Shall We Get Better At Combat?

They say practice makes perfect. Now I don't know about perfect, exactly, but I do know that the revised combat mechanics for this game slap a lot harder than they did before. Additional playtesting did result in a few minor updates, such as the skill die being downgraded to a d4, at least to start, and the recovery mechanic showing back up as a way to keep you in a fight right as you're about to die. I still might revise recovery a bit going forward, but the base mechanics are working well enough that we can now start working on the next steps.

Upgrades.

As I talked about in my first post (linked above) I want ship upgrades to happen outside of character progression. The hope is that players can feel free to take whatever upgrade path they want without calling into question how their character got there.

To that end all of the combat improvements will be weapon upgrades, essentially. This will make your ship a part of the story, and while what your character is like might influence how you get your upgrades for your ship or how they're installed (at least if you're role-playing at all) it won't dictate how the upgrades work mechanically. Character progression is about how you interact with other characters and organizations within the game world. Ship progression is how you get better at zoomies and pew-pews.

There are a few obvious ways to improve your ship in terms of getting better at combat. Lengthening the armor scale makes you harder to kill, and lengthening the engine scale makes you harder to hit. Those are both serious upgrades, though, and I'm thinking it might be interesting to make it such that adding points to armor reduces points in engine power, simply because the ship has more mass now. A penalty like that plus a scarcity of upgrades for either would make other methods of upgrade more appealing. Since the only other obvious way to upgrade would be weapon accuracy or efficacy, that might have the effect of turning everyone into a glass cannon. Which could be interesting, but I'm not fully sold.

Upgrading the guns is a simpler matter. There would be various options to add numbers to the accuracy roll or the efficacy roll, as well as being able to add dice to either. Adding numbers or dice to the recovery roll is also a viable upgrade path, but with the understanding that you may only get to use that once.

I'm also thinking of adding an escape roll, which would essentially be a last ditch attempt for your pilot to eject to safety in the event that their ship blows up completely. That might also be a thing you can upgrade.

So plenty of thoughts here. Now I need to write a few upgrade paths for ships and stage a few pre-built vessels to run through a couple of combat encounters. Get a few more eyes on what these upgrades might mean, and how they change the dynamics of the game. Maybe I'll toy around with small fleets of opponent ships, see if I can figure out how to make dice rolling work for them.

Basically expand the scope a little and play it again. That's how we roll.