STGOD 2020 Concept/Planning Thread

[Simon_Jester]

In game use, no. In order of battle creation, yes.

The part where I have to sit down and think about how multiple different aspects of any given combat unit "cash out" into multiple point stats strikes me as significantly more complicated. Though if you're including "nation creation" into "order of battle creation," then yes, SDNW4's rules have a lot more complexity loaded into that part of the process.

I believe I should explain exactly where I'm coming from. Simple is good, but I don't believe it is the only objective. After all, we're talking about rules used as a backstop for a semi-freeform game. If you don't need that backstop, great. Everything's working. If you do, though, it needs to be both simple and fit for purpose, and purpose, in that case, is adjudicating what has become an adversarial process.

That part I can respect and understand- such rules were not in use in SDNW4, though I will note that in practice no one ever argued with a straight face that (for example) a 1001-point force could casually bulldoze through a 1000-point force because N+1 is greater than N.

However, your core point that the game should have a mechanism that makes play continue to be interesting even if inter-player conflict becomes adversarial is well-taken. We made do without it for quite a long time, and had a good deal of fun anyway, in SDNW4... but that doesn't mean it isn't useful or necessary.

Hey all... So.. Not sure if this is me being Nit picky, but, after reading Eternal_Freedoms rather intimidating ship descriptions...

Does anyone else think it would make sense to lay down a standardized "ship size" for ship weight limits? As in "ship of X point value = 1000 meters aprox" or such.

I ask because after thinking about it, he listed SIZE for his ships, but not strength. And i am now imagining something very silly of people who, say, each had a "100 point battleship" and one of these was 2400 meters.... and the other one 240 meters or something silly.

Thoughts?

No. Please no. Stop. Don't do this.

The solution to such conflicts is either to leave them alone and ignore them, or intentionally play them up as cases where one side has, say, superior technology that is very compact.

It is NOT to create universal rules that clamp down on everyone's imagination and lock us all down to designing functionally identical ship concepts and tactical concepts and so on.

Why the fuck does it matter. Seriously I feel like I wanna just post an ogre gif screaming nerds. No amount of rules fixes bad players. This is literally the lesson that dnd taught us over the last 3 editions. Honestly if we can't trust a bunch of 30 year olds to play the game with decorum I really don't want to play with those people to begin with.

My natural inclination is to go with this- on the grounds that any serious amount of adversarial play in these games is almost certainly a bad thing and likely to bring the game down screaming.

Because unlike Rogue's example of tabletop Warhammer 40k play, many of the core functions of STGOD roleplay do rely on collaborative gaming. When a bunch of Space Marines fight a bunch of Tyranids in tabletop, the two armies' players are explicitly not having to share the products of their labors or jointly plan out a sequence of events. In a good STGOD, such sharing and joint planning becomes far more important, if the goal is a good finished product.

But that doesn't make the adversarial play rules bad in and of themselves. Guess I can maybe work with them.

Yeah, there's no reason to dictate fluff. (Though under SDNW4's rules, the shuttle full of mages as powerful as a dreadnought couldn't make planetary landing, which is a hilarious image. ) No matter what system we're likely to adopt, the points will be what matters, not the physical characteristics of the vessel.

It totally is.

I've just done a full editing pass on the Imperial Wiki to remove speculative language, what should have been out of article notes on what to put where, and so forth, as well as put in perfunctory provisions for buying ground troops and the above provisional planetary assault rules. Simon, I know you said the introductory text made it hard for you to get into it, but at the same time, that's what the wiki's hyperlinked table of contents is for; I believe that if the article is going to purport to be an STGOD handbook, it should explain the basic concepts of what the game is. The SDN World rules article saves a lot of words on not doing that, but if people who didn't know what the game was (new players, say) were to read that in isolation they'd have no idea what it was talking about.

OK, but then we need the document to effectively have separated first and second halves in the same document. The first half is a wordy article explaining the basic theory of what the game is. The second is a relatively terse article explaining what the rules are. If we run into newbies who are still confused after reading both, we can show them the ropes as we go.

The problem isn't really bad as long as the author doesn't expect people to read through five paragraphs of philosophical musing before they get to the meat of how the rules work. I'm guilty of this myself sometimes, admittedly.

