What It Means to be Human

Okay, that title promises a lot. I won't even pretend to have the answer to that question. I'm just a guy here to talk about making up game rules.

As discussed in my previous post, SELF is the measure of character's personal identity and psychological stability. A lot has been made of "Insanity" or "Madness" mechanics in games like Call of Cthulhu. Boiling down mental health into Sane and Insane is a rather dated, and less than helpful examination of the subject. SELF isn't intended to present someone's "stability" or "sanity" in a psychological sense. Instead, it is more of a panic system, which is a companion to physical injuries.

As of this writing, characters begin with roughly 75-85 SELF. This means there's always a chance of a DE-SYNC when things go poorly, but it's pretty slim. We'll cover that in later on. The lower your SELF, the more the character has become dissociated from reality, either losing touch with their own humanity, or their augmentations make it difficult for them to feel like they used to.

In essence, characters with lower SELF scores have traded their innate humanity for high technology and power. However, this avoidable. Don't want to risk nasty DE-SYNCs? Well, you could always stop now. It's not like you really needed that Reflex Enhancement chip, right?

Losing SELF

SELF never increases. It is something you slowly lose, either through augmentation or through traumatic events. As your self decreases, you are more likely to suffer a fictional condition related to advanced cybernetic augmentation known as DE-SYNC. The more chromed-up your character becomes, the more their SELF suffers. This is a classic "press your luck" system. Cybernetics inherently make your character more powerful, making them smarter, faster, stronger, or more well-equipped for the job of being a Merc. But the drawback is that when a situation causes your character to panic or come under cybernetic attack, you have both a higher risk of DE-SYNC and the effects are worse as you lower your SELF.

Every time your character augments themself with a new piece of cyberware, they lose SELF. Depending on the implant, this could be 1d6, 2d10 or more. The amount of SELF loss is different depending on the implant's effects, and what your character is already sporting. This could be 1d6, 2d10 or more. How that all works is outside the scope of this post. For now, let's just say that the more cyberware you implant, the faster you can potentially lose SELF.

DE-SYNC

When a character suffers a panic attack, or is affected by a hack, they can potentially suffer a DE-SYNC. When you're forced to make a DE-SYNC check, you roll 1d100. If the roll is equal to or under your current SELF, you're fine.

It's when you roll over your current SELF that things get hairy. The lower your roll, while still going over your SELF rating, the worse the effect is. A 93 is always going to fail, but it's just a relatively minor problem. However, if you have 55 SELF and roll a 57, that's probably a bad time (in the current draft, that's a CODE RED result, and there's a good chance you're going to be shooting random people unless you keep your COOL).

So when do DE-SYNCs happen? Well, currently triggering a DE-SYNC is one of the Surges you can do in combat. This way to trigger DE-SYNC (intended to represent the stress of a gun fight) is going to require playtesting. Currently, I'm not sure if it's too strong, too weak, or maybe just a niche thing that players won't think is worth doing, since they can't inherently know the SELF rating of enemies. Other ways a DE-SYNC could be triggered is through hacking, but that's a topic for a later date.

Next Time

I have no master plan for how to talk about this thing, so forgive me if it seems like I'm talking about things at random. Next time, I think we'll cover how I plan to handle Chases in Null Protocol. Until then, don't Flatline.