hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2932.txt

Episode: 2932
Title: HPR2932: Stardrifter RPG Playtest Part 10
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2932/hpr2932.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 13:33:28

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This is HBR episode 2932 entitled Star Drifter RPG Playtest Part 10 and is part of the series,
tabletop gaming, it is hosted by Lost in Drunks and is about 54 minutes long and carry
an explicit flag.
The summary is Lost in Drunks and Friends Playtest and you, original RPG system,
today's show is licensed under a CC Zero License.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15.
That's HBR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at An Honesthost.com.
Hello, this is Lost in Drunks, also known as David Collins Rivera.
Welcome to part 10 of the Star Drifter role-playing game Playtest.
Today we have Taj, Brynn and X1101.
Now this is the final episode in this mini-series.
Last time the player characters successfully completed their mission of removing the people
from a derelict starship by helping them find a small mcguffin called a data block in
Star Drifter Powerlands. Though there had been some combat, the player characters
ultimately found a peaceful solution. Today, the players rip into the game and provide me with
some valuable feedback. Let's get started.
I think a lot of the stuff we talked about is, it's a good direction to go.
I really do. I think getting rid of the classes as a thing and changing it to something a little
more broad is probably good. I still, there are skills I would like to see. I know we talked about
like at the Vary skill. There was another one that I thought of tonight and I can't remember what
it was. I had to think back on it. Maybe a couple of skills to round it out, but I wouldn't
go overboard. Yeah. And then when you were talking about the FP and stuff, I think getting rid of that
could give it its own flavor. Yeah. So it stops being sort of a dungeon writer's hack and starts
to become its own thing. So just workshopping your idea there. If you get rid of the character classes,
how do you determine starting hit point in stamina? I was thinking of a standard for everybody,
but with modifiers based on your statistics attributes so that maybe more constitution will give
you better hit points. That's sort of thing. Yeah, that's you know, possibly, possibly. Or maybe
depending on your background, it might have a modification. I don't know. I'm not certain. Or
taking another tack, something that Clat 2 suggested is having a point system rather than rolling
dice for your statistics, have a point system. In which case, you can set your own hit points
at the very beginning, depending on how many points you put into it, having a system like that. So
you could have somebody who has a lot of hit points, but maybe they're pretty dumb. So similar to
the point by systems I've seen. Yeah, it would be it would be something like that. And actually,
an optimum version of these rules have viable rules for that and for rolling up your character.
And depending on what you prefer, you know, when it comes to creating a character,
and all of them will work just fine in the game. That's that would be a perfect world for this game.
I don't know exactly how to get there just yet, but I think I would love to have something like that.
Because some people do prefer one over the other. You know, the other thought I had while reading
one of these, oh, the spacer, opt to roll a second time and choose the best number.
Currently, Dungeons & Dragons 5e does that thing and has a name for it.
Okay. I am not necessarily suggesting that you rip off the name, but if that's a mechanic,
you want to use multiple times, have a name for it and refer to it by name.
Yeah, yeah, that's a good idea. So far, that's the only thing that I have for that, but yeah,
that's a good thought because then I can refer to that as a thing that everyone understands.
Well, and to give you an idea to either crib or not, currently 5e does, there's a standard
roll 1d20, but then there's advantage and disadvantage. Advantage, you do basically exactly
the spacer as you roll 2d20, take the better. Disadvantage is you roll 2d20 and you have to take the
worst one. Interesting. A lot of times they use disadvantage for like you're attacking someone
who's in cover, roll with disadvantage. Okay. Okay. Yeah, that's interesting. I've never heard of
that. That's interesting. It's a mechanic that I've found works really well in the games I've
played and because it's a standard, it's a terminology that's easy to understand. Yeah.
Yeah. It's something to think about and I will write that down right now. Another thing that I would
suggest is kind of it's not even really a rules thing. It's one of our flavors. Flavor thing.
I would because we had the conversation about how lethal it is, I may actually talk about that.
Yeah. Especially talk about it somewhere around the armor conversation. Yeah.
So people get an idea that like you should probably have something so that someone who decides they
want to build a thug doesn't decide they don't need armor. Mate. Yeah. Survive. I bought two guns
and four dives and no armor. Well, yeah. For pretty else getting shot at.
Diet rules can make a hash of any amount of armor that you have. I think you know that. I mean,
depends on whether they're, you know, the dice are rolling hot. These actually did. I rolled
at least two eights in that fight, which is unusual. But, you know, an eight would plus two is ten.
When you're talking first level characters, that really, that really hurts.
Wait, were there rifles? Were there rifles? Um, two d six or were they d eights? They were d eights.
Oh, wow. You should have got two rifles. Yeah, but I can't, I can't carry two rifles at once.
I think you like ambition. He had the money to buy him too. He had the money to buy a rifle.
They can be expensive. I also do want to figure out some way of
cooperating dexterity into armor class somehow or an ability maybe if you're being shot and it's
seen like something like the saving throw, something like the saving throw that if you get shot,
maybe there's a saving throw and in fact, you dodged out of the way something that would
necessarily be a bad. The adventure itself, would you guys? Is there any point on the rules system
that you'd love to see changed or the only thing is, uh, I guess it may come from the fact that
it was a pilot in the game, but it just seemed a little that there should be more, uh, affinity
between, uh, piloting a spaceship and spiraling a space boat because it seems like the principles
would be the same. Going from a spaceship to a space boat should be fairly easy versus going
from a space boat to a spaceship. My thinking is that when a spaceship isn't jumping, it is a
space boat, effectively the same thing. The one thing you won't be able to do easily or safely
necessarily if you have been trained in space boats is jumping. Other than that, they effectively
work the same way. Maybe there should be one skill that just covers piloting normal space.
