Infinity - Rules Questions!

Infinity The RPG
41

Hi Genk!

I’m actually running Quantronic Heat myself, but I’m not up to Chapter 2 yet. My group has finished Chapter 1, and they’re currently on a side-quest before starting Chapter 2.

However, I’m familiar with Quantronic Heat, having read and prepared a bit for it. It sounds like really your question is about how Complex Skill Tests work though.

A Complex Skill test is basically a basic skill test that you have to spend X amount of momentum on to succeed. To avoid spoilers for Quantronic Heat, let’s say you are trying to break through a heavy reinforced door. You’ve got to disable some mechanical locks, and use a welder to melt part of the door lock away, and so the GM decides this will be a Complex Thievery Test. It’s a pretty hefty door, so he gives you a total of 6 Momentum to open the door. He sets the difficulty of the test at a standard D1. He also might secretly set a number of failures you’re allowed to get before you break the lock mechanism on the door and can’t open it that way anymore. Time to get the heavy explosives!

So on your first turn, You roll your Tech, and you succeed and generate 1 momentum. Now, you have to SPEND that momentum to open the door. You can’t put that momentum into the pool to get yourself more dice, or any other benefit that you’d get from momentum. You SPEND it on the test. Now instead of 6 momentum, you only need 5.

This is going to take awhile, and uh oh, you’ve got some guards coming. Your team has 3 momentum in your pool. So you decide to use all three of those to get yourself extra dice for your Tech test. Now you’re rolling 5 dice, and you get lucky and generate 4 more momentum! You spend all that momentum to open the door. So now your pool is empty, but the door still isn’t open.

Maybe the rest of the team gets desperate at this point, and if the GM allows it, they might use a Group Test to generate momentum for your Tech test to open the door. Your three teammates pick supporting skills like Observation (Melt this area here!) or Education (turn the power on your welder up!) and they roll their single dice for the Group Test and 2 out of three of them succeed, giving you 2 momentum for your test. You roll your Tech… and you roll badly! You get a single success, but you don’t generate any momentum. But… that’s okay because your Group Test gave you two points of momentum to add to your roll. So you spend those two points of Momentum on the door, and it collapses onto the floor, since you’re over the 6 point threshold! If the GM told you exactly how much momentum you needed, maybe you’d save a point, but the GM was probably keeping that value a secret.

So for Quantronic Heat…

Any momentum the Hacker Pilot spends to progress to the next leg of the race CANNOT be used to add complications to other pilots. However they could spend SOME momentum to do this.

For example, say the player racing team generates 3 momentum on their pilot test. They could decide to spend 2 points on the race itself, and then they could use one point to generate a complication for the Bleeding Edge remote, and make their next pilot test more difficult.

I noticed in Quantronic Heat that the second race for the Encke Gap actually doesn’t give you the Momentum thresholds for the various legs of the race. I’m assuming this is Errata. I just made up some numbers based on the first race.

I’m glad to hear your feedback that the momentum thresholds on the races aren’t high enough and that the players just plowed through them. I was sort of thinking the same thing. The difficulty thresholds for all the race legs is only between 2-4 momentum. That basically means the players could plow through the whole race in just 4 combat turns. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for excitement, or for much of the drama that is supposed to unfold during the races. I think when I run the game I will increase the momentum thresholds for the legs… I’ll probably multiply by at least 2 or even 3, so that the legs take between 4-12 momentum per leg.

2 Likes
42

New to the game and I find that it is very complex. I cannot seem to find in the core book how the Infinity Dice are used aside from the one little blurb on pg. 29. It says the 1 and 2 on the six sided die are counted as normal. Does that mean on a damage roll a roll of 2 means 2 additional damage. And how are events rolled used when Infinity Dice are used to roll on cost of acquisitions? The pages where the relevant information can be found would also be appreciated. Thanks so much!

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Hello @Warcorespondant! Welcome to the game! One of the great things about the Infinity 2d20 system that you’ll find is that once you wrap your head around it, it’s a very simple game system. Hacking a computer uses the same rules as firing a gun and the same rules as trying to persuade a guard to let you past.

