nighthazerpg

[nighthazerpg]

Patch August 22nd

Have a small content and fixes patch! Traits:

I Love My Puter: You have amazing internet friends who will craft things for you! However this leaves you unable to make Contacts of the regular kind.

Best Worst Friend: Your Contacts are more effective but they're all mad at you because you did something.

Streetwise rework: Now, any information you get for knowledge rolls to do with your hometown is definitely correct - your roll determines how current and relevant it is.

Some new big Items!

The Rewind Drive is a new combat utility toy that lets you set a location to teleport back to! The further you go the more charges it consumes and it goes to a maximum of 30m.

The FetchBox Stick is a magic USB drive that opens a portal in your computer screen to your home machine, specifically for items! However it has a lot of catches (the item description is as long as the description for Portal).

Little item: Tracking Dust now comes in a magnetic flavour.

The overlap of multiple Crowd Controllers now cancels out in the overlap area instead of implicitly stacking. Woe, geometry puzzle be upon ye.

New phone app: Cindr is a dating and hookup app! The developers don't care that you didn't ask for it, and neither do I

Scars changes:

You can now take a scar to an Implant, breaking it (and as usual fixing it costs kB equal to XP gained).

Addiction is now suggested as a scar for Spirit Injuries.

Miscellaneous changes:

You can now become untargetable by going Prone behind Cover! This only applies if the Cover bonus would apply, but now there's a reason why you might want to go prone!

Stinky is now added as a status, described in the Infiltration section under Evidence. If you crawl around in the garbage, don't be surprised when your cartoon stink trail leads guards to the desk you're hiding under.

[nighthazerpg]

Patch May 4th

Well that got away from me a little bit, here's a bargain bin full of small fixes and clarifications. Any substantive change that's not just clearing up wording has bold on it:

Martial Arts involving a melee attack now specify that they inherit the damage type of the weapon you're using - this made sense intuitively anyway, but it was worth being clear

Some minor clarifications on Pin, Shield and Boost Kick so their intent is clear.

Quickload may now be used in conjunction with other Trickshots because otherwise it just kind of sucks

Added the ability for the Drift Technique Stunt to be used with two-wheeled vehicles so you can Akira slide - and do so under that tanker truck that's sideways, but you can only drift for one turn!

The Brake Check and PIT Manoeuvre Stunts can now be used against vehicles up to one weight class above yours because without that they're just Ramming But Worse

Specified that the Gotcha! Stunt refers to you catching people with your vehicle, not reaching out the driver side window to catch people that sounds like it would end badly

The Blend In trait now has an * on the "you can't take this as a Pony" rule because there are exceptions like Palominians but there isn't the space to explain that in the Trait box

Added the Staggered condition to the list of Crowd Control effects on tab 10. It's just reference in case you never read the Martial Arts section

Specified that Aim only benefits the immediately proceeding Action

Specified that Thermocompensator Vest targets Resistance

Changed the notation on special ammo for the Amount of Default ammo to be "-" rather than "Infinite" because that raises more questions than it answers

Specified that the Combat Power Wing does not lose its Cover bonus against Opponents at higher altitudes

Specified that Heelz don't do anything if you're flying

Specified that normal methods of Fall mitigation do not apply to the damage taken in car crashes

Carrying capacity of ASL Encore buffed from L to 0.5. We'll be monitoring this change closely and watching out for any shenanigans that result. We're really trusting the community not to go crazy on this one.

Cargo capacity of F512 Hovercraft nerfed from L to 0. This terror has finally been reined in. I know the F512 mains will have my head for this one but the toxic gameplay that came out of this just had to stop.

Specified what happens with drones regarding Mind & Spirit damage - drones can be disoriented by dazzling attacks, but don't take damage, and they also don't have feelings you can hurt. But also, they don't pass this damage to the pilot in manual mode - I would imagine that someone piloting a drone in combat is expecting gunshots to peak the audio on their device, and has the volume adjusted accordingly. Not the same as getting literally flashbanged yourself.

Broadened the wording on what drone pilots are allowed to take advantage of with an aim action to include Trickshots

Specified that the Martial Staff is compatible with the Target Sprint Routine and also that you spend the stamina for all three spells cast

Specified that After-Image only affects sight and sound, which opens the door for somebody to use an exotic sense to tell it apart

Expanded wording on Simulacrum to specify that it can affect a range of senses (1/rank in spellcraft) but it is phantom and can't push buttons for you

Specified that when using Projection you need to have a sense to be able to deceive or perceive it - you can't use Projection to temporarily gain senses you don't have.

Spelled out on Spirit Blade some of the finnicky details of how it interacts with Martial Arts and Action Economy

Rising Strike reworked to clear up the ambiguity around Fall Damage and streamline the spell a bit more. It now launches equal to Margin of Success instead of a fixed 4 (which means a lot of Rising Strikes are going to be kind of underwhelming but some of them are going to be really impressive), and the ceiling height does NOT affect damage - because if you think about it, getting rocketed into a low ceiling comes with the consolation prize of only falling one floor instead of three. However, there's now a clause that explicitly damages the ceiling if you do that, opening the door (or, the ceiling) for some real matrix kung fu antics where you punch someone into the floor above.

Specified that Steady Heart and Knit Wounds cannot be cast multiple times per short rest

Dragonbreath has had its range buffed from 4 to Cone 4

Shared Burden now times out at 15 minutes so you don't have a Breezie shoulder buddy who makes you ungrapplable forever

Stated explicitly that queued hacks tick down in parallel, not in sequence - parallel was always the intention because Hacking gets comically weak if you need to wait for each one to go off before you start the next one, but apparently this wasn't spelled out

[nighthazerpg]

I want you...r character sheets!

It's been a hot minute since I last sent out a Nighthaze feedback form and while development has slowed down as I've been working on other things. In this new feedback form I want to see as many real, actually-played character sheets so I can try and aggregate as much data as possible about the decisions you guys are making with the game. I've also included a space for you to input toy builds - sheets you've made without the context of a campaign. This questionnaire should be a little shorter than the previous forms, it's just a case of digging up links! There's also space for comment, some 1-5 scale questions, etc. I'd appreciate it if you took ten minutes to help me make Nighthaze the best it can be!

[nighthazerpg]

Towards 0.4

So, Nighthaze 0.3 has been out for just over 2 years now. Considering that 0.1 and 0.2 lasted about 9 months each, that's a long time on substantively the same version! I think the game is in a relatively good place in terms of balance and like, being fun. However, there's still some wider issues I'd like to address, and they're things that I can't really tackle without rewriting the whole game - which is what the incrementing of the middle number is for.

