Tag: diaspora

Categories
Actual Play Musing Table Top

Diaspora Hacks, by way of Dresden Files

After a series of scheduling problems, we finally got back to the Diaspora game last night for the first time in… oh, six weeks or something. Been awhile.

In retrospect, I’m glad for the delay, because it gave me time to think about a few problems I felt like we were having with the game, mechanically. As I said over in this post, I’ve been pondering how to tweak the Diaspora system — it felt like we had a few too many get of jail free cards in play (in the form of Fate points), and a little too much cruft on the character sheet that wasn’t getting used.

As I’ve also said before, the designers behind Diaspora have built a hell of a game — they have my admiration for, if nothing else, their free-form stunt construction — but while they are fluent in FATE, it is the fluency of someone speaking a second language. The author’s themselves have said that even now they aren’t wholly comfortable with the way FATE does some things.

Enter Dresden Files.

This is a big, beautiful game from Evil Hat, and while I still don’t feel as though I completely grok everything they’re doing in character generation, there ARE a few things that I saw and immediately wanted to implement in the Diaspora game — solutions to my problems far more elegant than anything I’d come up with. Which makes sense: these are guys who (obviously) grok FATE at an atomic level.

Hack One: Reducing the number of Aspects on Characters

In Spirit of the Century and Diaspora, each of the five phases of character generation yield two character Aspects, for a total of ten. That’s fine in the SotC, which is kind of crazy and over the top and creates characters that are sort of swiss army knives of awesome, but in Diaspora it feels like too much.

Dresden files does it differently. Basically, your character has a “High Concept Aspect” that sort of sums up your character’s idea in a few words. Then they have a “Trouble” aspect that is basically “the thing that’s screwing up your High Concept”. Finally, you get only one aspect for each of the five phases of character generation.

Looking at the hard numbers, it doesn’t seem like THAT much of a change: seven aspects instead of ten, right? In practice, the combination of getting fewer aspects and giving two of those seven aspect specific “jobs” really, really helps tighten up the characters and clarify how they’re envisioned in play. Instead of having more money than you know what to do with, you’re on a budget — constraints are good.  We pared down the Diaspora characters to follow these guidelines (which was easy – the dead wood, unused aspects were easy to spot), and (for me, at least) the result was like walking into the optometrist, getting in the chair, and having him drop that first lens in place that shows you no, you really haven’t been seeing things that clearly until Right Now. The characters came into proper focus, is what I’m saying.

Hack Two: Reducing the number of Fate Points floating around

I’d toyed around with a few changes to the normal system in that previous post, but a little bit before the game I decided to try out — again — something from Dresden Files.

Normally, everyone gets 5 Fate points at the start of every session. It’s too many. Aside from any other consideration, we play on weeknights for three hours — we simply don’t NEED that many Fate points. Anyway.

Dresden’s method, super-simplified, is: “take the basic refresh (5, in this case) and subtract however many Stunt Abilities your character has (2 or 3, in this case), and the remainder is how many Fate points you get to start each session.”  (Unless you ended last session with more points than that refresh, in which case, keep that higher total.)

So rather than everyone starting with 5 Fate points, Tim and Kate started with 2 and Chris started with 3. This did a BUNCH of stuff during the session last night that I liked a lot.

  • More compels. Compels become a much more attractive and desirable option in play, because you’re more likely to need more Fate points.
  • A bit more hording of points. Fate Point totals higher than the refresh actually remain for next session — Kate’s had more Fate points at the end of the session than the beginning.
  • More struggle. With fewer Fate Points around, people weren’t piling on as many Aspects on during conflicts. This gave my poor mooks in a gunfight the chance to actually do some damage, and we started to see people actually take a consequence or two, rather than use up all their Fate points.
  • More invention. With Fate points in short supply, it actually became much more attractive to take a round “off” during a fight and set up some ‘free taggable’ aspects to use during the next actual attack. Tim did this a couple times, and it worked out well for him. This makes for more interesting, more textured conflicts. (Typing this out, I realize that that’s what I should have had the NPC crew members doing: rather than whiffing attacks at the enemy, they could have been hitting much easier target numbers to give Tim some help. Ahh well — hindsight.)

In short, the Fate points became more valuable, play became more dynamic, and the use of Aspects as fate point generators rose as well. Basically, the FATE core — the economy and mechanics of the system — actually got engaged a lot more. Since it’s a system I like, this was a big win from my point of view.

How about the play itself?

The net result of this was a session that – to my mind – had more clarity. The characters were in better focus. The game system gears were turning and grinding and chugging away and just generally much more present — more able to do what they were meant to do in the game.

Aspects (permanent and temporary alike) are the Killer App of the FATE system.

Somehow, by having fewer Aspects and giving people fewer points with which to invoke them, we actually made them MORE important.

Weird, but true.

Good game.

