I come back to this often with the tale of why Battlegroup has a two-ship minimum rule baked in, because when it didn't people tried making "single hero ship" battlegroups and got bodied so hard it was turning them off from the game. I explicitly did not make this rule optional for this reason - ThreadSky

kaitave.bsky.social • 56 days ago

I come back to this often with the tale of why Battlegroup has a two-ship minimum rule baked in, because when it didn't people tried making "single hero ship" battlegroups and got bodied so hard it was turning them off from the game. I explicitly did not make this rule optional for this reason

Comments

genestealeraction.bsky.social•56 days ago

Also like i struggle to say it in an nicer way than that: it makes the writing look really insecure, and also like a cope out, going to the bad habit in rpgs of saying "you GM can figure it out", it makes games look like dnd (derogatory)

kaitave.bsky.social•56 days ago

No you're right, it absolutely does. One of the first big projects I worked on, I did a lot of this equivocation, lots of qualifiers and "you COULD do this or you COULD do that" and it got very ruthlessly pared down in editing, both because it made the writing weaker AND it took up space

mundaneaxiom.bsky.social•56 days ago

This is real as hell my group would definitely try this.
I think none of us would be surprised when they lose but no everyone has enough tabletop CTE to enjoy the "find out" phase.

kaitave.bsky.social•56 days ago

Anybody can break this rule if they want to have a bad time, I cannot physically stop them from doing so, but if I were to equivocate or put in the text "wellll if you want to" then it would give people the idea that this rule is one that's meant to be tweaked and discarded, and no actually it's not

kaitave.bsky.social•56 days ago

I don't want a game that keeps wasting its time telling me that I can tweak things, I know that, everybody knows that by this point the same way we don't keep needing "What Is An RPG?" sections in each new game that comes out, just make the game and let it stand on its own

antifashionaktion.bsky.social•56 days ago

Is this more influence from the perfidious dnd which people insist is okay because you can ignore the shitty rules

kaitave.bsky.social•56 days ago

I mean I think in a lot of ways a bunch of RPG discourse AND design philosophy is still stuck relitigating shit from decades ago which includes Rule 0 et al, it definitely does not help that even the guy who made 5E is out there now like "wow these rules STINK, I sure don't use'em!"

antifashionaktion.bsky.social•56 days ago

Lmao true

jarenth.bsky.social•56 days ago

This is very interesting -- I hadn't heard of Battlegroup before, but when you described the player tendency to try and build single shop configs my literal first thought was "yeah, I'd also want to try that, and then be annoyed if I lost".

jarenth.bsky.social•56 days ago

Actually, would you be okay if I incorporate this skeet into a lecture on game design I'm writing? It encapsulates a lot of clever design thinking really succinctly.

kaitave.bsky.social•56 days ago

Sure go for it. And to your first post, it's ABSOLUTELY a totally reasonable thing for people to do in a starship battles game. Think of how much starship media out there is about The One Protagonist Ship. It's very reasonable for folks to go "oh I should try this" so I can't at all blame the player

kaitave.bsky.social•56 days ago

So, just to add some additional clarity/context, this wasn't a case of "oh those dumb players did a dumb thing," it was a case of me needing to see the return on "yeah this is gonna be a bad idea" through testing and then going "okay, I should put a guard rail around this"

iriswolf.bsky.social•56 days ago

Good, because i opened the book and immediately thought about doing a 1 Greenland Build, how dare these useless Frigates waste my precious points.

kaitave.bsky.social•56 days ago

In was, in fact, a solo Greenland build that really highlighted this issue, there's something about that ship

therivertrix.bsky.social•56 days ago

can't believe you're taking away my power fantasy....... (shump boss)

vorpalcoil.bsky.social•56 days ago

You are absolutely in the right to not bend over backwards to allow people to try to play a completely different game inside of a game about fleet battles.

texasapiary.bsky.social•56 days ago

My single Onopordum will steal so much luck from the devil that he will be running a gas station casino in the red. It will kill Harrison III with its bare hands that have not had a new coat of paint since the first interest war.

rommdan.bsky.social•56 days ago

Why didn't they added somekind of reroll mechanic to make the hero ships more viable? I think that could work

kaitave.bsky.social•56 days ago

With all due respect, as the person who designed the game in question, this is the equivalent of a non-sequitur on par with "why didn't they just add a special rock-paper-scissors minigame to make it more viable." Reroll what exactly? In what way? What knock-on effects would this create as a result?

kaitave.bsky.social•56 days ago

Let's say I, somehow, made some sort of "reroll when you only have one ship" rule that would, in some way, address the issue in a game where not every form of incoming damage is mitigated by being able to reroll things (i.e. payloads), have I now created perverse incentives to do single-ship runs?

kaitave.bsky.social•56 days ago

Well now that's a whole other layer of playtesting I have to do, all to see if a thing that I do not actually really want to do is balanced, viable, and doesn't distort the game.

Or I could put in a rule that says "two ship minimum to ride this ride" because I know that actually does what I want

rommdan.bsky.social•56 days ago

Yeah, that sounds awesome! I would do that playtest xD

kaitave.bsky.social•56 days ago

okay

herahex.bsky.social•56 days ago

I do like that the game is designed in such a way that a big expensive "Wunderwaffe" just isn't a good idea.
Or how even the mightiest weapons are vulnerable to get absolutely bodies if they operate without support.
Art imitating real life.
I dunno, call it the Bismarck rule.

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply