Designing Uncharted Worlds 2nd Edition

#121

Moves v3

Time again for the “it’s been too long since the last update” Update!

I had mentioned last week how the core Moves and career Moves went through a major overhaul, and how well the subsequent playtesting went. So I cleaned it all up, and I’d like to share it here. Please check it out, take it for a spin, whatever. I’d love to hear feedback or questions about it. The responses so far have been instrumental in shaping the design, and I thank you all for your input! <3

Almost all the Core and Career Moves have been majorly overhauled. I’d be curious to know which Career move(s) pique your interest the most, or which ones you feel work well together.

Character Moves, v3

Edit: I almost completely forgot to mention one of the biggest Career changes. I’ve done away with the Survivor career. It felt a bit too reactive, a bit too much like an Origin. Unlike the other careers, it didn’t have a proactive way of dealing with problems, but was rather content to “weather the storm”.

In it’s stead, I’ve introduced the Psionic career. Psionics are now one of the default 10 careers, rather than an optional add-on as they were in UW1. I know this will meet with some mixed responses, but I’ll write a full post about my reasoning later.

Design principles I’ve tried to uphold in this latest iteration:

  • Players should pick their own poison. When possible, give players the choice of consequences.
  • Core moves solve a problem with a cost or consequence. They’re blunt instruments.
  • Career moves solve problems in a narrow way, prone to creating a specific result.
  • Career moves 7-9 result solve the problem but reveal/introduce new challenges.
  • All 6- results provide (light) direction for the GM as to the expected fallout for a Mishap.

These principles have really helped focus my design, and in my opinion have created some of my best Moves. I’m tentatively locking down the Move design for now, barring any alterations from feedback, and I’m moving on to Origins. I’ve already got a significant amount of work done there, but as it progresses, it’s getting more and more linked to the other major rules section: Downtime. So I may be bouncing back and forth between the two.

And there’s still the whole Credits/currency/economy elephant in the room. I’m trying not to look directly at it yet. >_>

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#122

As you can see from the Career Moves, v3 linked above, in the latest iteration of the rules I’ve done away with the Survivor career, and added the Psionic career instead as one of the core 10 careers. Survivor itself was a new career, ostensibly an updated “Explorer” from UW1. A couple of other 1st Ed careers were merged or divvied up as well. I figure I should go through my reasoning for the various career changes.

Out with the old

  • The Explorer and Starfarer careers were merged into the new “Explorer”, which focuses on mobility and vehicles. The subtheme of “survival” in old Explorer was moved to the new Survivor career, while the cosmopolitan aspects of old Starfarer were divvied up between Personality and Commercial.
  • The old Technocrat was retired, its computer and programming skills divvied up between Clandestine and Academic.

In with the new

  • A new “Advocate” career was introduced, an outwards mirror to Personality’s self-aggrandizement. This takes many of the diplomatic aspects of the old “Consul” career from FBH.
  • A new “Survivor” career picks up a number of loose ends from the old Explorer, including the recklessness and wilderness aspects.

Out with the new
After repeated iterations of the career moves, I was left with the realization that the Survivor career was too passive or narrow to provide interesting gameplay by itself. I needed to replace it. Each career had a two-stat identity, and Survivor took up the Force/Intellect slot. Force made sense for “weather the storm”, but the Intellect variation (“resist mental/emotional harm”) was a bit of a stretch.

Much of the tone and fantasy of the Survivor career felt like an Origin instead, so a lot of its philosophies were brought over to the Brutal, Frontier, and Impoverished Origins (more on Origins later).

In with the psychic
Deciding to have a psionic career as one of the ten core careers is probably the biggest decision for UW, tone-wise. I intentionally made things as ‘vanilla’ as possible in UW1, thinking it would allow players to play in their setting of choice* .

*that wasn’t necessarily effective, since “Starfarer” was a career, which didn’t work with single-planet cyberpunk-ish games without space flight.

In any game, each career, class, and character option implies something about the universe, and creates base assumptions about the kind of stories the game will tell. Take D&D, for instance: The mere existence of the Cleric, the Wizard, the Druid, etc, implies a world where there are many kinds of magic, and that those magics are a relatively common tool. It would theoretically be possible to run a no-magic “realistic” campaign in D&D, but that would severely limit character choices and (more importantly) would undercut a number of design decisions.

