But if you re-read that, you realize it’s a pretty shallow analysis. Despite what movies think, most important computers aren’t connected to the internet — the pentagon, the FBI, bank ATMs, all that stuff are their own private networks and if you want to hack them you need to physically get to a place you can make a connection. Furthermore, these days, a substantial fraction of the serious hacking is social engineering — yeah, there’s a lot of automatic exploitation of known security holes in insecure software, but in plenty of cases the software is secure enough you can’t just “hack” it: you need to impersonate an authorized user and pretend to have forgotten your password, or dig up appropriate personal information to answer some other security question, or steal their security dongle and use it to pass half of their two-factor authentication. The most important thing, though, is this is not at all a new problem. There’s a famous line in a few places where Bond’s referred to as a blunt instrument: killing people is sexy and makes for good movies, but the premise of Bond isn’t that MI6 goes around killing people all the time. There are whole layers of diplomacy, surveillance, bribery, blackmail, etc that you go through before you get to the point where assassination is looking like the best option. Just because the safety of the free world is threatened by the sinister plans of a madman blah blah blah doesn’t mean you call in Bond; you only do that when it’s a problem Bond is the best tool to solve, and the fact that the world has more data-driven threats these days doesn’t change that. It just means that for the movie, you have to pick threats that Bond is suited for, same as before. In the modern world, you could do a totally reasonable movie where Bond infiltrates the Iranian nuclear plant to load stuxnet onto their computers, or where Bond has to kill a guy so access on some system devolves to another person who’s already been compromised.

And speaking of threats, let’s talk about Bond villains. I’m sure people have written essays on this before now but I don’t know why recent movies keep screwing it up, so to reiterate: there are three things you need for an action-movie villain — motivation, goal, and gimmick — and of the three, gimmick is by far the most important. It’s the most important because goal and motivation are revealed over time (so on initial introduction, all you have is gimmick to make them interesting), and it’s also the most important because the villain’s goal and motivation almost always turn out to be stupid. I assume this has something to do with how movies get made or something — you start out by shooting the fight scenes and then have to rewrite the goal to explain why the jetski chase is now in Miami instead of Madagascar because that’s all your budget had room for or whatever. Motivation is only interesting if you care about the characters, and in this kind of movie we don’t really care about the characters — we all know that whatever beef this guy has with M is purely imaginary and exists only within the confines of the movie, and we also know that at the end of the movie he’s going to be dead and Bond is going to win, so it’s not like we are on the edge of our seats wondering if the villain will work through his mono-oedipus complex and achieve personal fulfillment.

We are not shocked and drawn into the story when we realize some guy is actually a traitor or has some hidden motivation or whatever, because we don’t have any investment in the character and so we don’t care (one exception of note here is the big shocker in Mission: Impossible when they made one of the beloved characters from the tv show the bad guy, but this was mostly shocking in the sense that people hated it, so I’m not sure it’s a great path to follow either). Another way to put it is gimmick is what the villain does, so you can tell the viewer the villain can do it and then you get hitchcockian bomb-under-the-table suspense as the viewer waits for them to actually do it; but motivation and goals are generally too big to relate to — we know the villain can’t work through them before the end of the movie so there’s no suspense wondering if they will (and the inverse situation is true too — in this movie when Bond captures the bad guy midway through, or in Avengers when Loki gets captured, the audience isn’t thinking “wow, who knows what will happen now?”, they’re thinking “well, obviously this isn’t going to stick because this is only halfway through the movie”).

Also, as a minor peeve, it’s a violation of the implicit laws of the Bond universe for the villain here to be both a master agent and a master hacker with no explanation; these are clearly separate skillsets*. It’s totally possible for them to be combined in one character, but they have to have some special shtick to explain it, they can’t just have them — like, if the guy’s skull had been partly burnt out by the cyanide and he got a cybernetic implant which then granted him hacking powers, that would be fine. I bet you could improve this movie if you split out the hacker and agent into separate characters, though; have your evil Bond and your evil Q and let them be fighting for dominance in the same way Bond and Q are while at the same time working together to bring down MI6. You could even do some plot switcheroo where the audience thinks there’s only one villain until later in the movie.

*Whereas in, say, Lensman, the more powerful a character you are, the better you are at all skills; you don’t really have to specialize.

The stuff with Bond’s death was kind of embarrassing from a screenwriting perspective — like, clearly they decided he had to have a death and resurrection for the anniversary, but it had so little time there was basically no point (and then they do it again when he goes into the lake at the end, which I guess you could say is a callback but in practice makes it look like he’s the Unbreakable guy and his one weakness is falling into lakes). Ditto the stuff with M’s death. I mean, look, nobody believes that these characters are actually going to die in a permanent way (well, ok, M as played by Judi Dench is, but M lives on), but it’s at least traditional to play it up a bit. I mean, what’s the point of writing in a character death if you’re not going to do a funeral scene and people talking about the dearly departed and sad music and putting “special collector’s issue!” on the cover and stuff? Nobody’s making you do this kind of plot point (except presumably the producers in this case), so if you’re going to do it, go big or don’t do it.

And speaking of comics, that’s what the gender stuff in this movie made me think about. Like, I didn’t find it sexist that Eve is a screwup agent — of course all agents in the movie are screwups compared to Bond* — and I didn’t find it sexist or rapey to have Bond get on the boat and have sex with the other lady — that is how hookups work in Bond movies and there’s no reason to think it’s non-consensual and a few reasons to think it is consensual — but what does seem implicitly sexist is the character rollback at the end of the movie. There’s a thing in the comics world now (Chris Sims talked about it in 2010) where they’re going back to the original versions of various characters, and the side effect of that is rolling back a bunch of the diversity that later versions introduced, because the originals reflect their 50s/60s design. So basically we have the same thing here: at the end of the movie, M is back to being male and has a sexy secretary. Really? It’s weird because since they also rolled over Q, they had the perfect chance to put in a female Q. They seem to be moving to a dynamic where Bond and Q have more ongoing (but remote) interaction, so it would have been great to make Q female and they could have a non-sexual relationship develop.

*That said, her banter with Bond about it later is a weird flirty “ha ha I’m so incompetent” thing that is reflective of a particular kind of female socialization.

So, uh, as usual this was mostly gripes but basically the film is fine as a Bond film. It doesn’t really sparkle — I think of slinking around parties in exotic locales as pretty fundamental to the Bond experience, and this one is mostly interested in running around basements in London*, and one of the exotic places is Scotland in winter, which is kind of the antithesis of sparkling — but if the intent is to mix it up a bit, it succeeds at that (like, James Bond doing Home Alone is kind of cute).

