Keeping an eye on this because UW 1e popped up in my research around science fiction PbtAs. You said above that you wanted to focus more on some specific genre elements to emphasize so as not to try to have both The Expanse and Doctor Who in the same game. Can you elaborate a little on the direction you’re considering now?
Designing Uncharted Worlds 2nd Edition
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I LOVE the idea of various types of harm. I like the Scars and Trauma concepts. I like the idea of reducing down minor harm into a scar or the like through a roleplaying heavy scene. It does not make sense though if the player is blasted by a laser rifle to the chest to reduce it down to a scar because the PC talked about it though.
I also prefer to not have Debts folded into any harm moves because that is what a lot of my 6- actions as GM would go towards, outside of harm moves…
Edit: I forgot to add that in my one real campaign (around 12 sessions) my PCs suffered very little direct harm as well. Instead, the ship was much more likely to be in danger. I did not feel like I had enough tools to mediate ship to ship combat though.
Counterpoint: I did have a character infested with an alien slug creature but the campaign died before it was discovered / burst out of his gut. He should not have bedded that alien diplomat…
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This is fantastic stuff, I really appreciate the feedback.
What I’m getting (in general) is that the idea of mixing personal (mental/physical) with social (reputation/debt) is a sticking point. I can see that.
So lets say, as a mental exercise, that we have two tracks:
- Harm (physical and mental injuries)
- Burdens (social and economic injuries).
Harm would be a “volatile” track, where injuries would be inflicted, fade, be healed, etc. That would still have the “5+ active Harm and it’s The End” rule.
Burdens would be the social hooks, where players record who they pissed off, who they owe, etc. These would hang around, decaying slowly unless the character actively seeks to rectify it.
“Hated by ___” “Reviled by ___” “Excommunicated by ___” “Indebted to ___” “Feared by ___” “Hunted by ___” and so forth.
While this does remove social standing and reputation from the Harm mechanical loop, it also is more easily grokkable: a knife wound can be stitched up during Downtime, but a shattered reputation will require a lot of PR work to heal. In a way, Burdens would be a lot like Scars: they hang around forever, in the background, just waiting for an opportunity to make things worse.
There would likely be skills in the Personality career (among others) that would interact with Burdens.
Thoughts?
I’m considering returning to the roots of Space Opera, and the settings that inspired me to start writing UW in the first place: Mass Effect, Babylon 5, Firefly, and the Vorkosigan Saga. Basically: Ships, lasers, explosions, and drama.
One element that I’m adding is the multiple-choice “calibration” questionnaire at the start of a campaign, an idea I’m cribbing from Ironsworn, with Shawn Tomkin’s blessing. It’ll modulate the setting and provide a clear framework and tone for the campaign. (More on the Calibration phase later, I promise)
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There are various RPGs that have a concept of social ‘damage’, but don’t call it that explicitly. So Blades in the Dark has Heat, which is basically a harm track for your gang.
So maybe each character should define what form their social harm takes. For a criminal it might be law enforcement complications, or pursuit by bounty hunters, like Heat in BitD. For a starship captain in hock to the banks or money lenders, it might represent them sending debt collectors, turning the financial screws, etc.
At the end of each session you tot up the effects of activities that session to a character’s Heat, or burdens and make a roll to see how intrusive that is likely to be next session.
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One thing I wonder here is if one PC makes an debt/ burden, how do you deal with the rest of the crew? Are they punished too?
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It’s a fair concern and does need to be thought through.
I’m rewatching Dark Matter with my kids at the moment. Each of the crew has issues from their backstory that eventually lead to complications. This has the potential to drive them apart, but in practice brings them together as they pool their talents to help each other out, because I’m the end they need each other.
You see the same dynamic in Firefly and Blake’s Seven. It’s one option. I can see it being awkward if one player keeps on hammering their social stress track. But then look at what happened to One (in Dark Matter - basically murdered).
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I’m inclined to support this, because it’s literally almost exactly what I’m doing for my “infiltrating a dangerous religious commune” game, Labors of Paradise. Also called “Harm” and “Burden.” Although my Burden is much more like a secondary health stat, and used more for stress, anxiety, and mental anguish, as I have a separate “Approval/Disapproval & Respect” system for social dynamics. And players can take twice as much Burden as they can Harm, although I’ve yet to clarify exactly what the consequences of maxing out Burden are…
So you’re suggesting your Burdens won’t be a track or clock, but more just a list of, essentially, aspects or traits that will be hooks for story, danger, complications, moves, etc.?
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So, what Debts (aka Burdens) were like in the 1st Ed was like owing Jabba the Hutt or the factions of Dsrk Matter. I treated it like this:
-1 debt as a job you were expected to do.
-2 debts was when you had to do a dangerous make up job for failing an earlier job or pissing off a faction Or you could pay restitution with a cargo hold of Tier 3 (expensive but not super rare) items
-3 debts to the same faction meant you were either indentured to them or on the run from them. You could only make it up to them by completing a mission that was likely to be a setup or a failure Or a cargo hold of extremely rare Tier 4 items
-4 debts to the same faction meant you were indentured to them or there was a bounty on you Or you could pay them back with a shipload of the exact thing they need.
-5 debts was wanted dead
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This is indeed a very important consideration, because I can see an argument for either. I’m not inclined to do both, since that adds another layer of book-keeping and might negatively impact the flow of play.
Between the two, I’m leaning towards having Burdens being ship/crew-based, rather than individual. Separating Harm (the self) and Burdens (the group) feels right. The crew are known accomplices of each other, registered to their ship. Since they have neither a planet nor a parent faction, the starship becomes the defacto “State”, and the crew are its citizens.
