On Flavor and Getting Lost in the Sauce

An Open Letter

Some readers here may remember a recent feature that discussed various odd call-outs Sonic TTH received last year. One such place was the 4chan adjacent wiki 1d6chan, a TV Tropes-esque wiki devoted to tabletop games. It's come to my attention recently that one or more opinionated users have added a whole section to the Sonic tabletop page purely to criticize elements they felt were lacking with the latest feature update, namely with the Technique: Genius, as well as the system as a whole.

Here's the original post, if you want to be thorough and don't mind the eyestrain

Rather flattering in a roundabout way, the other RPGs don't currently have this much color commentary.

After reviewing the critiques, I have opted to post my rebuttals here, as there are some tangential insights on the design philosophy for the system that might be helpful to would-be GMs and players when implementing homebrew content.

There were several points in the diatribe that ultimately alleged that the Technique: Genius and the system as a whole lacked features that made the character option desirable due to an apparent lack of supporting mechanics to justify it. I have condensed the points and rephrased them for clarity and conciseness. For convenience, I will also address this person as a singular individual moving forward, as though the anonymous nature of this wiki makes attribution difficult, it seems likely this was written by one individual.

Before proceeding further, I want to iterate that none of the criticisms offended me in any way, and I bear no ill will towards this person. By and large, I welcome constructive criticism, and I choose to believe these critiques were done in good faith. I will admit, I raised an eyebrow at some of the idiosyncrasies this individual seems disposed to. Nevertheless, I'm glad to have found this feedback, as it helps me gauge expectations about what sort of content different players gravitate towards.

On Stats and Subsystems

"Not a lot of gear has been statted out/it's hard to tell relative strength of various tools and gadgets (lists several theoretical minor variants of handsaws and other improvised weapons as being impossible to differentiate)"

Something to keep in mind regarding the Sonic series and the underlying tropes that it's built upon is that it has a very "soft" technology and power system. Applications of technology and superpowers are dictated mostly by Rule of Cool. In a Sonic story, a rusty handsaw from an old tool shed would likely be depicted as just as effective as a high-spec laser chainsaw, so long as the people involved did it with lots of style or made impassioned speeches about friendship or something similar. It's just a matter of how the action would be stylized differently.

Despite its reputation as "the crunchy Sonic RPG," (I'm partial to the term "crispy" myself), Sonic TTH doesn't get too bogged down in relative specifications regarding technology and items that players equip. If I were a for-profit publisher, I might make whole splatbooks of gear and items that I could dole out to keep a consistent revenue, maybe even outsource it to various freelancers to add a bunch of unplaytested fluff...

Instead, I've opted to make a generic framework that can be easily tuned to various scenarios the players come up with. The system empowers players to use universal modifiers that help them hone in on broad concepts (heavy attacks, AoE, precision strikes, assisting an action, etc.) and flavor their attack/item to suit their concept much like the videogames themselves do. (i.e., lots of mechanics are identical between characters, but visuals and thematics differ). Most things are within the player's power to create if they leverage the system enough.

The rulebook has quite a bit of information relating to this in the character creation section (see Attacks and Flavoring), as well as providing several templates for inspiration. 

The sample templates for Inventive Solution. If it's a Signature Attack, it can be a weapon. If it's a Talent, it can be Field or Specialty Gear

These example weapons for Egg Pawns are a good source of inspiration as well

In other words, dear critic, you have the paradigm reversed. When augmenting a character, the effect is determined first and the item is flavored on top as window dressing. Once you get a feel for how these templates work, it will be easier to assign corresponding items to them. Keep this in mind, it will come up later for your other points.

I will close out this point by saying that this leaning towards abstractions isn't an absolute. Obviously, if a player picks up a rusty handsaw or a laser chainsaw in the wild, they will have certain expectations about how each will work, but there is a distinction between the context of the two examples. Is the item supposed to be a mundane discovery or an empowering story beat? I leave that distinction in the hands of the GM to decide how they want to represent the item mechanically.

"Several other mechanics that are critical for a tech genius are completely missing such as (lists half a dozen eclectic ideas, such as creating elaborate factories, controlling armies of robots remotely, creating robot party members, mind controlling and brain surgery, etc .) Also, not having these hard-coded into the rules makes it difficult to run NPCs, like Eggman, because it is unclear how he works mechanically."