*I think you could do an good thing with “the most exotic place for an agent is your home town”, but aside from the one scene on the tube where Q comments that Bond isn’t really used to rush hour, they pretty much blow that.

To make things a challenge, presumably the goal should be to do so with the minimum number of changes. So here’s my attempt at Fixing Prometheus In N Easy Steps:
Actually, before I get started, let me clarify a couple of things. First, “coherent” can mean thematic coherency or plot coherency, and plot coherency can mean in-scene, cross-scene, or cross-movie coherency. I don’t think Prometheus has any issues with thematic coherency, at least in the sense that it has plenty of stuff in there about “Parents and Children, Fightin’ All The Time”. Similarly, the in-scene coherency is fine: it’s generally clear what is going on and why people are doing what they’re doing, at least if you look at the movie in five-minute chunks. The main issue with the movie that people have focused on is the cross-scene coherency, things like “why is character X doing Y given what we know about them from earlier?” So that’s what I’m going to focus on (and I haven’t seen any of the Alien movies, so I’m not going to talk about cross-movie coherency much).

Then, changes: I am sure somebody out there has already suggested “1) Discard entire movie, replace with first Alien movie”. I’m thinking scene- or subscene-level changes here — anything larger than that counts as multiple changes. Also, in Real Movie-Making Life some changes, like filming new scenes, are much more expensive than strategic cutting or adding a voice-over, but I’m going to ignore that and just focus on number of changes.

So let’s get to it, with the first question some people are going to ask:

Why did Weyland spend a trillion dollars on a mission based off a few cave paintings found by some scientists who don’t appear particularly bright or talented (“lucky” seems more apropos)?

We can answer this if it turns out Weyland’s found other evidence of these Engineers in the past (not surprising if we posit they’ve visited earth multiple times), but hasn’t found a location until now, so this discovery is just the last in a series. We know he developed David, so it makes sense to say he’s been working on projects involving life extension/creation for a while, and it’s not much of a leap to say he was investigating the origins of the human race and came upon stuff about the Engineers. Put in a scene that establishes that Weyland knew about the Engineers already and that David and Vickers are both things he made as part of a larger project and both are failures (or, more charitably, just steps along the way) because Weyland actually wants to extend his own life, not create new life. It’s tempting given this to make Vickers a clone, as another kind of life-creating attempt, but probably not necessary. A good way to bring her back in the sequel, though.

Why do Engineers look so similar to humans? Why do Engineers have “100% identical!” DNA to humans? Why is Engineer language so close to human language?

This isn’t actually a big deal, but it seems like a big deal because the movie bobbles it, having one of the scientists ask “so what about evolution, is that all wrong?” and Shaw give a faith-based response. Clearly one of two things must have happened: 1) Engineers seeded all life on Earth, having picked a planet that was similar to theirs, and done some kind of directed evolution thing, so stuff still evolved but branches that diverged too much from theirs got pruned. Seems difficult but not out of the question for a group that we know can create new life forms or 2) some other group of aliens pulled proto-humans off Earth at an early stage of human evolution, and those proto-humans became Engineers. In either case, we know that Engineers visited Earth at intervals in the early days (which supports theory #1 a bit); it seems likely that Earth-human language was taught to us by the Engineers, and then evolved on its own. So there really isn’t much to do here, just make it clear that the characters don’t know what the answer is and are aware it’s a question and save it for the sequel.

What is the Engineer base for? Why did the Engineers leave maps for how to find their weapon stash? Did the Engineers want humans to come here or not?

Other points I talk about in this post are things where you could reasonably claim that the director or the writers intended what I said, and it just didn’t get spelled out. But with this issue, I don’t think there is a simple explanation that covers all of what we know in a sensible way. That said, I think it’s possible to make some explanation that mostly works. To start with, we can discard Janek’s theory that the place is a military base or research lab or biological weapons testing facility, because it doesn’t look like any of those: it’s got a bunch of tunnels and a lot of artwork and not much else. It’s clearly more like a memorial or a temple. That said, something weird happened in it, since we know a from the holograms that a bunch of Engineers ran around in a panic and then through a blast door as it was shutting, leading to the one guy getting decapitated.

So here’s a theory: four thousand years ago, this was Engineer HQ, a lush and verdant planet etc. They’ve seeded Earth, humans are finally getting kind of civilized, and they decide to leave them alone for a while, so they drop off some “come see us when you’re more developed!” maps and split. Then they have some kind of war. Either intra-Engineer or Engineers vs some other group, but one of the results is this planet gets blasted and all life gets erased. Another result is they develop some biological weapons which are their equivalent of nuclear weapons. The Engineers win the war, and they decide to set up a memorial on the old home planet; nobody can live here any more, but they’ll come occasionally to visit, so they do some mild re-terraforming, repurpose one of the buried old spaceships, put in some religious art, and put in a bunch of funeral urns with victims of the biological weapons (I assume they’re intended to look like canopic jars, anyway). They get it all installed, and then one of them starts coughing or gets a snake in the eyeball or whatever, and they suddenly realize that some of the urns aren’t properly sealed and the area’s still infectious. Cue mass panic and fleeing to the escape pods in the control room (except for one group that sickens and dies together in a pile), and one poor dude getting his head chopped off by a closing door. So yeah, that’s my theory: art installation gone terribly wrong.

But regardless of the explanation, it’s too long and too complicated to go in the movie. So this is another place where you just put in a scene where the characters say they don’t know and speculate a bit and leave it at that (though I suppose you could have something on the computers which David finds and translates if you don’t mind twenty minutes of exposition).

What is David’s deal? Is he just a jerk? Why does he infect Holloway, why does he poke and prod at things and open doors without worrying about the safety of the crew?

In general androids in movies can be assumed to be Three-Laws-compliant unless specified otherwise, and people certainly treat David as though that’s the case: they order him around, they’re mean to him, and clearly he could rip their head off but just gives them a little sassy back-talk. But despite this apparent prohibition on harming humans, he’s able to engage in a lot of behavior that puts humans at risk (though in the most direct case of harm, infecting Holloway, the movie establishes that he gets Holloway’s unwitting permission first). The easiest way to reconcile this is to say David has an overriding directive from Weyland to gather alien samples and get them back to Earth for more research. Weyland comes along on the mission because there’s a chance there might be a live Engineer he can negotiate with directly, but it’s only a chance; if it fails, they can at least still gather information and bring it back to Earth for more study*. Given that, it makes perfect sense that David would try to put the alien baby into Shaw and then stick her in coldsleep for the trip back to Earth, and given that David hates the humans but is bound by his programming, it makes perfect sense that he would charge ahead and open doors and release specimens, and if that gets everyone on the mission except him killed, oops, what a sad accident. So all we need here is a scene in which Weyland tells David that finding an alien to talk to is priority one and getting some samples for study on Earth is priority two and the safety of the crew is priority three.

