The Setup: You are an Arms Corporation that has entered the bidding for a contract with the Military Complex. Your goal is to design and produce a Mecha prototype to participate in combat demonstrations that will take place in 90 days. Your prototype, if it survives the initial trials, will then be pitted against the competition. The last surviving Mech will be adopted by the Military Complex, and its designing corporation will win the bid for the contract.
The Military Complex has an upper bidding limit however. The more expensive your mech is to produce, the fewer the Complex will ultimately have your corporation manufacture, and the less money you will actually make.
You must therefore ensure your mech prototype is versatile, deadly, and as cheap as feasibly possible.
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For the purposes of this RP, I am considering implementing a point system to serve as a check on the variety/relative balance of each Corporation in play. That said, I am open to suggestions on the notion, and if enough people think it would be better to do without it I will probably let everyone make their corporation however they like and handle adjustments individually. I would appreciate it if I could at least get feedback on the point system I describe below though, since I've tried to handle it in a way that leaves creating your corporation as open as possible.
The central premise of MDC: Corporate Warfare is the interactions between all of the corporations during the 90 day bidding race. The below categories are only briefly described, and I have no problems with posters using them creatively for purposes not otherwise described (using Legal to steal R&D or budget from other corporations for example, which is normally the purview of Troubleshooting).
Deficit spending is so last decade. You have already calculated the approximate upper boundaries of resource expenditure you can invest in this project before your net profit from winning the bid (IF you win the bid) becomes negligible. You have 40 points to distribute between seven categories (with a max score of 10 in each category) that will represent the scope of this project.
How much money do you have to throw around? As the days tick by, various incidents can impact your category scores, potentially boosting or damaging them - and influencing the final product you submit for the Combat Trials. You can use your Budget in order to boost damaged scores back up to their original total (scores cannot be boosted above the original total using Budget). Budget is also used to for miscellaneous expenditures, such as bribery and litigation. Budget essentially exists to make problems go away. If you run out of money, you have to suck up your losses and keep going. A high budget score can help to accommodate, but not replace, the Legal and Security scores. Budget can also be stolen by hostile Troubleshooters.
In order to make a Mech, you need raw materials and personnel from here and there shipped to your center of operations. This score describes the shipping of materials and people to and from your holdings from various different, distant locations. The higher this score, the more places you can obtain materials from, and the faster your materials and personnel are moved around. Not only can a high logistics score help complete a project faster, it helps prevent shipment/convoy interception by hostile Troubleshooters. If your logistics score is too low, parts and personnel can take a week or more to arrive, leaving you with an unfinished project after the 90 day time allotment.
You can't make a mech without engineers and assembly lines. This score describes how sophisticated your construction process actually is. At its lowest, you probably have some guy with a Bachelor's Degree working in his garage. The higher the score, the faster work goes, and the more sophisticated your mech can be. While you can theoretically make a mech of extreme sophistication even using just the one guy, the time he would take to do so would exceed the 90 day time limit. Like Logistics, a low Manufacturing score can mean you might not finish your Mech in time if it is highly sophisticated (simpler Mech designs will not have this problem).
This score describes the power of SCIENCE!!! The higher it is, the fancier and more sophisticated your mech can be. This does not define what technologies you use so much as the efficiency with which the design is implemented. A low R&D score can still produce big zappy science lasers for example, but the laser will be less effective/efficient than the death laser the other team with the better R&D score produced. R&D, like Budget, can be stolen by Troubleshooters.
It turns out that making large death machines has a number of legal ramifications. The Legal Score has numerous purposes. It is used to reduce the costs of purchased materials, cover workplace accidents, prevent bribery, conceal internal conspiracies and incriminating events/evidence, attempt hostile takeovers of other companies, and so forth. A high legal score means you'll have a team of Paralegals on-call 24/7 to cover your ass if anything goes wrong during the bidding race, or else to pressure other corporations with red tape.
