Skank, ol’ buddy, those images of Quirky in his goofy SuitPal 9000 will haunt my funniest dreams for the rest of my life!
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I wish I had something to add other than “what ^^they^^ said!”.
I will admit to being disappointed that my character didn’t do anything in the final round. But overall, thumbs up! This was only my second RPG (the first being BSD2), and I had fun playing.
**WHEN DOES THE NEXT ONE START.**
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I want to start by saying thank you to all of you for trusting me enough to come along on this crazy ride, let alone sticking around to discuss the whole thing. It has been an absolute labor of love and I can easily see doing something like this again in the future. I deeply enjoy this dance of collaborative storytelling and mutants like you make it all worthwhile. It is a lot of effort, and yet I also find myself a little sad that the story has come to a close. Running the game has been a lot of fun for many reasons, namely…
Top shelf playerbase
We’re fortunate to have remarkably talented players and should recognize that as a strength. All a GM really does is build a stage, stick some props on it, and take a step back. Your efforts breathe life into this thing and wow is it magical to watch from this side of the table. For anyone else that attempts this sort of thing, you couldn’t ask for a more supportive group.
Because, holy cow, is it daunting to invent a game system and then turn around and essentially playtest it live. I went back and forth from “This is great! Everyone’s having fun!” to “Story’s awful, everything’s imbalanced, they’re just playing along to humor me.” about four times a week. Have faith and trust the players to let you know if things aren’t working. Which brings me to…
The Idle Fee
A design blunder in retrospect. It was primarily intended to cull idle players, prevent a debt economy, and force players off the ship and into danger every round. But player engagement was super high! We had zero dropouts and only one missed order submission (which was played brilliantly, I might add). I wager the nagbot did a far better job of reminding folks to get orders in than the Idle Penalty ever did. And I also hoped it would allow for…
Indirect PvP
Unsatisfied with any PvP framework I could come up with, I was instead hoping for a little indirect PvP via betrayal, since running out of juice was supposed to get you killed. I quickly realized that losing your character due to a misreading of the mission or a math error is a really unsatisfying way to go. And in retrospect, instant death is a harsh betrayal.
What I thought would happen:
Player_A: “Buddy, can you spare some juice so I can take a mission?”
Player_B: “Sure pal!”
Player_B: [submits orders]
Player_A: “Phew, thanks!” [submits orders]
Player_B: [quietly removes PAY order via PM]
Player_B: “Man, it’s a shame how he died like that. Better watch my juice.”
What actually happened:
Player_A: “Phew, my orders are in! I’m done for the week”
Round Execution: [orders contain small math error which leaves insufficient juice to take the mission]
Round Execution: [Idle fee kills player]
GM:
Mission fee comes last in order of execution, but I quietly repaired this behind the scenes where I could with failed BUY orders. The one time I had to be more brazen about it , I was lucky enough to have accidentally built a loophole into the narrative due to the Coleridge being offline.
Plenty more to come in dribs and drabs. Lots of excellent input that I’m still digesting.
I was so hoping to hear you say that. 
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Tee hee!
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For future games, I have a couple of ideas for you to use, mis-use, or abuse as you see fit.
One suggestion I have is for “Alternative Incidental Consequences” (for Idleness, or other offenses.)
Idleness Gear Atrophy: If not regularly exercised, a suit or piece of equipment could go whonky. It could lose a stat (effectiveness), or mis-operate in an unexpected way. (E.g., "SURPRISE! Because you were idle on Round 3, your Harpoon_Gun choked up and misfired on your Round 4 Mission.)
It might also be interesting if that, in turn, had an effect on other players. (E.g., "SURPRISE PART 2! Your Harpoon_Gun hit @Player2 for X amount of damage. Sorry, @Player2, talk to @Player1 about his idle ass.)
