Probably SW, Dungeon Planet, or a homebrewed system that I've been mulling over (You won't need any books and the system will be pretty simple.) I could be persuaded into running something else if I already have it.
The setting with be a Star Wars-ish kinda place with a multitude of worlds and races, soft sci-fi, and strange and unexplainable powers in the galaxy. I want to do a small squad/crew kind of thing with the first adventure being all of you meeting up or your first assignment together.
One thing I am kinda undecided on is whether to go full science-fantasy and have explicit magic, or keep it more vague like the Force.
Have you read Mindjammer? It's currently one of my favorite sci-fi RPGs and uses the FATE system.
No I haven't. I may take a look.
That said, I've been itching to do a sci-fi game lately. Any takers?
I've got plenty of bandwidth and love anything sci-fi. I've contemplated running Star Wars here in Paizo, but I'm also running Middle Earth right now and one campaign is enough to GM at a time.
I'd be interested in any game that uses Savage Worlds. Other systems, not so much.
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You are sorely tempting my inner world-builder and GM here.
That said, I've been itching to do a sci-fi game lately. Any takers?
YESSSS!!
YEEEEESSSSSSSSS!!!
By "SW" I assume you mean the BEST system-- Savage Worlds, of course!
I love Love LOVE the Sci-FI Savage Worlds system. The ship-building system is SO intrinsic and SO good. I love their weapons, I love their shields, I love how they've got (almost) everything covered.
I would Ab-so-lutely devour me some SW Sci-Fi.
(note: I've done a lot of Dungeon Worlds and...I like the system but. Ironically I feel it pigeon holes a character too much, because your specialty is too limited. I also feel it punishes risk because so many bad things revolve around hp damage, and healing is so rare. Mind you, I've ran both a vampire and a Mastermind in sci-fi DW settings, so I don't complain toooo strongly...I guess it's just one of those systems that I've played a lot and kinda like but don't actually recommend.)
I'm pretty close to full up but curious. It's been a while since I played science fantasy in SW. :)
Yup, Savage Worlds was the SW system.
Alright, give me some time to write done and polish some things as well as refresh myself on the rules. Unfortunately, I'm going to be busy over the next week or so. It's probably going to be mid december before I get the ball rolling here.
I've no problem with that.
Just curious, will your sci-fi world have tech advanced enough for an autonomous robot to be a PC? I've always wanted to see how well the SW sci-fi rules work for that...
Yes, and cyborgs, and you'll be able to purchase upgrades, but I'm planning on taking a page out of some GURPS GMing advice I saw a long time ago. "If a player buys it with points, you have to give them a chance to recover it or replace it if they lose it through no fault of their own. If they buy it with money, it's fair game."
Also planning on having espers and orders of knights based off of them, but I need to figure out exactly how that works, though I do have an idea. See the spoiler below and let me know what you think.
Characters with the Esper Edge get 3 Psi Points +1 per Psi Point Edge. As long as a character has at least 1 Psi point, they can use their Esper abilities. Each time a character fails a Esper skill roll, they lose 1 Psi Point. Psi Points are recovered at a rate of 1 per hour's rest. If an Esper hits 0 Psi Points, they must make a Vigor roll or pass out.
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I'm a power-gamer at heart, so I'm constantly fighting against myself to maximize everything. I've seen guys who do that, and I can't imagine that they're enjoying themselves.
Anyway, it means that there's a real, live, A-TAC program always running in the back of my head going "How could I bypass that restriction?"
For your proposed rule, I'd just makes sure to buy my skill as high as I could, at least a d10, so that I'd hardly ever fail. Remember that the Wild Die means your base fail rate is never below 50%, and even a d6 in a skill drops that to 25%. (I'm sure ZenFox will have many more numbers.)
Anyway, I'd either make it more cutthroat, as in, to include a failed roll on -ANY- die. i.e. If you roll an 8 on your main die, but a 3 on your Wild die, you still lose a psi point,
or
I'd put a cap on the skill die relative to char level. i.e. You can not have your Esper skill higher than a d8 at Novice, d10 at Seasonsed, etc....
Just some initial impressions. IMHO. YMMV.
Hmm, not quite. Here's the statistics comparing the original to your proposal. Even with a d12, just over 1 out of every 5 rolls is resulting in a lost Psi Points. Admittedly, I could have messed up with the rules used to generate those odds.
Psi Points are also much harder to recover since you only get 1 back if you rest for an hour. That means no adventuring or even walking around or thinking about something too hard, which means you'll be steadily losing those points throughout the day most of the time. I'm also planning on putting restrictions onto the Psi Points edge similar to the Power Points edge, that'll limit you to 4 Psi Points as a novice, +1 per level up to legendary. Legendary characters will have to spend multiple edges in order to get 1 Psi Point. At them moment I'm leaning towards 2 edges.