Categories
Game Design Musing Nobilis Table Top

Sacrifice, Interesting Failure, and Diaspora Hacks

I’ve been thinking (and talking) about sacrifice in games, and how that ends up playing out at the table.
Originally, I was going to amass some kind of who’s who list of games that have mechanics that let you ‘push’ to achieve victory, but in the end I came to the conclusion that that kind of misses the point unless I use it as an illustration of the larger issue.
Which begs the question: what’s the larger issue?
Well, it’s a little bit about suffering and sacrifice, and a little bit about game currency, and as always it’s colored by the games I’m playing right now, so let’s start there.
As I mentioned before, Shadows Over Camelot is a game that requires some tactically tough choices from the players, and that’s the kind of thing that appeals to me as a player; I like it — it makes me make that Tim the Toolman simian grunt and nod appreciatively. I like mechanics that let you pay for a little more awesome with your own blood (symbolically speaking).
There aren’t a *lot* of RPGs that have mechanics that do that, but there are a few, and they each do things a little differently, so let me talk about them.
  • “The hard choice: be awesome now, or get better in the long run?” The best examples of these that I can think of off the top of my head are Nobilis and Heroquest (the RPG, not the boardgame, and the old edition, not the new one, which I’m not familiar with).  In both these games, your character earns one type of currency (can’t remember what it’s called in Nobilis, but it’s Hero Points in HQ) that gets used for two different things: (1) one-shot boosts to your current conflict, (2) improving your character by improving or buying new abilities.  In this kind of situation it’s the players who are put in kind of a crunch — do I really want to win this current conflict, or do I want to finally buy a new mastery level in Butterknives (or whatever).  There are systems and methods that people tend to adopt for coping with this decision, but it does make things interesting, in that people might not automatically buy their way to victory every single time. (More about that tendency later.)
  • “You can keep trying, but it’ll cost you.” There are other examples of this, but the one that I remember right now is Trollbabe. Very interesting game. The conflict mechnic is a very simple yes-no roll. However, if you fail the roll, you can either take your lumps (you don’t get what you want and you suffer virtually no other fall out), or you can try again. If you try again, the potential fallout gets more dangerous. Did you fail again? Okay, you can bow out NOW and take some more serious lumps or… yeah, you can try again. If you try again… You can see where that’s going. I believe you can keep pushing, looking for a victory, about three times before the only thing left to roll for is “do I get to decide what happens to me, or does the GM?” I’ve only had a chance to run the game once, but it yielded what is to me (even today) a really compelling scene where the player – perhaps conditioned by a “we cannot accept failure if the opportunity to win presents itself” mindset – kept rolling until they were left unconscious in the middle of a dirt track, and their boyfriend was dead. How important is winning to you?
  • “Success comes through sacrifice.” This is sort of my Mouse Guard mantra. In that game, success any any given test is guaranteed; the only question — the real reason you’re rolling — is find out what it will cost you… how long did it take? who interrupted you in the middle of the task? how lost did you get as you traveled from A to B, and what found you as you traveled? Et cetera. In Mouse Guard, success clearly isn’t the interesting thing: it’s the failures that we want to know about.
Ahh, here we are again. Failure should make things more interesting. That wonderful trick where you lay out a conflict in such a way that the players are actually okay with failing, because what might happen then sounds pretty damn cool. Mouse Guard does a wonderful thing here — the whole (fifteen minute) adventure prep process amounts to working out the conflicts that arise from failue — the fact is, if the Guard succeed at the Main Tasks for a mission, the mission will be (a) kind of boring and (b) kind of short. (Same’s true of Trollbabe, actually. Anyway.)
((Note to self: Construct the next Dragon Age session using the mission creation method from Mouse Guard and see what happens.)
So let’s talk about Diaspora and Fate. A first glance, FATE seems to have a similar mechanic to Nobilis or Heroquest: points that you can use to push yourself to victory — but they’re different in a couple key ways.
  1. The points aren’t used for anything except giving yourself a boost (and much more rarely compelling someone to act or not-act a certain way). There’s no point where you have to decide between using the points for the bonus or using them to improve your character. (SotC and Diaspora don’t have traditional ‘level ups’, though Dresden Files, another FATE game, kinda does, which excites me.)
  2. The points don’t run out. As written, the rule for Fate points is that they refresh back up to max at the start of every session. This works fine in the naturally episodic Spirit of the Century, but not so well in the grittier, more narratively-structured Diaspora.
In play, what actually happens is that Fate points don’t have a lot of value — mechanically they do, yes, but they’re not valuable to the players — they aren’t precious. They have lots of them, they know they’re going to get lots more next session, so they spend them like water, following the purest instinct of a game-player: win the conflict if the means exists to do so. Buy your way to victory, should you possess the currency to do so. It’s automatic, instinctual, and completely understandable.
Since they can DO that, we don’t see very many interesting failures in our Diaspora game, simply because the currency is thick enough on the ground to keep failures (interesting or otherwise) from happening.
This leads me back to a small fix for a specific problem in a specific game, rather than thinking about the Big Discussion I keep circling around, but whatever: theory is nice, but in the end I just want my games to be fun, yeah?
So here’s a few thoughts:
  1. Present interesting failures. I do this automatically in Mouse Guard, because the game makes me do so. I’ve been lax in Diaspora about constructing situations in which the players say “Yeah, I could win this, but I’m just as happy losing.”  This is one of the Gaming Kung-fu Basics that I have to keep reminding myself to go back and practice, practice, practice.
  2. Too many Fate Points. My initial thought about this is to work it like Primetime Adventures Fan Mail: basically, that no one has Fate Points to start out with, and it’s only through compelling a player’s Aspects that we get Fate Points into their hot little hands. This would make Fate Points INCREDIBLY precious and, while that’s intriguing, it might be a little too much.

    2a) Kate suggested that a good middle ground would be “Start everyone at the normal Fate Point total at the start of the game, but get rid of all the refreshes — that way, it’s only through Compels that we replenish the pool.” I like this idea quite a lot, and I’m curious what the other crew members of the Tempest think.

  3. We have way too many Aspects floating around — to steal from Dresden Files, if each player had ONE aspect from each phase of character generation (rather than two) then a couple more to reflect a characters goal and beliefs… that would be better than what we have in Diaspora right now — so many Aspects never get used. Dunno if that’s worth hacking at right now, but next time I’ll know better.

Anyway, just wanted to get this out of my head and onto the screen; all the rattling about in there is distracting.

Categories
Actual Play Table Top

Diaspora, Session 3: Heat up the Iridium, it’s Shootin’ Time

It had been my intention to introduce everyone to the Ship, Personal, and Social combat mini-games in Diaspora during the first three sessions — basically in that order.

Didn’t work out that way. As I mentioned at the time, the first session took a bit of an odd turn when Kate flipped the space combat setup on its ear and turned it into a Social Conflict (for which I was wholly unprepared). Fun stuff.

So, with that taken care of, and personal conflict introduced in the last session, I made it clear that session three was to be SPAAAACE COMBAAAT. Period.

Unless, you know, something came up. Chris joked about flipping it into a cutthroat game of checkers, but such was not to be — ships faced off, and lo and behold, actually shot at each other.

There are fifteen enemy missile boats in this picture. Can you find them?
There are fifteen enemy missile boats in this picture. Can you find them?

At the end of the last session, the crew of the Tempest had agreed to take a ‘follow-up’ job with the pro-science Dauphine collective they’d sort of accidentally saved from an assassination attempt — in short, to escort the collective’s ship from the soon-to-be-abandoned, not-as-secret-as-they-thought base to a destination elsewhere in the system.

This presented a few problems.

  1. The collective’s ship had no pilot. It HAD had a pilot – the lead engineer, by the name of Darrec – but he’d come down with a bad case of silencer-to-the-temple during the attack, and was no longer an option.
  2. The ship was… sub-optimal. That’s not entirely fair: for Dauphine, it’s a GREAT ship. Not slip-capable, but certainly viable for moving around a single system at something like .1 Gs. It, like everything else in the base, was constructed modularly from materials that could be shipped in-system as something else.
  3. Suspicions abound within the collective. Specifically, a young hothead scientist by the name of Anton pulled Miranda aside and had a lot to say about no one could have known about the Tempest shipment OR about the base unless someone on the Inside had told them. His Culprit-Of-Choice was Eugene Felix, the group’s administrator (whom the heroes had found hiding in the comms chamber inside his office, with is executive assistant, Isabelle).  On the other side of the coin, there’s Terese, the mousy fuel engineer who thinks sleezy Isabelle had something to do with it.  The fact that she has a crush on Anton has nothing to do with it, of course.

The whole thing was giving Miranda a headache.

While the collective loaded up the Intrepid (and Phyll “tweaked it” with a few new Aspects that could be used if needed), Miranda tried to figure out who could help man the other ship.  Eventually, they decided to keep their ‘main’ crew on the Tempest and sent over Maric to keep an eye on the engine, Chance to fly the thing, and Anjela to man the one gun battery.

