Simplifying space combat in my Rogue Trader hack

Having spent an awful lot of time recently working on my FAE NWOD hack i've been going to great lengths to keep the rules as simple as possible, capturing the feel and mood of the World of Darkness without bolting on loads of unnecessary additional rules and sub-systems that would slow the game down without really adding all that much to it; as well as the character generation session for my God Machine Chronicle FAE game this weekend i've also got another session of my Rogue Trader FATE game on Sunday (not to mention playing in a Pathfinder game that a friend is running on Saturday) and so i've been leafing through my hack rules in advance of the session.

The plan for the next game has always been to include a couple of space fights in them; since we changed to using the FATE rules we haven't really gone in for any big space combats as we adjusted to using the new rules and it's about time IMO that we test drive the hack rules for space combat. Originally the space combat rules in my hack were very much based on the Diaspora rules with a few tweaks and alterations by myself; the players have a number of build points which they use to purchase skills, aspects and stunts for their ship with each ship having multiple stress tracks and various other bits and pieces. Although I was quite pleased with it when I first finished writing up that part of the hack, looking at it now the rules really do seem a little bit over the top and more suited to a strategic wargame or miniatures game rather than a narrative-based RP game.

With that in mind I decided to dust off the rules and see if I could simplify them using some of the lessions that i'm current learning from Fate Accelerated Edition.

Ship Construction

The first step, I decided, was to throw out the notion of variable build points (based on vessel size) to create a ship and the use of multiple stress tracks. I decided that i'd give the ships some basic skills (the words in blue show the skills that players can use instead if they are crewing that section(if applicable)); the players can pick one at Great (+4), one at Good (+3), one at Fair (+2) and the remaining one at Average (+1).

• Engine (drive(spacecraft)) - used to make maneuvres and initiative rolls
• Hull (crafts(tech use)) - used in defence and affects stress tracker
• Trade (resources) - used for trading and maintenance
• Weapons (shooting)- used to make attack rolls

These skills would receive a set number of levels to be allocated between them (as character do when they are created), each ship (regardless of size) would receive a number of Stunts and Aspects; larger ships could be achieved by taking a higher Hull Skill, this would add additional boxes to the ships Hull Stress tracker in the same way as Physique does for characters.

Ships would have a refresh of three fate points, deducted by 1 for everyone stunt beyond the first that was taken, they would also receive 5 Aspects (as with normal FATE characters).

By default the ship would receive 2 stress boxes and 3 consequences boxes (with the standard 2, 4 and 6 values) in the same way as a character.

• If the Hull skill is Average (+1) or Fair (+2) then one more stress box is added.
• If the Hull skill is Good (+3) or higher then two more stress boxes are added.
• At Superb (+5) or higher an additional mild consequence slot is added.

Stunts could be purchased in the same way as FAE or FATE allowing the characters to justify under what circumstances they would receive the bonus; one that I was going to give them was the following (since it has been established that the ship has this bit of tech).

Stunt - Teleportarium

Once per game as long as the ship is in the same system it may move up to 10 people to another place in the same system from the ship, or back onto the ship.

Another stunt that would like possesses by the flagship of Admiral Blacks fleet is:

Stunt - Large ship

This stunt adds an additional stress box to the ships character sheet.

Combat Zone Layout

I decide to use three zones for space combat (that I would represent on the table with index cards) with a single 'empty' card represent the vast emptiness of space and the other two each containing something related to the systems aspects. For example: if the combat took place around Catan Prime then there might be an asteroid in one zone and a burning world.

These elements will be Aspects in their various zones and function as normal Aspects, for instance someone could spend one of their fate points to gain a +2 to a defensive hull roll because they are taking cover behind the asteroid.

Ships would only be able to fire/engage with enemy vessels in the same zone but would be able to move between zones freely on their turn as per the FATE rules, possibly with a roll if there was some sort of impediment to movement (like an asteroid belt or something similar).

Music for my GMC session

Although tomorrow's (21/06/13) session is for the players to run through the generation process with me and help create links between the characters, NPCs and other setting elements I have already been thinking about appropriate music that could be played in the background of the generation session and then continued through into the game proper. I've never really made a great deal of use of music beyond having a couple of quiet tracks playing in the background since I normally prefer not to be fiddling around with music tracks on the computer when I could be describing the action of a game, I also find that if I don't keep track of where the music is then it's possible for a tense IC situation to be ruined when the track abruptly changes to something less suitable. On the opposite side of the scale though i've played in tabletop RPG games where music has been used to great effect; the main proponent of this (at least in games I have played) has been Simon Webber who normally has a speaker rig and extensive collection of soundtracks that he knows very well and uses to the benefit of his game sessions whenever he runs something.

