Destiny lore thread 3: Late night drink with Cayde-6

Actually, My Name is Byf has a bunch of videos if you want to watch them. The speculative ones are much better than the ones he gets more narratively into (it gets corny), but those are his earlier videos.

If you want some of the best written Grimoire Cards to read from, try The Book of Sorrows series and Thorn/Dredgen Yor. There's a number of neat cards out there, but those are considered among people's favorites because they're stories in their own right.

My experience with the starwars system is limited so are the details of how special abilities are laid you in genesys avilable to see?

Also pic related was the last one I tried to do until some bitch motherfuckers called in the mods

thank you for that sexy beast of a carbine

Genesys if FFG's generic system from Edge of the Empire.

We, unfortunately, don't have any pdfs or images to scan through, but their own news pages do have short articles which describe some of the basic systems, plus a few mentions of the up and coming expansion books for specific properties that they own.

Magic, as it works in Genesys, seems to work off keyworded effects, each a basic effect like bolt, blast, or fire, and on their own are pretty basic and wimpy, but combined can create more powerful effects. Bolt, Blast, and Fire makes a Fireball, but it seems like additional modifiers also increase the difficulty of the spell.

For Destiny, Light could act as a pool of tokens that, when spend, reduce that extra difficulty and allow these spells to be effortlessly at-will. Guardians would be pretty competent at magic until their Light runs low and it becomes harder to manifest powers. I'd also love to tie Light into a resurrection mechanic, so players have a risk/reward incentive for using/keeping their Light.

So for a Destiny RPG game, should there be a sort of sidebar recommending GMs to rule groups into non-Guardian and all-Guardian? Playing as a Guardian in a party of made up of regular people and/or non-hostile Fallen seems like it would trivialize combat encounters, with all their legendary weapons and immortality.

the system with generic and boring combat

>Magic, as it works in Genesys, seems to work off keyworded effects, each a basic effect like bolt, blast, or fire, and on their own are pretty basic and wimpy, but combined can create more powerful effects. Bolt, Blast, and Fire makes a Fireball, but it seems like additional modifiers also increase the difficulty of the spell.
>For Destiny, Light could act as a pool of tokens that, when spend, reduce that extra difficulty and allow these spells to be effortlessly at-will. Guardians would be pretty competent at magic until their Light runs low and it becomes harder to manifest powers. I'd also love to tie Light into a resurrection mechanic, so players have a risk/reward incentive for using/keeping their Light.

I like this and it makes sense. Certain abilities would naturally cost more or less light than others and you can even give the chance to use your light in ways not expounded upon in game.

I would add that other players could use their own light on each other such as reviving when it's harder to accumulate light and what not.

I think it would make for a good Scout Rifle. I've been looking at a bunch of Native American stuff and was reminded of the Medicine Stick from Fallout NV and now i want a native american themed hunter who's wielding it.

I should think so. Going by the game there are places that are easier for Guardians to go to because they can do stuff like double jump/hover to platforms normies wouldn't be able to get to easily.

Then again maybe they wouldn't suffer effects from darkness zones like guardians do so can act normally when guardians might suffer a penalty or something.

Normie humans would definitely be more reliant on various types of gadgets I think certainly as well but this is something that could be explored in a Table Top setting since we've only recently seen regular humans in action against the various enemies of humanity as a whole.

I'd say all-Guardian exclusively. The setting is built for Guardians to be the PCs given the nature of the Light they carry, and they're some of the only things that can pit themselves against the kind of evil space bullshit going on without dying/going insane/being corrupted instantly.

By restricting their use of Light, and by pitting them against enemies that pose a huge threat to the PCs, you can make even ressurection non-trivial. Some enemies might actively drain or steal Light like the Hive, while others like the Vex can seriously fuck you up by shunting you into other times and places. Otherwise, Fallen and Cabal have their own just very powerful dudes who can take/dish out beatings enough to make a serious drain on Guardian Light reserves, and often make their bases in areas where resurrection is restricted, if not actively making it so.

>I think it would make for a good Scout Rifle.
actually, if I recall correctly that model is specifically designed to break in half for easy storage in a backpack

its called a "takedown" weapon.
its a little like the latest fad for survival nuts
they can get pretty damn sexy.
youtube.com/watch?v=tYcPMs_b0CU

pic related is sort of the grandpappy of the takedown rifle the AR-7.
its chambered in .22LR and wont take down more than a possum, but it IS effective in survival situations. lots of bush-pilots pack them along in case of bad or forced landings.