Also, I was thinking about doing something similar to Extra Effort where you could spend 2 Psi Points to make a failure into a success as well as other ways to spend them. The problem is trying to avoid making them too much like Bennies.
So, yeah, not as cut and dry as it might appear.
Allysen - your formulas are all incorrect, they should be ">= 4". Also, why are there two bars ("0" and "1") for each formula - what do they represent?
So you can check your results, a "regular" d6 roll with Wild die should have a 75% chance of success, and a d10 should be 85%.
So an esper with a d10 should be able to cast 6-7 spells on average before losing a psi point. With 4 psi points, an esper could cast 18-21 spells per day (leaving 1 psi point to avoid passing out). To compare, an SWD d10 Mage could successfully cast 2-4 spells before being completely done for the day. I'll take an esper any day!
Whoops, that'll show me to do this late at night. The bars are for failure and success, 0 for failure and 1 for success. Here's the actual statistics for those rolls
Since the Espers are supposed to be Ersatz Jedi and other Force users, I think that result is what I'm looking for. A d10 would be a very skilled Esper and should be able to do a lot of hopping around. On the flip side, not ever mechanical advantage has to have a mechanical disadvantage. Narrative disadvantages can also be used to balance things. At the moment, Espers have either obligations or people after them for their powers. I can probably think of some other things to throw out there, too. As I mentioned in my last post, I also want to add some things that Espers can spend Psi Points on, but I have to think about how to do so without making them like bennies.
Also, while I'm going to be using SW mechanics, I'm probably going to be tweaking character creation and advancement to allow for a bit more customization.
Ah, I thought I had made it clear that Belros was going to examine the ring. No such thing as being too clear in pbp methinks. :)
As for sci-fi, would be interested to see more details of the setting before digging far into character ideas.
Probably wise. Things are probably going to be a bit weird.
Ok, so espers will be *super*-powerful, the same as an SWD Novice Mage with about 60 PP (that's the equivalent of a Veteran Mage who took Power Points on *every* advancement, assuming that was even possible)! You'll have to come up with some really good reasons for everyone not to be one.
Regarding the "tweaks", will your starting point be SWD or SWADE?
How about an all-ESPer party? Say a crack squad of troubleshooters?
SWADE, since we're already playing it and I figured it'd be better to stick with the same rules.
That's a point about the power level of an Esper. I may just scrap the rules and use the normal ones for mages and psions. I was thinking about trying to balance things out by requiring that you take either an obligation or enemy hindrance and either a secret or outsider hindrance.
The tweaks would mainly regard character backgrounds and providing mechanical advantages/disadvantages for elements of it, kinda like how GURPS does things. Still mulling things over and I may not do it since, well, I'm pretty new at hacking TTRPGs.
I'm not a SWADE expert, but it seems like hindrances are very rarely roleplayed. Seems too subjective, like how is a GM going to hold players to being overly curious? If the benefits are disproportionate to the challenge, then there should be an equal offset that has real game ramifications.
Either that, or let the players be awesome. There's really nothing wrong with that.
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Mind you, Wolfram has a point. Much with how SW do with RIFTS, if the characters are more powerful, then it leaves room for the enemies to be more powerful.
Mind you, that means that anyone not playing a super-powered class will either constantly feel like the kid at the adult table, or they'll want something else to make up for it. (Again, with RIFTS they let any "normal" human start at Seasoned to put them on par with the "Lords of War".)
I think I'm going to forgo the mechanic and stick to the system in Savage Worlds. I thought about adopting the RIFTS ruleset, but after reading through the Rifts game that Atlas is in, I feel that that's going to be way too much for me to handle as a newbie SWGM.
I'll try to have something more up tonight as far as setting goes. I'll be sticking to the vanilla rules for the moment.
FWIW, I am working (albeit it will be into the new year before I am ready) on a Savage Worlds fantasy setting of my own. It is set on an alternate earth, c. 1890? In this world, magic exists alongside science, and races such as elves and dwarves still walk the earth. In fact, there are eight possible PC races: automaton, human, elf, dwarf, harrowfolk, faerie, goblin, and ork.
Automatons are clockwork beings gifted with sentience. No one knows what sparked their intelligence, but there can be no denying that they exist and are self-aware. Automatons are constructs and are often seen as property, rather than free citizens, though there are groups working to change that, including some of the automatons themselves.
