STGOD 2020 OOC Thread

[VX-145]

I kind of like that as well - partially because with all these ancients running around, Endeavour will be trying to figure out just who the fuck blew all these planets up and getting a "Well I don't know, try asking Jimbo"-style runaround, and partially because it leaves things a mystery.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Crossroads and I are possibly plotting some sort of epic backstory battle. I like the idea of it leaving a huge, mysterious debris field like the Karos Graveyard in Homeworld (though maybe without the Dyson Sphere fragments).

It would be "fun"
since, as discussed any "Great Old Ones" would certainly not be used in game during "modern times" we can have a brutal slug fest with them, just as long as it is suitably "a long time ago"

[Eternal_Freedom]

I'm liking this idea more and more. A War in Heaven (or the Scourge of the Gods, or the Harrowing, as two of my backstory races called it), with worlds shattered and star systems burnt. The Foe v the Lazari, with the Lazari losing but it being almost a pyrrhic victory for The Foe. Then the Skothians turn up, sparks fly, and a final apocalyptic battle nearly consumes them all, leaving a single Skothian city-ship, nothing of the Foe, and a vast debris field.

Neatly explains why so few "Precursors" are around, gives a "War in Heaven" kinda thing to drop into backstories, and can also explain why habitable worlds are rare enough to be worth fighting over - plenty were destroyed in ages past.

Also, to add tot he absurd irony, I'm toying with the idea that the relativistic kill vehicle that crippled the Lazari Habitat and let the Orions overthrown them was a Lazari weapon fired off during said War in Heaven, that missed its intended target and slingshotted off on a new trajectory by mistake.

[Rogue 9]

Yeah, it does provide a certain background. 2k8 had the recently fallen Transhuman Empire (of which all the player nations were either successor states or barbarians, hence the outsider tags in the rules), but that was recent and a much more monolithic thing that everyone basically had to account for in their backgrounds. We don't need to go that heavy (and it's too late for that anyway), but some unifying theme is nice.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Crossroads and I have A Plan (TM). And unlike the Cylons, ours is a bit more detailed than "nukes fall, everyone dies"

[Simon_Jester]

I guess it depends on whether the fighters are cheap enough to be considered ammunition or not. If your combat strength would be materially altered by not being able to pickup the fighters as you leave, put the points in the carrier, and don't worry about it too much. If they would be altered by not being able to bring them back, then put them as separately accounted units, and if you can't recover them, sucks to be you.

Also with having them being part of your larger ship as "ammo", you can repair the carrier relatively cheaply, while you need to replace the destroyed units. So mechanically, they can have slightly cheaper for their power fighters, but with the major disadvantage of: anything lost has to be replaced through production, instead of repair, and it's a whole bunch easier to lose them. I suppose another advantage is that you can distribute them more if they're individual units, instead of a massive carrier. 45 points of carrier can only be in one place, 45 points of .5 pt fighters can be in 90 places. This could be mitigated a bit by having smaller carriers though.

See, what I'm actually envisioning is both. I've got swarms of cutters that are functionally 0.5-point (or whatever) ships, individually tiny and operating in large groups for any purpose other than, say, "fan out and do a sensor sweep."

But then I've got fighters that are functionally ammunition fired by the carriers, except they're enough of a pain in the ass to replace that we normally do doctrine around the expectation of being able to recover them. Such that it's arguably reasonable to treat that as "gotta repair the carrier," I guess, for the sake of having consistent rules. Though in-game I'd be modeling it as "we straight-up don't have the fighters," which FEELS weird but I guess is, again, worth it to have consistent rules.

I kind of like that as well - partially because with all these ancients running around, Endeavour will be trying to figure out just who the fuck blew all these planets up and getting a "Well I don't know, try asking Jimbo"-style runaround, and partially because it leaves things a mystery.

Me too, though the Umerians... hm, come to think of it I've been pitching them as relatively "normal" Earth colonists. Is this a problem? I'm a little vague on whether that causes anyone backstory problems.

[Sorry, been under a FUCKTON of stress lately, not in a great position to participate]

[Eternal_Freedom]

I don't think the Umerians being "normal" Earth colonists will be an issue.

Incidentally, are you gonna have those Mentats appear again?

