No Port Called home

[nineGardens]

Down planetside they say that space is silent, that without
atmosphere there is no roar of engines, no clatter and clang as
stray bits of metal bump against one another, and spin, catching
beams of lamplight.

But no one whose actually been out there would call it silent
though. There’s always the crumpling sound of suit fabric. The
click-click hum of the air circulator. Your stomach. Your heartbeat.
The sound of your partner’s breath, coming through the radio.

The only time you’ll ever hear silence out in the black is if you’re
dead. If every single one of the machines dedicated to keeping you
alive has shut down.




So.... here's the deal: I wrote a game system, vaguely D&D/Pathfinder adjacent, and based on playtesting so far, it is feeling pretty friggin' rad.
I'm at the stage of wanting to test it out with people who *weren't* involved in its creation in any way, so figured I'ld throw it out here to see if anyone wanted to have an explore or give it a shot. It's reasonably polished, but very much at the stage of "late stage beta testing" rather than "release"

I have an adventurer's guide, with art by the very excellent zonked-eye (go check them out, if you are looking for a commission artist, Zonked is great to work with)

Genre:
Sci-fi. Leaning towards space opera.
There's robots, there's genetic engineering, there's spaceships, there's terrifying God AI's, there's pirates, and more terrible engine disasters than you can shake a stick at.

What kinds of adventures can we expect:
My current party just survived a stormdiving trip into a gas giant twice the size of Jupiter. I was a little afraid everyone would die, but they didn't. It was great.
We've run campaigns with 600 year old robot paladins, professional ship thieves, idealistic terraformers, and cowardly engineers. We've spent entire episodes planning heists, or trying to fix a ships life support system using control rods we pulled out of a damaged nuclear reactor (we had to keep the reactor running at the same time). Combat has involved pirates, genetically engineered monsters, and trying to punch a small space ship until it stopped shooting at us..
Also there was a serpent the size of a small city swimming around in space.
We still don't know what the hell was up with that: it was terrifying.

Complexity level:
Medium. Higher complexity than Powered by the Apocalypse style games, lower complexity than D&D or Shadowrun style games.
The game has lots in it, but also has a big focus on shielding players from rules that aren't relevant to them.

Mechanics:
The core mechanic of the game that you need to know is this: each player picks three classes and mashes them together. The game is set up to have multiple classes blend together seamlessly. This leads to everyone having really resonant characters by the end of the first session, and there being a *stupid* wide variety of possible characters.
You want to play Han Solo? Sure- combine Pilot, Con-artist and Gunslinger.
Prefer to play as a surly detective? Perhaps Infiltrator, Bodyguard and Brute will fit your character.

Even after years of playtesting, we are still finding flavour and ability combinations that surprise and excite us (abilities in one class empowering attributes of another, stories that feel like they couldn't be told *anywhere* else).
In terms of design philosophy, the goal is to set things up so that players make a small number of big decisions, rather than many tiny choices.
If you want to get a feel for things, go check out the players guide, and just slam a character together (Page 5 says how. You can build a character without knowing the rest of the rules).

Also there's a bunch of guidance on how to manage engineering, because engineering is a critical part of the sci-fi genre, and needs to be more interesting than "I roll a repair check until its fixed". Engineering crops up as minor obstacles in the day to day business of adventuring (messing with elevators, fixing broken robots), and can also lead to entire episodes worth of panic (the nuclear-life support mentioned above, faulty gravity drives, damaged gyros, etc etc etc)
In space, there is nothing as frightening as poor wiring.



For GM's:
We also made a guide for GMs.
It's got three possible starting adventures, along with a bunch of monsters, lore, equipment lists, spare NPC's and locations... and also advice on GMing ship combat, mechanical disasters, and various other things which are unique to Sci-fi settings (we found that there were plenty of aspects of Sci-fi that are hard to GM without a little guidance, since people have practice imagining combat, and less practice imagining engineering disasters, terraforming, and interplanetary slingshot manoeuvrers).


Why are you posting this here?
Because I need a vibe check on the game....
and because I need to do beta testing; I need questions and feedback from people who have never seen the game before...
and because I genuinely believe it is a fabulous RPG, and if I can persuade any of you to play it, you will have a good time.


So...if you have questions please ask.
If you slam a character together, please post it here, I would love to see.
If someone wants to run a session or three, get in touch- I can point you to the relevant parts of the GM guide, or you can find them yourself.

Thanks heaps everybody,
Take care out there.

[Potato_Priest]

Wow, this looks awesome! I'm excited to take a look at this, you've clearly put in a TON of work making a system for a genre I love.

I'll let you know what I think when I've read some more.

[dafrca]

Looks interesting. The art is great. I look forward to reading through this.

[Potato_Priest]

So, one thing has me a little confused.

In session zero, the players are supposed to create the setting- designing worlds, factions, etc. I like this idea because it means you have less game specific lore to learn to be able to play. However, the races section of the book makes it clear that the game has a lot of lore already established, and I mean a LOT, to the point where to keep the lore from getting out of hand I'd want to restrict my players (and the setting) to the human variants and maybe a couple select other options to keep the lore knowledge required from getting out of hand. How do you expect GMs to reconcile the player-created factions and lore with the "official" ones?

