What Makes a Great Game? Return to Star Smuggler

My last post addressed my desire to create a new game system. In order to make great games, you need to know how to play games. This helps create new mechanics that are hopefully fun. So for the past week, I have been quietly playing a lot of games. 

I've also been collecting data from the gang at MeWe.com via a poll. There will probably be more polls over there. It used to be that Blogger had a poll system, but that has been depreciated to unhelpfulness. 

This week, I busted out Battletech, Star Smuggler, and the classic risk game. I have a feeling that my system will use only 1d6, but the question is how many of them. 

During this process, I happened to notice a good tactic for "winning" at Star Smuggler which is very simple. On day one, you start in the Regari system at the Spaceport with 1d6+150 credits (secs. not credits, actually. I hate that abbreviation). One of the highest-priced items with a good rate of return is e37 GM bots. They cost 120 and can be sold for 100, not including multipliers. Yes, you can sell the ship boat for more, but only once. 

Spend the day collecting your GM bots. We are talking 5, max. You just don't have the funds to do more. Next, jet off to Nipna. Nipna has a wealth of 60 which allows for a 10 multiplier. You can offload those bots for 4000 or 5000 creds. 

WARNING: You have a 1 in 6 chance of damaging your ship on the way to Nipna and once that happens, you have another 1 in 6 chance of being forced to turn in the Status Unit in pilotage which is very negative to gameplay, if not impossible to recover. I won't tell you the event number, but it is interesting as it is one of the cases where Duke can patch up the ship like an engineer. 

That takes the bite out of it, assuming he survives the event. The real kick in the pants is the event becomes more difficult if you have a lot of crew, as they could just outright die from it OR subject Duke to death by not piloting his own ship. 

This is not the end, as you just burned 4 of 6 hypercharges getting to Nipna. That is a cost of 2000 to replace cutting into your bottom line. Before we do that, spend some time hopping back and forth from the space station to the colony. You are looking for two interesting events:

e153 Buy High Technology items and 
e198 Disgruntaled Colonists. 

Also, be on the lookout for cheap items that can be resold at a profit. Due to e198, there is a good chance that selling your ship's boat is a good idea because you're going to need the space. 

How I imagine an empty hold looks like on the
Antelope. 

The High Tech Items has a collection of fun items, but the Portable Life Support unit is my favorite. It allows you to provide 50 cu of goods with life support for a month. After that, it takes a week to recharge it with the ship's engines. What is interesting to me is, it doesn't say where you can use this. So, what if you strap it to the side of the ship? You now have a good-sized second hold for goods for 3 weeks a month. 

All of this space plays positively with the Wealth code of 60. You have a 1 in six chance of picking up items at the base price and an equal chance of selling them at 10 times their value. This is helpful no matter what you buy. The lowly repair unit is 1 to buy but you sell it for 10 on this one planet. Heck, even with half of that rate of return, it's well worth doing. Nipna is played as dark and dangerous, but more dark than really dangerous. 

This is where e198 comes in. Once you sell off the boat and add the PLS system, you can carry all of the disgruntled colonists no matter what you roll. The closest destination that meets the criteria is New Karma. You could probably do it without the PLS with a lucky roll. The result of this event scores you 30 creds per colonist, so even 30 of them is almost enough to buy 2 hypercharges at New Karma. 

New Karma is kind of the End Game planet for Star Smuggler and getting there in week 1 or week 2 totally changes the dynamic of the game. It is strongly suggested that once you build your bank account, you should try to take on crewmembers at a low-wealth planet, so you haven't completely abandoned the rest of the Pavonus Sector. 

Tired Thoughts on Tired OGL

I love posts that start with the Chaos Star

The OGL has attained the maximum cultural entropy. Even my wife has a passing familiarity with OGL, which is impressive as she is a nurse and doesn't do "nerd stuff". She's still pretty hot that our children's collective initials are NPC. 

Anyway, I took on this new project to write a campaign setting. And then I busted my shoulder, leaving me to do everything with one hand tied behind my back... literally. Now that I have the immobilizer off, I can start moving and thinking again. 

Here is the long and short of my thoughts on the OGL. 

I have 6 products on DriveThruRPG: 

1. Kobold’s Folly Mini Setting
2. Compass Rose Inn Mini Setting
3. The Hex Pack
4. Swashbuckler Character Class for D&D and AD&D
5. Zero to Hero: Uncommon Heroes
6. Character Sheet for AD&D

Three of these products have nothing to do with D&D, the OGL or SRD: Kobold’s Folly and Compass Rose Inn Mini Settings plus The Hex Pack. I can ignore these. 