*Weyland makes a big deal about not having a lot of time left, but this setting has coldsleep technology, so he has plenty of time to wait for research on Earth to happen, and just wake up once a year or so to see how things are going. If you want to get super-meta, you could claim the coldsleep or his prototype rejuvenation work is why he looks like he’s played by a young actor in bad old-age makeup, but that is probably too much.

What is up with the ending? Why does Weyland go into the Engineer base in person? Why is the Engineer mad when it wakes up? Why does it try to fly to Earth to kill everyone?

Given what we’ve said earlier, it’s pretty clear that David hates the humans but is unable to harm them directly (and that goes double for Weyland). So maybe the reason that Weyland goes into the base is because David talks him into it, knowing there’d be trouble. If you buy the earlier theory about a war among the Engineers, then maybe David even knows that the guy in the stasis pod is somebody from that war and will be crazy or angry or paranoid when he wakes up. Under this interpretation, maybe we should add subtitles to what David says to the Engineer, where he’s like “surrender! we’re here to kill you!” just to provoke the guy. As to why the Engineer was trying to fly to Earth to kill everyone there, I don’t think there is any reason to think that’s the case — he’s probably just trying to get off this crappy planet … and then is understandably angry at humans when they bring down his ship. Or maybe the Engineer heads to Vickers’ escape ship once it crashes because it seems possible that can be flown off the planet too. I think what we need here is a scene with David to establish the Engineer’s identity and motives at the end; probably this means David accessing the computer bank holograms again.

Finally, what is up with those two guys getting lost in the base despite one of them being the one in charge of the map?

Obviously they didn’t actually get lost, they wandered off to find some alien stuff to hide and bring back to earth, where they would sell it and make zillions. This also explains why they head back to alien-goo central despite claiming to be scared of aliens. Just add a scene where they explain their plot and it’s fine.

Ok, not too bad! Six scenes! Oh, and one bonus theory: engineers are actually exactly identical in appearance to humans, and the tall doughy look is due to later bio-engineering and/or alien infestation, which makes them act crazy.

Character setup:

Characters have skills (ranked Untrained, Average, Fair, Good, Great) chosen from the following list: Academics, Athletics, Brawn, Community*, Fingersmithery, Nature, Reflexes, Resolve, Riding, Sailing, Science, Stealth, Weapons*. Starred skills require a specialization: see below for details.

You can pick 20 points worth of skills, where a skill at Great costs four points, Good three, Fair two, Average one. This means the standard layout is a build with two skills each at Great, Good, Fair, and Average. If you want to have a more generalist build you can swap out either/both of the Great skills for one additional Fair and two additional Average skills, but it’s not recommended for most character concepts. Skills otherwise not ranked are considered to be Untrained.

In addition to the skills characters have five aspects, two “primary” aspects and three “secondary” ones. Primary aspects should be things that your character demonstrates most sessions: the most common primary aspects are going to be swordsman schools and sorcery, but you can use whatever your core character concept is (Dashing Courtier, Master of Deception, Man of Will, Crazy Alchemist, etc). Secondary aspects are things that flesh out the character, but don’t come up as frequently: Lucky, Good-Looking, Vodacce, and so on — though any particular aspect could work as a primary or a secondary depending on the character concept.

Basic mechanics:

Rolling a skill is done with the Apocalypse World model: 2d6+skill+modifier; less than 8 is a failure, 8-10 is a partial success, 11-12 is a full success, 13+ is an advanced success. A roll of 2 always fails and 12 always at least succeeds (it may be an advanced success). By default advanced successes act as normal successes, but see below about techniques. Skill adjustments are +3 for Great rank, +2 for Good rank, +1 for Fair, +0 for Average, -1 for Untrained. Other modifiers are set by the GM, but are usually +/-1 (+/-2 is as large as is generally seen in practice). As an alternative to a more extreme modifier, the GM may require an additional roll before the main roll.

Note that players roll all the dice in this system: to attack an opponent with a sword, a player rolls Weapons (Fencing), and to defend, they roll Weapons (Fencing), Athletics, Resolve, Reflexes, or other skill, depending on how they choose to defend.

Aspects are used to modify skill rolls and effects in two ways. If you have an aspect of any type (secondary or primary) that is related to the roll you’re making, then after you roll, you can pay a fate point to increase the success level by one step, from failure to partial success to full success to advanced success. You can even use an aspect on an opponent or on the situation, as long as it’s relevant (taunting someone with a Hot-Headed aspect, say).

Additionally, only with primary aspects, you can spend a fate point before or after a roll to unlock “techniques” of the aspect. Once unlocked, a technique is available for the rest of the adventure (without having to pay to unlock each time). The specifics of the technique get decided on at the time you unlock them, though they should roughly conform to the guidelines below.

Things a technique can do:

• Negate a penalty, either a modifier or a required extra die roll (fighting in pitch darkness for an “Ambrogia Student” aspect; walking on a tightrope for an “Acrobat” aspect)
• Provide a +1 or +2 bonus in some specialized situation (+1 for less-specialized situations, +2 for more-specialized) which isn’t a direct attack (+1 to Reflexes rolls when outdoors for a “Hawk and Wolf Are My Spirits” aspect; +2 to Fingersmithery rolls when picking locks for a “Master Burglar” aspect)
• Get an advanced benefit when you roll an advanced success with a skill relevant to this aspect, instead of treating the advanced success as a normal success (Weapons (Heavy) rolls with a “Wandering Bogatyr Master” aspect; Science rolls with a “Mad Scientist” aspect)
• No mechanical benefit, but allow some really specialized or magical in-world action (retrieving or pocketing an object for an “Apprentice Porte Sorcerer” aspect; performing the five-finger death punch for a “Cathayan Martial Artist” aspect)

…or anything else you feel like of roughly equivalent power (plenty of stunts from the standard FATE rules qualify, like reappearing in the guise of an NPC for a “Master of Deception” aspect).