Space Cooties: As a side-effect or consequence of some action (or inaction), a Player might contract Space Cooties, which could have a variety of effects, such as lowering a stat, or transposing two stats. Or it could make a Player allergic to a species. (E.g., “MEDICAL ALERT! You are allergic to seafood! Any Mission you share with a Space Lobster is subject to a 5% reduction in success!”) And so on. Space Cooties might even be contagious! (Say thru TRADE or PAY orders. (E.g., “I really need that Fluorometer, but that Player has Space Cooties…do I dare???” Take your chances!)
Brig: :** A character might commit some offense (from a disclosed or undisclosed list, or by whim) that lands them in the brig. So they might miss a mission, or be disqualified from PAY, BUY, or TRADE functions. OTOH, a stay in the brig might have an upside, where @Player learns some key story element (say, from an NPC prisoner, or glitch in the Brig tech.)
Another notion I had was, where a story has a split path (or potential), give the players (as a group) some control over which path they will pursue.
E,g.: The meteor swarm knocked out the navigation it’s up to the Crew to get us back on course. Use the Voting feature to have the Crew go:
- Into the Nebula (Where story arc A happens)
- Into the Black Hole (Where story arc B happens)
- Into the Dimensional Jump Drive (Where story arc C happens)
Provide clues and incentives for each path, and let the Crew battle it out in the thread, then vote.
Of course this could be used for other ship/story functions.
E.g. "INCOMING THREAT! Does the crew vote to:
- Fix the Engines.
- Fix the Guns.
- Fix the Liqui-Vend.
Only time for one!
Can’t wait for the next one.
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This was something I was wondering about this morning, as a way to (sort of) implement PvP.
Rather than have player death as a result of one player (or group of players) defeating their antagonists, rather they could control the narrative. I dunno, one group tries to mutiny on the Coleridge and turn to a life of piracy. If they succeed, Kassandra is reprogrammed and the ship’s course is changed, the other side is thrown in the brig and their mission next round is to escape.
Of course, to do that, you’d have to write a tree of lots of narratives, and/or have a way of pulling them back together behind the scenes.
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Oh, savage irony. Believe it or not, the story isn’t fully formed at the start and this was invisibly taking place the whole time. I had a few major arcs and splits sketched and was open to having players nudge them in different directions. @bizmail_public hinted toward the ‘mutiny against the ship itself’ arc but by then the Bogey arc was starting the next round. If the crew had repaired the engines instead of the repair bay, another arc was waiting for the Coleridge escaping the clutches of the Bogey and running into a different sort of trouble, and so on. Is it more exciting to have that choice explicitly available? I chose to keep it hidden for the sake of immersion.
This was another potential arc along the mutiny arc where different corporate interests broadcast sweet deals to anyone who joins their faction and delivers the Coleridge to them. Your instincts were correct and in some alternate universe, this happened.
Much to my surprise! I was really hoping that the players would breath life into what the heck the dangerous salvage turned out to be this time, why certain types of loot were being found, and so on. I’d intended these to be hooks for role playing, but with a few notable exceptions they were largely untouched so I tossed them back to the NPCs for comment. This observation is spot on and something I could have been more clear from the beginning.
It’s the eternal tension between a GM wanting the players to follow a specific course of action and the players finding their own path in spite of that. For my money, the best campaigns allow for this sort of ad libbing (within reason!) and I try hard to leave room for that in the way the story unfolds. I try to listen to the story the players are telling and feed that back into what comes next. I certainly could have been more open about this at the start of the game or more encouraging within the game via the NPCs. I’ll keep that in mind.
As a wise man once said:
I’ve found that to be a most excellent observation.
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It’s a great one indeed. The only real restriction I feel moved to enforce is that each player’s embroidery must make some loosely defensible kind of sense based upon the game world as defined up to that point by the players and GM. One shouldn’t produce a magical wizard’s staff during a space battle in Charybdis, for example, unless one goes to uniquely entertaining lengths to justify its existence. I had a player in BDW who came up with a large convoy of fuel trucks that he presented to me in PMs that would have completely overturned the game economy, but I was going to let him do it since he made it fit plausibly within the game narrative. (He dropped out during my unplanned hiatus, unfortunately, so it didn’t come to anything.)
Anyway, so far most players seem to innately understand the rule of improv that discourages contradicting other people’s established “facts,” so we’re good there.
