Hello. So I was mucking about with Departure to help wrap my head around Uncharted Worlds before running it and I was wondering if more experienced folk could opine on the Asset Class system. I enjoy the process of building assets, but it just feels a bit stingy with tags. Adding a bit of reinforcement to this bias of mine were some examples in the book that had too many upgrades for their class but still sounded narratively appropriate for their class.
I understood how maybe a Rugged Booster Truck with a small Turret would be a Class 3, but then I started thinking about what happens if I want to slap some armored plating on the thing–but even the Industrial can only upgrade things temporarily and it looks like assets aren’t supposed to go above Class 3.
Am I aiming for too high-octane a sci-fi here? Am I thinking too much in the Mass Effect or Star Wars direction and not enough in the Firefly or Battlestar Galactica direction? I can’t quite tell because I can also build a nigh-industructible super-truck as a class 2 asset with Plated and Armored and it just seems thematically odd that, having the technology to do that, making it also Rugged is the feather that breaks the market-availability camel and a gun then thrown onto it somewhere takes it beyond the technological pale.
Or let’s take a surveillance drone. Remote controlled, Tools out the exhaust port, Sensors. Even with only one Tool, we’ve got ourselves a Class 3 super rare drone that, in terms of it’s upgrade tags, reads like something I could buy at Target tomorrow. Similarly, an old school metal sword is good at Severing and Impaling and is Class 1 which is fine but narrow its focus to Impaling and suddenly it’s Class 0.
I recognize that maybe this is a lower-key sci-fi than I was expecting when I tested out my jump-truck (which felt like a sci-fi staple to me but I’m a heathen who hasn’t read very much Asimov 😛 ), or when I tested out space marine armor with Coms, Armored, Sealed, and Tough. But that doesn’t answer some of the jarring combos that can squeak in, or some of the low-key objects that reach an oddly high class tier.
It feels like there are two different systemic logics butting heads here–fictionally appropriate tagging with a rough Class system to identify how valuable or rare or accessible an item is based on the fiction vs. a rigid Class hierarchy that limits asset capabilities to a fixed list of limited, roughly balanced choices.
What’s the best approach to this that people have tried in play? If my players hit a similar confusion how do I explain the rationale here? Which of those two logics is safest to break with if I’m going to ignore one of them–the fiction-first Class-and-tag system or the structure-first Class-and-n-Upgrades-per-tier system?
Also how does upgrading items work? As written it sort of feels like it is presumed that no PC has the ability to make more than temporary changes on the scale of an item’s Class, but they can hit the markets to buy a better asset and/or buy the difference-worth of assets in upgrades from a more adequately endowed faction. But we hit similar holes in the fictional integration here. I have an Industrial with a Manufactory that “builds, upgrades, repairs.” If a player rigs some batteries up to a sword in a Manufactory … how does that interact with Class and tier and the Electric upgrade option on the Weapons page, how is that different from using the Upgrade skill, if it isn’t why is the Upgrade skill only temporary if there’s a Manufactory involved etc.
I just give tags for free if it feels appropriate. I used Uncharted Worlds recently for a StarWars. All guns had the “plasma” tag for free, since it is the staple of the franchise. The game happened in the Rogue1-NewHope era, so lightsabers climbed up to Class 66 and were worth a fortune.
Regarding the super-armor truck you mentioned: I’d not give rugged for free in this case. If you go for the cheese superarmored truck, its heavy armor leaves its under parts softs, it wheels suffer or are somehow prone to terrain damage (so not rugged). Just my opinion.
In the drone case, if we want to make drones a common thing, I’d give the drone you described a -1 or -2 class discount. I’d maybe even rule that class 0 drones come by default with remote. Then pay for add-ons with “class” numbers.
To summarize: The book gives a good starting point, but don’t feel constrained by the rules if the world you are constructing together tells you otherwise. Just weight in if you players are adding flavour to the game or are just trying to add bonuses to their character sheets.
Uncharted Worlds does not default to Mass Effect or Guardians of the Galaxy or Jupiter Ascending. It defaults to something more like Firefly or The Foundation. You are entirely within your rights as the GM to heap on tags if you want to, but you’ll find that doing so makes each particular Asset less “special” insofar as you’re making fewer hard choices along the way. Not getting exactly what you want is a regular enough occurrence, what with partial hits in the system, and all that, heh.
But, as above, your table can do tags how they would like to do tags. No harm, no foul, just make sure you’re doling them out in some uniform way so players can rely on the system.
Alfred Rudzki It sounds like it’s not too big a deal in-system to mess with how tags and tier work so I’ll probably just do that while also toning down my thematic expectations a little bit.
That said, I’m not sure I quite get what you mean about fewer hard choices. I would think more hard choices would come about from slapping faction debts onto useful kit or making it expensive or making it hard to make than limiting useful kit to three features–the desirability of each being a separate matter.
I guess fundamentally I’m having trouble placing the kind of setting where an Impaling, Severing, Hafted melee weapon (a halberd, fancy space halberd or not) on the same rough tier as a Penetrating, Destructive, Energy weapon (like a Plasma Cutter or Lightsaber). What’s the internal logic of the system as-written that I’m missing here before I ditch it too casually? I’m having trouble placing that in a Firefly or Vorkosigan or what-have-you sort of thematic space, too.
To address the part where you don’t get what I mean: if you can have an Asset that does everything you want, that’s not a hard choice. Having to sacrifice something to make the Asset viable is a hard choice. I was commenting, perhaps a little facetiously, that Uncharted Worlds and its PbtA kin are games built on hard choices, so having to make-do with Assets is thematically fitting.