Dwarves are as in most fantasy campaigns; dour and serious earth-dwellers who spend their days toiling in their underground cities and mines, though many choose to become adventurers and go out into the world to seek their fortunes.
Elves (known as Sidhe ("shee")) and faeries are denizens of the first world and must spend eight out of every 24 hours therein or else risk undergoing transmogrification and becoming orks or goblins, respectively.
Harrow folk (also known as ha'folk or, more derogatorily, halflings) are smaller than humans, but otherwise, are similar to the "big folk" (as they refer to humans and their ilk).
As already noted, orks and goblins are what become of elves and faeries who linger too long in our world, but with time, the races have also begun to breed true, and it is possible to have a native ork or goblin.
This is a world of wonders, where travel through the æther is accomplished by great skyships, held aloft by magic. With the development of oxigum, it became possible to travel to other worlds in the solar system, and where Venus is younger than Earth and a hothouse world of dinosaurs and lizardmen, Mars is an older, dead world dotted with the ruins of a once-great civilization.
If this sounds like a world that would attract your interest, speak up and when I get things closer to being actually ready for play, I will post here letting everyone know. The world is definitively steampunk, but with a pulp feel.
It draws upon the works of others (such as Space: 1889, Gaslight, and Masque of the Red Death) but the setting itself is original. The trappings are steampunk, but the setting is over-the-top and very pulpish, with death traps and megalomaniacal villains and cliffhangers.
Here's a sneak peek:
QUEENSBURY RULES
[color=red]REQUIREMENTS:[/color] Seasoned, Brawler, Fighting d8+
The hero’s blow rain down like the impact of a freight train and he is experienced in the science of boxing. His fists are weapons (see Natural Weapons (SWADE, p. 104)) and he is always considered armed. He does Strength+d6 when striking unarmed. If he already has Strength+d6 or higher damage dice from another source, his damage increases by one die type.
KNOCKOUT BLOW
[color=red]REQUIREMENTS:[/color] Veteran, Mighty Blow, Queensbury Rules, Strength d10+, Fighting d10+
The hero has learned to put all of his power into a single, devastating blow that can send an opponent to the canvas! A Raise on a successful unarmed melee attack means that the opponent must succeed at a Vigor roll or be immediately rendered incapacitated.
Oh boy! That does sound fun, almost like getting to romp around the Girl Genius verse fun! I even have a character idea or two that would fit right in with the pulpy feel.
Just a random question, but how would you handle a semi-sessile race in Savage Worlds?
Yes, indeed, WhtKnt, please let me know when that system's ready to play-test!
Adam - Pace 1 or 2? What exactly are you thinking of?
Pace 1 may actually be a little fast for these guys.
The Barouzhi Hanuu, or more commonly the Barouzhi, are a race where the individuals are actually colonies of cnidarian (jellyfish) and cephalopod (octopodes, cuttlefish, squid) organisms that are very intelligent. Colonies resemble jellyfish two to five meters across and dozens of meters long. Off of their homeworld, they require massive tanks and specialized life support equipment to survive. They are capable pilots, navigators, administrators, and engineers. Most Barouzhi use robotic remotes to interact with the world outside of their tanks. They're mostly filter feeders with fish and crustaceans supplementing their diets.
For the curious, here are the stats for the Barouzhi that I came up with.
In the Zuun Galaxy is the homeworld of the Barouzhi Hanuu, a planet covered by vast oceans dotted with island chains. The Barouzhi Hanuu, or more commonly just Barouzhi, are perhaps the strangest sophonts in Palioxis. Made up of a colony of hundreds or even thousands of creatures, a Barouzhi is unable to survive off of their homeworld outside of their huge tank and life support system. Thankfully, they have long since figured out ways around that problem. The Barouzhi use drones to interact with the world outside of their tanks and accompany their crewmates off the ship. Their unique nature makes it difficult for them to interact with most races, and since Barouzhi can combine and split off at will (which is how they reproduce,) they have trouble understanding concepts such as individuality, sexual attraction, familial bonds, and even death.
Barouzhi use their own mental stats and the physical stats of their robotic drone in most situations. In cases where the Barouzhi themself is threatened, the player and GM will need to work together to determine how things go. The following stats are for an average Barouzhi drone. Barouzhi can control only 1 drone at any time, but edges can allow them to control more at once.
Construct - Barouzhi add +2 to recover from being Shaken, don’t breathe, ignore one level of Wound modifiers, and are immune to poison and disease. Constructs cannot heal naturally. Healing one requires the Repair skill, which takes one hour per current Wound level per attempt and is not limited to the “Golden Hour” (see page 96).
Mind over Matter - For determining Strain, Barouzhi use their Smarts instead of their Vigor. Each drone as their own Strain value.
