(Developer's Diary) Encounters

[MongooseMatt]

A quick look at the Encounters (and Dangers) chapter, as we now have a working draft of it...

As well as the usual dangers from Traveller (suffocation, fire, radiation, etc...), Dark Conspiracy also includes animals and characters to trouble your Operatives with.

Animals are more or less ported over from Traveller (the benefits of a common core system), which of course means that you can cross over from one game to the other if you are looking for something mundane in the Far Future or something weird in Dark Conspiracy. We will not be including a massive bestiary, as natural beasties are really not the focus of Dark Conspiracy and we are including plenty of notes for Referees to create their own. As things stand, we have included Bears, Bulls, Hippos, Rattlesnakes and Wolves. And Hippos are only in there because we wanted to include something truly terrifying...

For more human characters, we give the Referee a choice of either having the full stat block, similar to players - or they can use the Trivial Characters that we have ported over from the Fifth Frontier War. For those of you not familiar, this is a greatly simplified stat block that just gives physical characteristics, an 'Area of Competency' (basically a modifier covering all checks related to one or more range of functions), and their equipment.

So, an experienced marine might look something like this:

Marine Rifleman
STR 8 DEX 8 END 10
AOC (military life) 4, AOC (warfighting) 4
Flak Jacket (+5), Assault Rifle (3D, Auto 2), Knife (2D)

So, not only can we portray characters like this in the minimum amount of space, Referees can also very easily create such characters on the fly during a game-in-progress. For that matter, a new animal would not take much more time either...

All of this, of course, does not include Dark Minions, who get their own chapter and own rules...

 

[Morthrai]

This seems a good way to go with animals. I think a handful of examples to cover the various sizes, shapes, types and environments so maybe 10 different creatures. There have to be rats - wouldn't be Dark Conspiracy without rats

 

[Geir]

AOC (military life) 4, AOC (warfighting) 4 seems a little high for a marine rifleman of no particular DEX or INT. If that means +4 with a rifle and +4 with Tactics, Recon, Stealth, etc. I would think 1 or 2 would be more appropriate. Marine Raider, maybe a 3, SEAL Team or Delta Force, maybe 4 (if we're including DEX and INT bonus in the rating directly).

 

[tadkelson]

I like the idea of few regular creatures. Not a real focus in most adventures I have seen. I think we do need giant albino gators of course and perhaps like Lee said Rats, both regular sized and wolverine sized as well

 

[Fluffy Bunny Feet]

Looks like a quick way of creating NPCs who either won't be interacting with the players in a way where the NPC would be expected to need to roll dice but where the GM is better off prepared to do so.

PCs use full career generation resulting in non specialist characters. "Trivial Character" creates more specialist characters quickly, leaving the GM ready if the players decide to do something they probably shouldn't do such as tackle a bailiff in a courtroom, the bailiff will have his skill set for that. Torturing an administrator to get him to use his Admin skill to let the players get away with something would also apply as you would know his Admin type skill level without breaking it down specifically.

I'm tempted to go through all the careers and make specialist "Trivial Characters" of various types for each career.

I might be tempted to break up the "Area of Competency" into Area of skill (gun combat for example) level 2-3 and "Area of interest" for related skills being level 0-1 and for some an Area of Expertise level 4-5.

Area of expertise would be rare in random encounters common if you are trying to kidnap say a highly skilled doctor but even there you might either snatch the wrong guy or get someone whose reputation is inflated "Honest I only do breast implants I can't do heart surgery".

Interesting at least and labour saving for the GM at best.

 

[TrippyHippy]

Is it really necessary to use the AOC acronym? Why not just say ‘Military Life 4, Warfighting 4’?

And why we are at it, why ‘Warfighting’ and not just ‘Combat’ or similar?