Posted May 28, 2024 by squidhead-games
After some more testing, it was painfully obvious the mechanics were skewed heavily in the favor of the characters. I'm all for heroic characters, but it was a bit over the top. The issue was with rolling up to 3 dice in addition to the d20 and taking the highest of the 3 additional dice and adding it to the d20. There were very few failures, so the game didn't scale well. It was fine when the characters attributes were in the d4-d8 range. Once they hit d10 they were almost invincible.
So, I made a simple change. I dropped the gear dice. I know, I know. Players like their characters to have fancy gear, and they still can. Gear grants narrative permission, so if a character has a sniper rifle, they can pick off a technopunk from a long distance. If a character has a neuro-jack, they can plug directly into something to try and hack it, etc.
Lean into how the gear allows the characters to do things, giving them a chance to roll.