “violence vs resourcefulness” paradigm of the first game with a new focus on “action vs flash.” Thus the two Active Characteristics from the former (Kill and Savvy) were easily ported into the latter (Caliber and Chrome).

However, CC also used two Passive Characteristics, which were tied directly into the Hurtin’ and Madness mechanics of that game – the higher your Grit, the more likely you were to stay alive, and the higher your Cool, the less likely you were to go insane. I don’t intend on carrying those mechanics over into this one, however, so I now must develop an alternate set of uses for the two new Passive Characteristics, Clip and Casing. In B&BoB, I’m no longer using the Hurtin’ system, choosing instead to implement the aforementioned Lifetimer mechanic. In the same vein, the Madness system of the previous game is removed, with an entirely new, intentionally much more antagonistic “Hand of Fate” system taking its place. As such, I now need to find a way to tie the two new characteristics in with the two new system extensions.

My current ideas on this are that Clip should somehow be connected to the Hand of Fate’s stash of Bullet Tokens, while Casing should be tied in with the Lifetimer. Current possibilities:

• Casing could set the number of Bullet tokens the Hand gets when you use your Gun. I’m leaning far away from this one, right now. First off, it would make it the only one of the four attributes in which having a high score would be bad for you, and I want to avoid having any of the mechanics be out of sync in that regard. Second, I still haven’t balanced out the Bullet costs of the Hand’s abilities, so I’m very hesitant to even throw such a mechanic into the foundation without a better view of the greater superstructure.
• Clip could determine how many conflicts you can play in before your Hand gets another Bullet added to his pile. This could work, but I’m a bit wary of adding in conflict-counting math to an otherwise math-light game system.
• Clip could instead be the number of bullets the Hand must use in order to affect you. Then again, this could limit the Hand-player’s desire to do things to you.
• Another idea: Clip determines the number of Bullet Tokens the Hand gets when you choose to draw an additional card in a Conflict. Hmmm… I’m finding myself drawn to this one, or a variant thereof. I haven’t put in a bonus card mechanic yet, but Cannibal Contagion had one implemented as a way for the mad Half to bribe you into going crazy. Perhaps the player can draw another card, giving the Hand of Fate a token for each one, and the Clip sets the maximum number of bonus cards you can draw in this regard? I think I like this one. Need to work on this particular train of thought a bit more.
• Casing, on the other hand, could represent how many ticks of the Timer are regained when you make a Time Check to restore it. Of course, I haven’t yet decided if I even want to implement such a recovery mechanic. In such a case, however, it could instead be a bit more Active, and determine how many cards are drawn in such an affair.
• Casing could also set the number of tokens the Hand must spend to affect your narration. This would make a bit more sense, at least as far as nomenclature is concerned, for the thicker your casing, the more bullet-resistant you would be (hyuk hyuk).

Hm. Not sure.

What do you think?