​

We also knew the game we wanted to make: a story-driven team-based tactical game, which reflects the feel of the old-school pen and paper RPG. The first order of business was codifying the tactics. To achieve this, we needed to hit our first concrete goal – creating a mathematical base that the engineers could implement and that we could use as our core design engine. We decided to call this the Action Calculator (AC1).

To mimic Shadowrun’s feel for the majority of the players, we wanted an Attribute / Skill / Specialization hierarchy like the ones was used in all of the electronic games and the first three editions of Shadowrun. Setting the game in the early 2050’s reinforced that decision. Now it was fun with numbers… and yes, for all you old-schoolers, we actually attempted to model rolling handfuls of six-sided dice. Unfortunately, the number-crunching in AC1 proved that chucking all those d6s around was not sustainable for what we wanted and not expandable into the other systems we’d planned.​