Neopteryx
2015-03-15, 01:53 AM
Something I started working on in a brainstorming topic over in Play-by-Post recruitment, that started to become a little more involved that I had anticipated.
I've been curious about the potential for a slightly more complex Fate game designed to put a focus on base-building and commanding groups of NPCs. The player characters would be a collection of figures controlling a larger faction, building themselves up, managing underlings with varying abilities, origins, and motivations, and carving a place into a setting ruled by a collection of similarly powerful factions. It would be roleplay-heavy, with the players managing not only a hostile world of external politics, but maintaining their hold over their own underlings and resources. Physical conflicts would primarily see the players acting as commanders in small-unit assaults or tower defense scenarios.
The base, be it an underworld Dungeon, a paramilitary base, a survivor's shelter, a starship, or a corporation's extraterritorial holdings, will be represented by individual rooms or modules, each with its own aspects and abilities. This base will also house underlings of whatever sort is appropriate to the settings and the characters- a necromancer's skeletons, a bandit king's thugs, a corporate executive's drones and enforcers, a ship's crew, etc. The underlings would be divided into groups of Minions and unique Agents, but each would have particular motivations tying them to the players or affecting their behavior, and unique abilities- either simple melee or ranged combat abilities, more specialized attacks, social or resource-acquiring skills, or more esoteric effects represented by Stunts.
I haven't worked out a concrete system yet, but the player characters would divide their starting attributes between themselves, one or more "rooms," and minions. They shouldn't be impotent without them, and minions and base features will never be fantastically competent on their own, but a character's greatest assets would come from their interactions with their resources, their home base, and their minions.
I do have a few ideas for how to make this work as a system without becoming excessively complicated, but I'd like to put the idea out there and see how people feel about it conceptually before fleshing things out.
Possible concepts:
- A Dungeon Keeper style game. There would be a big focus on tower-defense style play and managing the motivations of minions.
- FTL or Star Trek: Voyager style, lost in another part of the Galaxy, discovering a new frontier of barely comprehensible alien politics, and picking up a few hitchhikers.
- (Alternately, A Fantastic Voyage with the twist of including an entire miniaturized civilization (human or otherwise) that has colonized a human or animal's body. Submarines and starships are basically the same thing, right?)
- A Shadowrun-style Megacorp with extraterritoriality. (Possibly even set in the Shadowrun universe?)
- X-COM: Apocalypse/Men in Black/Space Colony, with the players being the leadership of a military or paramilitary organization (or even the local face of a corporation) on a colony world, struggling to deal simultaneously with one or perhaps several insidious alien threats, homegrown conspiracies, and local powers with their own agendas.
- An exotic post-apocalyptic survivors setting that has filled a metropolitan area with nameless and dangerous wildlife, paranormal dangers, and rapidly transformed the skyline into a vertical jungle, forcing the players to try to rebuild some sort of society amongst themselves while learning by a mix of observation and trial-and-error how things work in this new world.
Wow, that is a huge undertaking, but you have some really great ideas and themes to explore, and I bet conjuring up some interest for players getting to take the role of a proactive leader shouldn't be too hard. Problem is getting everyone on board for a heavily modified Fate game when there are few enough players here on the forums with Fate-Core experience.
Still though, I think it's possible, especially as long as you conform to the Fate Fractal (Everything is a Character; Aspects, Stunts, Skills, etc.). I would recommend right off the bat utilizing a more freely creative Approaches system when dealing with rooms/traps/mooks, rather than the vanilla skills list. You've got the expanded Resources Track Extra to draw off of and some examples for building organizations/locales along the Fate Fractal as well. So, on the whole I think it's eminently playable.
Personally, I like the idea of running a Dungeon Keeper/Overlord/Boss-Monster style game, where each PC runs their own corner of a dungeon, and the idea is to lure heroes to their doom. Failing that a space-based colony building game could be fun, trying to build up your factions hold on an alien world.
Suffice to say, I'd love to help how I can.