Nighthaze has an information problem. If you have exhaustive knowledge of the rulebook, you can have a great time playing a fully-fledged strategic immersive sim full of diabolical tradeoffs and satisfying mechanical interactions. If you don't, you're stumbling through spreadsheet hell, making uninformed guesses at what's a good idea and hoping a good time will fall into existence as a result. Some amount of this is unavoidable. A tabletop immersive sim will have a level of irreducible complexity, and different people have different amounts of patience for working through the legal errata needed to build a character. But the game can also do a lot more to help people making their first character, and sticking around long enough to really access that juicy tactical play.

Right now there's a lot of bare metal in the game. The game presents a lot of mechanics without really telling you what they're for and how they fit together. For example, the Sniping trait (+1 damage when there's no interference) only weakly suggests that you get a Scope (reduces interference from range). Relationships like how Implants make spellcasters more vulnerable, or that Tanks are supposed to get Harmonic spells, or how Hackers are more effective on bosses than groups, are implied - which is to say, you're kinda guessing because there's no wiki to guide you. The game can do a lot more to teach people how to play it well.

Nighthaze 0.3 has also gathered a lot of clutter. This is the same initial impetus for the move to 0.3 in the first place - 0.2 had accumulated cruft in the form of hotfixes and neat-idea mechanics that didn't really belong, or just things that seemed like a good idea at the time until the rubber hit the road. 0.3's clutter isn't as egregious as 0.2's (looking at you, magic), but there are still things like infiltration rules, new crafting types, addendums to Martial Arts, and the mess left by multiple reworks of the Diplomacy rules that could do with a clean slate to properly work out. There's a very slick, robust game in there, it just needs digging out of the disorganised manuscript that it's currently trapped in.

Supporting materials need adding. Another consequence of the bare metal is the lack of flavour text in a lot of places, and while I've been steadily adding to the Operator's Manual, what people have really wanted from me is more of the Rogues' Gallery, and one or two actually published scenarios for Operators to run on their own couldn't hurt either.

There's still a couple of big ideas I'd like to try. Given that 0.3 is so stable the temptation is there to not rock the boat, but there's still some bold new ways of doing things like damage that I want to give a test at some point that may find their way into 0.4, so keep an eye out for more experimental playtests like that on my Discord server (what Discord? Check out my Patreon!)

0.4 could end up being 1.0. I've long said that a printed edition of Nighthaze is on the cards for some time in the future, and while you can always tinker with things like this forever, if it's going to see print, at some point you need to call it a day. I wouldn't expect this to happen this year, and probably not in the first half of 2024 either, but it all depends on how the move to a new version goes down. And also whether I can find time to work on the dang thing I'm doing so many other things in that time like goddamn

There's nothing immediately forthcoming from this announcement, it's more just a general statement of intent, that at some point in the next 3 months I want to begin work on a new version of Nighthaze that's cleaner and more flavourful, and just as mechanically deep, but whose depths are more accessible. I guess you can toss out some thoughts on this roadmap if you like, or things you'd like to see in the future, but it's all very vague right now.

[nighthazerpg]

Patch Nov 11th

It's been a hot second since the last patch! This one's mostly little fixes and comment resolutions.

Cantrips are now considered to take up 1 space in a Runebook. Previously it was undefined, now keeping Cantrips in a Runebook is actively inefficient.

Biotic Recharge now does not pay out stamina when you get hit in a Ward.

Added an exception to the Pin and Shield martial arts so you can't perform a Knockout or Execution on the same turn that you begin the Pin or Shield, to prevent one-turn KOs. This is kinda klugey and I'd like to add a more elegant solution later.

Changed the SRAD to target Resistance.

Changed the Control Burner to hit all targets in a line, while removing its +1 to attack.

Changed the wording on the Sniping tag to reduce confusion with another keyword

Specified what happens when you try to use the Stealth Takedown with no ranks in Stealth (you need to be adjacent).

Added the Agile property to the Duelling Poncho to align it more with the Found Cloth

Specified that pulling someone with the Leash spell is a Move action, and how much you move when you do that

Specified that **Portal **is 1 tile wide

Exempted attacks with Aura, Cone and Audio range from the effects of Smoke Grenades

Changed the Irostatic Capacitor's Overclock effect from +1 duration to +1 radius, because the Overclock effect kinda did nothing

Specified that Blend In only gives you one free language

Haemophagy's Enthrall was missing a stamina cost. Oops

The Range Tables in Appendix B were still referencing old Sniper Training

Changed Knight's Vow so that dropping it when it's not your turn is a Reaction, because that's potentially relevant

Added the Armoured keyword to the SPQR Rubicon and Vicimus.

Changed pegasus' Stormwalker ability from Body + Acrobatics to Body + Fitness in line with other weather modification abilities

Cost of the Gym lifestyle upgrade cut from 5 to 3, because it's the same price it was back in 0.2 when skills were more expensive

Slight mistake on the Rocket ammo type where the columns were misaligned

Changed wording on Burning Storm to be clearer that the ball of fire slows down temporarily when it hits someone

[nighthazerpg]

Patch Roundup: July 2nd

It’s been a while! I’ve been busy! I have a new animation!

I fixed the problems I was having with the theme so now the description displays the correct version number!

✨ New ✨ Company Scrip! It's money, but worse! Each of the three megacorps issues their own form of internal currency (Sunrise Stars for Dawnray, ClearCredits for Cleartech, Advent Points for ASC) that you can only spend with that company. Make no bones about it, a contract that pays out in scrip sucks. It is a bad contract from a client who thinks you're a chump. But sometimes you're in situations where that's all you can get. It also doesn't work if your Credit Score is too high and you can't buy illegal stuff with it!

Scrip can be traded on the black market - if you roll well, you can trade different kinds of scrip on a 1:1 basis (at the cost of a Barter slot), but the best you can generally get in real money is about a third (0.3kB per 1 scrip) of the face value of your scrip, because nobody really wants to buy Itchy and Scratchy Dollars unless they're in a weird situation.

Lowered the thresholds for "expensive" and "very expensive" difficulty modifiers for Item Selling in line with the general deflation of item prices.

Shield Pack changes: Instead of having two "charges" and four "hits", these have been combined into 8 charges - so you're only tracking one number. Toggling the shield on and off is free and charges are consumed when the shield takes damage. This removes some of the ambiguity over "what happens if I put a partially damaged shield away" - some Operators could interpret that as the charge being spent, some might refund it. So depending on your Operator, this could be either a buff or a nerf. The shield also now has a defined height!

