Uncharted Worlds 2nd Edition - Alpha

#41

Hey Sean! Checking in after a crazy year and super thrilled that this is coming along. Really like that the Origins are distinct from the regular move-set now, and the downtime bonuses that they get are really neat. Really plays strongly to the scrappy keep-on-flying theme!

I really love how the career moves are laid out, with pithy descriptors that the players would be eager to choose from! Kind of wish the Core Moves (actually just Face Adversity) also got a similar treatment!

I’m curious how much spotlight the +Secondary Career Achetypes will get – some of them aren’t mechanically sound since they won’t have overlapping stats (ex: Field Medic use Intellect+Expertise and Finesse+Force). I know this kind of balance is probably not a goal, but I worry about it being a build trap for new players.

I see you are building out the Starship section. Starship combat was always something that felt incomplete in the original game. My attempts at cajoling my group was not successful, so we never did get to test it, but I’m eager to see what the new edition brings on that front!

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#42

For those of you following along with the behind-the-scenes of UW2 design, we have a fun little update today.

Over the past month I’ve focused on playtesting the existing rules, with an eye towards “smoothing out the bumps”. In any game, and especially in tabletop rpgs, there are moments that interrupt the natural flow of the game. Speedbumps in the otherwise smooth loop of description and resolution. It’s jarring when a rule interrupts that flow, forcing the GM and players to exit the fiction in order to clarify the system.

One important bump I’ve noticed over the past few playtests is the “player chooses from a list on resolution” that is a part of most Moves. For example:

Access – Clandestine Move
When you ghost through a hostile area, unseen and unnoticed, Roll+Finesse.
When you bypass the security of a computer console or access port, Roll+Intellect.

On a 10+, you pass through unnoticed, and choose what you secure for yourself:

  • Cache: An unexpected bonus (creds, data, objects, etc). GM decides.
  • Back Door: The access persists. Anyone who knows about it can use it.
  • No Trace : Disable or clear the path behind you. No one can follow this way.
  • Sweep: Gain a rough idea of occupants, vantages, and local activity.

Most of the time when the Move resolves, the player expects A Thing to happen, and there’s a stumble where the GM has to remind them that they need to make a choice. They often have to change their mental picture of what they were doing to accommodate the choices.

It feels like I’m fighting against the players’ instincts, which is always a loosing battle. As of yet, I’m not quite sure if it’s an issue with conveyance (make it explicit that they have to choose, like “CHOOSE ONE”), or a timing issue (make their choice before the roll?), or a control issue (the GM chooses?), or a systemic problem (remove that granularity, let the Move dictate what happens).

Despite the fact that it’s a pretty big design setback, I feel that it’s important that this becomes smoother, so that it doesn’t interfere with the free flow of the narrative. I don’t want to start getting too clever and spoiling what made UW approachable in the first place.

Just as a general polling/preference gauging, what do you folks tend to prefer for your PbtA-style Move resolutions:

  • Player choices as part of resolution (Choose one from the list below:)
  • Straightforward resolution (This specific thing happens)
  • Vague/Open to interpretation (A thing occurs, what and how?)
  • GM countermove (The GM will present you with a choice between X and Y)
  • Something else (I haven’t played every PbtA style, and new tech is coming out all the time)

Soooo yeah. A bit of a crisis of faith, but nothing that can’t be salvaged. If you’ve tried the alpha version yourself, or have any opinions or suggestions for particularly intuitive Moves, I’m all ears.

Cheers
-SG

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#43

I favour presenting the options while the move is being done. Like so : I ghost behind enemy lines. OK, how so ? (player describes) OK, are you looking for something in particular or just trying to pass through to the other side ? I am looking for weak spots where we could hide and smuggle goods and person by night. (MC checks the Back door benefit, with Sweep as a secondary). OK, this is the Access move : roll +Finesse (…)

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#44

I definitely prefer the classic, player chooses options approach. It is breaking up the constant flow of fiction - by design. The game reaches a fork in the road, this is a moment of choice for the player, their mechanically guaranteed agency.

