Playtest Feedback: World Building

[LucasC]

I have been busy lately putting together the setting we will use in our campaign (starts tomorrow, cannot wait). Here is some generalized feedback from the work I've done.

Armor

• I’d like to see some more variety in the armor tables. Maybe a reason to use light v medium v heavy armor (right now, there really seems to be no reason for everyone to not do everything in their power to get to a navy battlesuit (or its equiv) just as quickly as possible).
• Does an environmental suit include an air supply? Presumably it must.
• Does SOAK provided from armor stack or overlap with SOAK provided from other sources (such as the ogron size bonus)?

Weapons

• If a weapon has multiple damage types, does increasing the weapons quality add 1d6 damage to each type, or to one type of the developer’s choice?

Creating a Star System

I have spent a lot of time with these sections of the playtest document and I appreciate them immensely but believe you could trim them up some and make them more easily consumable by those of us w/out any experience in these things.

Here is some general feedback and thoughts.

• I spend a lot of time bouncing between Adjudicating the Game (specifically the chart showing FTL speeds and travel times), Space and Building a Universe.
• Not being familiar with stellar objects prior to this game, I had a LOT of learning to do to familiarize myself with some of the terminology sprinkled around (for example, everything on page 250 under the Habitable Exoplanets Catalog).
• Add a more detailed description of the type of planet to the Planetary Classification section. It took me a while to realize that a Terrestrial planet is really just another way of saying a planet that has a solid surface of some sort that I could walk on vs. a gas/ice giant which is not-so-solid on the surface but seem too often have rocky cores.
• Maybe a summary of different star types including what a main sequence is v. other types and why it matters (if it matters!).

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I found the guidelines particularly confusing when it comes to creating planets. IMO you should drop all the Habitable Exoplanets Catalog stuff and replace it with a simplified version that groups planets by some plain-language categories (conceptually along the lines of the Star Trek catalog for planets).

I have created 21 planets so far (not counting the Solar System planets) and ultimately conclude that a short list of things are important for most of them:

• What is the surface of the planet like? (rock, water, gas, etc.)
• What is the gravity like? (zero, low, normal, high, ultrahigh)
• What is the atmosphere like? (vacuum, thin, normal, thick)
• Can I breathe the air? (terrestrial, poison, toxic, etc.)
• What is the temperature? (superheated, hot, normal, cold, supercold)

Basically everything has a direct relation to what it’s going to mean for me when I land my spaceship on that planet and step out.

I would recommend you adjust the table on page 264, creating a terrestrial planet, to answer those questions above (and any I may not be thinking of)

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Speaking of that table (page 264, creating a terrestrial planet), I found myself using some parts a lot and others never. Every planet created I rolled on the Size, Terrain and Atmosphere categories and pretty much ignored the rest.

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The orbital period chart is an awesome resource. Love it.

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Planetary size is an area I spent a lot of time on and that you could, with a little work, make things more clear for people on what a big v small planet actually means. Here was my process through this:

1. I made a point to note the size of my planets in relation to our own planet Earth.
2. Looking at your random table, I noted a variance of planet size from 3 to 21.
3. With that as my start, I set Jupiter to size 21 and Mercury to size 3. Then I calculated a spread between those two that allowed me to size everything else in scale. This makes Earth size 7 by the way, a small planet.
4. That then allowed me to make some nice images of our planets all sized to scale.

Here’s a picture out of my Excel document where I track this. The line labeled Pixel size is for sizing the planets in the images below.


And some of the results of this sizing work.

 

[Morrus]

That's fantastic! I love the stuff you're doing with the system. And your feedback is incredibly useful.

Re. the armour - my intention (whether or not I've yet achieved it!) is that the heavier armor weight penalties to AGILITY offset the SOAK bonus. At the moment, yes they do stack, but that clearly needs playtesting a whole bunch - especially in terms of the amount of damage folks can do with more accurate shots*. Other options might include things like SPEED reductions, but AGI reductions already do that, so it's kind of incorporated.

The result, of course, is that stronger characters wear heavier armor. This may be a little more realistic, it might not be the idea outcome for a game.

*A s side note - that little section on spending attack dice for effects in N.E.W. is just a seed. I've taken the concept further in O.L.D. melee combat, with the combat tricks system, and that will feed back into N.E.W. at a later date.

 

[Morrus]

Okey, dokey. I've started tweaking the chapter in question. I want to leave the terminology in there because I want folks to be able to use it - if they want to (some of the hard sci-fi fans will insist on it!) I figure an optional glossary might be the way forward. I've also renamed terrestrial planets rocky planets (they mean much the same thing). More to come!

 

[LucasC]

That looks better already. One thing ...



Are these two things related and/or can they be? If yes, this would be a good example of how you can translate the science speak into something more generally consumable.


I can envision a table that says something like...

• Rocky ... terran ... Earth, Mercury ... rocky planets
• gas giant ... jovian ... jupiter, saturn ... massive gaseous
• etc.

Not sure if I'm intermingling terms and stuff.