I still think Light works best as your narrative focused mechanic, like a luck pool or edge or something, but also have it tied to your ability to revive.

I had previously developed an upkeep system for running Destiny-style abilities. For example:

Your [decay timer] for your Grenade is 60.
Your Discipline stat is 5.
On each initiative pass you roll d12+(stat) for upkeep.

So last turn you chucked a grenade, so you start at 60 for your [decay timer] to recharge, roll your upkeep and d12+5 is removed from your [decay timer] and when it hits 0 you can use that ability again. Same idea for Charged Melee attacks.

Alternately it can be dX+(stat)+Light depending on what sort of system works out. Where Light is more an actual stat and your Pool of Light is a separate state for revives/luck/edge that is limited by your Light stat. Let Class abilities have a similar cooldown.

I haven't sorted a method for supers, but figured a similar system that also included Orbs and kills to speed it up. Ideally it would be 1-5 ability uses (across all 3 abilties) and 1 Super per medium encounter or something.

My only major concern is upkeep being too crunchy.

Ishtar Collective is probably the easiest/best Database to use, as it is probably the best organized.

I agree. I still don't know why we haven't get a lever action Scout. Even if it were just an exotic. Albeit I'd like to see Tex Mechanica actually brought in as a proper foundry.

I agree with regarding establishing it as pretty much Guardian Exclusive. At least at the core. It gives less to worry about to build mechanically.

Doesn't look like a takedown to me, but that is because the rail system looks contiguous and bad for the twist at the receiver. I guess more information would be required to really judge.

Oh, additionally, the idea was that outside of combat any equivalent to a light rest would recharge core abilities, but to let supers only charge in combat. It would allow more brief skirmishes to hopefully rely on more tactical combat over "pop supers and we'll long-rest after"

That's why timers as a mechanic are shuffled into digital games because the computer can do all that work for you and display it as an icon that fills up until it brightens up to tell you when it's ready to use again.

Given that the systems being scoped are designed for faster play, which makes them more necessarily narrative, you'd have to cut the bookkeeping down to basic dice results with maybe one or two extra systems tacked on (as long as they're simple).

The game doesn't have to be a straight 1:1 of Destiny the videogame, and frankly it's better if it isn't. Focus more on the narrative scope of play rather than the mechanics, and build a system that does justice to the setting.

My suggestion: Light tokens in the Light token pool are what you activate for powers and stuff, and recharge over time. But the Light pool has a maximum cap and this represents inherent Light as a passive effect. This Light pool's capacity can be spent for more narrative effects or direct mechanical bonuses, like burning Fate points. There, now we have both Guardian Powers and the nebulous Light folded into a single, simple mechanic without tacking anything extra on.

>Doesn't look like a takedown to me
still sexy though...

Seems to me it would do the opposite by giving an immediate and severe consequence to failure, the death of the non-guardians.

I don't think darkness zone are supposed to be a thing that exists in the narrative. They're just a gameplay mechanic to designate especially dangerous areas where even guardians are at risk.

Remember, during development Bungie still hadn't figured out what the darkness was supposed to be. It was maybe its own thing, but it was also a generic term for all the alien invaders, so any zone with a buildup of enemies was a "darkness zone". It barely made sense at launch and makes no sense with the darkness as it currently exists in lore, that's why it was changed to "restriction zone" in D2.

You'd imagine non-Guardians would have a hard time against beings like the Vex who could more easily delete them then they could a Guardian. More so the fact they can simulate non-guardians without issue.

It makes me wonder though. In the Curse of Osiris (CoO) trailier Osiris freaks because he says they can see Sagira's light.

Does this mean they are figuring out how to read the light?

Fiar point. Perhaps rather than a zone where it's harder to accumulate light it's just more dangerous and indicates you're gonig to chewing through your light like a fat kid on a box of little debbies

Part of why I considered single upkeep roll. It's just something at the start of your turn to influence your tactical decisions, so that it keeps that flexibility that is what makes the digital game enjoyable to play. If you put your ability to punch hard in the same place as your grenades it will lead to mechanical decisions to either just use your light for your super or focus on building nuke-nades or a falcon-punch. I personally would not consider a single pool a simple mechanic for all of those things given the style of universe Destiny is.

