Hey, school's out for a while, and I finally took care of that giant printing job, so maybe I have a little time to spend online for the next couple months.

I'll start off by sharing. Here's my game in the works, Galactic. I've been agonizing over it for a really long time, but I'm gonna be playing it this weekend, and Clinton and Remi and Jason started playing it this week. Want to play it too? See below.

At its heart, the game is about human beings in crisis situations. It's also about making uncomfortable choices. You know how in Trollbabe you have to risk the well being of a relationship in order to try again in a conflict? It's like that, kind of, except that down the road is the welfare of the whole human race.

It's meant to be nar facilitating, and it may be walking a fine line between N and G. You have strategic resources, but your resources all have faces, so to speak, and how you apply them makes for fun reactions and judgments around the table. Was it necessary for people to get hurt? Maybe you think so. What about the other players? At least that's my intended "fruitful void."

The necessary files to playtest it are here: http://www.dog-eared-designs.com/g_playtest.zip

I'm keen on answering any questions, and I'm dying to get some AP reports, but I'm totally not interested in speculation about what might happen in play.

Oh, and just in case this comes up: I originally imagined this as using some cool color tiles, and they still have kind of a vestigial use in this version, but they're something that I can't effectively package without putting a big burden on the players to print out and so on.

Hi Matt. First off, let me say this is a facinating work. I love the overall arcing storyline and its inherent wargame-like aspects.

I'm a relative newcomer to narrative/conflict resolution games. I've only run one session of Primetime Adventures (which pretty much worked and was enjoyed by all) as the conflict resolution format doesn't seem to engage my regular players. Galactic seems to have a nice balance between conflict resolution and task resolution which may be more appealing.

It took a few moments for me to understand the conflict resolution mechanism from the text. It may be a common resolution form in other CR games, but being new to me it took a couple of readings to understand the little dice battle mini-game. It seems the object is to knock out your opposing dice until one side either realizes they have little hope and conceeds or gets all their dice knocked out. Correct?

The idea of each player having a captain and the other players crewmembers on their ship is a great way to offer everyone the spotlight and hero role equally. However, it seems the idea of play is to focus in turn on each captain, completing a story for each captain in every gaming session, yes? I would expect that to be very jarring and make following the thread of the story difficult, wouldn't it? It would be hard on the GM who still holds the responsibility for the story no matter how much is delegated to the players. At first glance I'd be more comfortable with spending an entire game session with one captain and rotating between sessions, though that would slow down the pace of the overall campaign story somewhat.

I'd like to see some sort of starting event or story to kick off the captains in their quest to save mankind if possible, even if it's just a suggestion to have such an event. Something has to light a fire under them and make them start this quest, since the Scourge doesn't even show up for quite a while (the cliffhanger ending of season one maybe). Something to tie their storylines together?

The resolution event seems to be logically focused on one captain saving the universe. Of course by that point you might be down to just one captain, but it might be interesting for there to be some game mechanic around all the captains joining forces for the endgame. Or even a mechanic around their teaming up from time to time during the course of play. The switching captain gameplay does kind of look like a bunch of separate adventure story lines, one of which may go on to save the universe. On the other hand, since every player would be playing multiple characters at the same time, having them meet seems to be a nightmare.

Thanks for posting it, it's certainly given me something to think about.

Michael:

Thanks, and welcome to the Forge. Long-time lurker? I gotta run to the post office, but here's some quick responses...

It seems the object is to knock out your opposing dice until one side either realizes they have little hope and conceeds or gets all their dice knocked out. Correct?

I would expect that to be very jarring and make following the thread of the story difficult, wouldn't it?

I'd like to see some sort of starting event or story to kick off the captains in their quest to save mankind if possible, even if it's just a suggestion to have such an event.

The resolution event seems to be logically focused on one captain saving the universe. Of course by that point you might be down to just one captain, but it might be interesting for there to be some game mechanic around all the captains joining forces for the endgame.

Trollbabes is often described as a good game for One-on-one though, how does that figure in?

Matt wrote:
Michael:

Thanks, and welcome to the Forge. Long-time lurker?

Matt wrote:
My thought is that you describe the circumstances that get the captain going, and you provide a tiny hint about the Scourge, like a color or sound or smell or something. The GM has to use that.

If you haven't checked out Sorcerer, I recommend that you do. It's pretty much the godparent of all the games produced by people who frequent this site.

Kickers are a player-provided setup, where that player introduces a situation that the character can't ignore, something that the player is really interested in.