By having a default level psionic career (rather than an optional add-on) I would be planting a flag. I would be implicitly stating that there are such ‘supernatural’ forces in the universe. And I feel that’s a stance I need to take, to support the core genre tropes, from Jedi, to Biotics, to Psykers, to the PsiCorps.

This whole thing ties in to what I said in my post-mortem: I wasn’t prepared to commit, and thus ended up being wishy-washy.

(Those who wanted to play in, say, Firefly or The Expanse -style settings would have to do a bit of tinkering or hand-waving to achieve their goal. Not nearly as extensive or problematic as removing magic from a D&D game, but still cutting out 10% of the available career combinations. A bit of a pain, but do-able)

Why not have [thing] be optional
The oft-suggested solution to these issues is “give people the option and let them choose”. That sounds all well and good on the surface, but it honestly creates a pretty bloated and inelegant design when it’s done as part of the core experience. Optional rules are superfluous by their very nature; the core needs to work without them. A rules-light game needs to be especially sleek. It needs to provide confident direction, and the mechanics need to mesh tightly together to subtly shape the gameplay and fulfill the promise of the genre.

Far Beyond Humanity was nothing but optional rules components, and honestly it kinda ended up creating bloat. I tried to cater to so many different styles of play, from horror, to cyberscapes, to psionics, to giant mechs, that I kinda lost sight of what I was doing. If I make another “Optional Rules Toolbox” in the vein of FBH, it will have to be designed and organised very differently.

…That ended up a LOT more rambly than I anticipated! Sorry about the meandering blog-esque post. I’ll have some more new design stuff next time. Possibly related to economy (gasp!).

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#123

Over the last week I ended up doing some of the crunchiest design I’ve ever done, which took me far outside my comfort zone. Fortunately I was able to consult with a couple of real designers* who helped get the ball rolling, and provided a great amount of food-for-thought.

*(Note to people like me, who suffer from impostor syndrome: Every designer is a real designer. You are not a fake designer. Stop it.)

Economy

On the economy side, a very useful tool was the concept of Orders of Magnitude. Rather than come up with individual prices, I instead had to categorize expenses in magnitudes of 10. I divided everything into three categories: Small, Medium, Large, and happily assigned a magnitude 1, 10, 100 to them. Since everything has a fixed price, and all items of the same magnitude have the same price, it’s fast and easy to make value comparisons.

Everything below a Small is hand-waived. Technically basic Starships and other super expensive stuff are an order of magnitude larger (1000 credits), but for simplicity’s sake they aren’t included in these “common purchases”.

1 Credit
Starship Refuel + Docking Fees, Vehicle Rental (1 week), Class 1 Equipment, Minor Repairs, Minor Medical Treatment, Food + Lodging (1 week), Major Bribe

10 Credits
Class 2 Equipment, Class 1 Vehicle, Building rental (1 month), Major Repairs, Major Medical Procedure, Minor Ship Upgrade, Lavish Bribe

100 Credits
Class 3 Equipment, Class 2 Vehicle, Major Ship Upgrade, Property (small), Political Lobbying

Income
Average salary: 1-2 Credits per week
Cargo sale: 1-6 Credits per cargo

Minor mission: 5-10 Credits
Major mission: 50-100 Credits
Big score: 500+ Credits

Starships

You may note “Minor Ship Upgrade” and “Major Ship Upgrade” in there. Those have to do with what could very well be the core “desire” loop of the game: building and improving your home. (Reminder: “Your three loyalties are to yourself, your ship, and your crewmates. Everything else is a burden”).

In the past, I hand-waved a LOT of the ship stuff, or designed kinda-sorta-but-not-really rules that worked if the GM and players did a lot of the mental heavy lifting. More importantly, ship “growth” was stymied by the fact that everyone had different ideas and assumptions of what the ship already had.

With UW2, I braced myself and actually created a modular system for starships, and designed the Minimum Viable Starship that players could customize and make their own. As I said, it ended up much more crunchy than I’m used to, but I felt it necessary to have that kind of detail.