So to me that means 4 token pools which are functionally the same as a turn-based cool down. Other options I had considered were treating abilities like a spell list and having to periodically rest or take dedicated action to refill them. Albeit, that is also not tonally very Destiny.

And design will influence play, and if players lose out on their cool powers if they use their tokens on narrative activities I know a lot of players who would never use it for narrative purposes, in the same regard that I no players who would never touch it for combat.

Ain't that the truth.

There is canon reasoning to believe that Darkness/Spawn Restricted Zones are thing, though. It's the same reason Ghost can't rez you until you reconnect with a substantial fount of Light in D2. We are venturing out beyond the reach of our more abundant Light and so when you die there your Ghost doesn't have the juice to resurrect you.

The narrative issue of The Darkness as an entity or concept and its associations with antagonist races has been shifted out of center field so that when they do reintroduce it they can do it the justice they feel it deserves. But lower case darkness as an area with minimal light still makes sense.

I don't think the Vex have issue seeing and identifying light. For them to acknowledge that they cannot simulate its effects they have to be aware of it. In theory Osiris' humanity can pretend to be a part of the simulation, but Her Light and the Light within him are obvious anomalies.

Not safe to respawn regularly because of some form of contaminant (radiological, technological, ontological, etc.), too many enemies who would target the Ghost directly, or its location is for some reason severed from the Traveller by some means (maybe some kind of shielding or just hard to get to?). Or that it is, in fact, just more dangerous and the consequences are going to be tougher in this spot.

Well, a system such as that could work, but considering the system I'm thinking of poaching for it, it wouldn't work (Genesys uses FFG's proprietary dice, rather than regular numbered). Having Light available to pull from at will seems like a more appealing alternative, and means that turns in between would have to be filled with bullets.

Say, a (Level 0/1) Guardian has a cap of 3 Light tokens:
>mobility (special jump) cost 1 Light token
>melee/grenade costs 2
>Super costs 3
>Light could recharge +1 every turn, possibly only starting to recharge the turn after a power was used if another wasn't used.

Now you have a very limited resource to expend tactically, but you get it back in a round or two to pull off again. This is pretty rules light and easier to keep track of, as all powers pull from the same pool.

>Dead Orbit
>now New Monarchy
>apparently everyone forget that best, objectively correct faction with best girl leading it exists

at least New Monarchy aren't a bunch of emo nihilists. say what you want about the tenets national socialism, at least it's an ethos.

and at least you don't need to win Faction Rally to unlock the best faction gun in the game: True Prophecy.

Byf kind of annoys me. His Destiny 2 videos aren't so bad, but he gets so up his own ass in some of his earlier videos, like the Vault of Glass raid and the Bones on Io.

Yeah, Vault of Glass is annoying. I like it better when he sticks to examining the narrative rather than trying to dramatically narrate it.

it's okay if you want to fuck the robot with the sexy voice, user

i do too

Distance from the Traveler does seem to matter, but as an explanation for darkness zones it doesn't really hold up. Especially by the time of TTK/D2 when we're going beyond Jupiter. Consider the fallen walker area in cosmodrome. You can go there on patrol and respawn fine, but go there as part of the strike and suddenly its a darkness zone. If the light is that unreliable on earth then it should be dysfunctional as hell on other worlds, yet it works all the way out on Nessus (which could be even further than Neptune) with nothing but a shard.

I agree that light-starved areas are a thing, but darkness zones are a poor indicator of them.

It's GM fiat, then. That or maybe something is actually causing Darkness zones, which would make a little more sense because those Raids and whatnot usually end at a powerful entity you have to fight.

Almost as if the Light loses purchase because a champion of an opposing philosophy is imposing their own will on their immediate vicinity. Also makes sense as to why you can port out when you defeat them, as they no longer exert that influence. And don't tougher raid bosses have a longer crawl to get to them? That might imply they impose a larger area of influence on the outer world around them.

And, similarly, don't Guardians kind of do the same in their immediate vicinitysince their paracausal... uh, -ness fucks with the Vex and allows them to beat the Hive at their own Sword Logic?

i always took it to mean that the presence of the Traveler's light suffused pretty much everything in our solar system, especially in its death throes during the Collapse, but sufficient concentrations of minions of the Darkness can smother it.

we clearly know that Light has reached outside our galaxy now. it's just that the flame gutters.

Her voice wasn't what I expected but my female Exo hunter is a sexual libertine and wouldn't have any trouble scissor clanging with her.