I honestly believe what you’re facing is problem with the players, not the system. Have they played any cooperative storytelling focused RPGs before? The expectation of GM moving things along makes me suspect they were not used to this sort of play culture.

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#45

This is a good point: it may be due to differences in player expectations and comfort levels, at least in part. I’ve had a number of positive comments about UW1 from more traditional gaming groups, how it bridged a comfort-gap between D&D style ttrpgs and the more free-form coop storytelling. I’d love to keep that approachability and friendliness for UW2.

Looking both at my original Moves, and the Moves from other popular games like Ironsworn and Masks and such, I feel that I may have gotten a bit verbose with UW2’s Moves (Me? Verbose?! Surely you jest.) Resolution needs to be quick to understand. You deal damage. You suffer a wound. Gain Influence over them. Mark an advancement. That kind of thing.

I realized that some of the “stumble” of resolution happened when the player had to actually read all four long choices before making a decision. I wanted that decision to be gut-level snappy to maintain a certain energy, not careful and ponderous. Because the decisions were florid and covered so many bases/situations, they weren’t as flexible as they needed to be.

I’ve done an experiment with three of the Career Moves, to see if I could make them dramatically more punchy. I included the original version as a point of comparison.

+++ Moves Refactor Example +++

I’d be interested in any reactions or thoughts on this particular change. I’m hoping to playtest these new ones soon, see if they give us a bit more fluidity in play.

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#46

Wow that is substantially different in feel. Very lean. I think this could be a very positive thing, really getting to the essential core of each move. “Subtract to add” is a philosophy I’ve been encountering quite a bit lately. I’ll want to take it for a spin and see if it feels as good in play as it looks on paper.

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#47

I have to admit, the conciseness of the new version is a good look! It’ll break the pacing up less in play too.

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#48

I don’t mind the occasional break in flow to make things exponentially more interesting, but I think there’s a definite balance to be struck. I think stating the intentions before the roll is ideal! If it’s a full success, it can then be narrated and move forward with no hiccups at all. If it’s a mixed, the GM has already had a chance to think about what complication could get in the way. And on a failure, well- failure shit.

For instance, in the above example, if I wanted to hack into a computer, I’d say “I want to hack into this computer with absolutely no trace left, I want to be INVISIBLE.” I roll my roll- on a 10+, it can be described how that happens and we move forward. On a 7-9, the GM explains the complication, or says why that doesn’t quite happen, or offers a hard choice like in the earlier versions. But then the expectation is set from the beginning so there’s no tug of war going on, and the GM gets those precious few extra seconds while the roll is happening to figure out what a fair complication would be, to help keep things running smooth.

As someone who’s experiencing this in real time, I’m loving seeing where the system is going, and can’t wait to test it further. :slight_smile:

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#49

Thank you all for your feedback! It’s super appreciated.

I toyed with the “state choices first” mode for a while but I ran into an issue with choices of consequences on partial success. That kind of pessimistic thinking doesn’t really jive with most players I know, and to remove the opportunity for player choice on partial success limits the design space (like in the Scoundrel’s Prey move, where they’re asked “which extra bad thing are you willing to do to pull this off”). I’m not discarding the concept out of hand, but that’s a concept I’ll revisit if this current refactoring doesn’t work.

Speaking of refactoring, I updated the rest of the Moves (including the two basic Moves) to the new punchier version, cutting out as many words as possible, leaving things as to-the-point as possible while leaving plenty of narrative elbow room. (You can use the same link up above, though you may have to redownload it if it still shows as the old version).

Now, I haven’t tried it out yet, but just writing them and re-reading them gave me a much stronger feeling. Maybe all those words got in the way of the simplicity and elegance. Heck, I used the opportunity to tighten up a couple of Moves mechanically, expressing their intent better (in my opinion).

Broader in scope and applicability because they don’t use evocative language, but rather compel you to resolve them first and foremost, but providing less language to shape that resolution.

On a 10+, choose what you create:

  • A brief surge of power.
  • A harmless stasis.
  • A hard awakening.
  • A useful diagnosis.

I’m hoping to playtest this tomorrow evening. I’ll hopefully have a follow-up this weekend, maybe with the changes integrated into a new Alpha version!

