Mostly the online stuff, systems, genres, et cetera.
In no particular order, just stream-of-consciousness stuff.
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I like running Star Wars, and I'm glad I finally got to run/play some version of Tatooine Manhunt, a classic WEG Star Wars scenario but… yeah. I'm kind of done with running modules. Ehn. Much more interesting to grab the character notes, a cool planet, some history stuff to mix in, NPCs that want stuff, and a crazy critter or something, and just play. Still, bucket list ticked.
Also, not for nothing: most non-demo published scenarios are too long for online play, unless they're super-tight and tied to the characters like crazy, because they take seven weeks to play through and we've forgotten how we even got involved in the thing by the time it wraps up.
I mean, if you know you're going to do some epic dungeon crawl thing that goes on for six or sixteen or sixty sessions, then that's fine, but otherwise, short and brutal is better for online, IMO.
Or meandering sandbox. Same diff.
Fate Accelerated is such a weird beast for me, these days. I like approaches on paper, but in play they're… kind of a pain in the ass? "Which approach is the right one for this thing you're doing, what's going on here?" Ugh. I don't mind meta-thinking, but it gets in my face on every.single.roll, and that's tiring.
I wouldn't want to do a skill list either, necessarily, but that's for other reasons.
There was a weird thing going on with the the dice rolling where we'd say what we were doing (good), then roll (good), and then figure out if it had been an attack or create advantage or overcome or whatever (weird). Fine, but… weird. It never retroactively changed the action taken (good), and I doubt it breaks anything, and it was nice for narrating interesting stuff other than "you shoot, then he shoots…" but it was – again – a kind of weird thing where the meta came in a lot. We tended to do a lot of "I only beat him by 1, so I'll just set up an advantage for later," and people only going for damage when they could really slam-dunk someone with a big hit. Which I totally get – I'd do the same thing, and probably encouraged that here.
I should absolutely have gone with my initial instincts and gotten rid of Stress. Otherwise there's just too many plink-plink-plink hits. Star Wars people get hit once, maybe twice, and they are done – from Leia to Chewbacca: one hit HURTS. Drop stress, everything goes to Consequences, and it speeds fights up a lot more and makes the hits much more significant. (Even then, Fate points give you more than enough ability to reduce the damage sustained.)
Six sessions, and we never refreshed fate points. There was never a need – we finally tapped one character down to zero fate points at the end of the last session, and he only started with two to begin with. One other guy had 1, and everyone else had 3 or more… and I almost never did a compel. (Maybe I never did – I can't think of any. I gave out two for particularly character-rich moments.)
In six sessions, the best scenes were the ones aboard the ship, in transit. Another argument in favor of character-focused winging it, as opposed to published scenarios, which should surprise no one.
Everyone felt tired last night. Or I did, and projected, but by the end of a basically normal-length session, we were dah-rag-ing. Big time.
If I keep going with Rebel Ops, I'll probably try another system. I'm very curious how various expressions of the setting, via system, change the way the game feels.
The cool thing: wouldn't need to keep the same characters, even, or people can. Either. The nature of the way Rebel Ops is set up is the group for that session can be different than the last, because the…
Huh.
Yeah, I need to make the situations/missions going forward a LOT shorter, so we can wrap them up in one session, maybe two. Lets us tell lots of stories about lots of different rebels, if we like. Get more people playing, different ones, and just try stuff out.
The Rebels TV show is a good model in this case (irony!): "Here's this one thing we need to do, we go do it, there's a complication, we address it, there's a twist, probably some fighting, and we deal with both the twist and fighting and get back out." Curtain drops.
Same basic model as a Mouse Guard mission: Mission, Challenge, Twist, Challenge, Twist, Conclusion. Hmm.
So, game systems: Streets of Mos Eisley (PtbA), Star Worlds (also PtbA), Risus (don't laugh, I've seen some good write-ups on this). Hell, maybe even Savage Worlds, just to figure out what all the G-D fuss is about, though I'm not sure I want to deal with … eh. I need to re-read the rules again.