Good to see some interest! I'll definitely be making very heavy use of the Fate Fractal to make this concept work. I've tended to shy away from the Approaches and Professions systems, but I can see how they would solve a big hurdle when it comes to managing so many independent entities. It might even make sense to have the commanding and administrative PCs make use of Approaches while rooms and underlings with specific purposes use Professions. That's negotiable, of course, and I'm not entirely sure just yet that I would want the PCs themselves to move away from Skills, but it's a possibility. It would help the PCs to remain versatile and thematically coherent, while still being able to invoke particular specialties and unique abilities, while their minions and structures held the capability to really excel at specific tasks.
A Dungeon Keeper/Underlords game is one I think could prove very interesting from a narrative perspective as well, exploring the state of affairs in the Underworld and questions about why the characters are where they are (and how "evil" would be treated in the context of the game). It would leave plenty of room for interactions both overtly and insidiously hostile with factions ranging from desperate overworld organizations, demons and devils from other planes, subterranean monsters and other groups fighting for the scarce resources of the underworld. Exploration of intrigue in an underworld long since driven mad in desperation for subsistence-level resources, or simply reveling in bloodthirsty madness and omnipresent treachery, there's plenty of potential for a fun game.
I think that would be a good breakdown, yeah:
PCs- Aspects, Skills, Stunts
Minions- Aspect(s), Profession, Stunt
Locales- Aspect, Approach
Or potentially, the opposite of an Approach, if they function as trap rooms or deterrents. Or resources. What would you call that maybe? An Asset?
Asset works, or maybe Function, probably fairly specific in scope. I think there's a need to clarify whether a given task should be given to a room or structure's abilities, or those of the underling using them. For most purposes, it would probably lean toward the latter. Since rooms will vary so much in function, it will probably vary a great deal whether they receive autonomous Functions of their own, or Stunts that can be activated by its owners.
So, a Gold Mine might have:
Aspects: Labyrinthine Tunnels & Untapped Riches
This room might not need much more than that. Labyrinthine Tunnels can be invoked for bonuses to defend against intruders unfamiliar with the terrain, and Untapped Riches to more quickly recover from consequences to the Resources Stress Track.
A Treasury or Hoard Room, on the other hand, might have:
Aspect: Ironclad Vault
Function: Good (+3) Traps
Stunt: "Savings:" Adds an extra stress box to the Resources stress track.
The aspect is appropriate to defensive measures, it has a function to present an immediate obstacle to intruders, and its purpose is neatly represented by its stunt. An in-game example would probably clarify in general terms the nature of the traps, clarifying what sort of obstacles they presented.
The minion actually working the mine, let's say a Dwarven Chain Gang, might look something like this:
Aspect: Starving Opportunists
Profession: Fair (+2) Miners
Stunt: "Motivation:" When the Dungeon would take a consequence to its resource track, the consequence may instead be applied as a physical consequence of equal severity to the Dwarves, provided they have an open consequence slot of the appropriate level.
That last example also opens up the question of how many stress boxes and consequence slots underlings should have, and how that number can be improved. Should they have the full suite, one unified set of stress boxes, defaulting to two, with the option to increase that number based on their Profession, and all three consequence slots? Or, for the sake of simplicity, a single consequence slot, that can be used for a mild, moderate, or severe consequence?
I can see you've put some thought in to this and I think that makes for a perfect framework and some great examples as a jumping off point. If I may though, a few general critiques/questions present themselves before I get into any specifics:
The Gold Mine and the Treasure Vault as your examples would both be rooms yes? Not distinct from one another? I believe they should have a unified template if so (Aspect; Function; Stunt or Aspect; Aspect; Function, etc.)
For the sake of conformity to the Fate Fractal I believe each room (and possibly minion) would be best served with a pair of Aspect, one positively slanted, the other negative (Concept & Trouble; Function & Flaw). This is the convention when building pieces of Equipment and Organizations as described in those Extras and I believe would be well warranted here as well.
Your Gold Mine, example I think only needs a slight tweaking to conform to that, with Labyrinthine Tunnels being a sort of 'catch' which can be compelled against it signifying the difficulty in navigating them (for friend and foe alike).
