Progress Report

Since releasing Charon Wormhole, I've been getting great positive feedback on the game.  People seem to like it a lot and are looking forward to the full game's release.  Here's an update on how things are progressing.

Core Rules

I've been playtesting Welcome Aboard, Captain quite a bit in preparation for that release, and it's feeling really good!  I can't wait to get this into your hands. The mission generator continues to spit out surprising twists, and the system is feeling solid, capable of handling a wide and diverse set of situations. I think it's some of the best design work I've done on games.  Feedback from others who have tried the game has been universally positive, which is heartening.

I did identify a few bumpy mechanics and smoothed them over with some fixes to simplify them and make things more sensical and intuitive. This was especially in the manner in which advantages are created during play.  A new version is going out to playtesters soon.

The optional extensions are also getting some tests – the excursion vehicles, companions, vignette missions, and nemesis enemies.  Those are turning out pretty nicely. They have some very simple rules but add all sorts of fun twists and details to your missions.

I've also gotten the book printed using a print-on-demand service (you can probably see it as the devlog post image). It feels great in play.  It's a digest-sized book, spiral bound, which makes it very portable and it lays flat on the table for ease of use during play.  I love it - more RPG's should utilize this format.  It's full-color all the way through, with the art nice and large. And it was surprisingly cheap for print-on-demand.  Once I release, I'll also post a link to the service where players can print their own books if they don't want to use the PDF's.

Charon Wormhole

I'd still like to hear feedback on your experience with Charon Wormhole if you played it, especially if you noticed any errors, omissions, or confusing parts that can be smoothed over for future players.

Duty Sector Booklets

I am struggling with the Duty Sector booklets.  As yet, I still only have two - the tutorial adventure Charon Wormhole and the Charybdis Nebula book. They are incredibly effort-intensive, which is making them prohibitive to make. Or even plan.  Or get started.

The reason I'm struggling is because they are so non-linear, which creates a combinatorial explosion of "plot paths" with each option I offer.  If each decision is meaningful (i.e., not just the same as another choice in disguise), then each choice I offer doubles the number of plot paths I have to write from that point on.  From a practical standpoint, that actually means it halves the length of the adventure, since I can only offer a finite, reasonable amount of content per book.  And let's be honest, one of the paths through the choices is going to be the most dramatic and most interesting – it's not great if someone plays through it and doesn't experience the best it has to offer.

I've been putting a lot of thought into how to deal with that problem and still deliver some books, and I think I've hit on a solution, but it has both strengths and drawbacks.

I'm thinking of restructuring how future Duty Sector booklets work into  a "follow along with a mission" structure, where it tells a linear story and you take over when "situations" happen, choosing who does what, how they respond, who assists who, etc.  In other words, all the decision-making in situations is there, just not the high-level command decisions that would splinter the story along several (possibly non-optimal)  paths.

One advantage of this is that it could model how the mission generator works to help people understand how it works.  Sidebars could include the rolls I make and explain how the rolls generate the fiction.  Might be a good way to get comfortable with generating your own missions, especially for people new to solitaire role-playing games.

The other thing I have struggled with when writing the adventures is in how to refer to the bridge officers. Allowing the player to bring their own bridge officer team means that I cannot refer to the bridge officers by name, and have to leave them as depersonalized, descriptionless ghosts, writing awkward things like, "Your science officer scowls at your operations officer" whenever I need to refer to them.

So what I'm thinking now is that perhaps the duty sector books are like playing through an episode of a Star Trek like show, with a linear plot and named characters.  You follow along with the mission, the named characters have their own personalities and dramas, and the plot throws dire situations at you that you play through.  I could add more character and natural language, provide one optimized path through the mission, keep things manageable, build up a stable of compelling recurring characters, teach people the workings of the mission generator, and offer more adventures.  Seems like a good idea.

But what do you think?  Would you play through pre-written linear mission adventures? And if not, would a more open mission generator be fine for your needs?  Or is there a niche of players who need both meaningful choices in an adventure but are not willing to have the mission generator provide them instead of them being pre-written?

And would you be okay following along with the crew of the science vessel AWF Emmy Noether and her crew for these "episodic" adventures? Or would you prefer the depersonalized crew interactions that you could pour your own characters into, despite the awkward phrasing?