[Yakk]

* Companion based PCs look like they run into a death spiral. Lose your companion, lose a feat, become less effective (relative to rest of party). Repeat, now more likely to lose your companion.

* Movement uses the same resource as doing non-movement. Discourages dynamic battles.

* AoO talks about sprinting, movement talks about dashing. It is unclear if carefully moving past someone is an AoO or not?

* The fact that the shapes are abilities is cute, but makes reading the class templates annoying unless you have it memorized.

* Looking over the classes quickly, offensive features are far more common than defensive. If this pattern is true of opponents as well, it looks like lethality goes up as the game progresses.

[nineGardens]

So, one thing has me a little confused.

In session zero, the players are supposed to create the setting- designing worlds, factions, etc. I like this idea because it means you have less game specific lore to learn to be able to play. However, the races section of the book makes it clear that the game has a lot of lore already established, and I mean a LOT, to the point where to keep the lore from getting out of hand I'd want to restrict my players (and the setting) to the human variants and maybe a couple select other options to keep the lore knowledge required from getting out of hand. How do you expect GMs to reconcile the player-created factions and lore with the "official" ones?

So... this is a fair point...
And exactly what I need from someone who unfamiliar with the system (easy to take lore for granted when you've been familiar with it for a while).
Calculating the correct amount of lore to put into a system to give people space to breath, and a scaffold to build on, is always tricky.


My answer here would be that most of the lore in the Race sections are... descriptions of how things got started, what they were like back in the sol system many years ago. You are in a new space system now.
A player doesn't need to know all the lore of the system to read up on say... the lore for Tsuku, and go "The Tsuku have a big weird cathedral thing on the north pole of Juhn".
On the GM's side of things, the GM can use the TIME between the baseline lore, and the present lore to explain away any differences. "Sure, that's what happened long ago, but RIGHT NOW, this is how things are", kind of deal. The flight between systems is deliberately kept vague, and allows the GM a bit of a lore reset.



I'm not certain this is a totally satisfying answer, but its how I've been running things, frequently running campaigns with people who have very different ideas of the lore and never running into problems.

[nineGardens]

* Companion based PCs look like they run into a death spiral. Lose your companion, lose a feat, become less effective (relative to rest of party). Repeat, now more likely to lose your companion.

* Movement uses the same resource as doing non-movement. Discourages dynamic battles.

* AoO talks about sprinting, movement talks about dashing. It is unclear if carefully moving past someone is an AoO or not?

* The fact that the shapes are abilities is cute, but makes reading the class templates annoying unless you have it memorized.

* Looking over the classes quickly, offensive features are far more common than defensive. If this pattern is true of opponents as well, it looks like lethality goes up as the game progresses.

Thanks for looking into these combat rules (and elsewhere). Much appreciated

1) companion death is intended to be pretty rare. Most companions are not designed to even be involved in combat, and the one that is is tanky as all hell. Its a valid concern, but the rate at which companions tend to die feels likely to prevent the problem you are talking about.... though I will keep an eye on this.

2) Because you get 3 beats, and most actions take 2, you are naturally left with one left over, with movement the most likely use of this "overhang" beat. I can see what you mean, but so far the results are pretty much equivalent to "standard +movement action" system I've seen elsewhere.

3) .... good tip. This should be clarified. Thank you.

4) The idea is that in practice, you'd have a printed copy of the main sheet on the table to refer to, with the labels.
We tried doing it will labels on every sheet, but... it kind of looked like ass, and was cluttered, and that made it confusing in a *different* way.
Also, the hope is that the shapes themselves are intuitive enough to suggest what they are for. (HP, ATK and DEF in particular).
Are there any particular stats you wish had a different shape?

5) Lethality going up with level... doesn't strike me as a terrible thing. It means that the game is more forgiving for newbie players, and demands more thought for high level ones. This *is* something I'll keep in mind and keep an eye out for while running campaigns. My most recent high level campaign actively reduced lethality as we went up.... but that's because the main combat guy went all in on bodygaurd and champion, which is a pretty defensive combintion. In a more general sense, your comment on lethality is probably right, and I should watch that.

[Yakk]

I mean, browsing the classes. I didn't know what they did because I could not read the symbols.

You could add it to class descriptions, even just as a reference.

...

For mobility, I guess the question is do you want a static or dynamic fight? The cheaper you make movement (in terms of risk and tradeoffs) the more everyone moves. And the worst storytelling generation mechanics in combat comes from two characters repeating attack roles from the same position.

So I'd bias towards movement not being a tradeoff. You'd only not move because you are pinned down or the like.

5e has no action economy tradeoff for movement, but with the melee combat glue of OAs it has substantial costs in melee.

While the problem of "kiting" - moving backwards against a melee foe - exists, solving it could be as simple as combining the "dodge" and "dash" actions into one. Under this, you can trade your attack for increased defence, which comes with free bonus move speed. Or maybe something else.

