[Galactic] We started tonight

[GB Steve]

We couldn't play Koenig Hospital tonight because Graham wasn't around so we played Galactic instead. It took around 2 hours, maybe longer to get all the character generation and backgrounds done. This seemed like a long time to me to everyone seemed to enjoy it and we got some interesting things to look at.

Some players needed to be reminded to talk about what they were doing, especially with planets and factions, to make sure that nothing was duplicated and that things could be made to mesh. I won't post the results because I left them at Simon's.

Then we did one conflict. Whereas character generation was fairly straightforward without too much toing and froing (quests are after the completed sheets are shown and planet rumors aren't described at all), conflict was a bit all over the place. Admittedly I hadn't read the book before so I just tried to go through things in the order they were written. This worked to an extent but we missed a lot. We don't yet really know when a conflict is won. Do you stop if one side gets to no dice? I'm not sure.

So I'll read it ready for next week's game and we'll have another go. Because we can see that there is something to this and probably some quite interesting tactical options. We'll see.

[Matt Wilson]

Hi Steve:

Sorry I haven't responded sooner. I don't get to surf much lately, and the Forge didn't send me a "hey, someone posted" message like it usually does.

The "out of dice, conflict over" bit is sadly missing. Luckily I'm having a professional editor help me out. I'm terribly unorganized, so the text probably reflects that.

Hope your follow-up game goes well.

[GB Steve]

We played another session of this game. Unfortunately, two of the original players couldn't make it but a different one did turn up. So we had three players. It wasn't a particularly succesful session I'm afraid. It was hard to maintain some kind of flow and there's a very big prep overhead. We've never taken a whole session before to get a game started, not even Mortal Coil. Perhaps 5 was too many players.

Here's some of the feedback.

I was starting to get into it. As a GM it's really hard to keep track of who everybody is. With 3 players it's just about possible, that's 3 captains and 6 crew, with 5 players that would be 20 crew and 5 captains.

It took about 20 minutes per scene so 4 hours per captain to do the 12 scenes necessary for four quests. That's a lot of game time. It's really a campaign, especially with 5 captains. At 2 1/2 hours per session, that's 8 sessions.

I didn't really have a clue how much resources I had and when I should be spending them. At least with hazard which we used in the first session I had a number I could track but with those sheets, I just didn't know. So, I didn't think I could make finales any harder or more special than any other scenes.

I also think that crew don't have enough influence to make them interesting characters to play, certainly not at the start. And you can get new ones if you break the old ones. Much of the interactions were amusing but didn't really energise the conflict. Quite fun but probably not what Matt was aiming for.

That said, the story was quite entertaining.

I'd actually prefer one captain and one crew, with crew members getting spolight scenes, with the others helping according to the rules.

The resolution rules were wildly an unecessarily complex for me.

I found that the game was not entirely suited to all player types.

It wasn't entirely to my taste.

I found the resolution quite a drain on energy. To me, it rather sucked the energy out of the game every time we hit the conflicts. I found it hard to treat it like Dogs: using the additional dice to add to the narration. I'm not sure why.

I quite liked playing different supporting characters. One problem was that the conflict wouldn't ever really involve the supporting characters, so I felt I had to get my roleplay in before the conflict, if you see what I mean.

I was rather looking forward to a sci-fi game, but found it all rather regimented.

The main effect of the game is that two of us have now written, at least partially written in my case, SF games that are more to our tastes.