Speaking of games I need to buy and play, after about ten minutes of the barebones demo for
Kerbal Space Program and some reading up on the exploits of
local dwarves, I've gotten yet another RTD idea.
Who Are You?Essentially, you play as some sort of small, cute by certain standards, probably not very bright
thing trying to get into space. Well, get other people into space; you personally are probably averse to blowing up.
You're in charge of your own company, and players can even band together if they don't mind sharing. Players can also be from different races/countries, to add a bit more pride or competition or what have you to making it to space first.
The government is fairly simple-minded, disorganized, and short-sighted, so while they might or might not be partially responsible for your funding, they're not going to play a huge role. Mainly you're doing this because you like money/power/progress/you feel like it. They could also possibly give quests or incentives or something, but again, main focus is whatever you feel like.
What Do You Do?Now, once you get up to space, the rest is kind of up to you. The rest of the world is kind of simple-minded, so if you want to invent satellite television or build a giant space telescope, odds are fairly decent nobody's beaten you to it. Aside from other players, of course.
There will also be more obvious goals, like trying to harvest asteroids, mine on planets, create a death laser, etc. Once again, the driving force here is whatever you feel like doing, not any particular goal of plant a flag on X or come back with samples of Y.
How Do You Do That?Now for the fun stuff.
Everything you build has to be designed and built in components; you don't just "build a rocket," you build a command module, slap an engine on it, slap a disposable booster on that, decide you might like cool racing stripes, etc. But before even that, you have to
design it.
So basically, this is where things get sadistic- in order to have a module, you need to roll for both designing and building it, and both will be hidden.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!That's right, you're going to be constructing spacecraft out of parts with two chances to not work, have a flaw, or actively try to kill you. Generally speaking the scale will work like so:
[6] Overboard. The part works better than intended, but more expensively and less efficiently.
[5] Flawless. The part works even better than anticipated, usually meaning its more efficient.
[4] Functional. The part works as intended.
[3] Flawed. The part has some hidden drawback or weakness; you might never encounter it, or it might ruin you immediately.
[2] Failed. The part doesn't work.
[1] Dangerous. The part is outright counterproductive.
Where this gets
double sadistic is that if a part does blow up immediately, you won't necessarily know if the design is crap or you built it wrong or what, so a few more test flights may be in order before you can officially say that yeah, this part is actively malicious or no, this works fine we just got unlucky.
There's A Silver Lining Though, Right?Oh yes! As reward for blowing up countless innocent, poorly trained "astronauts," you'll learn what works and what doesn't. Which in turn means you can refine your designs, improving them as you see fit. At a minimum, this means your stuff will get better when it does work. Better still, this might mean different players will specialize in different things, meaning if you suddenly find yourself needing totally different rockets or hungering for life support that actually does anything, someone else might have just that and be willing to sell it to you.
Well That Doesn't Sound So-Oh wait, have I mentioned that once a mission gets underway, you have to roll
for the mission? So, you know, you can't just
lift off the one time you get a ship where nothing explodes- you've gotta
roll for that too! Meaning, oh, wait, did I forget to mention, in addition to not knowing if something has a
design flaw or
manufacturing flaw, it could have been
pilot error also?!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!So yeah. The more I put this on paper the more it sounds like an excuse to be a dick to my players.
Also, in addition to general vagueness regarding what stats or features modules would have, how precisely those are improved, what happens when you just chain-improve something without testing it (default answer- it globs allllllllll the flaws together and there's either no way to fix them or good luck figuring out what went wrong when the answer is everything), there's the fact that a hidden-roll game sounds awfully opaque. I don't doubt it could be entertaining, and I have seen other hidden-roll games be very interesting, but I tend to prefer seeing that [3] or [6] in there.
Author
Topic: Roller's Block (RTD Brainstorming Thread) (HAPPY LATE BIRTHDAY) (Derm is 5k) (Read 702166 times)