Badass Space Dragon - Final Results

games
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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…

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42

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

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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

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44

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.

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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.”

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46

You are eaten by a space eel.

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47

Quite honestly, it was a ton of work. I spent 6-12 hours on each round between inputting data, calculating results, writing and planning the next round. It could be streamlined but that’s going to take some time and focus… both of which I’m lacking right now.

Here are some of the basics if you’re developing something…

Shopping Missions
The shopping missions were pretty straight forward, roll some dice for events and pay accordingly. Did your sand fish get worms? Bummer.

All the cases where things are “based on” a stat were generally weighted by the community. If most people had 15-20 EN then I’d probably use a range of 10-25 or something like that. If someone was way ahead or behind the curve, I’d let them be an outlier.

Smuggling Missions
In retrospect, I should have lumped all the commodity/smuggling missions into a category with the shopping missions. Moving sand fish and high protein algae isn’t much different than oranges or crystal.

Ship to Ship Combat
It wasn’t perfect but it worked.
Damage Multiplier = iferror(sign(C14+10)*(log(abs(C14+10),10)),0)+1
Where C14 is the difference between FP of ship A and SH of ship B.
I used a log to smooth out the damage extremes. I didn’t want the gap between big ships and little ships to be too giant.

Engineering Adjustment =max(min((E14*.5),5),-5)
Where E14 is EN. This gives a ship a little boost if they have better engineering but has a cap.

Luck - Then a lot of complicated stuff happens with luck, basically a 5% chance of a critical strike adjusted based on the difference in LK between the two ships. The damage of critical strikes varied a bit too.

Damage =max((B1915+D19)+max((.6C14),0)+((B19*15+D19)*I19),0)
B19 is Damage multiplier. D19 is EN bonus. C14 is Fire Power/Shields Difference

Then I would add a small percentage of random +/- damage to avoid stale results. DAMAGE * (.8+rand()*.4)

The damage would be subtracted from the ship’s hull points and then I’d continue running these rounds/volleys until one ship was destroyed. Some ships died after 2-3 rounds, one battle lasted 15 rounds.

Multiple Ship Combat

I would clump the ship stats together and go through a similar process to determine the damage. My system didn’t scale very well for large ships so I’d usually use the combat system to determine the outcome of combat and a threshold for damage. Then I’d divide that damage amongst the ships and determine who they attacked.

All very straight forward, yeah? I’d be happy to share the spreadsheets with you but I really don’t think it’s going to be very decipherable.

Part of why I’m not ready to do this again right away is that it was entirely experimental and incredibly messy and I need to spend some time evaluating and improving my system… system isn’t even the right word. I need to create a system. What I was working from was more like a brew of primordial spreadsheet ooze and story glop.

3 Likes
48

Wow. I hadn’t realized just how much work went into it. When you first brought it up, it was like, “Hey dudes, it’s a boring afternoon and I thought it might be cool to whip up a quick game, who wants to be a Space Lizard?” I honestly thought the anticipated Time Commitment of 5-10 minutes per day would scale to you as well, giving you maybe an hour’s worth of Boredom Repellent per day for a couple weeks.

Of course, once it got going, it became immediately apparent that you were putting in a hell of a lot more than I’d thought. But I didn’t realize the numbers were so complicated too.

You sneaky so & so, you made it look so easy and off-the-cuff on the surface!

@daneel, @penguinchris, and I have something in the works, but it’ll be a while yet. I can’t speak for the other two, but I’m a total amateur here. We’re gonna have to really bust ass to make sure we don’t fall splat on our faces here. You’ve made a tough act to follow, you know.

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How much of the story was prewritten before we started and how much was created based on what our input?
Oh and how on the ball was @bizmail_public with his eye for an eye theory?

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I’m sure you guys will make something amazing! PM me with a Google account if you want me to share the spreadsheet.

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I didn’t write any of the story until the game began and it was definitely influenced by user input in big and small ways. On the small side, I added cat food to the store because there was a cat on the Jewel. The biggest way the story was influenced was taking out Don Mondo, the whole second week could have been different.

I originally had plans to introduce PvP in the second week, I wanted people to be able to spend money to send additional space scum after their enemies or to sacrifice their own hull points by taking them on directly. I ended up leaving it out because it didn’t seem to fit into the narrative that the captains were creating.

One thing I didn’t want was a clear way to “win” the game. I wanted each individual to decide what they were trying to achieve… money, grit, living to the end, etc.

As for the eyeball theory, nope. Waaaaaay off. I did think it was incredibly creative though!

I really liked Don Mondo and wanted him to do the classic villain trick of never quite dying all the way but I wasn’t planning to bring him back into the game until the epilogue.

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yes

Putting all of this in a set of python scripts, for example, would be a few hours light work for me.

Focus on game mechanics; we’ll code up tools to make your life easier.

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If this is going to live in the BBS it might be good to develop a plug-in rather than stand alone software. I talked to @sam about it briefly, he’s interested in helping to develop a plug-in for Discourse that makes it a true BBS game. We should probably check in with @codinghorror as well and see if he has thoughts. It would be great to get support from the Discourse team… or maybe it makes more sense to code it as a separate, stand-alone helper app that a GM can plug things into? Thoughts? Either way, it’s probably time to scoot this evolving discussion to another topic thread.

Can a boss or mini-boss lock this thread up?

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Wow man - thanks for the work. I’ve run games before, but nothing as labor intensive. I assumed you were using an already established rules system and coming up with your own missions.

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This all sounds complicated. Let’s just play Yatzee. I’ll go first.

rattle rattle rattle

Five sixes! Yatzee! Who’s next?

1 Like