[Caterpillar] A Space Game of Space Pirates in Space

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Josh Porter:
I'm currently working on this game: Caterpillar.

It is a silly game about space pirates, inspired by 3:16 and Poison'd, of course.  The tone, as I mentioned, is quite silly. The mechanics operate the way I hoped (at least in the playtests I've done so far), and the play is fun.  I am a fan.

I would like some feedback, though, on a few aspects of the game.
Are the rules organized in a comprehensive order/format?Does the silly tone of the game come across through the rules as written?Does the currency of the game flow in a way that drives interesting play?I know the game is fun when I play it with my friends, but will that fun translate out of my play group?  Can the game be picked up and played as-is by the average fun-seeker?  That's what I hope to learn from you fine folks.  There are three PDFs linked here, the rules so far, the different character sheets for each kind of pirate, and the examples that will be inserted as sidebars into the final copy.  Let me know what you think!  Thanks, everybody!

The Rules
The Character Sheets
The Examples

Kyle Van Pelt:
Honestly, this looks like a lot of fun. As far as your bullet points:

1. The rules seem to make sense and are laid out in a decent fashion.
2. The game seems most silly when reading about Skulls, looking at sample character names, and perusing the random roll tables.
3. Observing how the currency flows will require play, which I'll try to do soon if you need playtesting done.

Out of curiosity, how often do you plan on Promotions occurring per character? Once per session?

The game, at the very least, is enjoyable enough of a concept to play. I'll give it a shot with some friends and see how it goes. Are there any specific goals you have in mind for playtests?

Josh Porter:
Thanks for reading!  It's really good to hear that the game sounds fun and appealing to a complete stranger (you).

As far as your questions are concerned:  I expect promotions to happen roughly once every session or so.  Maybe you won't quite get one one session, maybe you'll get two next session, etc.  One thing I did realize after the last playtest, was that I need to shorten the accident track for promotions.  Previous playtests had all the pirates chain-rolling off each other, and one player racked up enough accidents to become an ensign in the first 50 minutes of the game.  So with that, I created the skull boxes to temper the die-rolling, and make sure everyone gets a fair shake and equal spotlight time.  But it means that now the accident track needs to be shortened again to reflect the revised pace of the die rolls.

I would love it if you (and/or anyone) would playtest the game.  I don't know if it would quite fit to post actual plays in this thread or not (or whether they need to go in the AP section of the forums), but I'd love to see some to see how it plays with you.  I'll write up and post some APs here as well, and even post the recording I made of our last session, which was tons of fun.

As far as the goals I'd like to see for playtesting, they are phrased as questions below:
Does the pacing of the game match up with the promotion system and the BoneTracks of each pirate.  (Does the game promote/kill them too fast or slow?)Is the RA able to run a session flying by the seat of his/her pant with no prep? (Are there enough tools to support it?)Does the game inherently motivate the players enough to drive the game forward in interesting ways without a Beliefs/Best Interests/Ambitions mechanic?What issues or problems did I not foresee yet in my own design and playtests?  (What breaks the game?)
Thanks for your interest, Kyle!  I'll get to posting some actuals plays on here in a bit.

Josh Porter:
The first playtest:

Characters
Mya: Turquoise Jacket (the Earthling) - She is a lady with a beard
Morgan: Hngh! (the Primer) - He has a secret kitten and infinite ammo.
Nathan: Nokia Qwest-Lockheed (the Fairy) - He has about 20 fake _book accounts (pronounced "space book")

What Happened in the Fiction
The new recruits are arrayed on a stage in the mess hall, just as laid out in the "Starting the Game" section in the book.  When Dugan the NPC goes up to the lectern to address the crew, Hngh! walks up and smacks his head into it, which is a hilarious Primer prank.  We then decide that the standard Primer handshake involves grasping the other's collar and head-butting each other as hard as possible.  This action results in a gigantic brawl, where all the recruits are fighting against each other to prove how cool they are.  Nokia hacks people's _book accounts and tries to defame a poor, hapless Fairy named Compaq Presario.  It goes on for a while and all are accepted, except for the spy who pulls his gun on the captain. 

Hngh! shoots the guy, but keeps having accidents, so the spy stays on his feet for a while, but is eventually taken down.  At that point, the giant head of a Royal Naval Admiral (Enron Hewlett-Packard) appears in the mess hall, just like The Last Starfighter.  He laughs at the crew and reveals that his spy has hidden a tracking device on their ship.  The Caterpillar will be surrounded when it surfaces.  Gasp!  Nokia searches the webbernet and reveals to everyone that Enron has secretly been writing Who's The Boss fanfic for years.  Enron is embarrassed and signs off in a huff.  The captain gets the crew ready for battle, and  sends the new recruits to find the tracking device.

What Happened Around the Table
The first session was a wild success.  It was chaotic in a good way, and full of comedy.  The players all embraced the ideas of declaring new facts about the world, and loved having accidents when they didn't succeed.  The game did need a way to keep all the players a little more balanced in terms of spotlight, however, and Hngh! got a promotion incredibly fast because his player, Morgan, kept rolling and rolling constantly.  The whole session was a little over two hours long, and did an excellent job of fleshing out the setting and the mechanics.  Session two post to come.

