Design Diary - Freeport (Previously "Unnamed Sci-fi Project")

[u_ne_korn]

@TheTimCrow

To combine both protagonist points and mental health points, to say “Stress”, then why not have both abilities cost this, and enemies deal this as damage? Bringing in a concept from Darkest Dungeon, where enemies stress out Heroes, and various in town activities ‘heal’ this.

Bothisgood.gif

However, the mental load of two HP tracks could be troublesome if things get frantic.

@TheTimCrow

Then you can play into both “Look, I just can’t handle going out there when X could be out there, I need this Vice.” but also “I’m not feeling great, but if I Vice, then i’ll be able to do Y thing”.

And people can play with the fun of "do I want to vice to regain stress, or do i think I can get away with it a bit longer. Because obviously, running out of stress should induce something terrible, but running around low can have some light tradeoff as well.

I explicitly want to avoid the standard Blades “lose one of your lives/Trauma’s when you spend all your protagonist points” because I want to avoid characters having to leave the game.

I’ve been thinking something like “You must throw the sort of tantrum that damages a relationship you value”, which i think could be very fun. While it keeps the focus on interpersonal relationships, I worry it’s not focused on player agency enough.

It would be easy to create a system that basically the worse a trash-fire you are, the more cool shit you get to do, but that seems like it wont create a happy, emotionally healthy player-base.

[u_ne_korn]

Step 4: Setting

The Verse

Several of the design points suggest that meaningful authority above the station of the self-determined characters should be elsewhere, absent, incompetent or nasty

Others design points suggest that the obvious setting is a meaningfully isolated and/or frontier environment, where the encroachment of “civilisation” is inevitable but could be delayed by a generation with concerted effort.

This gives room for the lawful to be lawful and the chaotics to be unlawful, and the evils to be unpleasant with minimal comeuppance, and the good to be good but with not much in the way of backup.

But in order for the lawfuls and goods to not feel like they’ve been abandoned, they need contact with The Establishment - bounties (hmm, another mook-crew problem), messages from the President, legitimate authority (even with no power to back it up), aims that will improve their lives, the lives of those around them, and the march of the arrival of the establishment.

So, there needs to be contact with the Establishment, but a good reason why they can’t just call in backup. Solution: Travel time from there to here is massive, with capacity for faster (close enough to instant) communication. And because it can be speeded up or slowed down by meaningful player action, it’s gotta be an infra-structure project. A stargate/mass relay type thing.

Design Decision:

An area in space that is connected enough to have it’s own name, with more than one planet/solar system - enough livable space to get meaningfully lost in. Enough space for people to live out their lives in and feel like it’s a good idea. Enough space for mysteries and secrets (because otherwise what is even the point).

But short enough travel time between each end that it would make sense to treat it as a single polity, and that it’s not ridiculous for the characters to keep running into each other.

On a frontier - the edge of the expansion of known space into (truely) unoccupied space. Travel distance/time to get to this space is very far/long, but communication moves much faster. The infrastructure to properly connect the space to the rest of the galaxy is in progress, but can be meaningfully hastened or shortened by a significant margin with concerted effort.

The place is not lawless, but similar to the Golden Age of Piracy or The Old West (or at least the myths thereof), the law struggles in the face of well organised crime. Much like other crime-focused fiction, the criminals provide a kind of order of their own, because they need other people to work to make money so that they can steal it, but they’re motivated to keep the actual law far away.

Are we alone out here?

Pro’s for everyone being human

• Everyone having the same skillsets makes more sense
  • Removes a bunch of balancing challenges
• Takes species-ism off the table as a plot point
• Reduces lore and costuming barriers to entry

Pros for NOT everyone being human

• Differences can be super fun RP
  • What if an alien species reacts to chocolate like humans do to cocaine?
• More ways to be a person
• It’s objectively more interesting
• Can justify some skills that are far enough outside of human norm to be fun
  • Balance still important! Being a normal human should still be as much fun as anything else

Design Decision:

Yes to Aliens. Then when I’m playing around with Skills then I can figure out what that looks like. But a small number of species, not an infinite set of options.