Honestly, I want to play STGOD because I want to play a semi-competitive collaborative storytelling game. I don't want to play a pen and paper 4S with some narrative attached. If I wanted a 4S game I would buy one, I'm a 35 year old man with a steady job, not a 24 year old underemployed grad schooler who can't afford to drop a few hundred for a game and some expansions. I can't just spend money to tell silly stories about Space Greeks fighting Space Squids with their Space ABS. That is what STGOD is about for me.

I appreciate the shout-out.

And, again, when you get right down to it, I share your sentiment. Every grand strategy roleplay I've ever felt any interest in was more about the roleplay than about having detailed rules for "how to be a pen and paper 4X game."

The objective isn't to make a 4X game. The objective is to have something to fall back on when the roleplay almost inevitably devolves into that. When their backs are against the wall, very few players are going to want to just roleplay their own inevitable demise, with no choice other than to respond to "my massive fleet opens fire" with "my ships all explode and the planet lies helpless before you." What I'm trying to do is both codify what happens in advance so someone presented with that will have already agreed to it, and make "what happens" involve meaningful choices for the defender - which is likely to be me, because Nashtar doesn't go conquering. I don't have fun with "N+1>N, you lose" from either side of it. Neither is it fun to go on the attack and have someone say "my ships all punch their hyperdrives before you attack and I'll be back with my whole damn navy, bye sucker." What I'm trying to do is make it possible for battles to have incremental rather than binary outcomes, so a tactical defeat doesn't have to mean you're strategically doomed (certainly disadvantaged, but not doomed).

I think the fundamental problem here is that while your goal is NOT to make a 4X game, it's to ensure that adversarial play can proceed to the point of faction annihilation, on the assumption that "factions get blown up by wars" is a major part of the in-game setting, without the game falling apart...

Your mechanism for achieving this involves making a 4X game.

We might do better to just have designated umpires for any inter-player wars who can glance at any situations and say "uh yeah, your N+1 points don't let you effortlessly brush aside N points, a bunch of your ships and theirs go into drydock and the war is on hold for a while." Among other things because then the 'system' is only introducing extra labor in the rare instance of a serious adversarial disagreement, instead of making everyone do extra labor all the time and making the extra labor the main focus of the system.

We're not teenagers anymore. Well, I never was on SDN, but I was in my early 20s, and a bunch of you were that young or younger too in the early 'glory days' of STGODs. We can hopefully avoid the dumbass shit that makes it necessary to have a complex ruleset to adjudicate conflicts. We can also hopefully avoid the dumbass shit whereby we get this weird idea that the object of the game is to emerge triumphant atop the bloodied carcasses of all the other players, which is a big part of what creates conflicts that must be adjudicated in the first place.

We are simply going to do it, one way or the other. I plan to, as promised, put up a poll now five days hence outlining every extant option. One of the poll options is going to be no-rules freeform. One will be SDNW4. If Hellion comes up with an actionable plan, his will be on there too. We'll vote on it, then go with the results. I just want to get a game off the ground; everything else is secondary and we can try to avoid the strategic deadlock in other ways if need be.

I respect that.

I will just say this: If I get to have my stealth frigates, I will make play opportunities (not necessarily combat ones) for everybody, because they're going to be everywhere poking into everybody's business. I learned that lesson all the way back in STGOD 4.

Oh, I believe it. Look up "Stealth Fail" in SDNW4.

---

Also, I think Dark Hellion is ENTIRELY right about the abstract issue even if I disagree with him about details. Namely, that one of the biggest problems with STGOD mechanics is that they tend to punish losers. Once you start losing there is no mechanical way within the rules to stop losing, because power (or power growth) is proportionate to territory, so losing territory means taking a permanent hit. Which weakens you permanently, and in turn makes you easier prey.

There's no equivalent to the real-life thing where an attacking nation can enjoy success but ultimately have to stop and only 'bite off' a few provinces despite having overrun half the enemy country... which is annoying in single player strategy games but GREAT in multiplayer because it means that nations get to continue existing for long periods of time, and that there are realistic ways to recover from a defeat.

So we need to either have a mechanism for that, OR have our moderation pre-commit to making the situation forgiving and permissive for easy rebounds so that we don't have players being easily forced out of play without their consent.

