PSYCHEBALL ---===PSYCHIC BATTLESPORT IN CYBERSPACE===--- Connected to your deck via brainjack, attuned to the CyberSpace realm via subjective transform sequencers and running the latest neurotransmission sensitivity software, your mind and your Avatar are one in the Arena. Every thought is a weapon, every memory is a grenade, every defense mechanism is a shield. Outside the Arena, Psycheball players deliberately undermine their own lives. The best players have the most personal problems and emotional struggles to deal with. The turmoil of their life provides mental fuel for their powers in the Arena. To succeed at the game, players sabotage their relationships and hurt those they love, or are hurt by them instead. With the MeatPuppet of your physical body forgotten in some remote room, its input diminished by hard drugs and soft restraints, the virtual body of your Avatar and impressions of the Arena fill your senses. The lights dim. A spotlight hits you. Around the Arena, other spots reveal the Avatars of your opponents. The buzzer sounds. Remember your training. Aim for your opponents’ subconscious, and guard your mind from attack. The whole network is watching. To play Psycheball, you’ll need 3-6 players, writing utensils, papers, some 12 sided dice and a large number of tokens, poker chips or other counters. Place the counters and dice in a pool where everyone can reach them. ---===CHARACTER CREATION===--- Choose these of every Psycheballer: HANDLE – This is your name in the CyberSpace Arena. THEME – This is the "genre" of your interface. Suggestions include Swords & Sorcery, Corporate Luxe, Neon Rave, Culture Clone (name the culture), Bookworm (name the book), and Wireframe. APPEARANCE – This should suit your Theme, naturally. CLASS - There are a large number of Classes. Too many to list and too many to have in a single league. Invent your own Class title that reflects your tactics and play style. Are you a Blocker? Striker? Wingman? Rogue? Scrapper? Mystic? Psychic warrior? Choose one emotion associated with your class: You receive a bonus token in that emotion at the start of every match. SPECIAL MOVE - Select one regular move in the game and an emotion. Each time you use that standard move, gain an extra token of that emotion. STRUGGLES - Outside the game, each Psycheballer cultivates problems in their life, in order to create the mixture of positive and negative emotions needed to power their Psycheball moves. Describe the player’s life outside the game, and the problems they face and issues they deal with on a daily basis. The more drama they self-inflict, the better. All player characters have four emotional scores, that track how much they are experiencing a given feeling. They are ANGER, FEAR, JOY and SADNESS. These fluctuate up and down over the course of a Psycheball match, and will be tracked with pools of tokens. These pools all begin empty, except for the bonus token provided by your class. ---===PLAYING PSYCHEBALL===--- A Psycheball league has a specific structure: Your league has three to seven players in it. Each match occurs in an artificial Arena created within the subconscious mind of one of the players, dubbed the Host. Arenas are created through psychic neuromanipulation devices to amplify the emotional responses the players experience. The Host feels this resonance most strongly, and so their emotions and psychic abilities are strongest. They intuitively can control and manipulate the battlefield, and the battlefield reflects their own worldview and desires. The Host’s player is responsible for describing the Arena’s style and appearance, in a way that matches their Theme. The other players will work together as Challengers to try to defeat the Host. Their standing in the league is tracked individually, so they are competing against each other. Yet at the same time they have to work together to win the battle and score their points. After each player has acted as Host, that concludes one season of Psycheball. (You could always play more seasons if you want.) To begin playing a session of Psycheball, decide who will be Host. If you have played before, the last Host selects the new Host out of those that have not yet Hosted. For the first session, anyone can volunteer, or it could be decided randomly. Before entering the Arena, each player frames a scene where their PC deals with their personal life outside the Psycheball Arena. Then, the Challengers enter the mind of the Host and engage in psychic battle sports. Once either the Host or Challengers win, the Host awards points. Then you can take a break or begin the cycle again, choosing a new Host, having outside scenes and then playing an Arena battle, etc. --==Outside the Arena==-- Between matches, the Psycheball players each deal with their real world lives. These scenes help create the emotional resonances that power Psycheball moves. Psycheball players deliberately construct their lives to be filled with conflicting emotions, including large portions of unpleasant emotions, to maximize their internal turmoil when entering a match. Each player, in turn, will frame a scene focusing on their PC dealing with their life Struggles. The player will describe the location and time of the scene, what is happening at the beginning, and who is present. Their PC (the focal PC) must be present in the scene. The focal player narrates the scene and roleplays their PC dealing with their Struggles. If necessary, the focal player assigns other players to roleplay NPCs for the scene. The PC and player should both work to drive the scene toward dramatic, emotional outcomes. After a few minutes of play, wrap up the scene at a good ending point. The other players all decide collectively on one emotion the focal PC illustrated over the course of the scene. They place a token in that PC’s pool for that emotion. Then the Host chooses an emotion they illustrated and places a token on that emotion’s sheet. The emotion the Host chooses might be the same emotion or a different one. If you have a scene featuring another player character, then the secondary character can also claim the scene as theirs as well and gain tokens based on their behavior (assuming they haven’t already played out their focal scene) or they can simply act as a foil to the focus character and then have their own focus scene of their own devising. --==In The Arena==-- Every Psycheballer starts each match with 20 Resilience. The Host starts with Resilience equal to 20xthe number of opponents they are facing. Each point of damage you take reduces your Resilience score an equal amount. When a