Thanks again for following this meandering, verbose journey through Amateur Design :stuck_out_tongue:

You all rock!

Also! Happy Canada Day to my fellow Canadians! Sorry!

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#50

Just wondering, if the choice the player had was get what you describe for 10+ in relation to the move (assuming the trigger is met for the move in the first place), then that wording seems a little verbose. I’m also wondering if the 7-9 could more often be a single choice rather than pick 2. As in 10+, you get the ideal situation, 7 - 9 you pick one thing that works or one thing that doesn’t, so that no one has to scan the list over again for a second result? I’m not sure if I am being clear or if it is a big ask, but 1 choice is always easier and quicker than 2.

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#51

Got to playtest with the new streamlined Moves on Friday.

Overall it went fairly well! Moves were resolved more smoothly, in my estimation, there were less long pauses before player choice. The added structure in the Military Move led to a couple of very entertaining fights involving narrow quarters and short-ranged kinetic shotguns that were basically pump-action ragdoll/physics toys (FusRoDah!), smashing people into walls and blasting them with shrapnel-clouds of cutlery.

Though it operated well, the Academic move felt wrong in its fundamental purpose. The “game” wanted it to do something else. I’m examining both Commercial and Academic at the moment, swapping design elements to see if they can’t be made to feel better.

Seek Solutions, an evolution of the whole “look around, read a sitch, etc” -style Move is in a weird place right now. It’s turned into a way for the players to add something they want to the world (usually a way forward or a way out of This Mess) but also tasks them with creating an obstacle to overcome. It still needs significant work, but I’m kinda digging how it’s evolving.

Overall, I had much better vibes from this playtest. Further data points will be required (more on that soon!) but I think I’m going to go ahead and publish a new version soon-ish.

(Also: Happy 4th of July to you wonderful folks down south! Be safe, stay away from explosives, and stay hydrated!)

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#52

Hello all. Time for a bit of an update plus some navel-gazing.

On the design/writing front, I feel like I’ve slowed down a bit. Work has gotten a lot more involved lately (good involved, it’s super fun), so I’ve had less mental fortitude to sit down and write at the end of the day.

Musings about player-motivated play.
While I do prompt my players to fill in pivotal information about a scenario, I’m still very traditional in the way the characters acquire things to do: the universe spews out plot hooks and missions, and the players take them on. It’s very reactive, and requires a lot of brainpower on the GM’s side.

While I’m not opposed to GM-driven storylines, with characters following the winds of fate, I’d like to give players the opportunity to come up with missions that they care about, that will show off their skills, or that will play into their archetype or Burden.

Opportunities - Player-Generated Missions.
I’ve already introduced the concept of Burdens; an overarching narrative element that the character either embraces or confronts (or both) during their story. Now I’m toying with the idea of Opportunities: short, player-created missions that the character has in their back pocket, waiting for an opportune moment, like the Loyalty Missions in Mass Effect.

Basically, an Opportunity would be expressed as [Action Verb] + [Subject] + [Locale]. It would still give the GM the chance to shape the story and set the obstacles/dangers, but the core is driven by the character’s desires and skills.

Examples:
A Doctors-Without-Borders -style archetype: “Cure the Plague quarantining a nearby Space Station”.
A Gambler -style character “Win the Jackpot at the Elite Poker Game.”
A Crowded origin, family-oriented burden: “Rescue my Dead-Beat Brother from life as a Space Pirate.”

Not sure if every table will grokk it. Some will find it too much (just want to relax, go along with the story, and throw dice). Others will find it too little, and they already are very player-driven in their undertakings. But I feel that, like Cramped Quarters and Prompting in general, it might be a safe, low-impact way of bridging a gap between full blown collaborative storytelling and the more traditional You Find A Quest On The Town’s Bulletin Board (because the GM put it there).

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#53

The Burdens in the current playtest have generated some great inter-personal play. One PC who is guilty about their ancient discovery the Govt abused finds out that that was how another PC lost his entire squad. Meanwhile, the PC who has a rivalry with another family discovers (surprise surprise) that they are now big wheels on the planet they are stuck on seeking enough cred to resupply and refuel. That has generated a series of incidents that are driving the broader plot.

