In this story, the protagonist Acid Narita, uses a special rifle which fires a round of psychic energy that targets a specific individual. While it sounds neat in the story, how would it work if you wanted your character to actually possess such an item? Let's walk through it.
The first step is to identify what attribute underlies the item, what is its function? It is a weapon, it is attacking a target in order to damage it in some fashion. So the attribute we will use is the Weapon attribute (pg. 60). Right away we can see that there are a bunch of custom variables which we will need to select from in order to get the right combination of effects. Since this weapon is a type of sniper rifle we will choose variables that help represent that.
Accurate: this is a great variable for a sniper rifle and we could buy it as high as level 3, but each level adds to the cost of the item, so let's stick with 1 for now. It's an accurate weapon, but you still have to be a good shot to use it properly.
Psychic: this one is obvious. Since the gun doesn't fire real bullets, we don't want it to be affected by armor and force fields. This is an expensive variable, costing 6 levels, but well worth it.
Homing: the bullet had a homing capacity didn't it. A very specific one in fact, so it must have been very good. We will call the sense the bullet uses "psychic" which means that it can be fooled by psychic shields and misdirection. To make sure it has a good chance of hitting, we'll buy this one up to level 3.
Drain: A psychic attack shouldn't just do normal damage. Since it is an attack on the mind let us add an effect which makes the bullet damage the mind of the target directly. The more the better, we'll buy this one to level 3 too.
Now, we move to the custom restrictions section. This gun also has characteristics which hinder it as well as help it. In this case:
Hands: It requires two hands to aim and fire a rifle. Which means you can't use a shield, parry, or do anything else with your off hand.
Everything above this point has come from the Weapon Attribute itself, but we aren't done customizing this attribute yet. In Chapter 5: Customisation, we can find a few rules we definitely need in order to accurately represent this rifle. First of all...
Range: right now our weapon can only attack people adjacent to the person holding it. Not much of a rifle eh? In order to give it a range we need to buy up this attribute a couple ranks. Flip to the table on pg. 73, and notice the progression of ranges by rank. To represent a reasonable distance for a sniper rifle we'll buy it up to rank 3 - 1km.
We could stop here of course, but the gun seems to be lacking just a little bit of flavor, and besides it has gotten quite expensive. We only have one restriction and about 16 levels of customisations. We ought to restrict it a little more, to bring the cost down, to make it feel more realistic, and importantly to create interesting choices for the user. Restrictions actually make the attribute more interesting, because it forces the player to balance the pros and cons. So now, for a couple restrictions:
Activation: No one should be able to do a hip shot with a sniper rifle. This restriction means that it takes extra actions to set up the shot during which the player must concentrate and not be disturbed. Let's buy this up to level 3, which means it requires 5 general actions. That's still a pretty fast setup for a shot with a sniper rifle.
Deplete: Since the rifle doesn't fire real bullets it should have some other cost to represent the ammunition. In this case it uses psychic energy, so we'll use this restriction to represent the depletion the character experiences when firing it. Level 3 will mean that it costs 30 energy to pull that trigger once. Ouch! but then, this bullet ignores armor, homes in on it's target, drains the Mind stat, and can hit from a very long range. It's worth it.
Alright, the last thing to decide is what level of a weapon to make it. This will determine its damage dealing potential and affect the cost. Since the book lists sniper rifles (pg. 167) as level 5 weapons, we'll scale this one back a tiny bit to 4. A real bullet would hit harder, but it would also have to go through armor. That gives us a cost breakdown as follows:
weapon level 4 + 16 custom levels - 7 restriction levels = 13levels
13 x 2(CP cost/level of weapon attribute) = 26CP
This would cost 26 character points if it were an innate ability of a character, but because it is an item, the item attribute halves the cost to 13CP altogether. On our character sheet we would write the item something like this:
Psychic Sniper Rifle - 13CP
Weapon 4 (Range 10km, Accurate +1, Drain3:Mind, Homing(psychic) +3, Psychic: ignores armor and force field and affects incorporeal)
- 2 hands
- requires 5 general actions to activate
- Deplete 30 energy per shot
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