[Solar System] Discouraged by crunch landscape preparation
CedricP:
I am discouraged by my crunch prep.
My group want to play a campaign with the Solar System and last week we had a good session zero.
I told the group that as the GM, I was interested to explore a shipwreck or a colony situation where the characters have to band together to survive, explore their surrounding, meet the native populations and deal with all the tension and the conflict it will generate, etc.
I asked a lot of questions and we came up together with:
-It will be science fiction, something like Fading Sun, a mix of medieval and hight tech.
-After a space battle, a prison ship and a enemy ship crash on a uncharted primitive jungle world.
-Some of the guards survive, some of the prisoners survive. Players can create characters of both side.
-The prison ship come from a theocracy empire were technology and psy powers are heretical.
-The prison ship contain hardened criminals, political prisoners, psy users, scientists, cyber augmented people, and huge troll like humanoids used for force labor.
-We also came up with other details about the theocracy, the planet and the enemy ship.
At the end of the session everyone were very enthusiastic and we talked about possible character concepts and interesting keys.
We decided to wait for the next session to create the characters.
Now I have to make some crunch for all of this, I have asked for some tips about how to represent cyberwares and I started trying to build a abilities & secrets landscape but I was unsure about what could fit together, how specific it need to be, etc... so I started looking on the internet for crunch landscapes and now after reading many forum posts and the World of Near web page, I feel overwhelmed by all the possibilities.
At first I was enthusiastic about preping the crunch, but right now after some fedling, I am discouraged by the size of the task and I am confuse about how much stuff I need to do.
My questions:
-Shoud I have done the crunch with the players on session zero? (Do you ask your players to prep their own crunch?)
-Can we just build up the crunch landscape as we play? Will it bog us down a lot?
-Maybe I could only prep the cyberware, psy and troll crunch and it will be ok? Starting with only a rough crunch is fine?
-Maybe I should just tell the group that we will drop the cyberware, psy powers and trolls if no one want to use them for their characters?
d.anderson:
What character ideas were tossed around? Which of them excited interest? That's the crunch you'll want to focus on.
It's true there are a lot of options, but you don't need many to make this kind of game be engaging. I really, really like Solar System crunch! However, I would feel comfortable using a handful of Abilities related to each Pool (stuff that I suspect will be important to the game - some fighting, some scouting, some arguing and backstabbing, some survival, scavenging, science, some color specific ones for the theocracy, the cyberware, the psykers). Then the Secrets from the Solar System book - maybe limit Mighty Blow to the trolls, Blessing to the theocracy types, and maybe a couple of Talent-types for psykers.
Keys are worth reflecting on, because I would want to make sure the players were engaged and that the Keys were immediately relevant to play.
CedricP:
The characters ideas were: the ship doctor or a scientist who was doing secrets cybernetic surgery, a troll with the key of the tribe who consider the other survivors as his tribe even if they don't aknowledge it, and a criminal with a lot of contacts within the prisoners. But they were only rough idea, everyone wanted to take the week to think about this. Also the player interested by the criminal came up with interesting details about the cyberware and the psy powers, so he is maybe interested by those two elements.
Eero Tuovinen:
This is a good general question.
My overall answer is that you shouldn't get intimidated by published crunch packages like World of Near - those are biased towards high crunch and intricate solutions simply because the GM in question cared enough to publish it, unlike the guy who's just throwing something together for actual play. Something you publish for others to use is obviously going to be more detailed and show-off than something you just throw together for a single campaign. The game works quite fine with much less. Were I in your situation, I'd probably go into the session with the following:
Decide how you're going to deal with cybernetics, psionics, trolls, theocratic society and high tech vs. low tech. No need for large and detailed crunch arrays here, it's more important to decide what these things mean, if anything. For instance, do you want to make the idea that the characters come from a feudal society to matter mechanically? How should it matter, generally speaking? If you do, then you can think up some crunch related to that.What is the thing with the indigenous population and the planet in general? Remember that the Story Guide has strong backstory powers, this is not a game where you strive for consensus on the setting. Therefore you have to think up something interesting for the planet, something you yourself find intriguing. Make crunch for the important bits, too, and consider using the key element rules.Once you have a sense of the "important things" in the setting, meaning the showy front-and-center elements, create crunch touchpoints for those things. Remember that anything and everything can be handled by just abilities, practically speaking; if you have no particular inspiration for how to handle trolls, just give them a "Troll (V)" Ability and call it a day. Let more complex crunch flow naturally, and only use as much as you feel comfortable with.
I myself approach crunch creation by developing important individual points like the cybernetics issue in the other thread, and then fitting them together like puzzle pieces; thus I create things like Ability lists last. It might, however, be easier to begin by listing some Abilities and Keys that would be common to the setting. You could even leave all the other crunch for later, most things can be done with just Abilities and Keys.
One more thing to note is that Solar System is somewhat agnostic about the issue of heavy rules vs. light rules; as you can see in the World of Near, the system can get rather intensive in the crunch department, but the default is just the opposite. The thing to do is to play at the level of crunch you're comfortable with. People sometimes tell me that they don't see the point in piling huge amounts of extra rules on what is a perfectly serviceable light or "freeformish" system; my answer is that they do not need to, if they don't want it. Crunch is only used in this game insofar as the players feel like using it.
Looking at your specific questions, I'd have to say that you can certainly create the crunch on the fly, especially if you're willing to revise it as better ideas come along. Pretty much the only reason to create things before play is to have some inspiring scaffolding that you can hook things on. For instance, if you know in advance how trolls are different from humans in absolute mechanical and thematic terms (the same thing in Solar System), then you can build other things to match. If you know that the thing about cybernetics is going to be that they allow you to buy piles of bonus dice, then the decision to make psi powers also give piles of bonus dice is significant; you're saying that psi is just as good as cyber, and the two are in fact indistinguishable for practical purposes.
There are good reasons for creating crunch that player characters do not immediately take, too. One reason is that your job as the Story Guide is in part to provoke player characters to change and define their identities. In a setting with cybertech I'd expect that sooner or later somebody is going to get their arm blown clean off in an accident, after which the player gets to choose between being a cripple or installing a sweet cyber-arm. Whether player characters have cybertech to begin with is somewhat incidental from this viewpoint; the important thing is whether the setting includes these options.
Finally, it seems to me that your setting is pretty well-defined and flavourful. It shouldn't be too much trouble for us to help you out with the other aspects of it, such as the psionics, trolls and such. I have something lying around for all of those if you want to look at how others have done similar things. No reason to work on the crunch alone if you like the sort of things we produce here and feel like doing it alone is a chore. The only reason not to have outside consultation is if you want a really specific thing and don't want others to mess with your creative process.
CedricP:
What I find intimidating, is that there is so many ways to represent something with crunch. You have to make choices and since I have no experience with the game I dint really know on what to base my preferences. Well, I was also effectively intimidated by the crunch packages of World of Near, The West and the steam punk animatron crunch. But your answer help me to put things in perspective.
I will regroup my notes and work a little bit on them to experiment a little by myself, then I will post the result here for advices.
(We don't play this weekend, so there is no rush)
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page