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Author Topic: (Hopefully) cool stuff clash is working on now  (Read 5408 times)

flyingmice

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(Hopefully) cool stuff clash is working on now
« on: December 19, 2007, 11:47:49 AM »
Right now I have two hot projects I'm spending time on.

Number one is an update of my Sweet Chariot game from 2003. Sweet Chariot is - in the words of the web-page blurb - "set on the world Chariot, where most of the atmosphere is a deadly narcotic and the people live only on the tops of mountains. The oldest Diasporan-settled world in StarCluster, Chariot was colonized when treachery was overcome by determination. Working within the limits of a hostile world, the Charioteers slowly overcame the natural obstacles in their path, and their culture now is based on steam and natural nuclear fission. The many scattered nations of Chariot are united only by the steam dirigibles that fly over the deadly Deathlands for trade and conquest."

This is an extremely setting-rich game. It is my favorite place to play games in, as the games just write themselves. Its a wierd, twisted setting with plot hooks littered over the landscape like chunks of uranium. Here's one of the 19 great nations of Chariot - Kukulkan. That's a sample of the ideosyncratic-but-wierdly-familiar settings found in the game.
 
I'm reformatting the game into a much cleaner style - I was soo bad, and this is my oldest game - and updating the mechanics to StarCluster 2.5/Cold Space level, and putting in some more illos. That is not in question. What I'm wondering is should I do more? Should I drop random chargen entirely, like in FTL Now, or should I keep it? Should I continue to use the percentle task resolution system I used in StarCluster and Cold Space, or should I use the StarPool dice pool T-R system I used in Blood Games II, as this is a more gritty yet wild game? Should I use another T-R system entirely, like StarKarma diceless, or StarRisk risk dice, or StarJAG JAGs dice rollover? It's really a pretty simple matter to switch T-R systems. Choices!

The other game I'm working hot and heavy on right now is In Harm's Way: Wild Blue, about a modern day mercenary soldier/air combat outfit. It's an extension of Aces In Spades and Aces And Angels into the modern day, with jets, and the addition of small unit ground pounder infantry and spec-ops. It's perfect for an RPG - military organization without the military red tape and bureacracy. This one will write itself, I expect. :D

Just keeping folks informed, as per request!

-clash
clash bowley * Flying Mice Games - an Imprint of Better Mousetrap Games
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Currently Designing: StarCluster 4 - Wavefront Empire
Last Releases: SC4 - Dark Orbital, SC4 - Out of the Ruins,  SC4 - Sabre & World
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beeber

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« Reply #1 on: December 19, 2007, 02:19:34 PM »
thanks for the update, clash.  your posts are the only thing that drags me into the design/theory part of this site (then i quickly run back to the rpg area).

i'll have to totally check out the sweet chariot stuff.  may have to incorporate it into my current traveller adventures somehow!  :keke:

flyingmice

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« Reply #2 on: December 19, 2007, 03:36:02 PM »
Quote from: beeber
thanks for the update, clash.  your posts are the only thing that drags me into the design/theory part of this site (then i quickly run back to the rpg area).

i'll have to totally check out the sweet chariot stuff.  may have to incorporate it into my current traveller adventures somehow!  :keke:


Sweet Chariot is an awesome setting - the best I've ever done - but the system needs a lot of work. It's the last remaining vestige of StarCluster 1 left out there. Iused it to prototype most of the changes I made to the SC engine to get to SC 2, but they are... embryonic... in places. Using StarPool would make the game more gritty and pulpish, and using StarKarma would make it less violent, based on my playtests. Decisions! I could always use the percentile system most of my games use, but it may not be the best solution!

-clash
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brettmb2

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« Reply #3 on: December 19, 2007, 04:13:33 PM »
The decision on the system is a tough one. I'm kind of leaning towards percentile. I would keep random character generation, maybe as an option in an appendix.
Brett Bernstein
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Hackmaster

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« Reply #4 on: December 19, 2007, 05:14:17 PM »
Quote from: flyingmice
Sweet Chariot is an awesome setting - the best I've ever done - but the system needs a lot of work. It's the last remaining vestige of StarCluster 1 left out there. Iused it to prototype most of the changes I made to the SC engine to get to SC 2, but they are... embryonic... in places. Using StarPool would make the game more gritty and pulpish, and using StarKarma would make it less violent, based on my playtests. Decisions! I could always use the percentile system most of my games use, but it may not be the best solution!

-clash


For some reason, percentile dice are starting to feel dated for me. I loved the % dice roll-over in Spacemaster and liked the roll-under from Star Frontiers, but lately in games (including one version of my own sci-fi homebrew), the percentile just felt a bit outdated and clunky. I'm starting to wonder if we really need more than 20 random points (i.e. should we just stick to a d20 or less). Why not convert all those d100 games to d20 by dividing everything by 5.