So for Galactic, you as a player would write up something like, "my captain was on Severus colony and found an ancient recording that showed a confederation-era settlement under attack. The footage was corrupted, but there was a distinct whirring noise in the background. It could only have been the Scourge. Now she's out trying to find people who will believe her and join her in finding a way to make sure they don't come back."

I see, making the responsibility for motivating the character part of the player's job. That would tend to make things easier.

Exactly. There's just no reason for any game to put a burden like that on the GM.

Really enjoyable read. And a couple of questions.

1. How many episodes/adventures do you reckon a ... campaign (?) of Galactic will run?

2. Could you expand on your aims the 'unlimited travel on charted routes' / 'always stop at a planet' rules?

Hey Matt, just to clarify my second question - could a captain take their ship along a charted route and branch off it at any point into unexplored space, and that's the point at which their 5 hexes of travel starts being counted?

Steve:

It's hard to know what you mean without a map to look at. The deal is you can reach any world for an adventure that's within 5 hexes of a world where you (or any other player) have already had an adventure. Does that answer your question?

Matt,

Holy crap this thing is cool. 

I wanna run this straight... I wanna kitbash it to run X-Com... I want to convince someone else to run it so I can *play* it.

How soon do you need AP and feedback? 

Doyce

Holy crap this thing is cool.

How soon do you need AP and feedback?

Do we toss APs in playtest, in this forum, or PM you?

I just tried it last night.  Short version of it is Factions yay, Galaxy map yay, Captain generation yay, GM hazard huh?, crewmates huh?.  I can elaborate, just don't know where.

On page 20 under Building the Adventure - Hazard, it states: "In addition to gaining Hazard from Fortune spent by other players..." I can't see anyplace in the rules where this happens.

From my analysis of GM Hazard, you only earn Hazard in two ways:

1) Rolling the Adversity dice for the world being explored at the start of the adventure
2) In Conflict between players and specific GMC's, in a similar fashion to the way players earn Fortune (i.e. roll eliminated dice, odd give a Hazard point).

There are some meta-objectives to keep in mind for the GM it seems.

1) Save up 25 Hazard for the first Scourge event. Saving 2-3 Hazard per adventure for it might be prudent.
2) Save up another 25 Hazard for the second Scourge event. Again, 2-3 Hazard per adventure seems reasonable.
3) Save up 35 Hazard for the Scourgyness of the endgame.

This does mean the first few adventures will be a bit easier as the GM is holding back Hazard points. Once the reserve has been met you can go all out, so there's a bit of a dramatic buildup there. Nice.

It seems the player meta-objectives center around gaining connection dice, which are essentially their re-rolls. They want to explore planets and complete goals to get connections. They want to explore planets with high Adversities to gain the higher value connection dice.

By the time the map is mostly explored you could expect players to be holding maybe 7d6 and 7d4 or so in connections. That's a lot of re-rolls, but they'll need them to save humanity.

The rules mention several times the player affecting planets they "influence". It's not spelled out anywhere I saw, but I suppose that means they can only spend Fortune on planets they've had adventures on.

Regarding explored planets, I assume you could have further adventures on that planet with other captains if they wished? Part of me is thinking that achieving a goal "eats" that Adversity die, thus limiting the number of connection dice there are available to be won in the map.

Maybe a Disorder event could add Adversity dice to an explored system, needing them to be resolved before the disorder is ended?

Michael:

Every point of Fortune spent by a player nets the GM a point of Hazard. I don't have a text open in front of me to point to where that is, but it's as official as I can declare it.

The rules mention several times the player affecting planets they "influence". It's not spelled out anywhere I saw, but I suppose that means they can only spend Fortune on planets they've had adventures on.

Glendower wrote:
Do we toss APs in playtest, in this forum, or PM you?

I just tried it last night.  Short version of it is Factions yay, Galaxy map yay, Captain generation yay, GM hazard huh?, crewmates huh?.  I can elaborate, just don't know where.

Hi Matt,

Thanks for that. I'm gunna refer to the map on page 16 for my question about ship travel - and, for the record, I'm trying to figure out whether you can min-max the rules to create fast travel routes across the galaxy.

So, say there's a world to the left of E, just above the top of the map.  This new world, F is 7 hexes away.  Can I travel along the route from Caliban to E for 4 hexes and then BRANCH OFF that route just before reaching E, and travel 3 more hexes to F?

I didn't notice any explicit mention of whether branching is allowed - but it's pretty much the first thing I thought of - and ultimately, being able to bypass worlds and travel along branches could make travel to the Core and back pretty damn fast.  Is that clearer?