Download the Starships v1 pdf here (includes v1 Economy).

Obviously there are a bunch of descriptions and stuff to be written around this core concept, but so far it passed the first, most important test: it made my playtest group go “oooh, I want that… and that… and that looks cool”.

The basic idea is that you can get minor upgrades to the existing modules, or buy new ship spaces (on page 2 of that document) for your starship, and then furnish them accordingly. The upgrades aren’t mechanics driven (no +1s to actions or anything), but rather descriptive/narrative upgrades as to what you can do with your ship/in your ship. Each component, system, or structural addition can become part of a action’s description.

In certain circumstances, players can “upgrade” their ship by flat-out taking the components from somewhere else. Loot artwork from a member of the galactic nobility? You could sell it as Cargo, or you could just display it to gain a rank of Decor in the crew quarters. Raid a space pirate drug lab? Those chemical supplies go straight to the Science Lab on your ship (if you have one).

So, question for you all: what would you push to be the first module added to your ship?

Next update will probably be the Downtime system. With the economy and starship worked out, it seems like the prime time to consider what characters get up to when they aren’t shooting/being shot at.

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#124

I like this detailed starship system. To answer your question, outside considerations that might be motivated by my specific character and plot position (ex. a science lab) I’d be most interested in upgrades that could lead to fun character interactions, so Communal Area and the AI Core.

I think your point about problems over people’s assumptions about what’s already on the ship is really key. I don’t know how to make this go away. You can always get more granular. Like when you say “recreation” what is that? I would assume holodeck, but someone else might think chess set, or something else. I remember someone reviewing another sci-fi game and saying they assumed everyone had tracking devices until the game outlined that as a class specific upgrade. Assumptions feel like a harder thing to deal with in a sci-fi setting than in fantasy, since there’s so much variance in the popular media people come from.

I’m curious about the multiple pips in your modules if this is narrative rather than mechanical +1s. What’s the benefit of more pips in “Jump Drives”?

I should mention I’m working on a starship system that is also modular, but I think it should feel very different. My starships have some specs/stats, and modules are currently more specific. Some are based around “rooms”, but others are things like a cloaking device that costs power/energy/fuel. Something like a Mining Rig would also probably be off for my game’s tone.

One other question I had while looking at your sheet–are there different sizes or classes of ships? Can I have a personal ship, or are all ships big ones with lots of rooms?

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#125

@SeanGomes, on the economy, the factor of 10 is interesting, but what players really wanted to know in my game of Uncharted Worlds which included a TON of Firefly pickup and deliver and trade missions was, how many of X fill a cargo space? It wasn’t so much how valuable an item is so much as if the current cargo / deal was worth dumping to take on the new cargo and save fuel. Nearly every session included a quick abstraction of per cargo hold price versus the next load. This required a very rough (and slightly uncomfortable) sort of estimate by me. On the other hand, using the new factor of 10, no deals would be made for the types of trades my players wanted to do because all but 1 of the deals they made would just be tier 1 now. Here’s what ended up happening in many sessions:

  • Bartering One cargo hold of Tier 1 dangerous chemicals for a load of Tier 1 clothes which took up half a cargo hold.
    *Bartering the Tier 1 clothes for Tier 2 exotic plants
    *Bartering the Tier 2 exotic plants for Tier 2 solar sail crystals which fit in a half a cargo hold.
    *Bartering the Tier 2 solar sail crystals for a Tier 3 weapons. Then, a mission for 2 more cargo bays of Tier 3 weapons. Finally, they sold the weapons for a ship upgrade.

With the 10 factor model only the last trade would be anything.

Regarding the ship setup, although it could use more structure, my players and I liked the idea that each of them got to define one section of the ship. The new way looks like it could work too although it is a little confusing as it currently stands without a few more details.

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#126

While it’s still very much Work In Progress, the idea behind upgrading the Jump Drives would be to incrementally unlock additional Jump capabilities, jumping further, and making safer Wild Jumps.

