Deadlands: Invasion

This is a page for the Deadlands conversion I plan to use with XCom Seattle, or probably any modern era Deadlands game.

Premise

There are some problems with Deadlands as a system, but its sound in the majority of areas and great in some. With a little patchwork it can be good. In its new incarnation, as Savage Worlds, its very popular. I think that its pretty much 'Deadlands for dummies', however.

Deadlands, The Good

Its fast. Combat, skills resolution, character generation, you name it. It starts at a good clip and keeps on moving. The complexity level is low, its easy to grasp, and yet there are still plenty of interesting possibilities. Its fun to have lots of different kinds of dice. Exploding dice are fun. The cards are fun. The chips are one of the great gaming innovations of all time.

Deadlands, The Bad

Movement is convoluted by the cards. Armor doesnt work well. Character generation is way too wild and crazy. Melee weapons do way too much damage. Skilled versus unskilled checks are kind of weird.

Deadlands, The Ugly

There are a lot of little this and thats in the system that I cant seem to recall that kept ping-pinging us into oblivion. Ironing it all out, along with the house changes might make the beginning kind of slow moving and develop an animosity for the system with new players.

Solution: Melee Weapons

In our last incarnation, melee weapons became absolutely devastating. With high strength they easily did more damage than guns, which cannot work well. People were constantly getting one punched, and I had to keep upping the ante to make things work.

Proposed solution: Melee weapons will do the lesser of either the characters strength or the weapon damage.

Solution: Armor

I think most of the reason armor was broken in the last attempt was that melee weapons were broken.

Proposed solution: Use armor straight out of the book, not the homebrew from last time.

Solution: Character Generation

Character gen is a lot of fun, draw some cards, put them on stats. Fun! But its also extremely arbitrary. One guy who draws a bunch of aces will be dominant.

Proposed solution: Develop a design character generation system.

Each character will begin with 20 character generation points, 1d6 in each stat and 10 skill points. Increasing a die type for a particular stat costs 2/3/4 for each successive level. So to go from d6 to d10 would cost 5. Skills cost 1 point each. Merit points cost 3 each. Flaws may be purchased at normal cost, and those points may be used to purchase merits only except with GM permission. Stats can be reduced to d4 in exchange for 2 points which may be spent anywhere, dice can be reduced to 1 for 1 point.

Solution: Skills Resolution

Skills resolution will work slightly differently. Characteristic rolls will use the dice indicated and unskilled attempts will not be divided by 2. Skills when rolled will use the skill level in dice plus the characteristic dice, and the highest number chosen. Certain high tech or difficult skills will use the old system.

Solution: Movement

During a standard combat round each character gets two half moves which may be combined with any other action. Each move may be up to the characters pace. Any move that is more than half the pace means the character is considered to be running for the remainder of the round. Any move at all and a character is walking. If a character has three or more actions he may pick up the pace on any action where he does not use a regular move.

New Idea

I think I know how to solve the movement problem as well as make jokers interesting and meaningful without being broken. Normally, during initiative each player rolls their quickness and gets a card for each success and raise plus one. They get this many actions, taking place in descending order. Instead, I propose that each character gets two actions only, but still draws that many cards. They may choose the two cards they wish to keep and discard the rest. Jokers must be kept. Each action has a movement attached to it, if you move up to half your pace you are walking. If you move more you are running. You may pick up the pace once in either action.

A joker allows that player to take another action. If the joker is red, it can be taken at any time, including interrupting another players action, with no roll. If the joker is black it can be taken at the beginning of any card sequence (like before Kings), but it also gives the GM a chip for the antagonists.

In the event a player does not get a success on his quickness roll he would only draw one card. In this case, he only has one action. Any time a player gets a dramatic failure on his quickness he has no actions and cannot use active defenses.

After a test session of this, I will be adding an Initiative skill under Quickness, which will be used when rolling for initiative. Otherwise, most of the time people ended up with 1 card, and that success was very critical albeit rare. This way, failing it will be a big deal, how it should be.

The Rest

Everything else will be as in the book, with some extra Edges and Hindrances that will be listed here. I will try to get all of the nuts and bolts written down so its clear how the game is played from this page alone.