[Diaspora] Mini-Game Help

[Jeffrey Hosmer]

Hi.  I recently posted for help in how to model a Court Martial in Social
Combat for a "con game" I was planning that involved all four mini-games.
 Well, I playtested this con game tonight, and I have a few questions that
were raised in play.  Forgive me if the answer was staring me in the face in
the book somewhere, but some things you only learn through doing.

First off, it seemed to me that in most of the mini-games the GM's usual
"infinite supply" of fate points should vanish.  The mini-games seemed to
run smoother and more quickly if only the actors in the mini-games (the NPCs
and their finite pool of fate points and the PCs) could compel, and tags
swiftly removed chips from play until there was nothing to do but pick up
consequences and take damage.  Is this an accurate reading of the rules?  My
players and I seemed to feel that if the GM still had his infinite pile of
chips, then it would quickly give him an advantage.

In the Personal Combat mini-game, one of the players attempted to do a
maneuver to place an aspect on himself.  I couldn't immediately find any
thing that ruled it out.  Is this possible?

The Platoon combat was the worst of the lot, partially because I only placed
two platoons (one for all the PCs and one for the enemy.)  I trusted to
Fate's fractal system (it scales up and down easily) and for the most part
it went OK.  I think I screwed up by compelling the PC's personal aspects,
rather than their platoon aspects.  Is this part of how the mini-games have
no mechanical link with the rest of the game?

The Platoon Combat ended when the players managed to Spot the enemy leader
and stack a truly horrendous Direct Fire roll on him.  They tagged his
aspects, their platoon, and a maneuver to do 12 shifts (he rolled very
badly, and a reroll didn't help much)  Even taking consequences wouldn't
save him.  Once he was gone, all his units, it seemed to me, would be out of
command range and just sulked off the field.  It seemed rather quick to me,
but is this how a decapitation should be handled in platoon combat?

The players really had trouble with how little their character skills seemed
to impact the Space Combat Game, especially a Pilot with Skill 5 on a ship
with a V-Shift of 1.  Again, it seemed to me that keeping the fate pool
finite helped the mini-game move to a final and bloody end.  (They managed
to blow up one torpedo boat, whereupon it's partner decided to do search and
rescue rather than chase.)  Questions:

If two enemy ships are formation flying, does each ship still get its own
fate pool?

Can you erode space band shift values?  i.e. If you have a 1 shift on the
Position roll, can you still move "halfway" to one of the higher value
bands?  (I didn't think so in the game.)

Finally, the Social Combat game went best, I think, though there were still
problems.  As Brad suggested, I used a single track of 7 zones, with
"Guilty" at one end and "Mistrial" at the other.  There were three judges
(pawns) and two lawyers.  One lawyer was an amalgam of the PC's skills and
aspects (representing their testimony and behavior at the trial) and the
other was an NPC I made.  One judge started out in the "Guilty" box, as he
was convinced of the PCs guilt.  I put a pass value of 2 on the border to
that zone, to model his prejudices.

The social combat started slow, with some compels passing fate points back
and forth.  Then the PCs decided to mainly obstruct, using invokes to build
some huge values on zones leading to guilty.  By the time my lawyer could
tear them down by moving and get back to moving the judges, the PCs were
strengthening the barriers again.  In the end, I conceded the battle as
there was not enough time to get any judges to "Guilty" or any actors to
"Mistrial."  Questions here:

Can one composure attack a Pawn?  I didn't think so, because the pawns had
no stats, but the PCs were interested in getting the judge sitting in the
Guilty box to recuse himself.

Can the PCs tag aspects on my NPC when doing an unopposed action?  I think I
let them do that... (it was late)

Is there any good tactic for fighting the obstructions?  I was at a bit of a
loss, as moving through them just left me at range from the judges I had to
motivate.  The PCs seemed to get pretty high values, too.  (Maybe make the
lawyers 3-cap skills rather than 5-cap?)

Anyhow, any answers you can offer would be greatly appreciated.  All in all,
the playtesters had fun.  I run this thing for real on Saturday for some
other players, so please let me know what you think ASAP.

Jeff
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://phreeow.net/pipermail/diaspora_phreeow.net/attachments/20091113/c1871617/attachment.html>