I like sci fi to be gritty and deadly. It doesn't have to be violence, but by that I mean it doesn't have to focus on combat, but if there is combat, it should be dangerous.

Whatever you do, don't go diceless! I still love dice. Cards don't cut it either.

Why not try something new altogether. Not SC2, not Starpool, not Star Karma - something fresh. What else have you had stewing around that you've been dying to try out? Die step mechanics? Other variations on the dice pool?

Those are a few off the cuff opinions, for what they're worth.

Cheers,
Jeff
 

flyingmice

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« Reply #5 on: December 19, 2007, 09:51:54 PM »
Quote from: brettmb
The decision on the system is a tough one. I'm kind of leaning towards percentile. I would keep random character generation, maybe as an option in an appendix.


If I keep Random Generation, it would be best in chargen. I'm leaning towards percentile too, if only because that would be the least change, and I love this game so much as it is.

-clash
clash bowley * Flying Mice Games - an Imprint of Better Mousetrap Games
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Currently Designing: StarCluster 4 - Wavefront Empire
Last Releases: SC4 - Dark Orbital, SC4 - Out of the Ruins,  SC4 - Sabre & World
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flyingmice

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« Reply #6 on: December 19, 2007, 10:11:17 PM »
Quote from: GoOrange
For some reason, percentile dice are starting to feel dated for me. I loved the % dice roll-over in Spacemaster and liked the roll-under from Star Frontiers, but lately in games (including one version of my own sci-fi homebrew), the percentile just felt a bit outdated and clunky. I'm starting to wonder if we really need more than 20 random points (i.e. should we just stick to a d20 or less). Why not convert all those d100 games to d20 by dividing everything by 5.

I like sci fi to be gritty and deadly. It doesn't have to be violence, but by that I mean it doesn't have to focus on combat, but if there is combat, it should be dangerous.

Whatever you do, don't go diceless! I still love dice. Cards don't cut it either.

Why not try something new altogether. Not SC2, not Starpool, not Star Karma - something fresh. What else have you had stewing around that you've been dying to try out? Die step mechanics? Other variations on the dice pool?

Those are a few off the cuff opinions, for what they're worth.

Cheers,
Jeff


Hi Jeff! Thanks for your opinion! I've been playing around with a few different T-R systems, but nothing too oddball. I really don't like complex dice systems - ORE is an utter nightmare for me - So they are all fairly straightforward implementations of already existing concepts.

The wierdest one is probably my own implementation of Kyle Aaron's Risk Dice called StarRisk. Roll as many six sideds as you want to, but the total has to be under the TN. If you roll a number of dice which can't possibly total the TN - for example rolling 1d6 to get under 13 - you get one success. That's an automatic success, but not a very good success. For each die over that number - say rolling 3d6 to get under 13 - you get an extra success. 3d6 under 13 would gain 2 successes, while 4d6 would net 3 successes. Like StarPool, the number of successes improves your quality.

I just asked my son Klaxon, who co-wrote Chariot with me. He said the best fit system to that setting is hands down StarPool, because it's gritty and flamboyant at the same time. I think I agree... The flavor of StarPool is very right.

-clash
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Currently Designing: StarCluster 4 - Wavefront Empire
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flyingmice

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« Reply #7 on: December 20, 2007, 08:48:33 AM »
The fun of designing Glorianna is designing a completely different society, wildly successful, yet distinct and nothing like what has gone before. The basis is Cultural Emulation, which is a concept that the Slowboats which came to the Cluster from Earth used to keep their people functional during the long (1200-1800) year journey from Earth.

The following is from Sweet Chariot:

The first slowboats packed a mixed colonist/crew from various ethnic and national backgrounds and assumed that they would work out any differences over the long voyage. This worked well for the first interplanetary colonies, and even for the Alpha Centauri colony, which was only a 40 year voyage at
0.1c speeds. When the colony ships left for more distant systems, however, there were several ugly incidents ranging from tensions between groups to bloody ethnic violence.

It appeared that under the pressure of very long voyages, the societies of
the ships were fracturing. Two factors seemed to be working against the colonists. The first was standard factionalism between non-homogeneous societies, each attempting to preserve as much of its own social processes as possible in the evolving shipboard standard culture. The second factor was
the evolving shipboard culture itself, which caused social trauma to those who were joining or rejoining the culture from decades in cold sleep. During the time they had been sleeping, their entire culture had been radically altered by those awake.

