Pacing in Battle Century G

Last week I started talking about what my next GGG-esque project is going to look like. I went into the most basic rules of the game: Tests, Attributes, Damage and Advantages. We've still got some pretty fundamental things to cover before we get into the real meat of the rules, so let's get on with it already.

Why Pacing?

The pacing of the game was an important part GGG's rules. On the micro level it balanced how often some abilities could be used and how much pain a PC could take before they had to start worrying about it. On the macro level it made characters gain more points and powers as the game went on and threatens characters that make one too many mistakes with terrible consequences. The Scene/Episode structure governed the pacing of Intermissions and Operations. The Episode Arc structure governed the pacing of Character Advancement.

A control of the pacing structure allowed the GM to keep a better grasp on how much danger the PCs were in and the rate they grew in power at. It also had a few downsides: Distinguishing between Episodes and Episode Arcs can cause some confusion if you're not actively keeping track of when one ends and another begins. Even if you do, it is easy to forget exactly how many Arcs have ended and how much you should buff up NPCs. Lastly, it just plain makes it weird to run games that don't start at low power and end much higher than that. The system works, but it could be better.

I am making a few changes to the pacing rules. The most important of which goes by the name of Power Levels.

As expected of Battle Century G, it is on a whole new Level.

What are Power Levels? In short, they are a scale that grades your Power based on how much XP you have. Like so:

Level 0: Faceless (0-29 XP)
Level 1: Talented (30-59 XP)
Level 2: Heroic (60-89 XP)
Level 3: Elite (90-119 XP)
Level 4: Mythical (120-149 XP)
Level 5: Godly (150+ XP)

At 30 XP your Power Level is 1, at 100 XP your Power Level is 3, and so on and so forth. The interesting thing here is that your Genre Points and Powers would not be tied to the Episode Arc structure, but to your Power Level. Went up a Power Level? That's great, add another Point to your stock and another Power to your pool.

You can run a game about low-power characters and keep it there without story progression forcing power advancement. You can also run a game where everyone starts out as gods of war and only gets stronger from there. So that's cool. More interestingly, you can now mix and match NPCs of various Power Levels to better challenge a group of PCs. Add up the Power Levels of the PC cast to get the Squad's Power Rating and compare it to the Power Rating of the Enemy encounter to see how they measure up. Like this:

Grunt Power Rating: 1 + Power Level
PC/Rival Power Rating: 2 + (Power Level * 2)
Boss Power Rating: 4 + (Power Level * 4)

So while everyone is at the same Power Level, two Grunts are still the equivalent of a PC and two PCs are the equivalent of a Boss, yes. But a single Level 1 PC is the equivalent of a single Level 3 Grunt or a Level 0 Boss, eight Level 0 Grunts are the equivalent of two PCs at Level 1, and four PCs at Power Level 2 are a match for a Level 5 Boss.

The math makes it pretty easy to build encounters full of Grunts that die in one hit, which GGG wasn't built to handle with its rigid Chassis system. It is also now possible to craft superbosses that can take on the whole party on their own, though not beyond a Power Rating of 24. After that they're still going to need a few Grunts or Rivals... At least by default. I will probably end up writing a few sidebars with suggestions for Bosses beyond Power Level 5 anyway.

Speaking of sidebars, I also will be including one with guidelines to replace the Scene/Episode/Arc structure with Hours/Days/Weeks of in-character playing time. The current system works well for keeping a handle on how often characters can use their special abilities or how long it takes for their wounds to heal. It is more or less entirely on the GM's court though, and some groups might want to let the Players have a say in it to add some tactical depth to Intermissions.

The Elephant in the Room

I've brought up XP, Genre Points and Genre Powers but haven't actually talked about them yet. That would be because they will largely stay the same from GGG, just with some of the math reworked. Characters still have their own XP track (Now called Character Points) and the same goes for Mecha (Who have Mecha Points). When we get to the other types of heroes with their own unique abilities, those will also have their own tracks (Under the name of Summon Points or Arcana Points or whatever). I am keeping things this way because GGG's separation of Intermission/Operation rules proved that it worked very well for anime-themed heroics. We're aiming for a similar feel here, so it will stick around.

So let's talk about this math getting reworked thingy. Or rather, let's talk after I show you in bullet point form.

• Characters start with 60 XP to distribute between Attributes and 30 XP to use in purchasing abilities. Yes, this means 90 for the Pilot and 90 for the Mecha. These do not count towards Power Levels, but further XP earned will do. 

 

• Attributes cost their new Rank in Points to enhance. Increasing your Awareness from 0 to 2 will cost 3 Points, because first you purchase the 1 and then the 2. The starting 60 XP is just enough to get 4 (low-end average) in every Attribute.
   
• Most abilities will cost 5 or 10, with the really big stuff having a cost of 20. There won't be more than a handful of the really expensive abilities, not going over 20 total for Pilots and Mecha combined. No abilities will cost 3, 7, or other numbers that make them weird to juggle.
   
• This means each Power Level is between 3 and 6 new abilities, or an average increase of somewhere between 4 and 6 to your Attributes as a whole. At Power Level 0 you are strictly average and can do a few things. At Power Level 5 you are very good at everything and have quite a few number of abilities.
   
• You still gain Genre Points for roleplaying or getting beat up and you still have six Default Genre Powers for free. Other than that, it is tied to your Power Level. A Power Level of 2 means a stock of 2 Genre Points and 2 more Genre Powers.
   
• A Genre Power is the equivalent of an ability with a cost of 10 XP that can only be used once. This also means that Power Levels are kinda sorta worth 40 XP instead of 30. And Power Level 5 characters are virtually over 200 XP from their Power Level 0 counterparts.

That is pretty much the whole of it. In general it is a similar take on GGG's ideas but the focus is on making them simpler and faster to work with. You also have less choices to make concerning your Powers in both their selection and their use, so you have to make them count more.

I'm keeping the ready-made Attribute templates (Natures and Chassis) as examples, but I will also write new packages of pre-selected Skills and Traits to go with those. It should still be relatively fast to make PCs and NPCs (There will be a table with recommended Attribute boosts based on Power Level).

This brings us to what will be the topic of the next post: Skills, Traits and Powers. What is happening to Skill Levels? How will a reduced number of Points and Powers affect the pacing of combat? Why can't I come up with any interesting questions about Traits? Don't miss the exciting conclusion* to the epic saga of Battle Century G next week!

*not actually a conclusion.

Introducing Battle Century G

As I mentioned last week, I'm crafting a new RPG system from scratch. The idea is to take a lot of what makes GGG work and streamline it so it can cover a better variety of action genres. My goal is to make a game where sentai heroes, giant robots and monster trainers can work under the same ruleset.

That is Battle Century G, and it will be the focus of my efforts from now on. Until it comes out I'll be posting about how exactly it is going to differ from GGG, enough to merit being its own thing. The first version will be about giant robots as a proof of concept, then I'll write the corresponding system hacks around it for the magical girls and the kaijus and whatnot.