[Eternal_Freedom]

I have no particular thoughts on the combat rules either way - I only did two STGOD's, one ina fantasy 1750's and one in 21st-century not-Earth with modern tech. Those were a lot more freeform and a great deal of fun.

On a faction-specific note, I'm thinking I may have to change some details of my culture. The idea of having them cloned in massive batches, be mono-gendered and not have family units is...too constraining I think. It limits what stories I can tell, what diplomatic stuff I can play with. The biology/physiology/psychology of having them all united as one species can still work, I think I just need to change how little Orions are made.

Could steal an idea from some Doctor Who EU stuff where individuals can pair up and submit their gene-templates to the Chromosome-Looms to be recombined and filtered, thus preventing any negative random mutations from being passed on and allowing positive mutations and/or unexpectedly effective permutations to be preserved and spread, advancing the species.

Thus individuals can still aspire to contribute to new gene-templates with the ultimate honour of a complete new template being named for them, while still allowing families and family dynamics. Also makes it easier to have names, since typing out Kratoc-126-75469 every time I mention what the Primus is up to will get tedious fast.

Also I may need to add about 2,000 years in the timespan between now and the Great Betrayal, to make settling twenty heavily-develoepd worlds and destroying three other species more plausible. As a Long-Term Faction Goal (TM) I will add searching out and exterminating any remaining Lazari - and finding whoever their enemies were and exterminating them as well for not finishing the job in the first place. Hence why my fleet list will include explorers and give me an excuse to maintain diplomatic contacts with other powers.

[Simon_Jester]

I have no particular thoughts on the combat rules either way - I only did two STGOD's, one ina fantasy 1750's and one in 21st-century not-Earth with modern tech. Those were a lot more freeform and a great deal of fun.

On a faction-specific note, I'm thinking I may have to change some details of my culture. The idea of having them cloned in massive batches, be mono-gendered and not have family units is...too constraining I think. It limits what stories I can tell, what diplomatic stuff I can play with. The biology/physiology/psychology of having them all united as one species can still work, I think I just need to change how little Orions are made.

Could steal an idea from some Doctor Who EU stuff where individuals can pair up and submit their gene-templates to the Chromosome-Looms to be recombined and filtered, thus preventing any negative random mutations from being passed on and allowing positive mutations and/or unexpectedly effective permutations to be preserved and spread, advancing the species.

Thus individuals can still aspire to contribute to new gene-templates with the ultimate honour of a complete new template being named for them, while still allowing families and family dynamics. Also makes it easier to have names, since typing out Kratoc-126-75469 every time I mention what the Primus is up to will get tedious fast.

Mhm.

Another option is that clones are produced in massive batches but that it's not conducive to the functionality and mental stability of the race for them to be raised that way, so that some analogue to family units exists for purposes of childrearing.

[Even if the clones were not designed that way by whoever created them, they may be that way]

[Crossroads Inc.]

I love how you think Rogue
And Hellion?

Great break down on a lot of my thoughts as well. At the end of the day, the points give us incredible freedom to do crazy wacky stuff and still have it "work" in terms of game play. If I had the time, and felt I was better at playing in general, I'd love to re do a full on Anime-like Nation with Giant Robots fulled by the power of Fangirls and Bishonen :3

[Rogue 9]

I'm just going to say that complete freeform led to this horseshit. "Your whole throw weight does nothing to me because lolwedges, nyah nyah." My only comfort was that when the game crashed and burned shortly after that, Stormbringer's allies revealed that their plan was to backstab and overrun him next.

[Crossroads Inc.]

LOL WOW! Man I had forgot just how fast that devolved.... 180 pages coming to a crashing hault ;P

But god, also makes me realize how, old we all are ;P Its been a long time, we certainly have all changed

[Rogue 9]

LOL WOW! Man I had forgot just how fast that devolved.... 180 pages coming to a crashing hault ;P

But god, also makes me realize how, old we all are ;P Its been a long time, we certainly have all changed

Yeah, well. Students of STGOD history (not that there are likely many of those) could probably have figured out that I've been talking about the end of that game upthread when talking about roleplaying your own demise, N+1>N, and arbitrary invincibility.

