By admin, on May 7th, 2009% I could use some extra grey matter around here.
As Stories from the Shelter nears completion (though it’s starting to feel a little like Zeno has been helping me), I find I’m not happy with the title of the game.
In truth, it’s a bit of a mouth full, which is why I so often acronyze it as SftS. Stories from the Shelter works for Scott’s original ideas of a nascent team of human PPC officers in training and their misadventures during their training and beyond, since in that case most of the stories are based in the Shelter of Sanctuary City. But for the game, where the Characters have all graduated to full Officers and are mostly flying about the galaxy righting wrongs and tweaking noses, Stories from the Shelter just doesn’t do an adequate job of encapsulating the experience.
My problem is, I have no ideas for a super title. I’ve had Spacehounds of the PPC: A Stories from the Shelter RPG stuck in my head for a while now. But I think Doc Smith might ignite his grave from friction with that one. Then again, he is one of the founding fathers of space opera from the golden age.
While Spacehounds has a nice ring to it, I don’t think “space hounds” is an adequate description of the Characters. So, I’m still hoping my subconscious will come up with something, but I’m opening the floor to suggestions from my cronies, in the hope that, even if no one comes up with the right title, one of your suggestions will at least jump-start my brain.
So, any ideas?
Q
P.S.
Spacehounds of IPC can be had as an eBook through Project Gutenberg.
Tags: Star Lost, titles
By admin, on April 6th, 2009% Well, this past Saturday we went to an egg decorating party at Joe and Karen’s place. It was a lot of fun. We got to see Dan and MK, who we don’t get to see enough, and meet some new people who were very nice. Kaylin found a new friend in a girl named Ananda. They had a great time decorating and doing artsy stuff. Perhaps we’ll see her and her folks (Bobbie and Dave, I believe?) again sometime. We found ourselves at one point discussing various ways to use malted milk powder in baking, and vowed to have an experimental baking party sometime soon. I look forward to that. Almost as soon as we got home Heather popped out one of our cookie cookbooks and flipped to a recipe using malted milk powder. It looks good, and if we try it out before the baking party, I’ll post about it.
I’m nearly done keying the dungeon for our D&D game, so I’ll soon be set for several sessions and I can return my attention to other important matters, like adding the sample characters to the SftS manual, and finishing the wooden hex tiles I’ve been making for the Igor game. I’ve got pretty much all the sample characters I need, I just have to come up with a more compact way of displaying their records. I’m trying something now with separate text boxes for the attributes that change from level to level, and leaving the static stuff in the regular text location. That should do at least to get it to Colin for formatting.
Okay, so, enough for now.
Q
Tags: Igor, Star Lost, Updates
By admin, on March 20th, 2009% I’m having such fun with prep for the D&D run that I haven’t spent any time thinking about the SffS game, which is in two days. I’m not terribly motivated to return to it, right now. I’m thinking about the new spells I want to write up.
I’ve been lagging in my interest for the SftS game recently. Every two weeks I start thinking maybe I should wrap it up, I can’t think of anything new to do. But every two weeks I have so much fun, and (some) new ideas come out of the session, so I get revitalized and interested again. I really enjoy hanging with my group, so it’s not something I really want to give up. I haven’t quite hit the point where it feels like work, but if I do, we’ll have to take a break for a while. I’d really like to segue the group into a new system and setting (which I haven’t fully designed, due to time constraints), the problem is, while I do well with setting ahead of time, plot works organically for me. That has served the group well so far, but I’m not sure how well we could transition that dynamic to a new system/setting. Mostly, I think, I’m just anxious about developing plots.
We’ll probably be winging it again this weekend.
Slaintè,
Q
Tags: maundering
By admin, on January 21st, 2009% The second Character from the gameplay demo, Jefferson Leeds.
PDF here.
Slaintè,
Q
Tags: character, Star Lost
By admin, on January 21st, 2009% Martha was worked up originally as a Pace 2 character for inclusion in the narrative demo you may remember from a previous post. Here she is younger and at Pace 1.
PDF here.
Slaintè,
Q
Tags: character, Star Lost
By admin, on January 21st, 2009% This guy is an adaptation of ‘s Steven Johansson. I had to come up with the background as Colin was never able to flesh him out.
Here’s the PDF.
