#TO DEFY THE STARS

9 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

rare idol
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I was surprised to see that Parts One and Three don't influence each other. If the ship took some scrapes or damage as a result of the first Montage Test, shouldn't the scenario give the GM some guidance to incorporate that in the second Montage Test? The "Total Failure" option in Part One says that several ship systems malfunction or cease operation. As a GM, I'd prefer the designer give me some explicit options to choose from that will have some mechanical effect in the second Montage Test involving the ship.

There'd have to be some connection between the physical components of the ship that were damaged or destroyed during Part One and their practical, physical use when navigating the Willy-Wonka-psychedelic-tunnel nature of the challenge in Part Three. For Part Three to make sense, the GM (and designer) need to understand how these timescape/spelljammer ships are typically navigated through astral rifts. I don't need a whole treatise on Timescape Ship Captaining. The mechanical effects described in Part One would be enough.

Why not put some mechanical bite into the Partial Success result in Part One, too, rather than glossing over it as "a few scrapes"? Keep the Victory gains and Recovery losses. Just put some mechanical meat on the dry narrative bone.

light root
rare idol
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I could have phrased that better. It's not about ship mechanisms. I might have asked, "What was the intent behind designing a second Montage Test that doesn't account for the narrative consequences of the first?"

light root
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I appreciate your rephrased question! I wouldn't say there was any intent either way (to include or not include). I'm sure there's a version of the adventure where the first montage test directly impacts the second, but that isn't what I ended up writing. I think there's room for directors to include that on their own, if they want to raise the stakes even higher.

rare idol
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That makes sense. Thanks.

light root
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I could definitely see a set of montage tests being designed for inter-manifold travel, where they build on each other, and you might have to tend to your ship in order to proceed. That would be pretty cool.

rare idol
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Definitely. When I read it, it felt a bit like a continuity error in a movie. DS is a cinematic game, so that's how I tend to think of it.

In the first scene (if there's a total failure), the ship gets blasted to Hell. Holes in the deck, stuff stops working. On screen and at the table, I would imagine a battered ship that reflects the GM's narration of the end of Part One. Then, they arrive at the rift and have to repel boarders. After that, they have to use the ship to navigate the rift.

Your text doesn't mention how much time passes between each Part. So just by reading the text, it would be like seeing the ship completely back to normal between the "cuts" of Part One and Part Two. If I saw that in a movie, it would be a little disorienting like it was when I read your draft text. We're talking about "total failure" in Part One. The characters lost. But the images on screen and in the text instantly wipe away those losses in the next Part/scene. The story just began and some drama had started to build as a result of the loss, but now the heroes are back on level ground without doing anything. Nothing that happened from the loss in Part One (the ship damage) shapes what will happen later in the story.

Your scenario could be the sort of adventure story where the heroes don't really suffer too many consequences in the story. They do suffer some mechanical consequences. They lose some Recoveries and didn't gain any Victories, that's true. But they could also keep their Recoveries and suffer mechanical consequences for the second Montage Test because their ship is messed up.

rare idol
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Losing Recoveries is very abstract. Notice that in both of your Montage Tests, the penalty for Total Failure is identical. But both Tests are very different narratively. In the first, the players are avoiding a fleet of pursuing ships. In the second, they're navigating some gnarly astral seas. Very different in terms of what the characters do in the narrative. But the result in each for Total Failure is the same: lose two "Recoveries." They get tired.

As a GM, I tend to use Recovery loss as a backstop when I can't think of any interesting consequences related to the situation the characters are in. I reach for it when I'm improvising in the moment and come up dry. As a scenario designer, you don't have to improvise. You can take time to come up with something cool that the GM can use so that they don't have to improvise in the moment. That's why I use published scenarios. 😉

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Sorry about all the text. I get carried away.