So yeah, I saw like piloting versus jumped. Yeah, that's a good, that's a very good suggestion
because then you can get, you know, if this thing worked, you could just fly it off and it would
be fine. Jumping might be a problem because you don't have a jump specialist board. Other than that,
having the skill to fly a boat should offer you more or less the same skill to fly one of these
things. Although the size of it would probably give you, you know, minuses because you aren't used to it,
situational modifiers. In other words, am I wrong? You feel it should be the opposite that there
shouldn't be a connection or you think there should be a very close connection between those two
things. No, there should be a very close connection because I was getting negatives for flying a
space boat when I can pilot a starship. Well, that's because that's because I have it set up in the
rules that there is a, you know, like if you don't have this skill, there's going to be a minus,
but I see your point that those shouldn't fact have been the exact same skill, not a different skill.
Okay, so I am making a note of that. Any other thoughts on system itself?
We didn't get much to do with them technically, but at least conceptually, I like what you've done
with the armor and shielding. Oh, okay. Both having a, this is how much damage it can receive
and this is how many times it can receive that damage. Yeah, yeah. Again, I lifted that from other
things. Okay, so that we think that works, right? Yeah, we didn't get much chance to play with it
mechanically, and I think that's one of those things that you'd almost have to, yeah, you'd have to
have a lot of fights. Yeah, a whole campaign to really see if the numbers, I think the idea works,
whether or not the numbers are on, we didn't play enough to tell, but I like the idea a lot.
So is there a possibility of getting your armor repaired or once it's all shot up, it's done in
you toss it? No, well, it's more or less designed to be tossed, but you can get a repaired, and in fact,
you can repair it if you have an engineering general repair, you can repair, possibly repair itself,
or you can go to an armorer and pay them and it's cheap. Yeah, there's ways to get a repair.
Things like ballistic shields might not be worth the time and effort to do that might be easier to
buy and to bother with it, but maybe not. Maybe you don't have a choice. Maybe you gotta fix it on
the fly, so man, this is the future. You just 3d print everything you need and just to run away
when you're done. Yeah, maybe, maybe it might be that simple, it might be that simple. I mean,
I don't even have rules for creating stuff like that. I would assume machinery like that would be
founded engineering, but if you have a fully stocked engineering section of a ship or a large boat,
probably you could build stuff like that. I don't know about maybe the extensible kind, but
definitely a standard ballistic shield, probably you could print it off. I would give you a
die roll for that absolutely, but that's me as a game master. That's not a rule in the game,
right? So I don't know how many rules do we want to include for kind of edge cases like that? I
don't know. That's one of those things that if I were writing the book, I would put kind of a
in a section entitled, you know, these are more of guidelines than hard rules. Here's an example
of a thing that we don't have a rule for it, but maybe this is how you would apply the rules.
Yeah, well, that I think right there, you've hit the key to the style of game that I'm hoping for
is use your imagination to apply these rules to your situation. And this is an example. Here's
another example. Here's another example. Now here are the skills that are available. Can you
apply those in a creative way? It's up to the players and it's up to the game master. I'm telling
you, I've played with game masters who would not have allowed a lot of the ideas that we came up with
today. You know, you guys came up with simply because they're not in the rules. He doesn't have
rules for it. So she says no. Yeah, yeah, those those game masters are well, they do, but there's a
lot of them, you know, there's a lot of them. But some people play games like that because they
play games that have those rules, you know, they have rules for almost everything. I think that's
something you can, like I said before, like it's not even really a rule. This is more of a
flavor text thing. Like you could say, like even in the intro of the book, like, you know, these
are all rules to get you started creativity and ingenuity are the hallmarks of e-joc in the
starter three universe. So that's why we're limiting the set of rules. Like we want you to be creative
in this and combine things in strange ways. That's that's the core of what this game is.
Yeah, yeah, maybe that's the way to go. Some people are looking, well, again, I keep talking about
the theoretical, some people, some game masters, some players. That's wrong. Yeah, you're right.
And I'll take that to heart. That's the wrong approach thinking about people that run a game
differently than I do. It's probably wrong. Maybe I should, I know the sun's self-evident, but
maybe I should write this game the way I write the books. Write what I like and if other people
like it too, great. If not, great. I agree with you. Write the, write the game the way you've
been writing the books because, you know, at the very least, the people who love the books,
they're going to love the game then. Maybe. It was some, yeah, some. I mean, the more niche I make
this, obviously, the less appeal it will have, but that's okay because the books don't have a lot
of appeal or at least, you know, up until now, they haven't. And that's fine. And that's fine. And
in many ways, I'm only creating this for my own fun and for the fun of my friends, right?
If in the future, other people come to like it, that would be great too, but I don't think I should
necessarily be thinking like that anymore. I'm making this for some broader audience. Yes, yes, we,
you know, Clatoon, I would love to put this out and make some money off of it, but it's unrealistic
to assume that that's really like it's a product, right? Because I haven't written anything in
Star Drifter as if it's a product. So maybe I shouldn't do it this way either. And then maybe it
could be a product. Okay, so that is the rules and what's anybody's got any other observations.
