Even more musing on gamewriting

[ultranos]

(Aside: I'm amused that no one is going to try to get me to talk about something else here. I'm just going to chalk that up right now to the fact that a significant percentage of you know me in RL and can easily ask me to my face.)

I'm happy to say that it looks like my friend's homebrew tabletop system (based in the Persona universe) seems to work very well. I will admit I was skeptical about the ease and randomness involved in using tarot cards as a source of entropy and your card hand to determine what spells you can cast in combat. (Dice are still used for some things.) But overall, it's very fun.

Seeing this experiment's promising beginnings (last night was the first run), I'm a little less scared of attempting my own campaign setting and altering rules for either of the two games I'm writing. Especially since the one I'm working on first is not nearly as far as a homebrew system. Now that I've gotten over that hurdle, all that's left is designing the universe, writing it, and making sure it's not terribly broken. :) Okay, yeah, that's a lot harder than it sounds.

Since the party is nominally supposed to be space pirates, one of the very first things I need to figure out is the scope. The largest would be the entire Milky Way galaxy (a la Mass Effect and Stargate, for example) or a small portion of the galaxy. Really, what this boils down to is how effective I want to make FTL (or by what mechanism FTL works on. No, I'm not using "warp speed", thank you very much.) After determining that, I can figure out the various organizations and governments the intrepid band of scoundrels (the party) will have to deal with.

Also, on an not-entirely-unrelated-note, I think I'm going to have to start digging up my old notes on Centauri. I believe I will be revisiting that universe very soon. :)

(See, this is what I start thinking about at work these days when I get zonked out on MATLAB.)

Comments

[rodlox.livejournal.com]

on one hand, the scale helps determine scope...but the scope can also determine scale.

I guess the question is what are you looking to do? if you'll just be on each planet only long enough to make a brief stop on the edge of one city (ala Firefly), then it can be a big scope, because otherwise you run out of planets.

[ultranos-fic.livejournal.com]

I'm not generally a fan of the cliche "every planet has one type of distinguishing feature, be it climate or city or whatever", despite how often it's used. The scientist in me wails about how unrealistic it is, but I see how it's so damn practical.

That being said, establishing a large scope allows for the choice of making it a series of brief stops at a few cities on series of planets, or developing them more. Like you said, otherwise you run out of planets.

I'm not sure exactly how much exploration of lots of worlds in-depth there needs to be, if the player characters are specifically designed to be "space pirates", meaning they spend most of their time in space and not on land.

[rodlox.livejournal.com]

would the Bootes Void be any help?
(pretty much the biggest *empty space* known to date)

[ultranos-fic.livejournal.com]

Oooh...I can do things with this.

I think this is the part where the "evil laughter" is cued. :)

Thank you!