If you've already had an adventure at world E, then you measure whether or not world F is within 5 hexes of E. Otherwise you have to first have an adventure on world E or some other world that will get you within 5 hexes of F.

It's like buiding a railroad in the Civ games and then having unlimited movement along it per turn.

On the subject of GM Hazard, these are the listed ways I can find to spend it:

Improve GMCs
Grant 1d4 worth of gear to a GMC - 1 Hazard
Add 1d6 to GMC's Archetype - 2 Hazard
Note: Generic GMCs start with 3d6 + the sector Adversity dice in archetype but the example on p.20 seems to imply 2d6 not 3d6. It also talks about adding 1d12 for 3 Hazard?

Conflict Resolution
Affecting Stakes (chart p.38)
Add 1d6 to any conflict - 3 Hazard (p.43 Gathering Dice)

Political
Create Disorder - 5 Hazard
Scourge Events - 25/35 Hazard

It looks like the primary use a GM will be making of Hazard is mucking about with stakes and making conflicts more difficult. I can see a common "bastard GM" tactic being waiting until the conflict is for the goal resolution and then spending five to make losing the conflict a player captain death. Easily avoidable by conceeding... and thus losing the goal and the connection dice reward.

I think the rulebook would benefit from a small section for the GM summarizing Hazard spending. I had to hunt around a good bit for the costs.

Michael:

That sounds about right. Also "bastard GM" = good player agony. How many redshirts will you cross off to keep your captain alive? How many connections will you strain? Will the crew jump in and fight on the captain's side?

Michael wrote:

Note: Generic GMCs start with 3d6 + the sector Adversity dice in archetype but the example on p.20 seems to imply 2d6 not 3d6. It also talks about adding 1d12 for 3 Hazard?

Whoops. That's supposed to be 3d6. Prepare for many mistakes like that. MANY. I aim to frustrate.

The 1d12 thing is totally an artifact.

As for the playtest page, yeah, sure. Clinton was considering a PBwiki, if I'm not mistaken, for the playtest game he's in. Maybe I'll just point them to you.

Doyce wrote: Also: My pitch to garner local players for a Galactic playtest is here: http://random.average-bear.com/archive/008922.html

Michael wrote:

Doyce wrote: Also: My pitch to garner local players for a Galactic playtest is here: http://random.average-bear.com/archive/008922.html

Doyce, if you don't mind, I am totally going to steal that pitch for my players.

I've started collecting notes here:  http://random.average-bear.com/GalacticPlaytest/HomePage

Y'all feel free to jump in.  (Clinton, if you're reading this, g'head and use the are to track stuff from your game if you want.)

First playtest session on Friday! Woo!

... and yea verily, I have questions:

1. My players are going to ask what kind of ships they can have.  I'm inclined to say "anything from a junky old Trans-U short-range hauler with an FTL drive stapled onto the ass, up to a Battlestar, but pick something commensurate to the about of Gear dice you can pull, related to an appropriate Archetype", except that the total Gear dice range is something like 1... all the way up to ... 2.  Hmm. Thoughts?

2. Let's say I've got for players and, first round, there's only three planets within 5 hexes of Caliban.  Someone's going to be having an adventure on the same planet as someone else.  Can we play a quick game of what-ifs there, regarding how resulting relationships and planetary influence will work out?

... feel free to just point me at page numbers if it turns out I'm blind.

Hey Doyce. Good luck with the playtest.

1. I'd think of Gear Dice in relation to the character, not the ship. A person with high Astronaut can make better use of ship engines or whatever than someone with a low astronaut. So the answer is what kind of ship has nothing to do with archetype.

2. Make it your job as GM to make sure there's enough worlds in range. If there aren't, re-throw one of your tokens.

Matt wrote:
So the answer is what kind of ship has nothing to do with archetype.

I would think the type of ship is linked strongly with the type of adventures the player wants the Captain to have. A small outdated transport with a crew of misfits won't have the same adventures as a shiny capital ship with a full compliment of 430 crewmembers. With greater power typically comes more restrictions on how you can use it.

They can have whatever kind of ship they want. There's no "space combat" section in the rules, and there won't be one. Your ship can hold three people or a hundred. It can be totally unarmed or it can be a mega warship.

Hmmm. The "whatever kind of ship you want" system seems pretty odd to me, for a sci-fi game that bothers to discuss its technology. Isn't "ship coolness" at least a part of what makes the game fun? I know it's not the focus (and full-on space combat rules would be too much) but a blank slate strikes me as the wrong thing.

