Far Beyond Humanity Weekly Update #4

15 thoughts on “Far Beyond Humanity Weekly Update #4”

1. It’s sounding great – and glad to hear your finger is recovering.

   rules for heavy-style and fast-style Mecha.

   I have a ‘Let’s Break The Vehicle Construction Rules!’ post coming tomorrow. 🙂

2. Noah Doyle Oooh, breaking vehicles. Looking forward to it.

   I should mention that the Mecha section will cover starship-sized Mecha: MadCat, Evangelion, Gundam, Megazord, Voltron, Imperator Titan, etc. That doesn’t mean there isn’t opportunities for other vehicular stuff in the Technology chapter, if you want to share 🙂

3. Took a look, sounds excellent. I can imagine times from our long running game where nearly all of those alternate advancements would have been useful. “Plan” especially sounds awesome as a way to basically buy a favorable narrative break.

   Although “acquit” reminds me that levels of debt are still ill defined. I would love to see a cheat sheet sort of like the injury table that gives example debt levels and how they function at each level, from minimal debt to insolvency.

   One other thing I’ve noticed from our game is that almost nobody felt any need or desire to pick skills from their own careers. Instead they found a skull they liked from wherever and picked an appropriate advancement trigger. Lots of fun was had but characters quickly lost definition and distinction, at least in terms of their skills. Should “cross class” skills be more expensive (maybe cost an extra 2 xp or so?), to encourage people to flesh out their chosen roles instead of homogenizing into Jacks of all trades?

4. This is all very exciting. I can’t wait for the finished product.

5. I’ll echo Chalice In Chains, I’m very excited for FBH and want to get our group back into space. We’re running 5e Eberron at the moment, but with our history that’ll only last 6 months or so.

6. I fuckin love these alternative advancement options.

7. Already looking foward to those mecha ^^

8. Oh the new Advancement seems interesting! Relate is super cool. Prosper seems strange because there’s no measure of wealth and there’s no real way to record this. “I took Prosper twice!” seems weird. Renounce seems super cool, too.

   I like this and may have to try it in play.

   Edit: it might be cool to also have “group advancements” where players can pool XP. Maybe to upgrade the ship, or the like.

9. Re: advancement. I think the advice in the book to give each player two triggers for 2-3 player games makes for too-quick advancement.

   I’d personally prefer something like this: each player chooses one trigger per career. Everyone automatically gains 1xp, plus 1xp for every player that hit one or more triggers.

10. After reading though the book I feel that 7 Skills seems a bit few. Considering Origin+2 Careers is already 14 available. Add in a group career and we have 19! And you only have access to 7? I guess if you have career overlap with other players this could be a problem, But I believe in a standard 3-4 Player group each character has a chance to have totally unique Career combinations. Especially with the new ones from FBH. The alternate advances are great, But I fell the Skill limit should be in the 10-12 Range. At that point Skills get very expensive. But I guess that limit could be flexible depending on the game you want to run. The people who have played longer campaigns, what is your average XP rate/Session ?

    Really like the new Careers and Origins, except the magic stuff. But it is great to give the option for players who like that in their setting.

    Not so sure about the new workspaces. They seem rather … weak? Compared to the ones from the corebook. Especially the Augmented seems weird. I really expected to see something akin to Darth Vaders Pressure chamber or similar in there. A room that is totally environmentally sealed and shielded from outside influences/scans. May be to hard to differentiate from Medical? Or a fine mechanics bay that can be used to create/modify Mods or weapons and Repair Mods or Robots. I just don`t quiet see the connection between an augmented person and what is basically a generator and a refinery.

    Looking forward to seeing it finished!

11. I dunno, Marcus. A quick look at other PbtA games suggests that 7 is actually a relatively high limit on Moves. AW playbooks all have around (or fewer) than 7 moves over their lifetimes, same with Masks characters, and Monsterhearts. Dungeon World is the outlier, with its 12ish Moves across a character’s lifetime.

12. Here’s the problem with more than seven skills in actual play: the characters begin to get to the point where they’re optimally where the player wanted them, but now they just have to pick a new skill. You end up just dumping garbage or being power-gamey just because it’s all you can do with XP.

    If you limit it, you make even that 7th skill a tradeoff – “do I buy X or Y for my last skill?” AND give some impetus to Renounce a career, which is super cool.

    The advanced improvements are wonderful. I’d still love to see some group improvements with XP.

13. Fair points all, thanks.

14. Weren’t there new origins in an earlier draft?

15. Indeed, Trey Palmer​, they were merged with the Careers chapter to make the new Characters chapter.

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