Today I went in and expanded the introductory fiction for Exoworld. I'm expecting the finished piece to be something like 1500-2000 words, and right now it's sitting at 800 words and in two pieces. I'll post the rough draft here once it's done, though I suspect I'll do some tweaking and prodding of it.
Right now my goal is to give an introduction to the universe through a character's eyes. It's a little limited, of course, because it needs to fit at the front of the book and short stories are not a great place for lots of exposition, but I'm happy with the balance I'm striking because I'm taking a character from a familiar but now irrelevant context to an unfamiliar and novel environment.
I've seen this work fairly well in other games, though one cautionary tale that I've seen is in things like the Eclipse Phase 2nd Edition rulebook where the opening fiction was just too long and too heavy-handed about the characters.
I've deliberately chosen to set the perspective from an Exemplar, in particular a Surveyor.
Surveyors are almost indistinguishable from the Originals, the colonists who hitched a ride on the Icarus but slept through all the spicy bits of the journey to Exile.
However, upon close inspection it's obvious that they're Exemplars. They have more heavily modified vision, the Exemplar digestive symbiotes, enhanced proprioception, and lots of stuff that you would only notice during a medical examination or when it kicks in and they do something weird.
Most of the time, Surveyors blow their cover because they're not used to the Originals' way of life. This is irrelevant for the focus character in this story, because she doesn't try to pass herself off as anything she's not. However, it might come into play if she sees another Surveyor doing something unexpected. This could be a good way to hype up the culture shock in the limited space I have remaining.
I've done something I often do and written the story out of order. The part that's done is maybe going to wind up as the climactic incident or a near-climactic incident with the other Exemplar dying because of gravity complications, and I know the events that link between the introduction and that, but not the events that come after. I also have written little after the planet-fall scene as far as "welcome to a new world" goes, so that's something to ruminate on.
Coincidentally, one of my inspirations, the great Michael Malice, says that anyone can write a book easily by writing two pages a day. While I write something like sixteen times that, I feel like I'm doing that with this story right now.
On the gameplay side, I've come up to a solution for some of my issues with combat.
Right now the core mechanic that Exoworld is following is a pass/fail mechanic. You add two Attributes and any Trait derived bonuses. Then you subtract the difficulty and try to roll at or under the number you get.
I had a somewhat complicated version of this where you'd count near failures as partial successes, but did away with that because it's clunky and added an extra step to every single roll. Plus, with the way the curves are shaping up having an extra +5 margin of error basically meant that it would be trivial to achieve universal success on tasks fairly easily during the character development process (which is still a blank slate, but I'm presuming that at some point the numbers will go up and a d20 doesn't give much room to work with that), which would mean just putting in a higher basic difficulty to most rolls to keep characters from breaking out of the system's range of probability.
While this is doable, I'd rather let low difficulty rolls sit at a 0 modifier without giving a guaranteed path to success on them, since that skips a step in the math process.
The problem is that hit/miss is kind of lame in combat. It works for a lite game, but that means that you can't have fancy technology and other fun stuff that has a lot of diversification in how it works.
The solution was simple and integrates nicely with the d20 roll-under system.
When you have a magnitude roll, you combine an existing value with the result of the roll. For instance, in combat weapons will have a Damage value. If you hit, you add your roll's result to that Damage value.
Then you take the tens place result. That result is your Damage, but it can also have different outcomes in different mechanics.
Or, to give an example:
Tim attacks with his character, who's got a Barbgun that does 22 damage. He rolls a 9, which is a success. He adds 22 and 9 together to get 31, then takes the 3 to reduce the target's Health by that much.
The thing that's particularly elegant here is that it works with our small pool sizes. A single hit with a Damage 35 weapon is likely going to put someone in Critical Health, as opposed to a hit with a Damage 8 weapon which might chip away a resource (and not even always at that!).
While NPCs just do straight damage to health (technically we won't use the term damage but rather say "Reduce Health by 1" to avoid confusion, this facilitates player-versus-player combat in theory. I don't have any system for opposed rolls and I don't intend for the Magnitude Roll system to be that, so we're a long way from getting to that.
This has the same effect that combat in Hammercalled had where you benefit from skill with weapons at an exponential rate as your skill and the weapons you're using get better.
Or, there's a superb reason to give the weapons expert the big guns in Exoworld. And that reason is dakka.
This mechanic will probably work into a few other places as well. Healing seems like a good fit, since supplies can just add to the dice roll in the same way weapons handle damage. The Reaction will play something like a fantasy spellcaster, using advanced nanomachine-derived abilities that might scale with Magnitude. I'm also thinking that there may be a small hacking system that involves bypassing electronic systems and Magnitude could come in handy there.
Now, I'm probably going to move away from the lite designation that Exoworld (or rather this project more broadly) had back when I started on it. That's not to say that I'm moving away from the goal of having this be a game that you can teach in a single sitting fairly easily.
But I am moving away from branding it as anything other than a full-bodied game, both because I hope to flesh out character content enough to make it feel very full and because I think it would attract people who aren't prepared for the final setup of the game.
I had originally set up the book in four sections (Universe/Rules/Character/GM), but I think I'm going to divide it once further to add a section for factions.
I'm torn on dividing the Universe section up further. Right now it feels awkward with headings to try and fit things on Exile into the Universe section, but it's not clear that the Icarus and Jewel, Exile's moon, have enough stuff to warrant their own sections.
So I've divided up the WIP of the manuscript so that there's a section for Factions, then Offworld, and Titania sections right now, since that's where the majority of the writing lives. That seems satisfactory for now, at least in the sense that I can keep header hierarchies more or less equivalent between the sections.
I've broken the 10k word mark on Exoworld as of today, and I'll start writing out the rules for Magnitude tonight, though I'm still going to wait a while before I handle the rest of the combat section.
There's a good feeling from being at this stage in the process. I have a goal of writing a million words this year, in case anyone missed that, and while I didn't do as much as I should have in January I think I can salvage February.
I don't want to get peoples' expectations too high, but I think I might try to write a novel in this setting. I do, after all, have a MFA.
I just need to hammer out some more of the details and have the spark of inspiration strike. I think it'll come, but I'm not guaranteeing anything. It might extend the introductory fiction, or it might be an entirely new thing. We'll see.
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