Also, while we're speaking broadly, how do you guys feel about vehicles? I imagine being an Ace pilot Guardian would be more dangerous because an exploding ship would almost assuradly mean the destruction of your ghost as well. Also, using a TT game means we can introduce more vehicles that would make sense to exist in setting and damnit I want a vehilce that can carry multiple people!

Could a Ghost hypothetically turn a Fallen into a Guardian?

yes. and now that the Traveler is awake, provided Variks and the Prince can keep the Eliksni in something resembling line, there will almost certainly be some after a while.

I suppose if you're going full-narrative I can see the tokens working, because then you're spending them to progress a story element. But mechanically what that says to me is you lead to two end options I consider in conflict with fun if you are having dice-based and mechanical systems. The first is your Super is weak, so as to provide motivations to use your other abilities which may be more cost efficient; second is you just take cover until you can buy another super and then you Press Q to Win.

Consideration for using a token based system: you have a separate Super Token which has to be otherwise earned during combat and it also cost from your Light Pool to use.

I'll probably stick with dice myself. And even if I pull from Genesys either I will sort some conversion or just have an addendum to include d12's for not action/conflict resolution actions.

Personally I consider FWC and DO to both be logical factions with viable goals.
>DO wants to expand into the universe, to remove our single point of failure, The Last City
>FWC wants to prepare for all inevitable conflicts drawn to or around The Last City
And only the Monarchy is dumb
>Lets consolidate all of our resources into building a totalitarian political structure almost wholly focused on rigid order within our single point of failure, The Last City

NM are Fascist shit heads who want nothing but their own influence at the fore. At least Dead Orbit would rather become harder to stomp out.

Distance to a Paracausal entity isn't solely a reflection of three dimensional separation. If we believe The Speaker's words that Light is in all things then I would surmise it is not in all things equally. So having spot with limited Light isn't entirely unreasonable. I don't think a Darkness Zone is the physical space so much as who or what is occupying that space.

I really feel bad for the Fallen.

The Cabal are imperialist assholes, the Vex are incomprehensible machines, the Taken are pure evil, the Hive are just magical Zerg, but the poor four-armed bugs are just trying to survive and keep some ember of their civilization going.

don' feel bad for the Fallen. they're past saving. feel bad for the Eliksni, what few are left.

It's beat the Hive /outside/ of their own Sword Logic. But yeah. It all gets weird when you actually start discussing the paracausal forces in the setting. And people have a hard enough time with the acausal nature of the Vex.

Hypothetically, but I would expect unlikely. There seems to be some level of predisposition with what life a Ghost can channel Light to. Could make a fun story hook, though. True or not.

Jumpships probably have a little bit more space inside them, but Dead Orbit probably has a number of smaller ships at their disposal, and a Guardian team might well use that as their transport rather than a number of smaller ships. Or maybe it's a light carrier, salvaged or converted, and Guardians come and go, using it as a stopgap to gather information, allies, and plan assaults, while possibly also housing offices and labs for researchers.

Hypothetically yes. Ghosts can turn Exos, Awoken, and Humans into Guardians, but although they're different they're all fundamentally human (Exos used to be, Awoken are a little something else).

Fallen have changed after being fucked over by what was presumably the Hive, and it's possible they no longer possess the traits that make Guardian candidates. Some have speculated that they are all touched by the Darkness, but it manifests as petty greed and anger rather than anything much darker, like the Dwarves in Lord of the Rings.

>you will see traitorous, back(and front) stabbing, 4 eyed & armed, ether breathing, Fallen become guardians before your final life

day of the head docking when?

I could say that your convert Light tokens into a Super token to use that combat, but also need to use that many extra Light tokens as well. So our Guardian uses 3 Light tokens to create a super, and needs to recharge 3 more before he can spend it.

That or you can burn Light capacity to set off a Super, and Light cap recharges between combats rather than turns, barring any light-sapping environmental effects.

you... are saltyyy, yesssss?

FINAL WAR NAO!!!!

Guess what? My gun was sitting on the side of a box for 400 years and was waiting to consume four arms

NM would make more sense if we had substantial examples of the consensus being corrupt or dangerously inefficient.

Dead Orbit has a fleet of larger-than-jumpship craft. They were utilized by The Consensus to help evacuate TLC, iirc. I don't have a source handy, but you can see them in the Skybox of Titan. Landed on other platforms.