The pips for Thrusters is to use them as a point of comparison to other vessels. Since we aren’t measuring real speed, everything is faster, slower, or the same speed, relative to your vessel. So a ship with Thrusters 3 is going to be a great pursuit vessel, while Thrusters 4 is a top-of-the-line racing ship, etc.

At the moment this is all I have planned, since I’m trying to focus on the core gameplay. That said, if it works out well there may be an opportunity to add other configurations, or have a ‘from scratch’ option. That’s in the “nice to have” pile, for sure.

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#127

Things have been going… remarkably well. On the writing/design front at least, work is going less good for me but whatever. Maybe it’s the fact that the core mechanics and economy ticking along nicely, but the Downtime design came together quite painlessly.

You may also note a bit of graphic design in there. Entirely premature, I know, but I recently started Inkscape and felt the best way to learn it was to make icons that I actually wanted to use, rather than context-less tutorial images. I haven’t done graphic design in over a year, so it was invigorating to get back into it.

Downtime
This design combines a whole bunch of tertiary Moves from UW1:

  • An evolution of Cramped Quarters (arguably the most popular mechanic/move in UW1)
  • An overhaul of the Barter system
  • A simplification of Acquisition
  • A simplification of Healing/Recovery
  • A formalization of downtime which still carries a hint of risk.
  • Adding an opportunity for a bit more of a sand-boxy campaign.

Without further adieu: Downtime v1

Cramped Quarters / Shore Leave
I knew if I didn’t include Cramped Quarters almost intact from UW1 I would be inviting the torches and pitchforks. The ‘Shore Leave’ version came about from Far Beyond Humanity, and outlines the trouble (and fun) you can find on new worlds.

One issue I ran into was when/how often to trigger Cramped Quarters. The downtime event track now covers that, making downtime slightly less safe, slightly less predictable.

Cargo
Despite being heavily inspired by Traveller, I really flubbed the whole acquire cargo -> sell cargo loop in UW1, as @Deckard can attest. With the new economy with it’s fixed price points, I wanted to inject a bit of that stock-market-gambling thrill back into cargo. A little bit more crunch, a little more bookkeeping, but considerably less hand-waving. Hopefully buying and selling is a bit more enticing in this system.

In the new system, cargo prices are variable when purchasing and when selling. You roll 1d6 credits per unit to buy (and buy as many as you want), and then the units sell at 1d6 credits on a different world. The sell price of cargo is determined per type, so having a diverse cargo means less “big scores” (full hold purchased for 1 cred, sold for 6 cred) but more reliability. Of course, uncommon (Tier 2) and rare (Tier 3) cargo go for 2d6 and 3d6, respectively, so the variance and potential for massive profit skyrockets. Especially if you didn’t pay for the initial cargo (/wink).

This makes cargo-as-reward an interesting proposition. A straight credit payout or an asset/ship upgrade is a known quantity. Cargo can be really valuable if you can find the right market for it.

Also, the Commercial career is going to have a number of skills that interact with Cargo prices, so if the players want to take your campaign in that direction, that career is really going to flex its muscles.

(Also @Deckard, my current rule of thumb is that a “Unit of Cargo” is roughly a cubic meter of stuff. Often as a half meter high, two meter wide pallet or casket.)

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#128

@SeanGomes, That sounds better than I was thinking! In terms of trading this is:

  1. MUCH less hand waving- check
  2. Simple enough that it won’t slow down the game - check
  3. Fun gambling mechanic - check
  4. Sure fire player incentive to sell - maybe not BUT if any of the character background or archetype gives a bonus then players can decide if they want the extra incentive

Assuming the last point is still true, this sounds great!

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#129

I don’t post on the Gauntlet forum much, but I’ve been following this thread and love the direction this game is taking!

For the 7-9 result on Shore Leave, I feel like the wording of “describe something ugly, crude, distasteful, dangerous, or broken about the local” might come with some unfortunate implications, considering this will likely be in reference to other planetary cultures and whatnot. Maybe “Describe something inconvenient, dangerous, or broken about the local and how it negatively affects you.” Just my two cents.

Good luck, the game is looking great!

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#130

Hi! Long time listener (I’ve read the whole thread), first time poster.