Josh Porter:
Actual Play Session Two:

A New Character
Tim: The Hammer-Polisher (The Rocket) - He has a chimp named Tungsten and a gigantic wrench

What Happened in the Fiction
Turquoise Jacket discovers a secret tracking beacon the size of a table nestled in a Jeffries tube above the kitchen.  She talls Hngh! about it and he shoots at it through the ceiling, but his success becomes complicated as the laser from his bullet narrowly misses Turquoise Jacket.  With the transmitter destroyed, Nokia back-hacks it and declares that Enron Hewlett-Packard and his battleship are hiding inside old earth's hollow moon.  He updates Enron's hacked _book account and broadcasts it to everyone (and gets a friend request from Captain Swallowtail).  The Hammer-Polisher meets and old friend from home (The Pants-Loser) who introduces him to the captain.  There, The Hammer-Polisher reveals his ingenious plan: to "repair" the tracker and send it out through The Deeps on a boarding pod, giving the enemy a false trail.  The Caterpillar will then catch the Navy ship from behind.

The plan goes off swimmingly.  The H-P fixes the beacon and sends it out, but the remote blows up in his hands, prematurely.  The Caterpillar lunges out of The Deeps and finds the enemy battleship right in their sights.  Hngh! brilliantly chooses to ride a torpedo (Dr. Strangelove style) toward the enemy bridge, and fires himself off almost immediately.  The crew engages in battle.  Nokia launches all of the escape pods and pilots them as a single giant organism (like the gore crows in Sabriel, if you've read it).  Turquoise runs the targeting computer, but cocks it all up, having an accident.  Uh-oh!  It looks like the sensors missed that destroyer behind you!  The Hammer-Polisher cranks the guns to 11, McGuyver style, while Hngh! sends back telemetry data from his torpedo mount.

The crew is SUPER-EFFECTIVE!  They do enough damage to the enemy (in a single exchange) to immediately board.  But first they must dodge that sippery destroyer.  They succeed (with just a little mishap-ery) and proceed to close in to board the battleship.  Meanwhile, Hngh!'s torpedo has flown through an open (broken) window on the bridge, and he hits his head on the ceiling, knocking him on his ass.  He pulls his gun and fires at the fanciest man he can find (and succeeds), who turns out to be the ship's magician.  A dove flies out of his wound.  Back on the Caterpillar, the crew readies the boarding pods, and The Hammer-Polisher mistakenly gives his pet chimp a block of C4.  Tungsten the chimp blows himself up, along with many other pirates.  How sad.

Regardless of setbacks, the crew successfully sends its boarders over.  They meet some marines upon arrival, but Turquoise Jacket bypasses them with the angry mob she has assembled and heads for the control room.  Nokia Qwest-Lockheed (who sent his flunky over in his place, along with his floating robot eye) jacks into a marine and guns down several more.  Hammer-Polisher throws his auto-hammer into the fray, and rigs up a downed marine's gun as a turret.  The marines hadn't a chance.  Turquoise Jacket arrives at the control room, and throws her mob into a frenzy, they defeat the hapless door guard and storm the room.  Inside Turquoise proceeds to force the control-room-ers to get very drunk, probably to screw up all the systems aboard ship.

On the bridge, Hngh! sees the admiral (who has been endowed with an irrational fear of vaccuum) rushing down a hallway.  Hngh! shoots out a nearby window, sucking them both out into space.  The admiral's re-breather and epaulets are stolen, and he is Falcon Kicked out and away, only to thud into the side of the destroyer.  Nokia begins hacking the destroyer's computer systems, while Hngh! races back to the bridge and charges up the experimental Yamato gun.  Concurrently, Nokia flubs his hack and launches all the destroyer's torpedos and Hngh! fires the Yamato gun, draining every single iota of power from the battleship.  The massive gun blast daisy-chains an explosion of torpedos and utterly destroys the destroyer, while a suffocating admiral Enron Hewlett-Packard rides the shockwave, screaming noiselessly.  As the power drains, one of the drunk idiots down in the control room pulls the "eject control room and plasma core" lever, and Turquoise Jacket barely leaps through the blast doors in time to save herself.  The pirates have won their first battleship, but it is completely drained of power and control.  How fittingly hilarious.

What Happened Around the Table
This session flowed much more cleverly than the previous one.  I give the credit to the Skull Boxes, which were not a part of the game as of the first playtest.  The spotlight naturally switched from one pirate to the other, leaving no one out, which was quite satisfying.  Accidents were, again, a huge part of the story.  They created most of the interesting wrinkles that developed in the fiction.  In addition, this session I began complicating low successes far more than I had previously, and it was incredibly fun.  It got to the point where the other players were requesting complications to add to their successes.  That's how much fun they were.  There were a few minor math oddities that I noticed during play (and will probably revise), but they didn't break the game at all.  The other players barely noticed or commented on them.

I achieved more insight on the Skull Box mechanic and on the promotion mechanics during this session.  The Skull Boxes not only move the spotlight, but also nudge players into performing actions that do not seem obvious, but create more interesting fiction.  The big stompy man can't keep shooting things over and over; he is forced to use his "non-shooty" die when the shooty one is in the Skull Box.  It created some really great stuff. 

In addition, I realized that the promotion mechanics allow pirates to min-max the ever-loving crap out of their (minimal) stats, and that's OK.  Since the most common way to get promoted is by having accidents, being too good at anything actually slows down your advancement.  It encourages players to keep their stats at a level where they can still fail.  Also, having a high target on a stat means that you are more likely to roll under by a larger margin, thus increasing the likelyhood of complications accompanying your success.  I think the promotion and die mechanics balance each other quite well.

And if You Have Some Free Time
I recorded about 95% of our session and you can listen to it here.  It begins with the crew looking for the secret transmitter that the Royal Spy had hidden on the Caterpillar.  Be warned, not only is it two hours long, but it is also full of tangents about such things as: cats presenting, can there be raw ham?, the Penn State scandal, modem dubstep, and many others.  My group loves to bullshit and talk over each other, but the tone of the game really comes across, and you can hear some fun stuff.  If you're like me and love listening to actual plays (The Walking Eye in particular), you may enjoy listening to this.

Thanks everyone!

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