Game Scale - Down the Rabbit Hole - Part 1

As mentioned last time, I am prototyping a science fiction game. 

Before I get to the fun of developing characters and equipment, I like to think about scales. Usually, the first scale I like to work with is "How big is it?" I have always hated the D&D weight and encumbrance scale but in certain ways it makes sense. 

A gold coin is heavy, this is sort of appealing from a DM's point of view. "How big?" is connected to "How much money?". It's not perfect but it does make sense. 

Since I am doing Sci-Fi, I want to leverage SI units. So meters and kilograms are usually what the players encounter. I don't have to come up with my own units. Made-up units nearly always sound silly. How much damage can the words like "Parsec" or "Cubits" do?

Don't answer that.  

The rabbit is out of the
hole.

In thinking about this, I wanted to go down the economic rabbit hole first. It was surprisingly, easy but also comes with its own problems: 

1. Cost doesn't equate to size or weight. 
2. What do I call space money? 
3. Space money sucks as a name. 
4. Will I use creeping capitals: "Space Money" vs. "space money"? 
5. What color is it?  

I decided to name the unit of money "Credits". It is a classic and doesn't suck like "Space Money". Credits are used to buy average, daily stuff. A loaf of bread, a bullet, a comb are all right around one credit each. 

Players won't want any of that, they want lasers, robots, aircars, fighters, and spaceships. One of the wacky things with letting characters have all of these things is that the scale rapidly gets into the millions or even billions of Space mone... er, credits. I hate math that gets out of control.  

The first issue I need to address is that credits are "shiney". It's sort of a color. (There is a whole different rabbit hole about most cultures not wanting to call the sky "blue", but "bright" or "shiny", like bronze. Feel free to climb into that rabbit hole on your own time. Here is a link to get you started.) 

Next, we need a scale to prevent players from yanking their hair out jumping from "How do I buy lunch?" to "How do I buy a spaceship?". 

SI units to the rescue. Will just use credits, kilo credits, mega credits (starting to sound silly..._ giga credits (somehow less silly), and so on:

• Credits (Cr) = Base unit
• Kilo Credits (kCr) = 1,000 Cr
• Mega Credits (MCr) = 1,000,000 Cr (1 million)
• Giga Credits (GCr) = 1,000,000,000 Cr (1 billion)
• Tera Credits (TCr) = 1,000,000,000,000 Cr (1 trillion)
• Peta Credits (PCr) = 1,000,000,000,000,000 Cr (1 quadrillion)

I haven't used AI chats to create content, but I decided to be lazy today and leverage it. ChatGPT did the chart above so I didn't have to do math. Even better, I didn't even sanity-check it. I have no one to blame but my lazy ass self. 

Anyway, I asked GTP Chat to compare that scale to a couple of different real things. A 60,000,000 credit vehicle is best measured in mega credits: 60 mcr. A space shuttle is 1.7 gcr. A motorcycle is 12 kcr. 

This chart gives a base of credits and 5 different scaling factors. That isn't much more difficult than D&D's copper, electrum, silver, gold, and platinum conversions. That will allow me to use 6 different colored tokens to scale things. Yes, I am ignoring that I need 1000 of one colored token to get to the next step in the scale. 

The nice bit about this scale is it is based on reality. The GDP of planet Earth is around 0.1 pcr. We aren't at most science fiction levels of technology so we don't produce a whole peta credit worth of stuff in a year. 

There is a time component to asking how long it takes to build a spaceship without starving everyone on the planet. You can build the Deathstar, but it takes a couple of years or more. This is why they aren't left sitting on a used spaceship lot but the Serenity is available at your local used spaceship lot. 

This time component is nice and I want to reuse this concept in my next post about combat scale. This is another headache for sci-fi: "What happens when a spaceship snipes individuals on the ground?" This will be my next post. 

The bad part is I thought I would be talking "game scale" like distances and weights, and this doesn't do it. A million-dollar diamond ring and a million-dollar airplane are wildly different sizes. An acre of desert could be less than an acre of farmland. A bag of feathers and a bag of lead are wildly different to lift. Nothing matches or scales nicely. I'll have to work on that bit. 

Anyway, thank you for climbing into this rabbit hole with me. I plan on having a whole series of posts as I develop this game. 

Prototyping and Fun

Back in 2021, I reviewed Atlas Game's The White Box Set. This is the handiest game set I've ever owned. The primary part is a 100+ book of essays that every game producer needs to read. It is loaded with a lot of research, details, and facts. I love it for that alone. 

The bits and bobs are perfect for role-playing and board games, even if you are not a content producer. They are so useful, I have five sets. 

Each box comes with:

3 counter sheets with 71 pre-printed and 49 blank counters,

150 small wooden cubes in 6 colors,

36 wooden meeples in 6 colors, 

6 large cubes in 6 colors, 

12 1d6 dice, again in 6 colors, 

110 bingo disks in 8 colors, 

Several clear bags for storage, 

102 page book of essays. 

These little bits and bobs are perfect for resource management in RPGS, replacing lost pieces from board games like dice, highlighting areas on maps without marking them up, etc. You have so many options. 

It's extremely useful. 

But now I have 5 copies of the same book. Well, 4 of those will be going up on my Ko-Fi store. I'll let you know when I have that done. I am on-call this week making a bad time for monitoring orders. 

If you must have this book now, I suggest the Atlas Game store as it's on clearance for $22.00 for the whole set. 

