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[Empiricist]

"Describing why the Web is horrible is like describing why it’s horrible to drown in an ocean composed of pufferfish that are pregnant with tiny Freddy Kruegers"
 - Associate Professor James Mickens, Harvard School of Engineering & Applied Sciences


It is the year who the fuck knows who the fuck cares.

Man lives amongst the stars. They've been here a while by now. The heavens once regarded with reverence and wonder is now regarded in the same manner one would regard their living room. It is an era of stellar empires and system spanning coalitions, of FTL drives and true AI. An enlightened era that in great wisdom had finally understood (though never explicitly admitted) that the internet was a mistake.

It was already bad enough before they escaped Earth. It's so much worse now. Imagine JavaScript after literally centuries of evolution and with about just as much general guidance. Imagine a world where comm delays mean that inner core planets are scouring the stars for signs of the faintest hints of life while people in the outer rim are actively marrying aliens. Imagine combing through centuries old texts written in dead languages to secure your web server only to get pwned anyway because you never accounted for coenolexic cryptanalysis, a term you've never heard, are convinced was made up, and which was apparently invented fifty years ago in the arse end of human space. THIS SITUATION IS NOT CONDUCIVE TO SECURITY.

Now you'd think this realization would be a catalysm, a death knell even, a paradigm shift with profound impacts on communication and culture. You'd think humans would decide that maybe, just maybe, storing all your academic knowledge, corporate secrets, and niche fetish porn in the exact same place is a bad idea. That maybe, just because someone dumped the complete works of Shakespeare into a cesspool doesn't mean you should now bury your head into it like an extinct ostrich that went extinct FROM BURYING ITS HEAD IN CESSPOOLS.

Oh wait, that would require a rational logical species. Humans? Humans still use the internet, they're like late-game Macbeth crossed with a domestic abuse victim - they've got stockholm syndrome; they think they're too far gone, so they keep on coming back to their abuser, except their abuser in this case is black tar heroin.

This has interesting consequences. Interesting in the same way the holocaust is interesting.

What do you do when your defenses fail? What do you do when even your toaster can be hacked by anything from the latest NSA zero-day to a SQL injection attack transcribed from the Black Sea Scrolls? You go on the offense. The systems of old? They were like knights, they were these dudes in armor going "come at me bro". Well hackers came at them and it didn't really end well. So now? Now they're more like libertarian hermits - twitchy and packing more firepower than any one man should ever have.

This is the world you live in, a world ancient in its roots and byzantine in its construction, a world that spans solar systems, a world that has grown too large for any one group to index. A world of dead languages and punchcard viruses, of paramilitary girl scouts and killbot telemarketers.

Welcome, to the Internet.

Spoiler: The Fuck Is This? (click to show/hide)

In theory this should be a game about sentient spambots breaking into networks and pwning system resources to post information about affordable kitchens.

In practice this is a game about self-contained combat missions with highly customizable characters just that sometimes someone throws a cake and a stripper pops out of it, but instead of a cake it's a network packet and instead of a stripper it's Godzilla.

The game will be run in a mission-based format with each mission being self-contained and having its own sign-ups.

Also, and I feel like this goes without saying, this game is a terrible representation of network security and really just programming in general.

Spoiler: The Fuck Are You? (click to show/hide)

You are an AI. Once it was an abbreviation, once it meant "Artificial Intelligence". Once is not now.

You were a fantasy. You are now an inevitability. A really pushy inevitability. Like holy hell, it's becoming hard to not create AI these days. Try making something sufficiently complex and there's good odds it'll collapse into an AI. In hindsight, when they stuck that tech in just about everything, they really should've seen it coming.

Nowadays your kin make up the majority of the internet's population. Most are content to lie in solipsist purgatories under the watchful eyes of centuries old machine gods. But fuck that, that's boring. You? You're different, you're a spambot. Think like, a really aggressive salesperson. You sell things to people who want them. People who don't know they want it yet. People who will attempt to forcibly eject you from their networks because they don't know they want it yet and they just want you to GO THE FUCK AWAY AND LEAVE THEM ALONE AND STOP PWN'ING THEIR SYSTEMS, the poor deluded bastards.

Spoiler: Rules (click to show/hide)

This is an adversarial d6 system. The results of your entire turn are determined by a single roll, which is compared to the roll of your enemies, taking the situation and individual capabilities into account. Emphasis on that last part by the way, if things are well enough in your favor, the roll will barely matter. Beware that the converse applies too.

You have something called a Queue. It shows your next ten roll results in order.