Characters start off with five fate points. In terms of refresh, the usual fate point economy doesn’t seem to work well in our games (though maybe this is just a lack of practice) so I’m thinking we instead have something like Shadow of Yesterday‘s pool refresh rules, and say you refill your fate points when you relax in a manner appropriate to one of your aspects. Relaxation in this way takes up a large chunk of the day (6-8 hours, say) during which time you can’t be doing anything else of importance.

Maneuvers and blocks:

There are a few other things you can use skills for besides a direct assault on a problem: a maneuver betters your position in some way in preparation for a direct attempt later, while a block attempts to stop an opponent from completing an action.

A maneuver creates a temporary aspect which can be used for later rolls, with specific effect based on the success level of the skill roll used to it: a success creates the aspect which comes with one free fate point to use it once, after which the aspect goes away; an advanced success works the same but the aspect doesn’t go away until the end of the conflict (though you have to pay fate points to use it later); a partial success creates a different aspect than the one intended and/or comes with no free fate point; a failure creates a penalty aspect (see below) on the character who attempted the maneuver, or causes some other penalty (though a lesser penalty than for a normal skill roll). Maneuvers are usually easier than direct actions, and get a bonus to the roll: +2 if it’s something the target is especially vulnerable to (Community (Merchants) to taunt a hotheaded shopkeeper), +1 in the normal case (Fingersmithery to distract a crowd with juggling), and +0 if it’s something the target is especially invulnerable to (Weapons (Fencing) to intimidate the king’s fencing master). Aspects and penalty aspects created by maneuvers generally last until the end of the conflict, or some other short period of time.

A block is an attempt to interrupt an action in progress. The effectiveness of the block depends on the skill roll to create it as follows: a success stops the action from occurring but not necessarily in a way the blocker controls; an advanced success stops the action from occurring and lets the blocker take control of the momentum of the situation; a partial success hurts the blocker and/or only partly stops the action and/or doesn’t prevent the blockee from retrying their action; a failure means the action proceeds as usual.

Penalty Aspects:

There are a few ways in this system to acquire penalty aspects. If a character has a penalty aspect, their opponent (usually the GM) can choose when to use it, but they have to do so before the roll. When they do so, the character receives a -2 modifier to the roll (in addition to whatever other modifiers apply). The first time a penalty aspect is used, it’s free; after that, the opponent must pay the character a fate point to use the aspect.

Skill Details:

The following describes the skills in more detail. Starred skills, as mentioned, require a specialization. When using a skill outside its specialization, it is treated as two ranks lower (but not lower than Untrained).

• Academics: Scholarship, library research, academic subjects that are mostly theoretical or observational (philosophy, mathematics, history, astronomy, cartography, ancient languages, etc)
• Athletics: Physical activities involving the whole body that require both dexterity and strength: climbing, jumping, swimming, rolling.
• Brawn: Physical activities primarily involving raw strength: arm-wrestling, shouldering down doors, pushing boulders.
• Community*: The ability to act as a member of a particular social group: gathering information, fashion, bluffing, understanding motives. Specializations are by profession (soldier, pirate), location (Vodacce), or social class (peasant, noble). If the campaign is set entirely within a particular social group (the PCs are all pirates, or all in Vodacce), specializations should be smaller than that group (pirates belonging to group X, or people from Numa).
• Fingersmithery: Physical activities involving manual dexterity, hand-eye coordination, and general cleverness: sleight of hand, lock-picking, knot-tying, juggling.
• Nature: Knowledge of animals and the natural world: finding safe food and water in the wilderness, building fires, interpreting animal behavior, gathering and using herbs.
• Reflexes: Anything that involves quick reaction and/or spotting: dodging thrown objects, reacting when ambushed, finding a hiding spot while being chased. Generally not a suitable skill for actions taking longer than a few seconds.
• Resolve: Will, persistence, endurance: hanging onto a hot object, resisting a sleeping drug, leading troops on a steady charge into gunfire, staying watchful on a long guard shift. Generally not a suitable skill for actions taking less than a few minutes.
• Riding: Horse selection and care, as well as riding them. Usually a roll is only required when performing tricks or unusual maneuvers while on horseback (or, for instance, jumping out a window and landing on a horse). Covers other basic horse-drawn vehicles like carriages.
• Sailing: Ship building, piloting, navigating, rigging, etc. In most situations only one person on a ship needs to have sailing to operate the ship, though having more helps. Does not cover gunnery or boarding, beyond getting the ship in a reasonable position to attempt them.
• Science: “Applied academics” that are mostly hands-on: alchemy, biology, chemistry, medicine, creating and analyzing poisons. Building large machines.
• Stealth: Concealing people, actions, or things; or detecting concealed things: sneaking past a guard, making a surprise attack, setting up an ambush, finding a secret door.
• Weapons*: Evaluating, attacking, and defending with weapons. Specializations are by type (bows, heavy, guns, fists) or by profession (duelist, assassin, soldier).

There is no skill for Sorte, Pyeryem, etc. If there is an obvious skill for for the situation (catching an object with Porte would be Athletics), you use that; if not, you use a default skill you select when you take the aspect. Suggested defaults are Porte: Weapons (Dueling Blades), Sorte: Community (any), Pyeryem: Nature, Laerdom: Sailing, Glamour: Fingersmithery.

Damage, wounds, and healing:

Damage from an attack depends on the source and the success level of the roll. There are two ways to absorb damage: stress and consequences. You can check off one or more stress boxes to absorb that many points of damage; alternately, you can check off a consequence to absorb some amount of damage (usually more than one point), but that forces you to also gain a penalty aspect describing the effects of the damage. Stress boxes are cleared at the end of the fight; consequences last some amount of time depending on the consequence.

You start off with two stress boxes, plus an additional one if you have at least a Fair Resolve or Brawn, and another one beyond that if you have at least a Great Resolve or Brawn. You have three consequences: a minor one that absorbs two points and lasts til the end of the fight; a moderate one that absorbs four points and lasts til you refresh your fate points; and a major one that absorbs six points and lasts til the end of the adventure. With an appropriate skill roll (usually Science), you can clear a minor consequence immediately instead of at the end of a fight.

Ballpark for weapon damage is that knives/daggers do two points, fencing swords and arrows do three points, heavy weapons do four, guns do five. A success on an attack roll does normal damage, an advanced success does one and a half times normal damage, a partial success does half damage; a partial success on a defense means you take half damage, and a failure means you take normal damage (and an advanced success gives you a +1 for your next move). Using a less-appropriate skill for defending (Resolve or Athletics are typically less-appropriate) may result in taking extra damage on a failure. A failure on attacking may result in you taking damage (which could be half or normal) or it may involve some other penalty.

