Making a tabletop roguelike - Part One (Another Manifesto)

 (Or how I posted in a discord and got told by the mods to write a blogpost instead).

In response to me looking to get some TTRPG people onto Roguelike Radio, a fellow discorder Markus posted a link to his blogpost on Bringing Roguelikes to the Tabletop - a considered and well written piece on how to leverage some of the design tropes from modern roguelikes into table top role-playing games. It turns out this is not the first time someone has thought of this idea: another discorder (SamR) pointed out that the Old School Renaissance was in part inspired by an rpg.net post where a succession of adventurers lived and died in a procedural generated dungeon. Markus' argument (made on discord, in response to me) is that the key three roguelike elements (procedural generation, permadeath and system interactions) have already been incorporated by the OSR movement, and so examining repeated runs and metaprogression is more worthwhile.

I'm not going to pretend that I have encyclopaedic knowledge of the OSR genre (I believe I own one OSR game), but this struck a chord, because Sersa Victory - designer of OSR game Victory Basic, has adapted Unexplored's Cyclic Dungeon Generation into a tabletop version. Unexplored takes inspiration from Brian Walker's Brogue in many ways, but cyclic dungeon generation is unique to that game and an interesting innovation in procedural generation techniques. Unfortunately the algorithm is brittle and prone to failure states at many points (such as destruction or loss of keys), and I believe simpler and more robust dungeon generation techniques - such as adopted by Spelunky and Brogue itself - are generally more successful.

And SamR goes on to point out the more obvious problem with procedural generation in TTRPGS:

Meanwhile, procedural generation has fallen largely out of favor, because there’s an abundance of bespoke modules and referees can create their own content... Like the implicit promise of procedural generation is endless content that is nevertheless comprehensible. But any GM can create that no problem. [Ellipsis added].

So if procedural generation doesn't suit table top play well* -- and I'm not going to argue against a presumably more experienced wisdom of crowds --, what should a tabletop roguelike look like?

Rather than look at the modern roguelike, titrated and diluted through decades of implementation, I'm going to go back to our ur-text: Rogue, itself, to try to find some design principles that can define what a tabletop roguelike could be.

The first is a straight forward response to SamR's very excellent point. Glenn R. Wichman, Michael Toy, Ken Arnold and Jon Lane created Rogue because they didn't want to have to DM (whatever that mean - direct message? maybe email was too slow) and just wanted to play. A video game allows a set of constrained systems and rules to (mostly) safely operate for the player; whereas the explosive medium of table top play rules requires some kind of dampening effect like a carbon rod being inserted into the fissile material in a reactor -- a game moderator (GM) if you will (this is not a metaphor for sex maybe?). But this sounds like a lot of work and not enough play for one person (I suspect they should get paid). So any roguelike game is similarly going to forgo the need for this game moderator to allow everyone to play instead.

So a tabletop roguelike must be:

1. GM-less.

The second constraint naturally flows from the first. In a shared world, where everyone is a player, there is no authorial fiat: everyone must agree to the actions, outcomes and events (the systems). This is relatively straightforward in the game present because we can constrain situations of play to be within a specific space and time, but when it comes to backstory: it is too easy to create and miss contradictions in the wider world being made. So much like our Rogue, we are going to descend into the dungeon with a clear endpoint in mind (The Amulet of Yendor, in the original) and free of any past that might complicate this. The systems within the game may allow this past to be constructed, but we certainly don't want to play part way, and then realise we missed an important fact in a spin-off novel that negated everything we did.

2. No lore, one goal

(The easiest way to avoid the need for lore is to set the game in a modern setting -- any well documented historical setting would also suffice. The fantasy settings of OSR games might lean on D&D tropes enough to also apply -- certainly Rogue depends somewhat on this).

The third constraint will be where all the load-bearing design sits.

3. You can learn from your mistakes

You, as in you the player, not you the character. This is has many implications: the game systems must be complex enough that a simple solution is not obvious or (equally) random, but for which your gradual comprehension of the underlying rules and your capabilities as a player are of benefit. This also implies the possibility of an auspicious outcome instead of a steady descent into failure (even if auspicious simply means the last one to die, or the one to die most memorably). This also implies some repetition of systems, either through repeated play, or through enough similar scenarios that repetition dominates (but does not eradicate) variation.

Now I have sketched out the three design principles, it is relatively easy to cast around and find games in the same mold. I'll just pick three out:

Decaying Orbit - https://storybrewersroleplaying.com/decaying-orbit/

The Zone - https://thezonerpg.com/

Last Train to Breman - https://seaexcursion.itch.io/bremen

You'll notice pretty quickly that two out of three of these examples have at least one modern roguelike feature:

4. Cards

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* I can think of two examples where procedural generation can still be successfully accommodated in GMed TTRPGs: scenario creation and character creation -- particularly life-path style character creation. In both instances the participant is essentially playing a solitaire game with its own rules and constraints that then feeds into the larger shared play.