The adventure itself, not saying that it's important, but it is a reflection of the rules. So
any thoughts about the adventure itself, it's your standard, you know, there are goblins in the cave
and the villagers want you to clear the goblins out. It's a very standard adventure.
But with the window dressing and the way that we played it, I felt like I was in the Star
Drifter universe for a few minutes there. And that was fantastic.
Well, you wouldn't have been able to, you know, negotiate the goblins out. So that's true, too.
But that's why it felt like it is, you know, I kind of when I suggested that we maybe not just go
in fighting, I was thinking about how would each other approach the situation and he'd come
out of sideways. And so we came out of sideways. Okay, okay, so that was, okay, that worked. That was one
of the options I had in mind. When I play Tested It Myself, I did nothing but the fighting because I
wanted to see if the fighting work. And it is actually possible to beat them, but you have to come
at it from a very particular way, not falling on your face. One of them, I go in from the side,
you take the guy out in the elevator, he's busy working there when you show up. And he doesn't
notice you if you go quietly. So it's possible to take him out quietly and then proceed elsewhere.
From there, we went into engineering. There's a couple of people in there. If you can take them out
quietly, then engineering is a big fight if they come at you in front in there. But there are a lot
of places to hide and there are a lot of options for fighting in there because there's so much
machinery in the way. None of it works, but it's all there in the way. It's also easy to die in there
because the firefight goes on and on. They all just keep coming at you. I had rules set up that if a
certain number of these guys get hurt, finally, finally, this lady finally says, no, this is ridiculous,
we're leaving now. And then she would withdraw, they'd call, you know, they would barricade
themselves in one of the airlocks and then have their ride show up and they would just take off
because it's not worth people's that many people's lives. That way. I had another one where they came
in through another, the airlock you guys came in, but they took those two guys out with stunners
and took them out quietly and then the fight was actually a hell of a lot easier there because
they can only come from a couple of different directions at that stage and it was easier to beat
them from that point. So it is possible, but it was also really touch and go even when I did it.
So I think you guys got off pretty well considering you took some major hits. So that went, I don't
know, overall, I think the adventure works on its own and that means the rule system behind it
kind of works. I don't know. I don't think I would do much more to it. Like, you know, like having
instead of just a shuttle show up a fighter shows up and he tries attacking you and there's no point
to it. I mean, you know, I wanted something very, very simple. So it is a very simple adventure.
Any other feedback on that or yeah, I got like two points that I would make. For me, I think
the combat part was the most unstarred Richter, but that's mainly because that's not the focus of
the books. I just didn't feel right. As soon as we started going at it, like, like, last
said sideways, it kind of made more sense. My only other critique would be I think when you're on
station, it's a little grindy. Like, do this, do this, do this. And it's almost like you're kind of,
I don't know if we just didn't pick up on signals of things to try. It just seemed like we were
kind of being let along a little bit to get to the right person. You were, however, you did have
the option to go in a different direction yourself. You did find your own job right off the bat
just in pursuit later. But that was an option too. Of course, that job would have been this job.
I think you figured that out, you know, and you wouldn't have been dealing with that other guy,
you would or that guy would have been a broker for this for this guy and it would have been all the
same. And it wouldn't have felt quite as forced possibly by the same token. You know, what was said,
you know, before the, the idea of going sideways, you guys were kind of floundering. You didn't know
what to do with yourself. So, you know, I could have let you just stay up at the high dock and then,
you know, wait for the phone call. That's pretty standard. That whole phone call thing. And I got
a job for you. Yeah, there are ways that probably that could have been more finessed. I agree with
that. Then again, the purpose of this was to get you into the into the job as fast as possible.
So I'm not sure or I could have done except to say that you were hired to do this job specifically,
that might have been a little bit easier. Well, and it's also kind of just inherent of the art form.
Like there's always the like meeting in the end, like there's always the slow start.
Well, and you either just narratively give a concession to there's not a way to not do this
awkwardly. So we're just going to do it awkwardly or you you try really hard to make it not awkward
and then it's awkward because you're trying to make it not awkward. Well, I can tell you this much,
if this had been a regular campaign, I would have had many other things you could have done and
not just this one, you know, I would have had adventure hooks that you could have gone in any
direction, but this would have been the adventure to have here in this star system. And then maybe
you wouldn't have had it here, you know, maybe you would have gotten an adventure hook that got you on
a starship and you took off some place else. This adventure never happened, but I keep it in my
back pocket because maybe next time you're in this place, I'll just drop this adventure in, right?
But because it was just a play test, this was the adventure. And, uh, you know, that's all I had.
I don't, you know, I didn't have a whole campaign behind it. So I'm not trying to defend it.
I'm just saying that yeah, I agree that it's pretty shallow overall, pretty shallow and pretty
forced. Well, and, and I probably was like, yeah, I get to play in the start of dirt and then I
was like, I'm stuck on the station, the sucks. Well, I, you know, there are different, I could have
done a different adventure entirely. You know, I could have stuck in Barlow during the fight,
all of that stuff. I don't know how much fun that would have been, but let's not do that.