I think the hangup that you’re having is that while Upgrades are descriptive, they’re more about fictional permissions and what players can and cannot get away with. They’re not “yeah, halberds are stabby cutting impaling sticks, these tags describe what it looks like.” Upgrades are “this fucking weapon is SEVERING. It is IMPALING.” Tags are big deals. They let you get away with things in the fiction you otherwise couldn’t.
Take Armored for instance. Pretty much any war vehicle is armored, right? That’s just a given. But not all of them are ARMORED. Tags draw attention to what matters about an Asset. If I have a sword, yeah, I can probably try and parry and disarm, right? But if I have DEFENSIVE, then that is what is notable about my sword, that is what it will get away with in the fiction more often than not.
The internal logic is that Impaling, Severing, Penetrating, and Destructive all carry with them permissions to engage with the narrative in certain ways. They’re considered equally valuable because they are equally valuable in terms of influencing what kind of narration is going to happen.
Alfred Rudzki Sure severing is SEVERING. I’m with you so far. But the list isn’t just positively defined, it’s negatively defined, right? SEVERING isn’t PENETRATING because we have a separate tag for that, right? I’m not saying it goes through space armor, goes through shields, cleaves through vehicles and metal. I’m saying it’s a hollywood-katana instead of a regular old katana, right? I’m saying even if something could maybe be cut by a sharp thing a PC with a SEVERING weapon is going to cut through, no big deal, because I’m a fan of the characters.
That’s already my baseline expectation of the system. It’s the forced equivalences I’m finding awkward. I guess I’m a bit confused as to how even SEVERING’s fictional positions are similarly advanced to a DESTRUCTIVE sword/axe. Similarly fictionally powerful, sure, especially with the implied disadvantages of Destructive! But that’s not what the Class tiers say. They don’t talk about fictional impact, they talk about availability, rarity and cost which isn’t just about how potent a tool is at it’s job but also about how marketable that tools job is, how socially desirable that tool’s job is, and how technologically feasible that tool’s materials are. That’s part 1 of where I’m still feeling a disconnect despite being on board with your severing vs. SEVERING.
Let’s try this. I have three assets. I have a long-range communicator headset–let’s call it a Class 1 Attire. I have a bi-layer armor coat. Mesh-Weave (Class 1 Attire) and an outer shell Armored and Sealed (Class 2 Attire). It’s not shielded, it doesn’t have magboots or a jumpkit. It’s not strapped with a gappling hook, a cloaking device, and three arm-mounted swivel guns. It’s not some kind of crazy uber-armor and I can assemble it with the starting kit for any character. But if I call it 1 bi-layer suit of space armor with a comms unit in the helmet? The exact same mechanical result is now a Class 4 impossibility. This is an issue whether I mean “armored and sealed and comms” or “ARMORED AND SEALED AND COMMS.” This is part 2 of the disconnect I’m feeling.
I’m not trying to give everyone Class 6 items and I’m totally fine playing this game a few octane ratings below where I was imagining and/or house ruling to get back up to where I was imagining. But whether or not it matters at that point, I’m still unsure how to bridge the as-written rigid class hierarchy with its fiction-first tag system and fiction-first Class descriptions.
Hard choices isn’t working for me. I feel like hard choices are easy to inject into vanilla Apocalypse World without the tier-based artifice. It’s more organic, and it works great. You want a truck that does everything, you can’t just go out and buy it. You need to buy all the bits and spend time building it. Stuff can go wrong, people can mess with it. It’s a whole big deal. A Savvyhead with access to a Workspace can weld armor plates to that truck and now it has +armor. To do it, you do it. The moves and the world tell you what it costs you.
Here, though, it sounds like even an Industrial with access to a Manufactory probably shouldn’t be able to improve the armor integrity of a space truck. That’s not really giving players hard choices. That’s saying “You want it? Too bad. You can maybe rig it temporarily if you’ve got the Upgrade skill.” Which isn’t an invalid thing to say, exactly. If Class 3 really means top-of-the-line impossible stuff? Yeah, Han and Chewie aren’t going to have any better luck getting around that than Mal and Zoe and even Shepard can’t get around it without the support of a powerful faction like the Alliance and the Turians working together. I’m certainly not opposed to saying no along consensus thematic grounds like that! The PCs exist on a different scale than in Apocalypse World. That suits me just fine in Space Opera–if not so much in a western-a-like like Firefly but that’s a whole separate discussion ;).
If the intent is hard choices and keeping players grounded, then we’re all good to go on this discussion and I’d just be more inclined to allow more upgrades per tier along with explicit disadvantages. Any big armored truck is slow, but only a REINFORCED armored truck is SLOW, right? That’s already baked into how some of the Upgrades are written so I can just go with what feels right from the fictional descriptions and use the 1-per-teir-rating thing as a very rough guideline. You want the super armor tank to also be SEALED? Fine but it’s SEALED; it has its own oxygen supply and you need to keep that in mind because lack of oxygen is now a Threat you have to contend with and a downside the GM can activate when appropriate. Taking damage or being breached is scary as heck when you’re in space or underwater or otherwise in an environment that needs to stay outside so now Amor Piercing or Breaching (if Reinforced) is a scary thing that’s probably going to show up more often. You want it to also be Rugged? Well, the armor plating’s pretty weather-proof and it’s already SEALED … but getting the wheels and the engine and all that jazz nice and weather proofed is going to be expensive, is going to make it an inefficient fuel-feaster, is going to make it not just SLOW but CLUMSY or several such things at once. That’s more my style of hard choices. If that’s the intent I’ll stick to the version of that I’ve had good experiences with.
And if the explanation is thematic grounds, I’m really lost as to what this setting looks and feels like and could use a more thorough explanation.