Every corporate entity needs to protect its interests. Security describes how difficult it is for your operations to be directly interfered with. A high security score will help protect against hostile Troubleshooting attempts, and in general will help to enforce workplace safety and deter pesky/inconvenient bystander interference (by ironically aggressive war protesters for example). Security is not just physical, but also digital - a high Security score will help to deter hacking and other forms of electronic treachery.
You don't necessarily need to make a good Mech if you can somehow make sure all the other corporations submit complete crap. Troubleshooters are professionals who will head out into the world and directly interfere with/sabotage the efforts of competing corporations. Troubleshooters can disrupt logistics, assassinate key project personnel, sabotage critical components, steal R&D information, disrupt manufacturing, and dangle Paralegals out of 12th story windows. In addition, Troubleshooters can even attempt to rig the Live Combat Trials your mech (or other mechs) will go through at the end of the 90 day bidding race. Note that, if caught or killed, a Troubleshooter's activities can be traced back to you, which will likely have notable legal ramifications (amongst other things).
Of course, it's not all corporate fun and games. At the end of the bidding race, we have some Mech action. How your mechs perform will be based primarily on how well you designed your mech, but other factors such as trial rigging and sabotage are still important factors.
The Military Complex is not picky about what design you use. How will your Mech operate? Will it be piloted, or run by an A.I.? Perhaps it is remote controlled via satellite uplink? Does it have legs or wheels, two or six? Does it hover? Can it navigate any kind of terrain? What weapons does it use? How durable is its chassis?
Most importantly, how cheap is it?
After 90 days, your mech will be subjected to a number of live-fire performance trials to determine that it meets the bare minimum requirements of the Complex. The mech will be expected to pass the following tests in order to win the bid - destruction of the mech results in failure and its elimination from the bid. The mech can be repaired between trials, but during the trial either makes it or breaks to pieces. Note that while more than one of the following trials allude to aerial performance, it is not a requirement for mechs to be able to fly - though it is advised that they have some means of attacking aerial combatants.
-Terrain Trial: Master of Sea, Land, Air. Stationary explosive hazards (mines) present.
-Speed Trial: Not a timed trial, but a test of maneuverability and breaking. How fast can you go without splattering against the walls? Hazards are limited to speed bumps and physical impediments.
-Stress Trial: Can you feel the burn? Push your mech's hardware and software far beyond their absolute stated limits, and see how long they last. Your only obstacle in this trial, is yourself.
-Infantry Trial: Pit your mech against an escalating series of foot soldier combatants equipped with a diverse arsenal. Hazards include small arms (rifles), grenades, flamethrowers, rockets, PEP weapons, and Human tenacity.
-Armor Trial: Pit your mech against an escalating series of armored vehicles. Hazards include high caliber machine guns, HEAT shells, MISV swarm missiles, high-yield energy weapons, and more.
-Aerial Trial: You've brushed away the brawn. Now you have to deal with the close air support. The final trial is a duel with an aerial gunship armed to the teeth. Its design is intimidating, its weapons terrifying, its tactics supreme. If your mech cannot defeat the gunship, it wouldn't have stood a chance in The Final Battle Anyway.
As long as at least two mechs passed all the trials, the surviving models are pitted against each other in a no-holds-barred free for all, last mech surviving wins. The Complex does not care about individual mechs being 'ganged up on,' or whether or not they spend the whole match skulking in the corner or else flying to the very top of the arena until everyone else is gone, or whether or not one mech 'cheated' by blocking another mech's satellite uplink and rendering it immobile. Any mech that made it this far already meets their requirements, the Final Battle is used to assess the 'mettle' of the winning model. Upset victories are to be expected.
Victory results in glory and winning the contract. Fame and accolades are yours. Loss results in nothing but wasted time, money, and crushed dreams. Also possibly crushed pilots if your mech had to be manned. Start scrambling to point blame and sack the people involved in the project.
This looks incredibly cool, and my internal game designer is super curious as to how the various numbers play against each other. For example, if someone makes an attempt at sending a troubleshooter against a rival group, how does the rival group's security score work to protect them? Are both values added to a dice roll and the higher result wins, or something? I'm quite interested in how the system here works.
