Starfinder Starship Combat: first impressions

[yhlee]

[from Nov 4, 2017]

My husband and daughter dragged me out of bed to go play Starfinder Society today even though (according to my husband) I looked so happy napping that he was considering letting me sleep. As a gamer I have suck endurance, but I'm glad we went, because I came home with a lot of chewy things to think about.

The GM did a fine job--it was definitely his first time running Starfinder Society. It may have been his first time GMing Society (Starfinder or Pathfinder) play, period. Given that Starfinder is still a fairly crunchy system, and that some of the adventure material was not as clearly organized as it could have been, hat's off to him!

The players were Joe (Solarian), the Dragon (operative), myself (soldier), and B. (another operative). B. said that he'd heard from others who'd experienced it before that starship combat in Starfinder is a mess. I've only gone through it once, in today's adventure, but I very much suspect this is the case.

Here's the thing: Starfinder is an inherently crunchy, old-school game. Personal/party combat is crunchy and very similar in feel to Pathfinder (or Dungeons & Dragons, really). You roll initiative, take your action(s) when your turn comes up, then wait for your turn to come around again. There's a fair amount of dead time while you wait for others' actions plus the GM running NPCs, but you can spend that dead time planning out your possible actions. You can also spend that time sketching things totally unrelated to the campaign, which is how the Dragon and I while away the time. She usually sketches on random loose-leaf paper; I like to bring a sketchbook. (I've given her any number of sketchbooks but she keeps losing them, heh.) Unless you get unlucky, though (paralyzed, etc.), your character usually gets to make some kind of contribution to the battle.

As it stands, starship combat is problematic (not in the social justice sense but the game design sense). ( Read more... )

notes on a Twine game I wrote for a friend

[yhlee]

You can play the game here: from every spark a fire. It's Twine (hypertext), although will probably not make much sense unless you're familiar with my novel NINEFOX GAMBIT. Will add more notes as I go through archives.

[from January 25, 2018]

This was my major achievement of the evening:



This is the action/interaction cycle for the Twine game. :3 I was getting stuck trying to write my thoughts out linearly so I decided a diagram would be more succinct and came up with this--seeing the diagrams in Network Attacks and Exploitation was curiously inspirational.

I decided to try a diagram because writing in linear bullet-point form kept obscuring interactivity--static fiction and IF (and games in general) exist on a sliding scale of interactivity and I wanted to be sure I captured some sense of how interaction was going to work. :3