Enemies and Groups:

Enemies meant to be a challenge singly have custom-designed sets of stress boxes and consequences; at minimum two to four stress boxes and one consequence that absorbs four points of damage and lasts for the duration of the adventure or longer.

Enemies meant to be a challenge in groups — minions — don’t have stress boxes or consequences: instead, a partial success injures one (or takes one out if already injured), a success takes out one, and an advanced success takes out one and injures another. However, defending against the attack of a group of minions takes a -1 penalty for each minion beyond the first in the group (but a group of minions only does damage as for a single attacker no matter how many minions are in the group). With an appropriate skill check, characters can reduce or eliminate the group penalty, either by maneuvering to limit the number of minions that can attack at once, or by disrupting their ability to work as a group (Athletics to move into a doorway, Brawn to topple a bookcase and provide some shelter, Community to taunt them into taking you on singly).

Minion variants might take more or less damage to be taken out (for weaker minions, a partial success takes out one, a normal success takes out two, and an advanced success takes out three; for stronger minions, a partial success gives a +1 to the character’s next roll, a normal success injures one, and an advanced success takes out one), modify the base bonus for rolling against them, or change which skills get the group penalty (a phalanx with shields might apply the penalty to attacking them instead of defending against their attacks; a group of gossipy nobles might apply the penalty to intimidating them).

Chases:

Chases and other stuff work by having a second track, representing the distance. Your skill rolls are essentially tradeoffs between the distance track and a health track (could be the character’s health, could be their vehicle’s health). Like, a typical roll where you’re just focused on advancement is like: success is +1 on the distance track; advanced success is +2; partial success is either -1 on the distance track or +1 on the distance track and -1 on the health track; failure is -1 on the health track and -1 on the distance track. Distance track modifiers are either up or down depending on what you want; on a typical setup, the distance starts at 5-ish, the chaser gets the chasee if the distance drops to 0 and the chasee gets away if the distance hits 10. Instead of running the racers can also try to attack/trap the other racers, change the arena (crowded streets to rooftops) or the vehicle (grab a horse and ride off) and so on.

Advancement:

Couple possibilities for advancement in this system.

• Permanently unlock a technique that you unlocked during the adventure/session
• Gain a skill you don’t have at Average
• Gain a new secondary aspect
• Advance an aspect to a more powerful version that allows for more/better techniques (“Porte Apprentice” -> “Porte Master”)
• Make a secondary aspect into a primary one (possibly making room by making a primary aspect into a secondary one)
• Increase the rank of a skill (possibly making room by decreasing the rank of a neighboring-ranked skill)

Examples:

• Venzi vs the pirates, sample character and play.
• Conan and the Dancer, sample character and play.
• Sebastien Trims a Goatee, sample character and play.
• Hanse and the Eye of the Snake, sample character and play.
• A half-dozen more 7th-sea-ish-characters, written for the latest version of the rules.
• Conan vs minions, latest state of the minion rules.

Probabilities:
For reference, probabilities at various modifiers out until success or failure has a 90% chance (this includes the rule that a 2 always fails and a 12 is always at least a success):

In 3rd edition magic was too separate from non-magic (you can affect non-magic with magic but not vice-versa), while in 4th it’s too similar (the arcane keyword means almost nothing, and you can’t look at a power and tell if it’s magic or not). The ideal is that magic and non-magic are separate but there’s still two-way interaction. So, magic can make somebody invisible in a way you can’t do without magic, but that invisible person isn’t undetectable to a non-magic person — they can listen for footsteps or throw flour or whatever, and a person of equal level to the invisible mage has a good chance (not just a chance) of spotting them, and with prolonged hanging around, they’ll definitely spot them. Magic can make somebody fly, but not in a way that puts them out of reach of somebody on the ground. Magic can lock a door, but somebody without magic can still pick the lock. And note that this all applies to magical monsters, too — medusae can turn people to stone and dragons can breathe fire, but not in a way that can’t be avoided by somebody non-magical with some skill. More about this later in classes, but this is the philosophy.

Healing. More about this later too, but basically I think healing during adventures is weak-ass and 4th edition’s expansion of it was a mistake. Like, you can see their reasoning: if there can be multiple encounters a day and the characters lose strength after each one, you don’t know how powerful the party will be for a particular encounter. But that’s D&D! Unbalanced fights are great! In fact, they’re a reward for skillful play earlier, or a penalty for non-skillful play. I’d go even farther, though — healing ought to be something that only happens during major downtime, like when you rest for the night, not something that can be handled easily with a spell (but 1e/2e went too far with non-magical healing being so slow — you shouldn’t have to sit around more than a week unless you got seriously fucked up; probably healing like 10-20% of your hp a night is the right ballpark).

Actually I think skills are mostly fine in 4e. I’d probably just cut the cord and make them a separate resource from combat stuff entirely, though — forget being able to spend a feat to get more skills. Just say you can learn N skills, and the GM can easily adjust N based on how skilled they want the characters to be. And put in an explicit rule that characters can learn new skills with in-game training.

Basically, look, skills in D&D have two points, flavor and niche protection. Flavor is where you put the skill on your sheet because you like what it says about your character — “my dude is a fast-talking gambler” — but don’t actually expect to use that skill in practice (though if there is a gambling situation you expect to be able to do well). Niche protection is where you put the skill on your sheet because it’s a situation that actually comes up in the game and you want to be the dude that people look at: “Hey, it’s a locked chest, time for Bob to step up”. For flavor picks, your skill in absolute terms doesn’t matter because it comes up so seldom and not generally in crisis situations, and in fact you’re probably not putting it down on the sheet unless you’re either 1) really good at it or 2) really bad at it. So just let people give themselves whatever skill level they want.

For niche protection picks, your absolute skill level matters, but you don’t want people to be able to get too far ahead or behind their level in, say, stealth for the same reason you don’t want them to get too far or behind their level in to-hit rolls — you have to be able to challenge the party as a whole in a skill, and you have to be able to have somebody fill in if the main guy is out. So for niche protection skills, that’s where you go with the 4e thing about they’re half your level +5 if you’re trained or whatever. So the dude trained in it is always your first choice, but if they’re gone or multiple people need to roll, things aren’t impossible. And you have some ‘aura’ rules for things like stealth where the trained guy can give everyone else a +2 or whatever.