Anyway: Intermediate option. I put the concept of specializations back in, but only the ones that affect roleplay elements (stealth, strategic speed, and things that interact with them) rather than the ones that mess with the math of combat (offense, defense, interdiction).

If we don't want to mess with the math of points, how about just describing in generalities? Without a points weight of at least 5x the defender, you can't just outright destroy them. That's what the math works out to doing anyway; to one-shot a 5 point destroyer you need a 25 point heavy cruiser under the 2k8 system.

[Rogue 9]

Also, I think Dark Hellion is ENTIRELY right about the abstract issue even if I disagree with him about details. Namely, that one of the biggest problems with STGOD mechanics is that they tend to punish losers. Once you start losing there is no mechanical way within the rules to stop losing, because power (or power growth) is proportionate to territory, so losing territory means taking a permanent hit. Which weakens you permanently, and in turn makes you easier prey.

There's no equivalent to the real-life thing where an attacking nation can enjoy success but ultimately have to stop and only 'bite off' a few provinces despite having overrun half the enemy country... which is annoying in single player strategy games but GREAT in multiplayer because it means that nations get to continue existing for long periods of time, and that there are realistic ways to recover from a defeat.

So we need to either have a mechanism for that, OR have our moderation pre-commit to making the situation forgiving and permissive for easy rebounds so that we don't have players being easily forced out of play without their consent.

That's why I designed (if you can call slapping them together in 20 minutes "design") the proposed planetary assault rules the way I did. (Added bonus: They're short!) Successfully taking a Class 10 planet requires 300 points of ground troops. On the scale we used in 2k8, where every player starts with 100 points worth of planets, to fully conquer a player one would need 3,000 points of troops - which simply is not possible to start with, and if you tried you wouldn't have a navy. You can reduce that through orbital bombardment, but doing so takes full production turns and wrecks the infrastructure you're trying to capture, leading to the defender having all kinds of time to marshal a response. Raids are easy; you can beat up a garrison fleet and withdraw and set a player back. But if you don't want that made up in a couple of production turns, you need to take a planet, which is time-consuming work.

I want it to be possible to take territory and eventually run down a power (with the understanding that space is big, and a player who desires can make a new nation and rejoin). I don't want it to be trivial. Anything I design is going to reflect that desire and be an attempt to achieve it.

If we scrap ship specializations, fine. But the big thing I'm after, again, is making raiding easy but defeat of major battle fleets and capture of planets hard. (This also lends itself to NPC pirates, something that gives my nation all kinds of motivation to get off its ass and send battle fleets around hunting for them; just have an NPC pirate power spend all its national characteristics points on Improved Salvage and before long it's getting enough scrap and cargo from convoys to build itself into a real problem if left unchecked.) Really, I think moderators controlling minor powers and having them actually do stuff is a key to making this work; it gives the players something to interact with, and potentially a method of limited expansion, without having to risk direct confrontation with a peer power every time they make a move. In my case, I'm going to submit Ernarn again as a minor power neighbor of mine, and messing with them would be a flashpoint with me, but not to the degree that trying to conquer one of my own planets would be.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Sigh....
I can't believe I still find myself wanting to try something really new.. I mean, The group I have, yeah, its fun, and it is something I created from scratch, but I just don't know what sort of 'STORY' I would tell with it these days. Same time, I just don't want to shamelessly rip off some other Sci-Fi narrative. I know I am over thinking things, the whole point of course is to have "fun", but also have something to tell a story with, and, just do not want mine to feel Stale as it were...

[Eternal_Freedom]

Mhm.

Another option is that clones are produced in massive batches but that it's not conducive to the functionality and mental stability of the race for them to be raised that way, so that some analogue to family units exists for purposes of childrearing.

[Even if the clones were not designed that way by whoever created them, they may be that way]

Good thinking. Ok, partners can join together (in pairs or larger groups if they want) to submit their gene-templates for recombination in the Chromosome-Looms (I like that name), the resulting "offspring" are then raised along with the others by the Childcare Service - one of the only service branches a ten-year-old Orion is not allowed to chose right off the bat, it and Education/Instruction are deemed vital enough that only experienced Orions can participate, those that have transferred in after their initial forty years.

Think Logan's Run in some respects, but without the random exploding 25 year olds.

