Dev Diary 7 - Framework Systems
In Dev Diary 5, we talked about the core dice mechanic of the game; how tools create dice pools which are resolved with your character’s skills. In this Dev Diary, we’ll be talking about some of the universal mechanics which frame play around those dice checks.
Most of the resources tracked in Torchship are material ones; reaction mass, budgets, supplies, radiation exposure and stress levels. Unity is the one central exception which binds the game together.
Unity is a resource which abstracts the benefits of the trust, goodwill, and sense of community the crew of the rocket have with one another. It’s the personal capacities made available by harmonious operation, how the work put in by everyone is reflected and amplified in its representatives. In short, it’s the Power of Friendship, which as we all know is the most powerful of the five fundamental forces.
Unity is gained through the Impulses and Relationships of the player characters on an individual basis, but is placed into a group pool that anyone can use when they need it. Unity can be used for two things; the first is that you can buy rerolls on any of your Checks with it, giving you another chance to get the successes you need. The second thing you can use Unity for is to remove Stress, one of the four types of Harm that players can take and a common penalty stemming from Checks and Traits.
Having a good pool of Unity is how you offset the penalties that’ll stack up as the situation gets more out of control.
Unity is also created by introducing new members of the Crew. Your rocket leaves spacedock with a half-dozen crew characters defined; if you have six PCs, all your NPCs are just a number. That number is essentially a reserve of guest stars. If you need some Unity for a challenge up ahead, or you need an expert for a task none of the players have Certs in, you can bring in an NPC guest star to generate some Unity, defining who they are, what they’re good at, and playing a few scenes with them. After that point, they go into your roster to be brought back for situation rolls when needed.
In this way, the number of people who are not yet defined on your rocket becomes a quantum foam of potential skills, expertise, and relevant hobbies you can tap as needed. This also means that rotating members of your crew off the rocket when you resupply can be incentivised; if your PCs have picked up the skills you once needed them for, they can leave the rocket and maybe come back later as the captain of a vehicle in distress or something!
As you go through your adventure, the GM can hand you Investigation cards as you come across things that are worth looking into. Investigation cards provide a Thing To Do when you aren’t sure what to do next; finding answers to the questions on the cards is always a good idea.
There’s six types of Investigation Checklists: Anomaly, Site, Technology, Society, Individual, and Incident, each with four predefined questions and one blank spot that either the GM or the players (depending) can fill in with a very specific question. Finding the answers to these questions is how you do Science.
This ties rather directly into one of the framework rules regulating the conversation between players and GMs; whenever the players ask an in-universe question, the GM must always either give the answer, or tell the players what they need to do to find the answer. The Checklist basically acts as a set of pre-defined questions to ask the GM with additional mechanical incentives.
As you fill out the Checklist, it starts to give you bonuses related to the subject of the investigation. 3 Answers give you ongoing Advantage to all Checks involving it, while 5 Answers additionally gives a +1 to all your Checks involving it. When you approach a problem you’ve fully mapped out, you have a much easier time; you essentially get home turf advantage anywhere you’ve done enough science at.
Finally, knowledge is power, and that means that there’s bureaucrats who really like to learn about stuff. Each and every tick you make on a checklist is rolled as a d6 in a big pool at the end of the episode for a chance to generate Credits, a metacurrency we’ll talk about at the end of this update. You’re never quite sure what information will be useful, or for what, but science isn’t something Star Patrol is doing just for its own sake; anything you learn might end up being the key part for a technology, a treaty, or a military strategy.
It also means that investigation is never, entirely, innocuous. You might be studying the inside of a black hole for the pursuit of pure truth and scientific curiosity, but somebody back home might look at it and figure out a really funny trick to pull involving an artificial singularity and somebody else’s war rockets.
This one is pretty simple. Every PC has a relationship to another PC, and we represent that with four attitudes you can have toward another person. Are they just a comrade, are they your best friend, are they a rival, or do you have a crush on them?
Every one of these affects the way you work alongside them. When you help your Bestie, you get an extra reroll, like there was a mini pool of Unity between you. You can generate Unity by one-upping your rival, so it actually benefits the whole team to have healthy competition, provided it doesn’t get out of hand.
And, this being a game by me, having a Crush is very funny. When your Crush helps you with something, an extra Unity is generated for the team… and you promptly have to reroll one of your successes as you start saying the dumbest things you could possibly say and your hands start shaking. You know, as you do.