Weird Space Stuff

Considering that Weird Space Stuff is one of the reasons I wanted to play around in Space, yes there is definitely going to be Weird Space Stuff

Out

• Space wizards - including the Doctor, Jedi, Jedi-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off

In

• Wormholes
• Fun and Games with Non-Linear Time
• Space monsters, some of whom might be bound by the rules of physics
• The Thing
• Digital people
• Medium-level transhumanism and cyberpunk elements
  • Though the frontier means we’ve reverted to early stage capitalism!

Maybes

• Brain/Brawn combos (brain could work well for distance players?)

Next up: First stab at skills. Much excite!

[TheTimCrow]

A couple fun technical ideas on how to sci-fi up the communications / logisitics to align with your goals.

So, you can get FTL communications using Quantum entanglement. Basic is you entangle utter oodles of electrons, then separate them, and send one set on a sub light journey to ‘very far away’. Once people turn up, they can use these Q bits for instant comms over any distance. Imperial telecommunication at Atomic Rockets. Entire site is great for a project like this.

This also suggests how the frontier happened, sublight torchs ships worked either as generation ships, or autonomous constructors (drones!), with a pile of q-bits and the components of a small, starter stargate artefact.

Combine one small, low power, self built stargate that only works intermittently, with a solar system with oh, 8-15 planets, plenty of habitable moons, and torchships: This makes travel between planets on the scale of ‘weeks’, but travel to / from the frontier is inherently slow / unreliable and infrequent.

It also plays into player agency, if they work towards improving the single stargate, the Establishment can have a greater / faster / more frequent impact.

But the generation ship / autonomous drone ship also suggests fun things like crashed previous attempts, lost secrets, semi failed colonies (they lived, the stargate was never built), lost-tech, and other fun tropes.

To change tack, since you’re talking about digital people, what about sentient intelligences in synthetic bodies? On a scale of TARS (Interstellar) to Bishop (Alien)? This could give some other options, while also reducing the number of alien species needed.

And as for weird space stuff and frontierness, have you thought about the rarity / difficulty of access for advanced tech? Is it like Star Wars where a criminal desert planet has starship junk all over, or like Firefly, where you land the ship then saddle up the horses because they’re more reliable than ground transport?

[u_ne_korn]

Step 5: Skills

Remember this list has to be long enough to stop a single crew from covering all the possible skills

Remember that when skills have an opportunity cost to acquire them, there becomes a obligation in the game-design to use them

Organisational concepts

Player progression?

• Is kinda anti to “minimising barriers to entry”
• Unless it’s based on number of games that have run, not number of games attended?
• Stil, I want to maintain the gaps in crew make-up to maintain the needed overlap
• Need a substantially larger list of skills if there will be progression, otherwise everyone gets more like each other

Playbooks or skills trees?

• Or neither?
• Playbooks formalise the difficulty getting enough people to cover all the skills
• Skill trees mean a need for more powerful versions of most skills

Downtime skills?

• Some of the really obvious fun space stuff doesn’t work well when there’s 20 players to juggle
• Maybe a set of downtime skills that define a functional space-worthy crew?
  • Actually I really like this now I’ve thought of it
  • And the crew gets to choose ONE downtime job at the end of the episode which impacts their position in the next episode

Skill list - draft 0.0.01

Space-legs

• Can handle zero g well

O2 optional

• Can last a long time without atmosphere

Boy racer

• Can really fucking fly a spaceship (coz anyone call manage?)

Hackzors

• Advantage to solving computer-based tasks

Bridge-builder

• Advantage to solving engineering-based tasks (fixing the ship)

HP-removal specialist skills

• A few different ways

HP-returning specialist skills

• Definitely want to keep this simple, compared to Saga/Musketeers/Consequence

Protagonist-point removing skills

• Still needs work as a concept

NO PROTAGONIST-POINT RETURNING SKILLS

Bad life choices do that

Navigation

• Understands space-google maps

Fast-draw

• Provided you’re wearing a loaded gun, you can point and someone and say bang and have it count as a shot

Bullet-renewal?