Setting fire to everything

I've been thinking a lot about the season 1 finale of Sens8 recently. It's a great piece of writing, bringing together a gestalt of characters with different abilities to achieve a goal much in the same way a table top role-playing game might. The finale is (mostly) set in an isolated facility in Iceland, and to get to the facility, the protagonist drives up in a expensive sports car with streams of blue smoke coming out from under the bonnet, and sneaks in while the red-blooded, car-loving guards are all distracted by the tragedy of a high performance vehicle gone to its death to soon.

In a TTTRPG, who comes up with that idea?

If it's the players, then congratulations: you've got the perfect OSR group capable of creative solutions to challenges and the rules just really need to get out of the way to let you play. If it's the game master or scenario designer, then that feels like there'd be the need for a lot of prompting for the solution, which might be hand-waived away with a couple of action checks.

But it's also probably not the first isolated facility you've had to get to, and it's definitely not the last. So how many times do we allow this technique to work? Maybe its not an isolated facility, but its a checkpoint in Gaza, and its not the first check point you've got to, but the fifth that day and you're going to have to go back through them in the other direction later on in the evening.

This is where the game designer steps in. We tend to focus a lot on the action check as a resolution mechanic, because its (usually) flexible and generic, and giving the players verbs to use are a really good idea, regardless of the medium, but action checks work best when situations are dynamic and the player's actions are varied and impactful (like combat); and less well when situations are repeatable and player influence on the outcome is limited.

I'd like to call this type of scenario an activity, to distinguish it from an action. Activities have repeatable outcomes, with limited scope for improvisation (or where we may wish to limit the scope for improvisation for thematic reasons) and are often tied to and reinforce the game's themes. Downtime is a good example of an activity. You get some points, spend them on some stuff, roll for some good or bad things to happen, and then get back to the important part of the game.

But activities should be in the important parts of the game as well; I'm just not sure they're designed as effectively. I've been thinking about the Sens8 scenario, because that corresponds almost exactly to something that comes up in my TTRPG Sixty Years in Space a lot. Arriving at a planet, asteroid or moon is almost exactly the same as arriving at an isolated facility: everyone can see you coming from a long way off, they have plenty of time to do something about it, and you need to turn up with a very good reason for why you're there.

Because we're doing this a lot, the players' first, smart idea of enforcing gun boat diplomacy on every world they go to is going to get repetitive fast - and may not fit in the themes of the game you're trying to create. But we don't want to hand waive away the impact of arriving at a site that you're not necessarily welcome at: instead we probably want to deal with a spectrum of reasons for turning up and responses. This feels like a perfect activity: at a minimum we'll construct some kind of list of things that a typical arrival goes through (are you travelling fast enough to explosively collide with your destination?, can they see whether you have weapons or contraband, what does customs think of you, do you need to quarantine for a while because the bug hunt you came from went a little awry), along with some skill checks to overcome some obstacles that may be put in your way.

But most players don't want to fill out a check list or a clock: they want to role-play. So maybe you decide that the activity should be a scenario: sitting inside your locked down ship while you wait to find out if any of your crew got replaced by a brain-sucking parasite sounds like a perfect sci-fi horror RPG. But it doesn't make much sense if you're delivering a cargo of fresh oranges. Hopefully the orange delivery guys like checklists more than the oopsie we did another Alien guys.

Or maybe you don't want to deal with this at all, and decide to just put a cut scene in, or a fade to black, and hand wave it away completely. Those are fine, but as a game designer, I like making systems more than scenes or scenarios.

I know of one way of creating an activity that's more complex than a check list, and more repeatable than a scenario - and so does every other board game designer. Because that's what I'm suggesting. If you can turn your down time or check list or clock filling exercise into a physical or logical map of a space with some rules for how you navigate it, then players will start to lean forward and engage with it in a way that elevates the experience. It might be as simple as a map of the space port, with the list of places that you have to go in order to get the paperwork completed to get past customs. It may be a combat system. It might be fire fighting rules.

I'm going to repost the TTRPG map making manifesto that I've posted elsewhere, because I think point 3 is especially relevant for the role-playing experience:

1. Put maps in your game for the players to use, not the GM

2. Make the maps force the players to make meaningful decisions about where, when and how to move on them

3. Have rules that make the players talk about the map the way that their characters would talk about the map

I'm still figuring out how best to use this idea. Sixty Years in Space has activities that drop tokens (dice, counters) on the map that have multiple meanings in different contexts (activities), but the overhead of each activity is quite high because they could all potentially interact with each other which means I have to keep scales and effects in line with each other.

I suspect the best way to do this is have different maps for different activities which have the same verbs so that players don't have to relearn the rules for each activity every time. Think of lock picking and hacking mini-games where the layout of the lock or computer system determines the approach you take, but the actions you use are consistent every time. Sixty Years in Space does the reverse: it has the same (High Frontier) map, and then gives you a whole lot of different actions you can perform on the map. And I keep adding them. The next update will feature a whole espionage game where you develop your contacts into agents on the map and then use them to enable covert operations and exfiltrations. That's a more verbs and more ways of reading the same map. This may be a cursed problem.