The other three are directly tied to D&D. They are nothing without the original game. If push comes to they are either going to be withdrawn or go to "OGL version whatever". I have some decisions to make, I guess. The Swashbuckler Character class really needs to be burned to the ground and remade or dumped in the historical stupidity bin. I'm ok with either. I'd like to rework Zero to Hero into OSE, so I need to wait and see what Old Games Essentials does. The character sheet is a historical snapshot that assumes the use of a couple of books, I am not sure if it needs to be connected to the SDR or OGL because it is literally nothing but an image of a collection of words and numbers that are very context specific to a certain version of a D&D game.  

I have come to the conclusion that I need to abandon D&D and ignore three of my products linked to the SRD and OGL while reworking the other three into something that doesn't remotely touch the works of Wizards of the Coast. 

I have decided to come up with a completely new game system. One of my own devising. In the best case, I am the next WotC. The worst-case scenario is no one uses it. 

What I know now: 

• I have the basic idea of a game system. 
• Playtesting has started.
• It will be called "Zero to Hero", which I am 99.9% is not a copyrightable name. That's cool, I'll deal with it if I can. 
  EDIT - No, No, this is no longer correct. I think I will call it "The Hearts System". 
• My first book, "Zero to Hero: Uncommon Commoners" will be worked into this somehow. I don't know how. 
• I will press on with my new campaign setting and tool it to work with "Zero to Hero". 
  
• I need to come up with a better naming convention because if I find too many things referencing "Zero to Hero" I will have to change the name. 

So here we are. 

This is a cross-post with my Ko-Fi project. 

Nice 1/22/2023 Update - Email Response from Maverick

UPDATE 1/22/2023. These files are now available at BoardGameGeek and already have 22 downloads for a 40+ year old game. 

Last night, I received an email from The Maverick, the webmaster of dwarfstar.brainiac.com. He granted me permission to post my Star Smuggler tiles, suggesting Boardgamegeek as the best host. 

To be honest, I don't like hosting files myself, so I gave it a shot. There seems to be a turnaround process, so they aren't there yet. So, here is the link to a zip file. (Edit- I hate hosting my own files as I can't tell how many are downloaded from Google Drive.)

The original tiles had a strange quirk. They were labeled A-J with Asteroids. To create planets, you needed to match up two tiles. Invariably, one of those tiles needed to be upside down. In studying them, there was no permutation where you could have left and right tiles labeled A-J without having several flipped. You'd need a left-hand set and a right-hand set. 

Annoying. 

I flipped each tile so that you don't have to have one upside down. This required relabeling all of the text so you didn't have one tile printed in the reverse. 

The process was super annoying, but I got it done. 

Just a reminder, I only have permission to post a link to these files. That is the extent of my ownership. Please download for personal use only and do not redistribute. I've been waiting a long time for this, please don't make me take it down. 

Thanks and Updates

First, I would like to thank Patrick for following me over on Ko-Fi. Following me over there is completely free and you'll pick up some insight into what I am working on. 

This evening, I'm working on a map for my upcoming project. I decided to start big and get smaller. This map of the capital is 50 feet per hex. In this view, you probably can't see the hexes. 

Map made using Worldographer^tm

Obviously, the capital is on the coast and is desperately in need of a name. Worldographer has the ability to generate maps via a seed process and some pretty cool tweaks you can select at the beginning. It will happily layout streets, drop in houses and businesses based on population plus a few other things like foliage. 

To make the process more manageable, I cut the population to 1000 so the area is sparse. As I work through the city, I'll add buildings in neighborhoods flavored by the underlying terrain. 

In this campaign setting, the city has been at peace for decades. They have gotten a bit sloppy with the trees and buildings close to the walls. I plan to remove a lot of the trees as I work, but there needs to be a balance between clearcut areas, the possibility of sloppy care, and being visually pleasing. 

This is a fortified city with the majority of people living outside the walls. Inside, there are garrison houses, towers, and a citadel for defense. I am picturing 40-foot tall walls, and 50-60 foot tall towers. The citadel was built first, before the city. It is ill-suited for its location as the citadel walls are only 30 feet tall. The central tower is 50 feet tall, which is not high enough to see over the walls. 

But the citadel has a magical defense. 

This is a view of the southern gate. Outside the walls is a lonely structure called the Tower of Eyes. This is the citadel's first line of defense. It appears to be a somewhat larger copy of the citadel's central tower. And "copy" is a perfect description. You see, all around the city are several Towers of Eyes which are magical copies. If one stands at the top of the citadel's tower and squints just right, one will see the view from any of the Towers of Eyes around the city. 

While this special vision is an illusion, as are the Towers of Eyes, the defenders can reconnoiter the whole area from a place of safety. While it's impossible to interact physically with the Towers of Eyes or the area it views, it is said that magic users can hurl spells down on to anyplace near the Towers. 

Strange magic, eh?