Gamecrafting: Excelsior
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@Pyrephox I think that's all that she was clarifying, possibly because of how you wrote it out.
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@bored Yes! So I was clarifying back to her.
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@Pyrephox I NEED CLARIFICATION PLEASE
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WHAT ARE NUMBERS
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Native creature hive-mind faction when?
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@Jennkryst Neeeeever.
(I do have some ideas I think are fun for alien ruins/remnants/problems, but I want to keep the game fairly focused on the core gameplay elements; I doubt it would have lasting appeal to enough people to go broad with it.)
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@Pyrephox said in Gamecrafting: Excelsior:
Ah! I see where we went wrong. I do not mean 6 as in 'this is the number each die must hit' I mean 6 as in 'this is the number in the opposing pool you roll against'.
Oh sorry, misunderstood. 6 just happens to be the default target number so I thought that's what you were referring to. Opposed rolls are intended for actual NPCs with skills. Using them for difficulty is not ideal from a mechanical standpoint either (it generally makes rolls much more difficult - as I rambled about to Karma from Grey Harbor as well) but YMMV. Anyway, carry on!
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@secretfire said in Gamecrafting: Excelsior:
This sounds like "Sid Mier's ALPHA CENTAURI: The Mush"
I'm down for that.
So which faction are Gaia's Stepdaughters?Oh my god YES! University or Morganites!
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So, one of the things I've been struggling with is how to create a survival and exploration game without creating a bottleneck where staff has to continually run plots or process jobs JUST so that people can explore an unfamiliar territory and run into interesting things. Also, much like with the flora and fauna, one of the ideas that intrigues me is giving players a chance to contribute to building the world, rather than just having it revealed for them. So when it came to grids, I decided to create an exploration system that guides people on how to create rooms for people to explore - //by exploring//.
The tldr: Outside of the 'home grid', the ship and immediate surroundings, grid rooms will be very broadly defined Sectors that are largely unknown (one sector will be more fleshed out, with some examples of grid rooms, so that people who don't really want to participate in the system still have the chance to do wilderness fun). Having scenes in these Sectors where players collaborate and generate challenges for their characters (or use these Sectors for things like food discover, etc.) generates EP for those players (players, not characters - it's entirely a metacurrency) for that Sector. When a group of players reaches a threshold of held EP for a Sector, they can spent the EP to create a grid room representing a section of that Sector in more defined detail, with special features they can purchase. These are not 'personal builds', but open territory that any players can subsequently use for plots and scenes.
The really spammy version:
Exploration and Grid Growth
Sectors
The game begins with a small grid, most of which is defined within the ship, and places immediately outside of the ship. Outside of those core grid rooms, there will be a series of grid rooms called ‘Sectors’. ICly, these are designated and named by Aggie, the colony ship AI, and are filled in as people discover more about them. In practical terms, what that means is that the desc of Sector rooms has only vague and general information. But, obviously, it would be boring if those sectors remained blank slates.
Grid Rooms From Sectors
Instead of a top down, simulationist approach for the creation of grid rooms, Excelsior favors a more bottom up, narrative one. Grid rooms will be defined by the results of scenes and plots taking place within those Sectors. Players who participate in scenes and plots dealing with specific sectors will earn Exploration Points for those sectors, and when a group of players gains enough EP, they can get together and collaboratively with staff design a grid room from that sector, indicating a stretch of wilderness which has been explored thoroughly enough that it can be defined as its own place.
Using EP, players can buy features for the grid room: resources, unusual terrain, rare fauna, exotic or unique features. Neither the players nor the characters OWN the grid room (unless the Colony government decides that creation of a grid room counts as staking a land claim to a specific place, and that’s okay) - once the grid room is created, anyone can use it. It’s a place and a public grid, not a personal or group build.
EP are a meta-currency, and as such, they can be earned for things which are not intentional IC actions, such as running scenes and plots within the sector. EP are also meant to incentivize players indulging in and enjoying higher character risk and consequences, so they are rewarded in larger amounts to players who put their characters in danger while exploring.
EP Rewards: (Note: All rewards and costs subject to change.)