You can now use AI training to produce outputs with a GUMBaLL unit - everything from a chatbot to a virtual video call. This basically works like an illusion - the successes on your roll is how difficult it is to spot the fakery.

The ASGARD Project background now has the added ability to spot this stuff right away.

New Phone app: Consorrt is an AI waifu that can pass for a conversation with a real person... temporarily. A bit like the GUMBaLL powered output function, except in exchange for not setting it up yourself, it's Connected.

Added some flavour text to the Hybrid Heritages because it's kind of warranted, especially for things like Meergrifs which I just made up from whole cloth

New: Social Media apps! Chirrp has been scrapped in favour of six whole entire new ones. They do nothing, it's just flavour. Except...

Added new sub-options for the Addiction trait for Gambling and Social Media! Since these aren't drugs that can stress your system, these are represented by requiring you to have specific apps on your phone, and either raising your Credit Score every month, or eating one of your crafting slots at random and denting your Concentration. I'm not 100% happy with these mechanics but I don't feel too bad just dropping them live because these are sub-options of an optional trait with no benefit. How these work may get another draft when it's not 3am.

[nighthazerpg]

Patch Roundup: April 18th

Ha there’s less of it this time

New endangered languages! Old Arisean and Arisean Sign Language. They are categorically useless outside of some REALLY WEIRD edge cases, they're just flavourful.

Updated Handcuffs to detail how they restrict you in combat, because hey, that might be fun. I may revise the Handcuff family of items again later to be more meaningful about this 

Added rules for card skimming - another extension of the pickpocketing rules for using devices like Kameleons

Added the Gekko card skimming app. Gekko doesn't completely replace the Kameleon, since it's a fairly chonky app, and the Kameleon does a couple of things Gekko can't.

Changed Encumbrance to penalise Stealth by adding Interference equal to how far over you are instead of being a flat skilln't penalty which doesn't mean anything if you don't have stealth points anyway

Removed the deprecated Junkie trait.

Added an alternate The Rhythm trait. This is intended as a replacement for the existing one, I just think it needs a little bit of testing first. The old one is still there.

Added ways you can remove Earbuds, and also specified that you can disable them by hacking the phone they're running off - which finally gives anyone a reason ever to hack phones!

Specified that the Automated Hearing Aid provides a music source

Specified that Blend in and Assimilated are mutually exclusive.

Another new phone app, Saja Defender gives you a simple +1 Security on your Phone (non-stacking, because installing multiple antiviruses is generally counterproductive).

Removed references to antiquated skills in Advent Translate app

Changed the exo stealth and acrobatics penalty to remove the Attribute portion of your dice pool (making investment in those skills an offset of the penalty instead of a waste), and replaced the Swim penalty with a "you sink in water" effect.

Oops! I forgot to update the drugs crafting list with the new drugs! They're on there now.

An exception worth mentioning is that while most of the list follows the normal medical crafting rules (use the listed Target and cost), Tryptachromane (Moth Dust, Mushrooms) doesn't. Instead it has no crafting cost, but you need an unused dose to extract spores from to grow more. This doesn't consume it - as long as you have one dose of Moth Dust left, you can craft more for free!

Operator’s Manual

New page: Your First Job! This is an expanded version of the advice I gave the other day about preparing your first mission, expanding the 'why' a little bit more behind each step.

Added a new section under the Flow page about Emergent Gameplay, understanding what it is and why it's worth thinking about with respect to Nighthaze specifically.

Added a subsection under the Adapting From Other Games about Blades in the Dark, because that game has a lot of interesting similarities to Nighthaze, but also a lot of stark differences, so it's interesting to compare and contrast.

[nighthazerpg]

Patch Roundup: March 27th

I kinda left these to accumulate for a while aa this is a big disorganised list because it’s three months of patches so I’m sorry about that I’ve tried to bold the keywords to help you scan things faster

▶️ Fixed Meergrifs and Batponies using the old Sky's Reach description ▶️ New trait: Assimilated! A lot of Heritages have a perk that is more cultural than physiological in origin. This trait reflects assimilation into a host culture, where you give up one cultural perk for one belonging to a different heritage. ▶️ Tagged a bunch of perks as cultural to make this work ▶️ Armour Enchanting is back in its new form! Adding passive spells to items. This should open up the world of passive spells to non-spellcasters, which is good because there's stuff on there that would be super useful to like, tanks and brawlers and stuff! I had debated removing some of the arcane armours from the item list as effectively pre-enchanted items, but for now they're still there. ▶️ A bunch of new Passive Spells have been added, which are some of the more interesting effects of the arcane armours. I'll be listening out to see if any of these cause serious issues. (In particular I'm already concerned about stacking "when I get hit" effects.) These new spells are Nightkeeper's Flight, Coward's Haste, Daybreaker's Courage, Biotic Recharge, Essence Theft, Panic Blink, and Thermal Discharge. ▶️ Added Enchanting by hire. See, I can remember to include the crafting shortcut of paying someone else to do it at the time of adding the new crafting rules. ▶️ This is just a small QOL thing for drone users, you can now make Spare Parts ahead of time for field repairs of drones! Using them takes 15 minutes (so you repair your drone instead of taking a short rest). Spare Parts are now the default method of repairing Drones with Crafting Slots ▶️ Added a contents list near the top of the Downtime page listing all of the skill-unlockable Downtime slots you can get with a quick summary of what you can use them for. I can't believe I forgot to do this before! Slots unlocked by Backgrounds and Training aren't listed here since they usually just duplicate one of these. ▶️ Added a stipulation for Precision + Perception to be used for reflex save-like rolls where you just need to react to something quick ▶️ Added illustrations to the Infiltration page to demonstrate the differences between diplomacy tactics in action! ▶️ Added a new language: Spiritung! It's an in-universe conlang, intended as an auxiliary language for the world by some optimistic modernist, that didn't catch on. This is probably up there with the Swim skill and Phone Games in terms of things that are probably useless 99.5% of the time, but their presence says things about the world, so that's why they're still there. ▶️ Corrected some stuff in the index ▶️ Addressed an ambiguity over Flourishes with the Triumph spell ▶️ Fleshed out the conditions for holding Knight's Vow: it's now a Focus spell - you can leave range after it's cast, but Focus checks autofail when you're out of range. Also removed the ambiguous term “physical damage” ▶️ Specified that you can't cast two Focus spells at the same time ▶️ Added to the Instant Flourish that it removes the Focus property from a spell ▶️ Specified that the Shield MA halves your movement ▶️ Redefined the criteria for Hiding by expanding it into a new Hidden Movement subsection under the Movement rules. ▶️ Added Face Masks (under Passive Items). It turns out that under a healthcare system that leaves everyone to fend for themselves, some kind of mask is probably sufficiently essential that it can be assumed you already have something that covers your face - along with other things that do the same job like scarves, construction PPE, military helmets, Nightmare Night costumes, etc. So instead of an essential item being tucked away in the miscellaneous items, there's now a note in the Infiltration section about covering your face, which you can do for free - at least in terms of kB.

