{"id":576,"date":"2017-11-17T00:36:04","date_gmt":"2017-11-17T00:36:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/personalized-special-effects-for-cinemechanix\/"},"modified":"2024-01-16T15:34:55","modified_gmt":"2024-01-16T21:34:55","slug":"personalized-special-effects-for-cinemechanix","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/personalized-special-effects-for-cinemechanix\/","title":{"rendered":"Personalized Special Effects for Cinemechanix"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before we start, you should go buy The Comprehensive Soldier<\/a>, the newest sourcebook for Qerth!<\/p>\n

One of the core ideas of Cinemechanix<\/a> is that we don\u2019t give you rules for playing a game, we give you the tools to create the rules for the game you want to play.* One recurring idea in the rules is that sometimes you need rules that are specific to the character. That\u2019s why we\u2019ve got a Special Effects trait that\u2019s basically defined as \u201csomething that doesn\u2019t work according to the usual rules.\u201d Super-heroes are probably the most obvious examples: The Flash and Superman both have super-speed, but since The Flash gets his speed from the Speed Force and Superman gets his from the effects of Earth\u2019s Yellow Sun (™) on his Kryptonian biology, they\u2019re going to work a little differently. The basic rule for running really fast might be the same, but Barry\u2019s also going to have all kinds of freaky Speed Force-related powers (and drawbacks, like Time Wraiths) that Superman doesn\u2019t. Likewise, Iron Man\u2019s \u201carmor\u201d power will probably require slightly more complex rules than The Thing\u2019s, if only because the Iron Man suit can get trashed without killing Tony. The Thing\u2019s armor is his skin, so you just need to know how much damage it soaks up. The Iron Man suit probably at least needs its own Stamina stat so we\u2019ve got a way of knowing when it\u2019s been blasted to uselessness. If you want to get fancy, you can even have rules and tables to decide what other suit capabilities get fragged when the suit takes a hit.<\/p>\n

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Until I created the demo characters for Archon, I\u2019d mostly just used Special Effects for \u201cweird stuff\u201d like super-powers and spells and toy gimmicks. Since the demo characters were a little less fantastical, I got to see how Special Effects could work as character gimmicks for more low-key characters. I really like the way they turned out, to the point that I\u2019m wondering if there\u2019s a way to make these kinds of character-based Special Effects more explicit in the rules. Since creating known characters that I was familiar with made it click for me, I\u2019m going to provide the demo characters as examples here to give you a better idea of what I\u2019m talking about. However, in the interest of not getting called a fuckwit<\/a> on a public forum, I\u2019m going to use generic character archetypes instead of actual character names.<\/p>\n

Space Cowboys<\/h1>\n

The first set of characters were for a Space Cowboys game and were certainly not based on any short-lived TV shows you might have seen. There were 9 characters, each with their own Special Effect:<\/p>\n