gdritter repos dogs / 891dca8
more writing about stats and assets and fallout Rosencrantz 5 years ago
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1 > The senator from the Ultaian delegation tries to look nonplussed, but the coloration of their neck fronds betrays a frantic nervousness. The Expeditionite pirate pushes her blaster hard against the Ultaian's scaled back, twisting it slightly, and growls at you.
1 > The senator from the Ultaian delegation tries to look nonplussed, but the coloration of their neck fronds betrays a frantic nervousness. The Expeditionite pirate pushes her blaster hard against the Ultaian's scaled back, twists its cold barrel, and growls at you.
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33 > "Please, I've done nothing, I'm a senator," they say with a quavering voice, their alien vocal tract elongating vowels and nearly dropping consonants. "Please—"
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3737 Assign each **trait** at least one die. You can assign more than one die to a trait, but each trait must have a consistent die size: you can assign *2d6* to a trait, but you can't assign *1d4 1d6* to a trait.
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39 4. **Decide on a few of your Relationships.** Your Background specified a number of _relationship dice_: use a few of these to give your character **Relationships**. A **Relationship** represents your character's relationship and history with another person and how important that history is to your character's story, but doesn't necessarily need to reflect your character's feelings or a breadth of history. You can, for example, assign *1d4* to your sibling and *2d8* to a stranger you met in Adullar Station: this doesn't mean that your character loves the stranger more than your brother, but it does mean that you think the stranger is more interesting to your character's story.
39 4. **Decide on a few of your Relationships.** Your Background specified a number of _relationship dice_: use a few of these to give your character **Relationships**. A **Relationship** represents your character's relationship and history with another person and how important that history is to your character's story, but doesn't necessarily need to reflect your character's feelings or a breadth of history. You can, for example, assign *1d4* to your character's spouse and *2d8* to a stranger whom your character met in Adullar Station: this doesn't mean that your character loves the stranger more than their spouse, but it does mean that you think the stranger is more interesting to your character's story.
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4141 Unlike with your _trait dice_, your _relationship dice_ don't need to be—and shouldn't be!—all assigned at the beginning. Keep some unassigned and then choose to assign them as events progress.
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4343 Additionally, if you have or come across members of your character's family, you can give your character a _1d6_ relationship die with them for free, without having to assign it from your pool of relationship dice. If you want your character to have a relationship with that person other than _1d6_, then you can still assign them dice out of your pool, but if you don't want to, you always have the option of letting that relationship be a _1d6_, both at character creation and in play.
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45 5. **Decide on a few of your Belongings.** The Guenašk order tends to give you the necessary equipment and the exigencies of your situation don't allow you to amass much of a fortune or a large set of belongings, but you do have some objects. All operatives will have at least a high-quality data-pad (2d6), a personal starship (2d8), and their Lun (2d6). If you can come up with another few objects that are important to you—and that you could easily keep in your small starship—you can also list them and assign them dice.
45 5. **Decide on a few of your Belongings.** The Guenašk order tends to give you the necessary equipment and the exigencies of your situation don't allow you to amass much of a fortune or a large set of belongings, but you do have some objects. All operatives will have at least a high-quality data-pad (2d6) and their Lun (2d6). If you can come up with another few objects that are important to you—and that you could easily keep in a small starship—you can also list them and assign them dice.
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4747 Be sure to specify any important details of your Lun, including the color of its plasma disc and the material and shape of its handle. Each Emissary builds their own Lun out of materials from their home planet, so each Lun is unique. Unless you have a good reason to argue otherwise, your Lun should be a 2d6 item, as it's a small but excellent item.
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4949 6. **Decide on an Accomplishment you hope your character had while at the Guenaški Academy.** You don't yet know if your character _actually_ succeeded at their Accomplishment, as that will depend on a short section of play to be explored in a minute, but you have reasonably free reign, subject to the approval of both your GM and your fellow Operatives, to decide on an Accompliment that you think is interesting. It might be a specific event that happened during their time at the Academy: "I hope that my character bested their instructor in the Utebna Belt Starskiff-race," or, "I hope that my character rescued and healed a wounded Tanga-bird on Rakhmus Alpha." It might also be a broader statement about how you grew as a Guenaški: "I hope that I learned restraint," or, "I hope that I won honor in the eyes of the instructors."
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5151 After you've done this, you and your GM can
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53 ## Fallout
54
55 Whenever you _take a blow_, you open yourself up to **fallout**. Fallout is a measure of the problems that arise from the conflicts in which the player characters are embroiled.