Anyway, they're all dead-simple to explain to people as we play, so they're all good in that way.
And this says nothing at all about doing something else like Don't Rest Your Head, Monster of the Week, or whatever. One Ring, even.
Man could I stand to play some more One Ring. I like that game.
Platform. I would 100% rather be running entirely in Roll20 with no Hangouts interface getting in my way, but right now it's not a good option: I need a more powerful streaming/recording machine first. Baby steps.
Until then, I'll deal with Hangouts. Le sigh.
More thoughts in comments, as I have them. Also pinging current players, since this is relevant and I welcome thoughts.
Fate Accelerated is such a weird beast for me, these days. I like approaches on paper, but in play they're… kind of a pain in the ass? "Which approach is the right one for this thing you're doing, what's going on here?" Ugh. I don't mind meta-thinking, but it gets in my face on every.single.roll, and that's tiring.
This. Even my daughter noticed that the story was feeling too much like a game compared to…D&D. (That was surprising to hear, but not when you think about how 5e abilities and advantages work.)
Considering game systems brought me to this random thought:
When parsing "Role Playing Games" and "stuff that isn't exactly an RPG, or at least doesn't scratch an RP Gaming itch for me," I think a reasonable criteria is "Can you use it to run Star Wars, and get a Star Wars gaming experience out of it?"
It's not that Star Wars is that great or anything. I just think you can probably run Star Wars with most any RPG and get something that's pretty Star Wars-ish in feel, and there are… RPG-adjascent games where whatever happened at the table might be interesting, but not … that. Like a Fiasco game set in Star Wars would probably be awesome and maybe funny, but it's not the system for your basic Rebels fighting the evil Empire stuff. No bad there, just what it is.
I mean, there really is a difference between a role playing game and a story telling game, right? It's printed right there on the tin.
I will delete this if anyone hares off into a rpg versus storygame tangent, though. Break it off into a different thing or something, and don't tag me – I'm just navel-gazing.
I agree. When I find a new system, I immediately write a Star Wars conversion for it. If it can handle Star Wars, then I know it can handle anything. SW has magic, special weapons, vehicles, politics, martial arts…everything.
Have you considered just replacing Approaches with Physical/Mental/Social/Spiritual or whatever so it relates more readily to the act?
Workable, but breaks "the corruption system I really like and have no use for in the current game because no one's a force user omg when has that ever happened in a star wars game."
You see my problem. 🙂
I dunno, it's not so much that I can't map it, I just have to stop and consider it, ever time. It's so rarely straightforward.
As a player in this game, I want to address some of the things I saw here, because I think you have a good thing going:
Fate points: I saw that you very rarely dipped into your pool. Just as a reminder, because a lot of Fate GMs I play with miss this: you get a pool, equal to the number of PCs in the scene, for every scene. We refresh every session, you refresh every scene.
You should absolutely be spending these to make our lives harder and more interesting! When you do that, we will naturally respond in kind. Invoke against us. Offer compels. Bleed us of our Fate points, the way we'll try to bleed you.
Approaches: in principle I agree, they can be difficult to parse sometimes. I don't necessarily think skills make this better, just different, because I'm playing in a game right now where we have a custom skill list and questions continually come up ("is dodging out of the way a Battlefield or Physique roll?")
You can experiment with different approaches that align better with your source material. A game I'm designing breaks starting characters into Brave, Clever, Cool, Curious, Determined, and Mysterious buckets. You can go with Jadepunk-style professions, which align very neatly with the characters we already have.
Actions: I personally have always tried to announce the action I think I'm doing, but I have a pretty good idea of what they mean. I think to some extent this requires some system knowledge to do properly as a player. For those players who may not be up to speed on it, as GM I think you're in your right to tell them what it sounds like they're doing. That doesn't necessarily make it easier for you to figure out, though.
