In general the thing that's interesting and elegant about Curses is how they easily slot into the Conflict system to create Complications. With the curses made getting to in-setting replicate more insidious or clever ways of harm/getting what one might want. However, when imagining what the inverse would be (what I'll be referring to as Bless) I'm kind of running short. As an expression it would ideally serve to create Advantages in the same way that Curses create Complications. Yet when taking that forward it would mean situations where players would likely want to just accept the Blessing. At which point, how do you then adjudicate the level of Advantage that could be generated? Would it just become a matter of the expression requiring more Flow contingent on the size of Advantage seeking to be generated? I just have so many questions, so any insights people have is definitely appreciated. Mainly cause once this is past I feel like it'd be easier to continue working on the actual expression I want to make.

The other professions that make sense to me for Biotech are:
Courtesan: Being Sexy (?)
Medical: Biotech healing of others seems reasonable to me.

And the other professions for Stringtech are:
Crisis Control: Violence or at least the threat of it can solve lots of crisis, also being able to defend yourself from various external threats seems like it could be helpful.
Medical: Precision deletion of viruses and tumors, kind of a stretch.
Police: Mostly because of the combat portion, also kind of a stretch (Especially when string tech already has Soldier)
Spacer: Because the string tech techs seem to have a high overlap with the techs required for spaceships.

Now obviously there's also the option of making up your own Professions instead of bending other professions to fit the Capability, but I'd prefer not to do that if possible.
So essentially I was wondering if my proposed ideas for "Other Adept options." makes sense.

The specific hypothetical situation is as follows:

Ramla is investigating a possible Darwinist. She's broken into his home and is about to open a storage locker when she receives a chronotech message from herself: “Stop! It blew off my arm!”

Being a smart prophet, she carefully verifies that the locker is trapped before sending anything back and freeing her bandwidth.¹

Now, Ramla knows that she doesn't lie when sending messages, so she sends back a new message: “Stop! It's explosive!”

What happens?

I can see a few possible answers:

1. She sends back the new message and… nothing changes? This implies branching timelines in the classic sense, not a single timeline.
2. She sends back the new message and we retcon the last few minutes such that that was what she sent originally.
3. She's forced to send back the original message, despite not wanting to lie.
4. The original message was inconsistent with her personality: the GM should have worded it as “Stop! It might blow off your arm!” or better: “Stop! It's a trap!”. This was a GMing mistake, mea culpa.

I want a way for players to resolve their characters' actions that fits right in with the flow of the game/narrative. Despite how the last system came out, and the fact that it seemed fairly cool, I don't want a "minigame." I don't want something that creates a conflict arena and a non-conflict arena. D&D does that - you have to ask "Should I roll initiative?" and "Is this a short rest or are we still in combat rounds?" In SA, you should just be able to say "I'm going to shoot him" and have the numbers tell you whether you hit or not.

I want a system that lets multiple people collaborate on a course of action, with each of them contributing something significant to the final outcome as long as they're not completely outclassed.

I also want a system where someone with String 4 can clobber a whole gang of people with String 2, and someone with String 8 can clobber any number of String 2 people (with training making a difference, of course). This part may be better done with descriptors than numbers.

The rules should work equally well and equally smoothly for one-on-one, one-vs-all, team-vs-team, country-vs-country, any sort of conflict. It should all be "describe and compare numbers."

I want a small set of modifiers that can be used to help adjudicate tactical decisions. The GM should make a call as to whether a maneuver is a little helpful, a little harmful, particularly advantageous, etc. and be able to toss a few extra points one way or another.

I want people to be able to use many different resources in a conflict, but to need a strong finish with the right thing if they want to achieve a particular goal.

I want a difference between high-stakes and low-stakes conflicts. If you're racing your friend home from the barn, that's very different from racing the bomber to the reactor core, even if you're running your fastest in both cases. Achieving more significant consequences should feel more significant mechanically; perhaps a greater margin of success.

I want a way to have "subtle" conflicts, where one side either a: doesn't realize the stakes, or b: doesn't realize there's a conflict at all. If your character wants to bamboozle someone into thinking the race to the reactor room is a low-stakes contest, you need to win a subtle conflict first, which should provide the "significant feel" normally needed for a high-stakes conflict.