Today we start it off with the building blocks of the game, the Test system and Attributes. There's a lot to talk about so let's jump into it.

The Core Mechanic

To decide whether a character succeeds or not at what they're doing we are going to keep the Test system more or less as you know it. You roll 1d10 and add your Attribute (ranging between 0 and 10) to it, then check against a number in a range of 1-20. 5 is for trivially easy tasks, 20 is for things that you're lucky to see happen once in a lifetime.

This is how Intermissions worked in GGG, but Operations were only vaguely like that. This time we're going to try and make the giant robots stick to this idea too, for the sake of simplicity.

There are also Advantages and Disadvantages, accounting for things like specialized training or lack of proper equipment. We are going to simplify them a bit too, so that when you have an Advantage you get to choose whether you use it to roll two dice and keep the better result, or to transform it to a +2 bonus. Likewise the GM may choose to transform Disadvantages into a +2 increase to the DN.

This should greatly simplify things, without having to juggle conversions into additive dice or the such. Don't get me wrong, I still love the idea of having to choose whether to roll three dice and keep the best, or two dice and add them up. This is just going to be much simpler to play with, and the game is going to be complicated enough already.

Similarily, I am going to keep the rule where Damage dealt to someone is equal to the amount you bypass their defenses by. It is fast to play with, it rewards you for rolling really well, and it is simple enough. More importantly, it works very well with Tension.

Speaking of which. Tension is one of the GGG's most defining and unique rules, and it will have a place in Battle Century G. Combat is probably going to be a bit too fast for Tension to be a decisive factor by itself, but it does what it needs to do.

Math Time!

I am going to balance combat around the following formula:

(Attack Attribute + 1d10 + Tension + Other Modifiers) - (Defense Attribute + Base Defense + Other Modifiers) = Damage dealt.

We'll start by assuming there's no modifiers from abilities in play. We'll also assume both characters have average corresponding Attributes (Ranked at 5) and that the 1d10 roll nets us an average result of 5. This gives us 1 damage against a Base Defense of 5 during Round 1. Then 2 Damage during Round 2, 3 during Round 3 and so on. Essentially, the Damage dealt will average around the current Tension. Sometimes they will roll higher and will deal even more Damage, while other times they will roll lower and hurt the enemy less or miss the attack entirely.

That's pretty cool, I think. The math is pretty transparent and you can tell how effective an Advantage or Disadvantage to your Attack Attribute is going to be right out of the gate.

Let's assume our characters also have less inflated HP totals. Let's say the average character has their HP Attribute at 5... Now that's not very much. Why, a good enough roll would destroy them on Turn 1! But let's see how that works with four HP Bars like GGG's Threshold Levels.

If we keep the formula where Tension = Damage dealt then characters will deal first 1, then 2 (3 total), then 3 (6 total), then 4 (10 total), then 5 (15 total), and lastly 6 (21 total) points of Damage to take out a character with 20 HP during their sixth attack. That's a goodish number, I think.

This is ignoring all the wacky abilities that grant advantages to using Weapons, increase the benefits of Tension, raise your Defense, or flat out buying more HP. But we'll get to that some other day. For now, our conclusion here is that health values can be lower and the focus of the math can be more on whether you get hit or not, rather than how many hits you can handle.

We've been tiptoeing around Attributes for a few paragraphs, let's fix that and take a look at them.

Attributes

We are keeping the current six Attributes for Characters, because they work well enough. Awareness would still be tied to Defense, and Willpower to Plot Armor. The only difference is that I want the six of them to be equal to each other in power. That means giving them all the same costs, rather than having Awareness, Willpower and Resources as the 'support' Attributes that cost less.

But Mecha Attributes are getting a major rewrite. There is no going around that. Let's take a look at them in order.

Might and Guard are your Attack and Defense Attributes. Might is used to punch things and shoot guns, Guard is used to parry blows and evade shots. I'm doing away with the Speed/Power divide of Evasion/Armor and Accuracy/Penetration because they're too mecha-specific. The game is meant to make it easier to play things that aren't giant robots, and that division was mostly there to have the Mazingers feel different to the Gundams.

Threshold is the Attribute you know and love, and because it is essentially multiplied by 4 it can afford to be a lower number without being completely worthless. A low rank of 1-2 is obviously suicidal, but an average rank of 4-5 is good enough to grant us 6 turns to live assuming we've got an average Guard. More than that, and you get considerably beefier.

Energy also joins us one more time, as the Attribute that can also represent Spiritual Energy or Mana Pools. The big change here is that Energy regenerates back to full every Round. This means that energy-dependent abilities are less about a long term plan and more about choosing how you want to spend your Energy each Turn. In order to make a high Energy Attribute an appealing choice, the game will need more abilities that let you dump extra Energy for more power.

Systems is something of a new entry to the list, in that it previously existed as a sub-Attribute of sorts but has been promoted now to full Attribute status. It does not directly contribute to combat, but instead powers up support abilities and increases the range of some Weapons. If you want to take a support role and heal your buddies, modify the battlefield terrain, and manage NPC sidekicks then Systems is your primary Attribute.

Speed is a completely new Attribute, though it is one that has been requested as part of GGG several times, and some groups even added it into the game by themselves. Well, now it is official. Giving characters different movement speeds is more important when you've got giant robots right next to regular-sized folk. Speed also handles Initiative and works together with Systems to get around Extreme Terrain and Defensive Maneuvers.

Of these, the first three are going to be more important than the latter trio the majority of the time. But they're all important, and you would do well to invest a little into each. Grunt Enemies can get away with having no Systems or Energy, but they're nameless mooks and are not expected to survive most things you throw at them anyway. Specially since Grunts can now have a Threshold of 0, letting us finally have simple throwaway enemies that die in a single hit.

Wait. Attributes can be at 0? Yes. Thanks to years of progress in game design technology, we have a point-buy Attribute system where you can customize your mary sue and accompanying giant robot to your heart's content.

There will be templates to pick from to simplify things, but I figure this was well overdue.

The Templates

My original plan with Natures, Archetypes, Power Packages and their ilk was to give Players lots of pre-balanced options they could play with. The game would start having a handful of them, then I could later expand it by adding more Chassis types, Natures, and so on. That went slightly against the effects-based nature of the game, not to mention it was harder to balance after PCs earned enough XP. And so we ended up slowly making things more customizable over time.

The logical conclusion of this process is to finally let Players customize their PCs however they want through a point-buy system. Most games like that generally don't bother with making the options balanced, largely because it is really difficult to pull off. My biggest challenge will be making sure that Battle Century G is a fully customizable point-buy system that remains balanced.

The tradeoff of this streamlining is that we lose cool bits of rules here and there that make mecha different from each other. The Speed/Power divide was kind of a big part of GGG, following the Super Robot/Real Robot logic. But Battle Century G is not just about robots, and if I want spellcasting support wizards in the game, then I can't make four out of six stats devoted just to see how much damage they do and take through attacking.