Anyways, on to your questions. For dice, results of 1 and 2 add to your damage, and a roll of 6 is called an “Effect”. When an “Effect” is rolled, then any special rules from your weapon or ammunition are applied to the roll. The rules for this are found on page 99-100 under “Damage”.

When you are performing Aquisitions in the game, think of it as your purchase doing damage to your Cashflow. Your Cashflow is your hitpoints, your Earnings are your armor. If you suffer a “Wound” as a result of purchasing the item, that’s a “Shortfall”.

When you roll Infinity Dice to purchase an item, the Effect triggers the Tariff cost of the item, which is bad. This is explained on page 330.

For example, let’s assume you want to buy Armoured Clothing. First, you need to see if you can acquire the item. It is Restriction 2, which means you need 2 successes on a Lifestyle test to obtain it. You aren’t leaving for your mission until tomorrow, so you decide you can take all day to find it. So you increase the amount of time you’re taking to find the item from “minutes” to “hours” to decrease the difficulty from 2 to 1 (This is explained in the sidebar on page 330). You roll your Lifestyle and you get 1 success, so you succeed at finding the Armoured Clothing! Now you need to actually purchase it.

You have 12 Cashflow, and Earnings of 5. Armoured Clothing costs 6+1N with a Tariff of 1. So that means you roll 1 dice. If you roll a 1 or a 2, the cost goes up by that much. If you roll a 6, you apply the Tariff, which in this case is a 1. Let’s assume you roll unlucky and you get a 2. Then the total cost of the item is 8. Your Earnings acts as armor for this damage. So you subtract 5 from that, and your Cashflow is reduced by 3. Not enough for a Shortfall, so you can keep buying!

Hope that helps!

8 Likes
44

Thanks @Murrdox - that’s the clearest concise explanation I’ve seen yet, and considerably smoother than any way I’ve tried to explain it! Kudos!

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Wow! Thank you SO much, Murrdox. That was incredibly helpful. I appreciate you taking the time to explain it in so much detail. You made my day!

1 Like
46

Not sure if I should start a new thread for rules questions, so I start off here.

So my question is: Does Aleph Aspects or true AI’s use Geists?

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OK take everything I say with a grain of salt but, if I’m not mistaken, aspect should use gheist for the most part. Them being a part of aleph doesn’t mean they can access the full computing power of the ai, for what I understand aspects of aleph are simply tailor made personalities inserted into an host. The biggest difference with a human is the presence of another voice in their head, that belong to aleph. This “voice” can provide ressource and support, or instructions, but in the end, the aspect is in charge of taking the final decision. That’s a lot of talking without answering the question, but that’s the issue: it depends. On paper they don’t need it since they have aleph in their head, however constant connection to alpeh might not be possible, and using processing power to accomplish a gheist job while gheist are efficient, autonomous and rather cheap may not be agood bargain. So it’s likely that self aware aspects have gheist.
true ai on the other and have no use for a gheist. They might use one or pretend to use one when in an host for camouflage purpose, but their abilities are beyond anything a gheist could pretend to.

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Thanks alot, I’ll go with that and it was kind of what I had imagined myself as well.

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Why wouldn’t they? Geists are fundamentally “just” semi-sentient personalised electronic interfaces. I do however think that the fact they’re a Geist for an AI should be reflected in their character (or perhaps not if the Aspect in question has acquired an off the shelf Geist to appear “more normal”).

Particularly for True AIs I’d probably RP them as a Daemon that the True AI has spun off their own code. This is similar to Svengali’s approach, but equally could work for an outre Aleph Aspect who created an Aspect of an Aspect to do multi-tasking for them (quite risque as it flirts with the one-AI laws).

Now if I was RPing a Rogue AI that had evolved from a LAI and was still acting in a way reasonably analogous to a LAI then I’d probably consider not having a Geist. Think Pi-well or Billie. A character concept I’d like to explore is a newly awakened REM LAI who appears to people outside the group like one of the other PC’s Tinbot.

