Move over Bioniclefag...

I've been wondering the same thing, actually.

Just the battle net stuff, sort of. Ton of people hated it when the games were coming out because they really had nothing to do with the actual megaman games.

Pretty much just Battle Network stuff. The series is vastly different than other Megaman games, in both story and gameplay.

Wouldn't this work pretty well?

>game series spanning 6 main games and spawning its own spin-off series Starforce
>long running anime
>merch out the wazoo

How is that obscure?

Well, I said Semi-obscure, and Bionicle is in about the same boat. Like... It was one of those things that came, went, and you loved it, but it just didn't stand the test of time like others did.

Alright, Megaman! Time to jack off!

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I'd run the whole thing in Strike! pretty much. A shocker, I know.

At-will powers work as common chips/low effort abilities that can be spammed, Encounters are rare chips. Other abilities, feats are NPC. Multiply numbers by 10 and you got a similar range to the games. And you already got the grid/element wheel/etc.

Operators handle the skills, tricks and complications are shared between the two.

Didn't play the Nechronica version, but I worked out a d100 version a while back. Played it twice. Shit was fun, but the setting was too goofy for my players to handle, they wanted to play it SRSLY.

Megaman, you say?

Mega Man itself is not obscure. The Battle Network subseries is simply one of the most obscure Mega Man variants. Mega Man Classic and Mega Man X are the two most popular by an incredibly large margin, for sake of comparison.

The Battle Network series is basically an alternate universe where instead of getting into robotics, Dr. Light and Dr. Wily got into networking and computer science instead. It embodies the "Internet of Things" that we're slowly entering into right now: everything can be jacked into, and 80% of what you see can connect to the Internet as a whole one way or another. Net Navis are a thing because they help operators make sense of the vast amounts of data coming through, essentially serving as a personal secretary. Plus, they serve as an additional expression of self among locals and the Internet abroad, to the point where they have their own personality and methodology, even if it's not the same as their operator.

I think the Battle Network setting is neat and worth exploring.

This later evolved to the even more obscure setting with the radiowaves.

I loved Star Force so much as a kid. It's a huge shame that the second game was so bad that they decided to end the timeline with the next game. It really felt like the worldbuilding was starting to get somewhere interesting in Star Force 3 with how it seemed like they were starting to build up an actual secret community of wave-beings and people capable of wave-changing.

I feel like Navi and Operator are distinct enough personalities with separate responsibilities and different types of scenes always focused on one or the other (with banter from the other party) that it's best done with the "everybody plays an operator and somebody else's Navi" method.

Star Force would be easier to have the GM just handle the FMians. Just due to the importance of interaction between the two sides, I wouldn't want one player to play both sides of a duo.

Semi-obscure franchise? Was it really that obscure? I played several of the GBA games, and they were all really fun.

I even made up a Netnavi when I was a kid - Omegaman. Real original, I know, but I was six.

Colonel and Tomahawk man coolest.

>It embodies the "Internet of Things" that we're slowly entering into right now: everything can be jacked into, and 80% of what you see can connect to the Internet as a whole one way or another.
>That feel when the only thing missing to make MMBN a reality are net navis

Well, we're feasibly close with Google, Cortana, and Siri. They learn to recognize our speech patterns and adapt to our behaviors online. Combine that with Google's Big Brother notifications telling us the ETA and weather conditions on our way to and from work, and I'd say it's a simple matter of creating a singular, responsive interface with more customization.

Don't forget the holowaifu.

The difference is of course navis are customized and, even more importantly, anti virus software is fun.

>semi-obscure
Battle Network was the single most wide spread and highest selling franchise in Mega Man's history.

>Dr. Light and Dr. Wily got into networking and computer science instead.
Slight nitpick here. Dr. Light got into networking/computer science. Dr. Wily stayed with robotics, and when networking became huge and robotics went into a slump compared, he became a huge bitter FUCK about it, hence why he's a terrorist.

That's supposed to be the timeline divergence point, isn't it? I remember it being brought up at some point that networking was Light's thing and robotics was Wily's, and the main split between Classic and Battle Network is who got the funding. Light was a good sport about it and got into building robots. Wily... didn't cope as well.

But wily designes some of the greatest navis which is how W3 is intimidating in the first place.

Weird.

He did get a redemption story at the end, which was kinda nice.