Stress and Consequences: I agree that taking Stress away could make things interesting, but I wouldn't go right to Consequences-as-actual-harm. I'd think about them more like "Peril" – taking damage puts an aspect on you that can be immediately Overcome, the difficulty for doing so is the shifts of damage put into it (like Consequences), but it's basically a risky situation that you have to maneuver out of rather than bodily injury.
Examples of Peril are everywhere in the trilogies: masher plates on conveyor belts, lava rivers, being stuck at the edge of a high cliff, whatever.
Honestly, I think that spending Fate points more aggressively as a GM will push through our Stress a lot faster, effectively getting you to your goal of faster fight resolution.
Good points, all, Bill, especially with Consequences as not-actually-harm-all-the-time.
And yeah, I've been bad about using my own Fate points, which is weird because I'll push like hell in other systems. Could be I've been running FAE for soft targets for so long I'm out of the habit. 🙂
And thanks for the feedback on the game as a whole – it's good to get some feedback and see where everyone's at.
edit The first star wars character I wrote up with FAE-ish rules used Jadepunk-style professions instead of approaches.
Think it was Leader, Explorer, Tech, Fighter, Scoundrel, Scholar
Another random thought:
I liked the idea of the way we laid out aspects at the beginning, in theory.
High Concept
Trouble
Rebellion
Team
Bond
The concept is sound, and it paints a good picture of the character in question, but in play it seems like people really struggle to come up with aspects that apply to the situations we're in, and that's weird and kind of annoying.
Could be we just need to re-tool some aspects, with a mind toward pointing them where you want the character to be, not as much where they were, unless it also applies to now. (I think Elir's were the most consistent problem for Kay, but Aral's ended up spinning in the mud quite a bit, also, with only a couple providing traction).
The hard lesson I learned as GM is "make things more difficult than you think the characters are ready for". 🙂 For Fate specifically, I wrote up a guide for how to create challenging encounters: http://station53.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-tao-of-fate-creating-challenging.html
I agree that we had some trouble with creating aspects that fell neatly into those buckets, and I think that may just be a function of "too many specific buckets". I'm the sort of guy who plays a character to discover that character. My roommates do online freeform RP, and have things like a 100-question sheet you are expected to fill in (asking stuff like "tea or coffee?") before starting to play, and that level of pre-thinking is not my style. Fate's traditional "crossing paths" thing rubs me the wrong way for a similar reason.
That said, I think asking "why are you here" was a very logical and appropriate thing to do. A single aspect, answering "why are you here – for the Rebellion, for the team here, for someone specific", might have been better.
Yeah, I think that question really bore fruit for a lot of people (Akana the activist, Backup's own "well, I don't really know…", Aral's political firebrand ties… good stuff.
I would just like to say that aspects are the greatest thing to ever come out of Fate. The idea of deciding what to roll after the character has taken an action, and having characters take specific actions to fit each approach is why I always run with accelerated over core in my games. Okay carry on.
I've got opinions on all of this, but don't have time to write them all out right now.
As for your tired comment, I was ill Monday and yesterday until almost 5 in the afternoon with a stomach bug, but I didn't want to miss another game after missing the previous week, especially given that this was the final session of this particular arc. I don't think I derailed the game too much (expect for my normal quote-heavy humor) but I definitely think I helped contribute to the low-energy of last night's game.
It's no problem, Michael – I was dragging by the end as well – my wife's out of the country and three kids are a lot, sometimes (the times when they're awake).
And +Kay Hill was sick (and still is today), and +Margie Kleerup and I were kind of dragging, too. (Which is also my clever way to make sure they see this thread.)
Couple of thoughts:
1. Fate Points – I'm pretty sure that Fate Points were regenned between sessions. Okay, I'm moderately sure. I never seemed to run out, at least, when I needed them.
I agree that more use by you of FP would have upped the stakes — but also prolonged the conflicts.
