Of for FSM’s sake…why didn’t that occur to me.
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What aspects did you enjoy or look forward to in the game?
Watching the plot unroll and seeing the players develop their characters. The player interactions were a highlight. It was fun to see new game concepts unveiled each turn (specialization, colors, fixing the damaged ship).
What aspects did you dislike or dread dealing with in the game?
It was often a bit of work to understand what my best options were in each round. I’m not sure I’d change this because the complexity of choice and action made the game richer, but it did take some effort.
What do you wish the game had more of?
I’d play more rounds. The GM generated plot and options were fantastic. I imagine it’s a tremendous amount of work to create all that, but if I were being a greedy-guts, I’d ask for more.
Less of?
It was often tough to keep track of my place in the game and my available options. I had to work offline to track and calculate that. However, I think that’s a function of the forum in which we were playing (the BBS) and that had many other benefits.
Was Kassandra an asset or a frustration when submitting orders?
Asset. As someone else said, it was good to know my orders had been received. I made syntax mistakes, but could fix them.
What sorts of game aspects would you want to see in future iterations ?
The mini-games between rounds that encouraged interaction between players were great. The nickname generation was a very successful example of this.
@rkt88edmo commented that the delay between results and exposition worked well. I think that’s a great observation that I wasn’t consciously aware of.
…and anything else that comes to mind.
There’s some discussion above about with what precision the risks and benefits of play should be described. My personality leans toward liking the ability to do more precise calculations, but I could also see how imprecise options might be freeing. There’s no right or wrong answer, but it would have a huge effect on the game.
My main objective every round was always not to die, since that meant the end of the fun, but that led me to some staid choices. If there’s another game some day, someone please remind me to play more recklessly.
PVP vs. Group Effort - PVP is fun, but in the context of the BBS I would find it difficult to wage war on my fellow mutants. There’s a risk of ill feelings or misunderstandings bleeding over into non-game threads. Perhaps if the game were structured explicitly as PVP from round one it would work. If that happens, you all should prepare to die.
Thanks again for a spectacular game!
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Predictable scheduling. It helps.
The idle penalty was severe. Not only did it incur a Juice loss, it also deprived one of stat advancement and juice attainment. Triple-whammy.
Given the rapid pace of a short game, what seemed as an accommodation for slower-paced gamers (an idle option) turned into a complete reversal of advantage. I chose to be more risky in my final round because the safe option meant I would lose ground.
And, of course, I needed to not be middling if I was to be a credible PvP threat to those lobsters and their subservient cacti.
Contrary to popularly expressed opinion, I thought the game was right-sized. Speaking as a participant that pushed several boundaries and died as a result: I didn’t want to see a longer game that I couldn’t participate in. So I died, fair enough. But I would not want to be on-the-hook for being emotionally-engaged in another 4 weeks, but obligated to be silent to respect the fact that my char had died.
Because of the narrative appeal, longer games with perma-death encourage turtling and communism. People will actually change their characters to respond to positive peer pressure (c.f., The Redemption of TexAsss).
I felt this acutely.
Once Seelo died, I felt the obligation to bow-out of the narrative. But, because I was emotionally invested in the co-created narrative, I still wanted to participate in some way toward bettering the collective storytelling…
…even if it meant Cantonese translations of pre-Weyland faxes received by the Yutani Corp.
I’m particularly proud of seeing audience participation in Badass Door Games.
I love the non-players (aka, fraidy-cats) who chose to express themselves in-relation-to StarfoxNews who would otherwise throw their noses up at door-games. Please allow me to speak directly to them:
WE KNOW YOU READ THIS TOO.
DON’T ACT LIKE YOU DON’T WANNA PLAY.
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I think the problem with PvP is that a) we’re generally inclined to be cooperative and b) there aren’t that many active players - the game won’t last long if you kill off half each round.
But fitting one or two rounds of PvP at the end requires some good scripting, I think.
Of course, we could set up antagonistic socks.