For starters, I'll say these are some interesting subsystems you've suggested here. I've considered adding mechanics along similar lines for some of these ideas in the past, but due to their disruptive nature to the existing game loop, I've decided to prioritize things that tend to be used by the average person in playtesting before drilling down into potentially troublesome subsystems.

Particularly, systems that introduce additional acting characters for the party to manage can be quite disruptive to the overall balance of the game and bog things down significantly with extra decisions and bookkeeping. Not saying that this can't or should never be done, but that it's something that needs to be carefully thought out and shouldn't necessarily be assumed as a baseline part of the experience. Once you go down the rabbit hole of having characters that essentially play the game by proxy, that's another can of worms that doesn't necessarily lend itself to a traditional Sonic experience.

Other concepts listed here frankly seem more like a desire for an entirely different game altogether. You could probably count on one hand how many players are coming to a Sonic RPG hoping to recreate Factorio or an RTS.

Finally, not everything needs a rule or statistic to reference, especially when it comes to NPCs. I'm not sure where you got the idea that NPCs have Types (only three in the entire book have them and it's specifically called out), but you don't need a rule that dictates how many robots Eggman can build in a minute, or if he can reprogram a robot as though it was a class specific ability. He just...does it. Without rolling. That's just how storytelling works.

Players can do it too if the story calls for it. Just call for a Tech check of appropriate difficulty with the specified tools in place and boom! You fixed the biplane or reprogrammed the computer or whatever. It doesn't even have to be a Technique Type, just anyone with a decent dice roll.

The thematics of the gadgeteer are reflected pretty well as-is with the Inventive Solution Special ability, since they allow the player to spontaneously invent and create things as the need arises, whereas your expected features require more digressing and prep time to accomplish. Maybe the game will have more long-term projects for Technique Types in the future, time will tell, but the system is already more flexible than you think. Case in point:

"The game needs cybernetic/augmentation rules"

Ok, remember that first part about the design philosophy of this system favoring generic modular components that can be reflavored? Take a look at the equipped gear section of the character sheet.  Now, take a look at the myriad of items that augment a character's attributes and skills.

What if, instead of buying "Light Speed Shoes" for 800 Mobiums (which increase a user's Speed rating by +1), it was instead a rocket thruster cybernetic that cost 800 Mobiums worth of spare parts? Or what if instead of a Red Gem Bracelet (which increases a user's ranks in Power skills), it was a computer chip preloaded with data on how to efficiently deadlift, allowing additional skill ranks in the character's Move skill? 

Don't want it to be a cyborg, but some genetic mutant? Make it a hormone treatment that achieves a similar effect, at a similar price point.

Doesn't feel DIY enough for you? Add a Tech or Knowledge check to craft it and knock the base price down by an arbitrary percentage (say 20-25%)? Boom, you have a crafting system.

Once you stop viewing the rulebook as a simulationist straightjacket, you can have a lot of creative leeway without disrupting existing mechanics by simply changing how you describe things within the fiction. This might be something worth revisiting in a future update or blog post, if there's demand for it.

Confusions and Misconceptions

"The rules don't explicitly state if you can multiclass" (That is, have more than one Type)

Because you don't. At least, not in the traditional sense. This is a D&D preconception that seeps into discussions new players have when talking about "classes" in TTH. Types are not classes, they are callings. Characters might be proficient in multiple areas, but they have only one true calling.

This is how the game characters work, after all. Tails, for example, is a genius gadgeteer, but he would be classified as a Fly Type rather than a Technique: Genius. Amy and Knuckles are both fast and strong, but they are typically classified as Speed and Power Types, respectively.

Admittedly, I can see where the confusion might originate from if you have a character with starting stats of, say 4 Speed and 4 Power and the description for each Type says you are X Type if you start with a 4 in X attribute. This wording might be refined in a future revision, but the problem is that players are looking at the end result rather than where they started.

When you start the character creation process by choosing a given Type, your character is locked into that template. You start with a 4 in Speed when you choose Speed Type and have a 1 in everything else. Only after completing character creation do you theoretically have a 4 in Power (even if the rules discourage this in favor focusing on your own Type specialty, it's not outright forbidden). You can push those boundaries and invest into things other Types are good at, but you will never have another Type's affinity for their respective Signature Attacks or gain their Tag-Team Attacks, for example. TTH is a team sport, and interdependency is a feature, not a bug.