The players have taken their burdens and run with them!

If you want to give them more narrative control then rather than asking them to choose an individual ‘Opportunity’ consider separate lists of action verbs, subjects, locales and threats. Then go around the table and ask player 1 to choose something from list 1, player 2 from list 2 etc. That way each member of the group helps define the scenario which gets buy in from all of them. Next time start with player 2 so everyone gets to choose from a different list.

Individual opportunities risk the combat focussed coming up with something the face will not find engaging. Co-creation gives everyone a stake.

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#54

Sweet! I’m so glad it’s working out.

Interesting!

That’s kinda what I tended to do with Jump Points in UW1: cold-open adventure starts that start with a GM-chosen premise (you are looting a crashed starship) and gets each character to provide one component of the overall context (who owned the starship?, what were they carrying?, who else is here opposing you?).

However, I feel the Opportunities would lose their main function if they were collaborative: giving an individual character a chance to shine. The whole point of a personal mission/Loyalty Mission structure is that it makes a specific character the primary protagonist.

If there’s a combat-focused Opportunity on the horizon, it’s because someone in the group is itching to show off their combat capabilities, or has a hankering for lasers and explosions. The buy-in comes from being a friend, ally, and teammate of the person with the Opportunity. If the Face character messes with that desire (by, say, choosing a subject that the Combat character doesn’t care about, or choosing a locale that isn’t conducive to direct violence), then it waters down the potential mission to something more palatable overall, but significantly blander.

Instead, the Face likely has their own Opportunity that involves flexing their diplomatic muscles.

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#55

Had a very interesting few days. Not many words written, but lots of thoughts about game tone, the nature of Sci Fi, and how design can achieve unintended goals.

In the Grim Darkness of The Present Day
One of my players brought up a very interesting issue. They felt they much preferred clear-cut situations to murky, grim settings. Their argument was that they deal with grey-zones pretty much all day, keeping ourselves alive by working for the benefit of rapacious corporations, and giving the money earned to other abusive conglomerates who sell goods made by quasi-slave labour. He plays roleplaying games to escape that reality. He wants an unambigious evil to stand against, something without all the social and legal knots. Which, honestly, is totally fair.

Science Fiction is Extrapolation of Present-Day Crap
Sad to say, sci fi tends to take what is and extrapolate it, often with one or two twists (the foundation of the What If genre of sci-fi, to be sure). It’s the reason there are so many more dystopian settings out there. Scrabbling for survival in the shadow of giants who own our souls, struggling to make ends meet so that we can live another day, making morally grey (or outright evil) decisions because The Corporation Says So or We’ll Starve If We Don’t… they make gripping stories because they’re relatable. Too relatable. Hell, I can’t even stand sci-fi about end-of-the-world scenarios because I’m basically going through the stages of grief over our own doomed civilization (This is the hottest summer in recorded history. It is also the coldest summer we will ever experience again for the rest of our lives.) Shit sucks.

Unambiguous Choices are the Real Fantasy
Fantasy rpgs, on the other hand, are usually unambiguous. There are evils in the world, and there is good worth fighting for, etc. There is hope, there is light, there are innocents. The characters are independently wealthy, able-bodied, and utterly free from the get-go. Delving into the tomb won’t have government agents descending upon you. The necromancer you defeat won’t take you to court. They could, but let’s be honest, if that happened in a Fantasy game, it would immediately feel like a parody. Or Game of Thrones I guess?

I acknowledge that the Fantasy genre hand-waves a LOT of problematic content when you actually think about it. The profoundly troubling nature of intelligent, self-aware “savage/monstrous races”. The overt support, if not outright glorification of extreme wealth disparity, social stratification, and theocratic control of the populace (usually as the only thing protecting people from the aforementioned “savage monsters”).

But that kinda brings us back to the original point: A Fantasy setting that tackles those issues head-on, that revels in the very murky and inhumane sludge of actual history… it might be realistic, but it also sounds like a great big downer.