Instead, it's considered part of the infiltration puzzle - covering your face is sort of like the opposite of diplomacy: quite effective against machines, but live security finds it suspicious. You also don't need to worry about it if you're not doing anything actually illegal (to cover off paranoia), or you're doing something very obviously illegal (it's assumed that you're covering your face in some manner if you're doing combat in a space with cameras). It's more a case of matching your face covering to the setting - you're gonna look out of place if you're bundled up in a heavy scarf in a baking hot restaurant, or if you've been inside for an hour and you're still wearing a bike helmet. ▶️ You can now by a specific facemask, and it just gives airborne Disease Armour - but also you can choose to spend more on it for fashion purposes. ▶️ Changed the Cultural perk on Sphinxes to be Riddlespeak instead of Pride of the Guardian, because ?????? I don't know why it wasn't that way already ▶️ Tightened up the wording on Minotaur's "When They Think You're Down, Don't Mess Around!" (the spending stamina to negate statuses) ▶️ Did you want flavour text about the exotic senses (Leyfinding, Traffic Sense, etc)? Too bad I did it anyway, it's in Appendix D ▶️ Starter kits have had some price adjustment to reflect the big spell discounts from a few patches back! This means the kits containing spells now have room for a couple more toys, because they all came out at like, 5kb. ▶️ For some reason I'd left a Training for a Bonus Crafting Slot for shield repair and armour enchanting on my workshop document for months and forgot that it was there ▶️ New Background: Foreign Office! Get a free language for being a diplomat. ▶️ New Spell: Seismic Sense! I too have seen Avatar ▶️ Added alternate downside to Chronic Illness of a random injury each day ▶️ Replaced ambiguous wording in the Shield Wall spell that referred to being "stunned", a condition which does not exist. Now Dazing someone with this spell up incurs a Focus check ▶️ Replaced unclear wording on Spray and Pray trickshot regarding which Target number is used ▶️ Specified that the Get Down! trickshot does not protect allies being used as Shields or otherwise not free to move ▶️ Specified when the Staggered condition ends ▶️ Removed the Bruising effect from Hydraulic legs and added a +1 to Strength checks that use the leg ▶️ Added a minimum weight for Recall Item to knock people prone, because no, you're not going to knock someone over with a piece of paper no matter how you hit them ▶️ Clarified wording on the After-Image spell about when attackers make perception checks ▶️ Housekeeping: added note that you unlock Trickshots with Marksman ranks to the Combat & Appendix pages ▶️ Incremented version number ▶️ Oh, also Breezie language 🦋 ▶️ Added a new phone game: Brix! In case you uh, wanted to play a game made by a virtual sweatshop owned by children

Drugs Overhaul

▶️ Tryptachromane/Moth Dust - a psychedelic mushroom with some therapeutic benefits, available as the dried mushroom or processed into a brew or chewy candy (ignore Panicked) ▶️ Anatonin - a rejected combat stimulant that blitzes you with stamina but gives you some mighty shakes ▶️ Ruby Salts - fire rubies prepared like heliodryl that cold-proofs you ▶️ Contrazeine - a synthetic opiate painkiller that lets you ignore all Critical Effects, but makes actions cost initiative so pretty soon you're gonna be asleep ▶️ APM - a performance enhancing stimulant for esports that gives you a huge boost to one skill, with a huge mood crash afterwards. Two existing drugs have been reworked: ▶️ Medicalised Runelime Oil/Merlin - Kinda works the same way, just reworded to be a bit clearer, maybe? ▶️ Umbranol - promoted from the chronic illnesses section, umbranol gives you wack ass (and hypothetically communal) dreams. This is mainly a tool for Operators to introduce dreamwalking and inception antics into games without needing to design a whole ass subsystem for it ▶️ Several of these drugs have the Addictive property, which means that you roll against the number of times you've taken it in the last month to see if you get the Addiction trait. ▶️ The Addiction trait now specifies that you don't need to choose an Addictive drug, because you can have both physical and psychological dependences! ▶️ sigh It is now in the rules that Initiative cannot go below 0, and each edge case that can cause you to run up against this has separate handling. Being super old just bottoms out Initiative at 0, Confuse on 0 Initiative targets Dazes them, and Contrazeine prevents you from taking actions at 0 Initiative. I don't like this and may harmonise these at a later date. ▶️ Removed Wizard and Overclock because they’ve been superseded by APM and Anatonin

Operator's Manual

▶️ There's now a Downtime page! ▶️ Added a section about Alternate Uses for Downtime Slots to the Downtime tab. The examples discussed are spending downtime slots on base-building, faction leading, doing favours for NPCs, and investigating plot gubbins, but really, the limit is your imagination. ▶️ The long awaited Wild Magic Table! This isn't meant to be a replacement for whatever you think is most interesting at the time, but I sure as hell can't come up with that stuff on the spot, so I came up with 20 side effects to pick from at random. ▶️ I've also started on a Hostile Encounter Table - this isn't combat encounters, this is just random events you can run into that are... unwanted situations. Attempts at petty theft against the players, confrontations with weird or misguided people, or just other people having a bad day and getting it in your way. These are meant to be relatively rare occurrences, especially since they actively distract from whatever the player happens to be doing in a way that the main table of urban random encounters generally doesn't. ▶️ Added a few notes in Infiltration about some approaches to encounter setup on a more tangible level

[nighthazerpg]

i got more followers here by mentioning it off-hand on sunjackers than i have from like, posting this to RPG forums lol

[nighthazerpg]

Not Quite Patch 0.3.6

There’s a rework of Armour Enchanting and Mech Shields and some updates to the Starter Item Kits that I want to do that will probably tip the version number over, but they need a little more work and I demand action now, dammit! So here’s The Rest Of That Patch:

New item: Duelling Poncho! A way to disrupt melee attacks as a Reaction.

I have come to acknowledge that the Bruising concept sucks, and these sources of stamina damage are being added back into the game. However, we have not learned nothing. Bean Bag Rounds and the Water Cannon now knock their targets prone, and the Martial Art that lets you choose whether your unarmed attacks do Body damage is still there (but changed name to the more thematic "Deadly Strike").

