Badass Space Dragon - Final Results

@patrace That was super fun. Thanks for being a great GM.

Somehow I knew, I knew when you said one ship had survived with one HP, that it was me. I got Pete to load the asbestos panels on extra-thick…

3 Likes

HEAR HEAR!

2 Likes

I’m not sure if this will animate automatically for everyone, click on it if it doesn’t.

(also I know I didn’t get everyone… in particular I was going to do Marvin but then I found out he didn’t die and also he isn’t at the party)

7 Likes

It’s 2 am and I’ve finally had a chance to take a break from tending and sit down at my terminal. Thank you all for the votes. The TARD-iss will live another day! All drinks free tonight, drink them all. Pour them big, pour them small. Oh and if there are any cute androids who wish to join me in the aft hold, see you in five minutes…( wink wink)

2 Likes

I would also like to thank @patrace for deciding to do this, and for doing it so well - I was kind of wary and didn’t know what to expect at first but it got really compelling and fun pretty much immediately. That’s largely because besides the work running the numbers etc., you gave us the glue that held our somewhat-disparate characters and stories together by shaping the missions and the overall story in a way that gelled all of our nonsense into something coherent.

There was talk in the rules thread of coding up some solutions to make this easier and I’d be interested in working on that; it would be fun and rewarding to contribute something to the open-source Discourse platform and (assuming it’s done reasonably well) BB seems like a place that would be happy to enable our added functionality.

If that ever comes about it will take lots of planning and quite some time to do, though, and like @Donald_Petersen suggests I’d like to do more games sooner than that.

Since I’m replying to you, I’ll address you directly now :slight_smile: If @patrace will share the secrets of how the mechanics work (I’m sure it’s not outrageously complicated but clearly neither of us knows anything about it) I would really enjoy working with you to come up with something and to share the burden of running the game. I know you’re super busy :wink: :wink: at WB all day, and I have lots of free time right now. I mean, we’re kind of rudely assuming he doesn’t want to do it again himself but as you say, perhaps he’s busy or burnt out.

This game universe was clearly perfect for the BB crowd, and there’s no reason to not do more with it, but I’m sure we could put our own unique spin on it (if we didn’t do something different entirely… but the idea of having a vehicle of some sort instead of upgrading a character like in a normal RPG is part of what I liked a lot about this… could do something similar in other contexts, of course).

On that note, another thing I’ve been thinking about is that the reason this was so fun is that we weren’t a bunch of dorks seeking out a message board to RPG in (and then take it really seriously)… we’re a bunch of dorks who just happen to be hanging around here for other reasons.

2 Likes

Epilogue

We are seventeen standard days into the War of Charybdis. The people are coalescing, finding their shape amid the chaos of war, a galactic nation forged in the fires of a great revolution.

Fighters defend Charybdis and smugglers embark on dangerous transport missions. Medical facilities are overrun, filled with the dead an dying.

The smell of blood is in the air ...the smell of freedom.
**Nurse Squill:** He's up and moving again, the first thing he did was pull the plug on his painkillers.
**Dr. Slike:** The limbs are regenerating at a normal rate, I think we should remove the feeding tubes.
**Nurse Squill:** Have you noticed, he has a resemblance to...
**Dr. Slike:** Shhhh... Quiet down Gretchen, he's just another patient. He came in without an identity and we aren't going to get involved in anything over our heads.
**Nurse Squill:** ...But the hat.
**Dr. Slike:** Gretchen, you have a family, I have a family. This isn't something we're going to discuss.
5 Likes

Yub nub!

1 Like

END CREDITS

Ha! What a great adventure that was. You took what I envisioned as Lemonade Stand in space and made it a thousand times more interesting and entertaining. I'm just blown away by the writing, animation, community, and everything else you brought to the table.

**Thank you from the deepest reaches of my spaceheart.**

There are several people who are interested in doing something like this again, Donald suggested a Werewolf Western!!? Not that you need my blessing or that you even have to ask but you've absolutely got it! Go be creative and make something amazing!

If anyone wants to talk about what worked and what didn't, I'd be happy to chat sometime.

I'd love to run another game of my own, and probably will, but it might be a while. I've got a lot of work ahead of me these upcoming months and this was a complete lark. A time devouring spacelark.

Thanks to the Boing Boing crew for making the world more interesting and for drawing together such talented, brilliant, and creative people. Thanks to my mom and dad for buying me a C64. Thanks to Marian for her patience and support and music. Thanks in a big way to Aaron Suring, A.K.A. Ranger Sura Slaal, A.K.A. The super nice quiet guy who helps me with all my crazy projects.

Thank you!!!

Ok. That's the end credits. Goodnight.

*In case that didn’t embed correctly.

2 Likes

Oh.

Bollocks.

4 Likes
OOC - That was thoroughly enjoyable, and brought home the real potential of the bbs system, as opposed to the old inline comments. The powers that be should show you some love, given the community gelling effects of this little exercise.

Glad I kept my stub. I’ll be off to claim my winnings later.

4 Likes

Ideas? Oooh! I has lots!