You know, just in case.

Finally, they got flying, and started the slow crawl toward the outer system.

The Diaspora guys love hard science — everything they do in this game, with the sole exception of the FTL travel (which pretty much has to be made out of Handwavium in order to work in ANY remotely realistic setting), is the kind of stuff that folks at Atomic Rockets would find plausible and supportable.

That makes space combat interesting and different from what you’d expect. Here’s a few key bits.

  • Properly-represented space combat would require some pretty wicked math and a three-dimensional ‘map’ that would take up my whole basement. Cool, but ultimately more work than the pay-off would justify.
  • There’s no anti-gravity, so there’s no dogfighting.
  • The ship and its hardware is going to be much more significant than the skills of the crew, whose impact is really going to be to in asking the ship to do things at the right time, rather than perform the actions themselves. In short, the ships are the characters.

There’s other stuff, but that’s the big parts that inform the combat.

Diaspora deals with the first point by boiling all the four-dimensional vector stuff into a one dimensional map. Yeah. ONE dimensional. Somehow — and I have to say it’s elegant how they manage it — they came up with a combat map where all you’re tracking is where your ship is on a LINE, and yet the location imparts not only location relative to other ships, but also relative velocity, acceleration, AND vector. It’s kind of brilliant.

Anyway, the reason I mention this is because the next thing that happened in the game was a space combat. I know, right? Who’d have expected THAT?

The Intrepid and the Tempest were set on pretty quickly by three missile boats looking to blow the Intrepid out of the sky. Now, if it had just been the Tempest, Iago could have gunned it and been gone before they ever got in range, but while the boats weren’t up to par with the Tempest, they were MUCH faster than the Intrepid.

The first phase in space combat is placement of the ships on the map, which is done by the players, following an opposed Navigation roll. I tried to get Kate to “take an automatic failure” here by offering her a Fate point and compelling her “A little bit Rusty” Aspect, but Kate decided that, while that was cool, she wanted to play the first combat ‘straight’, before we started mucking it up with compels.

So rolls were made, and Kate got to place the Intrepid and Tempest about as far away from the bad guys as she could and still leave them on the map.

The next phase of combat had to do with maneuvering, so Iago and Chance tried to get away. In this, the bad guys seemed more than competent enough to keep the two ships from escaping immediately, despite flying in formation.

The next phase were the weapons that worked at the speed of light — to whit, electronic warfare. This was a pretty one-sided battle, since only the Tempest had the hardware necessary to go on the offensive in this arena, and the enemy ships were hampered by a weak Data ‘health bar’ and Aspects like “Too Stupid to Know We’ve Been Hacked”.  Kaetlyn got into the systems of one of the gun boats and gave it a Major Consequence of “Friend or Foe Fire Control Recognition is Frelled”.

The next phase was Beam weapons, so energy beams started … beaming. This was interesting, because you don’t really want to use the full power of your beam weapons, because you may need to use them again in the torpedo phase for defense, and if you fired them a lot, it would cause some significant heat problems for the ship.  Kate played it safe but still managed to score a hit on one of the ships.

During the Torpedo phase that immediately followed, both Kate and Anjela (on the Intrepid) managed to defend from too much damage (the Tempest took a minor hit), and someone compelled the Hacked enemy ship to shoot one of its allies instead of them. That was cool. Also, explodey.

Then it was Repair phase, and Phyll went to work on patching the minor damage, which he did handily.

Then you start again at the top.  Each “round” probably takes about an hour inside the fiction of the game… it’s not Star Wars, but I find that I don’t mind – it feels like naval warfare, kind of.

In short, we played about three full rounds of all the phases before two of the three enemy ships were destroyed and the Intrepid escaped from the combat by working its way off the edge of the map.  The Tempest decided to stick it out and make sure there were  no enemy survivors, which took something like one or one-and-a-half more rounds, and then turned itself around and radioed the Intrepid for its location and vector so they could catch up.

There is no answer.

Dun dun DUNNNNNN.

Tune in next session to see what the heck happened to the ship the Tempest is supposed to be guarding.

—–

Once again, we had that weirdly ‘traditional gaming’ experience, where the combat scene took up most of the night.

However, the stuff in combat that takes up the time is different.

In a game like DnD, there’s a lot of time agonizing over the pieces on the board, trying to decided between 10 to 100 different bad-to-less-bad moves. It’s like chess without what I’ve realized is the pure genius of using a turn-clock.

Now, to be sure, the stuff in DnD that causes this kind of behavior is there for a reason — with all those tactical options/threats, there’s plenty of good reasons not to remain static in a fight and just plug away: “Roll to hit, roll damage, next guy…”

But there are lots of ways to solve that problem, and Fate keeps things interesting by seeding the play area with a constantly expanding and shifting list of Aspects — free-floating bonuses that you can use to buff up both your attacks and defenses if you can just think of a cool way your guy takes advantage of them.  Rather than reviewing your many chess-like options, you’re looking at the things happening in a fight and asking “what is out there that I can take advantage of?”  It’s kind of the role-playing combat version of what Jackie Chan does when you try to attack him with a stepladder.

((There are other ways to solve the problem of static, boring combats, by the way, and I’m going to talk about how Dragon Age RPG does it in some other post, but not today.))

The problem is, while it’s a more aggressive, active, and generally more inventive way of getting the players to interact with the ‘story’ of a conflict, it’s kind of… different, and it does increase processing time when, during every person’s turn, you have to stop to remind yourself to DO it.

Anyway.

My impression of the game – any game – has to be informed somewhat by what I see at the table and how I feel afterwards.

What I see at the table is that we’re having fun, and that some of that fun – perhaps a higher percentage than usual – is coming from the system. Kudos to the system.

More than any other ‘indie’ game I’ve played recently, Diaspora strikes me as a game that would work well in a longer-form game. This isn’t surprising; it’s a game designed by a group of guys inspired by Traveller, who come to Aspects and a lot of the Fate kung-fu a little uncomfortably, even after all this time — there’s is a mindset that assumes the 20-session campaign, and they built a game that supports that kind of play.

Moreover, they built a game that makes me support that kind of play, which is quite the accomplishment. Again, kudos.

I don’t know how long this game will run — I continue to muse about what game we’ll play next — but I’m in no hurry to wrap up and move on to the next thing. For now, I’m more than happy to stick around and – now that we’ve got system and all the sub-systems introduced – see what happens.

Because, best of all, there’s some stuff going on, and it’s pretty cool.

Categories
Actual Play Table Top

Diaspora, Session 2: Fight!

When we last left our space-faring heroes, they were delivering a cargo bay full of “mining equipment” to a (one assumes) secret base on Sebastus, a moon orbiting the main planet of the Dauphine system.