I was about to start a campaign of Uncharted Worlds. We’ve had our session zero to figure out what kind of game people were into, but haven’t done character creation yet.

I want to help playtest these new rules. I’ve got CareersV3, StarshipV1, and DowntimeV1. Are these the most up to date? Am I missing anything?
What are other people doing to fill in gaps? Referring back to UW1 and FBH? How much compatibility is there?

@SeanGomes thank you for all your work on this and the original UW. I know as a creator it is hard to step back from the flaws you see in your own work, but you’ve done great things with the form. I’m excited for a second edition.

Cheers!

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#131

I think you’re right, and thank you for pointing that out. Especially the word “crude”, yikes, that just invites all kinds of unfortunate colonial sentiment.

That said, I wanted to convey that the so-called civilized places the characters visit may have dark, ugly sides to them, full of injustice, inequality, brutality, corruption, or abuse, which may Stress or otherwise harm the character. It’s meant to be “what does this world/society do to its people” rather than a rebuke of the people themselves, since a LOT of sci-fi is meant to turn social aspects into full-blown cultures. But I totally get where that can go awry real quick.

I’m thinking I put all of that into the in-depth description of the Move instead, and have the simple result be something like:

“On a 7-9, describe a darkness or danger in this locale, and how it affects you. You suffer Stress.”
(I should add that in my scribbled Downtime v2, the 4-6 Cramped Quarters and 7-9 Shore Leave results cause Stress).

More open to interpretation, and hopefully it doesn’t immediately invite cultural judgement. How does that feel?

I appreciate you raising the flag (and welcome to the community! A pleasure to have you in the thread)

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#132

Aw, thank you. It means the world to me, really.

Careers3, Starship1, and Downtime1 should be it… though if you have a few days before you run character creation, I may have OriginsV1 ready very soon. (Honestly I’ve kinda been on a roll, design-wise, a lot of stuff just came together.) With OriginsV1, the only things majorly missing are Assets, level up Skills, and Stress/Scars.

On that note, I can probably knock out a quick HarmV1 too, mostly putting the current implicit system that I use for my playtests into words.

Gimme a few days, let me see what I can throw together for you. I appreciate the playtesting :slight_smile:

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#133

I have some days to work with. I’ve given them 3 separate pitches based on the session zero and I’m waiting to hear back. Origins would be helpful for chargen, obviously. HarmV1 would be great too. I have an old document from before the latest revamp so I can kind of see the outlines, but a revised version would be aces. Leveling won’t be an immediate concern (although I have to admit I’m curious. I liked career specific advancement triggers and having the additional skills to choose gave players that XP incentive to unlock the next shiny) … and I’d probably just crib assets from UW1 for the most part and file off the rough edges as they cropped up.

How do you envision starship combat playing out? with only the core rules or will there be ship-specific moves? I noticed that only the explorer has a move that explicitly interacts with vehicles however, I could see how many of the other career moves could work to dramatic effect in a ship-to-ship action scene (Patch-Up, Access, Assault, Appraise(?))

Thanks again!

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#134

@SeanGomes
I also meant to ask in the previous message: I saw in an old playtest document that there were two +2s in the stat array versus only the one in UW1. Was this a typo or influenced by new balance issues? UW1 characters were very capable out of the gate.

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#135

Goodness, I’m not used to this kind of pace. It’s been only 4 days since the last update, but I’ve got a couple of new elements designed. To be fair, a lot of this design was sitting it bits and pieces in my documents, ready to be repurposed, but still. A few more weeks like this, and I may have an alpha version ready!

Origins
First up are the Origins, which complete the Careers as part of designing a character. In UW1, Origins allowed a player to either get a cross-class skill, or boost one of their stats (so that their Stat range was usually +2, +2, +1, +0, -1). However, as many math/power-minded gamers pointed out, since you could level into skills as a campaign progressed, and there was no way to get a +1 to a stat in any other way, it was almost always better to grab the stat bonus offered by the Origin. So right off the bat in UW2 I made the [+2, +2, +1, +0, -1] Stat spread the default.

