Honestly, 0.3.5. should have been the combat update, but who’s counting. I’m counting. Anyway, today on updates is:
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Most of the higher end armour
Hwageumon Irostatic Capacitor
Neutral Shock Compensation
The more expensive drones (+ the JourneyRite Smartcase)
Traffic Network Automation
Trial of Titans Battle Valley (well actually reduced in Space)
Most Subscriptions & Health Insurance