It’s also true that BSD2 offered a “try to shaft everyone else” option in the last round and some players (including myself) perhaps didn’t take respond in the spirit of the game to the person who wanted to do that.
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Okay, I haven’t gamed in 20 years and this was a fantastic reintroduction. Kudos on the storyline (well, everything really), and as others have said nice twists throughout while sticking to an arc.
What aspects did you enjoy or look forward to in the game?
My rewards at the end of each round! Which, admittedly, were not so great. It took me a bit to wrap my head around some of the numbers and I think I made some bad calls in the beginning that set me back. Patching up hull points prevented me from buying more goodies as the missions seemed to rapidly escalate and my options dwindled.
What aspects did you dislike or dread dealing with in the game?
Letting everyone down when not adding to the narrative. Ya’ll some creative funny people, I hope to play with you again. As a newb, I wasn’t entirely clear how much of the story carried over from from previous games (and I did not read through them completely as I probably should have) so it took me a bit to figure the player narrative was spontaneously creating itself.
What do you wish the game had more of? Less of?
More segmented rounds. Less me being a meatshield.
What sorts of game aspects would you want to see in future iterations ?
I really liked how the final mission segments almost played out in real time. I realize this becomes an exponential amount of work but I liked the complexity of it, the excitement of waiting for the next results to come in and the ability to play along as it was happening.
Grab the first couple replies on each mission thread so results, orders, and ship’s store can all be readily found.
Specialties playing more of a part.
Was Kassandra an asset or a frustration when submitting orders?
I liked Kassie, thought that was a great way to execute orders and she worked very well, even if I had to look at other players orders to remember syntax 
…and anything else that comes to mind.
I’m still finding little slips of paper everywhere from totaling up my stats/possible moves.
Confusion abounded when people started switching orders, but that was sort of meta for Tom since he didn’t know his cloaca from a human’s hole.
Thank you again!
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1. THANK YOU, MESSANA
I love these games. I don’t have the narrative skills to run one, so I deeply appreciate those of your that step forward to make this possible for duffers like me.
WELL DONE.
Vaguer Stats were Gooder
One innovation, which drove me crazy, was the use of adjectives over numbers for describing the missions. When all the odds and damage ranges were explicit, people like me could go wild with the mathematical optimization. – and it soon ends up feeling like work. But a mission with “great salvage” versus a mission with “average salvage”? What’s a number cruncher like me to do? Focus on narrative – and build up statistical distributions, that’s what! Way more interesting!!!
Specialization encourages cooperation
I like having specialties. If one has a strength, then perforce one has a (relative) weakness, which is a problem. Good to work with someone who can complement this.
However, this does make life harder for the GM, as these need to be kept balanced. This game definitely favored SCI and Scholars.
10 -12 rounds is about right
I appreciate Seelio’s point that a longer game punishes early risk taking too heavily. Who wants to get killed early and miss out on the fun?
I definitely want to encourage more risk taking,which means getting “killed” early in the game can’t be too “final”
Some ideas:
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have NPC 's laying around that “dead” players can take over. Seelio’s ghost could have haunted the ship, with Seelio causing trouble for characters that didn’t make proper offerings.
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a GM driven “resurrection” option early on. For example. a full reset at around round 6. o
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A player driven resurrection option. maybe a ritual where n players can spend X resources to bring back a recently killed player. The gameplay around a dead seelio – who wanted him back, who was willing to pay to bring him back - would have created an interesting dynamic, and exposed a deep fissure within the crew of the Coleridge that the gameplay never quite exposed.
4.have enough resources early that a an early death really isn’t possible.
More opportunities to be mean to fellow players
The first BSD was heavily weighted to non-cooperation. That game should have been a ego-centric bloodbath. However, several of us worked to create a collaborative, narrative-driven experience. My more talented fellow players did the heavy lifting of creating character arcs and narrative drive. It was their narrative and characters that really made the transformation. As a result, there is a now a strong ethos of cooperation woven into BSD games. I love that and don’t want to lose that spirit of cooperation, but I think that ethos is now firmly enough entrenched that we can take some risks with (in game) assholery. I love @SteampunkBanana and the great characters s/he creates, but the Lobster was totally ready to stuff Watney in an escape pod - fellow players discouraged this.
