I ran a little tiny kickstarter to make a game in a month. The kickstarter funded and the game Station Keepers was made. It’s a dungeon crawl on a freaky space station.
It has an odd mechanic to it in that you pay to succeed in passing through elements of the station. Only it’s way to specific in some ways on how that happens and not specific enough in others. I got kind good at running it even but it left a machine oil taste in my mouth.
I was trying really hard to keep the moving parts of the machine to an absolute minimum. What that ended up doing was severely limiting what the players could actually do. That’s what really needs to be fixed and I have a vague idea of what needs to happen to open up player choice.
I need to find some way to let the player’s exploration effect the game. The trick is that the station is spontaneously generated so it’s not like a GM is sitting there, trying to figure out how all this works. It’s possible that I could do a series of random tables and prompts for secrets in each room but there’s already a lot of tables to go through. There’s also an element of backstabbing the other characters and I have the idea that a player could offer a “bounty” by describing a secret in the room that their character discovers and that exempts them from some of the difficulty but locks in the difficulty for the other characters. Something like a -5 to the difficulty for your character when you describe a danger and you explain how you avoid it but you don’t share that detail with the others.
The other thing that needed to get fixed was what the consequence of failure means. You bid to try and overcome challenges, paying for your bid with bad things that happen to you. and after a few tries, if you don’t bid high enough, you fail. Only failure was kind of meh.
So my new thought is to ask three times what the player will give and then, if they don’t succeed, the GM gets to tell them what is taken from them. There should be rules for how much can be taken and I have the idea should be things that will actually impact the character and the player. Things like a worsening plague that’s infecting them, losing the ability to speak, losing a limb, losing a sense. Major effects. I think a list to roll or choose from would fit with the existing game well.
It’s been a while since I worked on this project and maybe it’s overdue for a revamp.