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[Diaspora] Friday Night Science Fiction
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<blockquote data-quote="Paka" data-source="post: 5019046" data-attributes="member: 100"><p><strong>Social Combat</strong></p><p></p><p>We tried out <a href="http://www.vsca.ca/Diaspora/diaspora-srd.html#social-combat" target="_blank">social combat </a>at the end of our first game.</p><p></p><p><strong>The situation</strong>: The Sars Mining Company is owned and run by the Sars family, who are also a fairly formidable criminal syndicate in the Lodi system. They use slaves for their mining operations, not seeing any other way to make money. Lodi is a desperate place, one of the Aspects for the system is, Backs against the wall.</p><p></p><p>The players wanted to convince the Sars that they could stop using slave labor. The social combat was on.</p><p></p><p>It was a montage, in the fiction, a representation of a month of negotiations and back and forth. Social Combat in Diaspora has a map, which is something new for me. Making the map was really interesting. I quartered the map into four sections: Family, Profit, Morals, Corporation. In the corners of the Family section were Clones and Sars. In the corners of the Profit section were Sars and the Valiance Corporation. Morals had Anti-slavery, Justified Servitude and in Corporation there was Valiance gains foothold and Valiance Owes Sars.</p><p></p><p>On the map were each of the PC's and the four major members of the Sars family: Carlov, Illen, Min and Solare, the father, mother, daughter and son - respectively. We set up a time limit, in this case, 3 rounds of combat, going around the table, with a Sars NPC acting in between each of the players' actions. </p><p></p><p>In Social Combat, you can do a few different things. You can erect a barrier around a spot, making it harder for someone to get into that position or to get in. Right away, JC used Rojas social prowess to make it really difficult for the Sars family to gain a profit and made it hard for them to feel they had the moral high ground on Justified Servitude. We saw this as him showing them that they could make money in other ways. You can put an aspect on a character so that another character can use the free tag to gain a +2 to an attack on them. You can move yourself or another character, all by rolling to move.</p><p></p><p>Storn attacked, destroying the son's social hit points, so to speak, using gambling. We decided that he cleaned the son right out. As a side-effect of this, I had Storn win a container of clone-slaves the son had picked up during the last game. This would be a huge part of the next session, when they found out what exactly kind of clones they had acquired and also, because Storn's character is an active anti-slavery proponent. I knew that gaining a container filled with clones in a kryo-sleep would be problematic and interesting for him.</p><p></p><p>As I recall, Pete's character ended up squaring off with the matriarch of the family and moved her firmly into the anti-slavery camp. There were scenes where Pete's clone captain and her went into zero-G to look at their ship from the outside, as she has a love of spaceship architecture. They bonded and she realized that clones are in fact people too and holding them to work for their company was wrong.</p><p></p><p>The father barricaded himself in the Sars corner of the Family quarter. </p><p></p><p>The daughter got interesting. She moved into Valiance gains foothold and on the last turn, the father moved her over to Valiance Owes Sars. This, coupled with her attacking JC's character earlier with an attack using a seduction skill, meant that we decided the characters got engaged. The Valiance company could have a share in the Sars Family Mining but she would marry into the company, sealing the pact. For now, they are engaged.</p><p></p><p>As it turned out, they convinced the Sars to adapt robots for their mining and to free the slaves once the robots proved profitable with the Valiance Corporation picking up the tab on the robot acquisition in return for a share of the profits.</p><p></p><p>So, there are a couple of techniques we used in making Diaspora Social Combat interesting, gleaned from our years of playing Burning Wheel's Duel of Wits:</p><p></p><p><strong>Tangible Effect</strong>: The Social Combat has a tangible effect on the in-game fiction. Otherwise, you are just moving pieces around a board for no damned reason. When Storn's gambler blew the Sars son right out of the combat, there were consequences and in-game stuff happened.</p><p></p><p><strong>Compromise</strong>: There has to be a mechanic for compromise. In this case, I used several different members of the opposing factions, each of which with slightly different goals. The father wanted what was best for the family. The mother wanted to keep the slaves. The son wanted to see the family gain control over the corporation and the daughter wanted profit. By seeing where everyone was positioned at the end, we could see how the combat shook out. If the players had just attempted to destroy every member of the Sars family's damage track, it would have gone very differently; they might have just liberated the clone-slaves on the spot.</p><p></p><p>As it was, I was very pleased with how it shook out. The map is a really interesting way to represent the whole abstracted process and it really allowed us to compress a month of game-time into a half hour or so of play. We got to roll dice and be strategic while giving the night a fun, dynamic and interesting conclusion.