Moving beyond Combat

After I had an initial draft of what was, essentially, a sci-fi re-skin of Four against Darkness, I gave it a playthrough and … I was bored. And, to be honest, I was also a bit put off by every interaction really resolving to combat. This science fiction I had created amounted to “meet new creatures and kill them.”

What I wanted was a game that was more about exploration and discovery. Also, I had this character, RSQb-103, who I liked and who I wanted to allow to grow. As a long-time advocate for the right to repair, I liked the idea of Qb, and thus the player, being on a mission to hack his own consciousness operating system.

With that in mind, I needed to develop a way for Qb to seemingly learn, which was a tall order if I also wanted to keep the overall game system fairly simple. What I eventually stumbled upon, and what I hope works, is a system which maximizes variation, thus keeping the feeling of novelty fairly high.

I maximized variability across a broad range of fronts: I started by increasing the number of human “types” to 11 — because initially they were the product of a 2d6 roll. (More on how this changed in a moment.) I then broadened the ways the player could engage the people they meet: they could seek to pacify them or suppress them—as well as, in the case of the worst humans (mercenaries) kill them.

In order to get the player not to risk pacification and go straight to supression, I needed a way to reward the player for attempting the peaceful option. That’s when compression gradient flux, called simply flux in the game, was introduced. Measured in “Kolmogorov units” (aka Ks), flux was an indicator of Qb having learned something. The player always received more flux for pacification versus suppression, and they got more flux as the opponents who were to be pacified got to be harder.

I introduced a new die roll mechanic to do this: for every member of a group Qb faced and tried to pacify, they added a die to a dice pool. The player then has to beat the product of the number of group members times the group’s difficulty level. So, for example, if they are faced with 4 scavengers who have a difficult level of 3, the player must roll greater than 12 with 3d6 to pacify them.

There is a greater probability of pacifying less difficult opponents than harder ones, but the rewards for doing so are also smaller—the rewards for pacification, however, is always greater than suppression—and killing actually costs a player flux.

But what is flux good for? It seemed important that it index learning in some fashion. I played with a number of mechanics, but, in the end (and for the time being), I have it available as something a player expends in order to modify a dice roll. If a roll is particularly important, the player is up against a difficult opponent or problem, then they can buy a +1DRM with a K of flux.

One of the moving parts of this mechanic is that the flux must be expended upfront and it is used up whether the roll is successful or not. Right now, I have it so that there is no limit to the amount of flux a player can use. So, if a player is willing to “burn” 5K of flux, they can guarantee a successful roll against even the most difficult opponents.

Like a lot of things, the game will need a lot of playtesting before the proper weighting of such things is revealed.

Next up: increasing the variability of the spaces and introducing new kinds of events.