Actually, what was really great about the setting was Dark Chips. Here you have chips that act as drugs, corrupting anyone who uses them in return for power, and there is no "Light Chip" counterpart. It basically saying that yeah, pure evil exists in this world, and there's no one Good thing that can beat it, but good people doing good can overcome it by working together. I mean, otherwise, sure, it's your hokey, sentimental "Friendship and Teamwork overcomes any obstacle" that's played out in every jrpg or anime, but I always found it neat that there was no "Ultimate Good" to combat "Ultimate Evil." Even mechanically, you use a Dark Chip and it permanently lowers your HP. I'm sure if Veeky Forums re-wrote the Battle Network Setting we'd capitalize on the concept.

But it's not vanilla nor X, so no one cares.

That was also the same arc that literally weaponized friendship

What Wily lacked in natural talent, he made up for with spite.

Though the long run when you think about it he coped with it a hell of a lot better than he did in response to Light beating him at his own game.

Gah, meant for .

Thats because Wily had friends and the like in Battle network, in the mainverse all he had were robots.

IMHO Wily was a better villain overall in Battle Network.

I reaaaaaally really want a mobile MMBN game.

Customizable Navi outfits.
Wide chip variation.
GPS-based terrain/obstacles.
NaviCust programs.

It could have been glorious. The battle screens are perfect for a mobile interface.

A spinoff where you create and customize your own navi would be friggin' amazing.

wat

There was a (very sadly shortlived) Archie Comic adaption of the classic Mega Man series. That particular page is from the arc based on the third game.

I've been doing the best I can at my local college. We've gotten a dozen or so people to start playing BN6, then do multiplayer according to Tournament rules using VBA Link and My Boy.

Also apparently someone is making a fan-made PET system... and it still seems to be a live project.

>Why aren't you running a cyber-bright setting already?
I was actually working on a homebrew for it, but set it aside after a bit of work because I felt the setting was too narrow. it was PBTA

Other inspirations:

Digimon
Summer Wars
Dennō Coil

My system used the approach of Geist, if I recall Geist correctly. Each player played an Op, and also played another player's NetNavi.

The reason I was making a homebrew is because I had an interesting idea to emphasize the teamwork nature of these storylines

You can level up alone - by collecting "Data", XP - but you can also level up your Connections with other players. When you level up alone, you get an upgrade from your class, like normal in games like this.

But when you level up a Connection - by collecting "Links", representing the deepening of emotional bonds, learning about each other, trusting in each other, etc. - you can select a new move from a "Connection" list. Each Connection you have with another character has a set of moves dependent on the two character's "Personality" - Aloof, Reckless, Outgoing, etc.

So for example, if I level up my Aloof character's Connection with their Reckless Netnavi, they can select from the "Aloof / Reckless" move list.

Forgot picture

Anyway, I probably won't finish that system, but if people like the idea, feel free to steal it

In the meantime I'll dump the images I saved for inspiration

Monsters and other childish thing also used a relationship power up thing, the difference was that using it actually strained the relationship if things went south.

Because magic.

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Yeah, that part was always odd. You can kinda flavor it, though...

If you rely on a relationship to motivate you, and you fail, you might feel like you failed the other person in the relationship. Or yourself. Or that you didn't feel strongly enough. Etc.

Also that's why I stopped working on the homebrew. I wasn't innovating enough, I felt. M&OCT does what I was trying to do with my system without all the weirdness and work and permutations of the personality lists and stuff. So, I figured, don't reinvent the wheel.

Has anyone run cyberpop in M&OCT? What'd you feel like needed changing, if anything?

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Well the way it worked in the setting was that if a monster eats the relationship for power, it will affect the realtionship in a cursedlike way.

For instance a tune up on your navi will fail and cause it to be hurt for a bit, or your mom finds your porn stash.

OR your navi tries to help you by hacking the computer mainframe and changing your test results and gets caught.

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Right, I was theorizing for how it could be reflavored for cyberpop. It seems too 'coincidental' in a setting that doesn't use magic, you know? But it could work, with creative players and GM that can tie the action's results to relationships.

Oh, to be clear, I always called this setting 'cyberpop'. Pop being opposite of punk, in a way.

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You know I haven't heard the pop suffix shoved onto things. It makes a lot of sense if you use punk to me against the system, gritty with uglyness, and all that shit while pop is light hearted, digestibility by the masses and generally vapid.

I don't think pop has to be vapid, but yeah, "light-hearted fun" was what I thought it'd evoke.

I've done something like this in M&M. The robot was the "main character" the human was build with Sidekick rules.

