Dead Belt Notes
Dead Belt is a solo tabletop RPG about salvaging loot from derelict spaceships. Dead Belt has two tiers of gameplay: There's a moment-to-moment tier, in which you explore derelict ships, moving from room to room finding tricks and treats, rolling dice, and trying not to die of asphyxiation. Between your looting sessions, you tally up your lucre, pay off (or take on more) debts, buy upgrades, and roll the next ship you'll be diving into. Randomness permeates almost every single mechanic throughout the game to a degree that can feel obsessive at times. You roll to determine what kind of ship you're going to, you roll every time you move between rooms, you roll when you encounter an obstacle, you roll when you try to stash your loot, you roll to determine how the ship breaks apart, etc etc etc. All the rolling and randomness during the ship-scavenging gameplay can be justified as a way of representing an inherently dangerous and unstable occupation, but it becomes a slog when it shows up in the meta-progression. In between scavenging trips, you roll to determine whether or not your debt, a long-term measure of how close your game is to ending, goes up. That single roll, which you have no control over whatsoever, has a greater impact than any other roll, and is potentially more important than the outcome of your salvage operation.
Here's a few more words to cover some of the more questionable mechanics in detail:
Gas
Gas is how much air you have to breathe. Every time you "check gas" (which happens most commonly as you move between modules, but also as a penalty in other circumstances), you roll 1d6. If that number is >= your current gas value, your gas value decreases by one. If it reaches zero, you die. As your gas counts down, it becomes increasingly risky to move between modules. The mechanic has a nice feeling in that, when you're at 6 gas, it feels safe and comfortable, but it can quickly turn a corner and become a strict time limit to get out of the ship you're looting.
On the other hand, this mechanic is very swingy. It's not uncommon to get your first 6 roll early in your expedition, and because losing points of gas means that future rolls are more likely to fail, your run will go downhill quickly. Gas tends to be main factor that limits how long you can spend in a wreck. There are very few ways to refill your gas, and no permanent upgrades that improve your gas capacity. A few consumable items allow you to traverse a few modules without spending gas, and another item allows you to refill a few points of gas at the airlock at a cost. The value of being able to refill your gas varies. If you can top yourself off, from 5 to 6, that brings you back to where you were at the start of the mission. Going from 1 to 2, however, will most likely only let you explore one more module that's adjacent to the airlock.
Going through the trouble of setting up an 18 card ship, only to get a series of bad rolls and only be able to spend 6 turns in there, is incredibly frustrating. Doubly so if, afterwards, you get hit with an increase in Debt.
Payday
Your goal is to get the payday for the big cred
Each ship has one Joker card mixed in- the Payday. Ostensibly, this is the big treasure you came to find- the spectacularly valuable artifact that makes risking your life worth it, but there's a catch. Extracting the payday comes with several nasty surprises. When you find the Payday, you roll a d6. On 1,2, and 3, the payday is worthless, though you can spend a point of Grit to avoid this. On 4, 5, and 6 you get to choose a few penalties that don't apply, presumably (although, somewhat awkwardly, this isn't stated explicitly in the rules) applying all the remaining ones. The penalties can range from the ship breaking into pieces, causing a Threat to appear (Threats being tremendously dangerous, persistent foes that hunt you and can't be removed), or forcing you to spent Grit or Gas to remove it. For your trouble, you get a certain amount of treasure. The amount of treasure you get, however, is slightly underwhelming. More than half the diamond cards give more loot than the payday of a small ship, entirely without a drawback. Larger ships have larger paydays, but unless you choose the bonus that allows you to transport the payday without regard to your Load stat (forcing you to take some different penalty), the amount of loot you can carry back to the airlock is limited.
The payday guarantees you have at least some loot in every ship, even if you are unlucky in the cards you draw, but typically it doesn't really define the success of your salvage operation in the way you'd expect it to.
Debt
Your Debt value goes from zero to 10. Depending on your choice of character and ship, you start at a different debt level. When this reaches 10, you lose. Whenever you come back from a salvage operation, you roll 1d6 and, if you roll 1 (or 1-2 at high debt levels), your debt increases. You can pay off debt with 10 credits, which is the maximum haul of the smallest ship and a typical haul for the second tier of ship.