If you need it faster than physical shipping would allow, I suggest DriveThru RPG. Driverthu has two different products: a PDF and an Audiobook. 

Each of these products are LESS than the 10 bucks I plan to sell used copies on Ko-Fi. I want to see what sort of costs are associated with selling physical goods on Ko-Fi. Esty is a non-starter due to the terms and fees. The $10 dollar price point is to make the math easy. These books will be clearly marked with a warning that you are helping me with an order and there are better options out there. 

#MiniMonday

Here are two of my least favorite things about minis: storage and bases. 

Why do I keep my models in a terrarium? My cats are dicks. There isn't much I can do about that, if Youtube is any indicator, all cats are dicks. 

Anyway, my second least favorite thing about models is doing the bases. 

Why? 

Because if you don't straight-up paint them, you end up with materials that are a completely different palette than the paint you used. 

The best you can do is hit the grass and sand with some paint or ink to try and get it close. Sometimes, that works. The other downside is, that sometimes your grass-like material is "sticky". Either actually sticky or it has a static-magnetic effect.

There is some irony that the grass tends to stick to metal models more than plastic models, despite the metal being completely non-magnetic. 

The last un-fun part of doing bases is, let's say you get this looking great, where the tones match your models and the table you use. It isn't long before you show up at a friend's house, or a comic book store with nice tables, and your bases look bad again. 

I suppose it's just like painting, I guess I need to practice. 

February Update - Catching Up

Since Christmas, I have been alternating between Football and illness, either me or someone in the house. Football is over, but this new ick still has me. Last week, 1-3 people were out of the office daily with one thing or another. It was a rough week.  

Let's start with the fun part of the update: Rabbits. 

Fiver has a new house. It's a Snoopy house for a small dog or cat. Fiver barely fits, but he likes it. He shares with the cats, but not at the same time. He'd squish them. He is rapidly approaching 30 lbs. 

Now to the dog, Tori. She has been very sick since Christmas week. More than a few times we thought we'd lose her. She was on a ridiculous amount of pills. As of now, she is down to just 2. Unfortunately, one of these is a steroid. She is packing on the weight and is very unpredictable. 

When I say, unpredictable, I mean really it. Sometimes she lays on her side like a stuffed animal with all four paws poking straight out. If something bothers her in this position, she barks like Cujo. It is surreal because she doesn't move at all. Just barks like a crazy thing.  

Once she recovers, the two of us are going walking each night. Between her lovely weight gain and my diabetes, we need it. If this lasts 'til spring, she will be out there with me re-doing the garden. I don't need to expand, I need to clean up.  

This post wouldn't be complete without circling back to rabbits. We have a family of bunnies in the backyard. Sometimes, I go out there and see 2-3 of them hiding in plain sight. Tori never notices them, or if she does, she ignores them. 

I expect to do battle with them over my garden. I don't mind, I sort of count on it. I have an area under a tree where I can plant strawberries for the rabbits. I might try carrots and radishes, too. I want to kill off the grass there so I don't have to mow that space. My real gardening spaces are fenced, so the rabbits can't do too much damage. 

I'll share pictures as the cleanup begins. Right now, I have a picture as a hint for the next post. I'm planning more than gardening:

Guest Stars - Star Wars Campaign 2025

Since I set my campaign just after the Battle of Endor, I have many main characters from the movies and TV shows to guest star in the campaign. However, some of them are poor choices. 

Luke and Leia are right out. They would break continuity. 

Han, Chewie, and Lando are available from the original movies while Ashoka, Zeb, Sabine, Hera, and Agent Kallus from Rebels could appear. I can tack on a few more such as a very old Kelleran Beq and slightly younger versions of the characters from the Mandolorian. 

That is not a bad group for the heroes to meet. 

But who do they fight? 

The Empire is collapsing. I will hypothesize that the remaining Imperial ships need planetary systems to resupply, which is why they are interested in the Meneth System. There will also be the usual scum and villains passing through and maybe sticking around. 

Meneth is strong enough to not align with either the Republic or the Imperial remnants. I've decided that the Menethian leadership thinks of itself as the core of a new Empire. Not having Sith lurking around makes them more self-centered than evil. They also had enough trouble in the system to prevent them from participating in a war-like colonization program. They are the ship in the bottle in Star Wars form. 

As far as bad guys go, I can have Imperial remnants, the old droid army kicking around, plus a handful of Night Sisters, and maybe an escaped Inquisitor or two. The Inquisitors were a pit of vipers and it stands to reason if one of them survived to the Ashoka TV show, there is more than one. That also adds in people like Baylan Skoll, Shin Hati, and their ilk who are good fodder for guest stars.  

The Home Town Heroes are going to be the characters. Of the original 6 Jedi, 4 force adepts, and 6 children Jedi candidates, 3 force adepts and 3 Jedi survived. That leaves the 6 force-sensitive children who are adults by now. Star Wars has no demographic info, we can guess that Meneth may have its own emerging force adepts to supplement these numbers. The players should have no trouble creating Jedi-like characters. This was my player's main complaint in my last Star Wars adventure. The Rebel base is there to provide other types of heroes like pilots and fringers while nobles and such can be from Meneth. 

I will keep my Neimoidian bounty hunter, La'ow Houd from my last series as a contact. He is a data dealer, not a killer. I like the idea of someone who has more than adequate defenses to punch way over their weight class.