Spitballing Idea:

Spitballing Idea:

Spitballing Idea:

This idea is stolen from Coriolis and Blades in the Dark… part of character creation should include a selection of a Group Role – like a Career, but for the group as a whole, and should have moves/skills that apply to all members of the crew.

For example: Merchants / Smugglers / Explorers / Military

Merchants would have 3-4 skills based on trading, Smugglers would have 3-4 skills based on stealth or crime, etc

Each Group Role could also have rules for creating the setting specific to that role. Maybe the four listed above include special rules for starship creation, while others might include planet or city creation.

I think something like this would address two of my concerns in the base system:

1. Group cohesion isn’t built in in the manner that Bonds/Debts/Hx from other PbtA games do it. Adding mechanics to your group as a whole could encourage that cohesion more.

2. Setting creation is a bit TOO open to me, so allowing the players to flag what they want (explorers and smugglers fit into very different settings) helps with knowing where the setting should be pointed to.

8 thoughts on “Spitballing Idea:”

  2. That’s a really neat idea! Playing off of that: perhaps the group could pick a career path that is their Group Career.

    During character creation, each player would pick their Origin and 2 Careers as normal. They would then pick 1 Origin Skill (early life), 2 Career Skills (adulthood) and then 1 Group Career Skill (the skills they picked up while working as a team).

    So if the group chose “Explorer”, then everyone would have one of the five Explorer skills (or more, if their personal Career path also includes Explorer). If the group chose “Commercial” then everyone would have a Commercial Skill as their last skill.

    While this might take away from focusing and fine-tuning their personal archetype, it certainly would heavily slant the style of play towards that career.

    Very cool.

  3. That’s a pretty good way to do it with the existing Careers. I also like the idea of starting with only 3 personal skills and 1 group level. It gives you more time to focus on your own growth.

    This opens the question up to: what do you do with the advancement triggers for that common career and how do you advance it?

    I still like the idea of tying the group career in at the setting level, so perhaps we could play off the workspace somehow – using that to define maybe a “home base” of some kind. If the “group workspace” for a commercial group becomes a star port, then it would probably be a planet bound game, etc.

  4. I think that everyone should have their own Advancement triggers (because it’s them, who they are), and as a group decide what their team Advancement trigger is.

    Similarly, the Group workspace would be the framework that all the individual workplaces were attached to or related to.

    If you consider The Group to be a meta-character, that opens up a lot of possibilities in regards to Debt and Favor, and the separation of private Debts and group Debts.

    It would probably be a LOT more difficult to track, all told, but the extra rules/tracking overhead might be just right for some groups, and give a lot of added mechanical structure to an otherwise loose system.

    I honestly like this idea a lot. Too late for anything official (and as you said it’s cribbed from BitD) but I’d totes toy with this idea for (God help me) UWv2.

Comments are closed.