"The rules don't explicitly state what stats you need to have to become a Generalist"

Pg 61 of current rulebook

Ok, this one is just wrong. Read the character creation rules again. The Generalist "Starts with an Intellect or Charisma rating of 3...resulting in a spread of mostly 3s and a single 2."

"It's not stated if an NPC can be without Type"

It's not stated anywhere that NPCs have Types. Why would you assume that every NPC uses the classifications that players use for character creation? If it's not stated in the rules in any meaningful way, it's probably not relevant.

Being the "Smart Guy" in a world of cartoon logic

"Flying vehicles need special environments for players to reach them or they are invincible. If they are too high up players can't reach them. (Reflects on how this 'plot-hole' happens in the Sonic games too and how Eggman doesn't bomb people from 1000 meters in the air for some reason)"

Yes, and on a similar note, the characters will drown if you trap them underwater with no air, or will TPK if you have a hundred robots fire on them all at once.

It's important to consider encounter design not in purely rational and tactical terms, otherwise a "smart" enemy can easily turn things discouragingly one-sided. On the other hand, putting little to no thought into how a Boss is presented can result in anticlimactic wins for the players. It's a choreographed dance that needs tuning in order for it to feel satisfying. This is why the Boss section of the rulebook offers advice on how GMs can create encounters that have an optimal amount of tension to them.

If you're getting hung up on these sorts of tropes in Sonic media, you're missing the forest for the trees.

(General sentiments desiring more tangible statistics and systems beyond what the game supports in order to feel more like a genius)

And here we come to what is really the underlying sentiment that precipitated the wiki entry to begin with. I get the sense that you're the type of player that enjoys getting into theorycrafting about game mechanics in and of themselves as a form of entertainment, fantasizing about combining disparate elements to rewrite the rules of the scenario to your whim. Regardless of whether those scenarios will come to pass in practice, you want the game to provide you with ample reference material to simulate those ideas into discrete, crunchy packages.

Might I suggest that, ironically enough, you're limiting your own creativity by focusing on whether a wish list of explicitly outlined features are included? After all, the role of the inventive genius is to create and blaze ahead where none have traveled before! There's nothing wrong with enjoying the nitty-gritty of various subsystems as they are, but where the magic of tabletop games comes from is realizing that the base code is just having an open dialogue with the other people at the table. You don't need to study a specific programming language, you just use your imagination and whatever language is spoken at the table.

As a developer, I have to carefully weigh which features will be the most valuable to the playerbase as a whole before publishing them, as well as budget out what features take priority to playtest. If I were to add more subsystems for the Geniuses, I would also need to balance it out with experiences for the other Types to sink their teeth into to a similar degree, which will take a while. I also operate at a much smaller scale than major publishers that have teams of designers, artists, PR managers, etc, so even small changes can add up for me.

But for you, at an individual table, you can take bigger swings with a quicker turnaround.

Of course, decent homebrew needs to fit into the existing framework of the game system as well as the social contract of those partaking in the game together. But I'd say about half of your suggestions would fit pretty seamlessly into the system with a bit of planning with your GM.

• You want to create a robot/cyborg/mutant abomination in your lab? Work with your GM to create a sidequest where you obtain the materials/schematics/(un)willing test subjects.

• You want to create an exoskeleton/walker/mecha to ride around in? Use the existing gear upgrade rules and flavor each equip as a component in the device.

• You want a big collection of handsaws as weapons? Really? Ok. Build them out using the Signature Attacks rules in character creation.

The stuff regarding creating factories and robot armies is a bit trickier, since it has the potential to disrupt gameplay balance. Perhaps something more manageable, such as creating a small squad of Henchman robots can be attempted, with full-on army creation being more of a plot device than a codified mechanic (i.e., deploying them into an abstracted war zone filled with a comparably sized army or something similar).

In conclusion, I'd say 50% of your list is doable in the game as-is with minor embellishments or simply working with your GM to create specific story beats that facilitate them, another 40% are things that could possibly be added to the system later on with dedicated playtesting, but may or may not be the best use of development time. The other 10% is simply not in alignment with the intended play experience.

But if you're willing to put in the legwork to homebrew your desired features into the system yourself, feel free to share them with the community on our Discord. Or you can send them directly to me using the contact form on this website. I make no promises that a community homebrew will make it into the official rulebook, but at the very least, there might be a few in the community who appreciate your contributions!

Keep On Rollin'

- McShmoodle