Game Mechanics

Welcome to the engine room. These pages document the real systems and equations the game runs every time you act: your odds before you take a shot, how much a hit will actually hurt, why you keep getting hungrier. The actual math is all here.

Start with Skill Checks. It's the dice engine behind almost everything else, so once it clicks, the rest of these pages read a lot faster.

How it all connects

Most of these systems exist to push and pull on a handful of stateful meters your character carries: health, the lasting wounds spread across your body parts, and the metabolism meters that tick down every heartbeat: hunger, arousal, and (for synthetics) battery. The diagram shows what feeds and drains each one, and how the skill check engine sits behind every action that does.

flowchart TD DMG["Damage Reduction"] -->|"hits that land"| HP DMG -->|"crit or over grit"| WND TRT["Wound Treatment"] -->|"medic / surgery"| WND FOOD["Food and Rations"] -->|"eat and drink"| HUN CHG["Recharge / swap cell"] -->|"synthetics"| BAT AUG["Mutation and Cyberware"] -->|"max health, soak, stats"| HP subgraph SELF["You"] direction LR HP["Health"] WND["Wounds<br/>(per body part)"] subgraph MET["Metabolism"] direction TB HUN["Hunger / satiety"] HOR["Arousal"] BAT["Battery (synths)"] end end WND -->|"bleeding drains"| HP HUN -->|"sets healing rate"| HP SEX["Sex"] -->|"each round banks"| HOR HOR -->|"climax, then decays"| SEX SKC{{"Skill Checks: the dice behind every action"}} SKC -.->|resolves| DMG SKC -.->|resolves| SEX SKC -.->|resolves| TRT

Where to go next

Page	What it covers
Skill Checks	The dice engine behind every action: stats, the difficulty curve, luck, criticals, and degrees of success. Read this first.
Damage Reduction	How an incoming hit becomes lost health — defense rolls, armor soak, shields, and the mitigation math.
Wounds & Treatment	What lasting wounds do, how bleeding and healing work, and the mechanics of patching yourself and others up.
Firearms	The firing side of ranged combat: landing the shot, accuracy, rate of fire, ammunition, and penetration.
Crafting	Turning materials into goods: the skill check, components and tools, work time, and how quality is decided.
Progression	The big picture on growing your character: how attributes, skills, and permanent upgrades fit together.
Progression: Skills	Attributes vs. skills, learning by doing, and the lifetime cap that forces you to specialize.
Progression: Augmentation	Mutations and cyberware: permanent body modification that lifts your stats, soak, and abilities.
Progression: Ascensions	Remort: reset your character for a permanent bonus and a higher XP cap, growing stronger each loop.
Sex	Arousal, pleasure, compatibility, orgasm, and the equations behind all of it.
Food (Satiety & Rations)	Hunger over time, eating and drinking, spoilage, and why staying fed helps you heal.

A note on the numbers

The values in these pages are the live tuning constants at the time of writing, exposed on purpose so you can weigh risk against reward. Expect them to get retuned over time. The shapes of the curves are far more stable than the exact coefficients, so the intuition you build here will keep paying off.