Okay, so good. I'll take that under consideration that it's, uh, it's a little forced. Yeah,
it is. I agree with that. Okay. And finally, my game mastering style, which is informed by
those two things. So what would you prefer a game master do in this system or less forcing?
I would see that. Yeah. I mean, it fit what we were doing. I don't think there was in like,
what you were doing was pretty spot on. Like everything was challenging. There wasn't a part where
I felt like we were sailing through things. Again, that has a lot to do with the adventure as well,
but Bryn, any thoughts on that? He has played under me as a, as a game master before.
Yeah, this is absolutely horrible. I mean, I guess I, I knew I liked him. I knew I liked him.
He doesn't pull punches. No. No, this is, I agree with the, uh, with the other guys. This is, uh,
uh, this is something I wish for it. Hopefully we'll become a, uh, a campaign that we could get
together and continue playing. If that's the indication of my thoughts and feelings about the playtest,
uh, I definitely like it. What follows is a discussion that took place about halfway through the
second game session when the group took a short break. Much of it is just me yammering on and on as
I want to do, but I place it here because we did chat about the structure, rules, and styling
of various RPGs, including, but not limited to Star Drifter. So the game, as I've structured it so far,
is mostly centered around the idea of problem solving by not having to roll dice or rely on
skills and such. Or I should say applying your skills in a creative way than maybe some of the
games will expect you to do. That makes any sense? No, I got it. I think that may just be an aspect
of simple game systems like this, rules like games like this. See, it's kind of, the onus is on
the players to come up with creative ways of applying what you rules there are to their advantage.
I don't know how much of that is coming through on the game system. See, and it doesn't matter
100% because the concepts I have for altering next version of the game, it might change things
considerably or change the way the game is played considerably. If there were a lot more skills
available that I had written down and if things were a little clearer in the basic game book,
it might make a difference too. But overall, one of the things that was brought up was the
question of, you know, I don't see any thief skills. I don't see a thief skill. And the idea was
that you're supposed to apply like things like engineering to picking locks and canicle stuff.
That's that sort of thing. I could use something like sleight of hand was to just a plain old
decks thing because that is a skill. I didn't include that here, but there are certain skills that
are very specific, but a lot of them are just how you apply some normal skills, you know,
a locksmith is also a very good lock picker. So it's that sort of thing.
It's just a different approach to gaming. It's a different one that I've had with most of the games
I've played, but I'm enjoying it anyway. Well, that's good. That's good. I know that's kind of
tangential to the purpose of being here, but no, it's actually entirely the purpose of you being
here getting your feedback, you know, because this doesn't exist in an island. It's, you know,
you coming to this game, you're also bringing all the experience you've had in other game systems
and the things you liked about those and things you didn't like about those you're bringing all of
that to this game. And that will inform the choices you make and overall how much you and you do
enjoy it or don't enjoy it in the end, you know, because there may be things about the game that
in another, you know, like you might enjoy yourself, but it might just be the company as opposed to
the game rules, you know what I'm saying? I mean, the games I've been running, that's actually a
thing that I'm trying to get across is, you know, this is a toolbox to inform how we do things,
not a list of what you can do. Yeah, see, that's the hard part and an awful lot of that is down to
the game master of the game, whoever's running the game and the players and what they're used to.
Something that I brought up last time was just that, you know, not everybody is good at this sort
of creative on the fly thinking and that's not to take anything away from them or their style of play.
It's just, it's just not especially that they have it's not something they're good at and they
don't enjoy it. They like seeing a menu of choices and coming up with a solution that way as opposed
to I'm just going to wing it and what can I do? Can I apply it this way? Can I apply it that way?
That sort of creative thinking isn't everybody's style and a game that focuses on one style over
another does leave out a certain amount of players, you know? Yeah, games that are very rules heavy
leave out people that want to be bogged down by like digging through the the rulebook for 20 minutes
to figure out what they can do. I mean, to me, that's boring, but some people enjoy it.
I have a bunch of my friends that I've been playing with. I've been big into Pathfinder recently
and just looking at them describe some of the nonsense builds they've come up with.
Like, that's too far for me. Like, I've found that for me personally 5E kind of hits check
boxes and kind of just the right amount of giving enough of a toolbox for new players to know how
to do what they want to do, but also be broad enough to just kind of make stuff up for me in the games
that I'm enjoying playing. But I can see how if you're used to something with less rules that even
that feels big and clunky. I'm not a real fan of a lot of the way skills are applied in some of the
games, especially the fantasy games. It seems like it's a it's a halfway solution, right? It's like
it's either going to be class based or it's going to be, you know, because in the original D&D,
your class was, I mean, that dictated everything you could do, right? If you're a fighter, you fought
really well. That was your skill. You know, if you're a magic user, you cast spells, that was your
skill. You didn't get anything beyond that. And adding skills on top of that feels weird to me,
right? Because I don't really come from that background. It seems like you already got a job,
but now these are other skills you got. Because you're not, because you're not always fighting.
You're not always fighting. No, you're not always fighting, but many of the skills, some of them
are fighting skills or are very, I mean, they're very closely aligned to fighting skills.