I say “one assumes” because, culturally, Dauphine is pretty anti-space — they tried it once, their attempt failed miserably (from their point of view — the scientists and settlers they stranded on Keepdown feel otherwise), and since then the highly insular conservatives have pretty much controlled the planet.

The conservatives don’t control their system, though — quite the contrary — since they’ve largely rejected any exploration of space-faring technology, the resource-rich system of Dauphine is pretty much defenseless and ripe for plucking, which the “indentured privateers” funded by resource-starved Caliban are more than willing to do.

So, when the crew is told that they’re delivering “mining equipment” (yes, it could be configured as mining equipment — it could also be configured to be a LOT of other stuff) to a base relatively close to Dauphine, on the spaceward-side of a tidally locked moon, they assume it’s for some kind of secret pro-tech Dauphine organization.

They’d be right.

Anyway, after their run in with some privateers/wildcat mining poachers when they arrived in system — three ships who’d apparently been informed they were coming, which begs the question of how anyone knew — they proceed in-system and radio the base to let them know their delivery is almost home.

No answer.

They continue inbound, discussing the radio silence, allow that that might be perfectly normal for a secret base, and simply try to raise the base every six hours or so as they fly (it’s a six-days-plus trip, so they have a lot of time).

They get one ‘normal’ reply once they get about two days out, very brief and a little too enthusiastically ‘covert’, and then nothing.

Until they pull into orbit and prepare to take the Squall (the Tempest’s shuttle) down to the base to finalize delivery plans; that’s when they get one very brief call for help.

Right. Lovely.

So the group suits up and prepares to land. Miranda, Phyll, Iago, and Kaetlyn are all going, and Miranda decides to bring Anjela (no-nonsense gunnery mate) along for a little extra firepower (Anjela’s an Orpheus native, and lovingly totes along a pack-powered personal laser).

The Short Version of What Happens

The group sneaks into the base, discovers via the security cameras that most of the personnel in the base are barricaded in one of the crew quarters, which are being cut through with plasma welders by a group of… well, they look like ninjas. Sort of burqa-wearing ninjas, but ninjas.

The ninjas and our heroes come to blows — guns are fired, swords are swung, a mining laser (and a smaller kind) are fired, and while the base is a little worse for wear afterwards, everyone is safe.

Once things settle down, the scientists in the base say they were attacked by a particularly militant fringe faction within the Dauphine conservative movement — a group that would rather see them dead than move into space any further. Since they sent assassins to end them, it’s clear this base location is compromised, so they need to move out to another base that’s much further away from Dauphine.

The question: can you carry our delivery just a little bit further… and… if it’s not too much trouble… could you escort our pathetic excuse for an intra-system cargo-hauler as we f l y v e r y s l o w l y to the other base?

Please?

How about if we pay you?

“Pay us? Why didn’t you say so?”

And that was the session.

The Long(er) Version

Well, it’s actually not that much longer in terms of relating what happened, but I didn’t want to talk a bit about the mechanics of the personal combat, and how it played out during the session, as well as note some of the cool and not-so-cool products of play.

The Base... well, a map of the base, anyway.

As you can see from the picture of the map, I laid out the base as a sort of series of pre-fab modules. As I was sketching the thing out, I read through the personal combat section to get an idea of the various kinds of things one normally does with these personal combat settings in this system.

See, while there’s definitely a story going on here (factions, politics, sides to pick, et cetera), the first three or four sessions of the game are very specifically “there” to introduce the various mini-games within Diaspora (with the exception – for now – of platoon combat). In this session, my goal was personal combat, so I wanted to explore and introduce as many of the relevant bells and whistles as possible.

To that end, I set up the bad guys to use various maneuvers, to be good at the sorts of things that one is good at in combat, and then messed around with the map a lot.

S’possible I messed around with the map a little TOO much.

What I WANTED was an over-crowded, super-cluttered base — stuff stacked along the walls, no truly straight path to anywhere, and kind of hard to get around. The nice thing about the way this expresses itself in this iteration of FATE is that you can create such things really easily, WITHOUT mapping some kind of crazy, maze-like environment — it’s enough to just draw in a really big room, break it into a couple zones, and give each zone “Stunts” like “Complicated” or “Cluttered” to limit the range of fire and things like that.

Truly difficult rooms, like those those circular ones with a central ‘core’ that you have to walk around anyway, which are then additionally filled with clutter, boxes, crates, desks, partitions, et cetera, I’d break into multiple zones, which means it would simply take more “movement” actions to get through them. And oh yeah: put in those hissing automatic doors that don’t really stop you but which do keep you from really tearing along at full speed.

Looked good in theory.

In practice, I started the bad guys on the opposite end of the base from Our Heroes, and it took us like… I dunno, six or seven rounds of just… moving to get anywhere close enough to DO anything.

And in that time, the players had managed to move like… I dunno. Two rooms. (One, for Tim, who didn’t have any levels in the requisite ‘moving quickly’ skill.)

So, that was that bad, most of which I could have totally fixed by breaking those smaller rooms up into two diagonal zones instead of one.

The good was… well, everything else.

The computer-hacker person actually had lots to do every round — she entrenched herself in the security station and proceeded to put Aspects on various zones that people would then tag for bonuses left and right: sprinkler systems flipped on and off, lights cut out, doors locked in front of a guy about to run through them (wham!), or right behind him, so he couldn’t retreat from a bad situation.

The gun-loving character got to shoot a lot of stuff, which worked out well. I feel like he was plenty effective.

The swashbuckling pirate’s daughter got into a nice little sword fight with one of the assassins, which included a lot of leaping around and also some sliding around on the sprinkler-system-slicked floor.

And we got to try out Iago’s stunt “Applied Biology”, which (a la the most recent Sherlock Holmes flick) lets him use a large chunk of his Scientist skill in lieu of Brawling — this led an exchange where one of the bad guys was left standing right in front of the mining laser that Iago had been pushing around on a cargo cart, just as Phyl flipped it on, remotely.

The bad guy grabbed the front of the laser, shoved it to the side just as it fired, and LIVED… although he sustained a Severe Consequence of “Amputated AND Cauterized” — the mostly wince- and chuckle-inducing consequence of the evening.

All in all, it was a pretty dynamic fight with a lot of good stuff going on, some nice tactical stuff happening, where one player was setting up another one or taking advantage of something someone else had just done — it felt like synergies were happening all over.

The weird part?

The weird part was that I set up a really big fight on a really big map and it took pretty much the whole game session just to do that one fight.

I haven’t had that happen since… well, DnD, honestly. I don’t think it’s every happened in any kind of “indie” game in, well, ever. Some of those games are plenty deadly (Dogs, for example), but even then, fights are nasty, brutish, and short.

FATE does a lot of wonderful, character-driven, evocative stuff — using Aspects in all their various permutations are THE Killer App of the game, without a doubt, even in spin-offs like Diaspora — but to a certain degree SotC and Diaspora and all the “Version 3.0” FATE games are still very traditional in a lot of ways. The detailed play of session two’s combat reminded me of that.