So that's what is happening with the game's foundations. As you can see Battle Century G will borrow a lot from GGG, but if you think it already looks different then just you wait until the next few posts. Next time, we will go into Experience, Genre, and character growth or advancement in general.

I leave you with just one two words: Power Levels.

Good and Bad News

So I wrote a mecha game once, and it was alright, you might have heard of it. It works pretty well for this whole anime robots thing, and also works for other anime action things with a little bit of creative interpretation of rules. And I really want to make it work even better for those other things! I want intelligent robots that don't need pilots, I want magical girls with all sorts of elemental-themed magic powers, I want to command platoons of ghosts, demons and pocket monsters with a single PC.

And I want to pull this off without making the system collapse into a black hole of incomprehensible rules or one type of character being obviously more powerful than the others. It would be pretty cool if it were possible to have heroes in costumes and giant atomic lizards fighting side by side as allies of Tokyo Justice.

But the current ruleset wouldn't work for it. It pains me to admit that a supposedly generic system doesn't really pull it off, but without some major rewrites to the rules the magical girls won't get along very well with the giant robots.

For the most obvious example I can think of, consider that Mecha moving at similar speeds and being virtually always faster than humans is fine by itself. But things get more complicated if you're going to include human sized characters into the mix, suddenly we either have some PCs being always slower than others or the average guy in a powered suit running as fast as a plane can fly.

Yes, I am saying we would actually need a Speed Attribute.

To make the Mecha work well together with the other character concepts I need to touch up the rules, simplifying them in places and adding complexity in others. It would keep a lot of what gives GGG its distinctive feel, like Genre Points and Tension, but some of the rules that are obviously only meant to work with giant robots in mind would most likely have to go. The four Weapon Types are the most obvious offenders here.

In short, I would need to rewrite the entire darn game. On top of that, it would not necessarily be a better game, it would for the most part be a different game.

And now the Good and Bad News

The good news is that I'm basically writing a new game altogether that can handle robots and non-robots better, because GGG works for the whole "robots only" thing. It will be similar in parts but aiming for genre versatility rather than variety of robot-themed options. I also don't want to be working on it forever either, so I want to get it done right without having to spend two years of rules fixes after the initial release.

Time flies, doesn't it? But I digress.

This means a more intensive design and development process than what I've been doing up till now, and as many delays as it takes to only release it when I am positively sure that is ready.

The bad news is that it also means no more more updates to GGG. Not even any supplements.

So today's post is a little short, but over the next few weeks I'll be explaining with more detail what I'm doing. I'll go over what I am going to keep from GGG and what I'm changing, plus the whys and hows of the process. Expect a lot of game design theory (and some playtesting stories shenanigans) until, at the very least, the holidays.

Next post will be about the basic mechanics of the game: Tests, Advantages and other general conflict resolution matters plus Attributes and the fate of Natures and Chassis templates. Hopefully that sounds like fun.

Our Roleplaying Persona

Another thing I want to do as part of expanding the game is making it easier to adapt to other kinds of settings. Magical Mecha (Masoukishin, Rayearth) have lots of elemental-themed magical attacks, but not a lot in the way of traditional technology-based weapons. Likewise, PCs as sentient Mecha (Transformers, Braves) would require a rewrite of the Attribute system to integrate their Intermission and Operation abilities into a single coherent entity.

Where I'm going with this is that I want the game to be more versatile, and that needs adapting various subsystems on a case by case basis. With that said, the examples above are complex changes beyond the scope of today's post, instead I will be posting a variant of the Genre Theme rules. Themes should not be ignored when it is time to adapt the rules to a different setting, their function is to help convey a game's... well, themes.

Never had a Friend like Me

Because GGG is very much about anime-styled heroics, we have cooperation and teamwork as a running theme throughout the rules, representing the Power of Friendship and other similar genre conventions. We have Synchro Attacks, Combinations, Leadership, and all other sorts of character abilities that are very strong when the characters work together. But they're limited to combat effectiveness, and don't really say much about the characters themselves. They tell us that characters who work together are good fighters, but not if they get are back-to-back badass partners, or if they get along despite disagreeing often, or if one of them is manipulating the other. The rules don't say much about their relationship.

Good mechanics to represent character relationships are hard to write. With that I don't mean rules for romantic relationships, but relationships in a more general sense. Something like, for example, characters who trust each other do work better when cooperating but are also more susceptible to each other's lies. The rules we have are not relationship rules. I swear that's the last time I'll italicize that word for emphasis. At least for today.

Relationship rules are conceptually easy to write in a way that is usable, but it is easy to accidentally make a rule that ends up getting in the way of the game when you aren't careful with them. If your Players don't want their PCs getting close to NPCs because the main cast end up penalized when something bad happens to the supporting actors, then you're doing something wrong.
 But it is also a matter of conveying the proper mood and tone. If characters who worked well together also had an easier time betraying each other, you would probably see both lasting friendships and deep betrayals more often than if those rules did not exist. Because GGG is a game meant to be taken in whatever direction you need (as long as it is somewhat heroic) there are no such rules in it.

The closest GGG has to relationship rules are Genre Typecasts, which are fairly agnostic in the mood and tone you can use them for, but they can be easily modified to encourage more specific group dynamics. Today's rewrite is for a game more about personal growth, with characters expected to be hitting their highest and lowest moral points, and a character centric narrative with a very tight cast.

Okay, I can't really dance around the issue or pointlessly obscure what it is I'm ripping off homaging any further. Today is about Social Link-styled rules in the vein of Persona 3 and 4 of the Shin Megami Tensei franchise of videogames. If you know what that means, feel free to skip the next paragraph.

In Persona, you fight by summoning various mythological entities (the titular Personas or Personae) each aligned with a different Tarot card of the Major Arcana (Odin, for instance, is a Persona of the Emperor Arcana, as chief of the other Norse Gods) and each Arcana has a corresponding Social Link. Social Links are the relationships you have as the Main Character with various NPCs, whether it is just one or a whole group of them. Your best friend or your pals from your sports club are valid Social Links. All Social Links have a Rank going from 1 to 10, which represents how close the bond is, and it grows (increasing in number) as you help the NPCs grow as people. High Social Link Ranks make their corresponding Personas grow stronger, and the Social Links of your party members make them stronger as a bonus, to boot.

Social Links are pretty neat, they put a spin on traditional 'grindy' gameplay by making you 'grind' through roleplaying and dialogue options instead of fighting mobs. I am far from the first to posit houserules of choice for adapting this to Roleplaying ends, since they're very popular videogames among roleplayers. I do, however, have a very clear idea of what parts of them translate better as rules in a kitchen table medium, or at least to the kind of game you'd play with GGG.

A Personal Matter

Here are the guidelines I set for myself to follow when writing up this variant Theme system:

The rules should encourage genuine, lasting bonds. Whether it is friendship, romance, rivalry, or something else altogether. Those things don't just spring from the ground, they start out small and grow over time getting more emotionally intense and resilient to outside forces. In a videogame this is easy to achieve because you are following a linear paths with a clear start and end point... But they have a preset script to be followed through, and that is not going to work in a Roleplaying game. Or at least it goes against the point of playing a game that has always had creativity and improvised acting as fundamental features.