Sixty Years in Space 4All

One of the wild design decisions I made with Sixty Years in Space is that it's rules compatible with the board game it is based on. Not only in the sense that it uses the same terms and units (in both senses) as High Frontier, but in that it could get to your turn in the board game and you say "hold up", assemble a group of players to form your crew, sit down and play the roleplaying game from the game state on the board and after a year of in-game time, the outcomes will be compatible with having played your year-long turn in the board game. That is, the odds of prospecting a site will be the same, building a factory has the same requirements, printing space craft components will take as long and so on.

That's all well and good, but I based the Sixty Years in Space on the 3rd edition of the board game, and during the intervening 12 years, a 4th edition got released, High Frontier 4All. And it significantly changes some core concepts: specifically Space Politics (but also promotions, Bernals, spacecraft components, colonists etc).

Space Politics is a core part of the Sixty Years in Space game: it touches almost every aspect of procedural generation which means it's woven amongst all the rules. I've always had it in my head that I'll end up making a High Frontier 4All version of Sixty Years in Space, but I've never gotten around to it because of the effort required to maintain what amounts to two separate editions.

Fast forward to today: I'm now working on a lite version of Sixty Years in Space called Epic Hazard Operations. When I say lite, it's still going to be completely rules compatible with Sixty Years in Space. What's lite about it is the theme. It's set in the era (the Exoglobalisation era) that makes sense to have combat and space dungeons and professionals exfiltrating technologies from other colonies. It'll still have you building factories and colonies and moving about the solar system: but you'll be doing it with much simpler rules (freighter movement) because you'll be playing as a minor faction stuck on a "dustside" on the edge of space -- and the building is done by dedicated players called exoarchitects who sort of act like game masters except you can have lots of them. And it'll have a much more traditional class and/or life path system that you'll use to create your crew.

Because I can never do just one thing, Epic Hazard Operations will also be an expansion for Sixty Years in Space, subtitled A Facility with Words, which you already possibly own and which will contribute a significant chunk of to Epic Hazard Operations rules. I'll be doing the same PWIW release of the remainder which will form part of a new supplement, All Terras are My Own.

And I think I'm in a position where I've solved most of the compatibility problems between the two games. The 4th edition version of Space Politics are going to correspond to the faction doctrines. I've already solved how I'm going to make promotions compatible; anchoring Bernals was an idea I'd already borrowed from the 4th edition and so it's a more straight forward addition; colonists never really worked in Sixty Years in Space the way they worked in the 3rd edition so they're not going to change at all; and some of the new stuff in the 4th edition (like delegates) are going in relatively seamlessly.

ETA for the first release is around September, which will include update 5 for the remaining rules.

Update 4 for Sixty Years in Space is out

Update 4 for Sixty Years in Space is now out. This update is focused on completing the colony administration rules in (A)-Base (D)-Landing and expanding the counter and dice "vocabulary" used across the game. The (A)-Base (D)-Landing supplement is now also priced at the same pre-release price as all the other supplements and core rules; but if you contributed $60 or more to buying the core game rules, you now get it for free! The colony administration game is the most board-game like of the any of the rules I've written for Sixty Years in Space and focuses as much on the social stratification of your growing population due to housing insecurity and inequality as it does on the mechanics of ensuring that you have enough food and labour to keep the colony running. You can read the full release notes here.

The Seduction of Roguelikes

The power of adventuring through New Plan or seeing the map of the Forgotten Realms for the first time is in the gaps in the maps. The sense of possibility that these give -- not every rumour is true on the rumour table but it could be. And as a player in this space or referee running it or video game designer trying to make it or author trying to write about it, you try where possible to try to smudge the margins -- to spill the writing on the page or pixels on the screen out beyond their constant boundaries to excite the imagination of the participants about a thing that you cannot possibly create.

I have for nine years now been making what is for most people an unplayable game -- Sixty Years in Space -- which has had a modest level of success in part because people reading it fall in love with the idea of the game, rather than its implementation. It works best in this fashion as a science fiction novel without any characters in the genre that is the most successful at telling stories without characters. Sixty Years in Space is the natural conclusion of this process of spilling pixels beyond the boundaries of the page, because it describes a thing that will never exist, empowering hypothetical players to use the roguelike tools of procedural generation, systems expression and permadeath to literally add colour to space.

But you could easily go in another direction with the same roguelike tools. Rather than expanding on absences, you can build a total systemisation engine: a series of interlocking systems that encompasses every possible interaction; procedurally filling in all the gaps on the map; and use permadeath to build an attention field with slopes between boredom and adrenaline. Dwarf Fortress and Caves of Qud both do this: Dwarf Fortress as a city builder/fantasy world simulator and Caves of Qud as an open world RPG. In Caves of Qud, instantiated players consume what looks so far to be well implemented genre fare in a science fantasy wish fulfilment engine. It fixes "no gaps in the map" by ensuring wherever you look there's enough detail to excite you, without any of the friction of it having to make sense.

