STAR TREK ADVENTURES Public Playtest Launches

oneshot · May 9, 2017

Aramis-- I'm not sure why you're claiming I'm grossly ignorant of the rules when I specifically and explicitly mentioned the rule you quoted in my third bullet in my post. And I mentioned unspent momentum from NPC rolls in my second bullet, which covers momentum from NPC rolls during opposed tasks. So I'm quite aware of rules.

You stated this in the post I responded to:

....you give the GM threat for bad rolls.

That's just not true, even from the rules you yourself cited. IF you roll a complication AND the GM or the players decide to buy it off with threat, then yes, but there's two conditions there. The first condition is relatively rare. On a basic test, you only roll a complication about 7.5% of the time. The second condition is key here because you never have to buy off a complication. You can roll horribly all game and never have the threat pool increase once all session. In any event, the implication that the players are steamrolled just for rolling badly is misleading at best.

You also completely ignored another point I made: The GM is never obligated to spend threat. It's a resource to be used at his or her discretion. I have ended sessions sitting on lots of threat because I didn't want to stick it to my players who are having a rough time of it. In fact, I've chosen to buy off a complication and then never spent the threat I received as a specific strategy to relieve some pressure on my players. If you have a GM who insists on spending all threat accumulated during a session regardless of whether it makes sense to do so both from the standpoint of the fiction and from the standpoint of making a fun game experience for everyone involved, then it could be difficult, but agin, that's a problem that comes from play style, not the rule set.

If all you're really saying is that "the rules permit a GM who wants to be a dick to his players to be a complete dick to his players," OK, sure, but that's true of every rule set ever. I have seen and played under GMs who used the letter of the rules to abuse the spirit of the rules in everything from Fate to 3.5. The underlying premise of your argument, that the GM is actively trying to defeat the players and make them fail, means that perhaps this isn't the system for that GM and that group. But I honestly can't think of any system that is immune to that style of GMing.

aramis erak · May 9, 2017

Winding up with piles of unused threat is PROOF the reward cycle is broken, oneshot.

That you're (intentionally or otherwise) blind to doesn't make it any less true.

oneshot · May 9, 2017

If there were a rule that required you to spend all threat accumulated or if there was no threat mechanic and instead something bad automatically just happened, without any ability for the GM to mitigate, I would agree with you that it is bad game design. But neither of those cases reflects STA, at least not in the versions we've seen in every iteration of the playtest. I certainly trust that Nathan won't add such a rule in the final version, either.

Sure, I sometimes end sessions with unspent threat. But the players also often end sessions with unspent momentum and determination. In fact, it's statistically far more likely that more momentum will be generated than complications, even before you start factoring in talents. So we often finish sessions with unspent metacurrency. So what? Fate sessions usually end with several players having unused Fate points, sometimes a lot of them. Is Fate broken? You were praising Cortex earlier, well, I've played Cortex games where there was unspent metacurrency at the end. Is Cortex broken? Heck, in D&D, we've agreed to rest for the night (or even ended adventures) even though we still had hit points and spells left. Is D&D broken?

Using GM discretion not to pile on the players is not a bug of tabletop RPGs; it's a feature. I once had a D&D adventure where the players were trying to smuggle a prisoner out of a stronghold. The characters were low level and had had a rough time of it thus far (I had rolled a lot of crits that day, and they had rolled badly on one particular trap). They were pretty beat up and had used up most of their spells. As they were close to getting back out of the building, one of the characters failed a move silently check and was noticed by a guard who happened to be standing next to an alarm bell. Now, he could have rung the bell and summoned the group of guards two rooms away, but that would likely have resulted in character deaths and potentially a TPK. So, I used my discretion and had the guard charge the group and attack instead of ringing the bell. Had my group preferred a harder, more dangerous play style, I might not have done that. But my choice not to do that in order to maximize the fun for my players (who didn't want to die) isn't a sign that D&D is somehow broken because, despite following the encounter guidelines, I could have killed them since the dice weren't falling their way that day. By the same token, if the players are rolling really badly in a session and I've bought off some complications as well as a few other sources of threat and now have a bunch, I can choose not to use that threat for the same reason I chose that the guard panicked, forgot he was standing next to an alarm bell, and ran into a battle where he was badly outnumbered: my group has more fun when I'm not kicking them when they're down.

It's one thing to say the game doesn't match your play style and you don't care for it. That's all fine and dandy, and I wouldn't disagree with you simply for having that opinion. Instead, though, you're criticizing that, in certain statistically improbable cases, the dice could really screw over the players unless the GM applies some common sense and doesn't use the rules to completely sink the players. But just as with my D&D example, any game can potentially screw over the players if the system uses dice as a randomizer, so that's not a valid criticism of STA in particular instead of dice-based games generally. The main objection I have to your argument is that you seem to be implying that (a) this is somehow a flaw in the game design of STA, and (b) this sort of thing would be a common occurrence instead of a rare statistical fluke. Neither of those statements is a fair assessment of the game.

aramis erak · May 13, 2017

To put it more bluntly, OneShot - you're ignoring the psychology of the threat pool. It's supposed to be in the open. The pile of threat is supposed to work to create both a sense of fear, and when success happens in spite of spent threat,

When you end with a huge threat pool, it's obvious to the players you were giving them their success. They didn't earn it, and it's obvious that you could have robbed them of it. This results in (for many) a feeling of incompetence; it certainly did for my players.

