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[AoshimaMichio]

Yes. And I don't entirely object to the change, though "Gotta eat the demon meat to play" is a little stringent for me, and I might opt out for it. But as a game mechanic it's fine. Just remember to change the other aspects, so as not to get self contradictory systems.

Besides ... I thought the little interchange was funny. Oh, not as well written as RC's noir bit up there, maybe, but humorous nonetheless.
...
maybe I'll go back and fix that broken quote tag ...

The adventure continues: https://abbradar.net/erlogs/2016-10-11.txt

Sounds like that could be funny meta game: Detective RC and Mystery of Mr. Bones.

[Sean Mirrsen]

I've had a severe case of boredom strike, and I think I sort of warped Shadowrun's system of hit-dice into a form usable for RTDs.

It seems pretty flexible, you can add +1s pretty easily, and you can also use the same "Stat+Skill, plus/minus circumstance, as number of dice rolled" thing Shadowrun does. Threshold serves to make things believably difficult for higher-skill characters, too.

For instance, for a 0 threshold roll of the "average joe" amount of 6 dice, you get some 55-60% chance of success, 20% chance of partial success, 10%-ish chance of failure, and low chances of perfect success, overshot, and critical failure. Things go rapidly south as threshold increases, and at 3, which is probably a difficulty level of "dodge bullet shot at you from across the room", you get only some 10% chance of success of any form, and as high as 70% chance of critical failure, with only 6 dice. With 12 dice you get a combined regular+partial success chance of about 50% on the same. 20 dice has only about 10% chance of failing. So it's pretty decent, I'd say.

[piecewise]

I'm rethinking the exact way the line system works, because the described method seems to create a lot of dead end combinations, so to speak. The problem is the middle bit.

The end part as the "effective" bit is fine. Cut, Grind, Dominate, Steal, Stick, basically any verb. The proximal part as a modifier is fine too, since it can be basically any "Magical" modifier you'd see on a magic weapon. Parasite, razor, lure, fear, etc.

But that middle part...it's too fluid, too specific for certain things and yet too ambiguous as a whole. The type of words that go there are hard for me to pin down. I could make it "Material" but that would inevitably end up just being a "Turn my arm into X" thing and it would mean that people would tend towards specific materials regardless of the two other parts they're using. Not to mention it doesn't let you target certain things with the effective part. For instance, if I wanted to "Steal" "Metal" as a method of pulling the weapon out of someone's hand.

But having that second word being the "Target" word would mean that most words would be useless in most situations. "Ash" for instance. Steal ash from a skeleton? What does that mean? Clearly nothing so it must be a dud.

The basic idea here is sound but I need to play around with exactly what each part does to make it work. A man has the right to have a steel gun arm that shoots maggots, after all. 666th Amendment must be accounted for.

[piecewise]

There's also the fact that you have to take functional arrangements into account. For instance, I was telling my girlfriend about this stuff and she asked if she could just make her character into a big ball of heads.  And that brought up an obvious point I was overlooking: What the hell do we do about non-humanoid type creatures? If I have you guys fight a big snake thing, can you then take part of the body and the head of that thing and use it as your arm and hand? It seems reasonable right? Or using the body and tail as a leg. Or any strange combination of limbs which could reasonably be strung along.

I'm thinking I may have to start thinking of these things from a functional standpoint rather than a perplexicon style "meaning" standpoint.  And that may mean that some parts simply have no function other than having a certain stat bonus or something similar. A Flesh Monger's hand might have the functional ability to tear off flesh at the touch, but his forearm? It might just have a +1 to endurance because it is a robust boney thing.

[piecewise]

Gun at the end of a snake body for a leg.

[piecewise]

In case you're wondering, this has already been sort of done.

Look up Rengoku tower of purgatory

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Egan_BW]

I'm going to replace my chest and head with the tail of a giant scorpion.

[Harry Baldman]

I'm going to replace my chest and head with the tail of a giant scorpion.

Not only will it look cool, you'll be able to curl it up and look like a human? question mark.

[Egan_BW]

Not very much like one, but maybe.

[piecewise]

I'm going to replace my chest and head with the tail of a giant scorpion.

The way I'm trying to make this, you'd probably be able to.

[Pancaek]

Clearly, the correct way to go is to replace every body part with tentacles.

[Egan_BW]

Oh yes.

[Whisperling]

You could switch the middle and the top, then have what's currently the middle be form or targeter. Using scorpion tails for heads and stuff sounds just as good, though, if not better.

[NJW2000]

So we have to have a humanoid shape? Otherwise you get spiders and centipedes, with hundreds of spells, or many based off one single OP part.

[syvarris]

Huh.  If I can replace my head with a scorpion tail, or a gun or whatever, that would presumably mean I can replace other distal parts with completely unrelated distal parts, such as my hands with heads.  This would imply that base parts and middle parts can also be swapped, at least with other limbs of the same category.  Which implies that I can replace my chest with a fleshmonger's forearm, which could then have two fleshmonger arms attached to it.

Taking this to the logical conclusion, I should be able to attach additional arms to those two arms' forearms, and more arms to those arms, ad infinitum.  The same can be said for any body part, using the same logic.

Of course, this obviously breaks the humanity as mana system.  Rather than keeping your original human bits to regen mana, you should just dismember your teammates and staple their limbs to yourself; you'll end up with more human parts than you started with, thus making yourself more human than a baseline human.  Since you can also staple demon parts to yourself, there's no real downside.

Perhaps humanity should regen on a percentage-based system?  Or extra limbs beyond the normal number should incur some penalty?  It would be a shame to simply say "No, you can't superglue your dead family's corpses to your back to triple the strength of your magic".  That's just Pinwheel discrimination.