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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9370685" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon/Polyhedron Issue 99/158: June 2003part 7/8Getting in Gear: The amount of money different classes get at the start varies quite dramatically, although as it’s based on how expensive their instruments are they’ll probably wind up with similar amounts left over at the end. The quality of gear you have does make a difference, but as in reality, not as much as your skill, with moving up a category costing several orders of magnitude more for maybe one or two more points of vibe damage or a slight increase in range. The different types of gear do handle quite differently though, particularly once you start adding on accessories like guitar pedals, vocoders, horn mutes, etc. Remember to wear your earplugs, they’re cheap and don’t use up an item slot but boost your defensive capability quite a bit by effectively giving you Cover. Awesome threads also boost your defence, but limit the amount of wis bonus you can add and tend to get ruined in action scenes, so make sure you take them off when you’re not onstage or it’ll cost you to replace them repeatedly. Even in this short page count, they’re packing in a fair bit of difference between an optimised character and one playing a beaten-up second hand instrument and making each class feel unique. This is actually turning out really fun to read. Rock the House: This is essentially the combat system, although as they said before, you won’t be getting into any real fights here. While you may be moving about onstage, that’s not important to the rules. You need to move your focus amongst the audience, trying to wear down their cool points to convert them to being fans of the band. Meanwhile they’ll be sending bad vibes back, some active ones like those from a rival band and some passive ones like an audience member who isn’t paying attention and just talks through the whole set. There are 5 different types of bad vibes, and like D&D damage, some classes get powers that make them better at resisting one kind or another. If your cool points hit 0 you stop playing and need pepping up by your bandmates pronto, because if you hit -10 you’ll quit the music business for good. Movement, flanking, stealth all get their own tweaks to fit the situation, but work similarly enough that it shouldn’t throw experienced D&D players off. One change that is pretty significant is that you generally have a fixed set length, with each song being 3 rounds (minutes) long and you getting 4 songs to a set (you’re only a small band, after all) after which it’s over even if you haven’t managed to win all the audience’s hearts yet. This isn’t a hard and fast rule though, so if you want to get into progressive rock as the campaign goes on and your characters get more skilled it’s easy to change this. More divergent from the standard D&D rules is the eponymous Hijinx system, which is pure Hanna-Barbera. While you may sometimes encounter hostile people or creatures outside a musical context, direct fighting is simply not a thing you can do. (unfortunately for any wannabe Scrappy Doos) Instead, you go into a chase scene, with one side or the other losing cool points depending on how the rolls go until the PC’s escape or wear down their chaser enough to set a trap and turn them over to the authorities, or get knocked out and imprisoned themselves. In the middle they can take breaks to hide or quickly adopt disguises to temporarily confuse the pursuers, giving you several different tactical options that key off different skills so it once again isn’t just rolling the same dice over and over until the DM or players win. It’s one of the silliest things they’ve done in here in a long time, but still looks a lot more playable than most of the old april fool gag articles. If you have players who are willing to commit to the genre conventions it does actually look like a really fun change of pace from killing things and taking their stuff.</blockquote>

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