Liminal Void's quickstart has been around a little more than a year now. It's the first Total//Effect thing I put out and it's...fine. It's fine. Total//Effect is a strong backbone, the vibe carries it pretty far in my opinion, and again in my humble opinion, my two quickstart scenarios are decent. (Read it yourself and see if you agree. It's free. Click that little liminal void tag at the bottom if you want to see me everything I've written about it here, which is quite a lot.)
This post is about the various mechanical choices made in Valiant Horizon at a very high level. I group these into three categories: Diceless mechanics (stuff that works), Roll for Magnitude mechanics (stuff that works but you roll to see how much), and Roll for Success mechanics (stuff that works if a roll goes your way).
Diceless
The simplest kind of mechanic. This is what Assets, Exhausting Assets, and Burdens are:
I don't have an actual cover for this one yet so for now you get a screencap from the SRD title. This one's still at pretty high level. But I did some of that high level work and I wanna talk about it!
Speaking of the SRD, this is the third Total//Effect game I initially proposed/outlined/etc on the Total//Effect SRD. My general (self)-pitch was:
So I'm thinking about what I'm doing with Professions in Liminal Void. A Profession is like...a class, kind of/sort of? It's got a starting skillset (basically a broad Skill category), a little passive ability that differentiates it, a few changes to being able to recover/reload/recharge in combat, and a starting equipment package (which includes an outfit, a capital-T Tool, and two consumables).
Advancement in a game is tough. Or rather, like all things in game design, you can kind of just do whatever with it but it'll have long-ranging implications as to player behavior. As much as we don't like to admit it sometimes, numbers going up very frequently provide a throughline and driving force for campaign-length games, but how those numbers go up matters. If you give XP for gold, guess what, your game is now at least partially about making money. If you give XP for killing things, guess what, you're going to see a lot of killing. If you don't have XP but just give out character levels when important milestones get finished, they'll frequently beeline to those milestones. And so on.
Thinking out loud about Liminal Void ship stuff because that's on my docket alongside Valiant Horizon and VH is mostly in the "the thing's constructed, just gotta tweak it around the edges" stage. (If you're not familiar from previous posts, basically it's a space game with an Expanse-ish level of hard-sci-fi-ness, give or take a bit, but more centered on survival in shit space capitalism than interplanetary politics as such. I have a free quickstart here! for ground-level, Level 0 rules if that sounds like your thing!)
So some of my early playtest feedback is that melee feels less good than range which...yeah, tactics games are sure like that, huh! I'm fixing to handle this in a few ways right now.
The obvious moves first:
Lower the utility of Far range attacks. (This is even more pronounced because 3/6 of my players have abilities that hit to Far - basically almost all of the ones in the book. It's a good stress test at least!) Far range support is probably fine.
Add movement to a lot of powers. I'd done this with some of the later classes I designed (self-buff powers, for example, are usually move + buff) but the older ones could stand to have that energy too.
Ok. This is the part where I talk more firmly about the scenario. (See the map above.)
The goal of this scenario, as repeated from above, is the same goals as Level 0 in general:
Establish some "starting points" for characters, and give some playstyle options.
Figure out, through play, what kind of people your characters were and are. (The Background mechanic is the obvious version of this, but even more subtle decisions inform a character.)
Make sure the party is a persona non grata in some way.
Get the party a spaceship. That's a major part of the game going forward.
I had more to do here than just present a fun adventure. I was tasked to present a jumping-off point for the rest of a campaign! And I think it worked.
I'm in a posting mood because I'm putting off finishing writing a press release/kit so I figured I'd ruminate a little bit about how I put the Liminal Void Quickstart rules and scenario, Escape from CICP-1, together. Mild spoilers for the scenario under the fold if you care about that sort of thing, but most of the big scenario stuff is going to be in a follow-up post, but also it's just long and this seems polite.
Your Icons and Inspirations should help a lot here. Be explicit about how your icons relate to these larger organizations or areas. You don't have to use all of them.
Given that this isn’t really a fantasy thing as such, “Dungeon” and “Season” are going to have liberties taken with them. And Factions are going to be very loose because I’m actively trying to avoid faction tech for this game: as fun as a more explicit Expanse-like game of Great Powers would be, the biggest players are mostly intended to be out of reach, these will be mostly groups of broad-strokes similar corporations.