Slaintè,
Q
Tags: character, Star Lost
By admin, on January 21st, 2009% So, I was thinking some more about the proposed revision to the Aid mechanic. The current mechanic is:
Whenever a Character makes a Check on an Ability that can be Aided, a reasonable number of cohorts with proficiency in the same Ability (or an Ability that may reasonably be useful) may aid him in his Check. When only one Character is Aiding, his Player rolls 1p6 per three PL in the aiding Ability, and adds the result to the Check Pool. When more than one Character is attempting to Aid, there is a reduction in efficacy. Each successive Aiding Character must subtract one more die from his usual allowed number. If there are two or more Aiding Characters, the first gets her full complement, the second loses one die, the third loses two dice, etc. So, for two Aiding Characters, one at PL9 and one at PL7, the first Character would roll 3p6, the second would roll 1p6 (normally, he would get 2p6, but he loses one for being a third wheel.).
And the recently proposed revision is:
Whenever a Character makes a Check on an Ability that can be Aided, a reasonable number of cohorts may aid him in his Check using either the same Ability, or a related one. When only one Character is Aiding, the Player controlling the main character adds to his Check Pool one die plus one more die for every three PL the aiding Character has in the aiding Ability. When more than one Character is attempting to Aid, there is a reduction in efficacy. Each successive Aiding Character must subtract one more die from his usual allowed number. If there are two or more Aiding Characters, the first gets her full complement, the second loses one die, the third loses two dice, etc. So, for two Aiding Characters, one at PL9 and one at PL7, the first Character would add 4p6, the second would add 2p6 (normally, he would add 3p6, but he loses one for being a third wheel.). In addition to the increased dice pool, there is also an increased chance of the Aiding Character(s) interfering with the main Character catastrophically, due to differences of opinion, lack of communication, conflicting personalities, et cetera. When the main Character rolls his dice for the Check, the Aiding Characters also roll a number of dice equal to half the difference between the main Character’s PL and their own, rounded up. If any of those dice match two or more of the main Character’s dice, the Check fails catastrophically.
But I would like to propose a slight change in that revision to:
Whenever a Character makes a Check on an Ability that can be Aided, any number of cohorts may aid him in his Check using either the same Ability, or a related one. For each Character Aiding him, the Player controlling the main Character adds to his Check Pool one die plus one more die for every three PL the aiding Character has in the aiding Ability (1+PL/3, rounded down). In addition to the increased dice pool, there is also an increased chance of the Aiding Character(s) interfering with the main Character in a crippling way, due to differences of opinion, lack of communication, conflicting personalities, dumb luck, or whatever. When the Opposition Pool is rolled, the Aiding Characters each roll one die plus a number of dice equal to one third the difference between the main Character’s PL and their own, rounded down (1+DPL/3). If any of the Failure Dice of the Aiding players match three or more of the dice in the Opposition Pool, the Check fails.
Any thoughts? I think that by shifting the comparison to the Opposition Pool we remove the exponentially increasing chance to fail that pointed out. And changing it to need three or more dice matching significantly decreases the chance to fail.
According to some preliminary bone rolling, comparing two dice against seven and looking for triples of the Failure Dice in the Opposition Pool, there is a 15% chance of failure due to the Failure Dice (down from an approximately 33% chance when looking for doubles of the Failure Dice). 15% may be a bit steep, still, so I may check out the stats on checking for quadruples in the Opposition Pool.
Slaintè,
Q
Tags: character, Games, mechanics, Star Lost
By admin, on January 21st, 2009% So, a recent post (Altering the Aid Mechanic) led us to wonder whether adding a die to both the check pool and the opposition pool would increase the chances of a Thrash or if they would stay the same.
I took some time out this morning to roll the bones and preliminary findings support my intuition that it makes no difference. However, the samples are not statistically significant.
I made 25 checks each for 4 on 3, 5 on 4, 6 on 5, 5 on 3, 6 on 4, and 7 on 5. For the single die-step rolls I got 2, 1, and 0 Thrashes, respectively. For the double die-step rolls I got 2, 10, and 8 Thrashes, respectively. The anomalous 2 in the double die-step trials is likely an artifact that would smooth out with more rolls, but who can say. I’m not likely to take the time now to hand roll 10,000 trials for each case. I really wish I could think of a clever way to model this in Excel, but the criteria for a Thrash seem to need fuzzy logic. Or maybe I’m just fuzzy because I’ve been up since 4 am (seeing H off to the airport).
Slaintè,
Q
Tags: character, Games, mechanics, Star Lost
By admin, on January 21st, 2009% Alex is a Diplomat archetype.
Here’s the PDF.
It’s getting really hard to come up with Paths and backgrounds for all these characters. I have a set of 14 now, but haven’t posted them all because of that.
Slaintè,
Q
Tags: character, Star Lost
By admin, on January 20th, 2009% Another fresh Character. I felt like making a Saboteur.
Here’s the PDF.
Slaintè,
Q
Tags: character, Star Lost
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