That's not good design; it's sloppy. And it's a result of a postivive feedback loop in that the side winning keeps winning unless they let the other side win.

It would be far better to have a bought complication provide a determination (flipping the feedback loop to negative - bad stuff now means good stuff later).

At this point, I'm not convinced the game will be worth spending money on as a game...

The current feedback loops:
Failure - none
Complications - bad roll to bad stuff now and/or later (positive feedback loop in negative direction0
Success - Good roll now means more good later (Positive feedback)
Threat - Good effect now for bad stuff later. (Negative Feedback)
Playing Values - Good RP now for Good effect later (positive feedback)
Creation of advantages with rolls/momentum: Success now for assistance later. (positive feedback).

THat success snowballs due to momentum, sure it's capped (and now takes the whole pool with the final changes made to continue the snowball), but its still a positive feedback loop.

Incautious use of advantages results in a snowball, as well - when it balances with increases due to threat, that's good; all too often, it does not.

My group has loved my adventures and disliked the feedback cycle in the mechanics; one player actively dislikes the mechanics for punishing failure (beyond the failure itself).

oneshot · May 14, 2017

I get where you're coming from, Aramis. I really do. I think our point of disagreement lies here:

Incautious use of advantages results in a snowball, as well - when it balances with increases due to threat, that's good; all too often, it does not.

My group has loved my adventures and disliked the feedback cycle in the mechanics; one player actively dislikes the mechanics for punishing failure (beyond the failure itself).

In my experience with my group, it's very, very rare that the momentum generated does not balance the threat that is created. And within those rare unbalanced sessions, it's far more likely to be a surplus of unused momentum, as the system is designed to generate far more momentum than it does complications. But when the metacurrencies didn't balance (in either direction), my group didn't think much of it either way, as finishing with unspent resources is just how games with metacurrency end more often than not.

The other safety valve is that vast majority of threat is generated by player choice. Most threat is generated by the PCs through immediate spends. I would say that NPC saved momentum is a distant second, with threat used to buy off complications dead last on the list. Thus, for most of the game, the player's have the strategic choice to trade current difficulty for future difficulty, which adds a nice level of tactical play that my primarily gamist group appreciates.

Again, I would agree with you that the system is unbalanced if I ended even a quarter or an eighth of my sessions with a large pile of threat. But in reality I would estimate based on my play experience, if you had a weekly game, you'd end a session with significant unspent threat at most maybe 2-3 times out of the 52-session year. That's not bad, all things considered. Any game with dice at the core of the resolution mechanic is going to have outlier sessions now and again. But I can understand different players and groups will have different tolerances for that sort of thing.

The other difference I think is this: rather than considering the mechanics as a feeback loop, I'm looking at it as more of a range of die outcomes: great (2 successes), good (one success), bad (no success), and very bad (a complication). Good is the statistically most common outcome out of those dice rolls, and great is far more common than very bad, so I find it to be not only a fun mechanic to use but also a great improvement over a simply binary "pass/fail" mechanic. But as with everything game related, your individual mileage will vary, as this game isn't for everyone. My group loves the game as much as you group apparently dislikes it.

Jester David · May 31, 2017

So with the giant and likely expensive boxed set being teased, how does everyone feel about the system?

oneshot · May 31, 2017

Generally speaking, I like it a lot. The core mechanic plays well, and the overall system has enough moving parts to make it a robust, interesting game, without it being so complicated that you need to study for it years to be "good" at the game. It's also set up so that you can have a command structure in place but not have my ensign be completely overshadowed by the lt. commander next to him. There's no zero-to-hero, so every character can be a contributing PC, regardless of rank or experience. Rank is mostly an RP thing and not an XP thing, which I like.

Edited to add: It's also a very fun game to GM, because you're not just running through the scenario, but instead you have to make tactical choices in how to spend the threat (GM metacurrency) that the players give you. So there are active decisions to make in how to tweak the adventure on the fly, which adds a new dynamic for the GM.

mykesfree · May 31, 2017

Also, the character creation system is fun and easy to do. The random charts were really able to flesh out a character and each character rolled felt very unique.

oneshot · May 31, 2017

mykesfree said:
Also, the character creation system is fun and easy to do. The random charts were really able to flesh out a character and each character rolled felt very unique.

And just to add, because I know it's a turn off to some people, that the random charts are optional and you can instead pick off of the list. There's also another optional chargen system where you just flesh out the basics of the character and add in further details through play, a la Fate.

Lwaxy · Jun 2, 2017

Looks like we will go back to d20 Future&Co, none of the players but one was invested, and there were too many non-intuitive rules for me.

Leaving Threat out in the open,for example, mixes player knowledge with char knowledge, and that is not wanted.

STAR TREK ADVENTURES Public Playtest Launches

oneshot

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aramis erak

Legend

oneshot

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aramis erak

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oneshot

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Jester David

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oneshot

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mykesfree

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oneshot

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Lwaxy

Cute but dangerous

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