Debt has the same issue with fickleness as Gas- you're a few bad rolls away from death regardless of how well you're doing. Getting a haul of 10 credits isn't a bad run, but to then lose those 10 credits to debt immediately due to a bad roll sets you right back to where you were when you started, which is incredibly frustrating. There's a strong desire to scum this roll, since it's unilaterally bad, somewhat rare, and very straightforward- If I had not rolled a 1 here, I would be ahead. In the moment-to-moment game, rolling badly is an expected part of the ebb and flow of fortunes. I can work around a bad roll and, to some degree, change my strategy as I go. I'm always making the choice- do I continue to push my luck, or return to my ship and cut my losses?
In the session-to-session game, that choice becomes, "do I pay off debt to stay in the safer tiers of debt, or do I re-invest it to gain more loot per salvage operation?" on paper this seems like it should be reasonable, but I think psychologically it's just too oppressive to roll a 1 and have that much progress taken away. Also, the particulars of the likelihood of each outcome on the debt roll mean that, until you get to 7 debt, it feels like it's always the right answer to re-invest, and if you aren't pulling in >10 loot per session on average once you hit 7 debt, you're not going to make it. I'm not sure if that's realistically how it works out.
Gas and debt form an interesting thematic pair. With both, you periodically roll 1d6 and, if the roll is bad, march towards your demise. With both, the likelihood of your roll being bad increases as your situation gets worse. The idea of compounding interest making debt worse and worse makes sense, although tying it a dice roll doesn't. Debt doesn't compound at random intervals, it happens with the inexorable periodicity that calls to mind the crushing forces of gravity of the black hole that the derelict spaceships orbit in the game's narrative. The pull of gravity gets stronger exponentially as you fall nearer to the event horizon, just as the pull of debt and gas gets stronger as you get nearer to death. The session-to-session gameplay has a "do or die" quality- if you don't earn money fast enough, you can't pay off your debt and it'll compound and kill you. If you can reach financial escape velocity, however, you can start paying it off and eventually win. It's a nice quality when it works, and it hastens the game towards a conclusion, but when you get stuck in the middle, neither spiraling out of control towards defeat nor rocketing towards victory, it feels like a pointless scramble to stay where you are.
Rolling Ships
When you set out to go loot a new ship, you roll twice. The first roll determines the rank of the ship you're going to loot, the second determines its class - Civilian, Merchant, or Military. Ships with a higher rank have more cards (modules / rooms), and their payday is worth more. You can buy an item that biases the outcome of the roll towards higher tier ships, but you can't choose what tier of ship you want to loot next.
Your ability to spend longer amounts of time in derelicts is highly tied to how much you've progressed in the meta-progression: What kind of ship you have, how many upgrades you have, etc. I'd expect the tier of derelict I want to explore would depend on what I think I can take on- I want to salvage the biggest ship I can, to find the most loot, but I don't want to overestimate my abilities and end up running out of air before I find the payday. However, because the payday isn't of critical importance, and because you don't have much influence over what kind of ships you can find, the game doesn't have as much room to allow the difference in ship size to be a major factor.
Redesign?
Some things I'd be curious to try in a redesign:
Instead of rolling debt after each mission, tie it to whether or not you gathered the payday. If you got the payday, no debt. If you didn't, increase debt.
If you can't randomly get fucked by dice rolls, 10 lives might be too many, maybe bring the max debt down to 6 to keep the connection to the Gas mechanic
This would probably get rid of some of the "do or die" quality, and it would privilege looting smaller ships to a degree. Maybe a mechanic that increases the amount of credits it takes to get rid of a point of debt? Or maybe debt just costs 20, 30 to get rid of.
If you can more consistently avoid accruing it through skilled play, it's not as important how quickly you pay it off
Allow you to choose the tier of ship you're going to loot next, and make the tiers of ships more impactful
With the debt redesign above, this becomes the big wager- do I think I can successfully get the payday of a medium ship with my skills? If not, it's big trouble for me.
This gives you a goal for vertical progression - I want to get my stats up high enough to take on the higher tier ships
To avoid privileging running small ships over and over again, increase the cost of upkeep and... make the lower tiers of power less consistent?
I'm not as sure about this one, but with the above two changes I think you'd privilege running small ships over and over again, since if you're overpowered for small ships you can reliably find the payday while bringing in small amounts of money each time, and eventually grind out a victory.
You might be able to balance things in such a way that, if you have a few upgrades, you can't get the payday consistently to avoid debt, but if you have enough upgrades to gain consistency you're paying too much for upkeep.
Alternatively, If the lower tiers of upgrades were less consistent overall, then the small amount of $ you get from small ships wouldn't overcome the slow increase of debt. If you miss the payday in 1/10 runs, but it takes 20 runs to pay off a debt, then you'll still come out behind.