Relationships are not inherently linked; you might have a Crush on somebody who considers you their Rival, for instance. However, it’s generally best for the team if relationships are symmetrical, because the bonuses stack with one another; two rivals competing will always result in 2 Unity for the team and Besties working together means 2 rerolls.
Mutual Crushes are the best though, because you get a proper will-they-or-won’t-they system. Every episode that goes by where the two are crushing on one another but having acted on it, you mark a track. When they finally get over themselves and smooch, you get a massive amount of Unity for each mark on the track, which also incentivises them doing this dramatic thing at moments when you absolutely need like thirty bazillion Unity for the task ahead.
At that point characters become Sweethearts, which removes the rerolled Success as you stop being such a mess.
I’ve saved the best for last. Or worst. Biggest, for certain.
Torchship does not have replicators. They do not exist. There is no technology that magically turns nothing into something. Instead, your spaceship has huge stores of fuel, food, spare parts, print-stock, ammunition, reaction mass, and everything else it might need for the journey. Every spare inch of space not dedicated to somebody sleeping or a machine working is packed with shelves, boxes, crates, and storage tanks. Over the course of your adventures, you’ll use all that stuff up.
There are three broad categories of scarce resources your spacecraft carries with it. Your Reaction Mass is the stuff you shoot out the back of the engines to go places. The back of your spacecraft is basically one or more olympic swimming pools worth of water, hydrogen, decane, or other fluid for your rocket to use up, which can also be used as emergency coolant and, in some cases, as fuel for a fusion reactor. Even though you have an FTL drive, you’ll still use it up circularising orbits, manoeuvring in combat, and fuelling shuttles, probes, and missiles.
Your Supplies are a generic amalgamation of all the random stuff you have to carry to keep the rocket running. Just about everything worth doing costs supplies; you need it to build tools and shuttles, you spend it on repairs and medicine, you shoot it out of your guns and missile tubes, you breathe it and eat it every single episode.
Rather than representing Supply as a big number that goes down until you’re out, you simply mark a tally down every time you use Supply. When the tally reaches your vehicle’s Supply Threshold, you take a Shortage; the GM tells you something is running low, or something that was running low is now out. There’s dozens of potential shortages listed in the rules, allowing the GM to pick one that is most relevant to how you’ve been spending supplies. You can run out of ammunition, food, spare parts, filters for life support, and weird matter for the FTL drive or gravity coils, among others. As time goes on, you’ll run out more and more.
Finally, most Star Patrol craft carry Antimatter, as fuel for the reactor and engines. You use this up sparingly when you overcharge either, or if you pack it into a missile to make a powerful antimatter warhead. You always have to be careful doing so, because antimatter is expensive, and running out means the next episode is going to be about you not having any antimatter and not being able to do very much about it.
You can, to a limited degree, replenish these resources in the field through salvage and barter with others, but most of the time you’ll need to do it through official channels, either calling for resupply or trading with people using, you know, money. This is where Credits come in.
Credits are an abstraction of the surplus wealth of the Star Union, as well as representing the universal, antimatter-backed trade currencies of Local Space. You can buy any of the scarce resources above using Credits, and you can also use it to unlock new capabilities and technologies for the Union or improve your vehicle. It is to your entire civilisation what XP is to characters.
Credits are not passively generated; like XP, you have to earn them. As mentioned above, filling out Investigation Checklists can earn you some credits, but it might not be enough; you need to at least generate a minimum number per episode to cover your Union Dues, otherwise shortfalls back home start to be an issue. The rest of the Credits are earned by finding strategic resources that the Union can use; reserves of metals, lithium, and exotic materials, for instance, but also useful allies or destroyed vessels from hostile nations in wartime. Prospecting is very often the most lucrative, as you usually find plenty of resources as a side effect from snooping around.
Here’s the catch, tough; it’s not enough just to find resources in many cases, you need to secure them. That means making sure that your pesky rivals don’t have a claim on it, yes, but it also means ensuring that the resources can be extracted. A big load of titanium on a planet isn’t actually very valuable, but a big load of titanium on a planet with a local workforce friendly to the Union and sufficient spacelife capabilities will earn you a fair number of credits.
Many resources, like exotic materials, simply don’t exist at all without being artificially created, so securing them is more about diplomacy than prospecting. Other times, there may be things that need solving to make the resources available; maybe it’s in the territory of a state on the planet hostile to the Union, or the impoverished locals might not have the ability to build the infrastructure needed to exploit the resource. You can, in some cases, actually end up spending some Credits as developmental aid to ‘solve’ those issues and earn more in the long run.
You may notice this might, in some circumstances, create some perverse incentives. To which we respond…