But yeah, right. Most of those are not fighting skills. Some of them have absolutely nothing
to do with your class, but that's fine too, because we all know certain skills. In other words,
I understand why they do it and I understand the appeal of it, but it still feels
in elegant. If that makes that, that's kind of a reach, because elegance of rules is subjective,
and I understand that. But basically, like, when I first started thinking about this game,
I was thinking, I'm going to make everything just skill-based. No levels, no anything. When you
got new points from your adventuring, you put them into skills, and that was that. And that's still
kind of appeals to me, but it also seems an awful lot like traveler, right? And it's in which case,
it's like, well, just play traveling. You don't need to play Star Trifter, right? There's no point in
a new game system in that case, if that's really what I'm after. Granted, that's simplifying
traveler, because there are more rules than that, and there are expanded rules, and there's, I mean,
it's been around a long time, and there are many different versions of it too, for that matter.
But I needed someplace to start, so I grabbed dungeon raiders, and I built from there,
and changed, and swapped out. As a result, this isn't the most elegant thing for me either,
necessarily, but I'm not sure what I mean by elegance again, because it is subjective. It's just
it's a feel thing, I suppose. I'm not comfortable necessarily with the way the rules are structured.
I don't know. Well, you know, that's what a play test is for, but I'm not entirely certain. Granted,
it needs way more rules, you know, for things like skills, and armor, and more weapons, and all of that.
You know, I understand that, but from a basic structural standpoint, the idea that mostly what
you're relying on are skills, and your skills are based on attributes, and your saving throws are
based on attributes and everything else. To me, I like that. There's a certain elegance to that,
and I like that, but I'm not sure I like the idea of classes, and I'm not sure I like the idea
of levels. These things seem to clash for me, and I don't know. I can't put my finger on it.
Well, specifically, the thing I thought of when I read the way you had talked about level ups,
is that doesn't feel like it would scale well with leveling up, because each level is just
going to become easier and easier, because your stronger, if your enemies aren't getting
progressively stronger, I mean, they'll get stronger, so you'll get more XP, or they won't
get stronger, so you can kill more of them, and you'll get more XP, and so each level becomes
easier and easier to get, is the first thought I had when I saw, oh, each level is the same
amount of XP. I agree with you. I agree with you on that. I figured the top end for a player
character in this game is probably about fifth level, probably not much more than that.
Oh, okay. In that case, it's less concerning. But understand, this was designed for a play test.
I just wanted to see if the basic combat system would work. Leveling, you're not the first one
to point out issues with the leveling. Clat 2 had several comments on that point, and I agree with
them. I do. I agree with them. I'm thinking of dumping levels. I'm thinking that we won't have
levels. We'll have skills. We will have attributes, and your skills and your attributes,
and your something else. You get those from whatever points you're getting. I'm calling them
character points instead of experience points, so that you don't get like 3,000 experience for
this great adventure. You might get three character points for this adventure, but you can expend
them immediately on things like raising your attributes, or raising a skill, or raising,
I'm not even sure, I had something else listed. The one thing I would see, the one thing that
immediately falls to the cracks for me there is how does one then raise their HP, or maybe the
answers you don't, because the HP is one of those things. I'm looking at it right now. Skills,
attributes, or HP, and your stamina is equal to your HP, so back goes up too. The other answer is
maybe you don't, because there is an upper limit on how tough you can make a human-ish body.
Not in this future, there isn't. Don't forget genetic engineering, there's biomechanics,
there's this, there's that. We can justify it almost any way we want, but probably the best way
is simply to have limits on how many of those you can spend at any one time, so that you can
you know, you can raise skills, or like an attribute, you can expend one character point on one
attribute, period, right? So like if you for per adventure or per time like that, so if I gave you
three character points, only one of those can go to an attribute at any one time, maybe one point
to a hit point, maybe in the rest have to go to skills, that sort of thing. I mean, I don't have
it figured out just yet, and I haven't, certainly I haven't played tested any of it, but
but it seems like you're noodling on it and trending towards, trending towards as a solution.
I'm trending towards it, whether it's a solution is another story. I think there's an idea there,
something. I think there's an idea there, but I don't know that I'm not sure that the one for one
thing is a great answer. You know, like one character point equals, you know, you can expend one
character point and get one new skill point, or that sort of thing. I don't know if that scales,
or if do we, you know, yes, certain amount of character points, and for each character point,
you can, you know, like 10 character points will buy you one skill point gets complicated for
no real reason when you start doing that sort of stuff. I'd rather have limitations on how many
you can spend and then just do it one for one, and then there's no confusion at that stage. I don't
know. There's a lot of directions I can go in, but I think I'm going in that one, along with some
of the other suggestions. The other thing that confused me for starting up mechanically, and it's
largely because of my lack of background in traditional D&D was the low is good. Yeah, I know,
that is that's counterintuitive. It's not a, I don't see it as fundamentally a bad idea,
so much as all of all of modern gaming that I've seen has gone the other direction. Yeah,
I find that confusing because you end up a lot of times like when we were play testing,
uh, we ran star finder star finder. I was, I never knew what I was rolling. I would just,
what do I roll a 20 set of die? I tell them what I got, told them what my skills were. That was it.