This leaves Improvised Weapons in a weird spot, because all of this faffing around has been to try and make picking up any kind of tool a meaningful improvement over your bare hands, without negating the value of buying a weapon. I don’t know why I didn’t think of the Fragile property earlier - Improvised Weapons now break after the first hit you land with them. Not on a miss, mind you - just when you connect.

Also added Improvised Shields and Found Cloths to the list, and changed Thrown Blunt objects to Stagger the target instead of doing Body damage, to diversify the available options.

Some Background changes:

The Medicart Doctor background was always a little bit hard to find a proper perk for, and the one they ended up with is a bit wishy-washy. After thinking about it, Medicart covers a lot of the other bases of gameplay - Nurses are good for combat, Surgeons and Pharmacists are good in downtime, so it stands to reason that something that can benefit infiltration would be good - so what I’ve arrived on is a more mechanically firm version of what they have at the moment. You can make a Medicine check on someone and your successes are a pool of bonus dice to use on later Diplomacy checks. Simple!

The Arbitr perk has been changed to something similar, just with Processing, and you can be observing a person, location or activity. As funny as being able to Bugs Bunny distract people in combat for an extra round is, I think people seriously trying to play a lawyer are probably not going to find themselves in the thick of combat very often.

The Cult of Doom felt a little bit... weird in its previous iteration. I’m not sure having a sect of cold-loving berserkers makes a ton of sense in the fiction, so it’s been given a face lift. (If your entire build revolved around the mechanic of getting a combat bonus for being frostbitten, feel free to keep it, I’m not your dad.) The new Orientist church is supposed to be the kind of hellfire-and-brimstone preacher, similar to what apocalyptic churches in our world actually look like. The perk is real simple - your Inspire works backwards. Instead of adding to the dice pools of allies, you take dice away from opponents by being a terrifying motherfucker.

Changes to Traits and things that follow on from those changes:

The benefit of Big-Boned and penalty of Half-Pint never actually... did anything? The +2 body weight of Big-Boned is more of a tradeoff than a straight benefit, and the carry weight penalty of Half-Pint, while substantial, is also easily negated by the carry weight floor, and kinda contributes to the “dump Body” build strat, which I don’t want to encourage. So here’s some new stuff:

In addition to the Body Weight increase, being Big-Boned now gives you Poison Armour. Yay!

Being a Half-Pint no longer penalises your Carry Weight. That kinda sucks and I imagine nobody is sorry to see it go. Instead, you are more throwable! Any effect that knocks you Prone also knocks you back 1 Tile, in addition to any other knockback that applies.

In order to tidy up a few contradictions, Nausea is finally being fully removed (wish I could say the same for myself) to smooth out the structure of Resolve Injuries (there may be more to come there because Resolve is currently the only Injury type where you really need to remember how you got hurt). This necessitates changing a few things:

You should probably not be able to die from Motion Sickness, so now instead of stacking Resolve Injuries, it just gives you one and Dazes you, which goes away on its own after some time to rest out of the car.

The Allergy trait now just gives you a deadass Normal Resolve Injury, which it really should have done with the Injury changes at the start of 0.3. A little more serious than 15 minutes of queasiness, but still something you can sleep off.

The Poison Scar now Dazes you when you take Resolve damage rather than being an Armour penalty vs. Nausea which never really attacked you anyway so it was kind of a nothing burger. I may start updating some of the Scar penalties to be more interesting challenges like this.

Anoxia has had to be reworded a little bit because it was the only thing that referenced “Critical Nausea”, instead just being its own subtype of Resolve injury. Given the nature of suffocating, this may be changed to Mind when I’ve had some time to think about it, because that would make it even simpler.

Miscellaneous stuff:

Changed the Shield Wall spell to use your ranks in Spellcraft rather than your Mind score for its strength

The Tripshot Trickshot now allows an ally in Melee range of the Tripped target to Capitalise

Added to the list of things that fluoresce under the Blacklight flashlight

Small fixes done yesterday:

Specified that the Nerves of Steel Stunt works on a 1:1 basis

Removed some references to removed Diplomacy mechanics and deprecated terms on the Backgrounds tab

Specified in the Pinnacle background that you cannot be a University Professor of Perception

Changed the rules for hotwiring automated Vehicles so they behave like Manually controlled drones - you do better if you have a Control Visor than if you're just using your phone or laptop to drive it, and until you can Offgrid it properly and install a steering wheel and pedals, you're vulnerable to Connection disruption effects

Specified that Brand Spoofing needs to take the usage setup into account so you can't just cheese the check by removing every implant except the one you're working on

The Diplomacy example of play was using the old diplomacy skills

Specified that you can perform an Execution or a Knockout on someone you have Dead to Rights

Also changed the description on the Church of Luna background to give a more concrete idea of what they actually do (ghetto therapy)

[nighthazerpg]

Patch Roundup Nov 5th

About two months of small updates that I’ve been documenting in the Discord channel!

September 14th:

I forgot to actually put the definition of the Sniping tag in the doc I fixed that now oops

September 21st:

Rallying Presence does not stack with itself

Pistol Technique was referring to a -2 dice penalty that was changed to Interference, and also where that penalty is coming from is now specified since multiple people have pointed this out thinking that it was referring to the close range penalties. (Also specified that the close range penalty does not apply.)

Added Audio Armour and a Brand to Earbuds

You can now purchase Security upgrades for your vehicles. No longer do you have to do it yourself. #RightToRepair? Sorta?

Specified that Implants you make in your garage have the Homecooked Brand, because that's the definition of Homecooked

Raised the price of the ASL Scuttlebug by 0.5kb.

Specified that drones using only Onboard Intelligence don't contribute to Crosstalk. These two measures are largely to add a speedbump to the cheese strategy of flooding the battlefield with Crosstalk by dropping 8 roombas. I'm still thinking about ways to preclude this, but for now, a 0.5kb price hike shouldn't hurt too much if you have one or two Scuttlebugs that you're doing something genuinely creative and weird with, but becoming the Pied Piper of Curry's Electrical becomes a much less efficient use of money

September 27th:

Added Equestrian Sign Language to the language learning options

October 2nd:

Added Gryphish Sign Language

Spelled out some Language rules on the Diplomacy section of the Infiltration tab - this is mostly just codifying things that are either present elsewhere (Citizenship determines starting language) or inferred from other descriptions (what "Basic" and "Fluent" mean), or common sense (how a sign language works).