I love the concept of making Fallen mostly just covetous Angry-Space-Spider-Dwarves. It would be an interesting way to motivate them in a PnP setting when you might do things other than shoot them. I'm not sure we actually know much about the culture of the current Fallen other than stature is part of position and that Ether is life.

I can see that being functional. Just something that requires an investment and choice to use your super, that way you can keep them as a power fantasy moment by keeping them potent. And it wouldn't even require you to use it immediately if you want to use your light tokens to charge your super up front.

Destroy your own mines.

NM in a lot of ways feels like a remnant of a past Version of Destiny. Like an idea that came in when they were concepting it as a fantasy setting and that stayed with it through revisions and never really escaped an obsession with fuedalism and stuff. Perhaps from when Destiny was less hopeful.

Who would NM make King, anyway? Are they going to put a giant crown on the Traveler?

According to Executor Hideo, they've asked Zavala repeatedly.

And in his greater wisdom has told them to shove it.

There's only one strong enough to lead humanity against the forces of the Darkness.

Randal the Vandal

The War Cult is the only faction I can stomach. Which isn't saying much. I genuinely don't get how DO is even in the game.

I don't get how FWC isn't leading the city when they were completely right about everything

Dead Orbit builds up to build out, and provide a great volume of external information to The Last City. Nihilistic reasoning or not, they are basically the practical intel source for TLC that isn't directly coming from Guardians. And they've built up a fleet of ships that are often used in support of the city.

>Pic
Is that the USS Enterprise?

Don't think so.

I can see non-Guardians getting pissed at faction rallies so soon after the Red War.
> Protests turning violent when?
> certain person "accidentally" killing a Guardian by getting a one in a million shot to a ghost
> an investigation campaign where you're forced to suppress your inner-light to go under cover

What should NM replaced by?
What does NM even provide?
> DO- interplanetary travel and intel
> FWC- combat tactics
> NM- political unity?

it's really not a false flag, nobody likes the threads cept the three of you who post in this.
Make a discord or something if you don't wanna go to Veeky Forums.

For what it's worth yes, NM does provide political unity because they are heavily invested in making sure the Last City is unified and safe in spite of their own desires. They even say they want the other factions to willingly agree to desolve the Consensus in order to install a Monachy of it's own volition. So far they havn't apparently tried to force this point on anyone and the one dude they want to be king doesn't want to.

I wonder if "Cult" has some kind of different meaning in the future and that's why FWC chose the name or Lakshmi-2 really does have a bunch of special flavor-aid saved up somewhere.

Well, I imagine after getting in a machine that literally blows your fucking mind you have to be the sort of person who'd join a cult to go "Yeah I'll support you guys and sport your colors"

The one thing I really wished they would have expounded upon was what exactly the factions were doing during the Red War. Lakshimi says FWC predicted it and the Consensus blew them off but they were able to save a lot of people. The Farm has crates with DO logos on them. I imagine, hard as it would be to do, NM was helping coordinating the evacuation of citizens out of the city.

I think it would have been pretty fucking cool if the faction leaders were drawn together along with the Vanguard.

During the Red War:

>New Monarchy was arranging various incestuous marriage alliances
>Future War Cult unearthed the Murdercube and declared it their new god
>Dead Orbit spent the whole time posting Carl Sagan memes on the space internet

like said, NM had stockpiled all kinds of supplies and organized the evacuation of the City, FWC had defense systems put in place around the city that massively slowed down the Red Legion and Dead Orbit had the ships at the ready for evacuation off-world, but failed to signal the incoming battle

>wanting content from nu-bungie
buy more silver goy

FWC being Space /k/ is now canon in my game.

In regards to the "How do we work in the Super / Light gauge in the Genesys hack" thing. Here's my current WIP that's probably going to change when I get the book, but fuck it I need to brainstorm this.

I'm thinking of using a modification to the way you spend Successes and Triumphs in combat. I've got to fine turn the numbers because I'm not sure how to make it balanced but having Successes recharge your Melee, Grenade and Class Ability and Triumphs recharge your Super seems like a good place to start.

Using Destiny(ha) points and force dice for rezzing / other narrative stuff seems fitting too, with the Light / Dark aspect the dice already have. That aspect I'll probably keep to only the "Darkness Zones", your Ghost can die anywhere if you're stupid or unlucky but having the darkness get closer each time you die in say, the Vault of Glass or other story important place seems fitting.

"Dude you wouldn't believe it but I found this old old server farm from way back when, thank the travler we have ghost, interacting with them wasn't easy but what a treasure trove!"

