The Skiffy Game
Some early, hopefully non-binding thoughts. Presumably, talking about this project will get me out of actually undertaking it! That's what I like.

This is all based on my attraction to and rejection of the ideas of this guy Rob who posts on the Forge as RobMuadib. Here's a place to start if you want to read about his game design in progress.

You'll also see the influence of Universalis and some stuff by Neel Krishniswami. Also I really don't want to compete with Matt Wilson's sf game (in design), so note the striking differences, please!

So: space ship, crew, exploring or running or surviving or something, with a certain technological emphasis in addition to the good meaty characters - more like Farscape than like Firefly, say. For aliens I'm thinking of: human expansion -> far-flung human world-states -> divergent human development to fit local environments. Everywhere you go, there are people but they're strange and sometimes there's no humanity left in 'em. You're strange and inhuman yourselves. But that's up for grabs locally, and must be, as you'll see.

The game isn't co-GMed, but the GM rotates at a brisk clip, formally defined. "This is my planet, I'm the GM until we leave it. That's your space station - you're the GM when we're there." I haven't decided about attaching the GM to locations or to chapters - it's easy when they line up, when every chapter is a visit to a planet and every planet is its own chapter. When they don't line up, who GMs?

Every player plays multiple protagonists. Every protagonist has at least one "off-screen interest": an in-character excuse to be elsewhere just now. When you're the GM, your characters are pursuing their off-screen interests. When one of your characters is at the forefront, the rest of them are.

The game absolutely depends on between-play world creation. You'll create world formally, on paper, with numbers and arrows and stuff; to play, you have to learn the notation the game uses for world creation. Bam! I just lost 30% of my audience forever, bye bye. To make up for it, it'll be extremely easy, plus you only have to create a couple of kinds of things: things you're interested in using when you're the GM, which is upcoming; and things you're interested in having one of your characters deal with, like the ship's workings if you're playing the ship's engineer.

I'll lose the other 70% of my audience too, if the resolution rules don't a) rely on the world creation notation, plus b) rock seriously on toast. They have to be as essential to resolution as Dogs' Traits are, and resolution has to be as good as Dogs'.

When you're the GM, you have a budget: you must inflict at least x worth of grief, not to exceed y worth of grief. "Grief" will be formally defined, as you'll see. Starting your stint as GM means inflicting at least 1 of grief.

You get your budget in two ways: 1) by having ideas that others like enough to build on them; 2) by building on others' ideas. "Building on an idea" means using the world creation rules to write up a) in instance of someone else's class, or b) the class of someone else's instance. For instance, if you wrote up the Bulragthi people, I could create a Bulragthi character; if you created a Bulragthi character, I could write up the Bulragthi people. If you wrote up the Fitzworther Warp-defect Reactor, I could write up a deep-space probe that has one in it; if I wrote up a deep-space probe, you could write up its reactor - or any other component I've given it. Technology, planets, their geology/geography/ecology/whatever, peoples, ideologies, academic/athletic/military/spiritual disciplines - whatever!

When you write up an instance, you give it Traits and Triggers. When you write up a class, you give it All/Most/Some/Few, like in the C&C.

All/Most/Some/Few! I might write this:
All Bulragthi:
Genetically Human
Most Bulragthi:
Speak Tsibat
Vegetarian
Tall
Wealthy
Literate
Trigger: Injured -> Ravenously Hungry.
Trigger: Impaired -> Enraged.
Some Bulragthi:
Military Rank
Attractive
Advanced Education
Extensive Family
Aggressive
Widely Traveled
Gender Transgressive
Few Bulragthi:
Conscienceless
Extensive Black Market Connections
Extensive Inner-planet Connections
Trigger: Frustrated -> Enraged.

Now when I write all that, maybe you've already created a Bulragthi character, right? If you have, you've already given your character some Core Traits and Triggers. I have to include all of them somewhere in my writeup.

For instance, maybe you'd happened to write:
Core Traits and Triggers
Genetically Human
Speaks Tsibat, literate too
Gender Transgressive (MtF)
Military Rank
Advanced Education
Widely Traveled
Extensive Inner-planet Connections
Trigger: Frustrated -> Enraged.