I really thought Ms Chum and Ms Chaum were going to show up and divide the scavengers against each other, so I was biding my time. Had the opportunity arisen, Hans Landau had plans, complex plans, that would have horrified Falkayn. After all, the Bruce Sterling character Philosolobster was based on staged a genocide over aesthetics.
Regularity is Crucial
Having a fixed schedule helps immensely. I was pushing around my Real Life schedule to accommodate BSD. That’s a good thing. As I learned the rhythm of the players I was able to play better myself, primarily by better co-ordinating other players.
I also liked the gap between mission results and the descriptions of the next round of missions. I just wish Watney would have been a more enthusiastic tag player during the “lull.”
Let’s do this again!
I really enjoyed this, and would love to do it again. My comments above are just observations intended to be helpful – please take any criticism as critiques, not complaints.
THANK YOU!
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It occurs to me that we have one small game element that rarely comes up when we discuss Badass games: how to win. It’s pretty much never a priority at all, since the real goal is always to have some laughs telling a cooperative and interactive story with each other. So “survival” always seems to be the only “win” condition, but due to the relative brevity of most of these games (BDW being an exception, though even that long-ass endeavor only went 10 rounds or so), using game profits to buy upgrades to enhance survival odds ends up being the only gamified part of the game, and there usually isn’t enough time to develop and execute this strategy.
I mean, the classic elements of a competitive game are there: limited resources, enemies both common and otherwise, “profit” in terms of juice or gold pieces or license plates or $ or whatever, upgrades both permanent and swappable, and Grit or Glory or equivalent. All these things can simply serve Survival, or they can count toward Winning.
We have yet to try instituting an actual competition that a player could actually Win. Even though we always have several forms of these currencies in-game, we never end up actually using them in any competitive way. I think maybe we should, otherwise it all comes down simply to survival, which is fun and fascinating enough in some scenarios, but not in others.
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I agree with this wholeheartedly. After the death of PingPing Pandan in the first BSD, and the silencing of such an entertaining character voice, we became somewhat allergic to permadeath. I felt this latest iteration was a bit too gentle (though it never felt like it at the time) since Seelo was our only casualty. The game is more thrilling when the stakes feel high, but it’s no fun to lose players. As I’ve mentioned before, I really liked the solution we used in BDW: reduction of HP to zero or lower meant the destruction of one’s vehicle and all its upgrades, but not the death of one’s character. A “dead” player was given the choice to either be dead and retire from the game, or, if they wanted, transfer to a new entry-level vehicle to keep playing. I thought it worked really well.
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Did anyone make use of it except the Major?
There was one mechanic too, wasn’t there?
I thought it took a bit of the tension out, but otherwise the game might have been a bit brutal.
I should echo @penguinchris, too. The puzzle type rounds were a fun addition. Something a bit different.
I think I’d want to slowly ramp up the risks, (you could tweak on the fly), manually massage results to keep things reasonably balanced but still having some disparity between players (I took a wrong turn somewhere in this game and lost loads of ground, stats-wise, but that wasn’t the worst thing), then narratively introduce a split a couple of rounds before the end.
Don’t want too early a death, but equally, you need some risk. A few losses towards the end would be okay. I’d still really like to have seen how the last round played out if Mission 4 hadn’t happened - or had reduced the big bad’s HP by 1000 per successful run, say. An Assault on Precinct 13 style end playing out round by round would have been awesome.
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I felt like I made some mistake somewhere here too, and never really regained ground - I think this was intentional with the setting (you know you can never really buy your way out of these situations), and I channeled it into my character narrative, but I don’t know… I think it should definitely be possible to make these kinds of mistakes (or just have bad luck), but then I think what was slightly disappointing was that there was no way to recover - even if recovering meant taking a big risk I might not return from. That risk would have also meant a chance of going out in a blaze of GLOry, which would have been fine. I felt stuck the last few rounds basically just scraping by (I realize in hindsight I could have written my way out of it if I really wanted to go out in a blaze of glory).