[VX-145]

Another thing to think about is that "X+1>X" 1) isn't necessarily true (since a significant part of those X+1 points may be tied up in one "clump" that gets taken out early on in a battle, to give an example) and 2) will, in a linear battle, leave the X+1 side on... 1 point. Even in a square battle you'll take significant losses, leaving you vulnerable to other powers.

That can be a problem in and of itself, since it discourages picking fair fights - so the raw points are points system doesn't necessarily work for our purposes. Though, I was slightly interested in Hellion's "the points represent this amount of military build-up" idea. Regardless, it's something I thought should be brought up.

Crossroads: if it helps any, Endeavour is something like 40-60% pop-culture references - so long as you're happy with the faction you're playing, the story can fall into place around it. And I do like the idea of a full-on anime nation, especially because it'd cause a bit of a mind-fuck to my guys.

[Elheru Aran]

I fully acknowledge that pure freeform is not conductive to cooperative play if someone decides to be an asshole. About the only thing you can do there is moderate them out of existence. That's where having an agreed-upon setting and the starts of a storyline come in as well-- for example, if we use the idea (I wanna say it was Crossroad's?) of having ancient alien artifacts or whatever around, someone tries to pull some shit, a moderator can just have this giant alien spaceship come in and wipe them out.

I do have a suggestion. I find it easy to visualize ship sizes and purposes if I compare them to craft from pop culture. It's not perfect, of course, but it might be worth a try. So you could say that your cruiser is the size of a Sovereign class Federation starship, your dreadnought is twice that size, whatever. Starship Dimensions is still around for visual comparison purposes. Of course, size is one thing, actual capabilities is another... that's where points would come in, I suppose.

Finally I would also encourage people to provide illustrations that fit their faction. They don't have to do their own artwork, naturally, but by all means post stuff that inspires them, to give the 'feel' of their faction. For example, I'm probably going to be posting a bunch of Juan Gimenez stuff as I go along because I fully intend to embrace that weirdness

[Eternal_Freedom]

Another thing to think about is that "X+1>X" 1) isn't necessarily true (since a significant part of those X+1 points may be tied up in one "clump" that gets taken out early on in a battle, to give an example) and 2) will, in a linear battle, leave the X+1 side on... 1 point. Even in a square battle you'll take significant losses, leaving you vulnerable to other powers.

That can be a problem in and of itself, since it discourages picking fair fights - so the raw points are points system doesn't necessarily work for our purposes. Though, I was slightly interested in Hellion's "the points represent this amount of military build-up" idea. Regardless, it's something I thought should be brought up.

There is also the fact that throughout history outnumbered/outgunned forces have still been able to punch above their weight and win - Trafalgar springs to mind, as does Midway. Equally, superior forces can still fuck up and not win decisively or even marginally when they logically should - the British at Dogger Bank would be a good example for that.

EDIT: Also, maybe n+1 greater than N does discourage fair fights - but since when did any competent military actively try and fight fair battles? A quote I came across somewhere - "If you're in a fair fight you've done something wrong."

[VX-145]

All true, although by "fair fight" I meant more in the strategic than operational/tactical sense. I.E. it could encourage picking off weaker players (who are perhaps more invested in the RP side of things), then snowballing and shutting the whole game down. This, of course, can be dealt with in other ways and is a common problem - but then I'd start digressing and lose focus.

[Elheru Aran]

While I will probably work out an OOB with points and such if that's what's decided upon, I'll probably just RP my way through the game. Winning battles and such is less interesting to me than writing fun stories.

[Rogue 9]

Just for completeness' sake I stripped the intro text out of the full 2k8 rules and put them on their own subpage. At this point I don't expect that to be what we wind up going with, but it's worth clarifying the options.

[VX-145]

I've done a quick reformatting edit to the 2k8 rules, based off the intermediate version. None of the actual rules have changed, I've just shifted things around to hopefully make them a bit easier to read.

It's currently hosted on this google document, and the intermediate rules page on the wiki is curently the edited version. I'd recommend checking out the Google Document since I've proposed some more edits in the comments there, and some extra / slightly changed rules. If people want edit permissions, just ask for them.

