Solar Wind & Sales
Ran a playtest last night. It went super well.
By which I mean: some things worked as intended, some things were disastrous!
Having the 18 crew members onboard continues to work well. That is, there's a stable of NPC the PCs can interact with, talk to, and be mean to. They pulled a gun on Polya! She should have made them shoot, but I weaseled out. Next time: Crosshairs!
As is, we go around the table deciding on ship's systems. Right now, this is four tours around the circle. I think I can get it down to two -- every chooses a broken system, and a ship's system in good repair. Everything else is merely OK. The fifth roll, if it exists, will upgrade a single system at the end, and will unbroke a single system. So, we'll wind up with 3 broken systems, 3 OK systems, and 1 Great system.
This was the first time trying out the "fifth roll" -- in this case, the shipboard AI.
She has moves like "If someone should make a roll and no one has told them, go ahead and mention it. If they do it, mark xp", and "If someone rolls a 6-, explain how it'll be SO EXCITING", and her XP trigger is "participate in multiple conversations at once".
So far as I'm concerned, it worked. There were conversations and scenes I wasn't privy to, which then came back and shook the fabric of the ship! Not knowing everything is kinda my jam, and this was pretty great.
The proxy voting also worked!
See, everybody on a pirate ship gets an equal vote. So, that's the 4 officers and the 18 crew. The 4 officers are each responsible for a section, and have the proxy votes of that section. There's six sailors, five boarders, 4 traders, and 3 seers, so everybody has a different amount of political authority.
I need to make the procedure a bit more obvious, but I think it worked.
Still, things to modify!
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Plenty of thoughts since last night, if you want further feedback.
ReplyDeleteYes!
ReplyDeleteIn a meeting now. More when I can keyboard.
ReplyDelete.
ReplyDeleteOkay, so I have observations that lead to possible rules changes, but here's the thing:
ReplyDeleteObservation #1: You are trying to run two games at the same time. One of them is a slice-of-life game about how being in a spaceship is ... what it's like to deal with crew, with systems that need constant babying, with not having anywhere to step away from the drama that isn't out an airlock. The other is a politicking game about working with bad people, how to maintain your cred with the crew by the way you keep things running or distribute bounty, and how to keep your head above water in a world where there is no organizational status quo.
Observation #2: These games could be the same game, but that will take not just refining, but very deep thought about what the connections are between them ... how, for instance, part of your tedious daily routine is attending to the political infighting, and how the tools of your political attacks can be something like "who makes the coffee?" Some of that will emerge just by rubbing these two themes together, but to get them feeding back into each other you're going to figure out how to make the connections vibrant and necessary. Or, of course, you could decide you only want to do one of the two games.
Observation #3: Tedium gets dropped, because it's not rewarded. Nobody made the coffee a second time. If you want that rhythm then both the Quartermaster and the Boatswain are ripe for an XP trigger that says (rather than the rather bland "bring everyone back safe" and "upgrade the shipe") "Do the same task, completely, a second time." For the quartermaster it would be "When you complete a task from start to finish for the crew's comfort the first time, do nothing. When you complete it a second time in the same session, take an XP." Likewise, for the boatswain, "When you complete a ship's-maintenance task ..." Then people will want (a) to make the coffee, (b) to narrate people drinking all the coffee and, (c) to sigh and make the coffee again.
Observation #4: There's a big energy-gap between steady-state politics (where the Doctor and the Boatswain wrangle with the crew to head off conflicts because it's expected of them) and dynamic politics (where the ship's AI decides the Boatswain is a problem and simultaneously sabotages his space-suit and reputation, to politically hamstring and/or explosively decompress him). Some people (cough, cough) will jump from the lower state to the higher state on their own, just for giggles, but there's no incentive to do so. You can bridge the two states by making political shifts more granular: Make the crew proxies that someone holds in a position into a pool that ebbs and flows: Someone with seven proxies in their division may (after initial vote) only have four proxies they can rely upon, and three crew (named) who are disgruntled with them. Potential mutineers, or folks down drinking away their sorrows in the Master-of-the-House's establishment. When something goes badly for the ship, somebody has to get blamed, and that person loses a proxy's support. When something goes well, somebody gets the credit, and maybe brings somebody back to their side.
Those apply to the individual systems. I'm still thinking through how to connect the two more forcefully together.
Oh yeah ... and "Ship's crew are not a ship's system."
ReplyDeleteBecause, seriously, that is some horrifically messed up stuff right there, and the way people's minds shy away from it is going to leave something like half of your play potential on the ship sheets forever unplayed.
"Okay, the ship's system that Pudge wants to take from us is ... our Boarders. Yeah, he's taking their discipline, so now they're just vile cut-throats." That's not a deal players are going to be comfortable making, if you are simultaneously working to present those boarders as people with names and affiliations. I think the proxy-disgruntlement system will serve you better there.
To track it, if 'twere me, I'd get eighteen colored poker chips (colored for their division) and sticky-attach name labels to each.
Thanks, Tony! I'll be thinking about this for a while.
ReplyDeleteI also want to make the officer roles more active -- make it an active trigger, rather than a kind of passive one. Then you've got a mini-game about day in the life, combat, trade, and lastly, exploration.
Making those bigger is gonna be some work!
I've been teeting on crew as a stat, ever since I gave 'em names and made 'em human. With the sailors, I've made it so its all about their stuff, and I may do the same for the others.
I'm really looking forward to trying this out once you have it in external playtest shape
ReplyDeleteJosh Mannon Do you want to look over what I've got?
ReplyDeleteI would love to!
ReplyDeleteSheets:
ReplyDeletehttps://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1IcfMTD2oC5s4bVehse-mZ7jiJ1yYJGE0r-H3NStXPWs/edit#slide=id.g8462881f9_2_52
All feedback is appreciated. I have basically no idea if this is going to be understandable without me explaining it.
Things're supposed to go like this:
1) Put out playbooks. There are 10, but there's only 5 available at any one time. If I choose the engineer, no one can be the surgeon.
2) Make characters, filling out stuff on the left until it tells you to stop.
3) Introduce characters.
4) Vote for ship's officers.
5) Hand out officer rolls. This includes giving the Captain the ship's systems, the Quartermaster the crew roster, the Boatswain the contact list, and the Stargazer the list of systems.
6) Build the ship.
7) Do camraderie
8) Play, probably opening with the Quartmaster's roll. Maybe with Combat and start with Discipline. Or, the other two, too!
I'll need to open this up on my computer.
ReplyDeleteYeah, probably. Alternatively, show up at Thursday in Falls Church with a couple days warning, and I'll hand you a physical copy.
ReplyDeleteI'm gonna see what happens if I transition from upgrading crew capabilities to upgrading crew morale.
ReplyDeleteThere's a basic move to the rely on the crew. This is the stat you roll. I thiiink it makes more sense to be morale than capability, with the assumption that the crew can do stuff, but there's always a social issue to deal with if you let them handle a problem.