It's a sci-fi game about spaceship captains, after all. A cyberpunk game that just said "you're a cyborg, have whatever cyborg stuff you want" would ring a little hollow.

Maybe you could get to build your ship from a little list of traits, which would provide the basis for the color (kind of what Doyce suggested). Or maybe your factions determine a few things about the type of vessel you command. I dunno. Something.

That sounds like speculation. Where's my big stick?

If there is anyone who is planning on putting together a playtest session of this game at GenCon, may I suggest the Games On Demand sessions?  In fact, the one on Saturday morning would be perfect, because that is one of the ones I am running, and I would get to see it in action!  As a friend of mine said, after reading the playtest rules, "This is what Traveller SHOULD have been!"

I do have to echo one of John's comments, even with the big stick looming.  I think I can dodge it a bit, however, as this was a comment made by one of the players in my game tonight.

"There's stuff on the sheet for our crew. Where do we right the ship stuff, or is that another sheet?"  I'm just pointing out that there's an obvious expectation that the ship will be represented in some way.

I think John's comment is a fair one: the heroes aren't 'crew captains', they're 'starship captains.'  One of the examples used in the Archetype section and one of the example for the GM spending Hazard involve space battles (or at least an impending fight in space) with the ships.  I think the reason for that is obvious: it's space-based sci-fi.

I'm certainly not arguing that people aren't the most important thing in this situation -- they absolutely are.  However, this is the kind of thing that matters in the genre -- there's isn't one bit of source material (Firefly, Farscape, Battlestar, Star Trek, etc etc) for a game like this where the ship doesn't some up at least some of the time.  I don't think that a seperate, designated-as-the-ship pool of dice (like the Gear rules) would be difficult to write in or unbalancing, because it's much less likely to have impact on a given scene, but would be there if the scene was appropriate.

Again, it's just a thought -- get the big stick ready.

That all said, I'm certainly presenting the rules exactly as written tonight, without judgment, comment or house ruling anything, so that any feedback speaks directly to them.

And honestly?  One line in the Gear section (maybe with one of those awesome little examples of play to suggest ways to narrate it) about bringing your Ship in with just Gear dice during spacey-stuff would shut me totally up.

Since the only game mechanic is the dice, introducing the ship as a separate element would seem to require giving the player extra dice they could use in, say "space situations". But what are space situations? If I'm on the surface of the planet I could justify using my ship dice for an orbital bombardment, a message relay or interception, all sorts of things. So the ship dice become generally added gear dice really.

It seems to me the ship could be simply represented by the gear dice, when it's appropriate to describe them that way. In story terms your exact ship doesn't matter, it's just how you describe its use. Thus a small Firefly class vessel can be gear dice vs a giant Alliance battlecruiser by describing how its small size and low ELINT profile allows it to hide behind the hulk of the ship you're looting, or when you spend 3 fortune and bring in your Scoundrel archetype the gear dice now represent the decoy distress signal you're sending.

Another way would be to describe the ship as a crewmember. I can think of one anime (Lost Universe) that does this by having the ship holographically present itself as an avatar with a personality and emotions, but you could equally just use the crewmember dice in any situation in which the ship's superior capabilities would be an issue.

One line in the Gear section (maybe with one of those awesome little examples of play to suggest ways to narrate it) about bringing your Ship in with just Gear dice during spacey-stuff would shut me totally up.

It seems to me the ship could be simply represented by the gear dice, when it's appropriate to describe them that way.

Conversely, it strikes me as highly in-genre to depict the ship's systems in terms of people, i.e. crew -- your engines are Scotty or Kaylee, your medical bay is Bones McCoy or Simon Tam, etc.

Sydney wrote:
Conversely, it strikes me as highly in-genre to depict the ship's systems in terms of people, i.e. crew -- your engines are Scotty or Kaylee, your medical bay is Bones McCoy or Simon Tam, etc.

Matt wrote:

It seems to me the ship could be simply represented by the gear dice, when it's appropriate to describe them that way.

*Ahem*  See page 12.

A playtest at Gen Con and some discussion over lunch today with Meredith made for a crazy audible click in my head.

Expect a revision soon that will be seriously awesome.

Hey Matt, I got to play Galactic last Friday and it was a blast. Great work! I just downloaded the current version and will try it out with my regular group. I hope Tim will do an AP report here.