There should also be a downside to being too close to someone, it doesn't have to be anything big, heck it should probably be something easy to ignore. But let's not forget that this is a game, and one about making choices, so your choice of who to befriend and who not to befriend should matter. If there are no real downsides and everyone is always everyone's bestest friend forever, then these are not so much relationship rules as they are just plain powerups.

The Tarot motif should play an important role, since its symbolism is a big part of what makes each Social Link distinctive, and you have just enough of them (around 20, depending on which version of the Tarot deck you use) to have a wide variety to choose from without being drowned in options. Each of the Major Arcana represents anything ranging from types of people, worldly influences, and various trials of the soul. And since they usually correspond to one specific character, that character should have a power of some sort over the portfolio of the Arcana in question. Likewise, the benefits of being best friends with the Death Arcana Character should be clearly different than those of being best friends with the Justice Arcana Character. Even if you don't quite know what the cards mean the names alone should tell you that much.

Here's what I got, I'll post the blank template first then a few examples. You can find a list of the Major Arcana and the symbolism attached to each card all over the web I'll just grab a few to use as examples. Note that I'm not saying you should seriously use Tarot card spreads to read the future for someone, this is just an adaptation of its symbolic themes for the purpose of playing a game about pretending to be people with superpowers.

Arcana Themes

Choose one of the Major Arcana to represent. As the embodiment of that Arcana, you have a limited ability to manipulate fate and luck towards shaping the world in a way according to your Arcana. You are at your strongest when your acts align to your Arcana's correspondence, but you can also bless others with good luck when they act in the same way, or curse them with the negative traits of your Arcana when they are messing with your domain. Your Genre Reason becomes an Arcana Reason using the card's positive connotations and your Genre Bane becomes an Arcana Bane using the card's negative qualities. You no longer have a Genre Typecast, but instead you have Arcana Providence, a version of the Providence Miracle that can do Blessings and Curses related to your chosen Arcana's portfolio.

Arcana Providence:

Through a concentrated effort you may transform your very life essence into a blessing or curse aimed at someone else, this can manifest as inner strength they did not know they had within them, or a stroke of bad luck that causes their tools to break at the worst possible moment, or some other effect that could be explained as being just plain (un?)lucky. This will cause you to have a headache, bleed from the nose a little, or feel a tad dizzy, so you shouldn't have to worry about it much. But should you be defeated from hurting yourself this way you immediately pass out, and anyone with this ability will be able to tell you were up to something just now. Note that you may only use this version of Providence towards Help and Disrupt Tests, and that it does not have an innate Advantage when you are using it. You may not use Arcana Providence on yourself.

Let's have some examples, starting with a pretty straightforward card in The Chariot, following it up one that is about as good as you can make it in The Fool, and lastly one that is almost always better reserved for antagonists in the Devil.
 
The Chariot

Reason - The Chariot excels at standing ground against adversity and trampling past the obstacles and competition in its path. Chariot characters are strong of will, and usually of mind and body too, knowing what they want and how to get it. The character earns a Genre Point when they have to struggle to pursue their goals, demonstrating their steadfast resolution to everyone around them.
Bane - The Chariot aims for the finish line relentlessly until they win the race against all odds, often leaving a trail of destruction behind, and sometimes they won't stop until they crash and burn themselves. Chariot characters tend to be aggressive, violent and ambitious enough to not care about the people they will inevitably hurt. The character earns a Genre Point when their stubbornness gets them or people they care about in trouble.
Providence - You may bless or curse others when they are acting with iron determination amidst uncertainty. This may make it easier for to walk barefoot through a fire, but can also make someone who stubbornly refuses your help to ruin everything they've worked so hard for. 
 
The Fool

Reason - The Fool is a free spirit, with the world before them waiting to experience the joys and sorrows it has to offer. Fool characters are optimistic and all about trying new experiences, chasing down opportunities for adventure without sweating the details. The character earns a Genre Point when taking leaps of faith and doing things that others would deem illogical yet seem to work out.
Bane - The Fool often embarks on a journey without a map, and ends up stranded in the wilderness as a consequence. Fool characters don't quite grasp consequences that their actions may have, and their naivete makes them the first to fall prety to deals too good to be true. The character earns a Genre Point when they get in trouble pursuing the pretty butterflies.
Providence - You may bless or curse others when they are acting with spontaneity and recklessness. What otherwise could seem like an idea destined to fail can be much more likely to succeed with your help, and someone taking a risk without fully thinking things through first can be doomed with a worst case scenario. This does not work if they are aware you will have a participation in it beforehand, though, because then their act is a calculated risk.
 
The Devil

Reason - The Devil is the dark side of humanity, the selfish, materialistic and lustful side that always wants more even if it means taking away from others. Devil characters are cynicists with little respect for moral values, and are attracted by positions of authority from which they can reign over others. The character earns a Genre Point when they go through very questionable means to meet their ends, which may or may not be just as questionable themselves, making enemies in the process.
Bane - The Devil was banished to the underworld because the world fears it, but it does not escape because it too fears the world outside. Devil characters are horrible people because it is all they know, sustaining themselves through various types of addictions. The character earns a Genre Point when their lifestyle of dependency on substances, behaviors, people or even beliefs gets the better of them.
Providence - You may bless or curse others when they act out of the pure greed and lust in their hearts. Someone looking for a good time might get lucky that night, while a ruthless plutocrat might make a mistake that costs them their fortune. Promises of power and deals with the Devil are recommended,  but optional rather than mandatory.

And the Relationships?

You now have have separate Affinity levels for each PC or NPC you are close to. Affinity Levels are mutual and decided by the owners of the characters, so both characters will always be at the same Affinity Level with each other. Characters that were once very close will continue to know each other inside and out even if they had a major falling out, this means that Affinity Levels can only go up, and characters may not go back down to the previous one with each other.

Affinity Level 0 - The characters don't click together, they might keep themselves at arm's reach or actively distrust and even hate each other. There are no special rules for this Level.
Affinity Level 1 - The characters are companions of circumstance or casual acquaintances, they trust each other enough to share food or a roof to sleep under, but not much more than that. Characters at this Affinity Level gain an Advantage to Blessings and Curses cast on each other.
Affinity Level 2 - The characters are close friends, they trust each other with personal favors and secrets... Just not the really shady, dark stuff. Characters at this Affinity Level gain a second Advantage to Blessings and Curses cast on the other.
Affinity Level 3 - The characters have a very close bond like that of life partners, and it would take genuinely surprising turns of events for them to split. Characters at this Affinity Level may freely give each other their own Genre Points, sharing with each other as necessary.

Characters without an Arcana don't gain any benefit from a high Affinity Level other than maybe the occasional blessing and getting a Genre Point every now and then, which they can't use considering they most likely don't have any Powers either.