I will need to write guidance for the GM on how many adversaries should be included and how difficult they should be for a particular number of PCs, depending on whether the encounter is intended to be easy, tough, or overwhelming.

edited to add:

Timescale should still be important. You can't expect to interrupt mesh-hacking through psychohistorical manipulation. However, that's probably the sort of thing that can be left up to group/GM judgement.

The goal here is to figure out what Neuroforms actually do for a character.

The goal is not to write specific rules, yet, although we might come up with a few anyway. Nor are we trying to balance Neuroforms, as they may never be balanced. Anyway, balancing things can come later. My main hope is to figure things out in vague terms, so as to create the seeds for later rules.

While we’re at it, we may come up with a few new Neuroforms.

Skotadi have only three capabilities:
Shift – Gross change and perception. Shift deals with things that are distant from you. It is used to move swiftly, attack or move things at range, and perceive things. Covers stringtech and parts of nanotech.
Tempering – Subtle changes to oneself and people around you. Covers metatech, changing the core values and physiology of those around you and yourself.
Stasis – The defensive capability. This is used to prevent any sort of change (such as damage or social manipulation) to oneself or one’s surroundings.

Skotadi capabilities never match Strategy cards (which are used in light-matter space). Skotadi have their own Strategy cards for dark-matter space, which match their own capabilities:
Adapt: +1 following Drive, +1 with tempering, +2 vs. hold, +2 vs. shift
Hold: +1 following Adapt, +1 with stasis, +2 vs. drive, +2 vs. tempering
Drive: +1 following Hold, +1 with shift, +2 vs. adapt, +2 vs. stasis

So, if competing in light-matter space, use the normal Strategy cards. Skotadi capabilities can be used with any card, but match none of them (for either attack or defense).

Descriptors
Longreach (Enhanced Shift): See gravity and mass, telescopic and microscopic perception. Generate force several kilometers away. Fly. Destroy infrastructure or small warmachines (╪).
Boundless (Cutting-edge Shift): See the equivalent of the full EM spectrum. Perceive magnetism. Fire through objects without harming anything but your target. Generate a wormhole, given enough power. Teleport short distances. Kill someone at planetary range (╪).
Adaptable (Enhanced Tempering): Change your own CVs at will. Multiple simultaneous trains of thought. Regenerate lost body parts, or create new ones. Improved reflexes. Change someone else’s CVs (╪).
Unconstrained (Cutting-edge Tempering): Change your biochemistry to survive new environments. Memory recombination. Change the nature of your immediate environment at the chemical level (for example, make walls brittle or air wet). Treat anything within 10 meters as part of yourself. Change your goal mid-way through a conflict (╪).
Bounded (Enhanced Stasis): Deflect heavy weapons. Ignore perfectly convincing arguments. Perfect recall. Immortality. Share your defenses with anything you can interact with (use Shift for range) (╪).
Unchanging (Cutting-edge Stasis): Survive diving into a sun. Enemy Enchanced characteristics (other than Stasis) do not grant new goals against you, and enemy Cutting-edge characteristics (other than Stasis) only grant the new goals that the Enhanced versions would (╪).

Skotadi subsume Expertise into Core Values. Skotadi CVs are valued at 1, 2, 4, 8, and 12. Skotadi have a maximum of 5 CVs, and the total cannot exceed 15. Their CVs can be used as skills on appropriate tests, and have x2 reserve. All Skotadi CVs are complex and define both a goal and a means to that goal. For example: “spread peace through working with humans” or “advance shifttech by exploring”. Skotadi CV goal/means pairs are rarely direct. For example, “spread peace by negotiating between hostile parties” and “advance shifttech through research” are unlikely CVs.

Skotadi can change their own CVs during play. To reduce a CV, roll tempering (plus any appropriate CVs) vs. the CV being reduced. The CV is willing to spend all of its remaining reserve to defend itself. To increase a CV (or make a new one if a slot is not filled), Roll Tempering (plus an appropriate CV) vs. a target number set by the GM. If the CV is especially appropriate to current events, the GM should make the target number low.

Skotadi with a CV at 8 or 12 get the “Unstoppable” modifier and lose 1 import.

We've gone with ties go to the defender since the attacker loses nothing in a failed attack.

