Also, I’ve seriously been meaning to, but I completely forget to document the game’s proceedings each time.  That will happen with the new party, because I’ll make them remind me. :P

My first campaign has been drawn to its glorious conclusion.  Some questions have been answered, but many more are raised.  I’m losing three of my four party members, so it looks like Act II will have a new cast of characters.

In general, I know what I need to tackle - simplification, simplification, simplification.  I’ve been afraid to play that angle too hard so far, but serious simplifications are necessary to make sure people that DON’T already play tabletop games are even slightly interested.

My biggest concern is that I’ve generated a system with a seriously enormous number of dice rolls, which on one hand can be kind of fun, in a sort of making-fun-of-itself sort of way.  A specific instance is weapons that have a chance of severing a limb - in that instance, the procedure is

Roll to hit - roll to get through armor - roll on damage table - if enough damage, roll to see if Limb Lost - if Limb Lost, roll to see which one.

That’s like five in a row that all rely on each other.  Granted, that specific instance is very satisfying for the player to get to, simply because whatever he did gets a little more awesome with each roll.  But the point is made - there are instances where simply far too many dice must be thrown in succession.  Hand-to-hand fighting rolls are the worst, honestly, which currently uses “opposed rolls,” which takes forever to sort out properly.  It’s a byproduct of my adherence to D6’s only, honestly - instead of many dice of many sizes, I’ve opted for a system which relies on sheer volume of dice.  This must be reduced a lot.

I’ve arrived at the idea that “roll to get through armor” and “roll for damage” ought to be bundled up with each other.  So armor doesn’t simply reject a shot the way it does currently, it reduces the damage roll.  That’s one dice roll eliminated, without really sacrificing anything in terms of tactical complexity.  At this point, any other corners I can cut to eliminate rolls, I’ll cut.

Also, my on-foot and starship rules have strayed a bit from each other.  For a little while, the system was attacker-wins-ties in space and defender-wins-ties on foot.  They must be brought back together.

So the next version of the rules is Alpha 0.2: the goals being smoother running, fewer rolls with no tactical complexity lost, better rule clarity, and the beginnings of a snazzy, well-designed rule book. 8)

Huh, actually never heard of this one until just now.  And I am a big Mech fan.  Warrants further investigation, perhaps.

A lot of my original inspiration came from Battlefleet Gothic, which operates on a larger scale than Space Game, so this might be a good place to gain insight into how smaller-scale stuff can be done in a streamlined way.

Not only that, but I have never seen Battleship Galaxies before.  It would seem I am not nearly the first to employ the good ol’ hex grid.  And check out those shield and hull pegs!  That’s a pretty sweet idea.

At any rate, I have just begun a couple of summer classes, and will be traveling a lot this coming month or two.  Updates might be more sporadic than usual.  Hopefully not.

As of yet, the rules for Space Game are jotted down in a messy assemblage of Word documents.  Today I actually started to put together their formal write-up - at least the textual bits of it anyway.  The idea is to get it into PDF-able or printable format.  This part will take a while. :P At least it means I can present the real name soon.

A.H. ran by me last game the idea that the singular alien race ought to have shape-shifting abilities, an idea that I’m not entirely opposed to.  Obviously this skill would need to have its limitations for the sake of balance but it kind of has me thinking a lot.  It would have to actually be a physical rather than psychic transformation - there are no “psychic” or “telepathic” powers in this universe as of currently.

There’s a run of the on-foot rules tomorrow.  Might try to photo-document the proceedings, though mostly I’ll be concentrating on writing down all my rules clarifications.  The party got its new space ship last game- the Ella Mae, a smuggling boat that’s definitely seen some action over the years.  It’ll be a fixer-upper but hopefully it’ll grow on everyone.  Have realized, however, that there might need to be a real write-up for each ship on how the interior is laid out… which could be time (and page) consuming. O.o We’ll see.

Here’s a model of the upcoming game board.

The board is going to be laser-cut into clear plexiglas (for the moment - if ever there is a board that comes with the game it’ll have to be made with a simpler/cheaper process.) It has a layer of hex grid placed over a solid layer: cutting the layer of hex grid means that I’ll have a good basket-full of hexagonal bases for game pieces already cut for me.  It’s two feet wide by three feet long, and has a 35 by 55 grid.  The whole board is transparent, which means that underneath you could place things like star charts and cool graphics.

Also, the game is not called Star Commander, though that was one early prototype name. :)

I’ve built in a few rules for stacking small ships in the same square now.  That will be immensely helpful, I think, with keeping track of things.