Extra HP

Telepathy?

• Can always text message people
• Hive mind while in proximity - for practical purposes would need to be something you could tune in on. Maybe radios set to always open and ear-peices you take on or off
  • Don’t want the contact to be involuntary, will end up with people being excluded because someone might be listening.

[u_ne_korn]

@TheTimCrow

To change tack, since you’re talking about digital people, what about sentient intelligences in synthetic bodies? On a scale of TARS (Interstellar) to Bishop (Alien)? This could give some other options, while also reducing the number of alien species needed.

I’m leaning towards Geth? But in a Bishop body?

@TheTimCrow

A couple fun technical ideas on how to sci-fi up the communications / logisitics to align with your goals.

So, you can get FTL communications using Quantum entanglement. Basic is you entangle utter oodles of electrons, then separate them, and send one set on a sub light journey to ‘very far away’. Once people turn up, they can use these Q bits for instant comms over any distance. Imperial telecommunication at Atomic Rockets. Entire site is great for a project like this.

So this is where “how real is the science” starts happening. More real = more research, less flexibility, more potentially unintended interactions
Less real = more formalised,

[IdiotSavant]

@u_ne_korn

So this is where “how real is the science” starts happening. More real = more research, less flexibility, more potentially unintended interactions
Less real = more formalised,

I believe the official Magic Word for FTL communication is “Ansible”. Just say that, and you’re covered in an impenetrable coat of handwavium

[Reanna]

100% keen on just using ansibles. They work.

[u_ne_korn]

Step 6: Crews

Crew Progression

Create a scale that goes from a person to a crew to a major criminal enterprise

• Eat this week
• Safe home
• Financial stability
• Buying a space-ship
• Important independence/safety upgrades

Etc etc

They’re all problems that are solved with money. You start at the appropriate place for your crew.

There are also resources that are not money, and they go into “recipes” for things. Some of these things are the same as upgrades, some can be sold, some are used for other aims. A large number of these Resources are available at each episode. Most of the recipes are publicly available, some are secret. So the dollars value of these resources changes based on supply and demand (“We agreed $4k.” “Yeah, well, someone just offered me 8.”).

So players now have to choose: will they save for their important upgrade, or will they throw resources at something they value?

Ship Structure

S&V starts with no sleeping space on the ship, you’re having to stop at truck-stops along the way, and sleeping quarters are something you have to buy with level-ups.

While from a space-ship design angle, this is ludicrous, I do like that it puts pressure on people needing somewhere to go often. I’m going to noodle this idea for a bit.

Crew Structure

Why can’t crews be any size people want?

• Because I say so
• Because I want crews to not be able to fill all skills gaps, as a design feature
• A ship crew is different to a crime crew
  • Must a crime crew be a ship crew?
  • …. No. No it musn’t.
  • Trade-off - ship vs more flexible crew structure
  • Transport is available
  • Opens up more plot structures.
    • (Why don’t you just leave?)
• Ok, so a ship crew needs a pilot and an engineer and 2 others
• And a crime crew needs a … group of 4?
• This stops the ship-crew-required classes being over-saturated and the non-ship-crew-required classes becoming more special as a consequence.

Job Structure

Jobs come from:

• GM-seeded (direct to char sheets)
• GM-determined-character seeded (shady guy in a bar)
• Emergent

Have two core forms

• Downtime
  • you must end the game with the following resources to do this job
  • if you do the rewards is X,
  • no dice, no odds,
  • if 2 plus crews go for the same job, straight toss-up to see who wins
• In-game
  • Lots of different scales and structures
  • Not always CRIME, per say, but still a job

Next: Plot Structures (including Jobs)

[Reanna]

@u_ne_korn

While from a space-ship design angle, this is ludicrous, I do like that it puts pressure on people needing somewhere to go often. I’m going to noodle this idea for a bit.

I think this is where, at the end of the day, you’re designing a game and not the real thing. I like this idea as well, it encourages mingling.

[TheTimCrow]

To bounce off this, what you’re really needing is a place to go often, to enforce mingling, rather than any specific push to go there.

