Category: Uncharted Worlds

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.