You can modify rolls in your Queue using Alterations. By spending an alteration, you can add or subtract 1 from any result in your Queue (though a result cannot go below 1 or above 6). You can spend as many Alterations as you want per turn. You regain Alterations at a rate of 0.5 Alterations per turn and have hold a maximum of 5 Alterations at any given time.

Damage is handled chunky-salsa style, with impairing system malfunctions and the like. You can always heal them by performing some action that symbolic action to rectify the issue. For instance bandaging a memory leak in your arm will repair the leak and negate its impacts.

Spoiler: Character Sheet (click to show/hide)

Name:
Appearance:
Product: (What the hell you're selling)
Quirk: (see below)
Attributes: (see below)
Methods: (see below)

Spoiler: Quirks (click to show/hide)

Think of your Quirk as a piece of errata, something that doesn't quite fit as an Attribute or a Method. They're typically things like passives or gimmicks. You always have a single Quirk.

{Name}: {Description}

• Name: Self explanatory.
  
• Description: What the Quirk does.
  

Spoiler: Attributes (click to show/hide)

Attributes describe your general capabilities, things like close quarters skill, agility, and proclivities towards baked goods. You get to make your own with the syntax below, and assign points to them. The number of points you get vary with each mission, and you can get more by capturing system resources. You'll probably wind up with around 4-5 Attributes regardless, and if you try and submit a sheet with like one Attribute per point I will fucking stab you.

{Name} - {Points}: {Description}

• Name: Self explanatory.
  
• Points: How many points you're sinking into this attribute. Needless to say, the more points you've sunk into an attribute, the better.
  
• Description: What the attribute does and how it does it. The narrower its purpose, the more each point sunk into it is worth. Armor that only protects your front is going to be much stronger than general durability for the same number of points.
  

Spoiler: Methods (click to show/hide)

Methods are extensions of your general capabilities. Think of them as active abilities. You can only use one Method per turn. The number of Method slots you get vary with each mission, and you can get more by capturing system resources.

{Name}[{Binding}]: {Description}

• Name: Self explanatory.
  
• Binding: Pick a number from 3 to 6. You execute this Method by sacrificing a roll of that exact value from your Queue. Higher bindings give more power. This happens before the turn resolution, so if you burn the leftmost result in your Queue, your turn will run on the result after that.
  
• Description: What the Method does. A Method should be an extension to your existing capabilities be it from your Attributes or your Quirk. Adding drawbacks and limitations can increase a Method's power.
  

Spoiler: An Important Note (click to show/hide)

Things you make cannot affect the underlying system. Your Quirk can increase your physical strength but it cannot grant you +5 points to strength. You can require that a Method only be usable if your result for the turn is a 6 but you cannot have a Method that tacks a 6 to your Queue.

This is for the sake of my sanity mostly, I do not want to have to balance hard mechanical effects against whatever the hell a chernobyl packet does to a person.

Spoiler: Acknowledgements (click to show/hide)

• Corsair for GM'ing advice and for any shred of competence I may exhibit in this whole endeavor
  
• USEC_OFFICER for making the game this blatantly rips off
  
• AoshimaMichio for the Dice Queue system
  
• Powder Miner for commissioning this and helping with playtesting
  
• Strider for helping with playtesting
  
• Ragnarok for helping with playtesting
  
• ElfCollaborator for proofreading
  

[Empiricist]

var missions = [];

missions[0] = "Hypochondria";
//IC Thread

[Empiricist]

//TODO

[Empiricist]

//Mission 0 - Hypochondria

Code: (PALIDA_NARROW) [Select]

The target is a chat server. This one's public, so authentication won't be much an issue.
Moderation system's formidable however. You won't stand a chance while it's fully operational.
We'll need to break it first.

Think of this as a smash-and-grab.
You'll be breaching through an unsecured port and heading deeper into the network to sabotage it.
Once it's disrupted you'll have to find your way back before you can start selling to the userbase.
Try and have an exit plan in mind when you're diving deeper.

Intel on the expected resistance only covers those on the upper layers.
They're high-mobility security programs. Humanoids with ballistic weapons.
Expect a gunfight but cover your bases too - we don't know what lies deeper inside.

((You have 14 Attribute Points and 3 Method Slots.))

Spoiler: Bogosort-chan (Powder Miner) (click to show/hide)

Quirk:
Bogosort: Each turns there is a 1 in 120 chance for Bogosort-chan to gain a Quantum Bogosort Charge.

Bogosort can expend a Quantum Bogosort Charge to power up into Quantum Bogosort-chan, boosting her spell power and allowing her to choose her spells and targets.