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As far as @patrace’s comment goes:
I’ve caused corporate training materials to have to be rewritten due to my propensity to ask for forgiveness rather than permission when doing those team building/training exercise things. If you didn’t want me to do it, you should have written that rule down. I’m not going to ask if use of the loophole I’ve spotted is allowed, because you’ll say no.
Here, though, I don’t want to tread on toes too much. I don’t mind messing about too much around the edges, but I kind of feel like there’s the framework of a plot there and I don’t want to break it. So maybe I need a little more signposting if there is some scope.
I kind of wish the cactus had been a bit more curious about what was going on now, though.
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Difficulty Level
You and me both, because that was my intended vision for the finale. To my dismay, round 10 was much more anticlimactic than intended and that’s ultimately on me. As a GM, it’s really hard to construct a sufficiently complicated maths problem that both delivers the desired narrative and can also withstand 17 boingboing-class brains looking to drive a truck through the weakest part of the problem (as they should!). I’ve been on those back-channel group PMs before. I know how players do. 
Round 10 was intended to be a prisoner’s dilemma wrapped in a bloodbath: difficult enough that everyone had to cooperate completely to achieve roughly even odds of group survival with heavy losses. This should increase the incentive to head to the pods, which should lower the chances for everyone else but never to zero. I think it took 7 hours to hang numbers on it in a way that meshed with the story properly.
Even with the scent of betrayal in the air, everyone cooperated! Multiple betrayal scenarios would have led to a bloodbath (e.g.: wardens defect, iconoclasts defect, jammers defect) and yet the story progressed along an axis of full cooperation. I feel this is further evidence that players want to work together in creating a shared story as several folks have pointed out.
With hindsight, I think we could have had the very dramatic conclusion with a tweak or two - make the first bombing run start on segment 5 instead of segment 4, cap chances of success on the bombing run at 66%, etc. I almost want to run a ‘Director’s Cut’ of Round 10 and have it stand as an alternate ending. For me, it was frustrating to get so close and then not stick the landing in the final round.
One thing on the back end that’s invisible to the players: over the week as orders can come in, I can make several dry runs against the missions to see what the results might look like. Too easy? Too ruthless? I could weak a tiny difficulty modifier up or down as needed. Same for loot payouts to keep them from being too stingy or too generous.
Example: The glob run on round 8 consistently resulted in 0-4 deaths depending on how the dice fell. That everyone came back okay and had insanely good rolls on the loot table for the eye gouging (RED was ~3% even with good SCI scores). The players got super lucky that round without knowing just how lucky they got - outcome opacity can cut both ways. 
Importantly:
I am acutely sensitive to this. In BASD2, I was deeply invested in participating in the story because telling the story together is the game for me. The character progression a fun bonus. The thought of being randomly culled was painful to me. In retrospect, I wish I’d introduced some sort of RED-like life insurance mechanism earlier. I’d toyed with the idea of dead players continuing to exist digitally alongside Kassandra on board the ship but never managed to flesh that out fully. In retrospect, it would have been perfectly in theme to include a rescue mission in Round 8 a la Aliens (“Seelo’s alive, man! His signs are real low but he ain’t dead!”). Talk about a missed opportunity. 
For what it’s worth, I thought your post-death contribution was very much in the Badass spirit and was looking forward to more updates from pinniped hell.
As has been concluded in previous analyses:
- Risk of loss provides desirable tension
- Being knocked out of the story is not fun
- Some sort of mechanism should exist to allow players to re-enter the story
Which leads to…
PvE vs PvP
Having missed the first BSD, honest question: how many players were knocked out during those PvP skirmishes? Of those knocked out, how many have played in a Badass game after that?
I think it’s human nature to tie ‘trustworthiness’ to the handles that we wear on the forum and that makes it really hard to properly play a heel. It’s hard to ‘leave it on the table’ without taking it a little personally at some level - we totally saw that at the end of BASD2. I think the advent of @SeaLion has pushed things in an entirely delicious new direction.
