Suggestions
A playground for random ideas and discussion we come up with. You want to see something in the game prior to its beginning? Put it here!
- Ideas for the Core World:
- The fabric of space in the Core World (name pending) is a little bendy there due to some phenomena, which means spaceships from across time, space, and dimensions are likely to warp there first when they enter this universe.
- As a result, the core world has seen many, many alien species come and go, bringing their people, culture, science, money, and warfare with them.
- There are permanent cities and structures, but one planet will be the 'melting pot' while cities and colonies on other planets in the system are mostly homogenous with the locals.
- Currency/Currencies. With the amount of comers-and-goers in this Universe (I'm thinking Space Dandy tier for sheer number of aliens, so we can also have random aliens in a pinch) there's a unified currency made to keep things relatively simple, using the ¤ sign (Unicode: U+00A4, HTML: ¤).
- ¤150 of something can mean the way its transported (coins, digital, gemstones, precious metal, on card) becomes irrelevant, and the value itself is what matters more.
- Not resource backed either because in space there's so much resources that it'd fluctuate or hyperinflate like crazy. It'd have to be fairly flat.
- It could be interesting to have a currency that's actually a liquid metal, not a solid.
- Culture: What sort of culture are we going to encounter? What is the closest parallel IRL/In other media?
- What sorts of things do they consider taboo? How open are they as a society? What things are considered the norm?
- Would they care about slavery?
- Would they care about public nudity?
- Drug use?
- Religious overtones?
- Etc.
- We need to make some changes to Character Biographies and how they function:
- First, Language and Cultural Familiarity should take subsection under Mental Traits, rubbing shoulders with personality, likes, dislikes, goals, and such. I felt as though bundling the languages spoken under a Communications skill was a bit of a waste, and the Communications skill is reserved for in depth understanding of using related equipment or crypto/etc.?
- Second, the way skills were laid out was vague in regards to how skilled the character was. With the previous way of writing up, it was difficult to tell how skilled they were at a moment's notice. Having the skill was binary Yes you know or No you don't, no shades in between. I'd like to know if my demoman is just learning the ropes, or if he can defuse the bomb with his eyes shut.
- Perhaps this points/dice sub-system in the parenthesis is optional, but hey, the descriptors are there. vOv
- Unskilled (0 Points, 0 dice)
- Beginner (1 Point, 1 dice)
- Basic (2 Points, 2 dice)
- Intermediate (4 Points, 3 dice)
- Advanced (7 Points, 4 dice)
- Expert (11 Points, 5 dice)
- Master (16 Points, 6 dice)
- No FTL sensors. Instead use a combination of FTL launched probes and FTL comms.
- First of all this prevents the omniscience fields that were so loathed by people who wanted to be sneaky.
- Secondly this gives crews something to do and creates a layer of tension in the writing. Without deployed sensor buoys/probes a ship is blind outside of waiting for sensor sweeps to ping back, and any passive data that comes in from radiance. This makes distance in combat mean something since you start getting delays as the distance grows. At 15 light seconds, your intel is at least 15 seconds out of date.
- Finally this gives us the actual choice to either engage or bug out, since as the distance grows it gets harder to catch someone.
- No FTL inside of a Star System's Hill Sphere.
- Proposed Hill Sphere = Radius of oort cloud + 10 light seconds? Or more…
- A ship that FTLs inside a Hill Sphere gets crippled or destroyed.
- Perhaps the hill sphere fluctuates encouraging over estimation? Better to take longer getting into the system than to possibly die.
- This will give us some travel time.
- The only exception to this rule would be wormhole gates. This is because wormhole gates require a gate to be placed physically at the intended destination. Basically you need pre-existing infrastructure which is much less flexible than other types of FTL. Additionally the gate would probably have mechanisms installed to cope with the gravity of the star system.
- Both sides of the gate must have their own power supply to start up and connect. So you need at the very least some infrastructure or a milspec power system to get one going.
- A power supply can potentially be passed through a gate to feed the other side after they have been started up.
- Active gates can not be moved. Or they blow up or something else that is bad.
- I propose that we keep all combat speeds below 0.1c relatively. Basically if you match speed with another ship to fight it, your relative speed is 0, so in this combat scenario you can accelerate and fly around between the two ships, but the relative speed should never approach relativistic speeds. This keeps combat more intuitive and prevents us from needing to make guns that fire projectiles at insane speeds which causes machine guns to have energetic output similar to large nuclear bombs. It also prevents armor technology from reaching a point where one can theoretically hang out in the corona of a star without worry.
- “Accident” synthetic species
- “Procedural” synthetic species