Over at Story Games I posted about some of my more recent works in progress, one of which is One Giant Leap. I expanded upon it a bit at Iain's request:
One Giant Leap is a game about space exploration, a pseudo-hard sci-fi game about astronauts travelling out into the solar system to visit other planets and finding weird stuff there. It's directly inspired by the likes of 2001: a space odyssey, Solaris and Sunshine, three sources of inspiration that immediately put paid to my hard sci-fi label. It's all realistic-ish science until they meet the weird shit, k?
The game is divided into three phases, which represent the various parts of the mission, and escalating tension and doom as they approach (and reach) their destination. I'm thinking along the lines of having a limited budget of scenes in each part of the mission, alongside mission log scenes, a la confessionals in InSpectres.
Players create their own adversity by writing down skills that they want challenging during the mission on index cards. Then the other players grab the cards and write out an appropriate challenge. These challenge cards are placed face down in the middle of the table with d10s on them that players can count down at any time. When they hit 0 the challenge rears it's ugly head and the players have to deal with it.
Players also have various pools of counters or dice that represent nebulous things, such as composure, health and resources. To give themselves a bonus when overcoming challenges, or as part of the consequences for failure, they can spend these points. In doing so they have to write something down related to it, such as a skill or ability they possess or a resource the ship has onboard. Other players can then threaten or even destroy these exposed traits, a bit like things you hold dear in Grey Ranks.
I'm not entirely sure whether there will be a GM (Mission Control) or whether adversity will all be player generated. I'm hoping as the mission progresses the stress will pile on and things will start to fall apart of their own accord. We'll see how it goes though!
Why would one count down on
Submitted by Tim Gray on Sun, 10/06/2007 - 18:12.
Why would one count down on a face-down card (where, presumably, all the information is hidden)?
Tim Gray
Silver Branch Games
www.silverbranch.co.uk
I'm thinking that the way
Submitted by Andrew Kenrick on Mon, 11/06/2007 - 07:10.
I'm thinking that the way the mission progresses to the next stage is by overcoming a certain number of challenges, so there's an incentive.
Plus, the alternative might be worse - you might have a choice between being injured or losing something, or counting down a card, so that might be a lesser of two evils.
Is that what you meant?
The three films you mention
Submitted by Iain McAllister on Mon, 11/06/2007 - 23:22.
The three films you mention all have that feeling of paranoia to them and how an enclosed space can affect people and their relationships. Any plans to handle this in the game or would it just occur through challneges?
Cheers
Iain
Lead Developer Mob Justice RPG
'The Giant Brain' has launched.
Stress
Submitted by Andrew Kenrick on Wed, 13/06/2007 - 11:16.
The three films you mention all have that feeling of paranoia to them and how an enclosed space can affect people and their relationships. Any plans to handle this in the game or would it just occur through challneges?
Oh yes! The currency in the game are 3 shared pools: resources, composure and health. You spend them to gain automatic successes, representing your training, equipment and whatever coming into use, but as you spend them they turn into stress which mission control (the GM) can use against you in the future. I'm hoping that by the end of the game everyone will have ran out of their pools and successes become less likely, and the stress will be piled on. Plus, because the pools are shared, if you dip in too regularly your fellow players might start to take umbridge!