The most commonly used solution was proposed by Dr. Danielle Otukwe of the University of Padua. Dr. Otukwe was a sociologist, and she proposed that the shipboard culture be an artificial one, chosen by the crew from past cultures rather than living ones. This addressed the fractioning factors in several
ways:

• The cultures were equally alien to all the people, lessening the pressures between the Earth cultures present.
• The artificial cultures were intended to be nearly static, drastically lessening the culture shock to a community most of who’s members were in cold sleep at any given time.
• The massive effort to learn a new language, new idioms, and new aesthetics served to unite the people of the ship in a common cause.
• Once in place, the artificial culture worked like a natural culture to keep the people united by shared commonalities.

Not all colony ships used the Cultural Emulation method. It was, however, quite commonly used, particularly on those ships with a culturally/ethnically diverse group of colonists, as tended to be the case with the UN launched ships. It seemed to be quite successful, and inspired a number of variants, such as Watch-based emulation rather than Ship-based emulation, where the watches were kept separate rather than blended, and each watch maintained its own cultural emulation.


Back to live typing!

So, in effect, a ship-bourne culture might be Meiji Japanese, or 21st century French, or 18th century British, or whatever, no mater what the passenger's ethnicity. It might also be a combination of several different cultures, which didn't interact much - the Watches, which are those people who are awake at one time. A ship might have had rotating Watches, where the composition of the ship was continually changing as people were put into and taken out of Cold Sleep, or static Watches, where the people were changed in batches after a decade of life awake. Ships with rotating watched used a single ship-wide cultural emulation model, whereas each static Watch could have its own culture.

Glorianna was settled by two slowboats which arrived in the Gloria system nearly simultaneously. While braking, they decided to join together and create a society, because they would have twice the recources, virtually guaranteeing a successful colony.

The ships were the HMS Royal George, owned by the British Royal Family. It carried 20,000 settlers from the UK, who had rotating Watches and a single cultural emulation model - Elizabethan England - and the UN ship Ostfriesland,
carrying 10,000 German, Argentinian, and French settlers, whose cultural emulation models were Frederick the Great's Prussia, Phillip I's Spain, and  France under the Sun King, Louis XIV, respectively.

That's the background of Glorianna. I'll be posting more!

-clash
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Hackmaster

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« Reply #8 on: December 20, 2007, 09:19:41 AM »
Quote from: flyingmice
I just asked my son Klaxon, who co-wrote Chariot with me. He said the best fit system to that setting is hands down StarPool, because it's gritty and flamboyant at the same time. I think I agree... The flavor of StarPool is very right.

-clash


Of the existing mechanics, StarPool would get my vote as well.
 

Hackmaster

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« Reply #9 on: December 20, 2007, 09:21:44 AM »
Quote from: flyingmice
That is not in question. What I'm wondering is should I do more? Should I drop random chargen entirely, like in FTL Now, or should I keep it?


I'm not a fan of random chargen at all. At this stage I definitely prefer point-buy systems.
 

flyingmice

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« Reply #10 on: December 20, 2007, 09:32:46 AM »
Quote from: GoOrange
I'm not a fan of random chargen at all. At this stage I definitely prefer point-buy systems.


That's not in question, Jeff. You will be able to create whatever character you want. Right now I have three ways to make a character, Random, Directed, and Template. It doesn't matter which way you go. In FTL Now I went to just Directed and Template, which reduced the page overhead. I also got requests from fans of Cold Space's random generation to put it back in the mix. I like all of these methods for different reasons.

-clash
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flyingmice

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« Reply #11 on: December 20, 2007, 09:39:43 AM »
Quote from: GoOrange
Of the existing mechanics, StarPool would get my vote as well.


Yeah, I'm thinking that. The game itself would best be served with StarPool. I do keep thinking "It's a StarCluster game, set in the Cluster! You should use the StarCluster percentiles!" Luckily, you can play any of my games with any of these mechanics, so it's really not so bad no matter what I eventually go with.

-clash
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One Horse Town

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« Reply #12 on: December 20, 2007, 10:27:38 AM »
In the interest of balance: How do you guys manage to write so much?

flyingmice

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« Reply #13 on: December 20, 2007, 10:42:15 AM »
Quote from: One Horse Town
In the interest of balance: How do you guys manage to write so much?


Coffee.

-clash
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HinterWelt

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« Reply #14 on: December 20, 2007, 11:41:04 AM »
Quote from: One Horse Town
In the interest of balance: How do you guys manage to write so much?

Not to barge in on Clash's thread but I am an insomniac. I sleep about 4 hours a night and sometimes not for days. This makes for a lot of time to do things.

I wish we had a general thread like this for all the publishers. It would be neat to compare what is rolling around peoples production schedules.

Good luck Clash. I like the sound of Sweet Chariot. I am getting revved up about a very similar concept (Future Skein) that would be neat to run past you.

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