That’s not a BAD thing, at all. Or good, really. It just is. A feature (in the landscape, not software, sense).

Anyway, the fight wrapped up, deals were made, and session three (which I’ll write up next) involved the crew of the Tempest splitting up a bit to pilot/escort the Dauphine collective’s “Intrepid” to a new base elsewhere in the system.

And, finally, some space combat. Heat up the iridium, Phyl, it’s Shootin’ Time…

Categories
Actual Play Table Top

Diaspora, Session 1: Teacup on The Tempest

I tell you, I don’t know why I bother prepping.

Last night was the only Wednesday in February where I could wrangle the Diaspora participants into the same location at the same time (which is an improvement; it had originally looked as though it would be April before we could play with the Cluster and characters we made up in January), and I’ve been reading, watching, and playing a LOT of sci fi lately, so it’s fair to say I was a little stoked and ready to go.

I’m not really much for prep work, but Diaspora has really gotten me revved up, and I’ve been all about doing Cool Hard Science research and reading, re-reading, and re-re-reading the rulebook to make sure I’ve got things worked out in my head.  It seems like the first couple sessions involve learning the game systems anyway, so I wanted to make sure I understood them.

And I came up with names and extremely wispy backstory for the NPC crew of the ship.

And… I prepped a little.

That last thing? I needn’t have bothered.

The Prep

So here’s what I did. I wanted to start the game off with a completely vanilla, Traveler-esque scenario. Not ground-breaking, but it would let me slowly introduce the mini-games inside diaspora, and establish the “norm” for the setting so that we could then riff off it.

I was a little flummoxed by all the possible options I had, though, so I poked around Abulafia and found a wonderful little “Traveller [sic] Mission Generator” that I hit refresh on a couple times until I found something fun and simple to start with.

  • Courier hires the party to transport goods.
  • The mission targets Asteroid Base.
  • Their efforts are opposed by foreign government.

Right, a fine start. I took that came up with:

The crew of the Tempest is on Unity Orbital Station in the Orpheus System, and has picked up a contract to ship mining equipment to the Dauphine System (specifically, to Sebastus, an icy, distant moon orbiting Dauphine itself). The source of this material is The Ladder, an Orphean research group, represented in this deal by Amalie Silas, and the recipient in Dauphine is group of politically progressive nobles who haven’t yet given up on the stars. The director of the base is one Denys Benois.

Getting the equipment to Dauphine is complicated due to the fact that the fast, quick route to Dauphine is through Caliban who (a) polices their slip-points (b) doesn’t want Dauphine getting better at utilizing their resources and (c) is hunting for most if not all of the PC characters for different reasons, so they either need to risk it, or take a longer, potentially more costly route.

I went for a ship-based mission right off the bat because when I looked at the characters we’d come up with, everyone had some kind of ship-based combat skill somewhere in their top teirs, and there was no other kind of activity (such as social conflict, personal conflict, et cetera) that was so universally present).

“Play to their strengths for this first session,” I thought.

Anyway, having worked out the basic plan, I crawled through the book and nailed down exactly what rules I wanted to hit.

Maintenance check

This was just to introduce this idea to the players. It was a pretty easy check to make (basic maintenance, upkeep-level repairs, refueling, etc), complicated just a little bit, due to the crew not actually working at making any kind of profit recently.

Setting up the job

Which I figured might involve a little roleplay and maybe a brokerage roll.

Navigation

The trip could take as little as 13 days, but could run 52 days (or more), and I wanted to make sure I knew the options well enough to be able to handle all the possible permutations the players might try to pull off.

Ship to Ship combat

Because obviously, there has to be some of that. For this, I grabbed and tweaked some of the pregenned ships from the book. (The pirate ship with the “Bowls of Fresh Fruit” aspect and a captain who’s apex skill is “Profession: Spokesmodel? Sold!)  Pretty soon, I had a trio of privateer/wildcatter ships: The Ingenue, the small-but-heavily-armed Queen Maab, and the modular, ore-hauling Keepdown Krab.

Ready? Ready!

The session opens with most of the PCs on the bridge of The Tempest. Before them, a azure-tinted holographic representation of three ships floats in the air. Over the comms, a voice says:

“Tempest, this it The Ingenue. Come to and prepare to be boarded. I repeat: come about and prepare to be boarded.”

Everyone looks at Captain Miranda.

Captain Miranda: “Ummmmm….”

We get a black screen with the words, “21 days earlier…”

We see the crew of the Tempest debarking, eager for a few days “shore” leave on Unity Orbital Station. As they file past, Captain Mirana “Drake” is charging their cred sticks with their pay and reminding them to be back on the ship in 45 hours. Kaetlyn, Phyll, and “Iago” (Titus Belliago) linger in the background.

As the last of the ‘lesser’ crew file down the docking port, Kaetlyn steps around in front of Miranda, hands her her cred stick and says “running low on funds yet?”

“Not yet,” Miranda’s voice is calm, but she’s clearly a little tense — since buying the ship and fleeing with the barest of skeleton crews, they’ve been hoping from system to system, filling the roster but taking on no jobs until she knew that she hadn’t been spotted by her relatives on Prospero Station. “We’ll have work lined up by the end of the day.”

“It’s a good place for it,” comments ‘Iago’. He looks around. “However, it’s possible I might not be the most welcome person here, so I think I’ll… stay on the ship.” He heads back into the Tempest without bothering to get his pay stick charged. “Good luck. Take someone with you.”

Miranda nodded. “I’d like to, actually.”

Phyll, always helpful, says “I can come along.”

Kaetlyn glowers at him.

“What?” He thinks. “You can come along too.”

“Well, I guess I have to, don’t I?”

“Oh…” he thinks some more. “Weren’t you going to go shopping?”

The glower acquires additional glower. “Well not now.”

Poor Phyll.

The meeting with the Ladder rep is at a sort of “rent a meeting room” facility on the station. Amalie Silas is refreshingly open and straightforward about the job; they want to hire the Tempest because it’s a Caliban-designed ship whose captain did not enter into an “indenture” relationship to afford it — this means it will be unremarkable in Caliban space, but the crew will not beholden to Caliban in anyway. This is desirable, because they are shipping deep space mining gear to Dauphine, and as Caliban routinely sends wildcatter/privateers  into that system for resources, they would NOT like this shipment being made.

The pay is good (Silas is paying for the longer, four-jump route, but points out that they can jump right through Caliban’s system if they want to risk it, drastically shortening the trip and probably reaping a tidy profit… if they don’t run afoul Caliban’s slippoint station “refuel enforcement”.

Miranda negotiates a bit, and gets Silas to put an additional 2-day pro-rated bonus on top of the standard payment if Miranda calls her crew back from shore leave immediately and sets out today. Kaetlyn storms out, her dreams of shop(lift)ing shattered.