2. Scenarios – For online play, 2 hours is a sweet spot, but it does cause problems with packaged scenario being sliced into more sesions and remembering what came before. (Side suggestion: add a new category "Recaps" to the G+ page, making it easier to quickly find who the hell Dekko is, etc.)
I think two-parters are a good target — long enough to line out a decent story (and have a cliff-hanger), short enough to remember the particulars (and work around absences or desire to change characters).
3. Aspects, Approaches, etc. – One problem I think we had with Aspects was that the scenario (last night in particular) felt combat-heavy — which means if you're in a basic firefight and you have one Aspect that's clearly applicable to combat, you end up overplaying it (and feeling like you're not changing things up or using the character properly).
(There's a similar challenge to "Hey, how can I keep using this Approach that I have a 3 in without feeling like I'm just being a one-note charlie?")
While all that could encourage thinking outside the box, it makes what should be routine actions (They Are Shooting At Me So I Will Shoot At Them) take more cogitation than they should.
I'm not sure of the the "right" answer for that one.
Related to that, with a large number of "who are you" and "what's your relationship" Aspect categories, the applicability to specific actions is less clear than broad approaches to situations. So Aral is going to have political, class, and emotional drivers behind what he does — but that doesn't easily inform how he shoots a blaster at the bounty hunter in a running gun fight, as much as how and why he avoids (or starts) one. (That, in turn, makes using those Aspects in combat feel like it requires more cogitation in order to take advantage of the mechanics.)
All this is also a way to long-winded suggest that character interactions (where motivations become part of the character, less a mechanic) were some of my favorite parts.
4. Broadcast Mechanics – Recording all this for others to share is cool, but if you're finding issues with Hangouts hampering you in using D20, it may be you're letting the tail (recording sessions) wag the dog (having good sessions) here.
5. Actions vs Aspects – My own Fate experience is such that I still don't have a good meta sense of when to go with trying to do damage (stress, consequences) and when to lay down a hampering or exploitable aspect for someone else. I understand what each of them do, just not when I'd want to do one vs the other. Thus my default to do damage (because someone's got to).
5. Switching things up – I'm fine with trying other systems and/or other character — but I'd caution against too much churn.
I'm also more than good with keeping the current system and/or characters and continue to work them.
Overall, I had a good time, and enjoyed my character (even if he turned out differently from how I'd envisioned). I do have a notion to try a Jedi at some point, but not an obsessive need to do so immediately.
+Dave Hill , I can take a shot at answering a couple of these questions from opinion and experience.
Having the GM spend more Fate points seems to speed things up in my experience, because damage happens faster and that speeds up conflict resolution one way or another – either through our concession, or by forcing us to abandon opportunities.
In the compound fight, for example, we really had one goal: get our guy to safety. A few secondary objectives presented themselves: defeat the head bounty hunter, defeat the quisling, get the Headhunters in the air. If the bad guys had been more aggressive at denying us options there, we would have had to give up one some of those things, and settle for a quick escape. As it was, with all options always on the table, we naturally went for them all, and that took time. Backup was going after Jada, which meant he wasn't working to create a safe exit, because Jada was a tactical option.
When to do damage vs. when to create advantages: there's two ways to answer this question. One is tactically, and one is narratively.
The tactical answer is: "if our biggest hitter attacked this target and tied with her, do we have enough free invokes on the table to do a Moderate or Serious Consequence?" If the answer is "yes", it's time to attack. If not, it's time to create an advantage.
The narrative answer is: "can you can see your attack definitively taking this opponent out?" If the answer is "yes", make an attack. For example, I can't really see Aral using one of those ornate aristocratic blasters to take out a Mandalorian bounty hunter, but I can definitely picture him popping up, clapping a few mooks, then vanishing down the hall. This isn't a hard and fast rule, just one that will help you make up your mind about what you want to do with your action.