You Absolutely Can Take The Sky From Me.
So what does all this have to do with Uncharted Worlds 2. A lot, when it comes to the design of the economic systems. If you look at the latest versions, you’ll find a very capitalist, very profit-driven mentality. All the rewards and costs are measured in wealth. Wealth keeps you flying. Missions earn you wealth. You spend wealth to fix breakages. You start off “Scraping By” and can claw your way up to “Breaking Even”.

In trying to emulate the feel of the “clunker”-style space faring tropes like Firefly and such, I ended up making something that encouraged greed, apathy, and selfishness. It creates a loop in the fiction, where logically the Big and Powerful have all the wealth, and the players have top choose which flavor of jackass megacorp they want to take missions from. Not only does that lead to a “choose between doing the right thing and getting paid”, it also makes the characters subservient to the GM-controlled corporation, rather than free-willed.

Presumed Heroic Until Proven Otherwise
I think I lost sight of the Space Opera somewhere along the way. I didn’t uphold my own principle of “Paint in Primary Colors” enough, and made everything too murky, too grey. I feel that there are two big elements that could bring back that bombastic, larger-than-life Space Opera feel.

  • One is that heroism should be mechanically rewarding, or at least as encouraged by the rules as greed and commerce.
  • The other is that great villains make great heroes. From Firefly, to the Expanse, to Star Wars, to Mass Effect, to Destiny: No matter how scrappy, scoundrel-ish, or ethically grey the heroes are, they still shine because of the evils arrayed against them. Criminal syndicates, alien war-fleets, killer robots, flesh-eating hordes, child kidnappers, and literal Space Nazis. Hell, even the Imperium in Warhammer 40k gets away with being quasi-Space Nazis by being arrayed against gore-drenched flesh-warping horrors from beyond the stars.

"Wealth By Any Other Name"
For the rewards issue, I think I’m going to dismantle the current economic systems in regards to the ship. The whole wealth and “Scraping By” was too narrow of a motivation. Instead, I’m applying something very similar to the way the characters earn XP to Advance.

When a Downtime is triggered, the ship earns 1 Resource for each of the following that happened since the last Downtime:

  • Completed a mission [ ] The stakes were high [ ]
  • Earned deep gratitude [ ] Far-reaching acclaim [ ]
  • Sold cargo for profit [ ] For a significant profit [ ]
  • Explored the unknown [ ] Found something rare [ ]

Spend (Rank * 3) Resources to increase the ship Rank:

  • Each Rank Up: Either upgrade a ship module, or add a new one.
  • At Rank 5: Also add a new, neutral Section (6 empty module slots).
  • Spending Money: (Rank * 2) Creds per crewmate on arrival.

Of course, profit rewards are still there. I’m not trying to do away with the concept of wealth = power. But now opposing drives (explore vs exploit, help vs complete mission, etc) will at least provide equal advancement, even if the consequences and subsequent opportunities will diverge. Hopefully it will encourage players to seek out different ways to advance their ship.

Great Villains Make Great Heroes
This is more difficult to arrange mechanically. Space Opera needs one or more unambiguous villains, but it’s hard to “force” that. I think it will require a lot of GM advice and guidance. Not to say that the villains shouldn’t have pathos and motivation. A great villain has just a touch of relatable truth to their evil (there’s a superb clip from a Harley Quinn cartoon where she and Poison Ivy pour highly toxic industrial waste down the throats of the manufacturing company’s board of directors).

…

Soooo yeah. Anywho, thought I’d share that. It’s good for me to write this stuff out to… shape it. Like clay. Get those thoughts lined up, see the size of them. Long and rambling, to be sure, but I hope it gave a little insight into the ongoing writing process.

Design with intent! Examine your biases! Etc!
-SG

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#56

I’m not familiar with the whole resource system (just picked up UW recently and slowly working towards running something PbtA), but is the opportunity to gain 4 resources being too generous, especially if the ship is the Serenity? Is there a way to increase the upkeep cost/apply a penalty to the number of resources obtained?