The cargo bay of the Tempest is stuffed full of crates and hard-to-package mining equipment, to the point where Iago comments they’re going to need to grease the ceiling to get the last two crates on. Everyone piles back aboard, their griping nicely muted by the fat pro-rate bonus the captain hands them as they return.

They set out for the six-day burn toward Orpheus’s “northern” slip point, and the command staff meets in the CIC to discuss the route they’ll take.

No one really wants to get into specifics about why certain systems should be avoided, so some of the reasons given are a bit vague, but the upshot is that Miranda, who’s “A bit Rusty” [aspect] doesn’t like their chances of slipping to Caliban, reorienting, reacquiring the slip point, and slipping out again before they’re intercepted by “escort boats” that will “forcibly invite” them to stop and refuel at the slip point station maintained (at great expense) at Caliban’s heavily-used slip points. While it sounds good in theory, in practice almost no one in the CIC wants to set foot on that station.

With all that said, they settle on a jump path of  Orpheus -> Achilles -> Lear -> Shylock -> Dauphine, with a maintenance stop planned at Shylock’s “tourist moon” of Nasira.

Business proceeds as normal up to the first jump (except for Phyll, who takes whatever opportunity he can to sneak into the cargo bay and poke through all the “really interesting” mining equipment).

Once at the slip point, Miranda makes her calculations, Iago and Phyll initiate the jump, and The Tempest arrives at the Achilles slip point, cooling panels already deploying to shed excess heat while they calculate the next jump.  They picked up a lot of momentum on the slip, and it takes them almost five hours to get the ship back to optimal slip range. Miranda silently notes that if that slip had been into Caliban space, there’s no way they’d have gotten out before being intercepted.

In the lull, Iago leaves the helm in (NPC) Keen’s hands and heads to the galley to start putting together the day’s main “together” meal. Many on board think he enjoys his role as cook more than that of pilot. They might not be wrong.

While doing so, Iago comms Phyll, asking him to come from engineering and help out. Ariel (the ship’s V.I.) informs him that Phyll is actually in the cargo bay. Iago deduces what Phyll’s up to and tells him to leave all the stuff there.

Food prep is made, Phyll natters on about how cool and infinitely modular the so-called mining equipment is (“You could make anything out of this stuff: plasma drills, yes, but also station defense systems, ship’s guns, automated laser platforms…”), and Miranda decides to do a little research into The Ladder.

What everyone learns from this is:

  • The Ladder is more R&D than manufacturing, and has a reputation (and notoriety) for providing advanced tech to “underdogs” throughout the Cluster, turning a profit, yes, but also following the credo encoded within their corporate logo: “Technology is the Great Equalizer.” (Like guns in the old west, right?)
  • Dauphine doesn’t really “do” tech and space exploration. Whoever’s doing all this is a minority in Dauphine.
  • NO one from Caliban will like ANYTHING Dauphine could make out of the equipment in their cargo hold.

The slip into Lear is nearly perfect: it takes the crew less than 15 minutes to reorient and slip out of the system: barely enough time to disperse heat and do the calculations. Everyone is happy about this, because Lear is a shithole.

The next jump takes them to Shylock. Reorientation is quick; Iago and Miranda get the ship on a course headed in-system, leave Ariel flying things, and head down for a Big Meal.

All eleven crew members are there, chatting about whatever comes up — talk is playfully steered by Iago to the topic of getting a hot tub installed for “crew comfort,” but Miranda quells that notion before the main course even comes out. Denied that, the crew starts speculating about the cargo, with Phyll talking about all the wonderful, destructive things one could make from the components. The talk gets turned around a little bit, and somehow returns to some speculation about a mining-laser-heated hot tub, at which point in time Miranda excuses herself and returns to the bridge.

Ariel: “Anything I can do, Captain?”

Miranda: “I’m fine.”

Ariel: “You seem… tense. Perhaps a game of chess?”

Miranda: “No…” (pause) “Load up C’tan.”

Ariel: “Yes, Captain. [pause] would you like the standard automated opponents?”

Miranda: “Two of them, yes. On Expert.”

Ariel: [dejected] “Yes, Captain.”

Miranda: [vaguely amused] “Would you like to play as well?”

Ariel: “May I?”

Miranda: “Certainly. Load scenario 23-B, with the random forest fires.”

Ariel: “Oh. My favorite…”

… and so they passed the flight.

[[I am slowly statting out Ariel-the-V.I.; one of her Aspects is totally going to be “Do you want to play a game?”]]

Their efforts are opposed by foreign government

The trip into and out of Shylock was relatively uneventful — the wear and tear from consecutive slips without maintenance was negligible, and the slip into Dauphine was, if anything, better than the Lear slip.

No sooner had they gotten reoriented, however, than Ariel announce multiple inbound contacts.

Before them, a azure-tinted holographic representation of three ships floats in the air. Over the comms, a voice says:

“Tempest, this it The Ingenue. Come to and prepare to be boarded. I repeat: come about and prepare to be boarded.”

Everyone looks at Captain Miranda.

Captain Miranda: “Ummmmm….”

Diaspora has a rule where anyone can spend a Fate point and declare something about the setting, as long as it pertains to their apex skill. Miranda’s apex skill is Brokerage (with a related “military grade” stunt that means she’s expert in the trading of goods in markets black or white); before she bought the ship, she advised hundreds of ship’s captains about the kinds of jobs to take and the kinds of upgrades to makes.

Kate spent a Fate point, announced that she knew the captain of the Ingenue and barked. “Jorge? Is that you? What are you doing and why are you in my way?”

I had her make a roll to see how well she knew Jorge and the Ingenue, and Kate rolled huge numbers, so I pretty much gave her everything I had on the ship:

“The Ingénue”, T2 Civilian Pirate

* Rotating license plates
* Glory-hungry pirates
* Camel of space (long time between refills and repairs)
* Friendly and approachable
* Big bowls of fresh fruit

Captain [Jorge] Demont
Profession: Spokesmodel 3; Resolve 2, Alertness 2; Charm 1, Slug Thrower 1, Intimidation 1

During the ensuing exchange, I also gave him aspects…
* I didn’t want to be a pirate
* Pretty and vain
* “I do love citrus…”

I had it all set up so that we’d be fighting these guys, plus:

“Queen Maab”
* Defending our weak friends
* Little room for cargo
* A monkey could fly this thing
* Gets pretty hot in here
* Out of ammo

And:

“Keepdown Krab”, T2 Modular Cargo Hauler
* All cargo is expendable
* Save our skins
* Unexpected burst of speed
* Plenty more space back there
* Can’t make money dead

… who wasn’t really interested in the fight; she had a full load of Dauphine ore and was ready to jump out of the system and screw the “bonus” promised by some mystery man who wanted them to empty the Tempest’s cargo hold.

But no fight was in the offing. Through a series of rolls, the crew convinced Captain Demont to come aboard and “inspect the cargo hold personally”, and I shucked the the Space Combat set up and starting setting up for a Social Combat (which I hadn’t prepped at all.)

