On Play Reviews

 Hi. I'm a game designer.

I get play reports.

Here's a play report from people I don't personally know and have never met (I've communicated with the GM in discord I guess).

Background

3 players

Session took place over 3 hours, covered getting an operation, recon, prep, sabotage, and running the op

Characters were a Green Face with maybe too broad of a focus (more on that later), a Synthetic Bruiser, and an Uplifted Octopus mage

What my players loved

• Gameplay felt pretty easy and straightforward, one remarked that once you were into the flow it just made sense
• One player described the game as definitely being easier than Shadowrun, but admitted that that is grading on a curve
• Players really liked the structure of mission prep, compared it to games like Blades in the Dark
• Really felt like they were in control of the story, high degree of agency
• One player compared character creation to making a custom race in Master of Orion, felt like they had a ton of meaningful choices and it was fun to think through

What my players were less enthusiastic about

• My face player went too broad and ended up with some pretty mediocre hacking and a bad innate spell as part of his Green heritage that was hard to use.  Felt certain things required a lot of investment and almost weren't worth taking as a result
• Some felt the somewhat structured nature made it maybe harder to roleplay or get in character much

GM Thoughts

• I used the in progress random mission generator and it mostly worked great! Shoutout to you and bacchist for making that possible
• There were definitely some gaps in the mission generator content, or maybe they're just assumptions the system makes? - For example the alert track talked about drones coming out to patrol, but didn't say what kind of drones or give stats for them.  I could've also used more information on NANs and electronic defenses. It feels like the current mission generator is great at providing "what is unique" about an operation but more of the baseline stuff would be helpful to me.

Note that the operation generator on https://sinlessrpg.com has been updated since then several times. 

• The core dice mechanic just works and makes it really easy to adjudicate what is happening and why.  I definitely felt like I had a long way to go w/ system understanding but it was easy to make reasonable rulings that everyone thought were fair in the moment
• Every once in a while you run into a little gap here or there; our run in this session was the gun cyber-limbs; none of the guns listed have effective ranges, so I just improvised off of what stats regular firearms had. Not a big deal, but mildly annoying to turn to a page in the book only to figure out it doesn't quite have what you need in the moment

I dunno guys. That's a raw play report. I've read some of them in my time, and, uh, they aren't usually this positive.

You should read into it yourself. 

https://sinlessrpg.com

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Hack & Slash 

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Asset Thursdays: Acrocolypse

 

Here we have Acrocolypse, and uplifted anarchist crocodile. This asset was the asset of a player in the playtest games, and I did my bestest to make the crocodile look like him. 

Because he's an anarchist, he takes cash (4 market capital, equivalent to approximately 40k.) but has no upkeep threshold. He'll work for people without infrastructural support. 

His sector action is best used in sectors that you don't control, the lockdown prevents any sort of profit from being made and increases enforcement on any operations in the sector. 

And, as a bonus, having him drive by on his chopper and launch grenades at your opponents is always helpful.

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Hack & Slash 

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On the Ease of Play

 I don't buy TTRPG's to put on my shelf.

One of the things I've learned through decades of play, is that if someone has to stop the game to play a separate game that takes place in a short period of time, like early edition psionics and deckers.

There's literally a joke about everyone going to watch a movie while one player takes their turn.

I run too many games to have someone sit out for an hour. It's just—it's not acceptable.

The way I addressed this in Sinless is that it all takes place on the same board. Everyone is playing the same game in the same literal space, hence the rule of targeting. Now there's more handwaving and explanation and in fact it does affect the in world fiction in concrete ways. 

But the goal is to play a fun cyber-sorcery heist game with friends. There's this trend, where you might say "Oh, you're just making everything simple and dumbed down."

Well, yes, but actually no, but maybe yes.

It is simple. If you can see something you can target it. But it isn't dumbed down for two reasons. 

First, your pools are limited and you bid your resources in combat. If you're out of dice, you can't defend. Second, there's a Jan-Ken-Pon interaction in combat. You can shoot a spirit, but it's much less effective. Lots of things are powerful but weak to other things. 

So there are a lotof simple meaninful decisions to make in combat. But instead of spending time figuring out how to do what you want to do, you spend your time deciding what you want to do.

YMMV.

https://sinlessrpg.com

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Hack & Slash 

Follow, Twitch, Support, Donate to end Cancer (5 Star Rating) sinlessrpg.com

On the Functional Face

So a big challenge I had with Sinless was "How do you have a functional face character?".

And my answer was, give them unique powerful resources that can only be accessed by people with social skills that derive from Charisma.

There are around 160 illustrated assets for Sinless, each with a pair of unique abilities that are accessed by Etiquettes. Characters have six ranks in etiquettes (which equal the number of dice they roll to use the asset abilities). You get points to choose etiquettes via your charisma score.

