Oh my.
Last night, in Solar Wind and Sale ...
They boarded a ship, and the boarded crew tried to space our protagonists. They failed, and our protagonists decided their sensor suite counted as cargo. Assholes.
They then offered anyone who wanted to join the crew of pirates. After giggling over "able seaman" versus "ordinary seaman" for a while, a bunch of crew joined. It should have been "able spacer", but meh. Note to self: write down some possible ranks, hand them to the Captain.
When they came back to port, the Boatswain (now named the Purser) sold the Prize, but admitted to ripping off the sensors. The dockmaster refused to pay full price, and the Boatswain accidentally gave him blackmail material. The dockmaster was going to use, it but the Boatswain asked the crew to rough the guy up.
My favorite boarder, Polya, stabbed the guy, and rolled him for cash. Then she left the ship to party and get laid. Exit stage left.
Then the PCs had to deal with these repercussions, including trying real hard not to let the dock master's boss get angry with them -- after all, they wanted to return to this port! PCs are the worst thing to ever happen to PCs.
The shipboard AI asked one of the sailors to space the bleeding dockmaster, which of course he did. Who'd turn against the AI?
I also got some good playtest material in! Some moves are gonna change, and some playbooks. One playbook was called "awful", which is probably an exaggeration but who knows!
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And this is why Polya should always be every officer's secret crush.
ReplyDeleteBecause she's the MCs favorite way of causing problems?
ReplyDeleteI feel like there's still one too many things, but I'm not sure what it is.
ReplyDeleteShip building? Move selection? Camraderie? Officer positions?
I dunno.
You might time things. I did it a little informally, but objectivity would help.
ReplyDeleteInformally: I'm not sure if you knew, but ship-building takes a bit less than an hour, start to finish. That seems like maybe more than you're getting out of the granularity of ... what... twenty individual ship stats grouped by departments? I totally get making it granular, because that lets you do damage and healing to it (in much the way that I'd love to see happen with more granular proxies), but it's taking a lot of time and focus. Can you accomplish the granularity of damage without forcing people to address questions like "precisely how robust, on a scale from -2 to +4, is our hull?"
Yeah, it does take a while. I'm not sure why.
ReplyDeleteEveryone makes two decisions, and does whatever drawing they want to. Sure, the decisions are done in serial rather than parallel ... so we're talking about 10 decisions. That shouldn't be six minutes per decisions.
At every decision point, the person making the decision gets handed a sheet with a huge amount of information, that is pretty much entirely new to them (even the second time ... it's all changed). You're asking them to choose one out of ... how many options? And each of those options has five categories that they need to assess. Plus, they need to know what the other people have chosen, and what consequences that will have. I'm surprised it goes as fast as it does. It's an immense info-overload.
ReplyDeleteI wonder what else to do. I really like the buildup, but it is a lot of stuff.
ReplyDeleteWell, what, specifically, do you like about the build-up?
ReplyDeleteI'm guessing, for instance, that you do not much enjoy watching people mull over the list, frowning and reading. That seems really boring, and there's an awful lot of that. If it all went away, would you miss it?
In the end, the ship is what the PCs came up with. They each took turns deciding what was important to them.
ReplyDeleteCould you get that by letting them free-hand it? Like, let them say "Our trader morale is important to me ... so we have lots of space-cocaine!"?
ReplyDeleteThat makes me concerned about a big blank space and folks not knowing what to fill it in with. "I want trader morale so ... we have trader morale?"
ReplyDeleteFair enough. But you really need to narrow down what they're looking at, if you're going to list options.
ReplyDeletePeople are simply not looking at the headers, picking a header, then reading the entries in that header. They are reading every entry, in every header, each time the list comes to them, in order to try to deduce what the headers mean to the game.
They're trying to deduce an intent that you haven't made clear, by synthesizing it out of all the details. Specifically, they're trying to figure out how to mini-max the system. If that puzzle-solving isn't something you want to spend a lot of time on, you need to give them that information in a way that lets them ignore whole sections with confidence that it won't ruin their game.
Every time you talk about how foolish past groups were for not paying attention to the importance of their Hull systems, you drive people to burrow even deeper into these details, by the way.
Obvious solution: give them options.
ReplyDelete"Choose a system to increase from trade"
"Choose to increase either boarder morale or ship weapons"
For the first-pass obviousness, I'll have each one upgrade one of their set and downgrade one of their set. So, Mechanic chooses a Life Support system, boarding leader chooses a gun system, etc.
ReplyDeleteThe fifth -- AI or shopkeeper -- chooses from the list the others already defined.
That way, each one has a list of 4 rather than 16, and the only overlap is with the fifth character.
That should drastically reduce it, but I dunno if I like people are forced to choose their own systems.
You could also put it in some order and say "either upgrade one of your systems, or another system in a group that's already gone."
ReplyDeleteMaybe, but I only want the fifth group to have the ability to negate decisions by other people. That's a little bit what they do, as it were.
ReplyDeleteIs this a terrible, shitty, no good game?
No, it's a fun game, you're just in the.really hard phase of design where you've got some elements that are working, and you need to separate them from other bits that need improvement. It's much harder than when you're just starting, and anything working is a victory.
ReplyDelete