As for how to doll out and quantify the number of Stunts, Stress, Consequences, etc. I would recommend that the "Dungeon" be built with a sort of separate but equal starting template to the PCs' character. So, the players have a set template for building their overlord/boss/what-have-you: Refresh, Skill Points, Free Stunts, etc. and then a separate pool of each for building their dungeon. You spend a point of Refresh from that pool for each room/minion you want in your dungeon, then Skill Points/Stunts to flesh them out. Everything starts at +0 (maybe +1) and then you buy up accordingly, just like a character. Furthermore, to keep players from sinking all their points in to one awesome room with one awesome NPC, you use the same convention as Skill Columns to keep everything balanced. For a player to have a room with a function higher than +1, they must have at least that many rooms at the rating beneath it; so if I have one room with a Fair (+2) to it's Function and I want to build another with at the Fair (+2) rating, I must first have two rooms at the Average +1 Function (a total of four rooms).
This even suggests the classic increasing difficulty structure of a dungeon delving game. If you want to have a super awesome mini-boss NPC as the last room of your dungeon, you have to have built a whole host of rooms before with of sequentially increasing difficulty before hand.
Using a standardized format probably makes the most sense, functionally, and I like the idea of using the Columns/Pyramid Scheme convention to keep resources evenly spread. For simplicity's sake, I'm thinking it's probably best to have the underlings use a single unified Stress Track with a number of boxes dependent on their Profession rating, and the single, variable Consequence slot until stunts are applied to offer more.
I'm still uncertain about the functionality of rooms. It seems to me that some would have a clear need for a skill-equivalent stat like defensive and retaliatory functions from traps, but other functions might be trickier. A library's aspect provides a boost to a minion with the appropriate Profession who uses it to research arcane lore, and it might have stunts that help out, too, but it would be redundant (and wouldn't make much sense) for the library to have a skill-equivalent trait to roll to perform research itself. Maybe this is easily enough solved by simply getting creative with the Functions? A library's existence allows a character with the appropriate skill to perform research, and its aspect, but its Function rating might be in something like "Divination," or some other form of ritual magic, or in "Forbidden Lore" so that the library itself makes psychological attacks on intruders poking around. It might just help to make every room unique and dynamic.
I've been curious about the potential for a slightly more complex Fate game designed to put a focus on base-building and commanding groups of NPCs. The player characters would be a collection of figures controlling a larger faction, building themselves up, managing underlings with varying abilities, origins, and motivations, and carving a place into a setting ruled by a collection of similarly powerful factions. It would be roleplay-heavy, with the players managing not only a hostile world of external politics, but maintaining their hold over their own underlings and resources. Physical conflicts would primarily see the players acting as commanders in small-unit assaults or tower defense scenarios.
The base, be it an underworld Dungeon, a paramilitary base, a survivor's shelter, a starship, or a corporation's extraterritorial holdings, will be represented by individual rooms or modules, each with its own aspects and abilities. This base will also house underlings of whatever sort is appropriate to the settings and the characters- a necromancer's skeletons, a bandit king's thugs, a corporate executive's drones and enforcers, a ship's crew, etc. The underlings would be divided into groups of Minions and unique Agents, but each would have particular motivations tying them to the players or affecting their behavior, and unique abilities- either simple melee or ranged combat abilities, more specialized attacks, social or resource-acquiring skills, or more esoteric effects represented by Stunts.
I haven't worked out a concrete system yet, but the player characters would divide their starting attributes between themselves, one or more "rooms," and minions. They shouldn't be impotent without them, and minions and base features will never be fantastically competent on their own, but a character's greatest assets would come from their interactions with their resources, their home base, and their minions.
I do have a few ideas for how to make this work as a system without becoming excessively complicated, but I'd like to put the idea out there and see how people feel about it conceptually before fleshing things out.
Possible concepts:
- A Dungeon Keeper style game. There would be a big focus on tower-defense style play and managing the motivations of minions.
- FTL or Star Trek: Voyager style, lost in another part of the Galaxy, discovering a new frontier of barely comprehensible alien politics, and picking up a few hitchhikers.
