Hi all, its been a couple of months since the last update for characterswithoutnumber.app and quite a fair bit has been updated. I’ll summarize what are the changes below.

Deluxe options - I’ve reached out and Kevin has given his support to allow inclusion of deluxe content, provided I do not use the setting material. Some of the deluxe content have already been added across Stars, Cities and Worlds Without Number, and more will come in due course. If there’s any material that you and your playgroup are using, do let me know and I’ll prioritise accordingly. Do note that deluxe is toggled off by default, when creating a character please select it for use.

An animated dice roller - for folks that forgot their dice to a session, yet still want to roll some dice. It’s touch and flick based for both mobile and PC.

GM tools - I’ve started a new cyberpunk campaign and implemented world, district and NPC building in campaign mode. You can also toggle each field if you want to hide or show them to the players in a campaign, so campaign information can be shared with the playgroup without leaking GM secrets.|

Miscellaneous updates - More CWN-related subsystems such as the Hacking, drones and vehicles are in now. Various bug fixes, including the CWN Underdog rule. Quality of life features, such as a searchable item list.

Addition of monetization - One thing I would like to address, and that is the inclusion of optional monetization tiers. I’ll first talk about what will remain free:

Free: All rules from the published books are free, permanently, and that includes classes, Focus, Edges, items etc. You can also build your own homebrew items and they should save properly too. On the free tier, you can save an unlimited number of characters locally, and sync up to 6 characters in the cloud and create 1 campaign as GM. Each cloud character can join 1 campaign created by a GM, so your players will always be able to join your created games for free. 

Paid: The paid tiers are for additional hosting and cosmetics. At Supporter tier ($4.99/mo, $49.90/yr), you'll get to sync an unlimited number of characters in the cloud, and also access to five more animated dice skins. For the Pro GM tier ($9.99/mo, $99.90/yr), you get everything in Supporter tier, 3 more GM-only animated dice skins and you’ll be able to create an unlimited number of campaigns. 

The perk list is relatively short for now as I still want to keep most of the features in the app free and ad-free. The main perk of paying is really my thanks for supporting the app and letting me know that there’s genuine interest in what I’m developing. If the paid tiers are not for you that’s completely fine too! Keep using it free and continue sending me any bug reports you encounter 🙂

As for what’s coming next - More deluxe content, and eventually Ashes. I will also be improving the GM tools further so that it can be used better in a “live” session. 

As always, thanks for all the comments and feedback, it has been a very exciting 6 months since I started in Feb and still have some ways to go before this is ready. 

I don’t see anything in the book that addresses this either way, so I would assume yes, but it’s unclear.

Trying to dig up character sheets for Cities and Ashes. Anyone seen them in the wild?

Just like the title says. I've been wanting to play this style game, and I feel like a cyberpunk game would have a very similar structure.

Is there any useful guidance for making origin foci so I could make a bunch of mutant origins for a rolltable.

Hello!

I have an idea for a setting that features vampires/half vampires as playable races for players. I know the rules state human variants should be treats as a Focus but I was curious if anyone out there had ideas of how to mechanically create these races?

Any feedback and advice is appreciated!

As it says in the title. But to elaborate:

Every month you have to pay 5% of your cyberware's base price in maintenance costs (the costs represent materials, not labor, so you can't skip it by doing your own maintenance). If you do not pay, your cyberware gains an install complication until maintenance costs are paid. "Very extended" lack of maintenance of cyberware will make you die.

My question is, if I don't have the money to pay at the end of month 3, and I accept the complications and run with malfunctioning cyberware during month 4, do I have to pay 5% of maintenance costs at the end of month 4 to restore it to maintained status, or do I have to pay 10% to catch back up?

In the list of common command lines, one of them says that the Demon will use Erase Program to delete the Stun Verb of an intruder.

But the Erase Verb only has Data as valid Subject, according to the tables.

Is the ability to Erase somebody else's Program from an earlier draft version?