Interspace truck stops for sleeping.
But what about criminal locations with well, job boards, fences, forgers? Think up as many sinks and sources as you can that don’t really contribute to the game (Well, are unsuitable for PCs), and group them in one or more Tortugas?

[u_ne_korn]

Step 7: Plot structures

What do I already know about my plot structures

• They focus on things that characters have reason to care about
  • Aims of various factions should relate to characters
    • Personally
    • Philosophically
    • Financially
    • (Personal isn’t the same as important)
• They enable medium-density character-vs-character conflict
  • They’re not immediate life/death scenarios (mostly)
  • Variation in scope of threat such that all working together sometimes happens
    • Occasional amoral threat to life allowing an all-out gunfight where nobody is the baddie
    • All the way down to 1-v-1 conflicts
  • Are not strongly morally coded
  • Avoid topics which aren’t fun to conflict about
    • Late stage capitalism
      • There is a level of wealth inequality which is fun for story-telling purposes - it’s the stage where street gangs do crime to survive, and the wealthy have enough ill-gotten wealth that you don’t feel like the bad guy if you rob them, but they haven’t purchased the entire means of production, and in the middle people get by.
    • Coercive and dictatorial governments and philosophies
      • A little light culting, as a treat, maybe.
    • Bigotry
  • Should rarely be zero-sum
• The action sequences must conclude in a 3-6 hour game episode
  • So a BIG one probably maxes out at 4 hours out of a 6 hour episode, once you leave time for snacks and scheduled shouting at each other time
• They’re either
  • Quite self contained OR
  • Very easy to join in on late in the piece
• Can involve Mel playing with technology
• Should not be on rails from Game in to Game out
• Not strongly species-focused
  • Is-it-a-person plot…… ?
• Lots of smaller plots going on in parallel
• Failure => interesting fun things albeit things that the character didn’t want, not being shut down or death-spirals

Topics I know the plot structures should cover

• Large-scale conflict between “I like being in charge of the Frontier, I push against the Establishment arriving” and “The Establishment brings travel agents and hospitals, I would like those please”.
  • Places where crews of all foci and scales can get involved in that if they wish
• Crime
  • Just… so much crime
• How To Be The Sheriff When You’re Surrounded By Cowboys
• Weird shit in space
  • Sometimes it’s geography
  • Sometimes it’s a plot point
  • Sometimes it’s Twilight Zone and you just have to live with the existential dread that it might happen again
• Revenge
• Smuggling (best crime)
• Bounty-hunting
• Enemy-team-ups and double-crosses
• Pinkertons (gone back around to being cool again)

Practical thoughts about plot and location

Community spaces and mess mix poorly, so horror plot/themes have got to be more abstract than my personal inclination (which is for loads of gore!)

Single continuous space

• Players have more agency about getting association and movement and working on jobs
• Less IC space (as each IRL space is only one IC space)

Rotating spaces into different spaces

• More flexibility for IC spaces as a single IRL space can be multiple IC spaces
• Opens up way more options for plot around more spaces
• More GM management,
• probably requires more mook-crew/single scene characters

Hybrid?

• In any case, they impact each other a lot

[u_ne_korn]

@Reanna

@u_ne_korn

While from a space-ship design angle, this is ludicrous, I do like that it puts pressure on people needing somewhere to go often. I’m going to noodle this idea for a bit.

I think this is where, at the end of the day, you’re designing a game and not the real thing. I like this idea as well, it encourages mingling.

I am definitely pro-mingling.

@TheTimCrow

To bounce off this, what you’re really needing is a place to go often, to enforce mingling, rather than any specific push to go there.

This is very true. You’ve gotta go there, or you’ve gotta be there.
It is a requirement to play this game that you develop a character who wants to go to the places where the game is happening.

@TheTimCrow

Interspace truck stops for sleeping.
But what about criminal locations with well, job boards, fences, forgers? Think up as many sinks and sources as you can that don’t really contribute to the game (Well, are unsuitable for PCs), and group them in one or more Tortugas?