Example time: Let's say Alice (Chariot) wants to help out Bob (Fool) and they have an Affinity Level of 2. Bob is having a really hard time with planning an anniversary event for his significant other because he has the attention span of a gnat, but he feels a really intense love even if he is terrible at committing to other things, and Alice wants to help him out. She can use Providence to help him keep his focus through all this responsible man stuff without messing up, because it fits right within the purview of The Chariot. Alice has two Advantages to her Help Test so Bob will have a much easier time with whatever it is he ends up rolling the dice for. Meanwhile, Charlie (Devil) keeps trying to get suckers to sign a contract with her for power in exchange for their eternal servitude, but they all have Affinity Levels of 0 with her so they don't fall for it. Even if they did, she can't do much for them without any Advantages to the eventual Help Tests, she would need to get closer for Providence to start getting effective. 

In Conclusion: No I don't want to get to writing supplements like right now what gave you that idea? Next month, I'll stop beating around the bush and start talking about my future plans.

Recycling Old Junk

From the first day the game was out there it changed a lot, and whole lots of individual mechanics got rewritten, merged together, or got entirely lost somewhere along the way. Today is about the last bunch of those, the ones that vanished entirely, or at least the most memorable ones of the bunch. I'll make the token attempt to bring them back here, plus some attempts at content that I've been trying to write in since forever but never felt it was good enough to make the cut. Let's start with some Mecha stuff.

Hidden Power's Missing Family Tree

Once upon a time, there existed the Potential line of Upgrades. It was a series that increased your Attributes after you reached Tension 10, then they got rewritten to work off of Tension 5, then ceased existing entirely. What happened? First off, Attribute changes are overwhelmingly powerful, and because you had to wait for ten whooping turns to get them, they had to be some really good Attribute boosts. They were just fundamentally flawed.

But couldn't they just do some more interesting stuff instead than Attributes? I tried that, and the game was pretty close to having something like this:

Awakened Power v1
Areas: Core
Cost: 5
Effect: Choose two Upgrades or Weapons worth 5 UP each and assign them to any compatible Areas. After Tension increases to 5 you may now use one of said abilities, and after Tension 10 you may use another. You choose which one is enabled when you reach the corresponding Tension bonus.

This doesn't look too bad, does it? Well, it kind of still sucks, because it has to be balanced around something the Player has no real control of: Operation length. Depending on the playstyle of the GM and the size of the group, it is either a guaranteed free 5 points, or a net 5 point loss for most of the combat sequence.

What about using Tension as a resource? Early on there was stuff that increased your Tension specifically (there's still a reference to that possibly happening in the manual, in case I ever want to go back there) but I never had anything that just ate up your Tension as if it were a Limit Break gauge. So what happens when we do that?

Awakened Power v2
Areas: Core
Cost: 5
Effect: Choose any number of Upgrades or Weapons worth a total Cost of 10 UP or less and assign them to any compatible Areas. At the beginning of your Turn you may reduce your Tension by 5 until End of Operation to gain use of said abilities until then. You may not do this if your Tension is under 5.

So why didn't it work? Well, it is almost always a strict downgrade. Odds are a bunch of defensive abilities, utility upgrades, or new weapons won't make it easier to win than a flat bonus of 5 to Accuracy does. And 'fixing' it by having it grant more UP just makes you want to pick Eagle Chassis so you can rack up on free UP, because your Accuracy is already high enough.

Tension-based abilities are neat, and I want more of them, but they have to be very limited in scope to keep them balanced. Anything that boosts your Attributes directly or grants UP is too versatile for its own good.

Speaking of dangerous versatility, Transformation and Expansion Pack had a bastard child that I never quite put out there on the web for that same reason...

Secret Equipment v1
Areas: Core
Cost: 10
Effect: Make two ‘sets’ of Upgrades or Weapons worth 10 UP each, and choose one Area to house all abilities within. One set will be usable normally, while the second set will be 'hidden' within this Area and unavailable. You may have the chosen Area purged at the beginning of your Turn, Maiming it and losing a Level of Threshold in the process to enable use of the second set. Once first Maimed, the first set is done for and will not be compatible with abilities that let you use Areas as if they weren’t Maimed.

So what is the problem with it? First, if you have any kind of regenerative ability, this is free points period. Second, even if you use this as intended and the choice has any legitimate tactic to it, the hidden Area is completely immune to Maiming, which last time I checked was what Expansion Pack did, and that one costs 10 UP. I mean, what are you going to do against the hidden area, Double Maim it? Hide the equipment in a completely different Area? Then why isn't it available regularly?

Attempting to fix either of those issues rules placing conditions of what you can do with it would result in a pile of words messy enough to make Combinations blush. As long as there is any way to heal you from the Damage you've dealt to yourself (even if we make the specific Area and Levels unrepairable) this is still free points. And I straight out have no idea how to even handle the thing with the hidden Area being a free Expansion Pack. Let's tackle it like a straight benefit instead because this is not quite working.

Secret Equipment v2
Areas: Core
Cost: 25
Effect: Make two ‘sets’ of Upgrades or Weapons worth 10 UP each. Both sets will be assigned to one of your non-Core Areas, but one of them will only be available after the chosen Area was Maimed. You may have the chosen Area at the beginning of your Turn purged, losing a Level of Threshold in the process. Once first Maimed, the first set is done for and will not be compatible with abilities that let you use Areas as if they weren’t Maimed.

Now we're talking. This one is less susceptible to abuse of various types and is much better balanced, but... There's something else that is wrong, isn't there? Yes, because this already exists. It is pretty much a more complicated, and essentially worse, rewrite of Expansion Pack. Well okay, because it only costs 5 extra UP, it is not strictly worse, it is just generally worse.

Oh well, can't win them all I guess. This is printable, but is complicated and bad enough that it looks like a trap choice when put next to its progenitors. As you can see, this kind of 'midfight powerup' stuff is tough to pull off well. Hidden Power is a tad too strong as a Genre Power, but it has a lot of slack to pick up for all the mechanics that don't exist.

The Big Fish in a Small Pond

Some NPCs used to be stronger than Grunts but weaker than Rivals, being either low-rank named characters or just faceless groups with a pedigree. Fittingly enough, they were called Elites. The problem with Elites is that they were at an odd cross with Grunts, because the existence of the former meant the latter had to be weaker, and that meant balancing Grunts so that they were worth even less than half a PC. And that was really weird to balance.

So I now have decided they don't necessarily need to have their own spot in the ladder. Elites could continue to exist if they are promoted to being up to par with PCs, bringing all the simplicity of Grunts to the power level of Rivals. Like so:

Elite Non-Combatants
Nature: Any. Choose one of Fitness, Intellect or Empathy and another of Awareness, Willpower or Resources. Enhance the chosen Attributes by 5.
Skills: Up to 30 PP worth in Skills
Traits: Up to 30 PP worth in Traits.
Genre: No Genre Points or Themes.
Progression: Choose one of Fitness, Intellect or Empathy and another of Awareness, Willpower or Resources. Increase the chosen Attributes at the end of every Episode Arc by 1.