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57 Each player character has four fallout tracks, each of which has three rows. The four tracks correspond to _Physical_, _Mental_, _Social_, and _Societal_ fallout. When you take _Physical_ fallout, it means your physical body is affected: this might be damage in combat, but it might also be sickness from an alien planet or simply fatigue from overwork. When you take _Mental_ fallout, it means that your mind or spirit is affected: maybe you've been awake for days, or you're being subject to the whims of a mind-controlling alien, or you've been outwitted by a master strategist. When you take _Social_ fallout, it means that your relationships with other people suffer: maybe you've made a decision that has made you less popular with your crew or has made you notorious among the local planet's population. When you take _Societal_ fallout, it means your ability to engage with society around you has suffered: in a capitalist context, this kind of fallout might mean that you're short on money and can't pay for things in a way that limits you, but it can also mean that you've been stigmatized for breaching some kind of cultural norm or that you've lost the favor of the ruling political group in a moneyless future.
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59 The stats you've brought into play will tell you how much fallout you take each time you _take a blow_. Whenever you take a blow, regardless of who struck the blow and how, you can decide which track it goes into and explain why your taking the blow led to that. For example, if you're in a conflict with the ambassador of the Etrinax system and they raise with a particularly clever treaty that puts your side at a disadvantage, you might choose to take the blow by:
60 - overworking yourself to come up with a rejointer, which would cause you to experience _Physical_ fallout
61 - stammering and becoming intimidated by the ambassador, which would cause you to experience _Mental_ fallout
62 - responding with a lackluster and showy speech that your crew sees right through, which would cause you to experience _Social_ fallout
63 - conceeding the point and failing to protect an important interest of your organization, which would cause you to experience _Societal_ fallout
64 You can only put fallout points into a single track: you can't, for example, take 2 fallout points and put 1 into _Physical_ and 1 into _Mental_.
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66 You can also _resist_ fallout by choosing to spend more dice from your pool. You can only do so by spending a single die, and the value on that die must exceed the fallout taken by at least 1: that is, if you take a blow and would take 2 fallout, then you must spend a die that reads 3 or more in order to resist the consequences of the fallout.
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68 Each row of a fallout track has four squares and then a fifth longer area. When you take fallout, you start by filling in individual squares, one for each point of fallout your experience, but once you've filled up four squares, then the next point of fallout becomes a _condition_: this is a larger consequence, and could be any kind of descriptor or phrase, but whatever condition you take is up to the GM. If you're marking fallout and you fill in a condition, then don't mark any more for the fallout at hand: for example, if you have 3 boxes ticked, and you would take another 3 fallout, then you tick the fourth box, and write a condition in the fifth one, and then stop: the last point doesn't count. However, the _next_ time you take fallout, you start on the next row.
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70 In addition to the condition described, each full row will reduce your dice pool for a relevant stat in some way. A single full row will reduce that stat by -1d; two full rows will reduce it by -2d, and three full rows will remove that stat entirely: you can still bring it into play, but you can no longer roll dice associated with it. You also can no longer put fallout into a track if that track is completely full: you have to choose a different way to take the blow.
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72 If you have two different tracks that have three full rows of fallout, then your character dies, although not until the end of the conflict that created the condition: you can arrange with the GM to figure out the most dramatic possible way for your character to die.
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74 ### Getting Rid of Fallout
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76 There are three major ways of getting rid of fallout. The first is for getting rid of individual ticks on a fallout track: after any conflict, you can choose a single fallout track and get rid of up to three ticks from the lowest filled-in row by describing a scene in which your character somehow alleviates any fallout related to that track. For example, if you're removing ticks from your Physical track, then maybe you can frame a scene of your character at the ship's doctor, or banding themselves up, or simply taking a bath. You can't remove conditions in this way: having a condition 'locks' that row of the fallout track, so it can't be simply removed.
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78 To get rid of a condition, you need to have a separate conflict. Tell the GM that you want to remove a condition, and the GM will set up a 4d6 4d8 conflict standing in as the condition. If you win the conflict, then you can clear the entire row. This doesn't clear any ticks above or below the row, and it's of course possible to get new fallout during this process!
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80 The last way of getting rid of a condition is to convert it to a permanent trait, which you can also only do once after a conflict. This trait will always be a trait at 1d4 and should reflect your character accepting that whatever condition they arrived at is now a permanent, non-fixable part of who they are. You can rephrase the condition in question so it makes more sense as a trait, if you'd like. For example, if your character took the physical condition _severed hand_, and you choose to turn this into a trait, then you can clear that row of the fallout track, but now your character has a 1d4 trait _has a severed hand_, because for whatever reason they can't right now get it replaced or regrown or otherwise mitigated. (But as usual, you can advance your traits, and as usual, you can rephrase or refocus traits when you advance them, so that 1d4 _has a severed hand_ might after several advancements become a 2d8 _has a robotic replacement hand_.)
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82 ## Assets
83
84 Certain things—large or important objects or organizations—are considered **assets**, and work a little differently than simple belongings. A belonging is on its own rated in dice, and bringing that belonging into play simply adds the dice. Something like a starship, on the other hand, is a big and complicated object, and therefore has stats of its own, as well as the ability to take fallout on its own.