One of the things that Simon does very well in his sessions is varying the tone and pacing of his descriptions so that it fits with the current music that is playing, normally queuing up some appropriate tracks at the start of the scene and then tailoring his prose to fit in with the pace and mood of the music. Another aspect that I have quite enjoyed is the use of certain music pieces to act as 'theme tunes' for certain NPCs or plot elements that are going to recur during the game; as soon as one of the recognisable theme tunes starts it give you the player (although not your character in most cases) a feel of what is going to occur and (if the music belongs to a major villain who has not yet made himself known in the present scene) can result in a lot of tension and atmosphere as you wait for the other shoe to drop and for the villain to make their inevitable appearance.

I've really enjoyed creating my fake hack for my God Machine Chronicle game and would like to make it a memorable experience for the players; given that the game has a fairly small focus and is only slated in for 4-5 sessions worth of play I want to pull out all the stops in order to make the game as exciting and gripping for my players as possible, both so that the game sticks in their minds and to get some enthusiasm up for their participation in a Demon: the Descent game or Mummy: the Curse game that I play to run later on (probably using my FAE hack). During the game I intend to make extensive use of index cards to track things like Zones, Aspects and NPCs, mainly because they are easy to reference, move about and relatively simple to transport along with my printouts of the quick reference sheets and the character sheets that I have designed for the game; it occurred to me that it would be very easy to note down a specific track or music on the index cards should an NPC, Zone, etc deserve their own 'theme-tune.'

I've been building up a fairly respectable collection of soundtracks for a while, however I always think it's good to get some additional ideas and so I put out the question on the G+ Game Master Tips community. A number of interesting suggestions were made:

• Dan Hall suggested the Cranes for a creepy, ethereal sound.
• Marcus Burggraf suggested a number of possible soundtracks:
• Requiem for a Dream
• Into the Black by Erdenstern
• Halloween by Two steps from Hell
• Vashnevskaya Ira provided a link to his blog post (http://ravenscourtabbey.blogspot.com.es/2013/05/ambientando-partidas-musica-perturbadora.html), although the post itself is in Spanish the links provide some interesting ideas.

I investigated the suggestions more closely and tagged several for future use during this (and other) RP sessions, particularly I found the Two Steps from Hell youtube channel extremely interesting with some great atmospheric and oppressive music on it that would be eminently suitable for use in a World of Darkness game. 

When I got home from work it was time to fire up my copy of media player and begin trawling through the collection of soundtracks that I have built up; since the settings of both the God Machine Chronicle and Rogue Trader are fairly dark I decided to compile a single list for both games and jot down locations and names of tracks that might be suitable.

First on my list was the Battlestar Galactica soundtrack, which had a good mix of eerie acoustic stuff and pounding drumbeats that would work well for the science fiction genre and also for the industrial modern era of the NWOD. I trawled through a number of other soundtracks (including the Final Fantasy Movie soundtrack, Terminator, Interview with a Vampire and others), creating a number of playlists:

• Calm/serenity
• Chase
• Choral
• Combat
• Drifting in space
• Generic industrial
• Horror
• Madness
• Military/marching
• Posh/upper floor
• Realisation
• Romantic
• Sorrow
• Space combat
• Suspense

I also picked a few random tracks because I thought they fight in well with the idea of the God Machine or a particular concept in WH40K.

Hopefully this will give me a fairly decent selection of tunes to use as background in my game.

Mankind leaves Earth - Microscope Game Session - 19/06/13

Had a cracking game of four player Microscope this evening, detailing mankind leaving earth and the eventually destruction of the planet.

A visual representation of the game in Excel format can be found here.

FAE character sheets for God Machine Chronicle

Although my NWOD Hack for FAE isn't complete i'm going to be holding the character genning session for my game on this Friday (21/06/13 as of writing), handily because this short campaign doesn't involve the players portraying supernatural creatures I only need the basic rules that have already been decided on in order to run it and can continue to work on the supernatural rules at my leisure (i'm hoping that the FATE toolkit comes out soon since there are some intriguing ideas that have been mentioned that may work well with my hack).

The character sheet is available here in Excel format (i'd recommend downloading the spreadsheet to your machine since it seems to look a bit poor when viewed preview mode.

Below is the initial summary of the game that was made available to the players:

***

The chronicle takes place in the Specto Vale block of council flats in the east Midlands; built in the late 19th century to help alleviate the housing problems caused by the Second World War and as a potential future model of urban living the shortcuts taken by the construction crews quickly became evident as cracks both material and social began to rise to surface amongst the community, culminating in the late 1960s when five apartments collapsed killing the occupants.