Tortuga was great, but Port Royal, technically an English colony, had 15 permanent residents per bar, and then earthquake flattened it and everyone’s response was “well that’s a very clear and deserved sign of gods wrath”.

[u_ne_korn]

Job template phase-space…. Thing

Skullduggery

Stalk/Surveil
Sabotage/destroy
Lift/plant
Subtle physical harm
Heist
Impersonate/Misdirect
Sling
Hide

Violence

Kidnap
Murder/death/kill
Grievous physical harm
Terrorise/extort
Destroy/Deface
Attack/Defend
Rob

Underworld

Guarding
Smuggle/deliver
Blackmail/discredit
Con/Espionage
Find/Hide
Negotiate/Threaten
Liberate/rescue
Fence

Space shit

Map
Mine
Capture
Survive
Natural philosophy
Fly/Race

Technological

Broadcast
Delete
Hack
Steal
Record
Track
Plant

And then I see if I can sketch out a job for loads of these options that match all squares in the classical alignment grid, plus personal/good, personal/neutral, personal/evil and personal/personal

And that shows me what skills I need to have covered when I do take 2 on skills

[u_ne_korn]

Good

Lawful/Establishment

Skullduggery

Stalk/Surveil

• Obtain specific info about criminal leaders/ enterprises
• Missing persons cases

Sabotage/destroy

• Blow a criminal cache up
• Interfere with mass relay sabotage

Lift/plant

• Investigate crime

Subtle physical harm

• ?

Impersonate/Misdirect

• Witness protection

Sling

• Deliver medicine/supplies

Hide

• Hide things criminals/anti establishment people need (weapons? explosives?)

Violence

Kidnap

• ?

Murder/death/kill

• ?

Grievous physical harm

• ?

Terrorise/extort

• Try to bully gangsters into being nicer

Destroy/Deface

• Sabotage plans of anti-establishment people (safely)
• Disrupt anti-establishment propaganda

Attack/Defend

• Defend things being attacked by gangsters
• Defend things being attacked by anti-establishment people
• Sabotage plans of anti-establishment people (safely)
• Defend a place/people against weird space shit

Neutral

Skullduggery

Stalk/Surveil

• Case a joint
• Missing persons

Sabotage/destroy

• Blow a criminal cache up

Lift/plant

• Set someone up for a crime
• Investigate a crime
• Heist

Subtle physical harm

• ?

Impersonate/Misdirect

• Fake IDs for refugees (inclu from the Est)
• Witness protection

Sling

• Illegal medicine
• Unlicensed medical practice

Hide

• Hide things people you disagree with need (weapons? explosives?)

Chaotic/Criminal

Skullduggery

Stalk/Surveil

• Case a joint

Sabotage/destroy

Lift/plant

• HEIST

Subtle physical harm
Heist
Impersonate/Misdirect
Sling
Hide

Violence

Kidnap

• Ransom (safely)

Murder/death/kill

• Assassination of last resort

Grievous physical harm
Terrorise/extort
Destroy/Deface
Attack/Defend
Rob

Wow, this is more tedious than I expected. I enjoy writing plot, but this is so… sterile.

[Reanna]

Why not leave it to the players or the plot itself to decide what sort of a person everyone is?

[u_ne_korn]

Absolutely, yes!
I seem to have poorly communicated what I’m trying to achieve here

I wanted to map out what sorts of things I thought players might be doing with their time, and what sorts of jobs characters would do. I wanted to make sure my list of potential escapades includes options for loads of different moralities, inclinations, and play-styles. Hence the very long list of things-wat-people-might-be-doing

I want to do this sort of basically phase-space planning NOW, instead of waiting until there are characters for a few reasons:

1. It helps me define what skills I need. If people are going to be relatively restricted in how many skills they’re allowed, (and I’m definitely leaning that way), then they all need to have good value for money. To be sure I’m achieving that, it helps for me to have worked examples of what a job looks like. A long list of options makes it easy for me to develop a small list into a lot more detail, and helps me mentally apply the results of my worked examples to the rest of the options.