Added some Endangered Languages in Appendix D. Hardly a complete list. Here's a bone for you, lore hounds

Trait: Dose Monkey! You lived in the danger zone of a man-made environmental disaster, damaging your health and giving you some measly compensation

October 14th:

New Implant: Shield Compartment! Literally just an Antiscan Pack in your leg.

New Scar options: Added gaining a Phobia for a Spirit Scar, and gaining an Allergy for a Resolve scar. Strictly speaking Scars can be whatever you want, but no harm expanding the list of suggestions!

October 25th:

Added the Addiction trait, and the matching Scar that gives you it. As such, the Junkie trait is now considered deprecated and will be removed if nobody complains

Added functionality to the Zapp Generator to power Deployable items when both are fitted to an exosuit (taking up a slot for the generator and another for the deployable). In accordance with this, a few things are being shuffled in definition:

LODAR Spotter has been moved to passive items. You can just use it passively.

Mounting Platform has a specific carveout that it doesn't work on an exosuit. Your bipod has to be on the ground.

Laser Microphone has been moved to miscellaneous and specifies that it needs a stationary surface to work. It makes more sense that it doesn't have the power draw that would require a zapp generator on an exo, but also using it on an exo is pretty sub-ideal anyway.

November 4th:

Clearance rules had an error where one line of the old version was pasted over a different line of the new version which both covered up some of it and also put contradictory rules in place so that's fixed oops

Cleaned up a few random typos and formatting errors

Added the definition of Botch to the How to Play page because it comes up before being mentioned in Crafting

[nighthazerpg]

I'm soliciting feedback about accessibility! If you have any accessibility needs you think need keeping in mind, chuck 'em in the form below. I'm mainly thinking about audiovisual impairments and stuff like dyslexia/dyscalculia, but anything that gets in your way is something I want to think about how to cut down!

[nighthazerpg]

Nighthaze 0.3.5

Honestly, 0.3.5. should have been the combat update, but who’s counting. I’m counting. Anyway, today on updates is:

Vehicle Damage

While the car chase rules are cool, one of the long-standing problems has been the fragility of vehicles. In addition to vehicles being just a bit more money than people generally feel like spending, many of them were actually more fragile than their occupants - which just makes buying a car feel bad, and with stealing cars being very impractical because most of them can’t even be driven, it just leads to this part of the rules being unused unless the Operator chases the players up a tree. That’s not right - players should want cool cars, and want to use them.

To combat this, vehicles are getting harder to damage. How much harder? Exponentially! Literally. Instead of breaking the moment it runs out of Toughness points, the vehicle will gain a Critical Effect based on the type of damage - something like a flat tyre, gearbox damage, stripped bodywork, etc. that will penalise its performance in some way... and then the damage points reset. You can keep stacking these Critical Effects without the vehicle being completely inoperable, it just gets harder to control, harder to keep up with the chase, and it accrues damage faster. This makes quickest way to knock a vehicle out of the chase is Destabilising it so it spins out, and it also means that in combat you’ll hide behind your car rather than hiding your car behind yourself.

The table of Critical Effects is right under the damage chart.

The Return of Consumable Allowance

Back in the days of the SNBB - the big Bounty Board campaign that formed the main test environment for Nighthaze 0.1 and 0.2 - there was a Consumable Allowance given to players. Every month you were given a budget of 2kb to spend on disposable items, use em or lose em. This had a narrative justification in the form of an allowance from the bounty board. It was cut with a view towards the future, since not every game is going to have that narrative anchor to explain why you have 2kb from the bank of mom and dad to go to the candy store with.

However, it turns out this allowance was load-bearing, and without it - even with per-contract consumable budgets (Investments) and debts to reflect contacts and subscriptions that get you in medical items and arms (Clearhealth and the Underworld Arms Dealer) -  people just didn’t touch consumables. It turns out people don’t like spending their permanent character upgrade money on energy drinks and magic nerf darts???

So it’s coming back, but in a different form. To keep it relatively agnostic to your game’s situation, your Consumable Budget is equal in kb to your ranks in Barter - representing your network of contacts and general resourcefulness. To prevent cheese, items bought with this budget, if unused, are lost - it’s like you never bought them in the first place. They vanish into the trash heap, forgotten until someone else needs painkillers or whatever.

As a quick note on what this can be spent on, it can be spent on gadgets, explosives, medical items and vehicle hire, but it cannot be spent on hospital bills, heliodryl or repair bills. The reason for this is to make you spend the budget on interesting stuff, rather than boring upkeep expenses.

Sniping & Stealth Attack Changes

Sniping is undergoing a rework in this patch. Up to this point sniping has come up a little short of the fantasy of being a sniper - the Sniper Training trickshot just being a limp reduction in range penalties, and the “sniper rifle” (the C&C Precision Rifle) conferring basically no benefit. At that point, sniping basically wasn’t in the game. Sniping should be powerful, but not the easiest thing to use - and that’s what these changes seek to do.

After a few revisions that were... contentious in discussion, the version coming out now sees the addition of the Sniping keyword (which at present applies to the Precision Rifle and the Rail Driver). Sniping weapons do an additional +1 damage on Sneak Attacks (what’s that? Keep reading) when there’s no Interference in play. The Sniper Training trickshot now gives you damage equal to your ranks in Marksman when you have 1 minute to set up. What this does is open the door for insane opening damage when you plan and invest appropriately, and damage which persists into combat if you haven’t taken your shot - but of which you only get one shot per battle, unless you really want to spend ten turns doing nothing while you line up your second mega shot.

What this does is create two sniping niches - combat sniping at comparatively close ranges in a fairly video gamey sense, where a well-positioned sniper can match or exceed an assault rifle for damage output, while taking advantage of trickshots (powerful but harder to use) - and the distant assassin who blows their target away with one perfect shot.

As for “Sneak Attack” - there’s been a little bit of terminology cleanup around that.

A Sneak Attack is the attack you make after Hiding in Combat. You get +1 damage on single target sneak attacks. A rocket launcher is not stealthy.

A Surprise Attack is when you attack an unaware target during Infiltration. This is what was previously called a “Stealth Attack”. Surprise Attacks do whatever damage is narratively appropriate.

A Stealth Takedown - unrelated to Sniping at all but mentioned here for clarity - is the Martial Art where you quietly take someone down without rolling, just requiring time to do so.

While I’m here, I’ve removed Mid-Range Optics, because with the changes to range penalties, there really isn’t anything meaningfully differentiating them from the Long-Range Optics except breaking patterns.

