Interface-Zero, or: How player characters can end up dying from breaking a sweat...

Dear Mr. Jarvis, dear Ladies and Gents at GunMetalGames!

While browsing on DriveThru-RPG.com recently, i stumbled upon a
setting named “Interface Zero” (by GunMetalGames) for Savage Worlds, so i
downloaded their “Betatest”-PDF (It’s not really a betatest pdf but
rather the “pre-release” version of the player part of the campaign
setting pdf) for free there.

So, what is IZ about?

Well, to cut a long story short: It’s a cyberpunk transhumanist
setting with added dystopian angst plus furries, androids, eugenic
humans and mutant critters thrown in.

So i took a glance at it, printed it out for personal use and
spiralbound it for reading pleasure and began reading.

The setting itself seems to be sort of a “mishmash”. It reminds me of
Cyberpunk, parts of Genetech and Eclipse Phase combined with elements
of Babylon 5 (it has psions in it) and several others.

Not bad at all. Seems rather like a grim & gritty setting in which
the players ought to play the known-and-overused run-of-the-mill
cyberpunk archetypes hired out by corporates “Joneses”.

Alas, a boring, but wellknown trope.

The setting description itself is rather so-so, but there’s a
sentence in the flavor text that made me go “WTF?!?”

Quote:

“Parents … could also select their child’s … sex, and sexual
orientation…”

(Interface Zero Betatest PDF, “Genetic engineering, tailoring and
splicing”, p.13)

This is… not good, to say the least, due to several reasons:

1st: The issue of biological gender gestating is highly debated in
science still. Chromosomal gender is just ONE variable in the equation.

2nd: Development of sexual orientation is a highly debated process among
scientists. Attributing it to one’s DNA is… not good, to say at least.
It gives away that a culturally not accepted sexual orientation is due
to “aberrant” DNA and might/can/ought to be “purged” from the DNA. Down
this path lies a thinking that made inhumane things possible. Here you
go, Godwin’s Law.

To be honest, after if read and understood the (even if unwanted)
inherent implication i skipped the rest of the setting flavor and read
the mechanics part only.

So, you want your setting to be grim&gritty, so you made the
setting by default use the grim&gritty damage rules option as seen
with “Crime City” by PEG.

Ok, i can handle that, so i read about the cyberware rules and was,
baffled, in a way…

You say that cyberware needs to be expensive and has to come along
with drawbacks…

Ok, i get that, but why does it have to be double to twenty times as
expensive as the versions Wiggy included in the Sci-Fi toolkits? Why do
you change the rules core of Savage Worlds by denying players the effect
of bennies with regard to vigor rolls? (Go read p.27 “Bennies and the
vigor roll”)

Why should a character die due to cybertrauma of a piece of cyberware
he paid a shipload of cash for? (10000$ the least for “gutterware”
implant, that will likely kill or cripple your character the first
instance you have to make a vigor roll, even due to fatigue, and roll on
the funny cybertrauma table that’ll make your character bleed out
instantly if he rolls a 1 or 2 on a d20, in this case.)

You think it’s “gritty”? I think it’s highly unfair and very
unattractive to play a Sam with your setting, due to the fact that even
if can get rid of body-related hindrances via cyberware/bioware he has
to pay it off by spending an Advance.

BTW: What about “Add, don’t change” or “trim the fat”? Why do you
fiddle with the bennie mechanics?

Next is the hacking chapter, which is oddly complicated and not
simple enough to make it run fast and furious in a Savage Worlds game
style, at least in my opinion.

Oh, and the setting does have psions. But, pardon me, wtf is “Arcane
Background (Mentalist)”?

Did you even read the SWEX?

There’s no such thing as a “Arcane Background (Mentalist)” edge. It’s
either the “Arcane Background (Psionics)” or the professional edge
“Mentalist”, so what exactly do you mean?

It’s to be assumed the former, but who might know.

