Category: Uncharted Worlds: Discussion

Yesterday, while going through my group’s Dropbox, I found ancient design documents from the very first prototype of Uncharted Worlds, back in 2013. Feels like it should be in a museum or something. Should I toss it into a ‘museum’ subfolder in the Preview materials?

Prescience in roleplaying games:

A question about the Bene Gesserit brought up an interesting point about prediction, prophecy and general future sight in roleplaying games. I had been tooling around with a prophetic skill for the Chosen career for a while, but could never quite come up with something that felt right.

The main issue is that prophecy denies both dice rolls and player choice, in-so-far as it assumes a future series of events. Unless the power is “what will happen by the time I finish speaking this sentence”, almost all predictive powers are either rendered useless by player free will and the dice results, or take control of the game.

A possible solution might lie in the Data Points, and leveraging the cryptic, metaphorical nature of prescience. Instead of earning Data Points about a current or past subject through investigation and Assessment, the prophetic Data would be about potential future events like “The moment I die” or “The wrong word spoken” or “Finding true love”. No need to explain what the prophet saw, it doesn’t translate well. But when the moment comes, they’ll know, and be able to spend that Data Point to get + 1 on the roll that could either change what they foresaw, or ensure it comes true.

That said, I’m open to other paths of approach. Also, anyone know of roleplaying games that do prophecy well?

Random design musings:

FBH is still a little while away, but I try to do a little tooling around every so often. I have 2 kinds of Psionic careers (Kinetic, Telepath), 2 Magic careers (Occult, Arcane) and 2 Faith careers (Chosen, Devoted).

Now, each of these have representations in popular sci-fi/space opera media. What I haven’t seen is sci-fi druidic magic. I suppose that being connected to “the land” or to “nature” is quite hard in a starship or space station. I feel like it would require significant lore, just to make it work… which kinda defeats the point of the mix-and-match approach of the Archetype system. Usually the Archetype will take the two careers (Occult Engineer, Clandestine Chosen, Kinetic Technocrat) and explain the how and why that works.

In short, I’m struggling to find a druidic concept that is generic enough that it can be half of an Archetype, rather than dominating the archetype with all its unique baggage.