- (Alternately, A Fantastic Voyage with the twist of including an entire miniaturized civilization (human or otherwise) that has colonized a human or animal's body. Submarines and starships are basically the same thing, right?)
- A Shadowrun-style Megacorp with extraterritoriality. (Possibly even set in the Shadowrun universe?)
- X-COM: Apocalypse/Men in Black/Space Colony, with the players being the leadership of a military or paramilitary organization (or even the local face of a corporation) on a colony world, struggling to deal simultaneously with one or perhaps several insidious alien threats, homegrown conspiracies, and local powers with their own agendas.
- An exotic post-apocalyptic survivors setting that has filled a metropolitan area with nameless and dangerous wildlife, paranormal dangers, and rapidly transformed the skyline into a vertical jungle, forcing the players to try to rebuild some sort of society amongst themselves while learning by a mix of observation and trial-and-error how things work in this new world.
Wow, that is a huge undertaking, but you have some really great ideas and themes to explore, and I bet conjuring up some interest for players getting to take the role of a proactive leader shouldn't be too hard. Problem is getting everyone on board for a heavily modified Fate game when there are few enough players here on the forums with Fate-Core experience.
Still though, I think it's possible, especially as long as you conform to the Fate Fractal (Everything is a Character; Aspects, Stunts, Skills, etc.). I would recommend right off the bat utilizing a more freely creative Approaches system when dealing with rooms/traps/mooks, rather than the vanilla skills list. You've got the expanded Resources Track Extra to draw off of and some examples for building organizations/locales along the Fate Fractal as well. So, on the whole I think it's eminently playable.
Personally, I like the idea of running a Dungeon Keeper/Overlord/Boss-Monster style game, where each PC runs their own corner of a dungeon, and the idea is to lure heroes to their doom. Failing that a space-based colony building game could be fun, trying to build up your factions hold on an alien world.
Suffice to say, I'd love to help how I can.
Good to see some interest! I'll definitely be making very heavy use of the Fate Fractal to make this concept work. I've tended to shy away from the Approaches and Professions systems, but I can see how they would solve a big hurdle when it comes to managing so many independent entities. It might even make sense to have the commanding and administrative PCs make use of Approaches while rooms and underlings with specific purposes use Professions. That's negotiable, of course, and I'm not entirely sure just yet that I would want the PCs themselves to move away from Skills, but it's a possibility. It would help the PCs to remain versatile and thematically coherent, while still being able to invoke particular specialties and unique abilities, while their minions and structures held the capability to really excel at specific tasks.
A Dungeon Keeper/Underlords game is one I think could prove very interesting from a narrative perspective as well, exploring the state of affairs in the Underworld and questions about why the characters are where they are (and how "evil" would be treated in the context of the game). It would leave plenty of room for interactions both overtly and insidiously hostile with factions ranging from desperate overworld organizations, demons and devils from other planes, subterranean monsters and other groups fighting for the scarce resources of the underworld. Exploration of intrigue in an underworld long since driven mad in desperation for subsistence-level resources, or simply reveling in bloodthirsty madness and omnipresent treachery, there's plenty of potential for a fun game.
I think that would be a good breakdown, yeah:
PCs- Aspects, Skills, Stunts
Minions- Aspect(s), Profession, Stunt
Locales- Aspect, Approach
Or potentially, the opposite of an Approach, if they function as trap rooms or deterrents. Or resources. What would you call that maybe? An Asset?
Asset works, or maybe Function, probably fairly specific in scope. I think there's a need to clarify whether a given task should be given to a room or structure's abilities, or those of the underling using them. For most purposes, it would probably lean toward the latter. Since rooms will vary so much in function, it will probably vary a great deal whether they receive autonomous Functions of their own, or Stunts that can be activated by its owners.
So, a Gold Mine might have:
Aspects: Labyrinthine Tunnels & Untapped Riches
This room might not need much more than that. Labyrinthine Tunnels can be invoked for bonuses to defend against intruders unfamiliar with the terrain, and Untapped Riches to more quickly recover from consequences to the Resources Stress Track.
A Treasury or Hoard Room, on the other hand, might have:
Aspect: Ironclad Vault
Function: Good (+3) Traps
Stunt: "Savings:" Adds an extra stress box to the Resources stress track.