character is reduced to 0 Resilience, they are ejected from the Arena. Ejected Challengers can only vaguely communicate with their allies still in the battle, and they can only undertake the Aid or Remember actions on their turn. (They still receive a turn, and the Host still receives a turn after the eliminated player’s turn.) If the Host is eliminated, the Challengers win. If the last Challenger is eliminated, the Host wins. At the start of a match, no player has a Psycheball. You can only possess one Psycheball at a time. The Challengers go first. After each Challenger takes a turn, the Host takes a turn as well. The Host decides what order the challengers go in, but the turns need to be spread evenly across Challengers: one player can’t take a second turn until all the players have taken their first turn. Each Turn, you will perform one Move. If you want to try something not within the realm of a move, discuss with your fellow players and determine how to handle that. Something out of left field might be best modeled as a Remember or Tactical Maneuver move, but you might have come up with some other solution. -=MOVES=- All Characters may perform the following Moves, one per turn. When you use a move, you always expend all the tokens from the associated emotional pool. Then, you place a token in each of your other emotional pools. This leads to an escalation of emotional power over the course of the match. (Summoning and Passing the Psycheball doesn’t expend any emotional energy, so you don’t escalate after using those moves.) There’s no limit on the amount of emotional energy you can have on any given emotion. SUMMON PSYCHEBALL* – You summon a fresh PsycheBall by concentrating. Take a d12 from the pool and set it to its starting charge of 1. Each Psycheball is a glowing spheroid that begins the size of a marble but can grow to be larger than a person at full charge. Each Psycheball has visual characteristics based on the summoner’s theme. PASS PSYCHEBALL* - If you are holding a Psycheball, you can give it to a teammate as your action for the turn. If you don’t have a Psycheball, you can have someone pass you the Psycheball and receiving the ball will be your action for the turn. You can also drop a Psycheball as an action, making it unclaimed. You don’t generate any emotional charge, but it might be useful to give the ball to someone with some energy stored up. CHARGE PSYCHEBALL – You expend your Sadness tokens to imbue power into the Psycheball. The Psycheball’s charge increases by the amount of Sadness energy you spent, up to a maximum of 12. Set the die to show the Psycheball’s current charge. If your description includes aspects of your outside life, add one additional charge to the Psycheball. If there is an unclaimed Psycheball on the field, you can claim that ball before charging it. The Psycheball grows in size corresponding to the charge it’s filled with. As you charge up a Psycheball, it takes on aspects of your character’s theme, so it looks more technological if you have a scifi theme, or more sorcerous if you have a necromantic theme. THROW PSYCHEBALL – If you possess a PsycheBall, you may hurl it at an opponent. You expend your Anger energy. Describe the attack with mixed metaphors incorporating the Themes of the attacker and target. When you throw the Psycheball, roll a d12 (not a Psycheball). If the result is equal to or lower than the Anger you spent, the target takes damage equal to the Psycheball’s charge and the charge becomes 1. If the d12 rolls higher than the Anger you spent, the target dodges the attack. The charge on the Psycheball decreases by one but otherwise there is no effect. Either way, the Psycheball then becomes unclaimed after being thrown. BLOCK - You can shield an allied character, making them harder to hit. Spend the tokens from your Fear emotion, placing half that many (round up) next to that ally’s hit point pool. The next time that character is the target of a thrown Psycheball, you subtract the blocking tokens from the attacker’s spent Anger. Challengers cannot Block attacks against themselves, but the Host can. You can only ever have one stack of tokens next to your hit points: if two allies try to Block you, only the higher total applies. AID - You reposition yourself in the arena to let another player take advantage of your placement. Place all the tokens from your Joy field onto the emotions of an ally or allies, distributing them as you feel appropriate. This could be described as setting up their next move, or as reminding them of past events, or trying to make them feel that emotion (by, say, heckling them to make them angry or telling them how great they are). If your description includes aspects of the scenery and the other players’ narrations, then you add an additional token to a different emotion of each character you aided. (The Host cannot Aid.) TRICK - You lay a trap for the opponent. Take the tokens from an emotion of your choice. Place them next to the same emotion of an opponent. If that opponent spends any tokens from that emotion on their next turn, they take damage equal to the number of tokens you spent. If you can incorporate aspects of your target’s own narration into describing the trap, then the trap is also triggered by a second emotion of your choice. REMEMBER - You spend your turn concentrating on past memories and how they made you feel. Narrate a flashback of an event in your past, then take all the tokens from one emotion, and place half that many (round up) on a different emotion on your card. Explain how you remember feeling one way and how you now turn that emotion into the new one. --==After The Match==-- After a match is completed, the Host awards points to the Challengers, if the Challengers won. The Host keeps all the points if the Challengers lost. The Host awards score to Challengers based on “Most impressive play” or “Clever move” or “Best narration” or any other categories they may invent. Don’t keep track of actual scores, just approximately who is doing best in the rankings, who is worst, etc. Use the scoring in the arena as a way of driving the drama between players. After each bout, everyone is jealous of the person in the lead. People who received few points might be angry at their unfairly low scores or upset that their poor showing prevents moving up to the pro circuit. Others might accuse their teammates of colluding and manipulating the scores. At the end of a season, the highest scoring player moves on up to the pro league. The lowest scoring player retires from the game in shame. The rest go on to play another season.