Well, as I allude to with the Budget score, category scores can be damaged over the course of the bidding race. If a Troubleshooter steals budget or R&D, those scores go down by 1 point and the opposing corporation gains a point.
That said, I am not a fan of forcing posters to go down railroad tracks because of dice rolls. The way I envision it, a high security score limits the actions a hostile Troubleshooter can take by default, and also determines whether you can even detect enemy troubleshooters at all.
Having a higher security score than the rival corporation has a troubleshooting score means that your security trips up the Troubleshooter, and your forces are made aware of their presence and intrusion. This doesn't mean the Troubleshooting effort is an automatic failure - the poster controlling the troubleshooter still has the option of trying to have them continue their mission, and the posters can reach an agreement dependent upon the context of the situation. Inversely, if the security score is lower than the opposing Troubleshooting score, the Troubleshooter gets in and out undetected - and in this case, all the Security score does is limit or else mitigate the damage the Troubleshooter can do. Security can even still capture/kill the Troubleshooter if they attempt something that this 'passive' security prevents.
Security Score of 4 versus a Troubleshooting score of 7? The Troubleshooter plants a nail bomb in your manufacturing center.
If that Security Score is 5 instead, the Troubleshooter wasn't able to gain access to your manufacturing center and instead 'merely' assassinates your chief engineer.
If this gets enough interest, I'll include a brief 'rule of thumb' description of how differences between Security/Troubleshooting will affect Troubleshooting attempts. Something important to keep in mind though that a lot of this will be dependent upon contextual information provided by each poster.
Okay, I dig it! Also, I can see that there could be room for an ongoing continuation of this beyond the primary storyline, if interest held, as the mech designs that didn't get selected could still likely find other buyers, meaning that the mech development and refinement could carry on long after this particular contract, except instead of the stakes being "who gets the contract", the stakes would be "Can you KEEP your contract". This could even lead to the organizations holding the mech company contracts putting out requests for mechs that can do specific things, leaving it up to the players to design mechs to fill that specific niche, and how well they perform impacts how well the patron organizations do and how quick they are to give out more work.
Entirely possible, but for now, baby steps. In order for anything to happen afterwards, this specific RP still needs to happen first. Hopefully this will garner more interest, in which case, no betting limit.
If I can get chime-ins from the following people to confirm whether or not they are still interested, and whether or not they have any questions, I can start the OOC as soon as I'm sure there's at least three parties other than myself who want to participate.
Below is a basic description of the mechanics of how the RP will proceed. Keep in mind, although it is fairly structured, everything below is mostly guidelines and rules of thumb. I am perfectly open to experimentation, suggestions, and creative twists over the course of the RP. The rules here are more to give you a basis of how to proceed within the narrative framework of our story.
I mention, for example, how differences in opposing scores can affect and influence the outcomes of certain events in favor of the poster with the higher score. This does not automatically designate that poster as the winner. It will be up to you, as the posters, to construct a meaningful, collaborative narrative and to reach an agreement on the outcome of various Corporate conflicts. The scores are just there to provide framework. This means that the Troubleshooter will not always lose if Security knows they are there and if they don't have all the information they need, and that the smaller, less experienced legal team will not always fail.
How the RP will Work:
After submitting your Mech design, I will attach to it a set pricetag figure and a resource evaluation. The pricetag will represent what the Military Complex is willing to pay for each individual Mech your corporation produces, if your corporation wins the contract bid. The Military Complex will not buy as many mechs from the winning corporation if it is particularly expensive, so it is important that your mech is as cheap as feasibly possible. The resource evaluation will include how many and what kind of resources you need to build your mech, as well as how much time is needed in order to complete a working prototype. As the weeks progress and you build components of your Mech, you cannot retroactively change their design. If you have a change of heart and want to pursue a new mech design, you have to use the time remaining in the RP to design and build it from scratch. However, you are perfectly free to change the design of components you have not yet built, in which case, rival corporations with information on the previous design will not be made aware of the revision unless they move to gather new intelligence on the Mech.