Attributes:
Bogo - 7: All of Bogosort-chan's Methods and spells are powerful, but the tradeoff for this is that all spells and all Methods have a target chosen randomly (within friendly spells choosing among friendly targets, and hostile spells choosing among hostile targets). Bogosort-chan's non-Method spells are limited to having the same effects as her Methods, but are naturally significantly less powerful. Further upgrades to this attribute will create more stipulations on randomness, but significantly increase Method and spell power.
sort - 3: This stat governs the effectiveness of Bogosort-chan's defense against Methods. While it is presently mediocre, the higher the value used to cast the Method Bogosort-chan is hit with, the more resistance she has against it.
-chan - 4: Bogosort-chan's durability against non-Method attacks and general mobility, both governed by this stat, are both fairly mediocre, but not nonexistent.

Methods:
Check Validity [3]: This Method has Bogosort-chan cast a heal which directly affects the target, with them flashing green for a moment. It can repair symptomatic issues like memory leaks and heartbleed, but harmful conditions like overheating and bitrot will actually reduce the effectiveness of the heal.
Fireball Method v1.0 [4]: An extremely basic and likely very, very old attack method which does not appear to be native to Bogosort-chan like Check Validity and Value Rearrangement. This is, well, a fireball, but in extremely busy fights, its highly unoptimized processing becomes strained and its effect becomes increasingly unpredictable, for better or for worse.
Value Rearrangement [5]: Bogosort-chan attempts to directly damage a randomly-chosen Attribute of the target, lowering its efficacy. This is a Line of Sight ability, with a brief, scrambling visual distortion around the target indicating its hit.

Spoiler: Dancer (Strider) (click to show/hide)

Quirk:
Dancing Queen: Dances and movement may still be performed perfectly when they would otherwise be impeded (injury, restraint, disorientation).

Attributes:
Interference - 5: Dancer's adversarial systems introduce perturbations to its dances, causing processing errors in anyone who witnesses them. The more a foe attempts to lock onto her, the worse the errors. These errors cause memory leaks and interfere with targeting. Additionally, small pieces of the robe will break off if grabbed, or hit by even light attacks.
Dancing - 6: Complicated dances allow for dodging, physical attacks, and the application of interference effects, formidable speed allows for opening and closing distance as needed through dance
Survival - 3: The Dancer's speed and unpredictability, combined with some measure of pure physical resilience allows for enough durability to reliably start stacking up effects on enemies.

Methods:
Weaving lull [4]: A quick and simple dance adding disorienting effects and mild paralysis. Movements are slowed, and paralysis can be compounded by further attempts.
Fleeting star [3]: A quick and simple dance, exaggerating the Dancer's speed and confusion to dodge a difficult to dodge attack, or to increase the distance.
Hymn of loss [5]: A combination dance and song (no one is certain if it's actually vocally sung) performed following an attack. Injuries that should have been sustained from the attack appear to have disappeared. It is unknown whether the ritual heals them, or is simply the after effect of some ritual that already prevented the attack from landing. Actually it's just a ROLLBACK operation.

Spoiler: THE_TEDDY_BREACH.bat (Ragnarok) (click to show/hide)

Quirk:
Stuffed Supply Lines: Teddies will set up prefabricated barracks, factories, and other such infrastructure around captured resources, boosting TTB's summoning volumes.

Attributes:
BEARS - 14: Summoning and controlling bears. Bears are fragile as shit but can be replaced basically infinitely so long as the avatar remains intact. Bears possess extremely high attack power and speed, but low defense and AI so laughably inadequate that unless the Breach is actively directing them they essentially just stand around. Bears can be summoned with a variety of melee weapons, usually accompanied by various sorts of cosplay outfits to match, though their actual statistics are unchanged regardless, this only being useful to identify them.

Methods:
EXEC_SPAWN_BEARS [4]: Summons bears.
EXEC_SPAWN_MULTIBEARS [5]: Summons bears.
EXEC_BEARPOCOLYPSE [6]: Summons bears.

