System
The game rules for Underground is an adaptation of the Mayfair Exponential Game System, originally developed at Mayfair Games for the earlier DC Heroes roleplaying game depicting the DC Universe. However the rules were modified to depict lower-powered characters and a more deadly setting.
The Underground game books had color-coded text. Each line of text in the books was colored differently if it was part of the rules, an example of game play, optional rules, or fiction and exposition for the setting.
As part of the political and social nature of the game, and to encourage games to be about righting the many wrongs in the setting, the designer included Parameter Rules, a mechanism wherein the players could change the entire setting. The rules allowed the players to change the parameters of an area, or even the country or the whole world. The drawback is that affecting one parameter (like Quality of Life or Education), would adjust another (like Take-Home Pay or Wealth). The players, because they are heroes, can change parameters without penalties if they perform actions that lead to change, with enough time and effort.
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Famous quotes containing the word system:
“Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humiliation and misery. Injustice sustained at the exact degree of necessary tension to turn the cogs of the huge machine-for- the-making-of-rich-men, without bursting the boiler.”
—Georges Bernanos (1888–1948)
“Science is a system of statements based on direct experience, and controlled by experimental verification. Verification in science is not, however, of single statements but of the entire system or a sub-system of such statements.”
—Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970)
“Society cannot share a common communication system so long as it is split into warring factions.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)