Recently, I’ve been trying to work out how someone creates a character for Decommissioned. On one hand, the character is, quite literally, disposable. But with a vanilla character generation process, players won’t find the story of their Player Character’s (PC) demise interesting.
Conceptually, the character generation works like this:
Players choose a base model and then build functions into the model to customize it. At currently, there will be three models: an armored type, a light but quick recon type and a vanilla average model. There will be different names and styles for the base models. I considered the names of Greek gods, but this doesn’t exactly fit in the corporate satire idea and it also smacks a bit of other robot-oriented games, which I’d like to avoid. So, I’m currently looking for something evocative, but something a corporation would name their products. But ultimately, they need names that sound cool to players.
The first twist is that the player is not only building his Battlebot, he’s also designing the main antagonists. When the PC runs from The Compound at the initial moment of the game, the Tech Masters send other Battlebots out to destroy the PC. The Battlebots sent after the PC are members of his former unit, so they’re the same model. I’m not sure if I’ll clue the player in on this during character generation or not. The second twist is that as the PC takes each step towards their destruction (either by taking damage during combat, or because the degradation program has progressed), the player must choose a system that loses function. So, allowing the player to engage in building the Bot will give the loss of critical systems during the demise more impact.
Once the player has chosen the base model, they then customize the character by choosing the systems and add-ons. Think about how you’d build a Dell PC here. The player will be able to prioritize these systems to adjust the level of strength. For example, one Battlebot could have weapons as highest priority, then tactical systems as secondary, then armor as last priority. This Battlebot would be a sniper or long range unit. If a player chose armor, then weapons, the Battlebot would be a ground pounding grunt.
The rough draft list of functions a player can build into their bot will be in a future post.
Tags: character generation, D-Com, RPGs
