[As inspred by The Shab-Al-Hiri Roach & the novel Starfish] Under Pressure

[Bailywolf]

It's dark down here.  Dark and cold, except where the continents are eating each other, and there it's fucking boiling.  Black smokers vomit into the ocean, and around it swarm monsters- tube worms the size of your leg, angler fish able to swollow you whole, squids... you don't want to think about the squids. 

You hitched up for a five year jag down the Trench, where the sun never reaches.  You went under the knife, got a genepatch full of fish DNA so your enzymes don't crap out and your blood runs with natural antifreeze.  A new gland in your next secretes something that keeps the pressure from giving you siezures.  Your eyes are hodded over with a set of protictive membrances, and shined from behind to catch a photon's worth of light.  You have a few extra cones in there too.  You see new colors, and the near IR looks gross, a putrifying purple, but you can see the smokers through the water, see the station's reactor cooling fins.  When the lock floods, your sinuses fill up with saline gel to keep the water from squashing your skull, and your lungs and guts just collapse- but that's fine, because the gills in your sides open up, and you don't breathe.  It's just liek dorwning, every time.  Coming back to drydoc in the station is worse though.  Fish out of water.  Your gills gape, trying to filter water that isn't there, while your lungs unstick and expand, lubricated by something like mucus so they don't close up permenatly.  Your skin is getting thicker too, as the genhack replaces your epidermis with something better adapted to this alien shore- darker, oilier, slicker. 

They say it's completely reversible- they debug your DNA when your haul is over, and your old skin grows back.  They take out the glands, the gills, the eye membranes, the fluid regulators, and you're human again.  Until then you're a wetback, a fish man, a Deep One, a lost soul claimed by the sea. 

In the station, the pings and pops and condensation dripping, it's enough to drive you nuts.  The lowest bidder built it, and you know that one bad seam, one faulty molecular join and a million tons of water squashes the thing flat, smashing you to goo, before you even know what's happening. Why is it so small?  Would it have killed them to make it a bit bigger?  Sardine a fewer number of techs and mechanics and project managers into it?   Sometimes, the claustrophobia drives you Outside.  Outside... it's a different kind of stress.

You learned early to keep you lights off.  Light in the Trench means Food.  But with your extra cones, you can see well enough- bioluminescence was the evolutionary fashion of the epoch. 

The Trench can kill you thousands of ways- boiled alive in an eruption, eaten by something horrific, crushed in a mudslide, or lost to deep hypnosis, just staring off into the black depths until your mind just... goes away.  Humming loudly into the darkness through your modded voicebox keeps the abyss from staring too hard into you.  Most of the time.

But you've got company, right?  The psyche designers claim to have perfectly balanced the psychologies of the crew the same way the station is designed to hold up under this kind of pressure even with a surface level atmosphere inside.  Saftey in numbers.  Sanity in numbers.  Just take your meds, do your job, and in five years down the well, you're rich.

But for all the native dangers of the Trench, isn't it just like humans to import their own horrors. 

Hell is other people.

Rundown- a deep sea station inhabited by biogenetically modified deep-adapted amphibious humans operating under enormous literal and psychological pressure when... something goes wrong.  The AI (named 'Cartwright') which runs the station has started to flake out, and the antipsychotic and antistress drugs it dispenses are... a bit off.  According to the surface, everything is running according to specs, and everyone just needs to double-down their REM inducers and stick to the schedule.  Structure and sound management is what's needed!  Oh, and we need to move up the timetable a bit- yearly accounting issues, you understand. 

The truth is, the crew is going crazy- getting more obsessive, paranoid, hateful, and careless.  Something has to give.

The PC's  plus a few others (to bring the number of characters up to 10 or so) constitute the Crew.  Other characters might visit the station on occasion (a Corporate QC expert... a shrink...a technical expert... some subjockey stopping by for a visit). 

Like The Shab Al-Hiri Roach it's GM'less with resolving scene-framing power.  Like The Shab Al-Hiri Roach it uses dice for resolving conflicts for preset stakes, and uses cards to mix things up, complicate things, and throw things into chaos. 

I should note at this point, that this isn't an effort to produce a saleable commercial game... I'm ripping too much setting from the novel Starfish and too many mechanics and style from The Shab-Al-Hiri Roach.  I'd be happy with something playable.

Anyhow...

Characters have four Stats, each with a unique descriptor:

Guile- how sneaky, clever, and manipulative you are.
Force-  how direct, physically adept, and violent you are.
Expertise- how skilled you are at your job and general technical matters.
Drive- how motivated you are. 

You have four dice- a d4, a d6, a d8, and a d10- to assign to these Stats. 

You also have four Pools, each loosley associated with one of the stats:

Paranoia (Hearts, Guile)- how suspicious and fearful you are of your fellow crewmembers.
Hate (Clubs, Force)- how angry and filled with rage you are towards your fellow crewmembers.
Obsession (Diamonds, Expertise)- how neurotically obsessive and compulsive you've become.
Doom (Spades, Drive)- how close to disaster and risk and misfortune you operate.

Distribute 10 points amongst these pools at start of play.

Finally, you have Control, the 'score' for the game.  The more in Control you are, the more authority you have (high control lets you veto things you don't like, break ties, and decide things in the context of the game).  If you're still in Control at the end, you win.  Control is wagered in conflicts- when you frame, you can wager up to 5 points, when you're just playing along, only 1.  If you're on the wining side of a conflict- by the dice- then you double your wagered control, otherwise, you lose it. 

During a scene, someone frames it, indicates who else is involved (PC's and Others), one card (from a standard deck with jokers in) is drawn, stakes are set, and play flows.  Based on the way the scene is framed, and the actions described, one Trait's die is used to resolve the conflict- high die wins. 

