Space Travel: a Sketch

[Bill Zebub]

A few months ago I started a thread titled Space Travel asking if anybody knew of games with interesting systems for hyperstellar travel.

I won't repeat the discussion, but the gist of it is that I wanted the party working together as a team to make decisions. If the GM is just rolling dice and telling a player (e.g. the designated "Engineer") to make a skill check, then nobody is really making any decisions, and certainly not working together. I want space travel to be a game-within-a-game, but not a "mini-game" that is divorced from roleplaying.

Really what I'm shooting for is that I want space travel in a sci-fi/space opera game to be the analogue of dungeon exploration.

I just spent 3.5 hours in the car with my 12-year-old and we talked about this for much of the drive. Here's what we came up with:

• There are multiple possible "jump routes" between destinations, and most travel will require making several hops. I.e. a kind of "traveling salesman" problem.
• There are variables to consider when choosing a route, including:
  • The demands placed on the ship for each leg, compared to the advantages/disadvantages of your own ship
  • The skill required to successfully navigate the route*
  • The type of hazards faced if a jump mistake is made and you don't emerge where you expect
  • The amount of fuel required
  • The stops along the way (hazards, factions, etc.)
  • E.g., "I don't know, that's a tricky jump, and there's an asteroid field near that star that's easy to land inside, and our forward matter shields are in a bad state..." "Yeah, but the Zeta Station is nearby, and those guys owe us a favor."
• *The difficulty level of a route is a function of how many times it has been traveled (with the idea that the math gets refined).
  • Some common routes have a lot of shared data so they are pretty safe
  • For many secret/protected routes the people who travel them don't share the data. Getting data on those routes becomes an objective.
  • Discovering brand new routes is considered crazy and is mostly left to droids, most of which never return. (Those that do are...different.)
• Some vague, un-defined, hypothetical mechanic in which everybody contributes to each leg by simultaneously rolling a relevant skill, and it's the combination/matrix of these rolls that determines how successful the jump is.

We also thought about how these maps were created.

• Our first idea was that random table generation, including lists of colorful challenges/hazards, would let GMs create star maps as they were explored
  • It would be fun to open this up to the community to come up with ideas for the tables
• Additionally/alternately, the game could start with a bunch of established star systems and routes, but include the tables for expanding beyond the campaign areas
• These rules could be built into a web app that allows you to instantly generate star maps of arbitrary sizes (and route densities)

Thoughts? Suggestions? The names of the seventeen games that have been on the market for decades that already do exactly this?

 

[Morrus]

When you says “a sketch” I was expecting a comedy routine!

 

[Bill Zebub]

This is an illustration of how I think this would be different.

The kind of resolution I'm trying to avoid is: the party jumps from Point A to Point B, the navigator fails a required Navigation check, and the GM rolls a random event of "Pirate Attack!"

Instead (to keep the example simple), the group has two possible routes to choose from. One option is relatively safe, but longer and more expensive (fuel) and the most likely consequences of a failed roll would be to not have enough fuel and thus waste even more time acquiring some. And they're in a hurry. The other option is much quicker, but there's an intermediate jump where pirates often lurk. They choose the quicker/dangerous route, fail a roll, and get attacked by pirates.

In both cases the outcome is the same, but in my mind in the second case the outcome was (at least partly) a function of the party's choices, rather than the whole thing being deterministic.

Does that make sense?

 

[Bill Zebub]

When you says “a sketch” I was expecting a comedy routine!

Titled "Who's on Alpha Centauri?"

 

[Koloth]

Instead of a simple pass/fail roll, have many degrees of outcome. No more success is you get there, fail is a life or death chance. Consider using 3d6. High is better. For an average task, keep the normal success band fairly wide. Say 7-14 is standard success. Still gives 4 degrees of fail and 4 of success with bonus. For a nav check, a 6 might be you are a day farther out, 5 is a week out, 4 is 2 weeks and 3 is edge of system. Maybe an 18 results in "Don't know how it happened but we only used 50% of the normal fuel burn." If the Jump was a hard task, say your secret route, shift and narrow the success band to higher. 13+ for some degree of success, otherwise a fail. But this time maybe a 3-6 is a total mis-jump. A 12 could be you get there but the engines are dead. And an 18 is you are exactly where you wanted to wind up plus you receive a mysterious message "What's on Seti Alpha 2."

 

[Bill Zebub]

Instead of a simple pass/fail roll, have many degrees of outcome. No more success is you get there, fail is a life or death chance. Consider using 3d6. High is better. For an average task, keep the normal success band fairly wide. Say 7-14 is standard success. Still gives 4 degrees of fail and 4 of success with bonus. For a nav check, a 6 might be you are a day farther out, 5 is a week out, 4 is 2 weeks and 3 is edge of system. Maybe an 18 results in "Don't know how it happened but we only used 50% of the normal fuel burn." If the Jump was a hard task, say your secret route, shift and narrow the success band to higher. 13+ for some degree of success, otherwise a fail. But this time maybe a 3-6 is a total mis-jump. A 12 could be you get there but the engines are dead. And an 18 is you are exactly where you wanted to wind up plus you receive a mysterious message "What's on Seti Alpha 2."

That maps nicely to our plans for a combat system as well. In order to maintain the lethality of plasma weapons (and light sabers!) our idea is that the number of successes determine seriousness of wound (e.g. 1 = injured but can keep fighting, 2 = down but not dead, and 3 = dead), but the target can spend a resource (variously fluffed as Luck, Reflexes, something mystical, etc., depending on the character) to reduce those successes. So instead of having your "hit points" whittled down, you run out of the resource that can turn a hit into a miss, or at least reduce the severity of it.

For reasons I can't explain, I am ok with the idea that you can survive getting hit by multiple sword strokes, several arrows, a bite from a dragon, and a fireball spell, all in the same fight. But a shot from a blaster or a hit by a light saber should be deadly, and "hit points" have too much of an association with "health" to work for me. (Maybe because we describe all successful attacks as "hits"?)

 

[JohnSnow]

That maps nicely to our plans for a combat system as well. In order to maintain the lethality of plasma weapons (and light sabers!) our idea is that the number of successes determine seriousness of wound (e.g. 1 = injured but can keep fighting, 2 = down but not dead, and 3 = dead), but the target can spend a resource (variously fluffed as Luck, Reflexes, something mystical, etc., depending on the character) to reduce those successes. So instead of having your "hit points" whittled down, you run out of the resource that can turn a hit into a miss, or at least reduce the severity of it.

For reasons I can't explain, I am ok with the idea that you can survive getting hit by multiple sword strokes, several arrows, a bite from a dragon, and a fireball spell, all in the same fight. But a shot from a blaster or a hit by a light saber should be deadly, and "hit points" have too much of an association with "health" to work for me. (Maybe because we describe all successful attacks as "hits"?)

For what it's worth, even in Star Wars, we have multiple examples of characters getting hit by lightsabers without them being cut through. The most obvious example I can recall off the top of my head is Luke hitting Vader in the shoulder during their Cloud City fight, right before he loses.