Elite Combatants
Genre: No Powers.
Archetype: One Boss Archetype.
Chassis: Any. Choose one of Evasion, Threshold or Penetration and another of Accuracy, Armor and Energy. Enhance the chosen Attributes by 5.
Upgrades: Up to 15 UP worth in Upgrades.
Weapons: Up to three Weapons with a Cost of 5 or less.
Progression: Choose one of Evasion, Threshold or Penetration and another of Accuracy, Armor and Energy for each type of Enemy Elite. Increase the chosen Attributes along with Systems at the end of every Episode Arc by 1.

As Mecha these guys have high stats and enough wiggle room to fit in a Boss Weapon or another Boss Archetype, making them pretty good for their complete lack of Genre Powers and slightly weaker Systems than Rivals. Even non-combatants have more than enough PP to burn with Skill training and Equipment, or Miracles and Psychic Power, to be a challenge. These guys are alright for something that got thrown away, let's say their recycling has been successful.

A Genius for Every Field

Another thing that got lost in the shuffle were the various Upgrades that let you Enhance Attributes past the regular mark and granted some kind of ability with it. Removing the limiters is just too strong to exist, as even Modules have proven. The special abilities fared better, getting recycled into Archetypes and being standardized into general rules for the most part, but some just disappeared. The biggest losses here would be Supercharged, which granted a static regeneration of 1 Energy per Round, and the Weapon Specialization line that rewarded you for sticking to one type of the four.

Now this here might be a shocker, but originally I was going to have all Mecha regenerate Energy naturally like with Supercharged. The reason I didn't was that I found out it made you want to bleed the most out of your Energy capacity every Turn, making things repetitive and dragging out fights longer from infinite use of Active Defenses. But after earning more than 40 XP most character builds require some kind of Energy regeneration if they're going to grab any more fun stuff, so the tradeoff wasn't all that good. I might go back to change back that thing, letting everyone restore 1 Energy each Round for free, we'll see.

Weapon Specializations got split up into being basic Keyword Abilities, the Weapon-based Genre Powers, and there's a Melee/Everyone else split with The Beast and Artillery Mode. These do encourage specialization... Slightly. I tried several things here, starting with the most obvious buff one can give them:

Weapon Specialization v1
Areas: Core
Cost: 10
Effect: Choose one type of Weapon when you take this Upgrade. If it is Melee, Ballistic or Missile, then whenever you take an Offensive Action with the chosen type of Weapon you can add all of the excess bonus to your Penetration instead of halving it. If it is Beam, then you gain an Advantage to all your Offensive Actions with Beam Weapons.

I kind of like this one for the sake of simplicity, but it does make all Custom Weapons play very, very much the same. Then again, it could be argued that being different is what Specific Weapons are for, so I remain uncertain. Let's try something more creative and see what happens.

Duelist
Areas: Core
Cost: 10
Effect: When using a Melee Weapon in a Duel you may shift the battle one Zone away in a direction of your choice.

Sniper
Areas: Core
Cost: 10
Effect: Your Ballistic Weapons increase their Maximum Range by one half of what it normally is after you take the Aim Action with them. If you would lose out on the Advantages from using a Ballistic Weapon because you cannot normally Move, then you don't lose the Advantage.

Blaster
Areas: Core
Cost: 10
Effect: When using a Beam Weapon you may do so for half its regular Energy cost, but doing so grants it the Slow ability until used regularly again, or until end of Operation. You may still only have one Slow weapon at a time.

Dogfighter
Areas: Core
Cost: 10
Effect: You gain an Advantage to Offensive Actions with Missile Weapons used while you Move.

Creative names, I know. With Duelist you can now effectively control the movement range of your Enemies forever, barring constant Disengaging. With Sniper you strike accurately and from beyond the horizon, specially now that Artillery mode no longer takes away your Advantage. Blaster seems overpowered, but it is only really notable with Weapons that cost 5 Energy and above... And that opens its own can of worms. Dogfighter makes your missiles pretty darn strong if you can keep your Enemies at medium range while you fly about.

These are alright. Ish. They do what they do and that's that. Perhaps the best move would be combining the previous entry with these other four ones to keep it expensive (We're talking at least 15 UP here, possibly 20, maybe more) but make it genuinely rewarding.

Man Against Machine

The game used to have Anti-Mecha Mines as a piece of Equipment you could buy. When detonated they would deal 1d10 Damage to Mecha (which meant more back then than it does now) and murder the crap out of pretty much any people in the Zone. They make sense to want to have around, as they're a common thing to use in fiction against giant robots when you don't have any of your own. But when PCs can buy them, scattering billions of the things all over the place every single time you get the drop on your Enemies gets old fast.

Also, we already have Extreme Terrain to represent them.

So uh... Yeah. I guess I now have material for a sidebar, if not any new Traits proper. Test Resources as if to obtain Equipment at a DN of 20, lay one Zone's worth of a mines. Yep. That's pretty much it.

But there's another Trait I can still make, one that I've been avoiding forever, simply because every time I pull it off I look at it again and realize it should not exist no matter how cool it might be on paper. I think I'll just leave it here so you can see for yourself and I'll and close off for the day week month time being.

Toppler of Titans
Cost: Your heart and soul.
Effect: Increase your Defense against Mecha by 10. When you strike down a Level of Threshold, the Core of a Mecha is an eligible Area for you, disabling them immediately if chosen. You may use Deathblows against Mecha while on foot, and your attacks add together the entire excess bonus from the Combat Test plus your Genre Points as Penetration.
Description: When your enemies see a person with a scarf they run away screaming. They are the prey and you are the hunter.

The Insanity Game

Mecha and Roleplaying Games both love action scenes. Rare is the piece of fiction belonging to either that doesn't involve the bad guy (or girl, or monster, or giant robot) getting beat up for the big climax of the story... Or any time they need to make an antagonist feel threatening at all.

That said, sometimes it is more about threatening the character's mental stability instead of physically hurting them. Characters get more and more messed up in the head with the passage of time, even those that are invincible on the battlefield.

GGG had a system for handling that in the past. It was exactly the same as the system for physical combat, for simplicity's sake, and wasn't all that good as a consequence. I think it is about time that gets fixed, but there's a few things that need to be kept in mind:

Turning elements of mental trauma into a game is never realistic, because what makes things fun in fiction often makes them very different from how they are in real life. This gets more complicated in a game about flashy action scenes, larger than life characters, and kicking reason to the curb in the name of coolness.The existing rules do handle things like being paralyzed with fear, running away from something horrifying, or similar consequences. It works off the usual Plot Armor rules and is meant to be a different way to knock someone out or defeat them momentarily.

