Clockwork Men and Clockwork Cats & Dogs

Breaking the Programming

An entry for game-fu 3 by Gavken
Elements used:
All Life is Mechanical
Become Something Greater
No character advancement, just enhancement
People are heavily divided into 3 tiers
Mechanism where other players have input on the design of your character
Author's Description:
Some Clockbots however have started to malfunction and want something more. They start to want to be something greater than mere slaves to routine tradition.
Those Clockbots have banded together to escape as they rely on each other to keep each other wound and to avoid the Security Clockbots determined to deactivate and “fix” them.
Vitenka's review:
It's got lovely art! Squeee!
Asimov, good good.
Some editing snafu in the fiction - the masters appear to die out AFTER they've all left. I thnk I get it, though.
Stats before rules. Bad bad. Forward references of jargon are bad.
Slightly complicated table for spending build points.

Hits elements

"Input on characters" is limited to quirks, but bonus points for getting a reference to 'freefall' in there.
"Become something greater" is setting only - indeed explicitly the PCs cannot become more free willed over time.
The division into three tiers is there, though it's not had much done with it.
The rest of it though, pure hit.

Fun

System seems nice and light, though there's potential for a bit of "Hang on, do I have a programme/upgrade that does that?" Interestingly, the only chance is whether something you try to do has a strange side-effect or quirk - success is purely deterministic.

The game mentions bots winding each other, but doesn't seem to do anything with it; sadly.
Anyway - the background seems quirky and fun, you aren't overly forced into a single set of actions and although the setting isn't too fleshed out there's some nice adventure seeds in there.

Tightness

There's some unused "Inputs/Outputs", I'm not sure what those are for. There's some complexity of different costs for each stat and different body.
There's costs assigned for buying stats above 8, although you aren't allowed to do so.

Other than that, pretty tight.

It's also only 23 pages, including character sheet, cover and table of contents.

I'd rate this 6/10