Sci-fi Horror Survival Game . . .foe ideas/concepts?

[Onix]

Not bad, but other than Rush dying in a flashback, there's no tension in this situation other than who'll they'll find next. It needs a survivor that the team has to deal with.

Even if it ends at them searching the normal habitat and not finding the last person but maybe freshly opened food packs on the floor. Now you expect what happened to Rush could happen again.

[J.K.Mosher]

More tension . . . got it.
May try a short re-write, and then move to getting some base mechanics done.

Worse ones are going to be the "to hit and damage". Feeling Damage will be static, with the adjustments/randomness coming from the hit location. (Ie a leg wound versus chest wound.)

I'm looking more at conditions, then straight damage, so weapons will be the "causes" (ie Stun, Bleeding, etc).

This will be interesting . . .

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

A quick thought for damage - perhaps it might directly affect how the player uses cards, rather than simply reduce numbers on a sheet. Bleeding might reduce the value of red cards or remove them from the stock. Concussions and heavy bruising rule out the use of face cards.

Another idea would be that injury cards are dealt out to either fill the player's hands with unusable blanks, reducing their options, or to simply remind them of injury without using a character sheet.

Speaking of tension, the game uses cards and has traitors. It also does a pretty good job of making the claustrophobic location a major factor. (SSN-589 was second place in our "Little Spaces" contest). Taking a look might give you a few ideas.

[J.K.Mosher]

That was sort of what I am thinking of doing.

Bleeding = reducing number of in hand cards available per turn.
Fear = reducing max number of cards that can be played per action
Stun/Confusion = Reducing the max number of cards available to be swapped.

I'll check out your suggestions, and may tweak in make more variables (ie like reducing card values & such).

I'm staying away from blank cards as I do wish to just use standard decks of playing cards.

But you never know . . . depends on how the mechanics take shape.

[J.K.Mosher]

So I haven't being doing much, but I did spend some-time re-reading my "intro Story" for my foray into Sci-fi style horror/survival gamey type thing.

Taking notes from comments that there was no suspense I added to the original story, with some more pages of cross talk and discovery. Again still not a best seller, but I think it adds to the idea of "unknown threat" that was missing from the first portion.

Also note . . . I didn't match them up, so any mistakes or "loop holes" are cause I did it while having a slow day at work and was unable to merge the files together.

Here's the link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8q-nG ... sp=sharing

At some point I may try and actually work on developing a game system, but right now this is all I have.