Ghost: If you can call it that....

"So what the hell did you find? A new gun?

"Even better, remember that book I showed you that showed the roman scrawls on a wall saying stupid shit? What if I told you it was the archieves of an old forum that survived into the Golden age. Reading some of this shit is hilarious although it's tough to puzzle out without context, I don't know how well the crytparchs are going to handle all these dank memes."

>I fucked up, FWC, I fucked up bad.

>What did you fucking do?

>You know how the Fallen have been clawing at the walls of our City? Long story short I tried hunting them with my "Fuck your Ether rounds"

>Guardian, tell us in detail what you did. What did you load these shells with?

>Basically I mixed Omolon liquid ammo with Wormspore and some dormant SIVA clusters. My idea is that it would burn the docking clamps off the Fallen, not set the fucking Walls on fire.

Zavala: I'm worried about the prevelance of these "dank memes" as I've heard them called. It's caused a number of guardians and, embarassingly, my own Titans to act a bit strange

Ikora: Because nothing is stranger than being caught with your genitals in your gun I'm sure...

Cayde: I mean, at least it's not as bad as them use to dancing on the table like...Oh yeah, forgot, that table got blown up in the Cabal attack. I miss that table.

Zavala: Thankfully it seems to only be FWC. I'm willing to tolerate their weirdness but I'm having second thoughts about vouching for them now after what happened with the Concordat and Lysander

Wait a second.

>Lost Golden Age knowledge
>Clovis Bray
>Clovis
>Clover
>4 leafed clover
>Dank ass memes.
>It all makes sense now

now that's quality!

I was working on a Destiny-expie TTRPG for awhile, but one thing I could never get working was guns and ammo. My system is a lot like FATE in that it revolves around universal descriptors, with a loose, conversational "turn order" like PbtA - but I never felt like I could give significant mechanical differentiation to "hand cannon" vs "auto rifle" beyond fluff description.

Anyone else tackled this, or know of games that do it well? I ended up going full fantasy specifically so I didn't have to deal with this, but if I could ever make it work I'd turn back in a heartbeat.

As a complete tangent, I think the Primary/Special/Heavy weapon distinction actually works very well for Genesys.
>d6 for Primary
>d8 for Secondary
>d12 for Heavy
And then you plug in drawbacks like increased likelihood of running out of ammo for them. Success results could cause enemies to drop ammo as well, turning success results not just into kills, but also resources. Although you could probably just say Primary has functionally unlimited ammo for the game's purposes.

Further distinguishing between weapon types could be an additional advantage or ability when used under various circumstances. Weapons could each get advantage at range bands, vs. elemental shields with the same type, or in various other circumstances or have their own abilities. Advantages could translate to bumping up die to a step higher, adding an additional d6, or just rolling an extra die of the same type and choosing the best result.

If Keywords are a thing in the new Genesys system then the way things are set up in the second game should translate well

I seem to recall the explanation that the different ammo drops in game were just programable matter packets (like Glimmer and Ammo Synths) that your Ghost transmats into the appropriate type.
I can't find it on the wikis or Ishtar but it makes sense on how a green box can be Omolon liquid ammo, Autorifle mags, Fusion Rifle batteries and Shotgun shells.

Maybe that would be a mechanic more suited to an RPG, Where you can choose to spend your box of purple ammo to either load your RPG or Sword, or to swap out the power ammo on your Shotgun for a bigger punch. Make Power Ammo a separate consumable to either counter the Limited Ammo quality on a Power Wep, or to boost the damage of a Primary / Secondary for a mag

They did also mention in their articles that items will have a similar keyword system to spells, where additional tags will add additional dimensions to the spells.

It just said items, but that could probably mean weapons as well. You could even limit the amount of tags a weapon can have by rarity if you wanted, giving basic weapons one advantage at most, while exotics might have three or four weird traits.

Give Special/Heavy weapons a limited tag, maybe 1-2 for Heavy and 3-4 for Special. If possible, you could have just one type of ammo drop, and the player decides if they want to reload their Special or Heavy guns. More shots with less power, or few shots with more power?

The idea is to try and limit the amount of tokens we have to deal with. Having Light as one and ammo as another seems like we're a stretching point before it becomes a token-collecting game. The more simplification we can have to streamline it, the better.