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86 Every asset has three stats (which get assigned in much the same way that player stats are assigned) and a single three-stage fallout track. The fallout track represents the degree to which the asset is usable by the player characters, which may or may not be simple damage. For example, fallout to a starship asset might be damage sustained in battle, but fallout to an organization might have to do with the player characters' standing in the organization (which might prevent the organization from providing aid when the player characters need it) or about the player characters' ability to contact or interact with that organization (which might prevent them from being able to even request aid).
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88 Common types of asset include:
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90 - Starships, which have the stats **Engines**, **Hull**, and **Systems**
91 - Cyberdecks, which have the stats **Network**, **Storage**, and **Software**
92 - Organizations, which have the stats **People**, **Assets** (?), and **Clout**
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94 When an asset is brought into play, decide which of the stats is most relevant to the conflict at hand. For example, if your crew is trying to catch up to a smuggler in your ship, then you might want to bring **Engines** into play; if your crew is trying to store the cargo they've found on the moon's surface in your cargo bay, then you might want to bring **Hull** into play; and if your crew is trying to scan a seemingly-abandoned space station, then you might want to bring **Systems** into play.
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96 (A good rule of thumb is: what would show up as important in the film adaptation of this story? If the camera would linger on the thrusters as they fired up, then maybe **Engines** is the right stat; if it would have a shot of the science officer peering at sensor readouts, then maybe **Systems** is the right stat instead.)
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98 Every time you bring the stat associated with an asset into play, you open that asset up to fallout. Assets take fallout in the same way that player characters do, and like player characters, they have a three-row fallout track with fillable conditions. There are a few small ways in which asset fallout is different from player fallout:
99 - The amount of fallout taken by an asset is determined by _how many of that asset's stats are in play_, regardless of which player stats are in play. For example, if a player is using _body + hard_ and has brought their ship's _systems_ into play, and that player takes a blow, then can choose to take 3 fallout into a personal fallout track (because they're engaged in physical combat) or they can choose to take 1 fallout into the ship's fallout track (because only one of the ship's stats has come into play.) Similarly, if a player is using _mind + soft_ but has brought their _people + assets + clout_ into play from their organization, then they can take a blow by taking 1 fallout into a personal fallout track or by taking 3 into their organization's fallout track.
100 - Unlike player fallout tracks, each filled-in row of an asset fallout track reduces the number of dice you can roll for _every_ stat associated with the asset: for example, if you have a ship that has _engines 5d6, hull 3d6, systems 2d10_, and you fill in the entire first row of its fallout track and give it the condition _shot up_, then you can only roll 4d6 for engines, 2d6 for hull, and 1d10 for systems. Once you've filled in all three rows of an asset track, then this asset is no longer usable.
101 - Clearing fallout from an asset works like clearing fallout from a player character: after a conflict, you can always remove up to three ticks from the lowest fallout row for each asset available to you in addition to clearing ticks from one of your personal tracks.
102 - There is no way of turning a condition into a permanent trait for an asset (as assets do not themselves have traits), so the only way to clear conditions is to win a 4d6 4d8 conflict against them.
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104 ### Custom Asset Types
105
106 It's possible that in your campaign, you might want to have a different, special kind of asset: these will all work the same way, but you may propose three new stats for them. For example, maybe your story takes place on a world where it's common to flying dragon-like alien creatures as aerial mounts, so your GM might stipulate that their three stats are **Ferocity**, **Size**, and **Cunning**. Maybe your story takes place in a destitute shantytown on a wasteland planet, so you might have small gangs as assets that have **Muscle**, **Gear**, and **Sharpness**.
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108 A good principle to follow when choosing three stats is that they should have intepretations for every instance of the asset, even if those interpretations might tend to be different from one asset to another. It's better for them to be overly-broad than overly-narrow: for example, all ships have **Systems**, but for one ship that might be sensor arrays, and for another it might be weapons subsystems. All organizations have **Goods**, but for some that might be money, while for others that might be actual physical resources on-hand. It's okay to leave them up to interpretation, and it's okay to allow for some wiggle room between which stat a player wants to bring into play.
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110 ## Creating a Ship
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112 Like characters, ships also have **Stats** and **Traits**. Unlike with a character, they're determined by the ship's **class**.
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114 1. Decide the ship's **class**. If you're creating a shared ship, this will be a *Frigate*; if you're creating personal ships, then this will be a *Fighter*.
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116 2. **Select your ship's Stats.** The ship's Class specified a number of _stat dice_: take these and divide them up among the ship's three **Stats**. Every ship must have at least 2d6 in each stat.
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118 The three stats for a ship are **Hull**, **Engines**, **Systems**.