The Bidding Race will take place over the course of 90 days. Each posting period will consist of a week, giving each poster 13 posts to act and prepare before the Live Combat Trial and the Final Battle.
Each week, every Corporation can receive a certain amount of raw materials and can complete a certain amount of work on their mech, dependent on their Logistics and Manufacturing scores.
Each week, every Corporation may pursue one Troubleshooting operation and one Legal action. Every corporation will, in addition to having to deal with their rival bidders, have to deal with a specific, contextually-tailored series of problems that will arise over the course of the race. These problems are designed so that, if left unaddressed, your corporation will not even be able to submit a finished project to the Military Complex.
The Corporations are all aware of one another, but will initially be unaware of the nature of their rivals' competing Mech prototypes. Each corporation is also nominally unaware of the Troubleshooting actions other corporations take, unless the Troubleshooter involved is caught or killed during their operation. As information is gathered by each Corporation, design specifications of the rival Corporation Mechs will be made available to the associated posters.
Each Corporation has key personnel associated with each score. In addition to being valuable viewpoint characters for the sake of our narrative, they are important for ensuring the smooth operations of the Corporation's Mech project, and for the final quality of the Mech prototype. Keeping them alive and in your employ is a priority.
In order to win, a Corporation must fend off interference by its competitors, address the problematic incident that arises during the biding race, ensure their Mech can pass the Live Combat Trials, prevail in the Final Battle, while being as cheap as possible, within a 90 day time limit.
Key Personnel contribute a whole two points to each of your scores. If you has less than two points in any score, then you do not have Key Personnel for that score. If they die, your score is damaged by two points until they are replaced (see Logistics for replacing them). Additionally, if they are kidnapped, the rival corporation can permanently increase their own equivalent score by one point, potentially beyond its initial value. However, no score can go above ten.
Each corporation has an invisible heat score, which caps at 20 points. Heat is bad. The more heat you have, the less secure your operations become due to interference from the general public. Extremely high heat can result in riots directed against your facilities, government investigations and raids, protests, vandalism, and harassment of your personnel. All of which can lead to various score totals beind damaged, or other various setbacks.
Heat is primarily reduced using the Legal score, and is protected against using the Security score (see both sections for more details). The higher your security, the better protected you are from interference by the outside world.
Heat can also be reduced by avoiding incriminating activities, and by transparancy. Giving public tours of your facilities, and allowing news crews to catch a glimpse of your shiny mech prototype are good ways of increasing transparency and getting people to trust you. Unfortunately, it also broadcasts your agenda, plans, and structure to rival corporations, and thus total transparency is bad. If you use transparency to reduce heat, you'll be informed that your heat has been reduced - but not by how much. In addition, whenever another Corporation is incriminated, every other corporation not involved in the affair will enjoy decreased heat as attention is drawn away from them.
The exact mechanics of how heat relates to threats and incidents will not be described here, in order to keep some element of mystery regarding its implementation.
How Individual Scores work:
Over the course of the 90 week bidding race, shit will hit the fan - resulting in various scores for your corporation being damaged, potentially affecting the performance of your Mech during the Live Combat Trials and the Final Battle, or rendering you more susceptible to future hazards. Budget is used to smooth over these complications. You can use a point of budget to restore a point in another score elsewhere (scores cannot rise above their initial values with the exception of successfully kidnapping rival Key Personnel). Your budget can also be used in conjunction with your Legal score in order to pursue litigation. Your paralegals will passively move and act to protect your interests, but they will not actively light fires under other peoples' asses unless they have money to use as fuel (see the Legal tab for more information). Budget can be used for miscellaneous expenditures, such as bribery - such actions being subject to contextual IC events, with associated effects and consequences.
Budget can be stolen by Troubleshooters, or taken by Corporation paralegals in certain sticky legal incidents. Budget may not seem like the most important score, but without it you may soon find your operation being whittled away by attrition. A high budget score can help to accommodate, but not replace, low Legal and Security scores.