Gonna continue the campaign I’ve been running on Friday.  Should be interesting, the party is getting their first real space ship.  A heap of junk, of course, but full of character and not even slightly inspired by Firefly. >.>

Also, I tweet now!  Find follow twitter.com/axelgordon.

Seriously. 

The engagement was run PVP, with myself and AA. on one side, and B., K., and AH. against.  Both teams had the same fleet at their disposal: a big superheavy-sized carrier stuffed with fighters and bombers, four supporting cruisers (which are actually the stars of the show, being generally bricklike and difficult to kill), and eight fast escort sloops with a mix of short range anti-fighter guns and a single long-range bombardment laser.  The goal for each team was the destruction of the enemy’s carrier, and the battle took place around the wreckage of an old space station, which ships could use for cover and to obscure themselves from detail scanners.

For the most part people understood the rules and they actually ran pretty smoothly, which was a pleasant surprise.  The ship-to-ship fighting rules support targeting and disabling individual sub-systems of a target ship, like its engines, or guns, or shield generators, and people leveraged that ability a lot this game.  The main-line cruisers are equipped with deflection fields: these, rather than increasing the “armor” of the vessel, actually increase it’s “hit difficulty” by turning incoming projectiles away and refracting incoming beams, effectively insulating them from slower and better-penetrating attacks like torpedoes.  Translation being, for each deflection field the ship has turned on, any incoming attack must roll one point higher to actually hit.  At that point, only a laser attack can get through with some regularity, and lasers have relatively low armor penetration, making them pretty impotent on their own against cruisers.  However, by targeting individual less-armored subsystems, lasers become useful.  A few sloops on the enemy team were able to kite one of my team’s slower cruisers and engage it with their long-range attack lasers - once their scans revealed the location of its deflection fields, they pinpointed and destroyed them, severely weakening the cruiser’s defenses.  Then his bombers jumped out of hiding in the wreckage of the station, unloading high-yield missiles by the dozen.  The cruiser was not quite destroyed that round but was certainly crippled.  Quite satisfying to watch the system you’ve set up working so well. :)

What took so much time, in general, was

A) moving and judging all the bonuses that every little individual ship gets.  Decided that yes, absolutely yes, like ships should be allowed to stack on a single square, if they are small enough.  The minutiae of rolling individual weapons versus individual ships is fine if there are few enough ships on the board, but in a battle this size (which is like to happen again), it’s intolerable.  The challenge in stacking ships is, of course, rationalizing how to target subsystems on the ships in a stack… if only smaller ships can be stacked, there might necessarily be some exemption they get from subsystem targeting (just by being tiny, I guess.) But that’s not exactly ideal.  Will have to think about that.

B) referencing the effects of weapons, which are not listed on the ship sheet (too much information.)  This is probably because I didn’t print up weapon and item cards in time. :P But I have discovered that yes, it will probably help a LOT.

Awesome road trip across Virginia, involving museum hopping in DC, Harley Davidson dealerships, music battles, the rather amazing Skyline Drive, a brief dip into North Carolina to meet family, rope swings, and tipsy walks home in the rain.  I think we might do it again some time.

In the meantime, back in the development (and job-searching) saddle.

I’ll be running the first really large-scale fleet engagement this weekend, and before that happens I will have system and weapon cards, as well as ship blueprint sheets, ready to roll.  Biggest challenge, in the meantime, is developing a slew of starships to blow each other up in the meantime…

I’ll be on the road for the next week or so, taking in the sights of Virginia.  In the event of a UFO sighting I will certainly pin up a picture as that would be pretty relevant, but other than that I’ll probably be silent until I’m back. :P

I’m improving as a DM, I think.

It’s constantly said in Darths and Droids that the very best DM’s make sure that their players are always paranoid, and currently it’s working.  I had them arriving at their first major civilized area shadowed by a couple of foreign space ships a long way outside of the territory they’re supposed to stay in - then they explore the space station waiting for the captain of their ship to return.  The captain never radios back, and when they make their way back to their ship, it’s gone!  With no record that it had ever landed in the last several months!  And of course, there was an assassination attempt.  Always helps.

The major thing we were testing were the character sheets, which actually helped amazingly much for everyone.  There are things that still need to be graphically streamlined but I don’t expect the design to change much at all.

One thing that’s in the works is individual weapon, tool, and feat cards - since all weapons are pretty specific and unique in what they do, they really ought to all be on separate cards.

And we’ve settled on a name!  Hooray.  There will be a logo and an unveiling shortly.