Steampunk? Mash-up of The Difference Engine & The Chaos Engine? Jules Verne, HG Wells?
Superhero/villain - never played it but I’m thinking something like what I’ve read of City of Heroes?
Generic sub-Tolkein, D&D rip-off. Always good, plenty of material out there
Hammer Horror/Universal Monsters
Western - a lot of what we just did was practically a western, could easily translate to something similar in the old west. Upgrade your horse? Oregon Trail? How about a zombie Organ Trail (already exists…)?
Pirates - Monkey Island, The Pyrates!, PoTC?
Crime/Noir - think Goodfellas, Scarface, GTA, Miami Vice? Anyone wanna be Sam Spade?
Period Sci-Fi - Mars Attacks! XCOM in the 60s?
Swords ‘n’ Sandals - Iliad, Odyssey etc?
Middle/Dark Ages - Arthurian knights? Ivanhoe? Robin Hood?
Vikings - usual pillaging etc, chuck in some Norse mythology?
H Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mine style?
Edgar Rice Burroughs John Carter-y stuff?
Fables? Everyone picks their favourite fairy tale character?
Cyberpunky stuff? Neuromancer, Matrix, Deus Ex? Cybernetic upgrades?
Mad Max post-apocalyptic style?
Spies? James Bond, Austin Powers, No One Lives Forever? Plenty of scope for double and triple agents with private messages; anyone want to defect? turn whistleblower?
Maybe something like Tad Williams’ Otherland - our avatars could jump around all sorts of virtual worlds (i.e. all of the above…)

1 Like

I want to thank you all as well. I know you didn’t see much of me the past few weeks since I’m more of a lurker than anything else, but I have been helping Patrick out some on the back end of the game and it was fun to see the whole thing evolve.

I know Pat has said it, but as someone who has seen him in person the past couple of weeks, I can fully corroborate how much he has enjoyed doing this. The time commitment has been much larger than original estimates, and not just because of the number of people that signed up. As much as you tried, there was no way he was going to let anyone out back-story him in his own game. And how much the story has changed over the course of the game has been remarkable too. It’s pretty cool to see the process of telling a truly interactive story, one that your choices and narratives completely changed.

I also want to own up to some of the faults in the game. I suspect that a lot of the errors in numbers along the way were due to my incompetence. I’ll try to do better next time. Speaking of, I am pretty sure that there will be a next time, but I’m going to try to keep Pat from running one anytime real soon as I need his help over in Alaska Robotics land!

2 Likes

Thanks so much for your contribution as well! I’m glad you two seemed to have as much fun as we did. And I was supremely tickled at how collaborative the whole thing became… as the overall narrative built, everyone’s disparate stories began to fit together more and more closely, without one instance of anyone contradicting anything that someone else put in before. Quite a canon we built!

Speaking of Charybdis… since a couple of us are interested in doing another game sooner rather than later, @patrace, would you guys have any objection to us continuing the Chronicles of Charybdis, as it were? We could very well end up doing something completely different (I do so love werewolves and the Old West), but since you’ve built us such a rich and tempting galaxy to play in (one that might afford us a slightly easier entry than building another fictional game-world out of whole cloth might), it’s quite a tantalizing prospect for us to dive back into Badass Space Dragon itself right away.

But BSD is your baby, and I wouldn’t dream of being all Gus Van Sant on your Psycho, if you take my meaning… especially without your blessing.

Waking up in the captain’s chair of the First Post1 Newb Naiv lifts his groggy head from the console to look into the empty repairs bay of Pete’s comet. Smeg! All ships left! The battle must be underway!

Newb lifts the First Post into first gear and up and out of the repair bay, on the space horizon he can already see the Scylla. Kicking his ship in the highest gear he shoots towards what is looking to become a major battlefield.

From somewhere far away a thought leaks into Newb’s head, a few beads of cold sweat form on his forehead, “did I…?” It feels like a brick drops into his stomach. “I didn’t…” He looks at the Scylla through the viewfinder, too late to turn back now… “I forgot to put the hull repairs on my shopping list!”

Ooc
A honest mistake that cost me my life, it is however pretty much fitting for my character to die from something so trivial. Ah well, at least it beats forgetting to zip up your space fly and dying from rapid decompression through the crotch area…

3 Likes

Hi Donald, no objections here, please feel free to continue exploring Charybdis if that’s what you choose to do, it’s a galaxy ripe with opportunity and adventure. I’m excited to see what you come up with!

Watch out for the space eels,
Pat

Ah an epilogue. This reminds me. I wanted to post this song at the end. If I ever make a movie this is going to be playing at the end and into the credits.

Chemical Brothers - Private Psychedelic Reel

2 Likes

Loads of great ideas. But you need to work out your stats and how you’re going to resolve conflict. You’re going to have to work some sort of game mechanism.

@patrace has got a space ship combat model. I suggest we gang up and bully him until he lets us know what system he was using.

Waves cable ties and pliers threateningly :smile:

We’ve also created a whole load of back story. You wouldn’t believe how much back story we’ve made. We’ve started creating a gaming universe.

The world of Charybdis.

If we want to carry on playing I suggest we stick with some thing we know.

Ain’t that the truth.

A while back, while I was visiting Firaxis, Jake Solomon, the XCOM:
Enemy Unknown designer, made a distinction that it’s worth remembering
at this point. He said, “When most people say they have an idea for a
game, they often only really have an idea for a story for a game.
Soldiers against invading aliens? That’s not a game, that’s a game
story. The game comes in with the design of how the turns work, how
the movement works, how the weapons work.”

1 Like