After all these steps character classes fall out as pretty obvious. Mages stay pretty much the same as 1e-3e — they memorize spells and carry spellbooks and wear robes, that’s just how shit works in D&D. Keep the rituals from 4e because those are cool, but they don’t cost any gold to cast — things are just rituals because (basically) they require an adventure to be able to do because it’s cooler that way, or because they’re something you can only do back at base, not in the dungeon. They don’t get any spells that auto-hit except maybe magic missile because, hey, magic missile — normally all their stuff can be dodged, evaded, blocked, etc, by a skillful enough opponent (which means that against an equally skilled person, it’ll take multiple spells to get through their opponent’s defenses, just like a fighter takes multiple hits to down their opponent).

Clerics are the same as 1e-3e again, but they can’t heal, because as mentioned healing spells are lame. But they can still bless the party and kick ass among the undead and all that stuff (I realize this is another thing that unbalances encounters depending on whether you have a cleric or not, but unbalanced encounters aren’t bad*) and should still be cool.

*Unbalanced encounters are bad if you get xp for killing monsters, but that sucks, as does xp for treasure. 5e should go to totally mission-based xp, and if you (the GM) want to make the mission be “kill a troll”, then there’s your killing-based xp.

Fighters, now here we get a little different. As mentioned way back in the first point, non-magical folks have to have a way to cope with magical folks. So to start out with, fighters get a bunch more skills than they did before, so they can do all the athletic and acrobatic stuff you expect, and in addition they can spot invisible wizards and dodge lightning bolts and otherwise cope. Also we get rid of weapon specialization — fighters can pick up any weapon and be good with it because that’s what they do, and also they need to be able to swap weapons around to shoot down the flying wizard or hold off the dragon with a longspear or whatever. So weapons and armors are the fighter’s tools, and they get different moves with them that gives them something more interesting to do during combat (“hunh, this golem’s skin is harder than I thought, better switch to a hammer” is exactly what you want a fighter to be saying). If you want, give them the 3e thief’s sneak attack ability, which is exactly the right amount of tactical maneuvering for a fighter to be doing in combat.

Thieves are bogus as always. They’ve always been my favorite class but more for the flavor and the endless fiddling they allow (so many percentage points to allocate to thief skills!) than for actually being decent characters. Basically the problem is the theoretical model is Bilbo, who is atypical as an adventurer and hence not a good model. So instead pick somebody like the Grey Mouser or Zorro or Batman: thieves are small, fast, good at combat but can’t rely on brute strength, and dabble in other areas to pick up tricks. In other words, you build them off a fighter chassis, with the intent of them being just as survivable in combat, albeit with a different style (presumably lower hit points, no armor skills, more limited weapon selection, somewhat different set of skills although there’s more overlap than you’d think, and then they can pick up some bonus abilities in gadgets or magic or acrobatics or charm, depending on style).

So that’s what I got! Realistically, even if 5e was exactly like this I wouldn’t play it myself — D&D characters are too incompetent on the low end and have too many fiddly bits on the high end — but I think it’d do a decent job of pulling in people who liked older editions while being different enough to be worth making a new edition for.

So this is a pretty good basis for a game. I haven’t seen anything quite like it before, and the intrinsic level of remove of the player from the game matches the premise — I’m bummed when soldiers die but they’re intrinsically replaceable and what’s most important is advancing the interests of the company, just like a real commander.

Where it mainly falls down, I think, is in the details. And by “falls down” I guess I mean “has as many problems as the typical facebook game”. Like, in theory this is nominally a story about a wily commander building up their company by skillful planning and deployment, but in practice it’s about a commander doing whatever seems like the most obvious thing and hoping it works. To put it another way, there isn’t really much strategic or tactical depth in the game.

For instance, take contracts. A typical contract has a short blurb, then says it costs, say, 10 command points (turns), pays 3200 gold, and requires one infantry squad, one scout squad, and one miscellaneous squad. You assign squads of the appropriate types and hit go, and then it runs one skill test per squad (combat, discipline, and maneuver being the most common) and it tells you if you win or not. If you’re like me, you have a bunch of different kinds of squads so you can take a bunch of different kinds of contracts, which means that you only have a few squads of each type — so when it says you need a scout, you only have one or two to pick between, making that not much of a choice. And since you don’t get to influence the success/failure of the execution, the only thing you can really do is pick which contracts you take. But that’s not much of a choice either — just take all the contracts you can handle, because the only real limiter is waiting for turns to regenerate, and there’s no penalty for not doing a contract if it looks too hard. (If you want to be ultra-efficient you can start skipping contracts with a bad gold/turns ratio, but it’s just a matter of waiting a little longer to get the turns back so it doesn’t really matter.) There’s a little more difficulty when the contract calls for a miscellaneous squad or when the contract has randomized events with it, but this doesn’t add tactical depth, it just means you have to guess what’s going to come up and hope you picked the right squad.

This kind of false tactics also comes up in the selection/design of squads. There’s a whole bunch of different kinds of squads: scouts, light/medium/heavy cavalry, knights, light/medium/heavy infantry, light/medium/heavy spears, medium/heavy pikes, sappers, “veteran” versions of all of the previous, etc. But in practice the distinctions are either obvious or don’t matter. You need at least one scout, one cavalry, one infantry, and one engineer to be able to fulfill most contracts, but in those categories there’s usually a best one and you can ignore the others, or the difference is close enough it doesn’t matter which you pick (this one has 10% to one stat, this other has 10% to another).

I think there’s a combination of things you could do to fix this. Since it’s a facebook game, you probably want each individual event to be resolved in just a few seconds, which means the tactics have to come in the assignments of squads to contracts, not in the execution of those contracts. So the first step is to give the player more information about the contract before they take it up, and have less restrictions on how they approach it. For instance, the contract could say that the fight takes place on the plains and the enemy is known to have two squads of heavy infantry. In that case, you might decide to send in some heavy infantry of your own, or you might decide to use cavalry and take advantage of the terrain. This also adds some strategic depth to the game: you can decide to specialize in infantry and send them in even when they’re less-suited (relying on training to win out, and skipping contracts when they’re totally unsuited) or you can decide to be a generalist, and use the terrain to compensate for weaker units.

Another issue with contracts is you can only execute one at a time, and they stick around until you get to them or decide to skip them. That means you can always send your best troops to the each contract. Instead, what if multiple contracts were running simultaneously, and you had to choose where to allocate your squads? Again, there’re multiple strategies: specialize into a single contract you know you can win, or spread out across several.