That's all I could understand. I didn't understand any of it. For me, equal to or less makes a little
more sense, right? It's just when you start adding modifiers to that because of your skills or because
of any situational modifiers that are happening on the ground at that moment, then it gets a little
complicated and I didn't describe it clearly either in the rules or in person when you talk to me
directly on it. I know I didn't describe it very well, but I, I hope that in certainly the,
the one line in the rules was not enough to make it click for me. Yeah, well, I, I couldn't even
describe it properly, so it probably didn't click very well for me either. I had a concept in my head,
but I think in the fight, we got to see it in, in action. Yeah, I think, yeah, mechanically,
it works really well, but I need to describe it better. Absolutely. And especially since it's not
just combat, every skill in the game and attribute checks, if you don't have a skill covering a
particular situation, all of them run on the same mechanic. So that has to be made clear. And I know
I didn't make it clear. Well, and I think that's a strength is having, you know, this is the way
things are checked being one way the whole time that's going to make it clear very quickly. Yeah,
I think that works pretty well. And I'm actually, although we didn't use them so far in this game,
I like saving throws quite a bit because they are based on your attributes and yet you check those
exactly the same way. The one thing, you know, people will say, well, you know, having to do a
little math to figure it out is confusing, but I mean, is it really, you know, I mean, you're
talking about very low numbers and no fractions. So I don't know how confusing it really is, but
that I thought that was fairly decent. We could have used that when people were taken damage from
the, because I have an alternate rule in the rulebook about if you take physical damage off your
hit points, not your stamina, but off your hit points, you get to roll for half. And that would be a
saving throw, a physical saving throw for half on just your damage. And the reason I came up with
that was because I don't have anything in these rules for dexterity adding to your armor class.
There's nothing for that in the rules. And it was like, well, what if, because your physical,
your physical saving throw is partly based on, on dexterity, as well as your physical strength
and, you know, your constitution. So what if you roll for half every time you get, you know,
damage off your hit points and minimum one point, but roll for half and, you know, rolling up or
dropping fractions, I haven't figured that out yet. But, and that's sort of a vague reflection of
your dexterity. It's that in elegant, if we're talking elegance, that is in elegant. I know that,
but it was kind of a last minute compromise. And we didn't even do it this time. And I thought the
fight still went fairly well, but it doesn't reflect your dexterity. So that, I think that needs to be
addressed as well. The other thing I got from the fight, and this isn't necessarily something
that's wrong, but something to be aware of is this game feels like it could be very lethal,
which might be what you want. I mean, that's, that's definitely a thing I've heard people criticize.
Shadow Run 4 is that, you know, one bad role in your character's dead. And here we had somebody
who, who bad rolls and we'd somebody dead. And maybe that's part of the aesthetic you want.
I'm just saying that that appears to be how it is. Make sure it is the way you want it to be or not.
Well, let's put it this way. I don't want characters dropping like flies. That is not a thing I'm
after. However, I do want firearm combat to be deadly because it is. I want people to come up
creative solutions like this instead of having to go in guns blazing all the time because if you do
in real life, you're a dead person. You know, I mean, guns are deadly. You know, you don't get half,
you know, saving throws for half. You get shot. You die. You know, so I'm not sure where I'm
falling because I like the fact that it's very lethal. But I recognize that for particular kinds of
players or particular kind of game master, it's a horrible game because it becomes a killer game
immediately. And I'm going to say again, I'm not complaining about that. I'm simply observing a
thing and saying, make sure this is doing the thing you want it to do. I understand that and I
appreciate the observation. I'm not exactly sure what to do about it just yet because I want
it to be deadly, but I also want characters to not drop like flies. That's where the armor comes
in. If you have good decent armor, you can take a bunch of hits like that guy got shot like three
or four times and he was still alive. You know, and he doesn't get me stamina because he's an NPC.
So that was just off his hit points and that was his armor doing. So the armor is supposed to
absorb an awful lot of that damage too. So kind of in your structure, the having this stamina
being able to shrug off a bunch of this is the thing that makes us better. Yeah, the heroicness.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that makes it so that you guys can take more than they can. Not necessarily
more than they can dish out, but more than they can. Yeah, it's the same. It's the same thing I
try to explain to my players is, you know, as a level one adventurer, you are already considerably
better than Joe on the street. Yeah. And the stamina thing kind of does seem like a good way of
expressing that. I lifted that from star finder. Yeah, star finder because that's part I guess
do they do that in half finder because they do it in star finder. I haven't. It's been a long time
plant path finder. Okay. Well, star finder has got that in there. And I thought, man, that is a
great idea. I love that. So I lifted that, you know, concept from there. You know, it's done my
own way, but it's it's it's a basic concept. Also, another thing with player characters is if you
get shot and you go to zero, you are unconscious, but you're still alive. You're losing points,
but you can go down to a negative that's equal to your constitution before you die. So that's a
number of chances of surviving this thing. If you, especially if you have people who can help you,
and I have a bunch of rules for staunching your wounds or stabilizing somebody so they don't keep
losing points, that sort of thing. So there are a number of things that player characters can do.
They're tougher overall player characters are tougher because they can take more damage and
survive it than non player characters. However, you know, all you need is a good couple of roles.
As you pointed out, all you need is a good couple of roles, especially with a rifle, nobody on our
team had a rifle doing more damage than anything else anybody was doing. And suddenly people had
dropped them like flies again. The balance that the combat balancing is really difficult. And I'm
not sure if the rules are adequate to it just yet. I'm not. So it would take a lot of fighting to
find out if this combat system actually works better chances, you know, better chances not to get
hit entirely then then the decks would come into it at that stage. My opinion just for the little
bit that we did is I think it's probably right as far as lethality because like when you start doing
the D&D thing or the Pathfinder thing, you're trying to be everything to everyone. And that's why
you never kind of know what game you're getting in when you play that like you could be in a total
role playing game that's narrative or you can be in like just a dungeon crawl where this kind of
forces it to be more narrative, which I think is probably what you're going for. Well, that's my
gaming style, right? That's my personal preference as a game master. As a game designer, I'm not sure
that's correct, right? Because, you know, someone picks up this game and they want something different.