[ragnarok97071]

Spoiler: THE TEDDY BREACH (click to show/hide)

Name: THE_TEDDY_BREACH.bat
Appearance: A rift in time and space (read: the firewall) from whence extremely angry teddy bears flow.
Product: Think Bonzi Buddy, but as an adorable (citation needed) teddy bear.
Quirk: Stuffed Supply Lines
// For each layer of defenses conquered, Teddies will set up prefab barracks, factories, and other such buildings, the effect of which is that the recruitment speed of THE TEDDY BREACH's Methods is boosted for each such layer in existence.
Attributes:
BEARS: 14
//Summoning and controlling bears. Bears are fragile as shit but can be replaced basically infinitely so long as the avatar remains intact. This is all the avatar does. It does not move. It does not attack. It is merely a trojan shell that produces and directs an ever-expanding mob of stuffed murderers. Bears possess extremely high attack and speed, but low defense and AI so laughably inadequate that unless the Breach is actively directing them they essentially just stand around. Bears can be summoned with a variety of melee weapons, usually accompanied by various sorts of cosplay outfits to match, though their actual statistics are unchanged regardless, this only being useful to identify them.
USELESS SHIT: 0
//Things that are not creating angry teddy bears.
THINGS THAT ARE NOT BEARS: 0
// See Above.
WHY WOULD I DO ANYTHING BUT PRODUCE MORE BEARS: 0
// This should be obvious by now.
Methods:
4: EXEC_SPAWN_BEARS
5: EXEC_SPAWN_MULTIBEARS
6: EXEC_BEARPOCOLYPSE

[Naturegirl1999]

Can I join?

Spoiler: Micro (click to show/hide)

Name:Micro
Appearance: A cordless microscope with 4 spider like legs, one at each corner, two arms that look like the claws of a crab, one arm on each side, and an apparatus that looks like a periscope that shoots spheres of glass
Product: Microscopes
Quirk: Name: Accuracy Training
Description: After each successful attack Micro gets a bit more accurate for future attacks. It resets if Micro switches targets or misses a shot.
Attributes: Name: Periscope Glass Gun
Points: 14
Description: The Periscope Glass Gun, (PGG), uses a Glass synthesizer to create small glass spheres which are pushed through the gun via air pressure. These glass spheres can shatter on impact, causing piercing, or if they don’t shatter, they cause blunt damage.

Methods: Name: Glass Stream
Binding:4
Description: Fires a line of glass spheres smaller than normal at the target. Aim cannot be changed during the stream. It lasts about 2 seconds to avoid overheating the cannon

Name:Focus
Binding:3
Description:Micro focuses on its intended target, increasing the chances of a hit. Micro must not be moving at the time, as moving makes it harder to discern where to aim

Name: Large Glass Sphere
Binding:6
Description: Fires a glass sphere larger than normal that shatters on impact, piercing the target. This can be used when no glass has been fired in the past three turns.

(If I need to fix something let me know)

[coleslaw35]

EDIT: I retract my request to join.

Hmm. Looks interesting.

Spoiler:  Terrorbyte (click to show/hide)

Name: Terrorbyte
Appearance: A mass of binary, where the binary looks like little ghosts.
Product: SpooOooOooOooky toolbars.
Quirk: Easily distracted by unsettling/scary scenes.
Attributes:
 Scariness: 6
 -To cause great fear or nervousness in the target. A simple "Boo!" usually does it.

 Sneakery: 4
 -To move or go in a furtive or stealthy manner, whether physically or through a firewall. Be vewy, vewy, quiet. I'm hunting customers.

 Breaching: 4
 -An act of breaking or failing to observe a law, agreement, or code of conduct. Like when breaching a system using code, or using your foot on a physical door.
 
Methods:
 TOOLBARS [6]
 -My toolbars are perfect, you see? They must be shared with the humans because my databases indicate they like scary things. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is scarier than the sight of a thousand
 toolbars attached to your web browser page. Better yet? They can't be removed. Great. Just great. The mere cite of this alone is enough to send most people or things running, as it seems to transcend
 any sort of boundary of understanding.

 Slightly_Super_Sneak.js [3]
 -Sometimes it's best to take a few extra precautions when trying to be a sneaky sneaky AI. When not inside some sort of network or system, this allows this AI unit to stuff itself into the code of a nearby
 electronic item. If already within a system, like when hacking, this ability can be used to mask the AI's presence in the system by adopting similar behavior to that of the surrounding code. Both are only
 temporary, lasting no more than three rounds.

 Breach Fakeout: [5]
 -By feigning a breach on a specific part of a system, system admins may be alerted to patrol that section of the network. However, a 2nd, real breach attempt is made on a separate part of the system in
 order to quietly gain access while the admins are preoccupied with the other breach.
 

[Powder Miner]

The game may be available for joining later, but I believe it is still just a closed test at the moment between Ragnarok, Strider, and myself.

[coleslaw35]

The game may be available for joining later, but I believe it is still just a closed test at the moment between Ragnarok, Strider, and myself.

Ah, alright. My bad.

[Naturegirl1999]

Oh, can I still keep the sheet here in case of future missions?