</p><p></p><p>Now to write up last night's game, in which they find out that Anton Kilkenny, in a card-game with Carlov Sars, won a cargo container filled with lost black-ops Void Marine clones, lost since the New Ovid-Vestal war that ended 20 years back...</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Paka, post: 5019046, member: 100"] [b]Social Combat[/b] We tried out [URL="http://www.vsca.ca/Diaspora/diaspora-srd.html#social-combat"]social combat [/URL]at the end of our first game. [B]The situation[/B]: The Sars Mining Company is owned and run by the Sars family, who are also a fairly formidable criminal syndicate in the Lodi system. They use slaves for their mining operations, not seeing any other way to make money. Lodi is a desperate place, one of the Aspects for the system is, Backs against the wall. The players wanted to convince the Sars that they could stop using slave labor. The social combat was on. It was a montage, in the fiction, a representation of a month of negotiations and back and forth. Social Combat in Diaspora has a map, which is something new for me. Making the map was really interesting. I quartered the map into four sections: Family, Profit, Morals, Corporation. In the corners of the Family section were Clones and Sars. In the corners of the Profit section were Sars and the Valiance Corporation. Morals had Anti-slavery, Justified Servitude and in Corporation there was Valiance gains foothold and Valiance Owes Sars. On the map were each of the PC's and the four major members of the Sars family: Carlov, Illen, Min and Solare, the father, mother, daughter and son - respectively. We set up a time limit, in this case, 3 rounds of combat, going around the table, with a Sars NPC acting in between each of the players' actions. In Social Combat, you can do a few different things. You can erect a barrier around a spot, making it harder for someone to get into that position or to get in. Right away, JC used Rojas social prowess to make it really difficult for the Sars family to gain a profit and made it hard for them to feel they had the moral high ground on Justified Servitude. We saw this as him showing them that they could make money in other ways. You can put an aspect on a character so that another character can use the free tag to gain a +2 to an attack on them. You can move yourself or another character, all by rolling to move. Storn attacked, destroying the son's social hit points, so to speak, using gambling. We decided that he cleaned the son right out. As a side-effect of this, I had Storn win a container of clone-slaves the son had picked up during the last game. This would be a huge part of the next session, when they found out what exactly kind of clones they had acquired and also, because Storn's character is an active anti-slavery proponent. I knew that gaining a container filled with clones in a kryo-sleep would be problematic and interesting for him. As I recall, Pete's character ended up squaring off with the matriarch of the family and moved her firmly into the anti-slavery camp. There were scenes where Pete's clone captain and her went into zero-G to look at their ship from the outside, as she has a love of spaceship architecture. They bonded and she realized that clones are in fact people too and holding them to work for their company was wrong. The father barricaded himself in the Sars corner of the Family quarter. The daughter got interesting. She moved into Valiance gains foothold and on the last turn, the father moved her over to Valiance Owes Sars. This, coupled with her attacking JC's character earlier with an attack using a seduction skill, meant that we decided the characters got engaged. The Valiance company could have a share in the Sars Family Mining but she would marry into the company, sealing the pact. For now, they are engaged. As it turned out, they convinced the Sars to adapt robots for their mining and to free the slaves once the robots proved profitable with the Valiance Corporation picking up the tab on the robot acquisition in return for a share of the profits. So, there are a couple of techniques we used in making Diaspora Social Combat interesting, gleaned from our years of playing Burning Wheel's Duel of Wits: [B]Tangible Effect[/B]: The Social Combat has a tangible effect on the in-game fiction. Otherwise, you are just moving pieces around a board for no damned reason. When Storn's gambler blew the Sars son right out of the combat, there were consequences and in-game stuff happened. [B]Compromise[/B]: There has to be a mechanic for compromise. In this case, I used several different members of the opposing factions, each of which with slightly different goals. The father wanted what was best for the family. The mother wanted to keep the slaves. The son wanted to see the family gain control over the corporation and the daughter wanted profit. By seeing where everyone was positioned at the end, we could see how the combat shook out. If the players had just attempted to destroy every member of the Sars family's damage track, it would have gone very differently; they might have just liberated the clone-slaves on the spot. As it was, I was very pleased with how it shook out. The map is a really interesting way to represent the whole abstracted process and it really allowed us to compress a month of game-time into a half hour or so of play. We got to roll dice and be strategic while giving the night a fun, dynamic and interesting conclusion. Now to write up last night's game, in which they find out that Anton Kilkenny, in a card-game with Carlov Sars, won a cargo container filled with lost black-ops Void Marine clones, lost since the New Ovid-Vestal war that ended 20 years back... [/QUOTE]
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