Galactic Menu (edit)Random Average Blogpmwiki.org |
< Caliban First | Denver Playtest | Denver Session 1 > So folks got together on Friday, roughly around 6pm, to run through all the prep-work for a Galactic campaign: Captains, Crews, Factions, the Galaxy, our First Worlds, and an addition that Matt mentioned which I decided to run with: Scourge elements. All the full-on details of the Factions and the like can be found at: http://random.average-bear.com/GalacticPlaytest/DenverPlaytest The Players I had three players (expected four, but there was a snafu with the scheduling and he thought we were playing on Saturday), and that turned out to be just about right for the time we had to work with.
Before actually getting into character generation, I handed out the character sheets and talked briefly about the basic mechanics of the system, what the redshirts, other Crew, and Gear did (but I didn't get into Connections, since I couldn't find that text quickly), and talked about the rules for disallowing an idea that everyone hated... allowing that I still prefered "yes, but" over "hell no." With that said, I mentioned that I was hoping for a fairly serious run this first time out with the game, but in return for that (if everyone was behind that idea), I'd run a "Buck Godot"-inspired Galactic! romp on our next go round to let everyone get their Silly on. Captains Although this is the area where we had the most number of notes on the text, the process itself went well enough -- it took about an hour, but the results were good. We ended up with: Amanda Tillotson, daughter of a high-ranking 'unification' commander in the Concordance Navy -- a man who who disappeared under mysterious circumstances, played by ***Dave.
Connections
Anse Schmalkalden, politically-disaffected captain from a major Territory's important family that has been shamed by shameful actions taken by his now-deceased sister, played by Randy
Connections
Robert James Wilson III ("Boyd"), university-trained rich-boy explorer, played by Margie
Connections
Here's a few notes from this part of the prep-work: 1. The fact that all archetypes are assumed to have a score of 1d6 (p.10) caused some confusion over the 10d6 to be allocated to attributes (p. 8) -- "Do you get the 1d6 rating for free, and then add 1 to get 2d6?" No, but it's hard to explain why. The group suggested saying, possibly, "You get 1d6 in everything, and then get 7d6 to raise up to three archetypes", or just not mentioning the the 1d6 'default' thing until later in the rules. 2. Two of the players immediately mentioned that they felt there should be a "Merchant" or "Trader" archetype. I pointed out that you can get the functionality of a merchant by combining, say, some dice in Tinker and Scoundrel, or Explorer and something else, but that didn't really scratch the itch. The feeling is that a Trader is an identifiable archetype of the genre -- something that someone does and is that has a real identity and name and definable set of abilities: in other words, an Archetype. While, yes, you can combine some of the listed archetypes to get that functionality in a squishy way, it (a) inefficient to have to take two (sometimes character-inappropriate) archetypes to get the basic abilities of what is an easily defined trope of the setting (b) unsatisfying to be unable point at your 'merchant' archetype ability for a measure of your ability in that arena. Frankly, it seemed to vex people to 'have' to be good at mechanics and sneaky tactics (tinker/scoundrel) in order to be a trader-by-profession, and ditto that for an Explorer/Professor combo. We brainstormed on this a bit, so as to not simply bitch without suggesting solutions and came up with: Archetype: Trader
Now, once all that was done, I explained that I wasn't going to house-rule in that archetype, since that would defeat the purpose of a playtest, which the players totally understood. (Amanda and "Boyd" above.) 3. The section of Virtues/Vices -- p. 11. last paragraph, reads funny: suggest saying "You can't apply both your Virtue and Vice in the same conflict." 4. P. 12 should simply say right there how many times you can use Virtue, or at least how many uses you can start off with. We never did find out what the limit mentioned on page 12 was for Virtue. 5. P. 12 - Suggest including a brief explanation as to how and why Connection dice might change in size, with refs to other areas. With the default connection starting at d6, and the examples in the text being d4 and d8, folk immediately wanted to understand how they changed, and that took a LOT of digging to provide a one-sentense summation. Crews Folks had a lot of fun, making up their crew members for each other's captains. They all went back to the captain's players and asked for reminders as to exactly which archetypes the Captains were good with, so that their crew members would fill realistic gaps. They also made a POINT of adding a few key adjectives to their brief crew descriptions, to give it some flavor. Here's what we ended up with: "Boyd"
Anse (picking up a rag-tag crew of supposed ne'er-do-wells)
Captain Tillotson (running her ship in a military style)
Factions One of the things that struck me about the Faction creation was that it felt a lot like the intertwining common in a Lexicon game, and Dave (who has also participated in such things in the past) made just exactly that comment, later. It was a good time, and the politics of the Colonies really start to flesh out at this point. Those factions fully filled out during this stage:
(Although my names are next to two of them, I'll also note that I simply detailed two previously-mentioned factions that I found too interesting to leave 'plain'.) Those factions alluded to in other faction entires:
The Galaxy Galaxy creation went smoothly enough, though we did have considerable coin-bounce -- it's not as though we have to do this step so often during the game that it was a serious problem -- but it did make me understand why Prince Valiant didn't take off back in the 80's. Matt sez: Well noted. We didn't have too much bouncing in the last setup. I think it's more to do with what's underneath the map. But in my dream package the game might come with less bouncy mini poker chips. First Worlds The night was running pretty late and with all the details we'd had to focus on all night, we were flagging a bit by the time we got to making up our first worlds. We flubbed up the process a bit. Basically, what we did was
We didn't get set resources as a seperate step, or a few other things -- misreading it, we thought we were just supposed to make sure that one of the player-introduced elements was a resource and so forth. The worksheet that Remi made up for the Durham Playtest would have totally bypassed this -- I recommend including something like this in the game, since world-creation will occur either in the middle or end of a session -- two times when people are most likely to forget something from a detailed procedure. That said, the First worlds, their conflict, the dice, and the Captain's goals worked out pretty well and are totally playable as is, and we'll get it right next time. By this point in the evening, I think everyone was just about "creatived-out" -- something I've seen happen in long sessions of things like Inspectres. Here's what they gave me to work with for next session: "Boyd"
Adversity: 2d6, 1d4 Crisis: Human vs. Nature Factions:
Goals
Anse
Adversity: 3d4 Crisis: Human vs. Human Factions:
Goals
Amanda Tillotson
Adversity: 2d4, 1d6 Crisis: Human vs. Human Factions:
Goals
Scourge Elements Finally, I borrowed a suggestion from Matt and asked each player to come up with a 'scourge element' -- some quality that I, as the GM, would be obliged to incorporate in our personal version of the Scourge. Here's what I got:
At which point, I think I uttered for about the fifth time that night "I love you guys..." what great material to work with! ... and with that, we called it for the night, having going four hours on these steps and taking playtest notes. Everyone seemed very interested in the creation of the setting and characters, and interested in what was going to come out of the whole thing. Good stuff, and I'm excited for our next session. |