Skilled - Barouzhi get a d6 in one Smarts skill that is not tied to spell casting or psionics, Piloting, or Driving.
Outsider - Barouzhi subtract 2 from Persuasion rolls when interacting with anyone besides other Barouzhi.
Dependency (Electricity) - Barouzhi must recharge for an hour out of every 24 or become Fatigued each day until Incapacitated. A day after that, the drone is rendered Inoperable (See Barouzhi, Wounds, and Death below), but recoverable. Each hour spent recharging restores a level of Fatigue.
Environmental Weakness (Jamming) - If a jamming field is in effect, the Barouzhi must make an Electronics roll at -4. Failure to make the roll results in the drone being rendered inoperable until out of the influence of the jamming field or the Barouzhi makes an Electronics roll at -4.
Given the unique nature of Barouzhi characters, injury and death are handled differently from normal.
- Barouzhi cannot spend Bennies to soak damage due to the lag in their control of their drone body.
- When a Barouzhi is Incapacitated, they make two Vigor rolls. One for the drone, and one for the Barouzhi. If the first fails, the drone is destroyed beyond recovery. If the second fails, the Barouzhi is Stunned.
- If the Barouzhi is not Stunned or recovers from being Stunned, they are free to take control of another drone they have access to.
Sorry to be so nit-picky, but here's the SWADE racial point-cost breakdown :
Construct : +8
Mind Over Matter : ??? (couldn't find this - I figured 0 since trading 1 Attribute for another was "even")
Skilled : +2
Outsider : Minor Hindrance, -1
Dependency : -1
Environmental Weakness : -1
For a total of +7, but the rules say a racial build should have a sum total of +2...
Of course, there's no limitation listed for an "immobile" species. BTW, how far does their connection to the drones reach? Could they stay in their tank in town while their drones join the group for a trip to some ruins a day's journey away? If not, they'll need some kind of transport support, which could qualify as a limitation (since it can break down, needs fuel, etc.).
And, how much does a drone cost? I'd probably want at least 3 on hand, since they can't Soak Wounds. Do drones take 3 Wounds to Incapacitate? Do they have offensive capabilities? If so, how much (or do you pay for better offenses)?
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Answered here.
I'm working on the write up for the game's setting. I'll be updating it to reflect my answers.
I apologize for the absence the past few days. My wife gave birth to a healthy baby boy yesterday morning. :)
Congratulations again! :)
Congrats! Hope the little booger is doing well. :)
Congrats!!!
Holy moly, congratulations!
Congratulations!
So, as luck would have it, I'm probably not going to be able to start the Star Wars inspired game until January. Mainly, I bit off more than I could chew before mid-December (lots of races and I keep having ideas for more.) I'll be working on it and if y'all want, I can post updates here. The link in my last post about this will allow you to comment, so feel free to point out stuff you'd like more detail on and things I can improve.
Thank you all for giving me the inspiration to do this. I'm really looking forward to what y'all come up with.
Thanks for the heads up. I hope to look over it properly later this week.
Novis Rune Setting Document for your convenience. Anyone using this link can comment.
So, Just an update. I've almost finished with the races. All I have left are the Iz'KiK'Krrk and the redo of the Barouzhi. I've also been working on the write ups for the different regions and powers in the galaxy. It's very much unpolished, but it's good enough for a first draft, and I'm hoping that this is coming alive a little bit for all of you. I still have a lot to do, but it feels good to look at this and see how much I have done and how much more I have planned.
Hope y'all have a chance to read it soon. I'm hoping to get the races done by the weekend, but we'll see. I should be able to make a dent in the write ups for the Arms and may be able to finish them by next week.
Wow, is this all original content?
I hope to digest that over the weekend!
Wow, is this all original content?
I pilfered stats for some of the races, but yeah, this is all mine for the most part.
Races are done! At least the first draft. I'll be working on refining after I've at least got everything in there.
So, if you have the time, please give it a look and let me know what you think of the races so far. Let me know if have anything you really want to see.
Truly excellent work! I'll put in for a Kalian Smuggler build! Can I get a ship?
Should we move this thread to a dedicated campaign page?
Cool. I'm not sure if I'm ready to fire up the campaign just yet, though. Still got a lot of work to do with the document first.
And yeah, you can have a ship. Maybe not right at the start, but you'll definitely be getting one.
I'd like to play a Construct (robot, not android). Perhaps (still debating) one that hovers instead of walks.
Can certainly do that. :) What kind of bot were you thinking about making?
Sorry, dealing with the purchase of a new home here plus the usual holiday craziness. Will be posting soon!