Which is kind of how the work in game as well. Everything from Legendary on down has the ability to swap certain features like ammo and sites that affects the performance of the weapon while exotics are set and can't be changed.

In a gameplay scenario when you have down time I could imagine you are carrying the different parts of a specific weapon and can use that down time to adjust your weapon parameters as needed. So in the since of the game changing out key words.

Then again, I would go further and allow people who have weapon/gunsmithing skills or going to a gunsmith (banshee for example) to make "special" modifications to regular weapons. This would probably go a long ways towards making a plain jane weapon into an exotic exclusive to the player. Your plain jane autorifle suddenly becomes a legendary becuase you picked apart this one Cabal legionare's weapon and incorporated parts of it into your gun for example. Or do what Rezyle Azir did and fused parts of a Knight he killed to his gun.

I'm not super familiar with how Genesys is shaping up since it's not out yet, but I have run a lot of FFG's star wars over the years and can see how it would work.

Most of your regular weapons, probably even many secondaries should just always have "ammo", but negative dice results can mean you run out (typically a single despair). Guns with lots of bullets but high rates of fire (like, say, an LMG) should make it much more likely to actually get your "out of ammo result". In FFGSW, you can counter these results by buying spare ammo as an item and using it to refresh your gun, a Destiny hack should be similar. Actually using the Limited Ammo quality should be reserved for very high power weapons which clearly have limited magazines, like Snipers and Rocket launchers. And even then, this doesn't necessarily mean you need to "acquire" more ammo unless it's specific (like rockets), you just take an action to reload. Also, let's skip the video game-ness of Swords with ammo. Guardians with swords can be any worse than PCs with Lightsabers.

Now, for using "tokens" for all your abilities, this I'm not sure about. But maybe somebody who knows more about what Genesys' magic system will be like can assuage me on that. Do they use specific "magic dice" (the Force Die equivalent) or is it worked into just a normal skill check? In SW, you can use force powers as much as you like, provided you've sunk EXP in them, but you won't get very far in them without upping your Force Rating to actually roll enough dice to do the power well. Even if it's a normal skill check, then for more complex stuff you'll still need to invest in training the stat/skill for "spellcasting". That's without powerful minions of the darkness making it an Opposed check (The Adversary ability would come in handy here).

To make it have less bookkeeping I'm probably going to make all Secondary weapons have the "Runs out of ammo if you roll 3 Threats or 1 Despair" trait. Power Packs / Extra Reloads will be renamed Ammo Synths and Power Weapons will have the Limited ammo trait. Have Rival tier enemies always drop power ammo and maybe let you spend Triumphs to make a Minion tier one drop ammo.

But, SW also uses (interestingly enough) a Destiny pool system for your fatemoxiwill mechanic. At the start of every session players generate the pool of points, divided into Light and Dark side. PCs flip Light points to do cool stuff, including activating their most powerful abilities. The GM can flip a Dark point to have bad things happen or empower enemies. I say "flip" because the pool oscilates back and forth - each point one side spends goes to the other.

You could adapt this to Destiny, and use it for the most powerful abilities akin to Supers, you flip a point to activate so the Darkness gets some narrative sway back. And the GM can push Dark points to say, make the Darkness Zones to prevent instant respawns or other terrible things.

SW had a robust weapon/armor modification and crafting system. Even if Genesys doesn't do that from the start you should be able to pull out and use it.

Hey, is there a lore reason why Guardians can't just pick up guns fresh off their fallen foes? Is it a Halo-esque "we can't into reload plasma" thing?

Because if not your RPG will have to deal with that, since presumably all the weapons will have stats. And with all this talk of the SW system, I'm pretty sure every group's first encounter with some Stormtroopers ends with the stormies missing their belts, grenades and rifles.

That's a pretty good idea. Then again, I'm just reading about it without experience in the system, you sound like you've played it.

Could work. Weapons could have more traits than they can feasibly have active at one time, so you swap them out as needed. Gunsmith traits could also allow you to add another trait to a weapon, but you can't have more than the maximum allowable active. That gives your gun flexibility without breaking it.

Good to hear it has a robust crafting/modding system. Also that it has a Destiny metacurrency system already in place to piggyback off of.

No lore reason. Gameplay reason is that Bungie wanted your guns to be special and coding is hard.
Honestly I don't see the issue if one of my players really, really wanted to lug around a Shrapnel Rifle or a Cabal Slugthrower. They had a wall of them back in the old Tower.

