Hey Sean, my group is excited to play – we’ll start next week.
Do you have any rough rules on star ship creation options? I haven’t dug on the ApocW forum on the UW thread yet…perhaps there?
Also how has play testing worked with your harm method? It seems easy to be able to assign very dangerous/deadly dmg to pcs, so in combat, on a weak hit using the non-harm options more often perhaps> ie; adding story/event complications.
Embarrassingly, the starship creation has always been the most hand-wave part of the alpha version of the rules. Early iterations had a whole bunch of options, but ultimately it got in the way of starting the game (the character creation/prep time is already quite high for a PbtA game)
That said, I’ll link a sneak preview to the ship rules, currently in progress. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4ky16XZasoPVm40YW1mZElFLUE/view?usp=sharing
Ship “creation” is still pretty simple; each player picks 2 rooms from those offered by their careers, the ship has those rooms in addition to the basics.
Tell me, would it be useful to you to have pre-generated characters and a cheat sheet? I can probably put them together tomorrow evening, if you feel they would make playtesting easier.
To answer you second question, Harm has tested quite well, in that it’s meant to be pretty deadly. Getting shot while not wearing armor will likely require a visit to the doctor. Brace For Impact can mitigate a LOT of harm.
That said, when declaring the severity of incoming damage, feel free to lessen it before calling the player to Brace For Impact, saying the shot grazed the character (Minor injury), or that the explosion doesn’t hit the character, but the flying chunks of concrete do (Major injury).
The Injury system is intended to be deadly, but there still is a modicum of GM fine tuning possible. And, as always, GM fiat trumps rules as written. If a story/non-harm option would be cooler for the scene, go ahead and use it!