At some point, I hope to experiment with several new wrinkles:
- Stunt accounts for all players: have the main account register the stunt account with the GM, and stunt accounts clearly label themselves as such in their summaries. Identities can be revealed or kept secret at the end of the game and are treated as sacrosanct by the GM. You now have complete freedom to behave in any manner and no reason to trust anyone.
- Order submission via PM only: now that I’ve fussed with the Discourse API, I realize that Kassandra could just as easily respond to PMs as to forum posts. And if you want uncertainty? Boy howdy, would that be uncertainty.
- Bake in some aspect of PvP from the beginning expectations. Leave the training wheels on for a few rounds and then let 'er rip.
I suspect PvP demands respawn, with first-person shooters being the example that leaps immediately to mind. That FPS + Roguelike Permadeath genre is very, very niche.
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If I’d gone on the glob mission like I was inclined to I’d have skewed that the other way.
BSD 1 PvP?
Let’s take a look…it’s hard to work out players 'cos the links are all screwed up.
Round 6 was the first PvP, I think:
Captain Roger Wilco Destroyed by The Jewel of the Desert
Captain Lenar Belox Destroyed by The First Post1
Dr. Esstimpress Destroyed by Das Boot
And one more on Round 7:
Marshal Paul Seldon Destroyed by The Jewel of the Desert
Honest, dumb, dead Marshal Seldon. Still, he got a prize for best character or something.
There were only 8 rounds in total, too, so the people that died didn’t miss too much apart from Hobar who got killed early on. BSD had a lot of players to start with, though. Many people got killed by NPCs.
I think The Jewel of the Desert was @penguinchris, so he was good at killing other players.
I know @Felipe_Budinich came back and played in BSD2, and @peregrinus_bis played in BDW. I don’t think the other two did.
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Well, here’s the thing: there was really no percentage in betraying, speaking as a player. Sure, you’d be guaranteed survival, with whatever resources you managed to get away with, but we all knew it was going to be the last round. Taking a pod meant essentially declaring Game Over for your character a round early. “Here’s what I got, now I’m gonna bugger off, can’t wait to hear what happens to you suckers who stayed.” Other than being declared outlaws (a somewhat empty threat, of course, since the story ends immediately afterward), there’s no consequences… you’re just tapping out.
Now once everyone started throwing resources at Tex, he could have bailed, leaving everyone behind to try and survive the consequences. But he’d only do that if he was lazy as well as an asshole, since his buffed stats guaranteed his success. I think Mission 4 should have been constructed to have some more uncertainty baked in; it was too easily gamed by buffing two stats. Once I realized that I knew that the only real suspense lay in whether Tex would bail or not, so I tried to play that up. But at that point it became a practical binary question: do I fuck 'em, or do I save 'em?
And I think that worked against all the well-laid plans. It’s good that all characters had the opportunity to defect, and that all defections would adversely affect the outcome. But it was less good that Round 4 players could single-handedly decide it up or down, provided they buffed those two stats.
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I’m glad that being the only in-game casualty and the only player that triggered out-game moderation is seen as a benefit.
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I was really looking forward to a bit of meta thread creep, but I’m glad the discomfort of the greater community was respected. Maybe next time with a little heads up to some of the regulars it could work. Nice work on StarFox.
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Honestly, I loved the challenge, and took it in-game to improv more better and make it part of the story.
Same with the idle week - gotta turn that into seamless narrative.
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I was saddened with StarFox news being cut off so early. I loved how the talking heads were always mammals, with maybe a token Marsupial to show they were truly independent.
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In that one I somehow rose near the top in stats - not exactly sure how that happened, in retrospect. 
Regarding cooperation in general, we’ve always had apparently-undue cooperation and though we scratch our heads and wonder about it as if it were holding us back… is it really?
It’s certainly unrealistic, considering the wide breadth of character personalities. Even when the stakes are incredibly low, people working as a group tend to have sometimes-serious personality clashes, and there are endless slightly-exaggerated examples of that in the kinds of fiction most of us rip stuff off from.