Plus, by splitting move from action, the possibility of hanging mechanics on it becomes a possibility. If you have both a Maneuver and an Action, everyone will Maneuver every round. And "pew pew" eith a laser makes a more boring story than "dive for new cover, pew pew" or "move to flank, pew pew" or "kick over barrels, pew pew".

Anyhow, just thoughts.

[Potato_Priest]

[Lore Discussion]

Having seen your explanation and reread the book, the only races that still give me goosebumps about the lore required are the Archons and the Avatars (only passingly alluded to as far as I can tell). These in particular make me nervous because the implication is that the Archons still existing are also the ones involved in that war, making it more immediately relevant to the characters than the other conflicts alluded to in the background of, say, the vesp. I think there are two directions you could go with this-

1. Add a more detailed section on the history of the empire.
2. Remove mention of the empire from the race lore. Maybe make it a suggested background in the GM's guide.

You should still mention in the world-building section that the solar system the players create is intended to be far both temporally and spacially from earth, though. That wasn't immediately clear to me on my first read.

You also said to roll up a character so you could see it, and like any rpg nerd worth our salt, I'm addicted to making characters even if I'll likely never get to use em.

Spoiler: Character Description

Show

Name: Reverend Keysi, aka "Plastic Pastor"
Race: Homonculus
Classes: Paragon, Conduit, Mender

The Plastic Pastor is a Televangelist known for popping up on planetary TV and Radio broadcasts preaching for the church of the Sanctified Family, a religious movement emphasizing homeschooling and tight nuclear families. Reverend Keysi in particular is known on the one hand for performing "miracles" on stage that are really just incredibly poorly disguised nanobot treatments and on the other hand for a series of cyberattacks against broadcasters and entertainment firms protesting the violence and smut in modern video games, holosimulations and television by replacing the offensive content with passages from scripture. While the homunculus's reasons for being a religious leader are unclear, his upbeat and rambling sermons and enthusiastic hackings speak to the homonculi's classic love for chaos.

[Rilmani]

I’m uncertain about combat maneuvers. So a player spends 2 beats to disarm an enemy. Does the player roll their Attack against their enemy’s defense roll AND their skill check against the *same* defense roll?
If the attacker is disarming via a melee weapon, do they still deal damage with their weapon attack? If I fail (roll too low) with the skill check, does my Attack still hit and deal damage?

Feedback: The Salvage page on 29-30 is fantastic, I love it.
The symbols on the race pages corresponding to the symbols on the character sheet? I like it. Need to really think about the Extras though, some are strong (a second reaction, wow).

[nineGardens]

Thanks everyones thoughts so far.

You also said to roll up a character so you could see it, and like any rpg nerd worth our salt, I'm addicted to making characters even if I'll likely never get to use em.

Spoiler: Character Description

Show

Name: Reverend Keysi, aka "Plastic Pastor"
Race: Homonculus
Classes: Paragon, Conduit, Mender

The Plastic Pastor is a Televangelist known for popping up on planetary TV and Radio broadcasts preaching for the church of the Sanctified Family, a religious movement emphasizing homeschooling and tight nuclear families. Reverend Keysi in particular is known on the one hand for performing "miracles" on stage that are really just incredibly poorly disguised nanobot treatments and on the other hand for a series of cyberattacks against broadcasters and entertainment firms protesting the violence and smut in modern video games, holosimulations and television by replacing the offensive content with passages from scripture. While the homunculus's reasons for being a religious leader are unclear, his upbeat and rambling sermons and enthusiastic hackings speak to the homonculi's classic love for chaos.

YAY character building.
Fun dude. Homunculi are very silly, you got their vibe very well.

Plus, by splitting move from action, the possibility of hanging mechanics on it becomes a possibility. If you have both a Maneuver and an Action, everyone will Maneuver every round. And "pew pew" eith a laser makes a more boring story than "dive for new cover, pew pew" or "move to flank, pew pew" or "kick over barrels, pew pew".

I mean... the way it is set up at the moment leads to "Dive for cover, pew pew". The thing you are describing is what happens. You have three beats. 2 of them are used to fire. The third one CAN'T be used to fire, so is generally used for movement (or some other manuever)

... I feel like I'm missing something here.

I’m uncertain about combat maneuvers. So a player spends 2 beats to disarm an enemy. Does the player roll their Attack against their enemy’s defense roll AND their skill check against the *same* defense roll?
If the attacker is disarming via a melee weapon, do they still deal damage with their weapon attack? If I fail (roll too low) with the skill check, does my Attack still hit and deal damage?

Feedback: The Salvage page on 29-30 is fantastic, I love it.
The symbols on the race pages corresponding to the symbols on the character sheet? I like it. Need to really think about the Extras though, some are strong (a second reaction, wow).

Glad you enjoy the Salvage, and the stat symbols work for you.
Uncertainty on combat maneuvers is... Hmmm... fair.
Honestly, this is one where I should probably go talk to the current team and double check how we are currently interpreting the rules, and then check that this is working for people (We have a Martial artist, so CM are being used a bunch, but I haven't really paid attention to HOW they are interpreting things)

Welp.... time for me to go pick a fight with our team Ninja, and see what dice he rolls to defeat me.