They want a space app or shoot them up. This isn't the game for them, you know, and that's fine.
That's fine. Not every game is going to be for everybody, but, you know, if you're trying to
appeal to an audience, I think you got to try to offer some of that up. Does that make any sense or
it does. My only my only counter that is if you're trying to appeal to an audience, you have to
most will see you have to know your audience, but I'm going to I'm going to spin on that and say
you have to decide who you want your audience to be. Yes. And, you know, if what you want to do is
build a system that is good at being the framework upon which people do collaborative storytelling,
build it that way. Don't worry about the fact that while these people over here who want to do a
super crunchy game, this isn't going to be the right system for them because, okay, it's not the right
system for them. And everybody's used to doing that. Every gamer has bought a game play that
has been like, Oh, that's not what that's not what I expected. Yeah. And my my complaint with
Starfinder anyways, that I really did feel like they're trying to be everything to everybody.
And I was going to say like that, I know you've been concerned about it being traveler like,
well, why don't I just do traveler? Traveler, this is how you do it. Like you just have to plant your
flag and say, this is what I want my game to feel like and go that direction. I think a lot of the
more successful games recently, probably in the last 10 years have definitely like went down one
path and said, you know, if you want to play this kind of game, this is the game to get. And the
word just gets out about it. Yeah. Maybe you're right. I mean, it's like all of the powered by the
apocalypse games. It ties you seem to be more familiar with that than I am, but it seems like it's
kind of a single system that then has a bunch of things grafted on per setting. Is that sound about
right? Yes, but the thing about powered by the apocalypse is it is in it in the best way possible,
at least in my opinion, it is forcing you to everything has to be narrative. Like there are rules
for combat and the rules count, but like even in that, the way the structure of the game works,
you can't just be passive and say, oh, I rolled the 20. Like you have to. Okay, tell me what that
means. Yeah, you have to be part of the storytelling. Like it offloads some of the storytelling from
the GM to the player. And so for me, because I when I play, I most often have to GM, which I get sick
of doing because I don't get any, you know, I know everything going in. It's nice for me because
I just like they don't know what they're getting into when they sit down the table. I have a rough
idea, but they can totally throw it off. And so a lot of people don't like that system because
you have to be quick on your feet and you have to be able to think on the fly and change things.
But that's one of the reasons I love it. I think it's it's challenging for both player and game
master. It's it's a lot more it's a big focus on the collaborative part of the collaborative
storytelling that I keep phrase I keep using. Definitely. And I can see where like Latu doesn't dig it
because it's not like it's not hard like here's the math, you know, there's some time that's a huge
appeal for a certain type of player. Clap to his one. He's he's told me straight up that that's
what he one of the greatest appeals to him is manipulating the numbers, rolling the dice, all
you know, the I don't know what you call it, the technical, well, as you say, the crunchy,
crunchy rules type of stuff, the crunchiness that he loves that. And I get that because I used to
be that way myself, you know, I am over it now. I way, way over it. But I understand the appeal of
that this game, if I do what I have in mind, we'll not appeal to people who like that sort of
gaming, because there won't be that much of it. There'll be some, but not very much. And the
less of it there is the happier I'll be. I don't want it entirely like I've actually I've seen
some game systems don't have any dice or anything like that. You know, there's point bidding and
all this other stuff, but it's entirely it's effectively just storytelling, you know, it's just
then that's a little loose for my taste. Even now, that's a little loose for my taste. I don't want
something quite like that, but I want something that, you know, it's star drifter, right? So I want
that sense of star drifter of detail in the background. That's really where this game is going to
live or die. I want that there. And I want the ability for people to come up with creative
solutions, because in my mind, that's what hijack does. And I want people to be able to emulate
that. So, you know, because this is the source material that I'm pulling from. I don't know,
I don't know. I think you're right. I need to pick an audience and decide that's who this is for
and the rest of you can find something else. What you just said, it just rings true to me,
because it's similar. I'm working on a homebrew thing and have been for a while that is powered
by the apocalypse, but because of the setting, I'm putting more crunch in it because it needs more
crunch for that setting. Like, yeah, you just do with the setting dictates, I think. Yeah, I agree.