At the start of the RP, your mech will be assigned a Resource Evaluation, defining how much raw material it requires to be built. Logistics will determine how quickly you can gather and move those materials to your facility, where they can be used to build the mech. It's important to have a sufficiently high Logistics score so that your Manufacturing team is always busy. If they have no resources to work with, that is time wasted.
Logistics also defines how quickly you can replace key personnel in the event they are killed or kidnapped. Key personnel take five weeks to replace, with one week being subtracted for every two points in Logistics.
Materials and Key Personnel being moved around can be Intercepted by Troubleshooters or apprehended by Law Enforcement in certain circumstances. However, your Logistics score will also determine how difficult it is for your shipments to be apprehended. A high logistics score will limit the damage Troubleshooters and Paralegals can do by targetting your shipments. If your material shipments are stolen or seized, the rival Troubleshooters and/or Paralegals will typically seize a percentage of your normal materials shipment equivalent to one hundred minus your score multipled by ten.
At the start of the RP, your mech will be assigned a Resource Evaluation, defining how long it takes to construct. Manufacturing determines how quickly your engineering team can build the mech, using the resources available to them. It is important that your Mech design has a degree of sophistication and complexity that is balanced with the time available to you and the skill of your Engineers. If your mech is too complex/sophisticated, it will take longer for your engineers to complete it. Simpler mech designs, on the other hand, take a shorter period of time to finish.
Manufacturing is a prime target for Troubleshooters. Troubleshooters, if successful in their efforts, can delay construction efforts, sabotage components of your mech during or after construction, destroy components that have already been completed, or even hijack your manufacturing facility and make off with any components you have already made.
R&D does not limit what technology you can utilize in your mech design. Even a Corporation with 0 in R&D can still make a big zappy death laser. However, R&D describes the efficiency and proficiency with which the big zappy death laser is made.
Your R&D score will, in effect, determine the effectiveness of your mech's armaments, armor, and tactical systems versus other mechs. Generally speaking, the mech with the higher R&D score has the advantage. The actual design of the mech will be a massive contributing factor to its success, but the R&D score will still provide a significant advantage in their overall performance.
Example: One mech has a dedicated armor-piercing buster shell cannon. Another mech has spaced armor specifically designed to decrease vulnerability to armor piercing weapons. If the buster shell has the higher R&D score, it will likely entirely ignore the spaced armor and deal a devestating blow. If the armor has the higher R&D score, it will likely prove effective and limit the overall damage done by the buster shell.
R&D is also useful for analysing and coming up with solutions to rival mech designs. By spending a point of Budget, your scientists can incorporate design specifications into all future Mech components to be produced to give it a specific edge against one rival Corporation's mech, according to any design specifications you are aware of. These advantages would be so highly specialized that they would not be helpful against any other threat, but on the plus side they take no longer and no more resources than normal to implement. For every two points of R&D, a single point of budget will get you one additional advantage versus an enemy mech.
Example: Corporation with 7 R&D spends 1 budget point, having two mech components remaining to be manufactured. They add two advantageous features to the first component, and one advantageous feature to the second. This proves to have been wise when a Troubleshooter sabotages the first component near the end of the bidding race.
R&D can be directly damaged and stolen by Troubleshooters. Paralegals can also 'seize' research on legal grounds.
The Legal score is a varied and useful utility. At its most basic, your team of paralegals will passively work to protect your corporation from legal threats and incrimination. When active and directed at a target, a good Legal team can ream a rival Corporation end to end.
Firstly, your Legal score is used to protect you from accidents. If something goes wrong in the process of constructing the mech prototype - such as a nailbomb going off in your main manufacturing facility - the legal team will work to staunch the flood of personal injury lawsuits and public heat. Every point in Legal will passively reduce your Corporation's heat by a point.
On top of that, your Paralegals will protect you from hostile legal action from other corporations. However, your paralegals can only do so many jobs at once. While defending you in court, they cannot reduce heat. If you are pursuing legal actions or defense, you must choose how much of your Legal score goes to the defense and how much goes to reducing heat.