However, Insanity is at its best when it is not just part of your Hit Points, because the fun part of roleplaying games with elements of insanity added in are its lasting consequences and long term damage. Another complication is that it is also one of those aspects of roleplaying where less is more, the more rules you attach to different types of mental illnesses, the more that you risk detracting from roleplaying them in favor of arbitrarily punishing a character. We have to work on the assumption that roleplaying a character's breakdown is fun (Otherwise why would you play a game where that is supposed to happen?) and enable that.

All of this is a gross oversimplification, and each of the previous paragraphs could stand to be expanded upon (or explained better, really) but it does serve as an introduction to the meat of this post.

Mental Damage and Plot Armor

Trauma takes its toll on the human soul, tragic things happen, and you are forced to readjust your beliefs and way of life in the face of things greater than yourself. The human mind and body are indeed fragile, specially when there are things out there that cannot be understood with human logic and want to destroy everything you care about. PCs are heroes, they can face the worst the world has to offer and hold themselves together as long as they are victorious. But when they falter and their shells crack, something does get to them, leaving a permanent scar.

Any time a character is defeated as a consequence of Plot Armor Damage, they accrue one Insanity Rank per Layer lost this way. This is most common as a consequence of physical violence, but it will also happen if you just see something horrific happen to someone else, as well as when something clearly supernatural takes place. Indeed, a game of GGG intending to make use of these rules should make Willpower Tests to not take Plot Armor Damage from being witness to traumatizing things more common.

Insanity Ranks go from 1 to 10, measuring just how well you are holding up from what you've been through... Or rather, how you aren't. An Insanity Rank of 1 leaves you just a tad more unhinged than you used to be, but at Rank 10 you have more issues than Time Magazine. Along the way, you pick up Trauma Traits at Insanity Ranks 3, 5, 7 and 10. After Rank 10 the character has seen way too much and been powerless too many times. At the Players' choice the character can either become an NPC because they're too far gone, or can be institutionalized until they've had enough Therapy to go back to 10 Insanity or under.

You can pick your Trauma Traits from an example list, or come up with your own variants as long as it is clearly explained how they would come into play. A Trauma Trait is not purchased with PP, you just get them as a consequence of having Insanity Ranks. They are like a combination of Features and Genre Banes in that they each have a positive and negative side to them. The positive side is that they will give you more Genre Points, while the negative side is that you don't control just how and when they make you go crazy, the GM does.

Once per Episode per Trauma Trait you possess, the GM may force the Trauma's effects on you, and you can choose to either submit or fight it out. If you submit your character must roleplay the Trauma Trait as appropriate, but you gain a Genre Point out of it. If you fight then you must make a Contested Test of Willpower against the GM Testing your Insanity, should you win then you compose and maintain control of yourself for the time being... But should the GM win, you lose control of yourself to the Trauma Trait and play it out without gaining any Genre Points for it.

Therapy can mitigate this ticking clock of doom. Therapy Tests are made through the Diplomacy Skill, and remove one Insanity Rank from the patient for each multiple of 5 met by the result. A Character may benefit from only one Therapy Test per Episode Arc, however, and going below the Insanity Ranks required to earn Trauma Traits will remove them. Trauma Traits lost this way may come back the moment the character earns enough Insanity Ranks again, or may instead be replaced with new ones.

A Character may start higher up in the Insanity Rank scale than 0 if they want to, giving them the appropriate number of Trauma Traits.

Insanity Rank Descriptions

Rank 0-2: You can be a little on edge or obsessive at times, and perhaps the coffee of your life needs a spoon or two more of sugar, but you're fairly normal.
Rank 3-4: You're not crazy. You're just anxious and get nervous in situations most people don't, and sometimes you wonder if things make too little or too much sense. But you're not crazy and will repeat it as long as you need to.
Rank 5-6: You can mask it if you try hard enough, but anyone who knows you personally should be able to tell that you've got issues. Maybe you know you're crazy, maybe you don't, but it is getting hard to hell.
Rank 7-9: Legitimately unaware of what is and isn't real anymore, you're an inch away from hurting yourself and others.
Rank 10+: Tethering on the edge of reason if not completely gone already, you're likely living a nightmare in waking life. Suicide looks pretty good.

Traumatic Experience Difficulty Numbers

DN 5 - Facing an alien monster for the first time, Watching someone else being tortured in front of your eyes, Spending days in jail.
DN 10 - Watching someone die victim to violent psychic powers, Seeing years of hard work being lost in minutes, Spending days in solitary confinement.
DN 15 - Watching a monster take on human form, Losing your family in a tragic accident, Being deeply betrayed or lied to by a loved one.
DN 20 - Being tortured for days, Having a loved one die in your arms after you failed to save them, Killing another human being and eating their corpse to survive.

Example Trauma Traits 

Terror - You are always under distress and feeling vulnerable, at times you experience sudden panic attacks no matter how calm the circumstances may logically be. Episodes can last from minutes to hours, with their consequences ranging from being paralyzed to a deeply uncomfortable nausea.
Flashbacks - When exposed to something that reminds you of a traumatic event, memories force their way to the forefront and you are in danger of reliving it. When this happens everything feels exactly like it did back then, physically and emotionally.
Depression - You feel tired and sour, you likely also have problems eating or sleeping to make it worse. This can get bad enough to hold you back from doing things that are really important, either because you don't feel like you can do it or you feel it is not worth it.
Blackouts - The character is prone to entering a fugue state and losing control of themselves for days at a time, ignoring everyone else and just idly hanging about until they wake up. They will snap back to reality if threatened or directly engaged, but this can make it impossible to get things done during downtime.
Megalomania - You are full of yourself these days, often acting with recklessness and arrogance with little to no provocation. As if that weren't enough, your hyperactivity and lack of concentration make you go seek out ways to get in trouble.
Hallucinations - You see things that aren't real, but even when you can tell the difference, imaginary fire still burns and the screams of imaginary people still keep you awake. At some point they will get you, and you will do something really bad while believing them to be real.
Antisocial - You have gotten violent, either out of hate or anger at everything and everyone. You could even be alternating between the calculated violation of the rights of others and flipping out in rage the next if it is bad enough.
Dependence - You cling to something or someone else to get through bad times, deferring to them whenever possible. Maybe you just ask another PC for what to do about every little thing, or perhaps you flip coins obsessively when it comes to yes/no questions, but you certainly don't trust your own judgement.
Delusions - You have your own explanation to make more sense of this nonsensical world. These range from flat denial of whatever happened to outright blaming everything on the inhabitants of fairyland.
Addiction - You're holding together thanks to taking in various chemicals in unhealthy doses and at irregular intervals. Alcohol, drugs and medication all change your mood in different ways, but the real problem comes from your desperation when you start to feel the withdrawal.

In Closing

The above is just a way to use the typical elements of insanity that could make for a suitable adaptation to an action-centric game. More complicated and detailed depictions of mental illnesses, like a character suddenly beginning to suffer from amnesia or multiple personality disorder would complicate things too much to represent in a satisfying way. Not to mention it would be something of a buzzkiller as far as character development goes.

