It's been a while, and I haven't been the most diligent about keeping up on my work. I was finishing up my MFA thesis and I just didn't have a lot of energy thanks to some personal stuff, but I think it's all downhill from here.
I've still been working on that rules-light game that I mentioned back in January.
I've made a few changes. First, I've scrapped the tiered success system and just go for a basic pass-fail. While this simplifies things a little too much, there are two elements I'm considering. One is to implement some sort of blackjack-style margin system to give degrees of success, which is a little risky given the tiny resource pools I'm going with. Another is to implement a D&D-style reroll system.
Combat
I've been looking into the possible designs for combat and I'm feeling like going lazy and copying what I did for Hammercalled.
Basically, instead of combat between characters, PCs are the only characters in the setting.
Enemies and hazards are represented as Threats, though I'm thinking of doing away with a lot of the hazards and just handling enemies this way (or, rather, creating a discrete system for things like environmental dangers).
At the start of combat, the GM determines whether the threat or the players goes "first", and then each PC acts or is acted upon.
The threat determines what roll a PC needs to make in order to avoid complications (like losing a resource).
One thing that this does, potentially, is let me write scripted solo/GM-less adventures, since I could write out a threat and its combat rotation (for more advanced enemies). It also means that players handle all dice rolls, which I like because it gives more of an engagement to them at the table.
I don't worry about GM engagement out of the perhaps self-centered principle that the only thing that bores a GM is a system that forces them to do too much bookkeeping. I don't have any evidence for this, since I'm going solely off of my own experience here, but since the GM can play an active role in a lot of the mechanical side of thing by setting up threats and the like and the only difference between a more traditional system is that they don't roll dice, I think it's probably fine.
Mechanics Under Consideration
I've already started thinking about some mechanics that could go into this.
Obviously the basic attribute roll with a loss of resources is the main way that a threat works. You can also do things like impose a penalty for the rest of combat.
Critical Status
One idea that I've had that gets around the issues regarding non-Health resources and also prevents potential instant kills is a critical state for characters.
Basically, if a character runs out of a resource, they suffer a -2/-3 penalty (maybe actually variable with certain mechanics, but I'm just not sure what the final number would be at rest) that stacks with all other penalties, including other critical status penalties from running out of other resources.
They remain functional for all other purposes, but another hit to Health kills them. The effects of running out of other resources have not yet been determined, and could even vary depending on threats (e.g. some enemies may try to knock the PCs out, supernatural elements might kill you by draining your psyche).
This also carries over into gameplay in the sense that a character can spend the last point from any of their resource pools to activate an effect and go into critical status in that resource.
Swarm
One thing that I always felt handled weirdly in a player-centric game is how the swarm mechanics in Hammercalled worked. Because each threat basically attacked separately, you wound up with a wall of reaction rolls if you had a lot of enemies. I'd typically abstract a lot of this out during play, but when the designer doesn't play by the rules that's a sign that there are some issues.
With the minimalistic design, I think a swarm would just hit multiple characters (if the enemy didn't already have something to do this), and any extra hits because of multiple swarm members could just impose a penalty on defense. Probably -2, but this could vary per-threat as needed.
Power Attack
One idea I had is letting players take a penalty to boost the damage output, since threats would basically receive damage during combat (whether this operates in an identical way to player resources is up for discussion; an asymmetrical system has extra weight, but would mean that I could have Damage numbers that are largely arbitrary and would make it easier to work in blackjack-style margins).
However, even with a flat system that treats threats as equivalent to characters and has a similar resource pool size between the two there's plenty of room for the power attack to shine, because a +1 to damage would just have to have a commensurate penalty on attack accuracy.
PC-Override Defenses
In Hammercalled players would defend against threats by responding with an attribute roll. In this system, all rolls involve the combination of two attributes. This means that a character can choose to buy a special trait that lets them use one attribute in place of another and still have to face one of the enemy's designated defense attributes.
Setting
I've also changed the setting. While I was enjoying exploring an Age of Sail motif, I found it very hard to balance the historical setting with the other elements and themes I was looking at.
I ran into a problem I often run into when I work with historical settings. I'm theoretically capable of historical research, and I know lots about the subject off the top of my head because I'll sit down and devour multi-volume histories and biographies for fun, but I hate blending fiction with history. Even when simplified game mechanics make it obvious that you're leaving out a lot of the daily life of people in historical settings, I just can't shake the feeling that I'm either making a theme-park version or creating something near enough to the truth but the deliberate alterations blur the boundaries.
Practically, I don't think this is an issue. I have no problem with putting in side-bars referencing my historical sources where I think the fictionalizations and simplifications might lead people astray, and while many people get history from games I think they also understand that a game is not a valid source to learn about history in a broad sense.