+Dave Hill re: Actions versus Aspects.
One of the benefits of using a set-up with specific skills is you tend to have guys who are more about their shooting/fighting skills than other people, so it becomes more clear when/whether to be the guy who sets up the big slam dunk with create advantage, or the guy slamming it home. If you're the person who's "shoot" is lower, you'll be going for the relatively easier create advantages, or using other skills entirely, and in more unusual ways, to do something.
One of the things I've always liked about Fate is you can make someone with no fighting skills at all who can still be MVP in a fight. Kay's been doing that quite a bit, and it's good stuff.
The thing with Approaches is, anyone can shoot and, barring relevant stunts and the ability to bring your best aspects to bear, anyone can be as good at that kind of stuff as the merc gun bunny with 47 different guns on their person. That's a strength and in some ways a weakness, since there's less 'niche' stuff going on, outside of whatever fiction you have set up (everyone generally deciding they don't really pilot ships much, for example, except Akana).
Now, you can create those niches with a lot of stunt focus and such – it's absolutely possible – but it's harder to get at.
Your note about broadcast mechanics is good, as is the tail wagging the dog. I really like recording sessions … well, no, I really like rewatching sessions, which then requires the recording part. I may be the only person who's gone back and rewatched sessions. Sometimes I'll even do that the same night we wrap up (used to do it quite a bit with the Demolished Ones).
Bill makes another good point – the more chips on the table, the harder we're going to go, and that'll create some good situations, even if they are failure situations.
One thing that's always bugged me about Fate is people don't lose very much, and failure is really really good for interesting things happening – better investment, more interest taken in eventual success, et cetera.
I don't think I spent a fate point the whole six sessions, and given I could have easily spent 30 if I just look at the conflicts where guns came out, it's fair to say I'm not pushing hard enough. :/
So: maybe a bit of character/aspect tuning (we have people who don't even have a third stunt picked out yet, and we've had enough minor milestones for people to rewrite any aspect on their sheet but the high concept), a moderate milestone 'level up', and we'll see where we are. Hmm.
Maybe only use aspects and actions? We experimented with that for Shadowcraft and liked it so much that it is our primary mechanic. You rank your aspects as your "skills" (+3 trouble aspect is pretty awesome) and roll those.
It might answer your problem here. Someone can try to justify their best aspect all the time, but that's actually a little harder than justifying your best approach, and has the benefit of pointing out that such an aspect defines who your character is and what they do more than the others. But if another aspect obviously represents what you're doing better, then you have to use that (can't use Practiced Negotiator +3 to lie if you have Con-Artist +1 on your sheet).
Heh, I always think of Aspect-only Fate as Fate-Risus.
I'm a Frickin' Viking [+3]
+Aaron Griffin – I've made a similar observation; in a lot of ways, Risus feels like Fate, with Aspects and Approaches mooshed into one thing, and it totally works. That game is deceptively tactical and deep, really, and accepts a lot of bolt-on accessories, if you're inclined.
I saw a guy writing up a bunch of star wars characters on the Risus group, doing the Force as a Sidekick – "The Force is a Powerful Ally", indeed. Good stuff.
You know, I've seen a different write up on Corruption that involves rewriting Aspects as you sink toward the dark side, rather than renamed Approaches. Combining the two… hmm. Yeah…
+Ryan M. Danks – finish up Shadowcraft, damn it. 🙂
I think that was my version of the dark side, +Doyce Testerman. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BweAq0yblvcgUm8ybF8xaTgzNW8/view?usp=sharing
Dark side changes first your trouble, then the other aspects, until you eventually lose yourself.
+Bill Garrett Good point on a more powerful (or threatening) scenario encouraging more focused/prioritized action. I'm still not sure it would have made things go faster (escaping the compound would have, I suspect, kicked the can down the road for another fight with the bounty hunters), but it would have been more of an adrenaline challenge to have had to flee with Adar (as much fun as it was pretty much plastering the BHs).
