[Diaspora] Mini-Game Help

[Jeffrey Hosmer]

The major complaint we had about the pilot was this:  Since the ship had a
V-shift of 1, it didn't matter whether he had a Pilot skill of 5 or 1.  The
V-Shift limits his skill, so the extra skill was lost.  And since it's a
mini-game, I don't know if the Pilot 5 could bring any of his aspects (such
as "Natural Pilot") into play to improve things (I think an allowance could
be made for such an obvious link).

So, looking at the rules, it seems that a better pilot would NOT have a
better chance of getting away from Pirates.  He's completely limited by his
ship.  This is realistic, I guess, but it definitely doesn't reward someone
for having Pilot as their Apex skill.

If I did this wrong, please let me know.

On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 10:29 AM, C. W. Marshall <toph at interchange.ubc.ca>wrote:

>
>
> Dear Jeff,
>
> Thanks for this. Playing 4 minigames in a single session is a lot, but I
> think it has shown us some things of interest. Brad has gone through your
> specific questions, so I'll just step back an make a few general
> observations.
>
> 1. Fate points in the minigames. You are right that in the minigames, the
> agents on the map have fate point pools, not the ref. We tried to make this
> clear by talking about the caller not the ref (the ref is just another
> player at this point). I suspect that if others had been caller, it would
> have been clear that there just isn't a fate point reserve to draw on.
> Perhaps a clarifying statement in the final section of chapter 4 is needed,
> however.
>
> 2. Platoon. I think you are correct that in the platoon game, players are
> subordinated into the larger groups. Since we limit the application of
> skills to such a degree (and rightfully, since we are not building
> comparable skill trees for the other ten guys there), it is the platoon
> aspects that should be played. I don't think there's an inherent problem of
> only two platoons (one could use the same rules/scale to model a highway
> chase between two vehicles, for instance).
>
> 3. Space combat. I think Star Wars dogfights have really spoiled us in some
> ways, and we continue to romanticize the space pilot. I'm sorry your players
> didn't feel they had enough control. the game is designed so that each
> player should get one thing to roll per turn, as long as they have a space
> skill (the guy shooting missiles gets to roll that, just as the pilot rolls
> positioning) and their skills do affect ship performance, though not a lot.
> To turn to your specific example about Pilot 1, as Brad says,
>
>
> Yeah a great pilot on a crappy ship is going to be frustrated. "This thing
>> STEERS LIKE A COW!"
>>
>
> But he should be frustrated -- an excellent pilot has a better chance to
> get a tanker away from a pirate ship, but it shouldn't be easy. And it will
> take time, as the delta vee slowly increases, as the tanker inches away, one
> band at a time. And a single bad roll means that the enemy matches your
> vector, pulling your ship back to the center of the map. So I think your
> experience is exactly right, and tells the story the game is designed to
> enable. (I'll further add that most pilots are three-cap characters have a
> skill rank of 2, or the v-shift of the ship. Your Pilot-5 is an anomaly, and
> would be able to do something meaningful on  the ship with big engines,
> where most pilots wouldn't. What was the v-shift of the opposing ship? If it
> was more than 2, then in normal circumstances a V-shift 1 ship should not be
> able to get away.
>
> I hope this helps. It's great to hear about your experiences, and I look
> forward to hearing about running it "for real".
>
> Toph
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://phreeow.net/pipermail/diaspora_phreeow.net/attachments/20091113/63182ee6/attachment.html>