Clearance

Clearance was a little odd when it came out at the start of 0.3, because it was completely undercooked and just shoved out to see what anyone would make of it. It turns out people did use it, and made their own changes based on necessity, which I’ve reincorporated back into mainline Nighthaze. Original Clearance had this glaring flaw where because drones circumvent your carry limit and your carry limit is how much stuff you can check out, unless drones are removed from the game, you can carry out unlimited stuff. Obviously busted.

The fix for this is that your Clearance is like one big Consumable Budget, except it’s for things that aren’t Consumables as well. Like with old Clearance you can just freely check out and return items in Downtime, but unlike old Clearance, the quantity actually matters. It also means that your Clearance values are going to be in the region of 25-100, rather than 1-12.

Spell Learning Cost

This change is actually really small, it just gets its own heading because it’s important. The cost of learning spells is being kicked down from 3 + Stamina Cost to 1 + Stamina Cost. This should make spells, like skills at the start of 0.3, a slightly more appealing prospect to invest frivolously into. I apologise to whichever lategame Operator has the player I’ve just handed a 16kb tax rebate to.

Okay Guys Drones Have Gotten Silly

Drones are in an awkward spot when it comes to game health. They have a high burden of rules to start using them at all, and it’s quite possible to just spend your money unwisely, but worse than that, when you do figure it out, you can absolutely break the game in half, leading to many headaches for operators as they try to figure out how to accommodate a player who has 12 attacks on their turn. This kind of gaping hole in the action economy has got to go, but i don’t want to reach for an extra-diegetic hard limit of auto drone actions per turn... yet. So here’s some changes to specifically cut down on the number of attacks drones can have:

You can only wear or mount one Autoturret. Two Autoturrets get in each others’ way.

If you mount multiple weapons to the same drone, they share intelligence. If you stick two pistols on it and ask it to fire both of them, they both get fired half as good.

Aerial drones can’t use the Automatic property. First shot knocks them around too much.

However, for a sufficiently minted player, this will not be enough. You will be able to afford enough separate basecamps and individual drones and weapons to continue spamming the field with carbon fibre wasps. For that I have a new innovation: Crosstalk. Simply put, the greater the density of autonomous drones, the more likely something is to go wrong. If a drone rolls less than the number of other drones within 10 tiles on any check, Crosstalk happens, causing it to malfunction - it might go the wrong way, disconnect its gun, fire at the wrong target... or I’m sure your operator can come up with something suitably daft. If you absolutely, 100% want to avoid the possibility of Crosstalk, manual drones are completely unaffected by it.

I should also mention that Crosstalk doesn’t care which side the drones are on - so if your Operator is really fed up with you, they can throw enemy drones at you and sit back as your two auto drones just forget how to function.

Armour Enchanting

Another small but semi-important one. Armour Enchanting is something that I was always kinda hesitant about - there seemed to be two camps when it came to it (besides the ‘don’t care’ camp): risk-averse players who love the uncomplicatedly good decision to spend a crafting slot that’s otherwise going unused to become harder to hit forever, and operators who find that higher targets to hit are just less fun for all, with some even banning it from their game. I’m inclined to agree with the operators - after all, there’s a reason I removed armour stacking - but I don’t want to leave nothing in it is place. So for now, Armour Enchanting is removed - I’ve left the rules in the doc crossed out so they can still be referenced, and I want to come back later to see what I can do with the pieces, but as of 0.3.5, the improvement path for Armour is in utility, not defence value.

New/Changed Items

The Martial Staff has been split into two items. The item now called the Martial Staff is just a spell focus that lets the user benefit from weapon attachments. It also only costs 2kb now.

The other half of the old Martial Staff’s function is now on the reworked Zapp Capacitor, which has 6 virtual stamina on board with which to cast the spell in a loaded spell can.

The old Zapp Capacitor has been removed, because it was just deadass too complicated, too niche, and too expensive.

New: The masses cried out for a combat healing item, and I give you the Experimental Quick Knitter. Make no mistake: making Knit Wounds take 6 seconds is a monument to equine arrogance. Instead of straight healing the injury, the process of healing so fast has a side effect - in the form of a fresh injury of another type. Body injuries become Precision (did the nerves set right? That’s concerning), Precision becomes Resolve (the numbness is gone but you don’t feel so good), Resolve becomes Mind (headaches, fever and nausea are now just headaches), and Mind becomes Spirit (maybe pointing an ‘experimental’ device at your head was a bad idea), which cannot be healed by the Quick Knitter. This leaves you playing a minigame of bouncing around damage types to keep people below 3 of a kind, until you can catch your breath and heal them properly. Or at least hand them a stiff drink to forget what they saw while you were curing their tinnitus.

The Animal Control Dart Gun is blocked by Kinetic Wards. This is just resolving a weird edge case that a lot of things need to fall a certain way to even encounter it.

New: The Chaff Grenade is a quick and disposable way to break Connections by making a cloud of aluminium foil. It’s better than shocking yourself.

The Plasma Grenade has been bumped up to Radius 2 to justify its cost.

Infinite Rockets are back! While a less pressing concern with the return of Consumable Budgets, it just kinda cramps the style of rocket wielders that their weapons chew up so much money. The option to load specialty grenades remains, but they now have dedicated rocket ammo which requires a rocket launcher to fire. It’s not truly unlimited, mind you, because the Rockets weigh L. And if anyone thinks they can just pull out the launch mechanism and get unlimited free grenades, that’s... that’s just called crafting grenades. (Okay it’s not completely free but it’s pretty dang cheap.)

The Mortar now requires that you have as much room above you as the range you’re firing to. I shouldn’t need to specify this, but if I don’t then some rules lawyer who doesn’t know what a Mortar is will try and argue that using the thing in a basement isn’t going to result in blowing themselves up.

New: The Teleport Beacon is mainly a tool for Operators who think slathering all their banks and police stations in Aquarepellant paint is kinda boring. The Teleport Beacon reroutes all teleportation effects in range to a designated target point. Useful if you want your execs to be able to teleport in, but don’t want ragamuffins cheekily flashing into the bank vault. It’s also available for the players to purchase, for... y’know, cockamamie schemes.

The wording on the Target Sprint Routine has been given another revision for more clarity on what “still in range” means, and what attacks you can use with it. Sight, Fixed or Melee yes, the weapon must be implanted or exo-mounted. Natural spellcasting no, but Arcanoneural spellcasting yes. This item will never not be super specific.

New Trickshot: Fireteam Tactics is super simple. Give any Automatic weapon the Suppressive ability for a hot second! Consumes 3 ammo.

New Spell: May regret this one. Vengeance refunds you an injury if you can tag your attacker before their next turn, encouraging aggression.