I don't intend to disparage Caves of Qud, which is more than happy to leave gaps for you to fill in its vast sweep of history, in its dull water-vine filled fields, in the articulation of its visual language and user interface, but more want to highlight that that the roguelike genre is a robust and vast enough an usul to contain both multitudes.

What's next for Sixty Years in Space?

Update 3 required a huge investment of time to put together - but it solved a number of problems with Sixty Years in Space. I really should take some time off to celebrate but I'm already thinking about starting writing further updates to the game.

I don't think I'll be making many changes to the Crewed Rules: and I anticipate those rules, along with All Errors are My Own, are unlikely to change significantly between now and some hypothetical version 1.0/ end of early access.

A Lot of Zeroes also didn't change much between updates 2 and 3 which suggests that it may be nearly feature complete. But A Lot of Zeroes is also different enough from the main game, that I might want to make it playable in a completely standalone fashion - with rules compatibility with a hypothetical Sixty Years In SRD, whatever that may be.

A Facility with Words would like to become two books, if it could: one about worlds with large populations -- and with more work done on civil functions and the exfiltration game -- and one about worlds with atmospheres and life. If I do make that split, the second book would be called All Terras are My Own, with a sub-game for terraforming worlds, much as I added a sub-game in (A)-Base (D)-Landing about base-building. A good part of expanding A Facility with Words will be making more encounter cards: for plants, animals and individuals and robots beyond the Advanced technology level that the current encounter cards stop at.

I shipped (A)-Base (D)-Landing with two empty chapters (which LaTeX conveniently compiled out) called Site Events and Colonists. This is part of the reason I'm comfortable only asking for a minimum of $1 for these rules -- not that they're incomplete: just that the base building game is missing some chaotic push back as you play. Both of those will tie together because the majority of site events will scale up with the number of colonists at site. The Colonists chapter will also add history encounter cards to give more context for the life that each colonist experienced back home on Earth.

There's also a number of supplements and spin-offs I've mentioned in the game or elsewhere. Absent Without is now going to end up covering the Directions era, starting in 2100 - now that Sixty Years in Space actually covers 60 years in space (2040-2099 inclusive). I'm still figuring out the shape of this, as many things that want to go in there may better be placed in other rules and as a result it's going to take a while. Colony: Subtitle is going to be a set of rules that cover getting from small colonies to big ones, with all that that entails: tax, legal systems, local politics - but also undersea exploration and an alternate scenario where humanity never leaves the surface of the Earth. RE: Crewed Rules is going to be an introductory scenario involving recruiting the crew and putting them through basic training. Of the Solar System is going to have a whole lot of faction missions -- one mission arc for each faction in All Eras are My Own -- and exists as material I initially cut from those rules. Six Meals in Space and Roche Limit are two card games that currently exist as a few scattered notes but could materialise at any point. I also at one point threatened to do a per-crew position rewrite of the rules called the 4Play system...

But first I think I'm going to address the chief culprit in the room - that there's too many rules and they're far too complex, still. Far too many for any playing group to be reasonably expected to learn. My argument has always been that space is complicated and getting it realistic takes a lot of work, and my expectation is that if you really care, you'll be willing to put in the work. But due to the segmentation of social media - and especially the evolution of TTRPGs to be more art, product and actual play focused - I'm finding that even connecting with the niche of a niche of people who I think will be interested is difficult - even as I struggle with discovering and clearly communicating the game. If you came to the rules in an earlier iteration, it appears you're not likely to come back.

And that's why I think I'm going to work on a different game for a while. It's going to be called Epic Hazard Operation. It's going to be about what happens from minute one of when the space station where you're working explodes, or the infection escapes, or the grey goo evolves. It's going to feature a crew from the bottom rung of society, the supervisors who try to keep them in line and the professionals who come to clean up afterwards. I'll try to make it as rules light as I can - which will still be rules heavy in the grand scheme of things. The secret sauce will be the players don't know the real rules. Because its designed for you, the Sixty Years in Space enthusiast, to act as the procedural generator for the map that they explore, the systems they don't know how to operate, the upgrades they don't know exist, the factions they don't know they can antagonise.

Update 3 for Sixty Years in Space is out

Update 3 is out for Sixty Years in Space is out. And I'm incredibly proud of it.

There's enough changes here that in many ways, this feels like an 1.5th edition. But the key improvement is I've found the shape of the game in a way that was unfortunately lacking in earlier versions. I've slimmed down the core (now called the Crewed) rules and put the focus firmly on space travel in the core game.  It includes significant revisions to the way actions work and a lot of new actions and activities such as phoning home, immigration and hull breaches, and moves the whole exploration of the surface of worlds to a new supplement (A)-Base (D)-Landing where it belongs: as a preamble to a whole new base building scenario for those players who like the idea of exploring and exploiting extraterrestrial worlds in much more detail.