I agree. Because like if this had a more of a cyberpunk sort of quality to it, I would have far
more rules about hacking and about cracking systems and about computers in general, different types
of computers, different specialties within computer engineering, et cetera, et cetera, all of which
can be applied by people who know what those things are, but certainly wouldn't apply to everybody,
you know, just the average person who doesn't know computers at all, all of that, all those rules
would be lost on them. So, unless you're doing something giant like StarFinder or Pathfinder,
you really want to pick your audience and run with them, I think. And I mean, the fact that Star Drifter,
this is the setting for it, this is the universe for it, I guess that's sort of the audience I'm
after people that like that sort of thing. But I mean, I could see just as much appeal in a
super crunchy gritty numbers driven game in the Star Drifter universe as one that's, you know,
even lighter weight than this, that's more about what kind of gamer you are than what kind of
setting you like. Well, true, true, or what kind of adventure, like what kind of like say your
company gets hired to retrieve something like these slabs did, but yours, you have to break into a
secure facility and get out, there might be tons and tons of cyberpunk type of, you know, cracking
systems and getting in. In which case, I would need more rules to cover much of that, right? My
concept for this game is that it's modular and that or just better roleplay. Well, you can,
you're right, you can figure it all out through roleplaying, but my concept was of a modular game where
I might have a supplement that would come out that would be all this cyberpunk rules that you could
graft in and use if you want, but they would build on top of the base rules. You could use the base
rules if you want, but if you want to go super crunchy into say computers or, you know, we'll use
computers, for an example, you would have this supplement that you could apply if you want,
that I think that would work because they wouldn't, they wouldn't get rid of anything that you've
already established. You would just add to the rules and people can use them or not. If they don't
have it, they can still play the same adventure. I don't know, it's a concept, but it's a lot of
work. We're talking about an awful lot of work and I don't know where to focus my attention
necessarily. I mean, I'm just plotting along on this and I'm having fun. I am having fun, but
if it stops being fun, I'm going to stop working on it and when it starts getting to be a lot of
work, it's a lot less fun. Quick thanks to all my players for their wonderful feedback and patience
as I fumbled through the game. I'd like to offer you my own overview of those three major topics
that is the rules, the adventure, and my own game mastering of this playtest. First, the rules,
and I'm reading from my own notes here, so please a little indulgence as I fumble along.
Playing and discussing what was going on gave me many ideas from improvements. Now, this is an
earlier version of the rules. I have since worked on a later edition and I've implemented many of
the changes that were discussed throughout the course of this playtest. For certain rules,
such as initiative, it was immediately obvious to me that change was required.
Initiative was slower and more clunky than I would have preferred. I also didn't like that. It broke
with one of the major mechanics of the game that is where lower is better, structuring it so that
higher was better. It's just why. There's no particular reason to, so I need to make a change there.
Let's see, what else? I didn't get to test saving throws at all, which was entirely my own fault,
and that goes into the adventure, which is next. I should have created situations in which to test
each major element of the rules. I didn't, which was a missed opportunity. If I had done that,
if I had picked out every section of the rules and created a scenario for that, I could have tested
all of those in this one game session. I wasn't thinking that far ahead, I guess, and I didn't do
that. My fault, that's on me. Next, I did get a sense of the combat rules, healing rules,
and some of the skill use, and that was nice. I do feel like I have a much better sense of how
all of that works. And finally, a couple of self-observations about my game mastering style.
I should have been much better organized than I was. I got confused routinely, and I contradicted
myself several times. I was rushing, I was feeling a little under the gun, frankly, and I wasn't quite
as prepared as I should have been walking into it. Next, it would have been easier to run the game
if we'd used some sort of digital tabletop or whiteboard. Now, if you're not familiar with those,
those are basically online services. There are also standalone applications that you can put
into your own server, but these are basically ways to create a desktop environment,
as if you were all sitting around a table where you can put little figurines down and have some
sort of background so that people could understand where everyone is at any particular time.
Some people use them routinely for almost everything they do in a game, but most people
only use them for critical situations such as combat. That's how I always use them in the old days,
and that's how I would have preferred to use them here for this playtest. And I didn't have that
available because it seemed a little bit more complicated than I wanted for something so quick.
In retrospect, I still don't think I would have done it, not for this, but going forward.
Any game that I do for Star Drifter will have to have something in place.
I'm still looking at my various options. Personally, I prefer a whiteboard because that is much more
theater of the mind, much more stylized. We'll see. We'll see how that goes, but definitely that
would have helped. Next, the adventure would have been better and easier to run if it had been
part of a larger campaign. Instead of an isolated one shot, or in this case, two sessions, but a
single adventure, and especially with rules that are in flux and untested. A larger game setting would
have allowed the players to have a wider latitude of action and way more options at their disposal.
They would have understood the universe better. They would have understood the structure of the game
better. They would have had perhaps NPC allies they could have called on. There are a lot of
things that they could have done. This is just a side effect of the fact that it is a play test.
Obviously, but in the end, it would have been easier for them to achieve the goal, I think,
if this had been one adventure among many rather than just a single one shot.
Now, I hope this mini series gave you some insight into at least part of the construction
process for tabletop role-playing games. Understand, though, that this particular approach, or my
approach, is only one possible way that it could happen. There are infinite numbers of ways that
this could be done. Some game creators work in larger teams with each rider taking on a particular
element of the game. One person is working on combat. Another person is working on character
construction. Another person is working on weapons and others on armor. That's sort of thing.
Some of these people rely upon play testing for the majority of their game design decisions.
Others do daily play tests, specifically focusing on new or evolving rule sets.
If you have those kinds of opportunities, that's a good thing. Because no matter how you go about it,
one thing is universal. Play testing is absolutely vital. Feedback is golden, and every criticism
presents an opportunity for improvement. I want to extend my sincere thanks to my fabulous
playtesters, Kla2, Taj, Mark, who played Bren, Brian, and Lyle, also known as X-1101.
If you enjoyed this many series, you have those fine gentlemen to thank. And if you didn't,
you have me to blame. Any strengths were theirs, any faults were my own.
This has been Lost in Bronx. Thank you for listening. Take care.
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