This game, something that has been on the backburner for months, will be my attempt to fuse the Arms Race and Suggestion Game genres found here on Bay into a coherent whole - and one that tells a story.
Discord Server
(non-mandatory):
https://discord.gg/68QFbdh (Formerly the server for my previous Arms Race, Ramshackle Titans)
What is an Arms Race?An Arms Race, most typically, is a game where two different teams of players, each having their own forum thread, play against each other in order to attempt to guide their nations' armies to victory in an ongoing war. Each turn, players create specifications for pieces of military equipment that they wish their nations' armies to use in combat, and collectively vote for what they feel to be the best, most relevant choices. The GM then assigns a difficulty to this piece of equipment, rolls dice and modifies the number according to that difficulty in order to get a result for how well the design went, and writes up what the piece of equipment actually looks like based on that. After making a number of designs (usually in a quantitatively larger Design phase and a smaller Revision phase meant to fix errors), the GM writes up a battle where each army fights with the equipment, simulating in that writing what the outcome ends up being. Usually, territory is won or lost according to how each side's equipment has strengthened their armies.
However, many games don't quite cleanly fall into these terms, but still are considered as part of the genre - "pseudo-ARs", or "ARlikes", the one commonality among these games is that they almost always still contain the collectively-made-and-voted-on equipment designs and some form of combat or competition based on those designs. This is one of those games.
What is a Suggestion Game?A Suggestion Game is a (usually) much simpler genre of game found on Bay and many other forums where the thread follows a single protagonist, players propose actions for the protagonist to take in response to the GM's posts, and the players collectively vote on what they feel to be the best course of action. Some Suggestion Games are illustrated (this one is not).
Suggestion Games are usually known as Quests outside of the Bay12 Forums - in Quests, although the write-in suggestions that SGs work by are common, players are also usually given premade choices to vote from. A good portion of this game will work in this fashion, with players asked to vote between a few fixed choices, though much of the game will also be composed of write-in answers.
RulesAlthough suggestion games on Bay and elsewhere usually use a pretty much free-for-all way of formatting votes where everyone just posts their vote and they have to be manually counted elsewhere, Arms Races have adopted a votebox system to tally votes as they're cast in order to handle the shifting and competitive votes of the system as they arise.
An example:
.50 Pistol: (1) Powder Miner
Sniper Rifle: (2) Mowder Piner, PowMi Derner
We will be using this format of voting in this game.
A further note, too: In general, you should be putting one vote down, unless I state otherwise; freely switching to "approval voting", where you vote for everything except for the things you don't like, is something I've had negative experiences with.
You are playing a single character! They have a physical status, representing their literal physical health, a mental status (as they are to a degree an independent character and being unwell will have effects on the way they act in some freeform situations), and they physically hold and equip objects.
Don't die.
In Decision Phases, you have a set number of mostly abstract Time Units (they represent somewhere in the neighborhood of a couple of hours) until an enemy comes back and you are forced into a likely life-or-death battle with them. These Time Units are a resource that you use to perform actions, with each type of action having a listed Time Unit cost. You must collectively vote on an action to take, and it will send you into a phase to perform that action, where I prompt you for some form of input - for example, voting to Design will mean a Design Phase.
In general in this game, you will be designing single pieces of equipment (as in, literally single individual pieces of equipment), out of materials that you have on hand, whether that be salvage from the environment or the equipment in your inventory. Write up a description of the piece of equipment you are looking for, with some detailing on how it was made, what you made it out of, how it works, and what you intend for it to do (if you were writing a rifle, for example, you'd put in the action, caliber, intended range, any special details etc). Fluff and the work you put into designs is often appreciated, but there also isn't a need to go completely microscopic with the detail on the design proposals - remember that I will be writing up what the actual final result is. Instead, you are more trying to write up something you want to work, and why it should work.
Once a proposal is collectively voted on as the design that should be built, I will then assign it a difficulty based on the power and number of the features in the proposal and on how much the creation process and justifications make sense. Designs can have the following difficulties, which modify the 2d6 result roll for the design:
Simple (+4)
Trivial (+3)
Very Easy (+2)
Easy (+1)
Normal (0)
Hard (-1)
Very Hard (-2)
Theoretical (-3)
Ludicrous (-4)
If a design just flatly can't be done, I'll tell you.