But basically the problem was that I felt like it was guaranteed to be misunderstood and subject to some really awful feature-creep, system-alignment, and setting-creep issues that would take me away from my original subject.
So I've begun work on a novel sci-fi setting for the game, which should integrate fairly well into the system.
Exoworld
I've been kicking around deep-space sci-fi settings for a long time. As a kid I think I had a fairly sophisticated (for my age) take on this sort of generation ship-gone-wild idea that resulted in people forgetting that they were on a space ship and going feral with all sorts of wild mutants.
Typically my ideas from my childhood existed more in my head than in writing, but I was drawn back to this one as a good fit for the system.
This is a more or less complete refresh. Some of the basic principles are the same, but the execution is largely distinct.
Exoworld is set in a relatively hard sci-fi setting, at least from a macro scale. There's some unexplained weirdness and I'll leave it to each table to decide how much to justify it based on science or let it operate as some supernatural phenomena, but that's at the corners of the setting and you don't have to feature it if you don't want to.
The setting in a nutshell is that there is a solar-system spanning confederation that sends out a colony sip to a rogue planet that's closer to Earth than any other habitable planet.
During the time the ship is under construction, the confederation more or less falls apart, but it's able to launch regardless despite the tension and conflict, though it has only a fraction of its intended passengers.
The journey still takes centuries, both because there's less fuel on-board and because space is very big. Over the course of these centuries, a variety of accidents cause the vessel to have major problems, including the loss of many of the original passengers.
By the time the vessel arrives, the crew have formed an entirely new society by biologically manipulating themselves to make up something that might be construed as Plato's ideal society if the architects of Aldous Huxley's World State from Brave New World wrote it. They call themselves Exemplars, because they're pretentious about their supposed perfection.
Because many of them are no longer well-suited for life in gravity, and because they've made themselves into genetically distinct castes that can't autonomously reproduce, they still unload the original colonists understanding that it's the only way their destination will ever get colonized. They're also somewhat mystical about not exceeding the magic numbers of their own population and have intra-societal conflict.
They live on the generation ship, which they've converted into a space station of sorts. There's also a moon around the rogue planet. The Exemplars are allergic to automation, for superstitious and historic reasons alike, and they're doing an execrable job at setting up a mining colony, but it's not like the original people who were in pods are suited for life on the lunar surface.
They're sort of sympathetic villains to the story. I consider the sort of rigid top-down hierarchal structure they represent a manifestation of evil, but I try to give them each a little personality when they enter the scene as characters. They're sufficiently different from us that they're hard to judge, too.
For instance, they are simultaneously living in a dystopian collectivist society but also fiercely alone. Since they're all grown in vats, they don't really have a lot in the way of familial bonding, but they don't have any real hedonism wired into them.
The opening fiction features a pair of Exemplars going down to investigate a mine shutdown with the order to basically ensure that a shipment gets sent up to them. The Exemplars' higher ups don't really care how this happens, but they really want it done, so anything's on the table. Fixing the issue is ideal, but taking supplies by force is also permissible.
Because the Exemplars are basically the human equivalent of pugs and their biological structure is a house of cards optimized for things not always compatible with survival, the protagonist's buddy has an aneurysm from adjusting to planetary conditions, which leads to a sort of odd coping process where she actually feels bad about this and doesn't have the words and philosophy to cope.
I want to give the idea that even though the Exemplars are these hyper-atomized individuals with a cold and engineered society and ethics that are entirely based on the idea of the ends with no consideration to the means they still have some human element deep inside their posthuman weirdness.
As far as the rest of the setting, I'm going to save it for other posts because this one is getting up in length, but I think it's novel enough to be interesting while also being straightforward and genre-loyal enough that it won't be off-putting to people who just want to play a game.
One thing that I'm struggling with as I write is balancing the setting elements with the other stuff. One obvious issue right now is that the Exemplars have a lot of potential gameplay interactions relative to any of the other factions in the setting because they have so many castes. This could be solved by splitting them up mechanically along certain lines (e.g. make more but shallower entities). It might also be a moot point by the time I wind up writing out the setting in more detail, though I suspect that the original colonists are going to give me an interesting time coming up with abilities that the Exemplars don't have for a unique trait list.
I like the combat system and yes, swarm rules are one of the most difficult things to get balanced. The setting is intriguing, kind of old school sci-fi :)
I'm leaning hard on LeGuin for influence, as well as a lot of older sci-fi. My hope is that it's something that feels fresh, but retains some of that Golden Age influence. It's dark, but not cynical, which seems to cut against the mold of modern sci-fi.