Hi folks,

So first thing off on Saturday, we got into Matt Wilson's developing space opera game, Galactic, run by Albert Anderson.

Galactic normally involves building a map with different space sectors with their own resources, which comes into play after you have an adventure occur and resolve a situation in that sector.  Due to our time limits, we skipped this and went right into character generation & situation prep.

First, every player (except the GM) creates their own Captain of a spaceship, as well as a supporting crew member for each of the other Captains.  The Captains are the only ones with real stats to speak of, the supporting crew exist as names and basic descriptions.  Each player makes some kind of suggestion of the adventure they want, leave the room, and the other players & the GM create some more details, set up some NPCs, and then the next person does the same.  At the end of it, you get some really great prep without having to do "between session" work and it really fits.

This worked out really well, and we had a mix of very different stories happening simultaneously, ranging from a classic high action "shoot your way out" space pirate, a diplomat/assassin facing an old flame and other people's problems, a militant ideologue who ended up commandeering a whole planet, and a miltary captain who ultimately fails at the last moment to save thousands of lives in a brutal endscene.

From a player side, we felt that the supporting characters ought to have a little less incentive to just throw in their big helping dice all the time, as it pretty much made a couple of conflicts easy run overs.  Granted, you only earn Fortune (the Big Resource in this game) by losing, but still it was a little too powerful when players would throw 3D10 onto the protagonists' pool.

Instead of simply reducing the numbers, we thought it might be best to give the supporting characters some kind of risk factor- such as getting a 1D8 impaired means being injured, incapactitated, or otherwise not able to participate in the next scene, and 1D10 impaired meaning the end of the character's story- either death, retirement, whatever.  Though supporting characters are not differentiated mechanically in any sense, it's easy enough to plug in a new character- the only reason to hold onto them is because you like the character concept.  This also gives the other players a chance to make a meaningful choice while in a supporting role.

I know Albert was finding the Hazard dice a little wonky, so hopefully he'll be able to add some observations on that.

Overall, I had a great time, and can't wait to see this finished.  I hope to playtest it some more, and might try applying the situation prep for other games that don't have strong prep structures already.

Chris

The other thing we talked about was an option for a player who spent five Fortune to try to end the Chapter but failed be able declare the Chapter ended anyway. In my case (the military captain), I decided that there wasn't a good way for the story to continue and I had no Fortune left, so it seemed pointless to go on. Perhaps in that case the players should be able to narrate an epilogue to indicate what they're taking away from the Chapter?

--Paul

I'm not sure if playtest discussion of Galactic is really kosher here. There's a non-public playtest forum, which I'm sure anybody who's playtested could get a link to if they PM Matt. I've already posted the meat of our post-mortem there.

Or Matt can come along and shut me up and continue discussion right here.

I haven't spilled anything deep about the mechanics, so hopefully it will just = more awesome word of mouth when it does come out... plus Matt has mentioned stuff about the game on his public blog, so if anyone just wanted to talk about how much fun they had, that'd probably be cool.

Or Matt can shut me up too :P

Chris