It works fairly well.

I know that in cyberpunk a lot of people enjoy the old fashioned 'having to connect wires and use a physical deck' feel, but does it feel too outdated for something more lighthearted like Megaman?

Having to actually jack in, plug in chips...is that something you want to keep, or something you'd be willing to cut out if you tried to make a tabletop system?

did you guys make Doughnut Steels or robots from the cartoon/games?

It makes sense to me, we still use usbs.

Also the alternative is that navis have micropay dlcs.

"Pay 1.00 to rent the "Cannon.exe" extra content!"

Why not just have a literal file folder full of files for weapons to give your Navi?

Economy.

If you could just get one cannon and then have a infinite arsenal then who would need chip stores? Or customization shops? You'll have newbs swinging gigachips and using the same metanavi.

No this is the age of DRM and timed self deletion to ensure a scarcity Only the undernet uses ripped black market Everprograms and ripped bootlegged HolyDrem.

...I mean it can work but it'll be a bitched to deal with mechanically if stuff were theoritically infinite, Rare chips wouldn't exist anymore.

I miss this series. I even miss SSR since the spirit was still there.

I justified it with chips being such complicated and heavily encrypted programs that the physical "chips" are actually mini RAM/CPU/memory things. You can only run it once in a fight because it needs to cool down and re-encrypt itself before it can be used again so you don't get your shit stolen.

What if chips are rare based on their encryption and difficulty to copy?
>DISCLAIMER: I AM NOT A COMPUTER SCIENTIST
>I AM TALKING OUT OF MY ASS

Make all chips have some basic level of encryption, so viruses can't pick up the Cannon * chip they found and fuck some old lady's digital thermometer up. Only someone using a PET (or PET equivalent) can use them.
The rarer the chip, the heftier the encryption—once-in-a-lifetime unique chips are nearly unreplicatable.

Yeah, yeah! Using a chip steals away a bit of the memory available to you, so it's unwise to go beyond the deck size limit you have. A few unsavory mods exist to make it larger, but it runs a lot of risks.
Using too few chips can risk deletion due to lack of resources, so safety standards (and your Navi's sense of self-preservation) demand certain lower limits.

I really liked how the darkchip addiction was handled mechanically.

The game kept track of the lowest you'd ever gotten with darkchip use and a darkchip would instantly knock you back down to that level if you used it. So the further you got in, the harder it was to get back out and the further you'd fall if you fucked up again.

Recently seen two different variant attempts at this kind of game. One is using PTU rules to make a pass at it, the other is it's own custom ruleset. That said, the custom one lost a lot of what it had some time before I found it, and the guy is trying to reconstruct it.

What was the point of Dark Chips, anyway?

In 4 they were just used to gain power by the BBEG(and yes, I do mean BBEG, every game ultimately centers around a single villain, so quit your bitching) and we're just a means to an end. Their presence was what the final boss(a sentient meteorite) judged the earth by, and was going to crash into the earth as judgement.

In 5, however, they take a more central role, and the final boss was a monster made from pure darkness, and the series really focused on combating darkness and the evil within as a whole.

The series aren't that deep, but they're got some pretty great ideas we can build from.

They were chip drugs that formed the first part of Megaman 4's storyline where you have to deal with Shademan and his gang.

They then worked as a "Last hooorah" move, with chips that could do a lot but all had powers that threatened to fuck you over, they made you weaker, repeated use turned megaman into a dick, and each chip was glitched to begin with.

Was it in 5 you could sidestep the drawbacks with the dark fusions or was that already in 4? Can't remember.

5 with CHAOS UNISON but that only worked one turn and if your timing was off you summoned a bossfight.

>and if your timing was off you summoned a bossfight.

That happened so rarely that I totally forgot about it.

That's pretty much what happened in one of the games, innit? There was this guy with a name like Mr. Flint or something, and he had Lan plant fire-themed virus patches into an otherwise secure network under the guise of updates. Lan pretty much freaked out because just before he found out he'd helped a criminal hack into the site, he'd boasted to a rival about how good he was at catching criminals.

Theorethically, if the whole chip loading thing is kept in, it could be arranged through a combo of inventory and point buy, with a stat - Regular Memory - allowing a card at or under a set regmem value to be kept on the side of the usual deck.

In short, you find a chip, add it to your pack, and non-Navi players can make and update a deck of set amount of chips that their Navi draws from.

Later in the series they switched over to an Infrared system instead of a wired port,