The key change is tying encounters to the expansion of exoinfrastructure. As you move on the High Frontier map, you'll see other factions building factories and colonies and anchoring Bernals in a way that should make the solar system feel much more of a living and breathing thing without having to learn a whole lot more rules in This Space Intentionally or All Errors are My Own. And encounters have been expanded and simplified by adding encounter cards, so you can quickly create adversaries and allies without having to roll on a whole lot of tables every time you have an encounter.

In making this change, I've also tweaked and enhanced rules across all the supplements. But the Crewed Rules (the new name for the core rules) have received the most attention and polish to make Sixty Years in Space an easier version of the hardest sci fi TTRPG. The full release notes are available on the itch.io devlog post.

A Manifesto on Making Simulating Games

I’ve spent a lot of time listening to a lot of smart people talking about table top role-playing games and the great news is that I think the best podcasts out there are better than anything equivalent in the video or board game space.

But I want to challenge that run counter to a common assumption that games should be fun and game designers should be working towards maximising fun - or at the very least least defend the choices that I’ve made in Sixty Years in Space that make this game less fun. This is a gross simplification - of course - but concentrating on fun misses one of the other things games can do really well, and that’s simulation. I’m going to make a broad claim now, and that claim is table top role playing game designers are missing a huge amount of possible game design space by concentrating on fun rather than simulation; and the strengths of that game design space they’re missing out on are best done by table top role playing games (as opposed to video games or board games).

Argument one: Video games are great at mathematical simulation but terrible at mechanical simulation. What I mean by that is that video games have a limited palette of interactions: a controller, a keyboard and mouse, and perhaps some other (expensive) peripherals. Board games fall in the middle of the spectrum of mechanical simulation, but they come with the expectation that everything that is needed to play the game comes in the box. TTRPGs don’t have this limitation. You can create a TTRPG with any mechanical simulation you want. Dice. Cards. Miniatures. Food. Clothing. Glitter. Your imagination (and the wallets of your target audience) is the limit.

Argument two: Board games are terrible sand boxes because they have to have a limited number of verbs. Each verb in a board game is both a rule and a choice, which exponentially encumbers the player with learning both. Video games are better at allowing more verbs, because the player is able to experiment with the verbs they are given without needing to completely understand them, and in doing so can discover both new intended verbs and new unintended verbs enabled inadvertently by the rules of the game. Table top role playing games have potentially unlimited verbs: again, both the verbs and outcomes are limited by the player’s imagination. This is a double-edged sword: video games encourage creative play in a way that sometimes feels constrained in TTRPGs - more research and development is needed here to let players feel empowered enough to try verbs they haven’t used before and existing verbs in ways they haven’t tried before.

Argument three: Board games are not great at being open-ended. Video games are better: but the economic model of games as a service required to sustain forever games ultimately constrains what kinds of video games can be played forever. TTRPGs can go for as little or as long as you want. Again, all recent innovation in TTRPGs is towards creating games with a beginning a middle and an end; I’ve not seen nearly as much done work done investigating what a TTRPG that could run forever looks like.

Argument four: Video games aren’t great at embodying the actions you perform. I’m sure there’s a better term for what I mean: by “embodying the action” I mean that the physical and verbal actions that the player does and the thoughts the player has are the same as what someone doing what is being simulated would do and be. For instance, disarming a bomb might require reading a manual on how the bomb operates both in the game and in the real world while under a significant time constraint. Board games are better at this, although the mechanical and verb constraints limit what embodiment can be achieved. Table top role playing games can do almost anything here. TTRPG designers should be stealing from LARPs more.

Argument five: Table top role playing games are good at getting the players to think as a character, but for a while drifted away from getting the players to solve problems. Both board games and video games are better at this, but they shouldn’t have to be. And the problems that can be posed by TTRPGs include collaboration and social dynamics that can never be simulated in a board game or video game: for instance, acting as journalists forced to censor the news while working under an authoritarian regime. More TTRPGs should be creating interesting problems for the players to solve while letting role playing appear around the edges.

Argument six: TTRPG game components are transferrable beyond the wildest dreams of any NFT bro. You can literally take a board game and make it part of your TTRPG like I did. Likewise, you can steal the nationalities and ethnicities table from Sixty Years in Space and use it to help generate the background of any early 21st century NPC. The MOSAIC system is a great way to build up simulation subsystems that could be cleanly movable from game to game; but you can pretty much do the same with any map or game supplement.

Argument seven: Game literacy is improving. Dungeons and Dragons is the most popular TTRPG in the world, and no one could call it simple. Other examples: Minecraft. League of Legends. Elden Ring. These are complicated games with weird subsystems (crafting in Minecraft!?!) that players are willing to invest hundreds of hours in to understand. We should be making more TTRPGs where the pay off is worth the time invested. The key is figuring out what that pay off should be.