Let aside the fact that psychic characters are not generated like in
normal SWEX games, but have to make a smarts(!) roll before they are
allowed to even take the edge and select powers, which may be chosen
from the list of available powers given in the pdf.

There’s an ingame “justification” given for this restricting and odd
setting rule, but the weirdness continues… A character may choose the
psionics background edge later, but only at points when he advances from
one rank to the next, but he has to roll smarts then also.

Next up is the “Rep” chapter, which i will leave out because it resulted
in violent headshaking while i was reading it.

At the end of the pdf there’s the races chapter, that has got such
niceties like androids, hybrids (Half human, half animal), simulacrums
(sterilized eugenic clones) and even plain humans.

If you want to min/max, take a hybrid, put some nice major&minor
physical hindrances into its design, and then take some nice eugenicly
designed abilities to counter for the flaws, and to top it off, they
even get a free edge, like humans do, who all in all get the shaft like
androids do in this setting.

The pdf closes with a list of occupational samples aka “Jobs your
character might work as when he’s not acting the measly paid prostitute
of a corporation in a dystopic world where even breaking a sweat can
kill your first level streetsam” which even gives income numbers for
starting characters and how much money they earn when they advance a
level…

Sorry for my harsh oppinion on this setting, GMG, but this setting
still SCREAMS “I AM A T20 SETTING!” from most of it pages. And not in a
good way, sorry. The framework is STILL d20/T20, and that’s what i got
from the PDF, although i’ve never even played T20 at all.

Although the credits and the introduction told me that you cooperated
with PEG, it seems to me no one did actually really proofread this for
errors and glitches, let alone streamline the flavor-related mechanics
with respect to how this would work out in Savage Worlds.

For example, there’s a sentence of the races chapter, under “Human
2.0″(p.54, special ability “Savant”) that is so sloppily written it is
almost unintelligible gibberish, quote:

“…Savant: Choose one skill linked to your Advanced
ability trait.

You gain a free d6 when using that skill. …”

What does that mean?

Does the character gain the skill at d6 permanently at character
creation?

Does he get to roll a d6 as untrained, so d6-2?

Or does he get an additional wild die when rolling?

Sorry, don’t get me wrong, i like most of the idea(s) behind IZ, but:

• This setting needs IMHO a major rules overhaul, because you seem to
  have converted not only the setting, but the rules mechanics too. The
  rules sections need to be cut down and clarified.
• You fiddle with a core rule of SWEX by taking away / crippling a
  bennie’s effect. That’s not cool, that’s an almost secure way how to
  frustrate players or make them not want to play cyber-enhanced
  characters. BTW: Bennies cannot be spent on table rolls, so even a
  player character with vigor d12 is doomed for certain if he has
  gutterware and rolls a 1 or 2 on the cybertrauma table.
• Gritty damage, ok. Gritty damage rules with this cyberware rules? No
  way. That’s the steepest downward spiral i’ve ever seen in a role
  playing game.
• The internal layout/organization of the pdf, pardon my harsh
  oppinion, is a mess. I had to thumb several times through the whole pdf
  to pick all setting rule bits to get the rules of IZ. Take a look at the
  other settings for Savage Worlds and how they’re done. The layout’s
  readability and accessability are common to the well done campaign
  settings for Savage Worlds, those have one clear chapter for the rules
  frameworks and one for the setting description, and they’re not
  intermingled like it’s the case with “Interface Zero”.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a bad setting, not at all.

But its presentation is just plain bad, at least regarding my
expectations i had for the product.

Fix the glitches, “trim the fat”, reread and redo the rules mechanics
parts for once, and take out the thing about the sex-related eugenics
and i’d like to buy your setting happily.

If not… well, your setting, your decision. But don’t ask for honest
feedback, then.

Best regards

The Heretic

p.s.: The Interface Zero Betatest PDF can be downloaded at
DriveThru-RPG.com by anyone who wants to take a look at the setting.
It’s worth the look, although it got me quite disappointed at some
point.