Survival Games

[bosky]

The thread has deviated a bit from the first post, but I'm just seeing it now and wanted to comment. There is a great short story by Jack London called that really, really captures the feeling of an inhospitable freezing cold wasteland.

I've always liked survival as a backdrop to a full fledged RPG, instead of the entire focus. Like a barbarian type character hunting and gathering in a cold, desolate stretch of plains. Skinning animals and building up a shelter and so on but still having the option to fight something besides deer and elk

I think something with cavemen would be kinda neato too, before any modern inventions and somehow with rules to really capture a brutal existence.

Or going futuristic and doing a survival game on a different planet, since then you could really flesh out learning about new plants and animals as part of it. Like maybe their spaceship crashed and they need to survive until a rescue comes. I think having a definite goal and end would help.

[Onix]

[J.K.Mosher]

While I'm currently mired in RL work/family stuff, I do wish to continue on
the system I'm setting up.

Basically I took this idea as a "challenge" of sorts to try and create a gaming system
that only really deals with Survival situations.

(IMHO I think I bit off more then I could chew on this but, I'm going to try and continue forward)

Would a system that is centered in fantasy/sci-fi be a good idea? Definitely, and doing the
work I'm doing is making me think of some of my other game incarnations (I'm thinking on doing one
set in the stone age/early bronze age) where harvesting a large animal not only provides a combat
encounter, but also gives the items needed to construct weapons, armor, and tools to promote the
continuation of the story arc.

I like what Onix is doing, and part of me wishes my system was simpler in that it would translate into
other game systems easily. But that's not the route I choose. However if I ever get to the point and have
my "resolution" system done (sometime before the end of the world I hope) feel free to tweak and mod it
to fit other realities/genres.

PS:
Glad some things I have a solid system
'cause there are days when I think I've gone completely off track.

[kylesgames]

Green Dawn's gonna be a science-fiction zombie survival game, but the zombies are going to be a minor threat- advanced technology means resource gathering depends not on explicit type (any organic material can feed a person when put into a nanovat) but on materials (some of the advanced tech requires similar grade material to be fed in). It'll mean no currency system but still a way of trading, and there's gonna be a survivor colony metagame to keep players occupied. So yeah, every encounter with a hunter-killer robot equals a new machine gun or nanovat or motorcycle (well, maybe every few), should it be salvaged. Weight will be an issue more than bulk, since players can use nanotools to reduce stuff to its component materials. Maybe it's not terribly hard sci-fi, but it's gonna be cool.

[misterecho]

I like the idea of a setting in a survival like atmosphere. However I would strongly avoid the minutia of survival. Perhaps its part of the modern wave of games which tend to gloss over encumbrance/hunger etc.

I think it's about telling great stories and developing and investing in characters. You sometimes need to "zoom out" of the daily action to achieve that narrative arc.

[SheikhJahbooty]

Actually Kyle,

Skip the zombies. I think it might be tighter if you just do the robots and leave the zombies out, kind of a Terminator or Matrix style robo-apocalypse, but like the robots don't need to be all that well put together, they could be haphazard like zombies.

I remember this was the problem I had years ago with Living Steel. Great game but very grainy, lots of crunchy rules and then the setting was also very full of too much stuff, aliens, psychotic survivors driven made by alien weapons or just what they had to do to still be around, robots, power armor, etc, just too much. Rifts had that problem even more, but at least was a simple game.

Oh actually, I take that back if the zombies look like they wandered off the set of Tetsuo, The Iron Man. Like if there are repair droids with bad wiring who go around "repairing" human corpses into shambling cyborg zombies, that way everything ties together.

Like how Jason does it, it ties together, one alien species, that doesn't use a vast array of technology, is somehow involved in an accident where medical nanites that were supposed to monitor and prevent disease, instead prevent humans from dying. Simple, if weird, aliens, and zombies that really only differ based on speed from shambling to "oh god how did it get behind me". I can wrap my head around that.

I wish I could point you to more games where resource tracking survival is a part of game play, but I don't know how much Living Steel would cost today if you could find it, and the free game that comes to mind, Charognards, is in French. if you speak French. I like the cut-outs in Charognards, so you can keep track of fitting stuff in your pack without getting bogged down in record keeping that Mr. Echo rightly said few people found fun so it was dropped from most modern games.

[kylesgames]

[J.K.Mosher]

After getting involved with Onix's SPF RPG, I've gotten some ideas/inspiration on how to move
forward with my "Survive . . ." game system.

Going to take a few tweaks, and some re-writing but as soon as I have something to show
I'll post it up in RPGLabratory for review.

[Onix]

That's cool, inspiration is always exciting. It's funny because I really want to build the survival situations for The Artifact into SPF but I don't have enough experience with it yet (I can breath Artifact rules I've been doing it so long). I should work on one of the environments (jungle maybe?) soon.

[J.K.Mosher]

It's the conflict resolution system you've set up, that is getting me going.

With some changes using the general idea of picking modifiers, it would work
great for working out events in a Survival game

I have to tweak some of the creation rules, and numbers, but other then that
it should work fairly similar to what you have for SPF, though my thoughts are
to avoid the set lists of tricks and just allow players to use the skill at a specific
value.

But we'll see how it works