Then I create the Bulragthi around your character, making some of your Traits very common among Bulragthi and some of them not common.

You can see how it works in reverse, when I've written up the Bulragthi people and then you go to make a Bulragthi character.

(We're allowed to talk to each other while all this is going on. For instance, you might create your character thinking that "Gender Transgressive" would be at Some, and tell me so.)

Now, you or I or a third player might take a look and go "hm, Military Rank?" and write up the Bulragthi Space Navy. She'd get a point for using others' ideas, and we'd each get a point for someone else building on our ideas. "A point" means "1 of grief to use as the GM."

Check this: 1 of grief can trigger one of those triggers.

Say that I've written up our ship's life support system, and it includes this:
Trigger: Breakdown -> Wicked Expensive to Replace.

When it's your turn to GM, you can inflict 1 of grief by saying "something's wrong with the ship; the air's getting pretty stale and you're starting to taste the bioites in it." And we all go, "dammit, where are we going to get the cash to replace the life support system?"

In addition to Traits and Triggers, you have to create causal connections between related things. This is Neel Krishnaswami's; he posted about it here in the 20' by 20' Room.

For instance, I write up our ship's life support system. I decide off the top of my head that it can be in one of two states: Functioning or Breakdown. I decide further that it depends on three things: Hull Integrity, Power Supply, and the Health of the Bioites.

What states can Hull Integrity be in? If somebody else already wrote up the hull, they already decided and I can just look it up. Otherwise I have to decide myself. Let's make it easy: Intact or Compromised. What about Power Supply? Let's say Full, Fluctuating, Partial or Out. And the Bioites? Let's say Healthy, Unhealthy or Dead. Just like the hull, I might be looking these up because somebody else already created them, or I might be making them up myself.

Now I create a table, crossing those three dependencies. On the left, Power Supply. Across the top, Hull Integrity and Bioite Health. Cross reference the current state of each to find out the state of our life support!

You can see how each of the hull, the power supply and the bioites might have its own causal grid. Maybe the hull doesn't - it's either intact or compromised, based on whether it's intact or compromised. But the ship's power supply clearly depends on at least the reactor and the power route core, both of which clearly depend on other things themselves. (It's also clear that a lot more than just the life support system depends on the power supply; probably every end-system on the ship does.) And maybe also the bioites' health depends on the sanctity of their containment environment and the quality of their nutrient bath.

I wrote up life support. If you write up the bioites, I get a point because you're building on my idea, and you get a point for building on my idea! Cool! Since you don't get any points for building on your own ideas, we have to share creation. Nobody gets their own little kingdom where they rule and everybody hopes that they stop being the GM soon. It's all cross-pollinated. Pretty soon we have our 200-page bible and everyone wrote something on every page!

Still one of the design tasks here is to nail down exactly how grief relates to the triggers relate to the causal grids. I've defined the life support system here so that it doesn't just go into breakdown, its breakdown is caused by something else ... So when you inflict 1 of grief to make the life support crap out, you've also implicated the hull, power supply (reactor, route core) and/or bioites. Not only do we have to replace the life support system, we might also have to...

Which is the whole point: I want characters to argue in play about flash hiccups in the route core and how much N44 to feed the bioites, and I want it to matter.

Which, back to characters. They have triggers too, right? Some of 'em are just like the ones I gave the Bulragthi, but some of them will be the point of the character. That's where you put things like "searching for my father's killer" and "trying to regain my throne." The GM will be inflicting grief to hit those triggers, directly or indirectly, just like in Farscape. The flash hiccups in the route core matter because, now or soon, my character is going to have to deal with his crap because of it. When we go to make the cash to replace the life support system, I know that you're going to use 1 grief to have a Bulragthi royal guard there watching the job line...

Well, that's everything I've thought about for this game. See all those holes? They're real. See all that very hard design work yet to do, like all of it? Me too.

You can comment here if you feel like it.