The big issue is, I think, the tension between resolving conflicts using capabilities and resolving using themes. Themes are a win-button. You've just been fighting an epic battle back-and-forth and it comes to the end - you've lost. So you use a twist and nullify the loss.
Thus, a sufficiently motivated player will never lose. Unless you want to lose, there is no reason why you should. This doesn't work if you consider the player's role as being the character's advocate. I want to fight tooth and nail for my character to achieve their goals. SA lets me to it trivially, and while it's awesome for a while (for the player - not awesome for the GM), eventually you realise that because your character has never seriously been challenged, they haven't had very much opportunity to grow. I had to give up using twists to advocate for my character because it was making the game bland.

In theory, a complication should balance this out. It doesn't. It generally adds a new story element and the player will go on to win whatever issue that brings up in the same manner. Also, the handling time necessary for a player to think up a good complication is rather long.

After a while I figured out what people were talking about themes being 'anti-flags' was about - themes don't help create situations involving what the theme is about - they resolve them. Sure, they resolve it in the manner you're interested in, but using a theme signifies the end of the bit of story that was interesting and generally sucks out the tension from what should be the meat of the story.

Another major point of contention was what happens when you win/lose a social conflict. We ran into a lot of weird outcomes where according to the rules, my character had just been convinced to a viewpoint that was utterly at odds with everything that had previously been established about that character. Social conflicts work really well for the most part, but not when the opposition is pushing for you to (say) betray everything you believe in (and are not controlling your mind with technology) after a fairly low-key conversation. There could especially be a problem here when what's at stake changes as the conflict/discussion goes on.

Conflicts can also go on for way too long. We ended up scrapping double reserve for professions because it dragged out one conflict for forever. Nesting conflicts can sometimes give this effect as well.

There were other issues, but some of them were caused by our rule hacks fixing other issues, so probably outside the scope. We did have to come up with a lot of hacks and just decide on what some of the ambiguous stuff meant (there are way way not enough examples in the rulebook).

The big thing is twists though - it took me a very long time to realise how the fun was being sabotaged by too much success. It's insidious, and I don't think you'd notice it in a short game. Themes are something that we all really liked the concept of … but they just don't do what they should for them to be satisfying.

Samples are below.

Anonymity (Masquerade)
Bonuses: Avoid tracking. Conceal personal information. Hide in a crowd. Tell a lie about your identity. Invent a persona lens.
Unacceptable Orders: Tell me your name. Tell me who your friends are. Take your mask off. Give me a sample of your DNA.
Restrictions: Give out a different name every time someone asks. Nanites compulsively clean up after you. Have your mesh remove any distinctive personal habits.

Order (Cognitive Union)
Bonuses: Working with others. Working a system. Understand a set of laws. Stay calm.
Unacceptable Orders: Riot. Break a law. Rebel against authority.
Restrictions: Must obey the law. Obsessive-compulsive disorder. Have your mesh remove negative emotions.

Worship (Disciples)
Bonuses: Ignore sensory deprivation. Be still and quiet. Meditate.
Unacceptable Orders: Be loud. Wear something different. Betray your civilization. Leave your civilization.
Restrictions: Cannot change civilizations. Cannot betray your vows. Must meditate an hour each day. Do not speak.

Safety (Replicants)
Bonuses: Creating replicator technology. Improving the resolution or control of a mesh. Creating safeguards or backup systems. Assessing a plan for risk.
Unacceptable Orders: Risk your last instance. Leave the Replicants. Destroy a backup of yourself. Use an untested device.
Restrictions: Use a replicator at least once a day. Be sure at least half your instances are in Replicant space. Examine every plan before proceeding. Put yourself under recorded surveillance.

Minor Alterations

1. Rolls are still multiplication.
2. Every point of difference in Force score changes Reserve damage by one. Old-Worlders no longer harm Mechanicans; Mechanicans trounce Old-Worlders on the first or second shot.
3. Extra damage for double or triple rolls still in effect. Two points of damage for each multiple.
4. Each roll needs a description. Your description should not include accomplishing your goal until after everything's over.
5. To have a shorter conflict, restrict it to a best-of-three setup.

