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.