I love the way the supporting cast is there to make the Captain look good, and by extension the player have the kind of adventure he's looking for. :) One thing I noticed was the lack of one-shot guidelines. Something like a simplified version of the game, if you're not sure whether you want to commit to an entire campaign. I think we dropped (or at least heavily simplified) the Impairment rules, thus allowing for some simple straight-forward fun. This had a lot to do with why this game got me so fired up. The struggle against the Scrouge is fun, if you're looking for a campaign. But occasionally you just want some old-fashioned Kirk-style adventuring, and Galactic seems perfect for that.

We had 4 players in the game, which was great for character interaction and throwing ideas back and forth between players, but it also meant we had to run 4 adventures at once. It made the game seem much longer and harder to run, than is really necessary. During the post-game talks, I suggested a switching mode: allowing for only two captains to be active during a game session. With the other two players getting to play their captains next time. I really wouldn't want to miss out on the breadth of characters available with 4 players, but I'm not sure I can play a 4-in-1 game each week.

Looking forward to your revision. The game we played rocked so hard, I'm still grinning like a madman four days later. If you're taking pre-orders, sign me up. :)

Matt wrote:
A playtest at Gen Con and some discussion over lunch today with Meredith made for a crazy audible click in my head.

Expect a revision soon that will be seriously awesome.

Ack. I'll put together a special Doyce thingy for you ASAP.

Matt wrote:
The necessary files to playtest it are here: http://www.dog-eared-designs.com/g_playtest.zip
they're something that I can't effectively package without putting a big burden on the players to print out and so on.

Phil wrote:

Matt wrote:
The necessary files to playtest it are here: http://www.dog-eared-designs.com/g_playtest.zip
they're something that I can't effectively package without putting a big burden on the players to print out and so on.

I'm interested in playtesting this, but the zipfile seems to be gone.  Is that intentional?

P

Adam wrote:
I'm interested in playtesting, too. However I believe Matt mentions in http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=20944.0 that the files are down intentionally while he's working on some major revisions.

Any News about a new link??? would love to check out the game.

At this point you'll most likely be checking it out as a retail product. I won't have a playtest version up again.

Matt wrote:
At this point you'll most likely be checking it out as a retail product. I won't have a playtest version up again.

Matt wrote:
At this point you'll most likely be checking it out as a retail product. I won't have a playtest version up again.

At this point you'll most likely be checking it out as a retail product. I won't have a playtest version up again.

My group will be shifting to a Galactic run just as soon as we 'clear' one of the other games currently running.  That's likely to be PTA, actually, since everyone's been so rabid to play the season. :)

Oh well that clealy some higher will! Just as I wonder what happened to Galactica!? after reading the whole thread and I see that post. My gaming group is at your disposal in that case. The least we can do for the wonderful game that PtA is.
In short, if you plan on playtesting Galactica further, I'd like to take part in it.

Hi Matt,

I'd be happy to try your game with a group of friends and let you know the result.
I have just a question: do you think 4 players + game master are too many people or will they do fine?

Best!

I'm not Matt, but I've seen the new character sheets, which have a 'default' group maximum (you'll see what I mean) of exactly the size you're asking about, so it should be fine.

Doyce wrote:
I'm not Matt, but I've seen the new character sheets, which have a 'default' group maximum (you'll see what I mean) of exactly the size you're asking about, so it should be fine.

We were in the middle of planning a Galactic playtest session, when you posted that there would be no new playtest version coming, which led to our group switching to another game.

I think we'd all love to give the game a proper thorough playtest.

Georgios wrote:
We were in the middle of planning a Galactic playtest session, when you posted that there would be no new playtest version coming, which led to our group switching to another game.

This concept sounds really interesting - I'm a great fan of PTA and really would like to try this out. You mentioned that Playtesting still needs to be done although the playtesting copy is no longer up for d/l.
I'm not going to outright ask for a playtest copy, but I'd be interested in whether you have a plan on when this will be up for retail. From what I've read in this thread, you already got one customer here :D

I have 5-6 groups playtesting the current rules. They'll undoubtedly have plenty of feedback, and I'll need to address that. Depending on whether it's minutia or serious, I might need further rounds of playtesting. After that, I need to tackle the presentation, adding nice friendly callouts and sidebar reminders and all that fun stuff.

So it could be a while before it's widely available. Depending on how it goes, I might first offer a "gamma" release on PDF, something better than an ashcan but not quite ready for big-time printing.

Knowing what I know now, I'd probably do that with first ed Primetime Adventures.

Matt wrote:
I have 5-6 groups playtesting the current rules.

It was scheduled for yesterday at Go Play NW; apparently Chris Bennett played in it, and it was also recorded, so you should get some feedback from that soon.