Download it here: Origins v1

In UW2, Origins instead do two major things:

First: they interact with Downtime. Each Origin interacts with Downtime moves slightly differently, like the Crowded origin that can freely Build Bonds with crewmates, or the Frontier which can Load Cargo in the wilderness by harvesting it themselves.

Second: they grant the character a burden. Burdens are aspects of the character’s past or personality, and a lot of each character’s journey will revolve around resolving, overcoming, accepting, or embracing that burden.

It should be noted that the Impoverished and Colonist Origins are gone. Impoverished was… a bit worrisome as an Origin. Any society can experience inequality and poverty, and making it a character aspect lent itself either towards being an outright penalty, or being a saccharine “poverty was somehow beneficial” bonus. I didn’t like the taste of it. And Colonist was just too close to Frontier anyway.

In their stead are the Ambitious and Secretive origins.

Harm
Nothing much to say here. These are the Harm rules I’ve been unofficially using for my playtests for a while, just formalized. I used a lot of old templating/writing that I did previously, so it may seem familiar to some (I’m still calling it v1 because reasons).

Download it here: Harm v1

Downtime
I much appreciated all the public, private, and post-playtest feedback for Downtime, and I quickly went over and implemented a few important changes.

The biggest change was making Build Bonds a little more advisable. Characters now roll with Disadvantage (3d6 drop highest) if they are alone during Shore Leave. This comes from numerous tales of one of my US Marine playtesters and his experiences with real life shore leave in foreign locales. Let’s just say that it’s way safer to have someone to watch your back.

Updated: Downtime v2

I think I’m close to having all the pieces in place. The only major design aspects left (that I can think of) are Assets, Armor, and Vehicles. After that, it’s on to fleshing out the mechanics with actual explanations and such… wow.

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#136

That’s pretty much what I’ve done so far. Mostly I’ve hand-waved Assets for characters as

  • Choose your personal weapon (heavy ranged, long ranged, light ranged, or melee)
  • Choose two tools, gadgets, or side-arms that fit your careers or archetype.
  • Describe your outfit (what you wear most often, ‘what your action figure would wear’)

And that’s it. Basically hand-wave the rest, no armor or anything. I mean, they can describe themselves as wearing armor, but it’s basically narrative armor with no mechanical components. Feel free to give the weapons energy types to make it a bit more sci-fi: plasma, blaster, beam, needle, kinetic, whatever.

While the Explorer’s Move explicitly interacts with vehicles (because that’s their shtick), any Career or Core Move can be used through the ship. A Military can definitely use Assault with the ship’s guns (using Finesse, since they’re at long-range), as well as they could with a plasma rifle. Access+Intellect (hacking mode) can be done through an open comm-uplink to another ship, while the Access+Finesse(stealth) mode could be used by the pilot to hide the ship in an asteroid field or keep below sensor range.

The ship is a big, shared asset that everyone can perform their actions through.

The old stat distribution basically was +2/+2/+1/+0/-1 because of Origins, so I just codified it. Since the 10+ results for Core moves still have a certain amount of cost, and there’s the new concept of Disadvantage (which should come into play more often than not when shit first hits the fan), characters should feel a little less flawless while still being Big Damn Heroes.

Oh, just so you don’t have to go scrounging up-thread if you want all the latest documents:

Cheers, good luck with the game, and tell us how it goes!

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#137

WOW! You are really cooking. This is great!
I have to admit I went on a REAL journey reading through the origins. My initial knee-jerk reaction was negative and came from a static conception of how I run games. In particular Ambitious: “But what if I’m running a sweeping space opera narrative that eschews randomly generated mission prompts?! The character won’t get any mileage out of that!” A little while later it hit me: If the the player chooses that option they are telling me that they want that kind of sandbox experience (and to have a bit more control over it). By choosing these origins they players are highlighting what they want to see in the interstitial spaces that tie the campaign together… it also further frames the downtime moves, which as mentioned previously are very fertile ground for UW.