1 EP: Participating in a scene set in a specific Sector.
2 EP: Directing a scene set in a specific Sector, +2 if your character is not involved in the scene.
5 EP: Running a plot set in a specific Sector consisting of at least three scenes (in addition to the EP you receive for directing each scene) - this can be a series of scenes hunting down a new source of food, looking for the cure to a disease, prospecting for minerals, chasing down a criminal who fled the justice of the colony, whatever. Just needs to be three connected scenes, ending on some sort of closing note.
1 EP: Including specific flora or fauna from the Herbarium or Bestiary into your scene in some significant way. (Just about anything other than just posing ‘oh there’s a stand of sunblood roots, or whatever, works.)
1 EP: Your character sustains an Impaired injury while in a scene set in the Sector.
3 EP: Your character sustains an Incapacitated injury while in a scene set in the Sector, or is infected by a disease or infection from the Sector or something harvested from it.
10 EP: Your character dies, or is permanently lost or retired as a result of a scene or plot taking place in the sector.
Creating a Grid Room
Once characters have reached the threshold of EP required to make a grid room (50?), they can put in a job. They do not have to submit a job with the minimum possible EP; if they wish to spend a lot of points on one room, they can go all the way up to the upper limit as established (100?). The job should link to the scenes that took place in the Sector, list each EP gained in the log, and where to find it. The second part of the job breaks down the Features they want to purchase for that grid room, how much they cost, and a brief summary of what they would like that Feature to be.
Features
Features are enduring aspects of a room which can be used as resources, plot points, or complications. These include mineralogical and biological bounty, unusual geographic features, alien mysteries, very rare fauna or flora, etc.
Sectors begin with baseline features, which can be further enhanced in their grid rooms. For example: If Sector 3 is desced as having a mineral wealth of 2, forests at 4, and Dangerous Weather (5), then a grid room built out of that Sector will start with those stats. But EP can be spent to boost the mineral and forest resources, and reduce the fury of the weather. A Feature could also be bought that gives that grid room a mysterious artifact to be uncovered.
Players will not create the desc - staff will do that in order to retain some continuity of terrain and sense of place, but players can collaborate on things they would like to see. ‘Science fantasy’ type terrain will be involved, and is actively encouraged.Towering fungi, floating crystals, abyssal lakes with strange, chitinous beasts? All good.
Features, Mysteries, and Plots: Players can ask for alien artifacts and features in the broad sense of ‘a city’ or ‘lost technology’ or ‘an ancient tomb’, but staff takes the responsibility of creating the artifact and its connection to the metaplot, solely so that there remains a mystery for these Features which can be explored. If a player wants to take on an artifact to run a PrP around it, that can absolutely happen, although it means spoiling the player at least a little bit on some of the mysteries, in order to retain continuity. -
I had a similar idea, though, with more of a focus on megacorporations fighting each other for resources and plots of land. I was going to steal some ideas from Offworld Trading Company, using a hex grid to mark off the world map. Throw in some Tales from the Borderlands with its space cowboys and some cyberpunk elements and voila! Yet another game idea I won't see to fruition.
Anyways, I am very interested in seeing how this develops. It looks like you have hashed out quite a bit of where you want to go with things.
EDIT - A random thought popped into my head from previous conversations months ago. Someone mentioned the joy of space trucking in a MU*. You might want to consider creating something like H-space (I think that's what its called) on the planet that people can drive/fly/sail/whatever through to get the poly-neutronium-yttrium-silver-chloride-154 from point A to point B. Though, it's sounding like you want a smaller grid.
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@Ominous said in Gamecrafting: Excelsior:
I had a similar idea, though, with more of a focus on megacorporations fighting each other for resources and plots of land. I was going to steal some ideas from Offworld Trading Company, using a hex grid to mark off the world map. Throw in some Tales from the Borderlands with its space cowboys and some cyberpunk elements and voila! Yet another game idea I won't see to fruition.
Anyways, I am very interested in seeing how this develops. It looks like you have hashed out quite a bit of where you want to go with things.
EDIT - A random thought popped into my head from previous conversations months ago. Someone mentioned the joy of space trucking in a MU*. You might want to consider creating something like H-space (I think that's what its called) on the planet that people can drive/fly/sail/whatever through to get the poly-neutronium-yttrium-silver-chloride-154 from point A to point B. Though, it's sounding like you want a smaller grid.