Here are my notes… some of which won’t make sense if you haven’t played the game, but luckily the system for the conflict conveys events of real weight into the actual story of the session, so “what happens” is just as clear as “how”.

  • I started with a basic kind of ‘v-shaped’ map, like the one presented for the ‘romance’ social combat in the book, so… seven zones in length. On one end of the map was the “Fight” zone, and on the other was “Flight”.
  • With seven zones, the conflict was given seven turns to resolve. Each box represented an hour of real time.
  • If, at the end of a turn, all the remaining pirate ships were in the Fight box, they’d decide to fight. Or leave, if they were all together in the Flight box.
  • All the players got a chance to act in each turn, but they were represented on the board by a single “Tempest” marker which started at the bend in the “V”.
  • The Ingenue was also at the bend in the V.
  • The Queen Maab was halfway between the center and “Fight”.
  • The Keepdown Krab was one square away from “Flight” at the start.
  • The order of actions was Miranda -> Ingenue -> Tim -> Maab’s captain -> Chris -> Krab’s captain.

Miranda started off by receiving the captain of the Ingenue in the CIC, having Iago serve him a nice pina colada, and basically promising him a big payoff if he went back and told the other ships that the cargo bay didn’t have what they were looking for in it.

A big payoff. Big. HUGE. She tapped the amount out on a pad and showed it to him. He was very impressed.

[In game terms, Miranda used Assets to erect a “barrier” between the zone that she and the captain were in and the next zone closer to “fight”. It was a BIG barrier, because she nailed the roll and tagged her Liquid Assets aspect and… some aspect on the ship, I think, maybe. At any rate, the barrier had a pass value of SEVEN. Bam.]

The talk was very pleasant, except for Dumont mentioning that the captain of the Maab seemed very motivated to fight her, and seemed to know something about why she’d be out here flying an independent trader… such talk made Miranda nervous.

[Dumont used… I think Spokesmodel or intimidate… or maybe one augmented by the other to smoothly lay down a veiled threat on Miranda — a composure attack. The roll was good, and Miranda took two hits to her Composure track and mitigated the rest of the damage with a Minor (taggable) Consequence “Delgado might remember who I really am.”]

Dumont returned to his ship with a lot to think over. As he departed, Iago revealed that he’d fed the captain a bugging device in the fruit in his drink.

[Tim did a Maneuver to put the Aspect “Bugged” on the captain. I believe he might have tagged the Captain’s “I do love Citrus” to make the roll.]

Once Dumont was back on his ship, Delgado opened a tight-beam comm with him to find out what was going on and to try to get the two captains on the same page about what they were really here to do. The crew of the tempest listened in via the Bug as Delgado tried to browbeat Dumont into taking action “as they paid us to do”, and Dumont played dumb and stonewalled, clearly (to Miranda) more motivated by the fat payoff she’d promised than by Delgado’s threat.

[Delgado tried to ‘get close’ to Dumont by taking a move action, using Intimidate, but the barrier Miranda erected was too high, and I rolled absolute crap — Delgado was only able to erode the barrier from a 7 to a 6, and still hadn’t gotten close to Dumont in any viable way.]

Phyll, listening to this conversation, decided that the captain of the Maab needed a lesson in caution. He headed down to the cargo bay and, working with Ariel, activated all the “mining” power sources stored in the bay, calibrating their output signature to mesh with the power plant of The Tempest — specifically with the power source for the ship’s guns. Ariel, a V.I. installed on a privateer vessel, was disturbingly competent at this kind of electronic subterfuge.  When he hit the switch, the Maab read the resultant spike as though the Tempest had, approximately, a Frigate’s worth of firepower behind their beam weapons.

[Chris performed a composure attack on the captain of the Maab, rolling Engineering and tagging the Tempest’s “A most Delicate Monster” aspect (which refers to Ariel) for the boost that got him the shifts he needed to fill in some boxes in on the Composure track.]

The captain of the Krab made it clear to both her allies that if they fought, she was leaving without them, and reminded Delgado that he was there to protect her ship, and that You Can’t Make Money Dead.

[The captain of the Krab made a move self action to enter into the Flight box. Basically, she was an ally for the PCs in this fight.]

ONE HOUR UP. TIME FOR ROUND TWO.

Miranda reopened comms to the captain of the Ingenue, but “accidentally” left it on an open channel, and said something like:

“You know, since we have you here, I just thought of something — there’s a job I had to turn down, very lucrative, but we didn’t have the cargo space for it. I’m friends with the client, though, and he asked me for recommendations when I turned him down. Would you lot be interested?”

[This was a Brokerage roll, and we debated whether to put an aspect on someone or something, but we instead settled on doing a “move another” action, which moved the Captain most of the way toward Flight. He wasn’t QUITE convinced, though.]

I think the Captain replied with a tight-beam message he just got from Delgado, talking about reporting her “real identity” to Caliban. Maybe? Maybe.

[In any case, this was a compel on Miranda’s “Pirate’s Daughter” aspect, inducing her to panic, and Kate denied the compel, paying me a Fate point.]

[edited to fix] Tim’s attack wasn’t even an action his part. As Dumont sat on his ship, thinking things over and toying with the little umbrella from the drink Iago had served him, he noticed a sizable diamond earring pinned to the inside of the thing. An extra little bribe.

[This was, I think, a Charm check to move the Captain the last space into “Flight.” It worked, once Tim tagged the Captain’s “Pretty and Vain” aspect for a bonus. [edited to add] Tim was really tickled that his attack could easily be described as someone ELSE doing something.]

Delgado beamed a private message to Miranda, which she took in her ready room. It was a text message that basically said “I know who you are, and the Lafite familiy will be so relieved…”

[This was NOT a composure attack — it was an attempt to Move Another — Delgado was trying to move Miranda into the Fight box! I rolled A BIG number, and moved the Tempest crew entirely through the 6 Barrier, thus removing it.]

Miranda stormed out of her cabin and straight for the the gunnery stations.

Meanwhile, Phyll wasn’t done with the Maab. He ran an analysis of the other ship, and sent the captain a quick visual image of the Maab’s schematics, with all the weak points on the ship highlighted. The “caption” to the image was “proceed with caution”.

[Chris got a big hit on this with… I’m not sure what he rolled. I hope it wasn’t engineering, because you can’t roll the same skill twice, but I might have missed it. He tagged the Maab’s “Gets a little hot in here” as well, to indicate on the map how vulnerable the ship was to beam weapons. I mitigated the damage with a Minor Consequence (second thoughts) and Severe Consequence (“The crew of the Tempest is just… too good.”)]

I don’t remember what the Krab did at this point.

END OF ROUND TWO. TWO HOURS IN-GAME, DONE.

… and the conflict was almost over, too.