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I didn’t see any replies to this so… You should have used Stealth checks. Stealth is to be used in all areas of conflict which is why it is described in the action section before Warfare, Infowar and Psywar.

51

This is exactly what I was going to say.

52

I have a question about TAGs in the RPG. I cant find anywhere that there is a maintenance cost for a TAG. But I noticed Power Armour and many other things do have a maintenance cost. Is this an error or do TAG pilots really not have a maintenance cost?

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TAGs are counted as vehicles and those don’t have maintenance costs. Maintenance covers more than just upkeep on a item though. I assume from the high price tags on most vehicles and TAGs that it’s factored into its initial price.

They are also the items most likely to have their structure reduced and suffer faults that need outside help to fix as most (unless they have Self-Repairing) can’t heal on their own.

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Hey Guys!

Sorry for change the subject, but I have some questions about the creation of a Hacker.

  1. The only possibility to be a hacker (as career) is to be part of the submondo (faction table B p.55)?. I know that there are other profession that includes hacking skill and other which includes hacker devices (like reverend agent or Bureau toth agent), but the only hacker as profession that I saw is in submondo, this is weird because every faction has their own hackers in the wargame for example, and/or Nomads and Aleph are the greatest hackers of human sphere, so I’m missing something?

  2. I saw that the only two options of hacking devices that a character could have during the life path system is assault hacking device or defensive hacking device the other possibilities are not allowed?

  3. When a player receives a hacker device as a gear in the creation of his character, such as an assault hacker device, this includes all the programs allowed for that device? or he must “buy” the programs associated with the device after?, or is the GM’s decision what programs he provides at the beginning of the campaign/story?

  4. Related with the previous question if the player want to buy another hacking dive, like killer hacking device, the player needs to buy the device and the program separately? Or when he/she buys the device, does it include all the programs? I ask this because the total cost (price) of the programs for one type of device (p. 352) is much higher than the price of the device (p.353).

Thanks!

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  1. You can also Hazard a Career as a Hacker. In both Nomads and Aleph there are ‘hacker’ career paths that don’t require you to take the Hacker career (notably Interventor in Nomads).

  2. In the Core book you can only get a AHD or DHD to start. You can get other Hacking Devices through non-Core career paths (Interventor in the Nomad book gets you a HD+ for instance)

  3. No, it’s just the device. Programs cost extra. Unless your GM is very kind.

  4. Yes. Programs cost extra. But unlike the device, you don’t really need to worry about them getting fried on each run as you probably have back-ups stored somewhere in case you need to ditch your Hacking Device for some reason.

3 Likes
56

There is only an hacker career in submondo because for most factions hacker isn’t a job, it’s a set of skills, used in diverse careers. Just because you don’t have the hacker career doesn’t mean you aren’t one. :slight_smile: For the rest of your questions Inane provided the answers.

1 Like
57

Thanks guys for your answer, is very clear now.

@inane.imp I forgot the hazard a career :-), and thanks for answering my questions one by one. @Chronic, maybe as I came from the wargame I have the idea that hacker is a career (a specific profile in several troops), but you are right, as mention in my previous comment, during the creation of character many professions can have the hacker skill and other have access to hacker devices too as other skill related to hacking. finally, I’ll look for supplements to have more hacker divices options.

58

Well some hackers in the wargame are insert unit name first, and hacker second!

3 Likes
59

This. For instance the character I’m playing ATM is a fairly-heavily-augmented, Ex-Wildcat Hacker that does bodyguard work.

He Hacks about as well as he Shoots, so depending on context does either. It’s a great utility build that never feels like I don’t have something to do (indeed often it feels the opposite).

Most Nomad builds function well as an X who Hacks.

The thing to look out for with Xs who Hack is the Analysis skill. This is really the secondary Hacking skill, but many Lifepaths can miss it entirely.

2 Likes
60

Yes, it is remarkable, that such an important skill - not only for Infowar applications - is so rarely accessible during the lifepath character creation.