2. I’ve said a lot of things about how I want the game to be played. This step makes me check that there is enough to do for each of those concepts. For example, I want lawful good characters to have as much to do a chaotic evil characters - well, do I have a similarly sized list of escapades? I want jobs to mix GM-seeded, self-determined and emergent, and also CvC and CvE - do I have workable ideas to make those different options work during play? Do I actually have any quick-one-and-done jobs in the list?

3. It helps me finalise decisions about the world-building. For example, in identifying that Impersonate is a REALLY strong option for jobs (you can make an impersonation work on multiple levels and from various angles, morally/legally/scope/vs mode), I’ve identified that I need to know how the legal concept of identity works. And how the system that produces it can be gamed.

4. It helps me identify the skills I want. I lot of the jobs I’ve come up with rely on the suite of skills that IRL come under sleight of hand or pick-pocketing. Ok, that means I need to figure out how that works, OR disallow jobs that rely on them.

So I’m not going to say “Jim is playing a lawful good character, so he gets these options”.
I’m saying “I know Jim wants to play a lawful good character - luckily, I did a tonne of work figuring out how to make that fun from a story perspective, and to ensure he has the skills to do jobs that are a fun experience for him AND make sense to his character”.

[Catnip]

The Lawful version of Kidnapping could be rescuing hostages, it uses a similar skill set.

Arresting someone or capturing a criminal with a bounty on them would also be lawful versions of kidnapping

[IdiotSavant]

Potentially useful when designing the specifics later:

72 Sci-Fi Heist Challenges (Part 2)

(note link to part 1 is in that post)

[u_ne_korn]

@Catnip

The Lawful version of Kidnapping could be rescuing hostages, it uses a similar skill set.

Arresting someone or capturing a criminal with a bounty on them would also be lawful versions of kidnapping

Excellent!! Yes!

@IdiotSavant

Potentially useful when designing the specifics later:

THE GAUNTLET

72 Sci-Fi Heist Challenges (Part 2)

This is the second half of my list of obstacles for sci-fi bounties and jobs. You can find the first part here . As someone pointed out regarding the first part, many of these could be adapted for…

(note link to part 1 is in that post)

Ahh!! Yes!! Thank you

[u_ne_korn]

Step 8: Vice-analogue game-play loop

Design Decisions:

• No accumulation of Trauma or similar meta-traits that will render characters unplayable
• Not a system where increasing trash-fire-ness generates more protagonist points to the point of incentivising it. Perhaps a hard limit on the number of trash-fire-produced protagonist-points per session.
• Poor life choices result in failing forward (aka they look like disasters but they open up new plotlines or new solutions to existing plotlines)

All characters need a Vice - players may choose this. It doesn’t need to be a specific VERB, but if not it needs a strong list of examples
This Vice should be

• Fun to RP (fun looks different to different people, not my job to adjudicate this)
• An active behaviour (so not getting blotto in a corner)
• Reasonably take 5-10 minutes of play time that your character is EXTREMELY STRONGLY disinclined, or UNABLE to stop early
  Vices might be
• Reasonably be a service offered by another character
• Reasonably linked to using your special power (ie, it stresses you out so much you maladaptively drink to cope)
  Vices shouldn’t be
• Things that remove you from the game or interaction with other characters
  So the GM team
• Provides GM directed characters that provide any missing Vices
• Provides suitable spaces for Vices to be engaged in
• Provide more opportunities for people who are failing forward into their Vices

Each skill class has a special power (several options?). It’s special enough to be fun, generic enough to come up a lot, powerful enough to be worth Vicing

• First use: you must Vice within the next hour
• Second use: you must Vice again by the end of the episode
• Third use: By the end of the episode you must engage in an action that OOC you’re fairly sure will damage a positive relationship your character has with another character
  (Second loop around becomes available if the game will be 4 plus hours)
• Fourth use: you must Vice within the next hour
• Fifth use: you must Vice again (so that would be number 4) by the end of the episode
• Sixth use: By the end of the episode you must engage in an action that OOC you’re fairly sure will damage a positive relationship your character has with another character

I’d love some constructive feedback on this bit specifically!