Ghosts of the Empire

[Matt Wilson]

Premise: exploration-focused space opera in the far future, with heaps of ruins, lost tech, aliens, creepy stuff, and politics.

The story:  The history of this setting is but scraps of legend. The old texts told of the 7 prophets who led their flock away from the Scourge (whatever that is) to safety. For some reason (?? for you to find out why in your campaign?) all the worlds discard their tech and the truth of their journey becomes myth, guarded by a select few.

A couple millennia later, the cultures have rebuilt themselves anew, and on one planet, a group (probably some dungeon-crawling group of PCs) follows some clues in the old legends to find an ancient interstellar spacecraft. With this new knowledge, they contact a few of the other lost worlds that the other "prophets" went to.

The game starts some time after this, when the reunited human cultures are finding each other to be really weird and different, and they're nosing about space in piece-of-crap ships, discovering strange aliens and wondering what the heck happened a few thousand years ago.

Color: Mysterious, old, lost, slightly sad. Think of that scene in the LotR movie when they're on the river rowing past those old, huge, cracked statues, and that sweeping music starts to play. Imagine that, except it's your character finding some ancient space station or derelict ship or something.

Setting: enough paint on the canvas to provide ideas and a mood, some secrets, some themes, some aliens, some cultures. No definitive answers. I chose from a few options when I ran the game, and thought it'd be better to take them out and let the group that's playing decide what the deal is.

Mechanic:  not sure yet. It needs to support what's written above, meaning it should scale to allow different levels of tech without some dumb "megadamage" effect, and it should have a quick search/handling time to keep from distracting people from the mood.

[Ron Edwards]

Hey,

I guess my first question is, "How is this distinguished from Fading Suns?"

I do not mean to imply that the game as you conceive it (and certainly beyond what you've presented in a brief post) is actually not distinguishable from Fading Suns. But that's my first question, so that I can learn how it's different.

Best,
Ron

[Matt Wilson]

Hey,

I guess my first question is, "How is this distinguished from Fading Suns?"

I do not mean to imply that the game as you conceive it (and certainly beyond what you've presented in a brief post) is actually not distinguishable from Fading Suns. But that's my first question, so that I can learn how it's different.

Best,
Ron

Yeah, I can see the similarities. I actually figured people would try to compare it to Traveller: The New Era.

I suppose one main difference between FS and this is that Ghosts will feel more traditionally space opera than FS, which has that Feudal Europe template that just about everything fits into.

It's not one of my main influences, so I don't worry about it being too alike. Actually, one of the first influence was the computer game Homeworld.

[Mike Holmes]

Mechanic:  not sure yet. It needs to support what's written above, meaning it should scale to allow different levels of tech without some dumb "megadamage" effect, and it should have a quick search/handling time to keep from distracting people from the mood.

Well, given the potentiality of high tech, how do you propose keeping characters alive?

This is a problem with a lot of sci-fi. From what you say above, I take it that there's going to be a combat system. If you go with that, then you have to acount for the presumably increasing lethality of weaponry available. Heck, right now you can get weapons of unbelieveble lethality. In the future survival in a fight is going to be difficult, an need an explanation.

How is it that combat is not over in just one round of fire?

Some games resort to armor. Which is reasonable. As lethality increases, defenses increase to counter. But the effect is one of lag, right now, as the technology to do damage is much easier to produce than the technology to prevent it. And ironically, a good offense is a good defense.

The real difficulty in any futuristic game is to figure out where the protagonism lies for the character. Why isn't he just a pile of armor and weapons? What makes the character important in a fight?  Once you determine that, then all the questions about how to allocate damage, etc will come into place.

My best suggestion is to not have a combat system, however.

Mike

[greyorm]

Homeworld is one of those games that just really caught my interest and fired my imagination, so this sort of thing is right up my alley.  I'd definitely like to see more development of it.

Sorry I don't have anything to contribute beyond the above encouragement.

[Matt Wilson]

My best suggestion is to not have a combat system, however.

Mike

Cool thread, and not too far off from what I was thinking. The mechanic used will have very ambiguous results. Maybe I'll play on players' love of "cool stuff" by giving things more general Event Modifiers, to adjust the outcome of an event. I'll have to think on that more.

[Mike Holmes]

Maybe I'll play on players' love of "cool stuff" by giving things more general Event Modifiers, to adjust the outcome of an event. I'll have to think on that more.