Revisions are extremely similar to designs, except that they're a smaller action. When you're working on a revision, you should be aiming to do one of two things with it - either upgrading, fixing, or otherwise editing (revising!) a piece of equipment that you already have on hand or in your immediate location, or creating a very simple piece of equipment. "Simple" here should be understood to mean doable in an hour or two of work, and taking only a few components - super in-depth work is likely to get very difficult. Revision Phases can take 1 Time Unit, to do 1 revision, or 2 Time Units, to do 2 revisions. In the case of 2 Time Units being spent, any rolls of 2 on the dice are rerolled.
Once I have figured out the difficulty for a chosen design, I roll 2d6, add or subtract the modifier from the design's difficulty, and the resulting number is the below Design Result.
2 (or less): Utter Failure: You failed so strongly that you flatly did not end up with the piece of equipment you intended to create, only a half-finished or wholly malformed combination of the materials you tried to make it with. You don't quite get nothing, as you can use said half-finished construct to try again, but you don't get a working piece of equipment.
3: Buggy Mess: You get a piece of equipment that technically is functioning and technically does accomplish some of what you were trying to make, but which is beset by crippling bugs or problems. It is better than nothing, but not by very much.
4: Poor: The design works, and does even fulfill its purpose, but major bugs or poor quality still seriously impair it.
5: Below Average: The design unambiguously does what it is meant to do, but performance is still hindered by minor or moderate bugs, or by unmet specifications.
6, 7, 8: Average: The design functions in the role it is meant to function, in the way it is meant to function. There might still be bugs, or trickier specifications may not quite be met, but these will be minor.
9: Above Average: The design works free of bugs and meets even fairly difficult specifications or exceeds less difficult specifications.
10: Superior: The design exceeds most, if not all, of its specifications.
11: Masterwork: The design exceeds its specifications significantly, and either gains some sort of additional functionality in line with the original design or gets a very large return on one of its specifications.
12: Unexpected Boon: Not only is this design a Masterwork, but the design offers an additional benefit. This can be a major functionality not written in the design, an extra piece of equipment entirely, or even something else.
In order to make designs in this game, you will need salvage most of the time. Salvage isn't a gamified thing where there are set amounts of salvage required, and I ask for specific combinations of things, like in my previous game Ramshackle Titans - instead, you just need to be able to create your designs out of something that exists, basically, and the salvage is the stuff that exists and is accessible in your immediate environment.
Salvage Phases consist of discovering and refining salvage in order to be able to create designs and widen what you can design. In a Salvage Phase, I kick the phase off by describing your immediate surroundings in much more detail, particularly regarding what items are things of potential interest regarding salvage. You will then respond by telling me what it is that you want to break down into further pieces, and what you want to extract and/or how you want to do it. The more things you want to extract, the harder the difficulty of this, but understandable and believable means of performing salvage help with difficulty. The Salvage Phase functions a lot like Design Phases - you vote for the preferred salvage plan, then I roll for it and apply difficulty a lot like a Design Phase, telling you the results.
In Scouting Phases, you have a much simpler choice on your hands - you will be scouting your wider environment to gain information on it, and I will be giving choices for what this scouting should focus on. Specifically, you will be getting three choices, of which you will pick two - and one of these choices will always be the ability to spy on your enemy and gain more information on it and its abilities. There will also be the option to write-in any other priorities you might have.
Despite the potential risk in write-ins, or in spying on enemies (because this is not guaranteed to be riskless, and in worst-case scenarios COULD cost you extra Time Units), there are no dice rolls in this phase, just GM decision-making.
Preparation Phases are fairly simple and just involve voting for a plan on how you want to prepare your environment, equipment, and/or self for the battle ahead. They take 1 Time Unit normally, and much like the Scouting Phases they don't involve any dice rolls. Preparation Phases can generally be expected to go the way you want them to unless you go out of your way to do something risky, which can lose you time or cause consequences. Failure of a risky preparation action is the rarest outcome (but that doesn't mean you can just do something like salvage for free).
Choosing to "Leave" involves spending at least one Time Unit to move from the larger vicinity around you to somewhere further away. This serves the purpose of both larger-scale travel and of attempting to avoid incoming fights - but depending on how much care the enemy takes to avoid in the latter case, or what the distance is in the former case, this can take multiple Time Units. If you run out when attempting to flee an enemy, it catches up with you and engages in battle.
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