By spending a point of budget, you can have your paralegals pursue legal action against other Corporations. Aside from tying up their legal staff, it can lead to settlements or rulings in your favor. With Legal actions you can aim to seize the budget, materials, or research of a rival corporation. If you possess evidence that incriminates the rival corporation, your legal score allocated to the Legal Action gains a three point bonus, and it will increase the target corporation's heat considerably on top of the heat gained from reallocating their Legal score from reducing heat passively.
To determine the advantage in a Legal Action, simply compare the points both sides have alloted to the action. The higher score has the advantage. If the prosecuting paralegals succeed in the action (as determined by the posters involved), they are refunded for the spent budget used to initiate the Legal Action on top of any resources they seize from the rival party. In addition, the losing party - either prosecuting or defending - results in a heat increase equivalent to the effective difference between the score allocations between the opposing Corporations.
It is also possible for Legal Actions to be settled out of court, which may involve blackmail, bribery, threats, and even figurative or literal Troubleshooting. If a Legal Action is settled, neither side gains heat - but has to deal with alternate and perhaps extortionate terms.
If the prosecuting Paralegals succeed in their Legal Action to acquire raw materials from the target corporation, the amount of raw materials they can successfully seize will be determined by rival Logistics.
If the prosecuting Paralegals possess incriminating evidence obtained from the capture or death of a hostile Troubleshooter, their poster may choose to damage the target corporation's Troubleshooting score as the aim of the Legal Action, having law enforcement apprehend additional agents from the target Corporation.
Incriminating evidence of any sort may be released to the open public. It gets you nothing, but it will drastically increase heat for the target corporation.
The Legal score can be directly damaged by Troubleshooters, who will dangle your paralegals out of twelth story windows.
Security is used to protect your assets from interference, both by Troubleshooters from rival corporations and by the pesky public and local government.
Where Legal reduces heat, Security defends against it. For every point of seucurity you have, you can reliably repulse incidents that would otherwise be caused by heat of a lesser or equal value.
Security is also important for fending off hostile Troubleshooters. Having a high security score allows you to detect whether or not a Troubleshooter is even present in the first place. If your security score is lower than the opposing Corporation's Troubleshooting score, you will not be made aware of the Troubleshooter's action until after the fact, or unless they make a mistake.
Even if your Security score is lower than an opposing Troubleshooter score, it will still passively limit the damage an enemy Troubleshooter can do. An enemy troubleshooter can even still make mistakes, alerting you to their activity if you weren't already.
Security is both physical and digital, protecting you from contortionists in your air vents and from electronic treachery alike.
While your security score will defend you against heat, if the issue at hand is not being addressed the resistance from your Security measures will often result in heat steadily increasing over time. You cannot stonewall behind a high security score forever.
The Security score can be directly damaged by Troubleshooters, assuming they have been directed to disrupt, sabotage, or interfere with security operations or personnel.
See the Troubleshooting section for an exact explanation on how Troubleshooting versus Security works.
Troubleshooting is used in order to damage rival Corporation scores, to steal assets from them, to gather information on the competing mech prototypes and on rival Corporate infrastructure, and even to rig the Live Combat Trials unfairly in your own favor.
Troubleshooters always have to content with Security in some form. Firstly, if the opposing Security score is higher than your Troubleshooting score, the target corporation will be aware of the Troubleshooting operation. They will not, however, be aware of who sent the Troubleshooter unless Security captures and/or kills them during the course of the operation. If your Troubleshooting score is higher than the opposing Security score, the target corporation will be unaware of the Troubleshooting effort either until after the fact, or up until the moment the Troubleshooter screws up.
A large part of whether or not a Troubleshooter stands a chance of succeeding at their objective depends on whether a task is 'safe' for a Troubleshooter of their skill. To determine what tasks are deemed safe or unsafe, calculate the difference between your Troubleshooting score and the opposing Security score. As the difference between the scores increases, the actions a Troubleshooter can safely take will either increase or decrease, relative to which score is the higher of the two. The higher the Troubleshooting score is relative to the Security score, the more actions the Troubleshooter can take safely.
