Scampir

Be the Choster you wanna read

  • He/Him + They/Them

One Canuck built the #ttrpg tag and the #mecha tag. And that was me.

Cohost Cultural Institution: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots
Priv: @Scampriv


I was sick last week (I'm on the mend)! And I really couldn't bring myself to write more for this little dice stacking outer wilds game. Wow! Even in #lostuwrimo form sticking to writing something every day is hard. What I have down has turned towards Quiet Year hack. On paper, it begins with drawing out planets in a solar system (I've written a table of types of planets in case you need some inspiration) and during the game, a team of explorers venture to the planets in their solar system. They take turns drawing cards from suit-specific decks to discover new things about that planet. The four suits that I have uncover information about 1. the planet's cycles 2. any precursor ruins 3. scientific discoveries and 4. potential dangers. However, writing out Quiet Year Tables is A LOT OF WORK!!! It's really left me stunned, and I think I have to take time to look into what's interesting about "exploring alien worlds" (I know, it seems so obvious until you have to write it down) before I can really do the concept justice.

What I have been tooling on instead is uh, well this is a little embarrassing because:
StarWarsFolderofShame

I was in here! Now, what was a Scamp such as I doing in here?


FitDGSheet

Horrible, truly horrible things. Utterly vile things. Gutting Force and Destiny to use the FitD engine. I think that FitD's stress and resistance roll tools mixes the high-power of jedi with the measurable anxiety of being in flight. I'm thinking this could serve well in games which focus on Jedi escaping the Inquisitorius, Jedi hiding after the Jedi Civil War (KOTOR II: The Sith Lords), or Jedi otherwise on the run (The Ninth Jedi).

The most arrogant task I have taken on is seeing if the talent tree is worth keeping in the transition to FitD. In the FFG SWRPGs, experience is given arbitrarily by the GM. It's not attached to enemies or objectives or duties or obligation or any of that. The GM just gives you XP at the end of the session. When granted in larger parcels, this can support a player aggressively working their way through their specialization's talent tree, but they might forgo upgrading their skills (and therefore dice pools) when pursuing this. A far cry from how Blades does it, and a shift I want to push this hack (a word I'm using deliberately) into.

Now, I don't know what's going to survive these two games making contact. Everything is up to be cut. Right now I just want to set up the dominos for a playtest so I can see how they fall.


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in reply to @Scampir's post:

I think the dice themselves are really cool, but I certainly won't defend the price to get the number you'll actually need to play.

I don't much like the systems built around the dice though. The combat system, for instance, feels way too fiddly and tactical for the narrative dice system. I would have preferred something that doubles down on the narrative aspect.

Also, the character sheets are rubbish that don't accommodate several of the subsystems built into the game. And--

You get the picture 😅

One of my earliest forays into game design was something that kept the overall structure of FFGSW dice but traded the custom set for regular polyhedrals. Ultimately abandoned as my tastes changed (and I decided I wasn't the right person to try to write a Viking game in Hell Year 2016).

I'm currently working on adapting a bespoke FitD toolkit I've been tinkering with to do a Niamos Vice home game. So, fun to see other people doing similar things in the space.

Glad you like Laser-Ritter! That's a project I super need to circle back to.