Okay everyone, here's the first set of details on where we're going with the new Etherscope system.

Firstly we're using a steam engine analogy for the core of the character system:

Characters have a Boiler which is a pool of essence points, not entirely dissimilar to Chi or other similar things in other games. Your boiler stores Steam Points, and has a capacity equal to the highest engine score in each of your three categories (see below).

The boiler feeds in to Engines, which are your main Ability Score Equivalents. The are divided into three categories, each with two Engine scores: your Prime engines are Finesse and Power, your Ether engines are Intellect and Spirit, and your Society engines are Intrigue and Standing. Engines start with at least 3 points (poor) and go up to 6 (outstanding), (with 4 being human average and 5 being good). However, your engines will be regularly boosted by steam points from your boiler. You need to achieve bonus successes in an action to be able to boost your Engine scores with steam points, and the maximum that any engine can be boosted to is double its initial value.

Each pair of Engines also feed into a Condenser. Which acts as wound track for each of the different situations you might find your self in. Your Prime condenser does more standard wounds, your Ether condenser handles mental damage, which can either be to your Scope avatar or for representing insanity effects. Your Society condenser represents your character's social position and capabilities, and it "wounds" represent your status in which ever branch of society you belong to dropping away. When you are "hit" by an attack of one variety or the other you lose points from your condenser. The final six points are wounding effects which are slow to recover and cause action penalties to your dice rolls. The other points are Buffer which have no effect on how your character acts. Spending steam points to improve your engine scores immediately improves your Condenser score. If you take wounds but then improve your engines and thus improve your condenser score, you merely add more points to teh buffer, rather than heal the wound - the penalties remain but the new buffer points can be removed before you take any further wounds. Each condenser has a final step representing some form of incapacitation: Dying for Prime, Frought for Ether and Excluded for Society - in this state you can no longer perform actions of the specified type. Different types of attack, on whichever of the condensers it hapens to be, might have the Lethal trait. Lethal wounds recover slower than non-lethal ones, and also can knock you into a final state: Dead, Insane, or Ostracised which effectively removes your character from the game.

You also have Gears, which are the different things that your character can do. There are five types of gears: Skills, Combat Manoeuvres, Ether-Schticks, Occult Powers and Cybernaughtics.

Here is a provisional skill list:

Finesse Skills: Acrobatics, Fencing, Martial Arts, Pilot, Shooting, Stealth,

Power Skills: Athletics, Brawl, Endurance, Melee

Intellect Skills: Bureaucracy, Engineering, Exploration, Medicine, Mystic Philosophy, Natural Philosophy, Scope Use

Spirit Skills: Alertness, Charm, Resolve, Scope Atunement, Will Power

Intrigue Skills: Empathy, Etiquette, Gossip, Intimidate, Tactics

Standing Skills: Academia, Civic, High Society, Industry, Military, Street, Wealth

Dice Mechanics:

When you make a roll you will use an Engine and a Gear (usually a skill). You roll a number of d12s equal to your current Engine score (could be up to 12 with steam point expenditure). You add your gear rank (between 0 and 8) to the roll. Any dice that, including this modifier, come up 11 or higher count as 1 success towards the action. Each action will have a set difficulty Dif 1 is very easy, Dif 2 is a typical action, dif 3 is a typical challenging action, Dif 4 fairly hard, Dif 5 difficult and Difficulty scores above five reserved for the most extreme actions.

Anyway, that's about where we've got to for now. Comments much appreciated. Also, note that names may be changed if we can think of some cooler ones, and the skill list is provisional, so may change too.

Cheerio for now,

Ben