merelymatt

Merely Matt

Creator/writer of I Need A Miracle, host of Merely Roleplayers. (Those are podcasts.) He/him.

1362 posts

Impulse Drive Abstracts This Into A Debt 'fuse' Which Causes You Problems When It Fills Up There's A

Impulse Drive abstracts this into a debt 'fuse' which causes you problems when it fills up – there's a resolution roll at the end of a job or mission, and if you roll well enough one of your options is to keep up with payments, which mechanically looks like 'the debt fuse doesn't tick up this time'

It's my favourite way I've seen this Cowboy Bebop plot propulsion model done in games. It's always hanging over you. It keeps ticking up. When you do well on a mission you have to sacrifice part of your success just to keep the fuse where it is. It feels precarious like you're one screwup away from having repo mercs dispatched to hunt you down. Exactly the feeling you want

been thinking about space opera TTRPGs, and like the campaign model of taking dodgy cargo jobs to pay the mortgage and cover running costs of your spaceship, having to make sure maintenance is done and all that, and encountering problems on the way, space pirates, precursor ruins, customs checks, floating cryotubes containing frozen space princesses and the like

I've also been thinking about abstracting money, my background in playing ttrpgs leans more heavily towards D10 dice-pool games from white wolf than anything else, and generally in those games characters have a resource rating (between 0 and 5) that describes their living standard and access to spending money, that rating can change over the course of play but like usually characters are motivated by things other than money (trauma it's almost always trauma)

and really I'm wondering how to do the space opera thing, which usually contains rather a lot of accounting, while also abstracting cash (I don't want to do the accounting)

counting coins is not fun, I want there to be a more fun way to achieve that tone