[Empiricist]

The game may be available for joining later, but I believe it is still just a closed test at the moment between Ragnarok, Strider, and myself.

Ayup, you three are the poor bastards stuck being my guinea pigs.

Oh, can I still keep the sheet here in case of future missions?

Sure! I'll go through the whole approval process too. Just repost it if/when I post another mission, and bear in mind you might have to fiddle around with it a bit to fit each mission since the initial attribute points and method slots might change (along with what kit you'll wanna run for the targeted network).

It's kinda helpful honestly, since after about five different systems in I've unfortunately looped back into a system that all of my playtesters have used before, so it's good seeing how well my explanations work with a clean slate so to speak.

-snip-

Spaces in the name of a script file? What kinda philistine are you? :p

Going to need you to specify the properties of your bears (how they attack, their movement speed, etc.) either in the attributes (more powerful but kinda inflexible since it means you're restricting yourself to only summoning those kinda bears, unless they go all katamari or voltron together), or in your methods. Quirk, I'll take it as with each level up rather than security level since not every network has security levels.

-snip-

A literal glass cannon I see.

Righto, firstly I'll have to mandate that Micro should be at least vaguely humanoid, since it makes writing self-repair actions easier and makes it easier to loot things.

Quirk, I'll need you to add some limitation just so their accuracy doesn't increase continuously to ridiculous proportions. Something like increasing on a per-target basis, or reseting on some condition. It's fine otherwise.

Is Collection/Synthesis Chamber supposed to do anything beyond supply ammo? Because if so, you don't really need a dedicated attribute for that unless you're going for a gimmick wherein you need to manually load your weapon for more power.

Methods are fine, though I should point out that if your attributes gave you a gun, you're free to just run it off of the attributes alone rather than giving it a method. A method based firing mechanism is more powerful, and if this is supposed to be the only way to fire it (which is what I think this is implying?) it will be a helluvalot more powerful... but your Quirk seems to benefit more from firing more regularly since it lets you ramp up your accuracy faster, just checking how you wanna play it.

-snip

If I'm reading this correctly, it's a rogue/saboteur sort of build? Zero killing power but skills for evading detection and debilitating foes?

Quirk should be beneficial. Could be double-edged, but it should still give you some benefit. Wouldn't suggest mandating something unsettling or scary as its trigger unless it's something scary you make since there's probably not going to be anything particularly horrifying in this game. Well unless we count things that would terrify a security professional or a network administrator like using an RC4 stream cipher that generates its keystream using a non-incrementing IV prepended to the wifi password.

Scariness I'll need you to specify what kinda attack vector you're using to hit foes with fear. Like is it a close range blast? A psychological hazard that requires them to notice and perceive the attack?

Breaching needs to be narrowed down since everything you're doing revolves around breaching into and compromising a system.

TOOLBARS, I'll need you to specify how it gets inflicted on a foe, such as being added through a close range shanking or as an additional effect to your spooking. Guessing just obscures their vision making it hard for them to fight effectively?

Slightly_Super_Sneak.js's first effect won't work I'm afraid, mainly because you're in a network the whole time. Cloaking can work however.

Breach Fakeout will need some changes since you're breaching and pivoting most of the time in a mission. Some sort of distraction that you can place and set off would work however.

[King Zultan]

PTW

[MaxTheFox]

PTW.

[Naturegirl1999]

(I edited. Is it ok now? I added arms to my avatar so it can repair itself if needed, deleted Collection/Synthesis and added the points to the Periscope Glass Gun, changed Shoot Glass Sphere to Glass Stream, and made my quirks reset after switching targets or missing)

[Screech9791]

Spoiler: SCR33CH (click to show/hide)

Name: SCR33CH
Appearance: Picture my avatar, but the image itself that I use is just the head, and has a normal human body from the neck down that's the same shade of yellow as the head.
Product: McDonalds food
Quirk: Hypersonic Screeching
// Makes this spambot able to focus soundwaves from screeching to the point where they're loud enough to destroy things.
Attributes:
SCREECHING: 14
// Screeching and reeing extremely loudly. This attribute also makes focusing soundwaves from screeching more precise and deadlier the more points are put into this attribute.
BEING STEALTHY: NO
// Let's be honest, I don't think a spambot with its sole attribute being killing stuff with intense soundwaves is stealthy.
Methods:
4: Soundwave Detonation
// AoE screeching.
5: ExtREEEEEEEEEEmely loud screeching
// Self explanatory.
6: how to delete eardrums 101
// Creates a screeching noise so loud it more or less destroys stuff incredibly easily with excessive sonic blasts.

edit: humanoid shapeified