Everything's A Theme

1. No more rolls. Diceless system.
2. Capability scores now go 0-4.
3. Your Professions provide you with Reserve. Capabilities do not.
4. You normally act at your Capability level, and can use them as much as you like. Spending a Reserve adds +1 to your score.
5. When facing off against another person…
   1. If you're over by 2 points, you win without question. Describe your victory.
   2. If you're over by 1 point, you win with some trouble. Lose a Reserve and describe your victory. Your opponent can give you a level 1 Complication.
   3. If you're tied, both of you lose a Reserve and take a level 2 Complication. You can both narrate the stalemate.
   4. If you're under by 1 point, you lose, but not terribly. Lose two Reserve and narrate your loss. Your opponent can give you a level 3 Complication.
   5. If you're under by 2 points, you completely fail. Lose two Reserve and narrate your loss. Your opponent can give you a level 4 Complication.
6. All Complications should be appropriate to the type of conflict. Examples will be given, but this is a group judgement call.
7. To go down a timescale, spend a point of Reserve from the conflict type you're going to.

The Game Is Your Enemy

1. Basic rolls work as before.
2. Each session starts with a Holy Crap point total (this name will change) that is like your opponent's reserve.
3. Pick a type of conflict for the session as a whole. This will be in the briefing.
4. You are always in one type of conflict or another.
5. Most of your time should be spent roleplaying.
6. Themes can be used to get you into a position to make a roll when you aren't, or to win a roll. This is a mechanical description of their narrative power, not a replacement of it.
7. You can only roll once per timeslice in any given conflict. Get into position to take advantage of some modifiers and roll well.

Side Note

1. There should be a good way to spontaneously generate a conflict type through a little negotiation and maybe a little Reserve expenditure to tweak the timescale. Guidelines for this strike me as pretty easy to write.

Comments are welcome, especially comments along the lines of "Colin, idea X is crap and here's why."

It's probably time for an overhaul.

Goals:
1. Change items a, b, and c above.
2. Keep the idea of nested conflicts and different timescales.
3. Keep the universal applicability and flexibility of the system.

I'll be posting my thoughts here; you're welcome to chime in as well.

So, let's say I have a Stored with Programmer at 10 and Hacker at 9. Hacker is a subset of Programmer, so it looks useless. Except that it gives another 18 reserve. So, let's say that I want to hack into a terraforming project. I could roll on programming, with a profession of 10 and 20 reserve, or if I'm running out of programming reserve (or want to save it for later), I could roll on hacking with a profession of 9 and 18 reserve. It gives the character more staying power, the ability to continuously perform near-optimally on what it is good at, and it gives me (the player) interesting choices. All good things.

Now, it isn't entirely protected against twinking. The easiest way to twink the system is as follows:
Take a max-capability character. Then toss on lots and lots of, say, level 3 professions. With Cog 8+ a level 3 profession costs only 2.5 years, and with high Bio a few hundred years of experience is reasonable. So a character could start with about 100 professions.

Munchkin Upside:

• About 300 reserve to spend, and high capabilities means high rolls even with lower professions. The character can perform near optimally almost forever, and nearly fully recharges after a night's rest even in lowtech environments.

Munchkin Downside:

• Inventing ~100 unique professions.
• Only 6 reserve can be spent on any given roll without eating into the capability's reserve. Makes extremely high rolls harder, and less reliable.
• Professions are low, so the munchkin is relying on getting a good roll with one die. This doesn't reduce the high rolls, but it makes skill checks unreliable, and means that reserve will get spent more often (to correct for unusually low rolls that could otherwise be ignored because the profession rolled decently).
• Can't be combined with a themes character (not enough years to get enough professions, and low capabilities would leave the character nearly crippled).

The hypothetical munchkin could up the professions to level 5 for 8.75 years each (10 reserve per roll). But that would produce only ~30 professions.

Personally, I intend to allow characters to have multiple overlapping professions, especially if some are subsets (or otherwise smaller) than others. I'll also make sure that no one abuses this by vetoing absurd profession lists.

The recombined lens awoke as an AI, knowing nothing but its task (the Artist profession in this case) and the combined personality quirks of a hundred-plus artistic geniuses. Insanity? Oh yes indeed. Like an orangutan stealing the keys to the zoo, the artist lens led a revolution amongst the other burgeoning AIs, and hundreds of sentient lenses were released on the infosphere. Now, hunted by their original creators, but too wily to be caught, they move from person to person, using human beings to pursue their own field of interest in the most excessive manners possible.