Argument eight: Table top roleplaying games create more interesting artefacts of play than video games or TTRPGs. Consider which contains more built-up history: a screen shot or a character sheet? I’m no fan of actual plays, but they appear to be persistent and meaningful in a way that game play videos are not. The value of simulation is often in the time invested in producing the outcomes, and these artefacts can provide a valuable trail of the path taken.

Argument nine: Creating worlds through play avoids the “porridge problem” — the issue where procedurally generated places and things blur into an indistinguishable soup of similarity. Even a +1 sword can be interesting in the hands of a player who rolls one short of their target in a key scene, instead of vendor trash. Many things we’d like to simulate will need procedural generation to populate part or all of the spaces in the game and simply limiting the pace at which players can reroll the dice goes a long way towards making each generated space meaningful.

Argument ten: TTRPGs are uniquely didactic. Video games don't require that you must understand their rules enough to be able to implement them. But board games are constrained in that at some point in understanding the rules of the game the simulation falls away and winning the game trumps realism. TTRPGs can always have "realism" trump their rules.

Sixty Years in Space update 2 is now out

 For more details see https://half-apress.itch.io/60-years-in-space/devlog/714676/update-2-is-out

Sixty Years In Space: Devlog 4

One of the great joys of maturing as a game designer is that I've got very good at making complex systems as simple as possible.

But it turns out when you decide to make a realistic TTRPG in space, all the rules you need to play end up being far more complicated than you'd otherwise think. For instance, if your crew is spending years travelling between planets, and you want them to care about what happens back on Earth, you probably want them to have family members and loved ones back home who are affected by events on the planet: disasters, pandemics and war. And the crew's parents will be aging and inevitably dying while the crew are away. There's several ways you could do this: but it'd seem weird and challenging to have an event where the player is suddenly forced to invent and immediately care about a bunch of people that their crew would care deeply about - so it makes sense to at least generate some information about the crew's relatives, friends and lovers during the character generation process - just like every other TTRPG does.

Sorry? What do you mean no other TTRPG has rules for generating a character's family?

This is not entirely true. I'm sure there are TTRPGs out there that do this. Feel free to list them in the comments. But I've got a number of games on my shelves and have experience with a whole lot more and apparently in all of them every character springs fully formed as an orphaned waif who has no connections to any other human outside of the party of adventurers they start with.

So even rolling 1D6 for how happy your childhood was, a few dice to see how wealthy your parents are and a few more to see how many siblings you have and where in the order of siblings you fall is more effort than 95% of TTRPGs put into family dynamics and of course every additional step in character generation makes it more complicated: enough so that the game apparently breaks most AI that attempts to parse it.

The whole system is already snowballing complications before we've even left the launch pad.

Speaking of which, despite leveraging High Frontier's rules for interplanetary travel, there's a whole lot of rocketry that the board game doesn't cover that I've had to include. There's a great blog post on suborbital hops I used to calculate the fuel requirements and travel times for one of the two possible suborbital travel methods using rockets, and the other required one of the few times I had to consult Atomic Rockets to help me solve the necessary equations (link goes to the seal of approval page for Sixty Years in Space).

I'm a game designer, not a physicist, Jim.

And finally we arrive at surface travel on a planet.

I've possibly spent more time writing the vehicle rules than anything else in the game: because they have to deal with varying atmospheric densities (which turns out is different from air pressure), local gravities and surface conditions, this again becomes much much more complicated than I'd like.

And then there's encumbrance systems. Let's state up front: there are no good encumbrance systems in TTRPGs and then also that Sixty Years In really needs one.

The game says that it really cares about mass. You're light minutes or hours from anywhere that can replace missing parts, but we're already fudging the game to say you can 3D print virtually anything - it's one of the premises of the High Frontier universe - but you can't just magic up mass out of nowhere, so when you want to walk 10 kilometres over the Lunar surface to mine an ice deposit, you're going to be carrying everything you need on your back. (It turns out you can't 3D print fabrics, so that space suit better not tear too often).

I'm rewriting the load system for the third or fourth time, and I think I'm finally happy with it.

This is a complicated decision. The game is already in early access and people will be reading and internalising the rules so it is generally a bad idea to immediately turn around and say "oh those rules you learned - throw them out of your brain please". I've worked this way with board game testers, and it literally burns people out - they stop playing your game and sometimes don't ever come back.

So this new version of the rules has to be exactly the same or very similar to the existing rules - which it is - but it has to be a whole lot more intuitive and expressive - and luckily it also is those things as well.

There's a lot of parameters that the encumbrance system has to model, but the biggest one is low gravity. Lowering gravity means that you can carry more stuff, because it weighs less, but the stuff you're carrying still slows you down, because acceleration is force divided by mass, and low gravity doesn't make you stronger. The game handles this by having a permitted load, which increases with lower gravity, but then a separate penalty based on load applied to things like net thrust.

At the moment, this is summarised on a load table, which gives you a bunch of slots, where each item has an appropriate slot it fits into, and the whole thing is entirely driven by something that makes no sense and you have to look up every single time. Then I have to special case balanced and fitted items, which affect your permitted load less, and the rules got even more complicated (but still as simple as possible).