I had considered something like that! But, ultimately, I rejected it on two grounds: One, that it tends to put the playerbase on a lot of mutually inaccessible minigrids, which isn't something that I really want to do as a regular thing. And two, something like that really works best when it's modeling a meaningful economy of some sort, which is more simulationist than I'm looking to get with this game.
While I am developing and thinking about a lot of systems, they're more process systems than simulation systems. My goal with them is really to ensure transparency for players about HOW they can do things in the world, as well as provide a basic framework which can be adapted in a fair way for unexpected actions on the part of the playerbase.
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One thing I would suggest is to make sure there's a low barrier to entry in any of the systems you implement. I.E. I wouldn't set the EP requirements to 50 right out the gate; I'd maybe set it to 25 and see how quickly players accumulate EP and if there's enough buy-in and excitement to get to that point.
I'd also have some good documentation in the Sector about the initial look of the room. If Staff creates the description after the EP points accumulate and the job is inputted, how am I supposed to RP and create plot in the sector without knowing what the environment looks like, etc?
I've noticed that players get REALLY EXCITED about the idea of exploring and building stuff, but there's not a lot of follow-through. I would have some back-up plans in the event that the exploration system really doesn't wind up being something that players are utilizing.
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@bear_necessities said in Gamecrafting: Excelsior:
One thing I would suggest is to make sure there's a low barrier to entry in any of the systems you implement. I.E. I wouldn't set the EP requirements to 50 right out the gate; I'd maybe set it to 25 and see how quickly players accumulate EP and if there's enough buy-in and excitement to get to that point.
I'd also have some good documentation in the Sector about the initial look of the room. If Staff creates the description after the EP points accumulate and the job is inputted, how am I supposed to RP and create plot in the sector without knowing what the environment looks like, etc?
I've noticed that players get REALLY EXCITED about the idea of exploring and building stuff, but there's not a lot of follow-through. I would have some back-up plans in the event that the exploration system really doesn't wind up being something that players are utilizing.
Yeah, to all of these. I'd actually like to have a bit of a beta period pre-game to really test things out. Probably with a test sector that wouldn't be used in the actual game, and pre-made test characters. Which isn't to say there wouldn't be tweaking to all of the systems, but ideally I'd like to have chance to run through some time where people just try to break it without having to worry about repercussions for other players, then fix, then wipe and reboot.
And what I'm thinking for the sector descs is actually kind of unusual, in that they'll be more like mini-reports with a brief, broad desc at the bottom. Like the sensor report the characters would be receiving from the ship. Considering how Ares puts the room desc at the top of the log if you set the location, I think that'd go well with it. A VERY off-the-cuff example might be:
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Designated Colonization Territory: Sector 1
Mineral Deposits: Very Rich
Flora and Fauna: Scarce
Terrain: Dangerous
Atmosphere: Moderately Toxic, High TemperatureThe land currently known as "Sector 1" is a broad swath of seismically active volcanic canyons which reach from mountains to a black sea, covering approximately 80 miles of territory. The ground and air are obscured by a thin haze of black ash that sears the lungs. Jagged cracks in the earth lead to 'rivers' of lava which flow into an ocean whose floor is rippled, black obsidian. The canyons are riddled with caves where subterranean fauna and various types of sulfur-loving fungus have been remotely observed. The occasional geyser erupts at irregular intervals from yellowed, crusted pools. Temperature and breathing regulators strongly advised.
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So, very broad, but still with enough 'hooks' (I hope) to draw people in and give them inspiration of what to play there. And there will be one Sector which will have several grid rooms pre-developed. Both to give people some examples of what you can do with the system (I'll include how much EP each one would be if it were built through the system, and why), as well as being immediate places to play for players who aren't as interested in the system, or who struggle to come up with ideas, but still want to get their 'alien wilderness explorer' on.
My hope is that by providing clear systems and examples it can overcome some of players' choice paralysis when it comes to "what do I do next". Ideally, I'd like it to be a very low stress way to try out running a scene here and there while also having something that people can contribute to the game in a concrete way. Sort of leaving your mark on the world. I feel like that captures the idea of exploration in a meta-way that I enjoy.
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This continues to sound EXTREMELY cool.
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