Mechanically, Trauma Traits are a slightly more hands-on approach to Genre Themes, retaining an element of rewarding Players for roleplaying in ways that are interesting if not exactly beneficial to the Characters themselves. Because they are meant to represent something that is outside of the control of the PCs, the GM is the one who brings them out to center stage. Their influence can be resisted, sure, but the threat of your PC losing themselves to their disorders remains, and that makes getting a reward for roleplaying them more enticing.

This is one of many ways in which Genre Themes can be rewritten into more interesting mechanics depending on the setting. They're the most malleable rule in the game, so this is not the last modification you'll see. Next time will be about Mecha Upgrades that once were part of the game but no longer do or were pretty close but didn't make it for whichever reason.

Reining NPC Forces In

Gonna make a few posts about some supplementary material that will, maybe, get its own manual down the line. The first content of this type I want to bring up is not specifically about PCs, or even about enemies. It is about support NPCs, and it called the Reinforcements system.

What are Reinforcements?

Reinforcements represent helping hands that are completely separate from your own Mecha, and thus different from Subpilots. Reinforcements can come in the form of sidekicks not directly under your command, bridge bunnies sending you crucial new information in the middle of a battle, or regular armed forces without their own Mecha contributing in their own way.

For instance, most of the GaoGaiGar cast can be represented through Reinforcements. They can't defeat the enemies entirely on their own, but they have a myriad of support abilities like the Eraser Head or the Melting Siren to make GaoGaiGar's fight easier. But Soushi Minashiro from Fafner in the Azure, who shares a mental link with the other pilots and guides them in battle from the base, is also a good example of Reinforcements.

Reinforcements are ranked from one to ten representing just how strong they are as a whole, as follows:

1-2 Insignificant: Lacking in power and versatility, these Reinforcements are better than nothing and can come useful every now and then, but aren't anything to write home about.
3-4 Elite Mook: The Reinforcements are strong enough to make the difference between otherwise matched opponents, and are equivalent to an Enemy Grunt in power.
5-6 Friendly Rival: As the equivalent of facing another full-blown Rival NPC, these Reinforcements make great companions out there in the front lines.
7-8 Mentor: The Reinforcements are powerful and have a deadly variety in what they can do, making them genuinely fearsome and the equivalent of having another Boss Enemy on the battlefield.
9-10 Deus Ex Machina: The Reinforcements are overwhelmingly powerful and victory is all but assured to the Squad that benefits from them.

How do Reinforcements work?

Reinforcements are NOT regular NPCs, they are simpler to work with and more useful to the Squad as a whole, for a variety of reasons. Let's see how, specifically.

First, they are a group resource represented by a single Squad Reinforcement Unit. This represents all of their sidekicks and allies at the same time - If there are multiple members to a Reinforcement Unit, they'll have to take turns sharing the narrative spotlight.

Second, the Reinforcement Unit has its own Initiative always set at 10, during which it may use any of its abilities. A Reinforcement Unit may use one ability during its Turn, and it may only use a total number of abilities equal to its Rank per Operation. The group should decide as a whole what they request the Reinforcement Unit to do.

Beyond Rank 5, Reinforcements exceed Rivals in power (and as such are likely at least a group of Rivals) they may use two abilities in one turn. A Rank 6 Reinforcement can use 2 abilities on turns one, two, and three, but it will have spent all of them by then. It may not, however, use the same ability twice per Turn.

Third, a single Reinforcement ability can be repeated any number of times (unless otherwise noted) for as long as the Reinforcement Unit’s Ranks allow, repeatable abilities are interchangeable this way as far as the number of uses they have go.

Lastly, a Reinforcement Unit has no other discernible battlefield presence outside of their own abilities. They cannot be attacked or disabled, but they also cannot win on their own and if the rest of the PC Squad is defeated, so are they.

A Rank 4 Reinforcement can use its abilities four times, and has four abilities. It can use each ability once, or use two abilities twice, and so on. Note that Reinforcements do not need to use an ability every Turn, they can just pass a Turn.

What can Reinforcements do?

There are ten Reinforcement abilities, Reinforcement Units have a number of these (of their choice) according to their Rank. A Rank 10 Reinforcement Unit has all 10 abilities.

Airstrike: All Units within a target area the size of a Blast suffer an amount of Damage equal to half the current Tension.
Assisted Targetting: One Ally gains the benefits of the Aim Action to their next Offensive Action this round.
Flash Analysis: One Enemy’s complete rules are revealed to the Squad. If they need an update afterwards on their status, they will need to use this ability again.
Pathfinder: One Ally may Move an additional Zone as part of their next Action, ignoring the effects of Difficult Terrain while doing so.
Remote Hotfix: One Ally may ignore the effects of Maiming on all of their Areas for a Round.
Electromagnetic Detonator: One Enemy may not restore Threshold by any means for a Round. Use this ability once per Operation.
Fight On!: Restore one Ally's Threshold by 5. Use this ability once per Operation.
Fire at Will: One Enemy suffers the effects of Extreme Terrain (in addition to any other Terrain properties) during their next Turn. Use this ability once per Operation.
IFF Hacking: One Enemy loses the benefits of Tension to Offensive Actions for a Round. Use this ability once per Operation.
Supply Drop: An area the size of a Blast becomes Base Terrain (in addition to any other Terrain properties) for the rest of the Operation. Use this ability once per Operation.

What is the best way to use Reinforcements?

Their primary use is to represent NPCs without the GM having to stat them out and take Actions in their stead. This becomes more important for weaker, sidekick-esque characters, who usually are left to do as they please constantly getting extra attacks in or explode violently the moment anyone looks at them funny and are completely useless. This system adds a middle ground to that.

It becomes a lot more useful when you're trying to represent that the PCs have some serious firepower backing them up. I am talking about having fleets of grunts behind them, which would be a nightmare to handle if we were trying to give 100 planes/tanks/robots turns of their own.

A small fleet of spaceships can get by with Airstrike, Fire at Will, and Assisted Targetting as a Rank 3 Reinforcement to have a small but noticeable impact. A Repair & Resupply support dropship can use Assisted Targetting, Flash Analysis, Remote Hotfix, Electromagnetic Detonator, Fight On! and Supply Drop to shape and affect the battlefield about as much effectiveness as one of the PCs.

High-Ranking Reinforcements make for perfect 'here comes the cavalry' moments for those times when the PCs could use a helping hand. They are pretty simple to make up rules for (Decide how powerful the Reinforcements are, think of a handful of abilities that are like Genre Powers and make sense for the Reinforcements in question, done). A final note to make is that, if you choose to customize their abilities, they shouldn't be much stronger than a Genre Power, and they should be more interesting than 'Deal Damage to one Enemy', Reinforcements are at their best when they support the characters, not when they steal their kills. If you are going to make abilities like that anyway (like Fire at Will), make them usable once per Operation.

That's about it for Reinforcements. There is not that much else to explain, since they're just something that the GM may decree necessary or not and is more or less up to them... At least until Reinforcements become purchasable with UP. Next time, it'll be about the return of Mental Plot Armor rules.