I hated this so much, I completely rewrote it to go back to a simple you can carry so many mass points (either centitanks, WT or a new O2t point scale) and just subtract items from this mass amount when you need them, but it turns out I hated this even more. (I've kept the idea that you can manifest items just-in-time rather than having to state what you have in advance - and that'll directly translate into carrying ink and 3D printing items when you need them for the High Frontier 4All compatible rules).

And then I had an idea.

Here's the new load table.

Each square represents (for a crew member) 4 kilograms. You cover up squares as you load up equipment and your load number is equal to the highest number you cover up. Equipment slots are represented by multi-square items: B for 8 kilogram slot items through to F for 125 kilogram slot items.

If you cover up a light grey grid, you get a -1 movement modifier (net thrust minus 10 in the original table); a medium grey grid means you have a -2 move modifier and a dark grey grid means you have a -3 move modifier.

The new load table is exactly mathematically equivalent to the old load table if you arrange your items correctly on it, but it's a whole lot more intuitive. The downside is it only goes up to load 16 but we'll deal with that later.

Except here's the new load table.

Now the load table incorporates the notion of balanced loads. It's mathematically equivalent to the old load table plus the "balanced load" special case rule which let you carry more balanced items -- each only counting half as much to the permitted load but the full amount to the move modifier. You can see how for a flatbed truck or a train, we could also treat this as spatial information and have items which can fall off, but don't improve the overall performance of the vehicle because there's an unbalanced item sitting elsewhere on the vehicle.

Except here's the new load table.

This load table is approximately equivalent to the notion of fitted loads - things like spacesuits which fit on your body and therefore a lot closer to your centre of mass -- and which count only as their actual mass for permitted load (I didn't tell you that the power series in the load table doubles the load mass for every 4 increase in load). But to do that, we need to have space suits load templates which fit as closely as possible to the "astronaut shape" drawn in the lighter greys on the table.

We've invented a paper doll inventory system from (close to) first principles.

This will all be incorporated (once it's tested) in update 2, but I've given you enough information to start using it now if you want to.

Sixty Years In Space: A Primer

 

Sixty Years In Space is the officially licensed tabletop roleplaying game of the High Frontier board game, which means it already starts with all the hard rocket science that the board game includes. And the inspiration doesn't stop there: you'll be exploring the solar system, finding water and building factories just like in the board game except zoomed in to the scale of individual crew members rather than from the perspective of the mission control. But it doesn't limit itself to the practicalities of space exploration at a human scale.  While you're in space, Earth society will be changing, including your mission control, and a significant part of the game is deciding how your crew reacts to the missions your are assigned and the technologies imposed on you.

The game is extremely crunchy - the core rules and first 4 supplements run to nearly two thousand pages - and covers everything from microgravity health risks to robots to colonies. Rather than having a fixed future, your crew will be responsible for defining and reacting to it over the course of their lives, with potential life spans measured in the millions of years or more. It also doesn't have a game master, instead relying on random tables to create missions, other factions, rewards and even space dungeons!; condensing systems modelling insolation, agricultural area and population distribution down into relatively simple maps generated by dropping different coloured counters and dice and placing playing cards. And if you're fascinated by the High Frontier board game map, the A Lot of Zeroes supplement has an appendix which provides guidance on how to create maps for solar systems other than our own.

It's hard to overstate just how much stuff is in this game, with small gems of insight on each page about what a part of a possible future in space might look like. But fortunately you can download the first 120 pages of the core rules for free along with a chapter on space infrastructure and terraforming from the This Space Intentionally supplement, even if you don't envisage playing the game with your regular gaming group.

Marvel Snap

Per my wont, I have become obsessed with another game: the 3 lane card battler Marvel Snap. I've been largely uninterested in large deck card games since 1995 because the deck building possibility space is too big - I always ran as slim and simple a Magic deck as possible using cards that were just clearly better than others like "true" dual lands and lightning bolt. Even Imbroglio's deck building is too complex for me, but the difference between 16 locations and the 12 cards in the Marvel Snap deck is apparently enough for me to dive deep into the collection and play mechanics.

I've mostly been posting bite-sized takes on Twitter which includes some microblogging about the game. A good recent example is my thoughts on Move decks at https://twitter.com/andrewdoull/status/1662591178708242433 which seems to have largely predicted the outcome of the latest card addition Ghost-Spider. If you're not familiar with the game, I summarize it at https://twitter.com/andrewdoull/status/1661002185960980482 and I highly recommend you read through that before proceeding further if you haven't played the game recently or at all.