What you say on when to attack-to-damage vs attack-to-create-aspects makes sense. I'll remember it next time.
A second fight with the bounty hunters is a feature, not a bug. Star Wars, like its serial predecessors, is full of recurring villains and "I'll get you next time" battles. Plus, two short fights break up across sessions more neatly than one long fight.
Seconding the Risus-style aspects-as-approaches, with some reservation – I think "Uncertain Loyalties" is a great part of Backup's character, but what does that tell you about his areas of competence, for example?
+Ryan M. Danks
It was!
The one I'm keeping handy right now focuses on renaming Approaches instead, with (by default) the Approach you used in anger changing, so Careful become Paranoid, Flashy becomes Arrogant, Forceful becomes Angry, et cetera.
+Dave Hill
Certainly, focusing on the 'fiction' thing that makes most sense can help when there are too many otherwise legitimate game-system options available.
If you use approaches, I like that better. Makes every action "feel" the dark side.
+Ryan M. Danks – with numeric values on Aspects and no Approaches, what do Stunts end up looking like, or is that not a thing in SC?
+Doyce Testerman I think you're getting at something I was talking around — more niched characters (in the sense of "team ecological niche"): the Grifter, the Thief, the Hacker, the Hitter, the Mastermind (the Tank, the DPSer, the Healer) … I think it's great conceptually not to have those things hardcoded into the character's mechanics, but it also practically makes it more difficult to differentiate or instinctively know what Aral is doing (or can do) vs Backup vs 'Akana.
That's RPGing Laziness on my part, I realize …
+Bill Garrett, the aspect would still work as a normal aspect (invoked/compelled), but if it comes up in play, then you roll it.
Uncertain Loyalties could come up when you are dealing with a possible traitor in the enemy ranks (the scene where Malcolm Reynolds convinces Jayne to switch sides comes to mind), as it could be relevant there. The first invoke could be the same aspect, really pointing it out as relevant and important here, or it could be something else.
Given how such an aspect is more telling of your characterization than ability, it's likely to get a lower rank, but still just as compellable or invokable as any other aspect, and to the same degree.
Yeah, I was expecting the invoke/compel to remain the same, just trying to think of when I'd roll it as part of my action. 🙂
+Bill Garrett I think the aspect as it stands now is actually "A good soldier follows orders" (deep delicious Clone Wars shudder), which is a bit more 'rollable' than Uncertain Loyalties, in any case.
Certainly a few aspects – especially the Bonds – would want a bit of a rewording tweak to give them at least an implied skill set, but maybe that's a feature-not-bug as well – we've got a few dead aspects around right now anyway. 🙂
Worth thinking about anyway. Maybe try it out for a scenario and see how it works. Not like we can't switch around with minimal effort. 🙂
+Doyce Testerman, stunts are a thing. They work just like FAE.
Excerpt:
Because I [describe some way that you are exceptional, have a cool bit of gear, or are otherwise awesome], I get a +2 when I [pick one action: defend, create an advantage, overcome] with [pick an aspect] when [describe a circumstance].
(There is no attack action in SC.)
+Doyce Testerman It feels like stunts could remain roughly the same while removing the Approach. Aspect-only Fate seems harder to spam an apex approach…
So "+2 to Sneakily stash cargo in nooks and crannies" could simply be "+2 to stash cargo in nooks and crannies".
/shrug
If I wrote SC (I didn't), I would have written stunts as: Because I [choose one of your aspects] I get +2 when I [choose action] when [choose circumstance].
Or, Because I [choose one of your aspects], once per session I can [choose thing you can do].
So this is +Dave Hill's guy, expressed this way, as a mental exercise:
Aral Tholemain
Patriotic Noble of Naboo [+3]
Naboo Revolutionary with a Bounty on my Head [+1]
The Empire took my family from me [+0]
An officer and sometimes bloodthirsty gentleman [+2]
E'lir would be my duaghter's age… [+1]
Family ties to Rebel Cells (or something – just making this one up to get to six aspects) [+2]
* Because I am Well Connected, once per game session I can find someone to assist in my team's mission.