After the stakes are set, the drawn card is compared to the total for the relevant pool linked to the card's suit.  If under, the character experiences some kind of freak-out related to the pool.  If higher, then the pool increases by 1 point.  If you Freak Out, you lose 1 Control. 

Face cards let you push someone else's buttons- blowing off steam by making someone else crazier, transferring points from your pools to their pools.  Jacks let you shift 1 point, Queens 2, Kings 3.

You can draw more than one card if you want- risking a freak out- but getting an additional die to roll in the conflict.  The die is based on the suit drawn, and if the same as the base die for the conflict, gives you another of the same type.  Work in how these traits collaborate to produce a coherent course of action.  (example- using Force + Guile might be a violent ambush.  Expertise + Drive might let you get a better service review and a raise when you really need the money).  Drawing a second (or third... or fourth) card also causes you to wager an additional point of Control as part of the escalation.

Winning a conflict lets you reduce involved pools by... oh... say 3 points.  Losing a conflict increases the linked pool by 1 point. 

And... that's the bones of it.  Cram three to five characters into a can on the bottom of the ocean, and see what happens. 

Without the evocative events, opportunities, and commands of Roach or the deliciously dark setting of Pemberton, I don't know if this would work... perhaps with a series of Events (or a collection of Events which can be picked and chosen to make up the game) as well as some NPC characters to introduce at various stages...

But this is the gist of it... this is what happens when I'm reading an awesome game and an awesome novel at the same time, and they sort of trainwreck in my brain.

-Ben 

 

[Bailywolf]

Jokers!

What the hell do jokers do?

-B

[Valamir]

Major breakdown of station equipment.

Major change in mission of the facility

Play to some trigger end game track like in With Great Power


Any of a variety of things.

[Bailywolf]

Perhaps they indicate things are starting to spiral, and Cartwright is going bonkers, the meds are really screwed up, and so each Joker drawn indicated a doubling in all gains in bad pool points.

-B

[Bailywolf]

A thought I had in the shower this morning- as in Roach , you declare the target for your card before you draw it, and if you freak out, this is the person (or people) who are on the receiving end. 

Should you get more dice for freaking out?

Not sure.

Here's the 1, 2, 3's I have so far...

1) A player frames a scene- likely doing so to take advantage of his strong Traits- and sets the Stakes.

2) Participants are nominated, NPC's assigned, and volunteers welcomed into the fray

3) Bets of Control are made.

4) Cards are aimed, and then drawn.

5) The effects on the crazy-pools are assessed, and any freak-outs determined.  Narration frames the conflict before it is resolved.

6) Dice are rolled

7) If desired, additional cards can be drawn to get more dice (each adding 1 to the bet) with running narration describing what this means.

8) Results tabulated, and winners get final narration narrate.


Question- is there enough different kinds of stuff going on at the bottom of the ocean to make this more than a boring DOA?

-B

[Jason Morningstar]

The reason the targeting thing works in The Roach is because the cards are balanced about 2:1 in favor of something bad happening to your target, but a third of the time something good happens to them instead.  Something to keep in mind. 

I need to read Starfish - it sounds really cool. 

[Bailywolf]

The reason the targeting thing works in The Roach is because the cards are balanced about 2:1 in favor of something bad happening to your target, but a third of the time something good happens to them instead.  Something to keep in mind. 

I need to read Starfish - it sounds really cool. 

I keep finding all these marvelous little bits of design in Roach like this one you point out here- the recurring Pembertonians who drag consequences from one event to another is another thing that struck me as teh awesome.

I need to monkey with this thing to find out if the dice/cards/pools/control exchanges aren't horribly broken right on their face.

Another thing which might make this idea DOA is that it is just too grim without being funny as in Roach... the advantage of cards is that I could sculpt all kinds of complications like bureaucratic snafus and budgetary cutbacks to mix things up, but since this thing is just a personal-use-only kind of thing, I can't really justify the efforts that would require... and it would mean ripping off you game's design even more.
 

[Jason Morningstar]

I think ripping off is a little harsh, and for what it's worth you have my encouragement.  It's not like I was shy about acknowledging my influences in The Roach - The Mountain Witch, Polaris, etc.  If my game inspires yours, that's high praise. 

[Bailywolf]

Thanks!

Roach is doing cragy things to my gamebrain right now- it's the first time I've ever liked a no-GM game.

And if you want to read Starfish, I found it and its sequels online under the Creative Commons here.

Up on level from that link, you can get an HTML version- that's what I'm reading.

-Ben

[Jason Morningstar]

Back on track, step 7 is where your gold is from my POV - if you can make additional card draws necessary for success or even just very tempting, and the cards themselves drive play, you've got endless interesting fun.  I imagine cascading failures where things get worse and worse as players willingly amp up the trouble. 

[Bailywolf]

Back on track, step 7 is where your gold is from my POV - if you can make additional card draws necessary for success or even just very tempting, and the cards themselves drive play, you've got endless interesting fun.  I imagine cascading failures where things get worse and worse as players willingly amp up the trouble. 

That was exactly what I was hopping would happen- a player doesn't want to eat failure, so he draws cards, which up the stakes, and increase the risk of things flying out of control.

-B

[Bailywolf]

 I felt inspired enough to 'shop a 'cover' for the imaginary game from stock images:

[img=http://img306.imageshack.us/img306/1969/uncerpressure2fv2.jpg]

-Ben

[Bailywolf]

Or rather...

[img=http://img306.imageshack.us/img306/1969/uncerpressure2fv2.jpg]

-Ben

[Bailywolf]

[img='http://img306.imageshack.us/img306/1969/uncerpressure2fv2.jpg[/img]

-Ben

[Bailywolf]

Damnit!

-B