Miranda stormed onto the gunnery deck, pulled Anjela out of her seat, dropped in, activated every weapon within the Tempest’s considerable arsenal…

… and targeted all the weak points Phyll had just pointed out.

[Composure Attack, using Gunnery (well, Navigation with a stunt to let it sub in for Gunner, but whatever), free-tagging the Severe Consequence Phyll had just put on the captain, and Taking him Out.  This gave Kate the ability to decide what happened to the captain — we decided he completely lost his nerve at this point, and would flee the scene, go into dry dock, and eventually sell his ship at a loss and take up farming on Achilles. He. Was. Done.]

And with that, the conflict was over. The ships parted ways…

[Miranda tagged her Liquid Assest aspect to hit a level 5 Assets check and wired a LARGE payment to Dumont, as promised (she has an aspect of “Respect, Not Fear”, so she keeps her promises).]

And the Tempest turned in-system, ready to deliver their shipment.

The End.

For now.

Categories
Musing Table Top

Being Immortal in Fate (Diaspora)

Tim challenges me.

First, he never lets me coast during our games: not as a GM, certainly, but neither as – more simply – a roleplayer. I consider that a good thing.

Second, he challenges me on my choices. I’m not saying he busts my balls over every single thing I do in a game, but he makes sure that I know why I’m doing something — that there’s a reason for it that goes beyond “well, it’s X kind of game, so we should do X.”

But Third, he never lets me coast when it comes to the system — whatever system we’re running. What that means is that, if something is theoretically possible in the game, he will grab that ‘theoretically’ possible thing and wrangle it by the throat, dragging it from Theory into Practice.

Case in point: Diaspora. Let me point out a few things Tim did with his guy that might/would be, in another system or another time, “game breaking”.  Tim’s concept was basically:

  • I’m the Benevolent Dictator for Life of an entire star system. (Except that I bailed and left a twin in my place.)
  • The solar system I control is the source of life-extending food. Which I created. And kept the good stuff for myself.
  • Because of this super-SUPER-food and my own experiments on myself, I am (so far) effectively immortal and can heal from just about any injury.

He’s not being a dick about it : that’s just his character concept, and if I look at it and say “I don’t think that’s possible”, he’ll work with me.

Not that I said that.

  • Dude, you left a stranger that looks just like you in charge of a whole system of rich, bored, nigh-immortals? THANK YOU.
  • I like super-food. I like trying to figure out how one fruity oaty bar can feed someone for a year, and how that would be remotely profitable for anyone.
  • And… well, I had this idea about the whole regen thing. It’s kinda neat.

Here’s the deal with with regeneration; there’s really two things it’s likely to do. One is A Game Thing, and one is A Story Thing.

  • Game Thing: You recover from wounds a hell of a lot faster than the rules allow, presumably for some game-point cost roughly equal to having internal body armor that would have stopped about the same amount of damage. That’s easy to do: you just get the “internalized gear: armor” stunt and describe it as you healing really fast. Which is fine. It’s not super-interesting to me; it’s just a thing. Whatever. (Tim: you SHOULD note that if what we came up with as a solution is unsatisfying or too non-crunchy, we can do this.)
  • Story Thing: You take horrific damage that should kill another person, but it doesn’t kill you.

The thing is, people worry a lot about how to make Crazy Regeneration (TM) work as a Game Thing, but most of the time what the player wants is the Story Thing — they want a story in which their guy takes horrific damage that should kill them… and it doesn’t.

The story-point of this kind of ability is the hurt they undergo, you know?  Wolverine isn’t about his per-second-healing-rate — he’s about Surviving Shit That Should Kill You (physical and otherwise); no one would give a shit about Corwin of Amber if it weren’t for the fact that he got his eyes burned out of his head with hot pokers and kept going.

I mean… no one builds a guy with regen and then gives them agility so high they never gets hit. Where’s the fun in that?

So I listened to Tim to see what he was talking about, when he was talking about this ability.

And? He was talking about the cool scenes that would come from it.

He was talking about the story.

Right, so this is how you deal with that.

  1. Make sure he can get hit a lot.  Tim built a stunt called “better living through science” that lets him determine the size of his “stress” bar (or whatever it’s called, I don’t have the book with me) from his Science skill, not Stamina. Boom. He suddenly got a very roomy stress bar for taking physical damage.
  2. Make sure he’s got an Aspect that reflects this regen/durability. Why? Just to give the whole concept weight.
  3. Finally: Remember what damage to this guy means.

Here’s the thing: in FATE, damage to the stress bar of a character is temporary stuff: it goes away with a few seconds’ rest at the end of the fight. Ditto Minor Consequences. Moderate Consequences take maybe a good night’s rest to shake off. Serious consequences take a fair bit longer.

On a normal guy, then, stress bar damage and minor consequences are things like little cuts, scrapes, bruises… stuff like that. Moderate might be a wrenched shoulder or a light weapon graze that draws blood. Serious is a solid hit. Blood everywhere, or a totally broken limb.

On Tim’s guy, quite simply, damage to his stress bar is described in play as something roughly similar to a normal guy’s Serious hit. That’s where damage-of-note STARTS with him — anything less is too inconsequential to mention.  From that starting point, we then ramp to the point where his “Takes awhile to shake off” injuries are things like “I chopped off my arm to escape” — because on this guy, that’s not a permanent problem.

Put more succintly: a stress-hit on a normal guy is a bruise; on Tim’s guy, I blow a hole through his leg. Increase from those starting points in parallel.

That’s it. With that tweak, we get what we’re looking for: a guy who shakes off in minutes what it would take other people months to heal from, which was the whole point.

And when he invokes that “practically immortal” aspect to give himself a bonus? That means I know that he’s solving the problem by (mis)using his body in some particularly damaging way.

Ouch. Should be fun.

Categories
Actual Play Table Top

Diaspora: Cluster and Character generation (ridiculously TL;DR)

Exactly one year after our first gathering, the Wednesday night group got together for our first session of the new year, and we decided to get started in 2010 with Diaspora, the world’s softest hard sci-fi game.

Counting myself, there were four players, and we opted to each create two worlds in “the cluster” (a series of different star systems, connected by ‘slip points’ located above and below the barycenter of each system), for a total of eight.

The “theme” that we used for the system cluster was this:

  • Your first system starts with the same letter as your first name.
  • Your second system starts with the same letter as your middle name.
  • All system names are derived from characters in Shakespeare.

This worked pretty well, and gave us some pretty evocative setting elements, especially when the players took things a bit further and wrote out some of the Aspects on the systems, their characters, and even their ship as quotes from various works of Shakespeare.

Due to scheduling problems, we won’t be able to play for a couple more weeks months, but we’re all looking forward to it.

Anyway, we did the whole Cluster and character generation the first night, then posted the results to a Google Wave where we’ve since fleshed things out a bit. Here are the results.

Continue reading “Diaspora: Cluster and Character generation (ridiculously TL;DR)”