Starting with the Conspiracy system, it feels like the new campaign settings are the perfect microcosms to deepen specific parts of the game, especially parts that have mixed audience reactions, like debt system and combat.
Since the Core is all about faction politics and interactions, it feels like an opportunity to implement a revamped debt/favor system. This probably won’t be a complete overhaul, and will be entirely optional (you can stick with the base game’s systems even if you’re running a game in this campaign setting).
A few aspects that I’m looking at right now:
– Differentiating Debt and Reputation.
– Making player-facing Debt choices (Calling in a Favor) more accessible.
– Group rewards vs solo rewards.
So, question to you wonderful community people: are there any aspects of the Debt system that are particularly problematic or confusing? Stuff that just doesn’t grok with you? Most importantly; have any of you implemented house-rules that you felt worked better.
I’m always interested in improving and iterating, so I think these campaign settings could provide me with a very interesting opportunity. The second campaign (The Divide) will be a more combat/war -style setting, and will be a perfect playground for a combat rules revamp/expansion.
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> are there any aspects of the Debt system that are particularly problematic or confusing?
How it works when applied to a whole crew rather than an individual, for one thing, although it sounds like you may already be tackling that. The relationship between “debt” and “favors” has also been confusing for basically every player in my group.
And, as I’ve written about before, there’s nothing that really tells you how each debt level number translates to mechanics OR narrative. I’ve wondered if a set of named levels with some example causes/effects, like the wound/damage system, would work better.
In practice, we’ve generally just steered away from debt mechanics because it’s been too hard to make it work as written, and generally just rely on simple narrative stuff without tracking things too closely. A lot of the most fun “I owe you / you owe me / I’m coming after you to collect” interactions happen with individual NPCs anyway, whether they’re tied to a faction or not.
In our game, clearing debts seemed to be one of the driving goals of the most of the players. They seem less interested in accumulating favors, and don’t seem to have a good notion of when to spend favor; they seem to see value in accumulating favors, so it’s sort of been a reputation system in that sense.
On the other hand, debts seem to be split between two types too — the convention sort of “economic” debt from overspending, and what I like to call “heat”. Two of the PCs are on the run, and started the game with debt reflecting their past trouble with the factions. But the debts themselves don’t track how close they are to being tracked down by the factions… so I kind of wish there was a “heat clock” mechanic (a la The Sprawl) to handle that sort of thing. Maybe reputation will fill that niche as well.
Also, maybe slightly related to the topic… we don’t seem to have a handle on how much a debt/favor is “worth”. At the table, we’ve sort of said taken the assumption that it’s “priceless” and therefore considered more valuable than a Class 4 cargo. But as a result of that, we’ve been very reluctant to take on more debt or call in favors, so the mechanic might be underused as a result.
It occurs to me that a reputation mechanic could also be adapted to service another missing feature from Uncharted Worlds — upkeep on the ship or its financing. The book suggests part of the players’ initial debts could be from the costs for the ship. But it has no way to tracking how urgent it becomes to repay that debt, and no way of handling the mounting upkeep and maintenance for the ship. The fuel optional rules helps somewhat with the latter (it came out too late for us to adopt it in the game, though I might try it for the next season).
it is very freeform and not a lot of crunch. I agree that levels would be helpful (5 debts with the same faction = bounty hunters) and maybe as system where you roll when you have to call in a debt would work, kind of like the favor and debt system from urban shadows where you can attempt to call in a debt and if you roll low the entity could refuse and not lose face.