So. XP and Leveling up. I previously said leveling up isn’t going to be an immediate concern for play testing… but, I neglected to consider XP tracking, which depending on how it is implemented could come up with the first roll of the dice. I’m sure you already have an idea, but I just read a very apropos article from another awesome Sean (Sean McCoy dev of Mothership RPG, which I’m getting into to scratch that survival horror sci-fi itch) : http://www.failuretolerated.com/leveling-down

In particular, I REALLY like the concept of exchanging stress for XP during downtime. As he says, “taking the word ‘Experience’ pretty literally.” This is something I might homebrew in, regardless. EDIT: In the future. I will faithfully playtest whatever system you have in mind to get you usable feedback (and if I find it isn’t working then I’ll tinker).

1 Like
#138

Origins
In UW2, Origins instead do two major things:
First: they interact with Downtime. Each Origin interacts with Downtime moves slightly differently, like the Crowded origin that can freely Build Bonds with crewmates, or the Frontier which can Load Cargo in the wilderness by harvesting it themselves.
Second: they grant the character a burden. Burdens are aspects of the character’s past or personality, and a lot of each character’s journey will revolve around resolving, overcoming, accepting, or embracing that burden.
…In their stead are the Ambitious and Secretive origins.

Although, I haven’t had time to absorb all of the Origins revisions, the new direction with these is great! Nearly everyone, everywhere thought the Cramped Quarters was a very clever move. Augmenting it with more prompts and mechanics seems like a good call. It also looks like you junked all the origins that were usually overlooked.

Harm
The new harm rules take away some of the silly back and forth rolling to see if damage was reduced and add a more permanent impact. Most of the crews will be more reluctant to solve everything with a firefight but also it’s not so deadly as to hear whining…and that is great!

Downtime
I much appreciated all the public, private, and post-playtest feedback for Downtime, and I quickly went over and implemented a few important changes.
Updated: **[Downtime v2 ]

Overall, I think this is interesting. It may derail a storyline at times but also builds in a structure for off mission time. This is REALLY helpful and awesome for sandbox play! I can’t help but think how much more awesome something like Mothership: Pound of Flesh would go with rules similar to these rather than the OSR horror. That game is AMAZING at building drama and allowing weird sci-fi plots full of paranoia but since that game has no downtime structure, in this sandbox of a space station, players just roam around the station with nothing much to do at first. The new downtime rules provide us with a mechanical hook before the craziness starts. I LOVE it for this.

This is all really good stuff! I’m really liking the direction of the game. All of these points also resolve your the issue of looking too similar to Impulse Drive. Uncharted Worlds will have an undoubtedly different feel with all these latest changes.

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#139

Funny you should mention it. On the Mothership Discord someone just mentioned they were running APoF using the Traveller ruleset. With the modular nature of APoF, you could easily use the bones (or just the space station generation tables) as a supplement for any sci-fi system and definitely UW. Not to deviate too much from the discussion of UW2e.

Regarding Harm : I have two initial thoughts.

  1. I don’t mind the removal of the Harm move I think it is largely unneeded cruft, except in one instance: the “simulation” of assets like armor or shields, specifically for PCs. I’ve had lots of players who love their gadgets and tech. I think just describing your character wearing armor with no mechanical benefit is going to feel pretty unsatisfying. For antagonists, I think FBH addresses really good fictional positioning concepts for the kinds of threats that protect the core threat. Is the answer just as simple as using the same strategy for PCs? For example, the fictional positioning of a gadgeteer character with a custom personal shield generator “forcing” the GM to impose a cost on the first barrage of laser fire (“your shield generator absorbs the blast, but overloads in a shower of sparks and smoke”) rather than a body stress?

  2. Magnitude of harm - I’m not even sure if I should talk about this before I’ve tested it at the table, but combining all of Body, Heart and Mind stress into a stress clock/track/whathaveyou with only 3 slots which can be further reduced by Scars seems pretty… intense? lethal? I’ve played and run a fair amount of Blades in the Dark and even with a harm track with 5 boxes, the characters often come back from missions pretty well beat up and bloodied (and occasionally humiliated). Maybe I fall too heavily on Harm as a consequence in my GM-style and will have to get more creative.

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#140

@ZeroFlee, I agree. Perhaps, armor could act as an extra box or two before the player gets into the harm track and then need replacement armor after use? This would keep those same players always scrounging for more armor.

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