Hastily repaired the tower block was pressed back into service, although most of the more affluent members of society had fled, making it a haven for less desirable members of society, students and people of low income; crime and drug use has steadily risen in the early 2000s and many unemployed were transferred to the cheap, badly maintained Specto Vale block. A fierce sense of community has built up amongst many people in the block, leading to a rise in youth gangs who haunt the underground car park and the now almost deserted open spaces that designers once touted as proof of modernity, leaving some residents huddled in their homes fearful of what stalks the corridors of the block.

Outwardly Specto Vale seems just like any other block, limping along and slowly rotting from within, or does something more sinister lurk behind the decay?

***

Thoughts on Microscope 19-06-13

As mentioned in my last brief blog entry (available here) myself and my wife Hannah sat down to do a test game of Microscope last night; although the game is recommended for more than two players, it does provide some useful advice on how to adapt the game for only a couple of players.

Basic Premise

The basic premise behind Microscope is that a group of players each create a fictional timeline or history between them using a number of different constructs that can be nested inside each other

• Periods: The largest division of the history, a very large chunk or time that can cover whole centuries depending on history (in my transcript the 'Golden Age of Dragons' was the first period in the game).
• Events: Events cover specific events that happen during a period (in my transcript the 'First elves are born to the wild magics of the forest' is a scene within the 'First age of elves (creation/birth of species)' period.
• Scenes: Scenes are the smallest unit of time and answer specific questions related to any event (in my transcript the 'What finally caused the Dragons to unite against the dwarves? | Sighing Mountains | Harrad a Dwarf Engineer-King killed the last pureblood dragon to build a great skyship' scene answers a question about the 'Dragons unite against the Dwarven Empire when Dwarf Technicians begin hunting Dragons for the innate magic in their bodies' event which is itself part of the 'Last great dwarf Empire is destroyed in the First Dragon War' period.

How is this done?

At the start of the game the players are directed to collaboratively come up with a brief 'mission statement' or summary for their timeline (in our example we chose 'A dark power rises and is defeated' and then to create the first and last period in their fictional history (for our example we chose the first period being 'The Golden Age of Dragons' and the last being 'The Dark Lord is defeated.'

Players then create a palette of ingredients that are either approved or banned from the history, banned ingredients are those story elements that you might expect to see in the genre of the timeline but that the players have agreed not to include (in our game Hannah chose to ban beastkin races from the timeline) whilst the approved ingredients are things that you might not expect to see in the genre but the players have approved for use (such as magitech in our example game).

Once this is done each player adds a Period or an Event to the timeline, placing them anyway that they see fit within the rules; the game uses index cards written in a portrait orientation and laid in a line to represent periods, place in landscape orientation underneath Periods are the Events that occurred within them and Scenes are also written portrait and are then placed in order behind the Events that they are answering questions about.

An example layout diagram is shown below for clarification:

Play then proceeds with one player being designated the Lens each turn, the Lens gets to add a couple more elements than the non-Lens players during a turn and they also define the Focus at the start of the turn. The Focus determines what plot element the game will focus on this turn, it can be anything, but every element placed on that turn must be connected with the Focus. Once a Focus has been decided on the turn then moves through a number of phases with each player putting down their own element on the timeline; the Focuses are written (we used a single index card for this) in a list with the name of the person who came up with them next to it.

The rulebook provides clear guidelines on how to write cards for the various different elements (Periods, Events and Scenes), it also directs you to put a circle at the bottom of the card and colour in the circle if it is a dark/negative element or to leave it blank if it is a light/positive element. Personally, although the writing was extremely clear and concise, enabling us to quickly press on with our game, neither myself or Hannah could see what point there was in the dark/light circles at the bottom of the cards, although I suppose that they may be useful as a general measure of whether your setting is overwhelmingly light or dark.

During their action players have complete narrative freedom to make up anything they want and put it anyway on the timeline as long as their entry is connected to the Focus, doesn't contradict anything already in play and doesn't include anything from the banned list; the game suggests that other peoples should only be allowed to the ask the current player for clarification and should not be able to offer any narrative advice or suggestions, keeping their ideas until creating their own elements. I found this a very enjoyable part of the game and several times I spent phases setting up something, only to have it turn out different when either Hannah introduced some of her own elements or when I changed my mind based on how the timeline had altered since my previous phase.

Once all the phases have been completed, the player to the right of the Lens chooses a concept from the last turn to become a Legacy; the only restrictions are that the Legacy has to be some that appeared in play this turn and it should be something that the Legacy-chooser is interested in exploring in more detail. There can only be as many Legacies as there are players, and if you want a new Legacy then you must replace your old one (either with a new Legacy or a previously discarded one).