Though there is plenty of political, cultural, and personality diversity here, If you put all of us all together in real life to solve a problem… I strongly suspect it’d be a lot like these games (including the humor), and there would be little trouble cooperating. And we’d laugh at and/or ignore anyone who acted like a drill sergeant… just like in this game, which I thought was hilarious.
So one possibility is to design the games more explicitly around cooperation. This puts a lot of narrative pressure on the DM (Dragon Master), but there could just be more clear prompts instead. One thing I noticed in this game that was different (and which @messana noted) is that we didn’t really explore all of the possibilities that were prompted to the same extent we have in the past (there are general reasons for this as others have noted). At a couple points I had intended to try to do some of this - for one thing, I thought it would be fun to describe the ship’s interiors more thoroughly, which would maybe help others to write their narratives within a more fully-described setting (I sort of did this with my illustration backgrounds, but I wanted to do some writing too) - but for the most part I just didn’t have time to participate (naturally, I do have time right now to write this long post…)
And yet, in any case, we do all seem to think that PvP of some sort is an asset, if nothing else to add some drama and narrative possibilities we otherwise wouldn’t have. Although, the pleasure from this kind of drama in fiction is often in one of the parties being proved spectacularly wrong - so they’re set up that way (you’re supposed to dislike them), which is harder to accomplish in this kind of fairly unpredictable game setting.
One thing that is clear is that incentives that might work in real life (fortune and glory, power) are really not an incentive here.
So, first option - force it. The conflict in BSD 1 worked because we were forced into it, and it was right at the end so it didn’t really matter. I think that might not always work that well, so it’s a tough one.
Second option - make cooperation a liability. The obvious ways to do this basically equal forcing it, but in a slightly different way - like in the movies where the villain forces friends to fight each other to the death or both will die. There are hopefully non-obvious ways to do this too but I don’t know. I could have sworn I had another idea but now I don’t remember.
Third option - simply reduce or eliminate the ability to cooperate. This could mean making mission orders etc. private. With the current way the rounds are set up, and what the narrative prompts are, this would be difficult - but things could be reorganized.
Fourth option - new game mechanics. Maybe one where after everyone chooses their missions as normal (cooperating), there’s a day or two after the deadline where the mission is actually in-progress - and you have to make big, potentially life-or-death decision(s) as they come up in the mission, in PM - with limited information, and without input or discussion from everyone else. These decisions may mean throwing others under the bus - of course everyone would choose to sacrifice themselves instead, so it has to be a Sophie’s choice. This would be incorporated into the story by the DM the next round - making it clear that we’re supposed to choose sides. Not the same as forcing, but clear enough to the players that they can figure out how to steer their characters. Basically everyone’s still cooperating… except cooperating to add drama to the narrative instead of the characters literally cooperating.
Also, I’d like to point out that these and other relevant concerns have, I’m 100% sure, been extensively discussed in the endless role-playing message boards across the internet. I suppose we should be proud that instead we’ve forged forward from scratch (more or less) on our own 
- and as I’m sure everyone else in other forums say, I think we have something uniquely great.
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That gives me an idea. Currently stuck on my phone, no time to go in depth. I shall elaborate on the morrow.
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Hans took to the outside of the ship a few times and I remember @uphill encouraging a little exploration of the interior of the ship. I suspect with a little more nudging from the NPCs, we’d have fleshed that out more - folks did a great job of showing off their quarters and picking out a suits after being prompted by the Coleridge.
It sounds like the NPCs were a net positive. From this side, it was very useful to have stunt accounts to play a specific voice and leave the GM-specific stuff to the messana account. NPCs could have been used to more clearly flag plot arcs by prompting for additional action or exposition.
I like where that is going and I’m going to guess it doesn’t look like Round 10. I was concerned that round felt unnecessarily complicated and as several have noted, the endless revision of orders was enough to make people throw up their hands and say “someone just tell me what I’m supposed to be doing”, which seems less fun.
This should be an easy enough fix. A PM to Kassandra asking for current status can send back a message with the current orders on file for everyone. I agree that is tedious to manage as a player.
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