* Because I am Well Bred, I get a +2 when I Create Advantages when I'm in conversation with someone who appreciates my noble background.
* Because I Need Another Stunt, whenever I need another +2 in something I do all the time, the GM reminds me I need another stunt.
Something I like about this is that the ratings on the Aspects can still change pretty fluidly, as they can with Approaches. It's all about what's important to the character at that time.
(Also, Aral would totally have been trained on Fighter craft – even the Queen's have to be certified.)
All in all, though, I like it! I think the aspects as skills sockets well – maybe even better than Approaches – into the action we've had.
At which point, your practically playing PDQ
+Doyce Testerman (Yes, but Aral wouldn't give those kludged-up Z95 variants a second thought; so blocky, so chunky, exposed-wirin-everywhere, so inelegantly non-Nabooan. Sniff. The very idea ..)
So rather than saying "Hmmm, going to figure out a way to be Flashy about this blaster attack so I get my +3 — and, think of how I can use one of my Aspects here (yeah, probably the officer one again) in case I need to give it a boost," most of my blaster fights become "Bloodthirsty officer coming online for +2" and leave it at that?
Numbers (and simplicity) aside, I'm not sure that's an improvement. Or am I missing something?
+Bill Garrett
I was wrong, you have both Uncertain Loyalties and A Good Soldier Follows Orders. My bad. 🙂
For Uncertain Loyalties, I think that's a option to roll for:
* Making merc contacts
* Reaching out to an old comrade/contact who's now/still in the Empire
* Resisting coercion of many different types 🙂
* Everything you ever have to do on Geonosis. 😀
+Dave Hill??? the opportunity I'm seeing is a more clean map between action and the relevant stat that's going to affect it. These things look and feel to me almost like miniature character classes with Associated skills and knowledge attached to them. Really, they already were that just as aspects, but assigning them a value gives the idea more weight, I think, when it comes time to roll dice and decide which of them is affecting the roll.
I'm not married to the concept by any stretch, it just seems interesting to me. Could be I'm the only one who dislikes wrestling with "which approach applies to this dice roll" questions that seem to come up every time dice hit the table in the current game. 🙂
The idea that you've got a specific attribute that tends to be the one you roll when you shoot somebody is really hardly a new idea in RPGs. 🙂 it also means that when you want to roll with an aspect that isn't super shooty in the middle of a combat, you're probably going to do something atypical.
If nothing else, writing it up this way was an interesting and useful mental exercise. Before I did this, it had never occurred to me that Aral would have been trained as a combat pilot at least in a perfunctory way and possibly with more depth. It also raised questions such as if he's tied to Naboo Rebels, would he know things about homemade explosives? What does a rebellion on Naboo look like? What does that mean in terms of what Aral knows and knows how to do?
All of these are things that I could have thought of before – it's not as though the aspects weren't already there – but stripping out some of the extra stuff on the character sheet so that that's about the only thing left has an interesting focusing affect.
Aspects that have a numeric rating actually remind me a little bit of HeroQuest – the Gestalt attributes that functioned almost like mini character classes.
+Doyce Testerman I have answers to many of those questions, but they aren't germane to the conversation. 🙂 The point that focusing on the Aspects adds to consideration of what they mean, though, is a useful one.
(I wonder if having additional Aspects — "How do you deal with combat?" for example — might be useful to address how to deal with shooty situations when relationship / background Aspects don't make that clear.)
+Dave Hill, what to do when no aspects come up was something we started to address when designing SC, but then settled on +0. If nothing you do works for the situation then you literally have no experience, talents, or knowledge to help, so you roll at +0.
(Doesn't have to be how you all use it, but maybe it'll help.)