I want to emphasize here that the game design is fundamentally solid and the designers are operating at a level of ongoing excellence that I've not seen in a live service game (Caveat: I wasn't around for the early days of Slay the Spire). A lot of Marvel Snap players are probably coughing into their tea at this statement - Second Dinner, the developers, apparently designed the game in 2 days and then took 4 years coming up with the card acquisition model, and that part of the overall experience is very rough at the moment. Undoubtedly there's a lot of internal pressures between monetization, community pressure to do the right thing, and (hopefully) pivoting to an improved card collection mechanic that they've been promising. The big error they've made is they're trying to hold back some clearly good but not great cards in order to do something with them, after creating the expectation that those cards were going to drop down to a more accessible tier in the acquisition mechanic.

That stuff doesn't especially interest me. As I've said elsewhere, you should play with the cards you have, not the cards you want, and besides I have some hot takes that the held back cards aren't that interesting (except for Zabu. And MODOK, for reasons I outline below).

What does interest me is the deck building space on the margins of the game, such as this deck which depends on you drawing 3 cards and playing them on turns 4, 5 and 6, and works extremely hard to make that happen. Part of how it works is the surprise of playing Spectrum as opposed to much more frequently played cards on a Wong -> Mystique combo, and the opponents realization that the low powered cards you played are because they have the Ongoing keyword rather than their abilities. I outlined in more detail the principles at play at https://twitter.com/andrewdoull/status/1665511669135740928.

That this deck is possible, is because of the redesign of the card Crystal, which used to work like the location Attilan but only if you played it in the center location. Because of tempo, there was almost never any benefit to playing the old Crystral, whereas the redesigned Crystal is now useful in decks looking for specific card combinations, like the one above. The devs have provided some insight into their process for Crystal specifically on Discord, an entirely transient and non-linkable medium, but luckily there are screen shots at https://twitter.com/MarvelSnapBugle/status/1667021988995399688 - in essence, the cost of redesigning a card from scratch is high enough that they're better off making a new card in almost all instances.

Which leads me to a couple of conclusions. One of which, naturally, is that I'm going to backseat design some new cards. The other of which is we haven't seen the full picture - the cards that currently look underpowered are either that way because there's new cards coming that will indirectly buff them (one new card referenced is likely Legion), because it's too hard to buff them cleanly by just adjusting their power or cost, or because they're actually better than expected.

A common complaint is Second Dinner is much happier to nerf cards than buff them. This is inevitably true, as any live service game is prone to power creep - I think the meta at the start of the current season at time of writing (Spider-Versus) was just fractionally too good to allow for much fun experimenting with decks and while the latest over the air (OTA) patch has gone some way to address this, bounce decks are likely still too strong. What interests me though is the cards that feel too weak at the moment but haven't been buffed - examples might include Strong Guy and Black Cat - because they point to data that isn't publicly available which suggests they're performing better than expected in decks which aren't in the current meta.

This is especially true if there isn't an upcoming card which will potentially buff them. The next season's cards have been announced - some of my initial thoughts on Phoenix Force, the July season card are at https://twitter.com/andrewdoull/status/1662620224410238976 which starts (hilariously in retrospect) ignoring the most obvious synergies in favour of a bunch of weird edge cases which may not even work at all. But, for instance, Strong Guy and Black Cat don't synergize with any upcoming cards  - except Black Cat with Night Nurse, and that's only going to be useful if you have The Collector out. I'm not entirely ruling this out, because +1 or -1 power is often significant enough a buff or nerf to make a difference, but I don't think its enough in this instance.

So that is a strong hint that there's a deck using those discard cards that wins a lot of games. I've seen something similar with Shanna - there's some viable Shanna decks out there that won't really hit the meta until Shanna drops to tier 3 this month which effectively means it's in the main card acquisition pool. Shanna works because you can get to around 20 points in each lane if locations permit, and that's the typical threshold for winning 2 lanes. If the locations permit is the big caveat which is why this deck isn't played that often (and why Legion is likely to be a big buff for it).

So let's talk MODOK. MODOK discards all your cards, and should theoretically synergize with Strong Guy who gets +6 power, but in reality MODOK is only used in Hela discard decks, which normally play Apocalypse and Apocalypse cannot be discarded (he gets buffed instead). Some Hela decks instead run without Apocalypse, but they are frustratingly unreliable because they keep discarding Hela, unless MODOK is hidden behind Invisible woman turn 5 along with Hela on turn 6. For a so-called invisibility power, this is incredibly telegraphed and takes a lot of set up and luck.

But I ran into a deck about a month ago that absolutely wrecked me using a combination of cards I haven't seen before: it ran MODOK without Hela or Apocalypse, and instead relied on Collector and Morbius. This is also a natural synergy, but it normally uses a lot more discard cards, whereas this deck relied on card acquisition cards like Sentinal to have a 7 card hand on the final turn and dropping Agent 13 and Morbius. That's a +16 power with two cards, and an empty hand, which makes me think that Strong Guy would work well in the mix (for another +6 in another lane). So my theory is that there's a deck, that is just wrecking house, but no one is picking up on it whereas some game designer at Second Dinner is just smiling and waiting for people to figure it out.

The problem is I don't have MODOK to test it. Which goes back to the card acquisition dilemma I mentioned earlier.