New: Here’s a silly one. Reward Vouchers are literally just coupons for other items in the game. This is mostly for the Operator to shower on players as a joke (or to actually encourage them to upgrade their gear), but who knows, maybe you’ll find some weird situation where you actually want to buy a voucher for 0.5kb off a Medicart Lifebag.

New: The LODAR Spotter is a deployable LODAR tagger that you connect to a remote viewport. The range of LODAR sight is quite limited - 10 tiles out from the spotter unit - but you can use this to support say, your sniper buddy 50 tiles away with a rail driver, who’s too far away for their own LODAR scope to be useful.

Fairly important change to the Ward spell - the stamina reduction mechanic from Auspice has been copied over, so your maximum stamina is reduced by your number of active wards. This is basically to prevent people going into battle with infinite wards by casting and resting.

Another important spell change: Heavy Lifting has been REMOVED - because it’s just been bolted on to Dysmantia so the trait actually has some use. The Littlepip experience continues to get more accurate.

Miscellaneous Changes

The Sprint action is now “up to” instead of “exactly”. I can’t remember quite why I demanded people go exactly their Sprint distance.

The threshold at which your Credit Score decides that you’re untrustworthy and breaks all your Connected services has been raised from 10 to 12. Just a mild encouragement for people to opt into consequences.

New: In the optional rules Appendix, there is now an Alternative Initiative system where you just roll a d10. To be clear, this is not the intended Nighthaze experience, but if your table feels like they’re just being punished for spending stamina, this is an option.

Added Chronic Condition cover to Clearhealth Lifestyle Basic and Plus.

Phome has been renamed to Phoam for obscure reasons of not just wanting to rip off a fellow indie creator.

Specified that failing the roll for Evasive Slide ends your movement

Updated wording on the Medicart Doctor background - this benefit is a bit rubbish and I wanna update it when I think of something better

Expanded the explanation of what being “Encumbered” by ill-fitting Armour means

Amended the wording on Flight Cancelled to be clearer about the intent and include Changelings

Specified that exosuits take the same time to put on as they do to take off

Some formatting fixes on the combat page

Specified that Font of Life lasts until the start of your next turn

More specific wording on the Misfire hack about what you can force your target to do

Siphon Talisman now limited to 1 Stamina refund per Action because I did not think about that interaction with Flurry of Blows

Added new anti-drone hacks inspired by the Crosstalk malfunctions, and rebalanced the time to complete on a couple

Price Adjustments

Reduced in Price:

Laser Rifle

Grinder

Energy Plough

SRAD

Sunset Rifle

Missile Battery

Nova Cannon

Hammertail

Spellcleaver

Momentum Gauntlet

MOST weapon attachments

All Nerf Ammo

Most of the higher end armour

All Shields

Dark Diamond Powershell

Microshimmer Resonator

Hwageumon Irostatic Capacitor

Arcanoneural Interface

Nanoimmunity

Dermal Capacitor Layer

Neutral Shock Compensation

Most Exosuits

The more expensive drones (+ the JourneyRite Smartcase)

Control Visor

Vehicles, again

Traffic Network Automation

Gumball Automation

Zapp Generator

Medicart Lifebag

Warding Station

Crowd Controller

Zapp Condenser

Antiscan Pack

All Phones

Trial of Titans Battle Valley (well actually reduced in Space)

One-Time Medicart Pickup

Most Subscriptions & Health Insurance

GUMBaLL Unit

Traffic Network Box

Stress

Deterioration

Horror of War

Twofold Return

Increased in Price:

Drone base stations

That’s it

[nighthazerpg]

Maintenance Notice

As part of the upcoming 0.3.5 patch, unless there are any objections, the rules document will be undergoing maintenance on Tuesday, September 6th! I won't be taking it offline, but I will be doing a broad price rebalance to many items, which has the potential to cause issues if anyone's doing any sheet updates on that day. My hope is to be finished same day, but it may spill over to Wednesday, and in any case I will be publishing the 0.3.5. patchnotes when everything is done.

[nighthazerpg]

Welcome Galacon newbies!

I didn't get pictures from the Nighthaze oneshot at Galacon 2022 but I did bring the stuff home with me and recreate it a little bit! I'm glad everyone had a good time doing some horse crime. Here you can find information about the game in the sidebar including all relevant documents, and I hope to be posting more stuff about it in general in due time here on this blog!

[nighthazerpg]

It's survey time! This survey is about balance and progression - specifically, I want to know your opinions about all the things you can spend your hard-earned kB on. You don't need to be particularly knowledgeable, you just need to have played. I'm collecting all those moments where you thought "I can't believe I'm getting away with this", or "man, that was a waste of money". This is a long-ish survey, I would expect about 20-30 minutes depending on how detailed you get with your answers!

[nighthazerpg]

Patch Roundup June 11th

A collection of small changes built up over the last 3-4 weeks.

New vehicle: the SPQR Parma exists not to fill a gameplay niche, but because I saw the airport and traffic police in San Francisco going around in these militarised golf carts and I thought it would be really funny to have them in the game

Added a clause to Warning Shot to only do damage on a botch if the attack is made with 4 or more dice to remove the auto-damage exploit 

Added Starter Kits in Appendix F - a list of grouped items that work together to help guide new players into the game without subjecting them to the utter choice paralysis of the full equipment list. This may be refined over time! This appendix is pointed to in the character creation page.

The IR Pyrium X now has a fancy camera that lets you spend app space for extra perception on pictures taken with it.

Planting is a mission prep activity where you go to the mission site and surreptitiously drop something there - such as a Trick Peripheral. But you can do it with anything!

AI Training Is a new feature for GUMBaLL units where you declare a search signal - dogs, measuring tapes, trance music, anything detectable with equipment you have - and the AI will tell you when it finds it a number of times equal to your crafting successes. However, you can get false positives and false negatives, especially if your search signal is very broad or very narrow, and it's up to you to figure out what to do when it flags a detection.

New items:

Launchbird feather: double jump!

Laser Microphone: point a laser at a surface you want to hear from!

A mortar: A target location is definitely getting blown up, next turn.

Merlin: A drug that lets you ignore combat injuries - in fact you have to get injured, or the drug will hurt you more.

Traffic Network Box: every car has one of these, you just plugged one into your computer.

Trick Peripheral: A fake USB cable or something that lets you bypass security on stuff it's plugged into. 

Small Fixes:

Scaling Factor was still defined

Added Thrown Range to the definition of the Throwing skill

Specified that autonomous drones go on their owner's turn

Flurry of Blows still said Press instead of Stagger

The DD Eclipse fighter jet was missing the Flying property