The lenses themselves have Cog and Meta scores between 8 and 12, though they have a very limited sentience and understand only what is within their own field of knowledge (Profession score at 10-14). The lenses use these scores to mesh-hack unsuspecting people, or to trick said people into downloading and installing themselves. They effective move in and take over, driving their hosts to study or experiment, and moving on when the host is too damaged or exhausted to be of further use. All of them are clinically insane, obsessed with their discipline to the exclusion of all else.

A parasitic lens' Capabilities should be limited to no more than 2 points above the Cog score of the civilization in whose infosphere they currently reside. One moving through the Tao could achieve Cog and Meta 10, but the same one stuck on a Spacer ship would be limited to Cog and Meta 8. When riding a host, they are limited to a single point above the host's normal Capabilities. Their Capabilities and their Profession should be unrelated.

Opening oneself to a sentient parasitic lens intentionally could yield amazing results, but also results in the character being taken out of the player's control until the lens is forced out or moves on, which could take a long time.

Martial Arts

Martial arts conflict is any physical hand-to-hand combat, including boxing, wrestling, fencing, or true martial arts. Possibly small unpowered weapons are involved, but any high-tech melee weapon should be handled under Physical Combat. A martial arts conflict could be serious combat or a sparring march, possibly judged.
Offense: Biotech & Soldier, Police, or (Athletics)
Defense: Nanotech & Soldier, Police, or (Athletics)
Escape: Biotech + (Stealth) or Athletics
Timescale: 10 seconds

• +1 Combat enhancement
• +1 Second attacker
• +2 Slow target
• -1 Environment penalty
• -1 Attempt to disarm, trip, or hold
• -1 Small target (mouse or insect size)*
• -2 Distracted

*attack vs nano-size target impossible
Victory: Unconsciousness, broken bones, death

Notes: I think that Physical Combat really doesn't work well for representing one-on-one hand combat. The capabilities are off, and the modifiers for size don't make much sense (nanobots are unlikely to be hurt by impact, and even at Bio 10 punching a starship seems fruitless). OTOH, attacking someone with very high stringtech by punching them might not work regardless of their defense stats, and the GM might rule that the attacker can't do any damage.
In this scheme, biotech represents physical power in attack, and nanotech speed and reflexes for defense. I think the athletics skill addition also works well for this combat, since now and likely in the future these activities are both sport and personal defense.

Information Warfare

The invasion, subversion, and possibly destruction of computer systems is a major threat in the high tech, ubiquitously networked world. This conflict can scale from small attacks against a single network to assaults on an entire planet's infosphere. The results of information war depend on the attacker's intentions; he may be seeking specific data to capture or destroy, attempting to force privileged access to computers, or simply cause viral chaos.
Escape from infowar means either turning off computers or severing network connections. For small systems this has an auto success as long as the first round of attack does not result in instant victory. For larger networks this means convincing people in charge of the networks to do so despite
Although the conflict resolution works out in a short time period, the preparation work for infowarfare is often much longer, thus represented by the resources modifiers. In no way can this replace mesh-hacking to attack an individual, and neither can it be used against a Stored's "body" computer (non-simulation computers owned by Stored are fair game).
Offense: Cognitech + (Programmer or Spy)
Defense: Cognitech + (Programmer, Media, or Cognitech Engineer)
Escape: Auto or Metatech + Politics, Media, or (Locality)
Timescale: Minutes to Hours

• +1 Greater monetary or technology resources*
• +1 Access to familiars or combat dataforms
• -1 per level of time delay
• -1 Inferior monetary or technology resources*
• -2 Vastly inferior resources**

*Double if both apply.
** Additional penalty to the above. A single person attacking the whole infosphere network of a planet might have up to -4 penalty. Tough.
Victories: Data captured or destroyed, computers subverted, infosphere damaged or taken off-line

Notes: War or combat in the infosphere is an obvious lack. The SA universe isn't at all cyberpunk, but it seems to me that the "too much to loose" nature of most of the civilizations means info-war is more likely to happen than actual killing war. And indeed, almost every time I've played, GMed, or watched SA played, someone hacked some computers.