Burdens would not just reputations (hated, reviled, feared, etc), but they also would include obligations. Specifically debts and missions. Earlier I mentioned the corollary of UW2’s “Find your independence out among the stars” mission statement. I’d like to add to it:
“You have three loyalties: Yourself, your ship, and your crew. They are the path to Independence. Everything else is a Burden.”
So agreeing to perform a mission would create a Burden (anti-independence), which would either be erased on completion, or would morph into a new burden on failure. Burdens would become a mix of a videogame-style Reputation track and a Quest Log; all of them are “solvable” in one way or another, usually through missions/story.
I’m feeling pretty good about the way this is shaking out, and it supports the overall mission statement.
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Ok, so I’ve been wrestling with an idea for a while, and I find myself unable to really make a decision one way or the other. Figured I’d get an informal community yea/nay vote.
I’ve been toying with a “Ship Character Sheet” just like a character, complete with name, inventory, harm track, “personality”/quirks, and Ship Stats. Part of this came up when thinking of the shared Burden track, and how to record it.
The idea would be to have a parallel to the character’s stats, except it would be something like Engines, Weapons, Defenses, and Systems (or whatever). Spaceship action scenes would use those stats, rather than individual character stats (assuming the characters are acting through the ship).
Also, the stats could start quite low, representing the traditional space opera rust-bucket starship. Improving or customizing the ship (or stealing a better one) would provide an extra goal for the party, a sort of communal hobby project. And it certainly plays into the whole “You are only loyal to yourself, your ship, and your crew” aspect.
That said, there are a couple of cons. The biggest one is that not using the characters stats makes it harder to ensure niche protection, where everyone is an equally good gunner/shields operator/pilot, depending on the ship. This can be rectified with skills (rather than stats), of course, but it is still a concern.
The other is a matter of book-keeping. It will invariably fall on one party member to do the bulk of the recording. The team would need an official/unofficial Quartermaster, to be “in charge” of the character sheet. Perhaps framing that as a privilege/responsibility, or making it a rotating duty each session.
So! Does this seem like an avenue worth pursuing? Or would it cause more trouble than it would solve? Any games that come to mind that have done something similar?
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Scum & Villany does this, with different ship options for different types of campaign.
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Fantastic, I’ll look into that for inspiration.
Have you had a chance to play around with the system? Does it feel good?
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It works great as a parallel to the Blades in the Dark crew sheet. I’ve played a decent bit of both, and it seems like the GM ends up maintaining that sheet. Having been on both sides as a player and a GM, I really like it, particularly since NPCs in that system are particularly thin.
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To be fair, your old system for the ship worked great too except in space battles where it was hard to know what to do for a hard move
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You’re probably already familiar, but Stars Without Number is the other game that comes to mind with pretty detailed ship mechanics, after Scum & Villainy.
I think that kind of has it the reverse of what you’re saying, where players make rolls using their own stats for things like piloting, gunnery, comms, etc., but then installed ship modules may provide bonuses or fictional positioning.
I like the classic power arch fiction of starting with a real scrappy ship and upgrading it over time, but I also think it might feel better to have rolls be based on PC skills instead of ship stats, so that the PC’s are always the mechanical focus? IMO the story is always going to be about the characters first and foremost, and their gear and possessions are more of an extension of them. Maybe there’s a nice middle ground where basic actions roll off player stats but ships have modules that can improve rolls, let them do special moves, provide fictional positioning, etc.?
Actually now that I think of it, another in-development PbtA game that has similar mechanics is Armour Astir. It’s about magical mechas and their pilots, so there are rules about the PC’s acting through their mechs. I think they essentially use their own stats to act, but the mechs have various modules and resources they’re using too. There’s also a home-base ‘carrier’ ship that they all operate out of and share, that also has its own modules. Might also be worth checking out.
My experience with S&V was that I (as a player) ended up doing the book-keeping for the ship, because I was the player who liked getting into character builds and stats and all that crunchish stuff, and the other players were happy to ignore it. So it might be something that sort of resolves itself naturally. If people care, they’ll do it, and the ones that don’t, don’t have to. If multiple people are interested, maybe have some sort of mediation in the text about passing it around or sharing it somehow.
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@DeusExBrockina - This is pretty close to how Uncharted Worlds 1ed. tracked this but in a simpler way.
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Yes sorry, I almost added that this is basically how the old system was, so might not be that useful to point out if @SeanGomes is wanting to try something different >.<
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I guess my point is either way sounds fun. Personally, for what it is worth, I would focus on other bits that were less clear or did not work as well.
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Awesome. So ‘ship stats instead of character stats’ might be too far, but a ship character sheet itself might still be viable. Fictional positioning, rather than numbers. I can dig it.
I’m thinking, maybe… maybe ships can have Careers, just like player characters? And this Career determines a unique Ship Move, the same way the characters get Career Moves to use in addition to the basic Control and Confront. Hmmmm. Feels like dangerous territory, might add too much complexity, but the idea is tempting.
First step will be to create a Ship version of the Harm rules, and see if the Control/Confront rules + Harm makes ship combat better by themselves. Then I can see about ship customization and character sheets and such.
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I fully agree with your first step! That was the only frustrating part of the ship rules. I also very much dig the idea of a ship “Career” or PbtA style tag for ship types. These could even be used as possible upgrades the PCs could buy from specific factions.
E.g. Career or Ship type “Smuggler” could imply the ship has an extra hidden cargo hold. Perhaps, this upgrade could only be gotten from Pirate factions.
E.g. Career or Ship type “Military” could imply the ship has an extra weapon system that can only be gotten from a government / militia faction.
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