I assume the guardians' weapons are just better. In SW, you play rebels who have no equipment; meanwhile, the guardians are like supersoldiers with twinked out and finely tuned weapons that are made to fit with their abilities. A Sniper wouldn't loot a shotgun, and he is probably most comfortable with his own rifle.

No reason why not, but they'd probably be a bit more alien and inflexible, as well as just kind of hard to use since they're not fit for human hands.

A few guns are looted from/modified from alien guns, though, so it's a possibility. I'd say alien guns are either unwieldy to use or just kind of junk considering what you're equipped with, any any alien gun they'd like to wield has to be modified to fit human hands, and probably fixed up to make it suck less.

Pretty sure Faction Rallies are a thing to focus inter-faction conflict out of the city and to avoid actual issues like that, and why non-Guardians don't participate. I mean, nobody wants new Faction Wars.

NM is a major soup kitchen/supply distributor within TLC itself. For all their bullshit ideology they are dedicated to TLC and its people. Their biggest problem is their lack of foresight for anything else.

I think it is fair that if the Consensus disregarded FWC's warning, and that Vanguard Intel networks were brought down in advance of the arrival of the Red Legion that DO probably didn't fail to signal, it's that the signal didn't get through. Which actually makes the Red Legion more intimidating, if they can pull off near-system jamming to that scale.

I think with the idea of limiting Light in however you work out Darkness Zones would also be a good place to have limits on ammo. Functionally infinite Primary and near-infinite Secondary with a reasonable Heavy reserve most of the time, but you enter a Darkness Zone and maybe you have to be a little more careful with how you use your ammo as well.

Its purely balance. Destiny is balanced around the idea of a limited supply of permanent weapons that you haul around by the truckload. Halo is balanced around the idea of an abundant supply of temporary weapons that you only carry a couple of at a time. Being able to pick up alien weapons would either result in your inventory being stuffed with garbage that no one will actually use for more than a couple minutes as a novelty, or break the balance by giving you an effectively limitless stream of quality loot that would make the loot cave look sparse in comparison.

In lore they can and do use them sometimes. Cayde 6 mentions using a shock pistol in one of the grimoire cards.

The closest Bungie gives to Lore reasoning is that the Exotics derived from enemy weapons (Vex Mythoclast, Lord of Wolves, Queenbreakers Bow, Dreg's Promise) are explicitly modified for human use and are not identical to the alien counterparts.

As suggests mostly this is because alien hands != human hands. Also, their method of ammunition sourcing may be different than what we use with Smartmatter Bricks. Making picked up ones worse than our own weapons and using the reasoning of is also a reasonable narrative way to do it. Which leads back into picking up one you like the look of, and then modifying it until it is a practical Guardian-scale weapon it totally the sort of thing I imagine players doing.

The only considerations I would make are that I think that to use them without substantial investment in modification and making them "Exotic" (where you can boost the power to a reasonable level and enhance their gimmick) would be that they would have to have you source ammo for them frequently and require a skill investment in knowing how to operate them properly. Having one Guardian in your fire team super into making Fallen guns his own would make for a very interesting character flavor.

This should be pretty easy to model in-system. Just make a rule (or even a keyword) that using unmodified alien increases the difficulty in some way and make replacing ammo harder - but if a Guardian spends some time and some glimmer they can modify it to be more normally usable. This can then let it be subject to normal mods and talents while also keeping whatever it's normal enemy gimmicks are.

That's probably a good way to handle exotics, they're just the normal weapon but with added special rules or new intrinsic keywords. If you wanted to make "building your own exotic" more common place you could even make them a bit like Lightsaber crystals - an "exotic shard" has certain properties when you add it to a gun or armor set, but such an item can only have one shard at a time. Contrast with actual exotic weapons built and modified by other Guardians as loot and repurposed alien exotics.

I think if you are getting to the point of building an exotic I think at that point it should require the commitment to it to boost it up to having that extra Exotic flavor. So when you build your own Exotic it isn't a case of being able to swap out an Exotic effect later, but that item is now locked and cannot be modified further. Excluding any direct modifications to power level if that ends up being something that is easily incorporated, albeit I would probably just disregard the gear leveling and worry about gear-as-effects.

Building an Exotic should be a big part of your characters story too. Not just getting a new gun with a cool power. Granted it should be cool as fuck too, but Thorn was more then a pistol with glowy darts just like Lukes Lightsaber was more then a glowy sword that cuts really good.