Two sessions into a new campaign in which we’re trying to do ad hoc drop-in-drop-out, self-contained sessions. Workspaces and crews have featured heavily into the moves of the players. Among the exploits:
– A player’s “beautiful staff” crew deactivated the artificial gravity on the team’s ship to gain the upper hand on a boarding party
– Another player successfully charmed some members of that boarding party in the ship’s Culinary workspace and taught them to make really good sandwiches
– An engineering crew was used as a distraction to make the boarding party cover them while the players sneaked up behind the boarding party using a hardpoint access hatch
– In the second session, the players needed to retreat with the retrieved cargo and forgot that one of them had a Luxury skill-granted NPC butler who brought the shuttle in to pick them up
I’ve been really happy with the system as we get our feet under us. Thanks!
Nice. I’m glad the Crews are working out. I always end up with teams of solo characters (Firefly esque), so it’s rare for me to see “larger” ships in action.
Also yay culinary workspace. 🙂
Notes on combat: deemphasizing combat is really helpful. Having to enter initiative and mark hit points and do things other than realistically roleplay what combat would be like is not ideal for folks who want to have short sessions. Both instances of combat were resolved in individual badass moves. This also helps deemphasize killing, which is nice.
I will say I miss having stronger individual threats, though, like the member of the boarding party who wore kinetic gauntlets. The plan to home-rule strong individuals will be to treat them like NPC players, giving them wounds and on successful rolls only allowing players to control part of the narration when they haven’t yet incapacitated the threat. I know FBH makes provision for dealing with powers as threats, but it doesn’t have the same flavor as wearing down a tough enemy with wounds and exhaustion.
Josh Monken Why couldn’t you just go with multiple threats named “Wound Level 1,” “Wound Level 2,” etc.?
Rob Barrett That’s a good point. I suppose in the same sense that blowing an airlock might neutralize all threats, using a move that covered Wound 4 would neutralize the other Wound threats. That’s formalizing what’s part of a partial success already then, I guess, in terms of dealing reduced harm to the target. I’ll try it.
In his new Genesis series, Jack Campbell has his heroes board an enemy ship. The protagonist’s hacker love interest uses her l33t sk1llz to spoof the enemy’s sensors (hiding the good-guy ship), and then the boarding party uses straight-up combat skills while the hacker subverts the internal sensors to give them added stealth.
The baddies’ ship had superior weapons, but the hacking attempt just took that threat right off the board (can’t shoot at what you can’t see). So no Move needed there.
(Of course, it helps that Campbell’s ships are all realistic enough not to have windows and viewports.)
100% the sort of thing you hope to have happen in a session. Totally possible with the system, but takes creative empowerment on the part of the players. I’m in the process of, I feel like, training them up to think more creatively.
How did you handle workspaces of non-present players?
Matthijs Krijger As it happened it was the first session and so we hadn’t yet positioned the non-present player workspaces, but in any case aside from the ones that would be always accessible (culinary, mercantile, rugged, stealth, etc), the assumption is that it should take some specialized knowledge to operate it. Didn’t matter for the session we were running but generally if they said they wanted to use Comms or Research and the players weren’t present, I’d probably just operate them as an NPC for that particular move.