Also, thinking about the Serenity – is there a way to slow progression? My home campaign group wrote their own system called FAST (not PbtA) and we often run campaigns without any progression, or we might get some XP once every couple years. In D&D style settings magic items are often used as a form of progression (that is, characters stay the same but gain better and/or more magic items). Or in a post apocalyptic campaign we had, our GM would give us better gear during certain plot progression points. So our progression was gear and the plot.

I can think of a few examples of space opera where the characters and the ship didn’t really advance, or advanced between seasons or only after major plot points. Like in Serenity, the crew had clearly been on a losing streak and were getting desperate at the beginning of the movie. River changed a bunch, but the others were about the same and the ship was worse off beyond the new hover sled.

So if I was going to run a Firefly style campaign, I think I’d want to keep most things static. Reputation might become important (maybe track that at each world/port). So I wouldn’t need an economic system because the crew is always going to be just scraping by, so crew morale and ship status would be more important than economics.

Anyway, some food for thought for you. UW 2E sounds promising.

Side question: will you be working Far Beyond Humanity into the core rules for 2E?

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#57

I think you will miss out if you slow down progression in UW (or any PbtA, to be honest). I think of it less as someone suddenly developing a new ability or talent and more as ‘this is the first time in this movie that we see this talent’ and (for me) part of the fun is having a new ability to play towards. There’s also the question of how long a run a PbtA game is designed for so you may be pitching at to long a run if you fear your players are going to advance too quickly. On the other hand in my recent UW2e playtest I thought advancement was slow … so I might just be looking for something different from it than you.

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#58

I like the movie way of thinking of it, but I also kind of agree with Professor Dungeon Master from DungeonCraft that levels are mostly illusory (PCs fighter tougher opponents) and make it harder for the GM to plan as levels go up. Of course, he’s talking about D&D where it’s a real problem. I see it in our system (FAST) too, and our GM in our dungeon crawl had to start giving out consumables to reign in the power creep from giving out too many magic items.

Our 1950s Super Heroes game has been going for I think five years now. One of our GMs was running a Victorian era gothic campaign for I think a couple decades. Multiple characters for that one, and some of us joined in for the second round of characters. He eventually connected this campaign in together with his Pulp campaign, and he had a 20 year anniversary finale where time merged and we played both of our characters in the big final battle/effort to stop the ritual and save the world.

We have had shorter campaigns, and we have a couple settings where we just have a map with several locations and the GM mostly makes things up on the fly. We sort of treat those as one-offs but we’ve never gone back to the same place twice yet. Our GM actually started a campaign during the lockdowns last year for one of those. So they’ve been running for a couple years. Sounds like they could be a better fit for PbtA.

I just picked up the Starfinder Humble Bundle and have to admit it’s an interesting setting, hence my interest in Far Beyond Humanity for 2E. Might be running this for some new-to-RPG players.

Anyway, so I’m looking for systems that can work for one-offs, for short campaigns, and long campaigns. But for the long campaigns, I want to avoid too much power creep.

Edit: And to tie this back to UW 2E, that’s why I’m interested in a lighter-weight economy. I’m looking for something that gives some sense of progression at the end of the session but doesn’t involve much upkeep or power creep.

#59

Old time player here, I was a funder in the original kickstarter and ran a quick campaign with my group once. I’ve just found out about this thread (after the G+ diaspora I had lost track of Sean), and read it all in a couple of days (including its precursor thread)!

Let me just say that I’m still in love with the original game, and I’m even more in love with the direction v2 is taking. I agree 100% with the post-mortem Sean did. So, really, I’m just here to give my moral support, and to ask if there are any updates.

Also, I was wondering if you would count Farscape among the series that have inspured Uncharted Worlds, or could inspire UWII. I think it was a really imaginative series, but it could have used a bit more grounding and a few more bucks.

And finally (I promise!), we really liked the leadership rules in UW. The ship’s “captain” had a small squad of marines. It was good fun having them interact with the crew, and be red-shirts in the horror episode. I used them as I would use the biker’s gang from Apocalypse World, which I think is an excellent way to portray secondary characters aligned with the PCs.

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#60

Welcome to the community @albx79 - glad you found this thread.

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