[VX-145]

Me too, though the Umerians... hm, come to think of it I've been pitching them as relatively "normal" Earth colonists. Is this a problem? I'm a little vague on whether that causes anyone backstory problems.

[Sorry, been under a FUCKTON of stress lately, not in a great position to participate]

From what's been said so far, Earth exists(ed) but might not be currently inhabited/active. The current implication is it's lost somewhere - I've posted upthread/in the concept thread about that IIRC. Umeria should be fine.

As a related aside; I sketched out a brief timeline on the discord chat using mine and Crossroads' polities as reference points. Bear in mind these dates are VERY provisional, basically coming out of my arse, but working backwards:

Present day (Crossroads' Skothians arrival+2k years),
Amazo-x war (Skothians+1.5k to +1.75k years),
Endeavour people wake up (Skothians+1k to +1.5k years)
Skothians arrive / last colony fleets leave Earth (Skothians+0 years)
Ancient wars (unknown start date, but Earth could get caught up in these, ends at Skothians-1k to +0 years, the latter currently being more likely) - this ties into Eternal_Freedom's backstory, i.e. when the Lazari were at war with whoever they were fighting.

There's a lot of flexibility in there - for example, the Theophanic Empire, which claims to be over 2k years old, can be from one of the earlier colony fleets. Or just making it up, but the window's open for either.

Hope things start getting better for you.

[Elheru Aran]

Basically don't worry about it too much. If your folk think they came from Earth 'recently', then chalk it up to either timey-wimey waffle caused by malfunctioning polarity in the flux capacitators in their lightspeed drives, time distortion caused by relativistic speeds, whatever. We can assume that there were multiple waves of colonists sent out from Earth, so naturally some will have been around longer than others. Some may not have accurate histories for whatever reason. Etc. Leaving it wide open like that gives a lot of latitude to develop the histories further as we go down the game road.

Or maybe that's an excuse to not put too much thought into my faction

That said, we will understand if you can't get into it too much. And likewise, hope things get better. It hasn't been an easy season of life for most lately...

[Simon_Jester]

Basically don't worry about it too much. If your folk think they came from Earth 'recently', then chalk it up to either timey-wimey waffle caused by malfunctioning polarity in the flux capacitators in their lightspeed drives, time distortion caused by relativistic speeds, whatever. We can assume that there were multiple waves of colonists sent out from Earth, so naturally some will have been around longer than others. Some may not have accurate histories for whatever reason. Etc. Leaving it wide open like that gives a lot of latitude to develop the histories further as we go down the game road.

Or maybe that's an excuse to not put too much thought into my faction

That said, we will understand if you can't get into it too much. And likewise, hope things get better. It hasn't been an easy season of life for most lately...

The Umerians aren't recent colonists; if anything they may have the opposite problem since they've been around long enough to have tertiary colonies on a lot of the surrounding planets. Last game I gave them a history something like a thousand years deep.

I don't think the Umerians being "normal" Earth colonists will be an issue.

Incidentally, are you gonna have those Mentats appear again?

If no one stops me, I think I'll have the order of telepaths whose SDNW4 presence vaguely inspired the mentats.

I'm not going to pull any bullshit on account of having precognitives, I seriously promise, everyone, but they're part of the flavor I'm hoping to recapture.

[Dark Hellion]

If you have precogs I am stealing a few criminal precogs who have been banished for cheating on the lotto. The shitty predictions I will force others to write into their stories will be worth it.

[Shinn Langley Soryu]

Sovereign Protector Rei Ayanami and ships named after Miho Nishizumi and Jotaro Kujo? Well, there goes my plan to outright revive the Holy Empire of Haruhi Suzumiya (or retool it into the Holy Empire of Madoka Kaname). I got other faction concepts I can fall back on, though.

Also, since when did we have a Discord server?

[VX-145]

There's enough room for two anime polities on the map

And, given Endeavour's general "we neither know nor overly care if this is fiction" attitude, it'd be like a group of medieval re-enactors meeting a whatever-the-organisational-unit-was of 12th century knights. Or more re-enactors.

RE: Discord, I don't have the link but it's been around for a while - I think the original invite thread was in testing and got testing'd.