After the choosing of Legacies has been resolved the Legacy-chooser then gets to make an Event or a dictated Scene then is connected with one of the Legacies in play and place it on the timeline. Once this is done the turn ends and the next player becomes the new Lens. During our test game, since we only had two players, we ignored the Legacy limits and just wrote them in a list on a single index file, this seemed to work reasonably well and certainly didn't impact on our enjoyment of the game.

There are guidelines in the book for roleplaying out Scenes and filling in the details of precisely what happened (although the outcome is decided at the beginning when the Scene is created), however, because of our limited player numbers and time, we chose to simply dictate the Scenes and write down the outcomes rather than RP through them, although I think that given more time and players the RP element would be an interesting avenue to explore. The rules for RPing Scenes are written in a similar informative and easy to understand fashion as the rest of the book.

Overall I thought that the book was extremely well written, allowing you to jump into the game with a minimum of prep and reading, the only thing beyond the book being required is a pack of index cards and some pens (although i'm sure other media such as flowchart software, a wipeboard, a piece of paper or others could easily be substituted); despite starting off with a fairly standard fantasy idea for our sample game it quickly developed into an interesting history that went to a number of places that I didn't expect when startin the game. I think that the game is great as long as all the players are comfortable with creating narrative details off-the-cuff as it were, although I think that people who prefer a more structured form of RPing might find it more challenging; it also seems that the game would be a a great way of having a group sit down and create the history of a setting that could then be used with another system to actually run a more traditional RPG in.

A very enjoyable book and evenings entertainment that I highly recommend :)

( Transcript of our test game ) 

Transcript of First Microscope game 19-06-13

Played my first game of microscope this evening, was an entertaining few hours of developing an anime-esque fantasy timeline for a fictional world, will post a more detailed summary of the system tomorrow when i'm more awake.

A transcript of the results can be found here.

Morality as Consequences in FAE

Last night and during my lunch hour today i've been thinking about the best way to represent morality within my NWOD hack; since all of the games feature some sort of morality (generally represented by a Hierarchy of Sins that causes moral degeneration of the character when it is transgressed against) and a struggle to prevent it from sliding down to a point where the character becomes a monstrous NPC that dances at the whims of the GM, it doesn't seem inappropriate to say that the descent of morality is a major theme within the entire gameline. The various Morality systems within the different game lines have been given different names, whether it's the Humanity of Vampire: the Requiem, Wisdom in Mage: the Awakening or Clarity in Changeling: the Lost but broadly they function in the same way, building on the mortal system of morality provided in the core NWOD rulebook to track a characters decline or fall.

I originally considered added an additional Stress Tracker where a character would sustain Stress when committing "sins" as a method of tracking a character's degeneration, however this wasn't particularly interesting as far a the story goes and didn't really take into account the individual tweaks on the morality system that were applied to each supernatural.

Currently my favourite alternative to the Stress Tracker system is the addition of a set of Morality Consequence boxes that function in most ways like the normal set of Consequence boxes as detailed in FAE, however when a character commits a sin from the reduced Hierarchy of Sins (as shown below) they automatically acquire a Morality Consequence, the strength of which is related to the "sin" committed.

Hierarchy of Sins

• Injury to another, theft - mild morality consequence.
• Arson, manslaughter - moderate morality consequence.
• Murder or other heinous acts - severe morality consequence.

Morality consequence boxes and normal consequence boxes can be used for this purpose and, if all the boxes of the listed level are full then the damage bumps up to the next level. For example: If a vampire steals from someone and both his Mild Consequence boxes are full then the consequence becomes a Moderate Consequence (and if they are both full then it gets bumped up to Severe).

Anyone who gains a morality consequence when their list is already full has fallen to such a state of degeneration that they are no longer suitable for play as an player character and become a particularly monstrous NPC. After thinking of this idea I wondered whether or not this was a little harsh considering that there are only three Morality Consequence boxes on the tweaked sheet that I have been working on, and I toyed with the idea of adding additional boxes; however some re-reading of the FAE rulebook lead me to realise that the recovery rate of Consequences is fairly rapid:

• Mild consequences - clear at the end of the scene.
• Moderate consequences - clear at the end of the next session.
• Severe consequences - clear at the end of the scenario.

Looking at the recovery times I think that it is not unreasonable that a creature who goes around committing "sins" willy-nilly will quickly burn through their consequences; although I did decide that allowing the normal consequence tracker to also 'soak' Morality Consequences was probably a wise move (although Morality Consequence tracker can only be used to 'soak' consequences from Morality.

I'm eventually planning to tie blood hunger and other such concepts into the two Consequence trackers.

A link to my WIP character sheet for the hack can be found here.