Possible Actions a Troubleshooter can take Include:
Probe - Security 5+ - Gather intelligence regarding your Corporate rivals. Gain intelligence on any of one of their scores, important events, or on their bidding project. Feint - Security 4+ - Stage a false operation in order to ruffle their feathers. This can cause the target to waste valuable time and resources chasing geese. Intercept - Security 3+ - Intercept materials or personnel being shuttled around. This deprives the target corporation of certain materials and manpower, but will not directly delay their project unless they have absolutely no material to work with. Disrupt - Security 2+ - Disrupt the regular activities at a particular site, setting back or delaying their progress. Plant - Security 1+ - Plant incriminating evidence in the wrong place at the right time. Then tip off either the authorities, or the appropriate paralegals. Steal - Possible if scores are equal. - Steal assets and resources from the target Corporation. Damages a target score by 1 point to boost your own score by 1. Assassinate - TS 1+ - Kill a project-critical member of the target corporation's personnel. Kidnap - TS 2+ - Kidnap a project-critical member of the target corporation's personnel. Sabotage - TS 3+ - Throw a wrench in the gear assembly. Destroy - TS 4+ - Throw a pipe bomb in the gear assembly. Hijack - TS 5+ - Take the gear assembly for yourself.
This does not encompass all possible actions a Troubleshooter can take - feel free to have them do other things. However, their actions will be appraised and then placed under one of these categories merely as a convenient means of measuring how difficult their task is.
Be warned: If your Troubleshooter is captured or killed, their activities can be traced back to you, which will constitute incriminating evidence. It will also result in your Troubleshooting score receiving damage due to losing a highly trained agent.
The Troubleshooter, if they are engaged in an operation that is deemed reasonably safe, will have sufficient information necessary to complete the mission. If the objective they are tasked with is too secure, they will have less information to work with, making the job much more difficult.
Examples:
A level 1 TS attempts a Hijack on a facility with a level 10 Security setup. The TS has to go in with NO INFORMATION WHATSOEVER on the target or how to successfully hijack it. They don't know what security measures are even in place. Meanwhile, Security is made aware of the TS before they even arrive at the facility proper.
A level 5 TS attempts an Intercept on a shipment with a level 7 Security setup. The objective is reasonably safe, and so the TS has all the information necessary to complete their objective. However, security is aware that somebody will attempt to intercept the shipment and can act accordingly.
A level 7 TS attempts to Destroy a facility with a level 5 Security setup. The target corporation is entirely unaware that the operation is taking place, but because the task is deemed dangerous for the operative they do not have all the information they need to complete the mission without any complications. They are missing two or so key pieces of information that would be necessary to Destroy the facility without being detected.
Troubleshooting can be used to damage any and every score, with the exception of itself, unless you go to the trouble of acquiring information on the target Corporation's Troubleshooting network first.
For the purposes of rigging the Live Combat Trials, the difficulty of rigging them begins low, but will increase with every COLLECTIVE Troubleshooting operation directed at them, between all corporations involved. The Military Complex's equivalent Security score starts at one, and increases by one for every Troubleshooting operation they are made a target of. This includes merely Probing for information, so it may be better to work in the dark for this sort of mission. These operations are always assumed to be Sabotage missions for the purposes of calculating whether the operation is safe for the Troubleshooter or not.
The Troubleshooting score cannot normally be damaged or targetted by enemy Corporations. However, enemy Troubleshooters can Paralegals can damage the Troubleshooting score if their Corporation possesses intelligence on your Troubleshooting (gathered by their own Troubleshooters), or else possesses incriminating evidence against you.
What is the limit on total overall initial starting points?
*drops out due to the idea of making 13 super-organized posts involving multiple OCs in a week before another weeklong-flurry followed by termination of RP*
As described in the initial post, you have 40 points to distribute between the seven categories, with a max of 10 in each.
Also, it's designed that way to make things short and sweet - and to leave room for future RPs in the same vein, as Primal Conundrum suggested.
Also, I should probably emphasize that the IC Weeks are not IRL weeks. You can take as little or as much time as you feel is necessary to write. Within reason.
