How to extract rules from a story/setting?

[BubbaBrown]

It all breaks down to understanding the economics of your game; a more abstract economics. As said in other posts, you really have to understand what want the game to value, reward, and punish. Only then can you really make mechanics that can properly fit.

You can look at games like DnD and gather by it's system that it is very focused on rigid combat. The bulk of the rules are there for combat, and the economics are very well defined for that. You take a look at Storyteller (White Wolf) and combat is treated as equally as any other skill via the mechanics. This changes what is valued in the game and what players will unconsciously (sometimes consciously) strive for. You can usually tell what kind of style a game is going for by looking at the mechanics. It's similar to going to a marketplace and seeing a bunch of a different kinds of Widgets and over half the vendor stalls dealing in Widgets in comparison to the many other things out there; you can safely assume that this town the marketplace is in takes their Widgets very seriously.

The main suggestion when dealing in mechanics and making rules is to look at the raw numbers, resulting statistics, and true economics. I've seen many people get hung up on the different dice rolling, strange abstractions of the statistics, and round-a-bout methods. There's very little point in trying something obscure and awkward mechanically to try to set your mechanics apart from the rest when the raw figures aren't that different in the end. This is especially true if it just makes things more complicated and difficult.

[Groffa]

[SheikhJahbooty]

If you have some cash, check out:

Cold City - they have mechanics for gaining bonuses from working together and different bonuses for betraying the other PCs, plus concrete reasons built into each character to betray.

Metamorphosis Alpha, the 4th edition, I think came out in 2006 and works explicitly in phases, where the first phase of the problems are addressed only by droids iirc, and then clone soldiers or something, and then actual crewmen, and the conflict takes place in separate phases, so you deal with the problems on your own ship, but then figure out that your ship has impacted an asteroid or something, and then that it is really an alien craft, and that it had already had a collision with another ship, so by the end the PCs are running around in three different vehicles, fighting two different alien civilizations, sometimes, if they are resourceful enough, strait out going outside, and climbing to the places they need to go. I didn't play it and don't remember it very well right now, but I really wanted to. The dudes I gamed with at the time weren't reliable enough for a long campaign where you might have to make three different characters to see the story from beginning to end.

To answer the original question: figure out what kind of behavior you want the game to reward and to penalize, and then come ask the monkeys.

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

Good work Groffa. These developments seem to hint at some mechanics (or problems that must be addressed mechanically) already, at least to me.

How do we keep the dread going, especially if there are breaks in the action ?(Be it pizza, ending the session for the night, etc.)

On the GM & book keeping side of the game, there could be a chart that tracks the degradation of the ship or situation. The resolution mechanics could include a system of diminishing returns - as the game progresses, success becomes less likely. Finally, we could have a system that makes people pay for success or reward acting as a traitor.

Have you considered a resolution system based on cards? This would allow you to adjust the probabilities of success and failure as the game goes on. The game "" resolves things by drawing from a deck of yes/no cards, trying to meet or exceed a target number with yes cards. In Dove, it could be set that at certain times - when part of the ship breaks, when the deck needs to be reshuffled, if the crew spends too many story points, etc. more "No" cards are added thus the odds are always getting worse.

Alternately, players might have a hand of cards that affects actions. This might either never refill, or becomes smaller each time.

Speaking of the board game idea, have you ever herd of a German style board game called ? Its played over as series of rounds, with new actions revealed at the start of each. Furthermore, certain rounds end with the need to feed the family/pay an upkeep cost. Look into it - there may be some ideas to farm there. (yes, pun intended)

Moving on to part three, there might be physical tokens that players use for certain effects. Some percentage of these may end up in new pools that can either be used by the GM to buy new hazards or can be reclaimed by a player by committing traitorous acts. Alternately, there can be one big pool in the center, and as it runs out, things get worse. Yet any player at any time to boost skills or replace lost HP. This second scenario exploits the situation known as the "".

[Groffa]

@SheikhJahbooty & Chainsaw Aardvark: thanks for the really helpful input. Although I didn't respond at once, I've read your suggestions over and over a bunch of times.

I actually found an old draft on the The Dove-blog, where I had started outlining the game according to the doctor's rpg guide. I don't know if I ever will complete the game (or even get past this first step!), but here it is anyway: .