The aspect is appropriate to defensive measures, it has a function to present an immediate obstacle to intruders, and its purpose is neatly represented by its stunt. An in-game example would probably clarify in general terms the nature of the traps, clarifying what sort of obstacles they presented.
The minion actually working the mine, let's say a Dwarven Chain Gang, might look something like this:
Aspect: Starving Opportunists
Profession: Fair (+2) Miners
Stunt: "Motivation:" When the Dungeon would take a consequence to its resource track, the consequence may instead be applied as a physical consequence of equal severity to the Dwarves, provided they have an open consequence slot of the appropriate level.
That last example also opens up the question of how many stress boxes and consequence slots underlings should have, and how that number can be improved. Should they have the full suite, one unified set of stress boxes, defaulting to two, with the option to increase that number based on their Profession, and all three consequence slots? Or, for the sake of simplicity, a single consequence slot, that can be used for a mild, moderate, or severe consequence?
I can see you've put some thought in to this and I think that makes for a perfect framework and some great examples as a jumping off point. If I may though, a few general critiques/questions present themselves before I get into any specifics:
The Gold Mine and the Treasure Vault as your examples would both be rooms yes? Not distinct from one another? I believe they should have a unified template if so (Aspect; Function; Stunt or Aspect; Aspect; Function, etc.)
For the sake of conformity to the Fate Fractal I believe each room (and possibly minion) would be best served with a pair of Aspect, one positively slanted, the other negative (Concept & Trouble; Function & Flaw). This is the convention when building pieces of Equipment and Organizations as described in those Extras and I believe would be well warranted here as well.
Your Gold Mine, example I think only needs a slight tweaking to conform to that, with Labyrinthine Tunnels being a sort of 'catch' which can be compelled against it signifying the difficulty in navigating them (for friend and foe alike).
As for how to doll out and quantify the number of Stunts, Stress, Consequences, etc. I would recommend that the "Dungeon" be built with a sort of separate but equal starting template to the PCs' character. So, the players have a set template for building their overlord/boss/what-have-you: Refresh, Skill Points, Free Stunts, etc. and then a separate pool of each for building their dungeon. You spend a point of Refresh from that pool for each room/minion you want in your dungeon, then Skill Points/Stunts to flesh them out. Everything starts at +0 (maybe +1) and then you buy up accordingly, just like a character. Furthermore, to keep players from sinking all their points in to one awesome room with one awesome NPC, you use the same convention as Skill Columns to keep everything balanced. For a player to have a room with a function higher than +1, they must have at least that many rooms at the rating beneath it; so if I have one room with a Fair (+2) to it's Function and I want to build another with at the Fair (+2) rating, I must first have two rooms at the Average +1 Function (a total of four rooms).
This even suggests the classic increasing difficulty structure of a dungeon delving game. If you want to have a super awesome mini-boss NPC as the last room of your dungeon, you have to have built a whole host of rooms before with of sequentially increasing difficulty before hand.
Using a standardized format probably makes the most sense, functionally, and I like the idea of using the Columns/Pyramid Scheme convention to keep resources evenly spread. For simplicity's sake, I'm thinking it's probably best to have the underlings use a single unified Stress Track with a number of boxes dependent on their Profession rating, and the single, variable Consequence slot until stunts are applied to offer more.
I'm still uncertain about the functionality of rooms. It seems to me that some would have a clear need for a skill-equivalent stat like defensive and retaliatory functions from traps, but other functions might be trickier. A library's aspect provides a boost to a minion with the appropriate Profession who uses it to research arcane lore, and it might have stunts that help out, too, but it would be redundant (and wouldn't make much sense) for the library to have a skill-equivalent trait to roll to perform research itself. Maybe this is easily enough solved by simply getting creative with the Functions? A library's existence allows a character with the appropriate skill to perform research, and its aspect, but its Function rating might be in something like "Divination," or some other form of ritual magic, or in "Forbidden Lore" so that the library itself makes psychological attacks on intruders poking around. It might just help to make every room unique and dynamic.