Oh behold the ludo-narrative synergy!

You see, a face knows a lot of people (assets) and can walk in many different circles (etiquette) and the assets have unique options that give face characters options other characters don't have.

And then they can use those assets to try and make the world the way they want.

Neat! 

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Hack & Slash 

Follow, Twitch, Support, Donate to end Cancer (5 Star Rating) sinlessrpg.com

On Lore

Sinless is a fully independent intellectual property with it's own lore. The basics: magic came back, a lot of data and tech was lost, there's fewer people and corporations are in charge are all the "lore" anyone needs to know.

It is not required to read one sentence of background or lore to play the game. You're already familiar with the idea of mages, ronin, deckers, riggers—they are just different 'classes' of approaching situations.

Not needing to know a single piece of background is a strength. like in the Forgotten Realms or Dark Souls, the lore is there to provide depth to those who seek it, but it isn't in any way required: It's designed to be set up so you can play out your cyber-sorcery games, not mine.

It's explicitly a classic-style game. What do I mean by that? I mean, like in early games, it was about sandboxes, open tables, and an evolving world. All the Sinless games in the discord take place in the same city. It isn't set up for traditional play, like in second edition, or vampire: the masquerade where there's a plot and the players follow it.

But, due to the fact that it follows a B/X (Basic/eXpert, Moldvay/Cook) modular exception-based design it is trivial to use the system without engaging in the corporation/brand building mechanics. 

In fact, that was the original design. I always found it difficult to understand how much to pay, what the budgets were for these corporations, how to model the surrounding effects of operational fallout, how would it impact the economy in the area. How do you handle medical procedures, acquiring new weapons, hurting or defeating a corporation. 

I don't want the players to do what I want, I want to find out what happens when they play.

So in laying out a system to handle common player actions (finding someone, gathering information, buying things, upgrading their character), it was necessary to create a framework (like a literal guide) to Gamemasters, so they knew how much to pay for operations, and how these entities interacted for players to affect them.

And all that exists! You can use it just like that, and handle character actions during downtime without needing to engage in brand or company management at all!

That said, since there's this wonderful framework for creating and managing power structures in the city, it is pretty easy to add a few actions that allow players to interact with that.

And during playtesting, it turns out it's pretty fun to fight over sectors and resources in an area. It's like, clearing hexes, but instead of killing indigenous species, you're making rich people miserable. 

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Hack & Slash 

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Asset Thursdays: Robert Science-Man

 

Many many of the assets are pastiches or parodies of memories of my youth. (Hold on to your hats guys, this stuff is going to make you feel old)

This is a mad scientist for the Aristocrats. Gorilla GroddTM (Property of DC comics) was influenced by an alien meteorite, so this would be the geneticist who reverse engineers a hypothetical (certainly not copyright infringing) gorilla influenced by alien radiation. And since Sinless takes place in our future earth they have a DC comics with a trademarked Gorilla. The study of Gorillas influenced by alien radiation obviously would be named Groddgenics. 

No Cap.

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Hack & Slash 

Follow, Twitch, Support, Donate to end Cancer (5 Star Rating) sinlessrpg.com

On the Action Economy

This is always a sticky wicket for games. 

My highest priority in designing Sinless was making a robust frame that was easily understandable. I wanted the thing you would guess the rules would be based on your TTRPG experience to be the rule. 

So, and stop me if you've heard this before, Sinless has Simple and Complex actions, and a Reflex action. A complex action is two simple actions. You get them at the start of the round.

Holy shit, you could probably just sit down and play a cyber-sorcery game without needing to take a college course and reference reddit!

Now this isn't novel or particularly special. But we have a "Summoner" situation. Speakers summon spirits, riggers command drones—there are a lot of situations that create this 'action economy' problem, where certain people act a lot. Examples include wired reflexes in Shadowrun 3e, Summoners in Pathfinder 1e, and utilizing the bonus action in 5e.

There are many solutions to this, but Sinless uses the cohort system.

You can get exploit actions (from VCR's, Wired Reflexes, Henchmen et. al.) that can only be used for a specific purpose. Adding more drones doesn't get you more actions, you have to divide your actions among your cohorts.

This 'restricted extra action' system is flexible and descriptive rather than prescriptive. Did you take fascination and train a tiger or dragonelle? Get an exploit action to command it in combat. 

This also fits the tropes of action movies, much like the way dice pools work, your focus is limited and you choose where to apply it. 

https://sinlessrpg.com

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Hack & Slash 

Follow, Twitch, Support, Donate to end Cancer (5 Star Rating) sinlessrpg.com