[Elheru Aran]

Hit Ace Pace up for a Discord link.

[VX-145]

So, now the US elections seem to be over - how's everyone doing with their OOBs and the like / when did people want to start the main game?

[Shinn Langley Soryu]

Seeing some of the discussion about precursor races made me think about some of the crazier ideas in SDNW4. The Q and other extradimensional gribblies were certainly a thing in SDW4, and we do have a special modifier in the rules for extradimensional polities, but I'm not sure if we have anything that crazy in this particular 'verse.

Your empire is from way outside the norms. Like Barbarian only more so. Requires permission to use as too many empires with this trait would become silly. Gives +60 to counter-espionage, -60 to espionage in addition to the normal benefits and costs of the Barbarian

So, how does the Extragalactic/Extradimensional modifier work, anyway? If Barbarian gives +/-30 to counter-espionage and espionage, does Extragalactic/Extradimensional's +/-60 override or stack with Barbarian? Also, how many attribute points?

[Crossroads Inc.]

My take on it was you.. are the ALIEN of aliens... like, Your race is a race of giant jellyfish... and everyone else in the galaxy are humanoids..
Keeping spies out is super easy. Getting spies into someone else is some hard.

Look at the Skothians... Imagine a race similar to Jubba The Hutt, but less tail, with stegosaurus fins, horns, and skin like sandstone...

[VX-145]

By the letter of the rules, the bonuses seem to stack - "in addition to the normal benefits and costs of the Barbarian" - but you can buy each independently of one another so it wouldn't make much sense to get Barbarian's espionage/counter-espionage bonuses. Same goes for the cost - it seems to be 50 national points (same as barbarian, from the same line). I'd suggest that benefits only stack if you buy both. E/E otherwise gives you the same map placement skew as Barbarian.

Does that sound fair/is that how it was done last time with these rules?

[Crossroads Inc.]

Nice, I love your most recent update.
You have been doing a good job in a short time from your first ones with very heavily Douglas Adams-sih in flavor, and into a more free form but still silly style that I am digging. Incidentally, you are also doing a good job of balancing silly and seriousness. I mean, the people are silly, and some of their actions are silly, and certainly their mannerisms are very silly.... But you still feel the deadly seriousness to their plight and their actions.

[VX-145]

Thanks It's pretty fun to try to figure out just how the bloody hell they went from baseline human colony fleet to anarchist cosplayers. I have roughly one more piece in the works, maybe some others if I feel like filling in some of the blanks.

I'm looking forwards to the rest of the War in Heaven, and anything else anyone puts out too.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Same here. I honestly originally figured i'd go from my first post and just flat out skip forward a good 2000 years to modern day stuff.
Doing all this other stuff has been way more fun!

[Elheru Aran]

Well, that's my first pre-game fluff post. More incoming, hopefully, in the next day or so.

If it wasn't clear, the guys that got beaten upon were an Amazo-X craft interloping upon the Theophanic Empire's boundaries. Turns out the TE has really strong corporate protections for its internal industries...

[Simon_Jester]

...I've been feeling really overloaded by life lately, but I don't want to outright ditch the game. When's the planned game start deadline? Is there any way I can arrange to just be "out of the way" for a few turns and be retconned in later? Is that okay? I wouldn't be doing this to exploit a position in a way harmful to anyone, I'm just swamped and finding my recreational energies mostly turning to other things.

[Elheru Aran]

...I've been feeling really overloaded by life lately, but I don't want to outright ditch the game. When's the planned game start deadline? Is there any way I can arrange to just be "out of the way" for a few turns and be retconned in later? Is that okay? I wouldn't be doing this to exploit a position in a way harmful to anyone, I'm just swamped and finding my recreational energies mostly turning to other things.

No start date has been established. I think most people right now are just kind of trying to expand a little bit on background in the pre-game thread. If you aren't getting into it right away, I think we can all agree to just kind of ignore your faction until further down the line whenever you feel like jumping in. You can use something like one of us passing through your space or a nearby battle as a hook to get your people in.

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah something like that sounds good.

I'm not really planning to play aggressively, for the moment, so having "and the Umerians were also there" for a while until I have the energy to deal with fleshing them out for the game a bit more would be nice.