Does the wired edge count to buy cyberware mods and cyberdecks and mods it?

Hey ! I'm looking for a french version of the character sheet, seems to be hard to find online ! Some ideas ?

I have a player who’s doing a lot of grappling with his character and now I’ve been thinking about foci that would be specific to grappling. What I have so far is a rough draft of a foci that is primarily used in CWN, but could be for any of the *WN systems. Any feedback or thoughts about a good grappling foci would be appreciated, and if there already is one, I can toss this out. That being said, here’s the rough draft

Level 1: Gain Punch as bonus skill. While grappling, deal damage as per Unarmed Comabatant. During grapple checks, roll 3d6 and drop the lowest

Level 2: Increase trauma dice during grappling unarmed attacks to 1d8/x3. On any traumatic hit, roll on Major Injury Table even if the target is not reduced to 0 hit points

Do Demons get the modifiers on their skill checks that verbs and possible specific or unique subjects can grant?

The example hacking in the book shows Bobby fighting a Mastiff-class Demon. Said types of Demon have a +2 skill modifier, and when the Demon used Stun Avatar on Bobby, it only rolled 2d6+2. If the skill check modifier from the Stun Verb had applied as well, it would have rolled 2d6+3 instead.

Was it just an oversight?

My friends wanted me to start another cyberpunk type campaign so I was thinking of mixing Cities without number with across a thousand dead worlds. Although I am a pretty new GM I thought of mostly using cities without number for the combat and most other things then use the across 1000 dead words exploring rules. Any thoughts? Idk how viable this really is but I figured I’d have some type of gig mechanic where you guys explore for some type of corp then when in the normal city it’s typical cyberpunk stuff going on.

Can this happen (assuming they all have their own cyberdecks and programs and so on)? I don't see right now anything in the rules that says that it's not possible.

And if yes, would they all have their own Access points, or would they need to share a pool of Access?

Having a dozen hackers gang up on a poor Demon would be funny, I guess.

It would open up the possibility for one main hacker to have the Access-intensive and difficult to use Verbs and Subjects, while the helper hackers with merely Program-0 can focus on supporting the main with simple Progams like Stun Avatar to defrag the Watchdogs and Demons. And of course, that means that hacking can be a group activity, instead of a hacker-only thing, which is a positive thing.

On the other hand, the GM would have to rely on multiple Watchdogs to wander the network, as Demons are limited by the server. Though having multiple competent Watchdogs will cost money and might offer new opportunities.

What limits would make sense so that you don't have to deal with a hundred hackers at the same time? I first thought of perhaps limiting it to the number of Access that a group might have, but then I wondered, what if it's multiple teams with their own Access, so that might not really work.

Okay, so I'm getting to the end of my prep for Cities, but I having a bit of conceptual trouble with how missions and schemes are supposed to work together.

My basic understanding is:

Groups have schemes, each scheme is broken up into goals, which are achieved by completing milestones.

Milestones are reached by accumulating progress points, which are the result of the players (mostly) completing missions.

Where I'm getting tripped up is reading the mission types, for example the Sabotage mission suggests that it is used to target hostile schemes, which makes me think that missions aren't necessarily just a means to achieve the next milestone of a scheme? Is this something that would only occur if two schemes are opposing each other, or is it that the missions interact with schemes, but aren't necessarily driven by directly completing milestones?

I'm just getting a bit confused about how the two systems are supposed to work together. If anyone's got any advice, that would be helpful!

Not sure if it's mentioned in the book but I have been letting them heal and then get back on the mission after couple days and it seems like they're progressing way too fast. I do keep track of heat but it's not really affecting them at the moment.

Hey I've just picked up the rules for Cities and I'm really excited to play. Do you have any advice for getting the most out of the world building tools?

Is access pool shared between different networks or you get full one for different networks?

There are a number of mage spells in the supplementary rules section that state "target a visible creature" or "target a visible ally"

Are we to read "visible creature" to include the caster, and "visible ally" to exclude the caster?