That sounds like an idea with potential. Event Modifiers. Very Conflict Resolution or even Scene Resolution. That would solve a lot of problems with using tech in games.

EX: Bob has a hypermagnetic super wrench, and his uplink to the galactic knowledgebase. He has to fix the ships outer Chromnabulaster. The GM agrees that these two items will apply to the task giving him a total of +5 (+2 for the wrench, and +3 for the knowledgbase). He rolls a success, and then narrates how the items used helped him acomplish the task. It's FitM applied to technology. TitM?

Just a thought.

Mike

[Matt Wilson]

EX: Bob has a hypermagnetic super wrench, and his uplink to the galactic knowledgebase. He has to fix the ships outer Chromnabulaster. The GM agrees that these two items will apply to the task giving him a total of +5 (+2 for the wrench, and +3 for the knowledgbase). He rolls a success, and then narrates how the items used helped him acomplish the task. It's FitM applied to technology. TitM?

I don't know what FitM is, but that's pretty much the idea. That kind of mechanic works great for just about any situation. In the event there is a combat, the successes against a character don't have to be wounds or death. Say I roll and get two successes over your defense. Maybe one success applies to your armor getting a big ugly scorch mark on it that will give you a big penalty later when you try and score with some chicks. The other applies to you diving back and bumping into a wall panel that activates some destruct sequence.

To keep the narration under control, I'd probably opt in some "veto" points that other players can use to adjust to the mad whims of GM or other players. Like maybe you spend one to say "luckily I had just applied a layer of ArmorAll before this battle, so that scorch mark will wipe right off."

[ADGBoss]

Definitely some good food for thought in these posts and the related ones but I am not as sold on the idea of narrative combat.   I will say this much though, if a game never has need for combat ie Life and Death kind of stuff then normal skill/conflict/opposition resolution should take care of it quite well.

However, in a game where Life and Death can be serious, there should be a rules set that governs it to avoid player (and GM) abuse.  Perhaps thats why special combat rules are so prevalent, instead of implying the system is immature perhaps we should consider them a "Realist" approach. I can tell you that even the best role players I have played with are going to take MORE chances, get into MORE fights if death is less likely.

One has to take into account that there may be a game where Bob the GM fires at Chrissy his girlfriend and Ross the geek from the LGS. Chrissy dents her armor and tears her pantyhose while Ross has to use Veto Points to fend off setting off the self destruct or being killed all night. Eventually he is out of Veto Points and boom... dies in a beautifully told narrative way.

Yes.

A GM may play your game and cheat or a player may cheat.  Their are going to stretch the idea of the NArrative well beyond inteded limits. When you write you write for the audience, when you design a game it has to be with the audience in mind.

People who will like your game and buy it (or play it if its free) will not necassarily play it the way you intend it.  Its true that even if you put in special rules for combat, they can still chuck 'em and do something else. In my experience however, its much better to have them there because Combat SHOULD be special.

Why? Its interfering in my great story! Well if you don't want players to avoid combat, minimizing the rules won't make a difference. In FACT large and convoluted combat systems may have a better deterant effect then a rules light combat system.

Example:
"Combat with this one guy may take 3 hours for 18 seconds of real time... perhaps I will bribe him instead.."

vs.

"Hey fights are three simple rolls! Roll 3d10 and add my Chiggy with it Points! He dies with no pants on!"

People point at system and say Hack n Slash and it is not always system.  It comes from limited choices.  I have yet to see a game yet where a realistic sort of combat ie one that COULD turn deadly, that deters combat.  Of course I have not seen eery game out there. I still have alot of ground to cover :)

In my opinion the best way to deter combat at the design level is to make the consequences BAD.  When even if you win a fight the police confiscate the probably illegal Laser gun your using, then players might (some of us are hard heads afterall) get the idea there is more to gaming then hack n slash.  

All that being said, I think a combat system with similar mechanics to the rest of the skill resolution system probably works best just to confuse players less.

Just my 2 Lunars

SMH
ADGBoss

[Mike Holmes]

So as not to derail this thread, I will not reply here. However, if you want to copy your comments over to the Combat System rant thread (referenced above) where they would be appropriate, I'd be glad to address them there.

For here, it must suffice to say that I disagree.

Mike

[ADGBoss]

Be happy to..

SMH
ADGBoss