In order to not clog up the thread with ruleschat - since the idea of a starting scenario was proposed, does anyone have ideas for one? A few basic ones spring to mind - an NPC nation being aggressive and needing to be stopped, some manner of natural disaster popping up, some unclaimed worlds being discovered, or Earth showing back up.

[Rogue 9]

Well, for the first basic idea, Shep did offer Shepistan.

[madd0ct0r]

I don't mind blowing up my own nation at midnight again.

Feeling a bit more prepared for the response from people this time.

Edit
Itd be a hyperspace/realspace dimensional collapse. Hyperspace is a defining feature of setting, it'll let everyone demonstrate their factions interaction with it

[MKSheppard]

Another NPC Nation Concept.

DIMENSIONAL POLICE
("You've just been DP'ed.")

Nobody knows where these people came from, or even what, or where. Sightings over the centuries have shown them appearing at different locations separated by thousands of light years, within +/- 24 hours of each sighting.

They make bizarre references to people, places, events, or things which have no known reference in any record by any species.

NOTABLE DP OPERATIVES

We have collated our records and there are a few DP operatives who are seen frequently. They are:

Bearoids These alien bears (known by the aliases Bragga, Bragscoe, et al) make references to a bizarre galaxy spanning empire known as "Bragule" and obviously ludicrous pieces of technology.

OMSKites: These appear to be multiple factions banding together, who seem to be united by a singular hatred of anything beginning with "Shep"; and are known for brutal strikes within Shepistan, causing massive casualties.

[MKSheppard]

Dimensional Police Leadership

Little is known about the leadership of this group, but we have obtained this grainy image from the optical nerve of a DP operative who was recently killed before he could complete his mission.



There are no known retinal or facial matches in our databases for this humanoid.

--------

Basically, the DIMENSIONAL POLICE are the not-so invisible fist of the MODERATOR.

They can also be used by others who wish to reference past STGODs

[Simon_Jester]

Just to be clear, what's the planned backstory for the "gameplay region?" My default STGOD space nation is Earth-descended human colonists who sort of englobed a couple of pre-FTL intelligent species in their immediate neighborhood; is that workable?

How do we envision FTL working, anyway? Gates? Tramlines? Go-anywhere-in-normal-space like Star Trek warp drive? Go-anywhere-in-parallel-dimension like the Honor Harrington series?

[VX-145]

That should be workable from what I understand - there's a fair few polities descended from Earth*. As to the backstory - there's a few ideas been thrown about, but I'm not sure anything's been settled upon.

As to FTL, again I'm not entirely sure; the 2k8 ruleset I know presribes the use of hyperspace, as does the SDNW4 ruleset from a glance. In RP terms, though I personally am fine with whatever, or a mix - I think someone might be using jump drives? - so long as the travel times are approximately the same. Or charge times, in the case of jump drive.

*Off the top of my head - mine, Rogue 9's and Elheru Aran's are all from Earth.

[Rogue 9]

Just to be clear, what's the planned backstory for the "gameplay region?" My default STGOD space nation is Earth-descended human colonists who sort of englobed a couple of pre-FTL intelligent species in their immediate neighborhood; is that workable?

How do we envision FTL working, anyway? Gates? Tramlines? Go-anywhere-in-normal-space like Star Trek warp drive? Go-anywhere-in-parallel-dimension like the Honor Harrington series?

When I played it was usually up to the player how to fluff it (except for 2k9, where we had a Freespace style subspace node network rather than go-anywhere FTL); we'd see slipspace, subspace, warp, and hyperspace all used, but generally go-anywhere-in-normal-space. As for the backstory, that's plenty workable; mine is pre-FTL human colonists who arrived in a star cluster inhabited by FTL-capable aliens by the time they got there.

[Elheru Aran]

I'm the one with jump-drives. Think BSG style instant spacefold travel. That said, Maddoc was talking about 'hyperspace'... I'm okay with just letting everybody have their own version of FTL and assuming that 'hyperspace' is roughly equivalent to 'warp' or whatever and that each faction has their own terms for it but it's all probably pretty much the same thing under different names.

As for backstory: I don't see a whole lot of need for one. Humans came from Earth (probably) at some point in the (now long distant, for most) past, aliens came from wherever they come. Some presumably came more recently from Earth than others. It's all part of each faction's fluff.