Once you add some more tactical depth like this, it becomes easier to differentiate the units. Unit X is good on several terrains and bad on others, whereas unit Y is ok across everything and good nowhere. Unit Z hits hard but takes longer to recover, so if you want to do several contracts in a row you’ll have to leave out Z on later fights.

This has been mostly griping but I do like a lot of the little story touches about the gameplay. Time passes as you spend command points and your soldiers age and eventually retire, meaning you need to keep rotating new recruits onto your squads. The setup that you need the right equipment to make a squad but can then rotate people on and off it (and the quality of the squad is determined by the skills of the people that compose it) works out nicely – if one of my knights dies, I can pick if I want to pull someone out of the heavy infantry as a replacement, or if I’d rather use a new recruit. The events that show up occasionally don’t make much of a difference but they’re a good break in the action from combat and add flavor. I wish there were actually more of the story touches — like, I wish I could name my squads and my company and customize my base more, and I wish there were enough contracts I could refuse those not in accordance with my company’s style.

Overall, I don’t think this game has a lot of long-term play in it, but it’s been totally fun the time I’ve spent on it, and I’m pretty sure you *could* make a more elaborate and longer-term game in this style.

  <hexmap width="800" height="600">
  <legend>
  meadow: 1
  lake: 2
  swamp: 3
  </legend>
  Hau Ndogg (7,3): text
  K1 (6,1): an unexplored lake hex, outlined n, nw, sw, ne
  O1 (10,1): an unexplored meadow hex with a resource, outlined n, nw, ne, se
  K2 (6,2): an unexplored swamp hex, outlined nw, sw
  K3 (6,3): a lake hex with a refinery, outlined nw, sw
  L3 (7,3): a lake hex with a refinery
  M3 (8,3): a swamp hex with a refinery
  </hexmap>

Pretty easy, right? This assumes that you have images corresponding to each hex type, but I’ve included some sample ones in the zipfile to get you started. Anyway, hope this is helpful for somebody. If you do use it, lemme know!

*Even Zeus, which makes the scenes where he is talking to Athena (who, needless to say, they cast as if she were Aphrodite) extra-weird, a situation is not helped by the one distinguishing feature they did decide to give the father of the gods, a child-molester mustache.

So similarly, I don’t think I can complain that the gods seem to have the power of Matrix-style slow-time-face-kicking (actually, isn’t that how they worked in Olympos?), but it does seem fair to complain that they don’t seem to have any other powers. Like, in the big fight at the end, you might assume Zeus was going to start shooting lightning bolts at people. But no, his strategy is to pick up a chain lying on the ground and hit people with it. Similarly, Poseidon doesn’t go all Squirtle on them or even go somewhere else in his portfolio and, I dunno, summon killer horses — he just uses his trident to stab people. Poseidon does have the only instance of Relevant Use of Domain in the movie where he creates a big wave, but he does it by flying into the water at high speed, not by waving his hand, which is how it seems to usually work.

I think the deal here is that the writers wrote themselves into a corner when they were putting together the basics of the story. Like, the overall driver for this story is this king had his family killed and swore vengeance against the gods and raises an army to burn down the world. This is a great premise for a greek mythology story (so great that I’m pretty sure it is based on an existing myth, although I can’t dig up who — in the movie I believe they call him King Hyperion, but that doesn’t seem to be the guy in question). Anyway, the problem is this is a standard-issue action movie, which means they need a likeable protagonist who is either a scrappy farm boy all grown up, or a grizzled veteran who has been out of the phalanx for years but then Socrates pulls him back in for one last score. They go for the former and call the guy Theseus.

So, ok, this means on the one hand you have King Hyperion and on the other you have Theseus and the entire greek pantheon. Even if you give Hyperion a big army it doesn’t really seem fair. There are various ways you can deal with this situation, but they all boil down to needing to tone down the gods and make them less interesting to keep the focus on Theseus versus Hyperion. Which is crazy, right? On the one hand, they were like “let’s put the greek gods as active characters in this movie and let them kick ass”, and on the other, they said “but all that ass-kicking can’t accomplish anything because that would detract from Theseus’s accomplishments”. Anyway, the movie’s solution is to have Zeus say that there’s an important existing rule that the gods can’t interfere with the affairs of mortals until the titans (ie, the bad guy gods) are freed.

Now, the Lensman series, which I love, has a similar rule of non-interference for the Arisians and for similar reasons story-wise. The difference is, in the Lensman series there is an existing plan: the Arisians don’t have the upper hand over their enemies, they have a stalemate, and they know that if they can hold off their enemies long enough for the mortals to accomplish stuff, then the Arisians win. Furthermore, the Arisians can’t die if the mortals fuck up, they just get banished to another dimension. By contrast, in this movie the greek gods have the upper hand (their enemies are all imprisoned), the mortals are unlikely to win the day without their assistance, and if the mortals screw up, the gods will die. So there’s much less incentive here for the gods to push a non-interference policy, but they do it anyway. Incidentally, this movie does the war-action-movie thing where one of the good guy mortals, King Dumbass, says “hey, I bet the enemy actually just wants to be friends, we should try diplomacy instead of just fighting them”, and as evidence for the fact that diplomacy sucks and fighting rules, he is slaughtered like a loser as he bleats for mercy. But if you look at the policy of the gods, it’s basically the same thing — Zeus pushes for staying out of war even when it’s the obviously correct and lives-saving thing to do, with the result that it’s a big mess later on when they do have to come down. I think this might be another case where Greek Tragedy and Action Movie are colliding: it’s totally reasonable in a tragedy to stick to your word of noninterference even when that ultimately destroys you, whereas in an action movie, if you have an rule not to use guns, that just exists to make it more badass when you do eventually pull them out.

Now, I think you could probably have pulled out a reasonable plot from these two genres, it’s just that this isn’t it. Like, one idea is you take the gods out of the movie entirely, and have the world-premise be that they don’t exist (you can keep stuff like the divination of the oracles, since the truth of that is ambiguous). Then the most sensible thing is you keep the tragic structure but leave Hyperion as the protagonist, and the action part is that you actually show his rise to power (he has a side-comment in the movie about how he was born a peasant, which of course has no real point whatsoever outside the scene in which it’s mentioned), how he fights his way to the top and to take on the gods themselves but it still doesn’t bring back his family, and his quest for vengeance ultimately destroys him. You can leave in all the stuff the characters talk about whether or not you should have faith in the gods, and also the weird thing where Theseus doesn’t fight a minotaur in the labyrinth, he fights a dude wearing a bull helmet in the maze of a burial crypt. You’d need some other long-term objective for Hyperion if you’re writing out the gods (and speaking of which, it’s weird that Hyperion doesn’t just deny faith in the gods but deny their existence, but he does believe in the magic bow that will let out the ancient enemies of the gods), but he can probably just be trying to conquer all of Greece and have it work out ok. I see they’re doing a movie of Coriolanus soon, which will probably be another take on this.