With that in mind, having characters come back from death with reset stats is possibly an insurmountable problem, if the game is the standard ten rounds or so, anyway, and not something much longer and less linear. I do like the idea of dead players having some clever way to keep participating (I have been making everyone who dies a force ghost since BASD 1 after all), but I’m not sure what it might be.
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The drawing was great in this game too. @penguinchris I loved your group portraits and @DreamboatSkanky ought to be illustrating professionally (Dottie was asking about a book called Badass Space Princess). As I recall @Glutnix stole the show in BASD, and I was very happy to see more drawings of Dakota and Browf here. Thanks all!
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Well, again we come back to the question of what constitutes a win condition. BDW wasn’t built to have a winner as such, and even the overall outcome was preordained: the Kid was brought to Mars, and what we discovered by playing was how he got there, and what happened to those who were tasked with bringing him there. Who would die? Who would betray the rest? How awesome could we make the experience? Who would kick ass in the Thunderdome? Who would get their asses kicked? Who would become an astral projection of a Demigod of Auto Repair?
Toward those ends, I don’t think we designed the game to have increased difficulty with every successive round. A re-rolled “dead” character wasn’t necessarily handicapped, or left hopelessly behind in stats. Resurrection was also a good way to shift character class, which opened up different playstyle options. And most of the fun puzzles were open to any player who wanted to try them, regardless of stats. I don’t think it was necessarily a conscious decision, but we didn’t really level the enemies the way a standard RPG might; as Chris points out, though combat rolls were indeed random, results were fudged to give players as much of a fighting chance as we could to keep it fun. This made the back end horrifically complicated since we didn’t want to just completely give up and cheat, but a carefully planned-out set of stat and combat formulas should result in decent game balance without all that jiggery-pokery. We just didn’t have the experience to set them up that way in advance successfully.
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listening intensifies
I’ve built up 8 pages of notes, so I’ll try to start in piece by piece later today. In the meantime, two more questions and a comment.
Items: Historically, players just bought direct stat increases from the turn shop. I thought items were a pretty big change this time around. Useful concept? Made the character reports too long? Neat but not necessary?
When a new round is posted:
- I set the topic to watching so I don’t miss a single response
- I don’t start watching the topic and that’s fine
- I don’t start watching the topic and wind up missing out on a chunk of the round
- What is this ‘watching’ you speak of?
0
voters
Absolutely. I’m not going to quit the field, take my copy of A GM’s Guide to Charybdis with me, and never run a game again. I’m up for serious criticism and don’t take it personally. If someone really did not care for some aspect of the game, I want that feedback.
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two related ideas to enable “in game assholery” without causing “premature finality” in way that harnesses Kassandra, thereby keeping the Game Masters workload manageable.
@Kassandra SUBMIT
TRADE diseased_potato watney
STEAL Arcturan_cone_of_silence TexAss
MIssion 2
END
First, use the trade facility to pass around something bad. This could be cooperative ( one could easily see sweetness volunteering to carry the burden) or skullduggery ( intentionally harming another player)
Second, empower theft. We were all desperadoes on the Coleridge, of course some selfish actor would steal your favorite clown hammer just before you embark on that high risk mission – it’s a cool hammer, and if you die out there, hey, more salvage!
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Dude, I watch this game like a hawk. I really could not get enough, or draw fast enough.
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blusssssssssh!!!
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Yeah… but to keep it from being too chaotic, theft should be a minigame, not guaranteed of success. Like pickpocketing in Skyrim. You might steal and get away with it. You might get caught and lose a hand. Is it worth the risk?
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[quote=“messana, post:34, topic:97914”] I thought items were a pretty big change this time around. Useful concept?
[/quote]
Definitely! Much more interesting for players developing their story, and being able to trade stats became interesting. I also liked the creativity you showed naming trandmodm… trsnsgromif… globbed up objects.
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