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:
“New York is more now than the sum of its people and buildings. It makes sense only as a mechanical intelligence, a transporter system for the daily absorbing and nightly redeploying of the human multitudes whose services it requires.”
—Peter Conrad (b. 1948)
“The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.”
—Socrates (469–399 B.C.)