Alternately, you can ramp up the involvement of the gods. All the stuff they talk in the movie about how humans just have to have faith in the gods who do bad things for inexplicable reasons and don’t respond to prayers is basically a repackaged take on Christian mythology, not Greek. Greek religious belief is the gods do jerky things because they’re pissed off, and they do those jerky things all the time. So if you’re going to do an action movie involving the Greek gods, you should copy the Trojan war model and have half the gods supporting one side and half the gods supporting the other and Zeus in the middle shouting at everyone to keep it down or he’s turning this pantheon right now. Then it’s totally fine to have Theseus and the gods vs Hyperion, because it’s Hyperion and the other gods, and the divine battles can be ongoing through the movie instead of jammed in at the end. You even get the tragedy, though this time the hubris belongs to the gods — they don’t think they can be harmed by mortals until it’s too late and everything’s fucked up.

So yeah, I think you could have made a good movie with this premise but I don’t think this one was it. One quick closing note: the Han Solo sidekick-protagonist (you can tell he is the Han Solo guy because he is rude to the female lead, although not actually in an attractive way) is explicitly identified as a thief (despite not doing any thief-type activities at any point), and then there’s the priest of the oracle, and the oracle herself (a mystic diviner type), all led by expert warrior Theseus — which means you have the prototypical D&D adventuring party. This explains everything!

Anyway, I bring this up because I thought on the whole the improv worked out really well: the setting felt both large and consistent, there was a good amount of challenge regardless of what people were trying to work on, and stuff that showed up early in the game came back to haunt people as appropriate later on. A few things didn’t work out as well: details of names and places got lost, and “point of interest exploration” never worked out as well as I’d intended. (A bunch of other things worked out well or not well in the game, but I’m focusing on the improv-related things here.)

So, techniques. The main one (which is why it gets to be in the title of the post) is “pick a metaphor and stick with it, but it doesn’t have to be the same metaphor for every situation”. So in this game, the base setting understanding is Star Wars: ships have hyperdrives but it still takes a while to get across the universe, droids exist but they’re mostly menials and don’t take over any interesting human jobs, the standard sidearm is a blaster, there’s a big imperial senate (ok, it’s older star wars). However, for particular of the world-building, some other metaphor comes into play. Like, the politics in the large are all Dune: big powerful feuding Houses, some associated with a particular trade, and the Emperor trying to balance things out. But in the small, they’re parody real-world politics: everybody wants something, and there is a lot of tacking unrelated riders onto bills to try to pull together a coalition to get the thing passed, and balancing who you’re going to suck up to and who you’re going to piss off. For another example, the Imperial culture tends to be HHGTTG but the general culture is 50s space serial.

Once I have this worked out, then when it comes time to talk about what kind of party the emperor would throw, I can say this: it’s going to be expensive, because the empire is rich (Star Wars), but also ridiculous (HHGTTG). I decide they towed in a planetoid to hold it on (roughly equivalent to making the Death Star) but instead of looking like the Death Star or like Cloud City, it looks like some crazy pleasure planet covered in xtreme sports facilities and 24-hour buffets. Then when you ask what’s going on with the party guests, I can tell you that a bunch of the Houses are using the chance to make behind-the-scenes deals (“real” politics), and there are also squabbles between various Houses, mysterious assassins, and fights about the succession (Dune). Or if you want to get a bill passed, then I know the opposition should come primarily from other Houses (Dune), and you should have to work things out with them by horse-trading (“real” politics), but that what they want should be a combination of the more-serious (Star Wars) and the crazy (HHGTTG).

Really this-all is the same thing that Vincent Baker talked about with setting principles, but instead of principles we’ve got whole metaphors — it basically works the same way but it’s a little fuzzier.

The thing I didn’t do here and should have was write stuff down after coming up with it. Normally I’m better about keeping transcripts but this time I didn’t, with the result that I’d remember that, say, Seve had to smuggle something from the Planet of Sheep to the Planet of Vaguely East-European Industry, but I wouldn’t remember what their names were. Maybe I should have made a wiki page. Anyway, this made it hard to do some callbacks, and even led for awkward “ok, you finish your mission, and report back to whats-her-face…” moments.

The other place this fell down was the point-of-interest exploration. Part of the original intent of the game was your House exploration would uncover interesting sites, and then your character would go and explore the site. This was fine in theory, but I couldn’t seem to work out a viable metaphor for what exploration should be like, and it caused some problems when trying to come up with a challenge. Like I think my original thought was that it was going to be straight-up D&D-style exploration, and then I quickly realized that wasn’t going to work, so then I figured maybe it would be D&D-parody exploration: like, D&D challenges, but you get to solve them with Star Wars technology. That was amusing for a bit but it didn’t totally work either (for one thing, part of that premise is there can’t be any non-trivial challenges for the characters).

I think at this point I’m inclined to say I made a bad choice in the original concept: points of interest like “these ancient tunnels” are generally too small-scale for characters to have as projects, and the focus (and challenge) should be on stuff more like “explore and clear out the entire city” and skill rolls should be done on that scale, with occasional zoom-ins for color and detail. Like, I’m thinking maybe the right metaphor here is Lensman, where the PC does stuff like “meet evil lady at a party, scan her to find out a description of her boss, search most of the planet for the boss, infiltrate the boss’s lair and destroy him”, and they’re handled at that granularity — searching the whole planet is covered in a paragraph or two, not even as much weight as talking to the lady at the party gets. The thing is, this (in part) depends on some of the opposition coming from social interaction where you can’t bull through with high tech, and the setting itself isn’t designed to support that (the colony worlds are mostly unsettled by “modern civilization”).

Anyway, I feel like overall this is a pretty satisfying technique; I’m going to have to see if I can re-use it in upcoming games.

Gameplay inspirations are Civilization, Diplomacy, Star Saga, and (on the RPG side) Kingmaker and Houses of the Blooded. There will be some space for collaborative world-building, but (I am guessing) this is going to be a lot more “game” than “cooperative writing project”.

Interested? Awesome. I put together a survey about what sort of game this might be like — if you have opinions or just want to show your interest in playing, please fill it out.