Reply To: Hobby weekender 17/05/19 – A good tone, tone deaf, dark tone? AtmosFearic!

[mageParticipant 20596xp 0]

So, answers to my own questions before my tonsils and sinuses start riddling me with gunk. I do not feel great. Time for lemsip and calmomile tea. Yes, Im a 66 year old grandmother…

Also I will post pictures shortly of my stuff.

(1) I played Coriolis last week. It is a sci fi RPG that blends elements of Firefly, Alien, and Arabian culture influence. You get a pool of d6s (not too far from World of Darkness) to do a task. A six is a success. One success means you have just completed the task. Two is a decent job. Three or more is a critical with better and better results.

However you can pray to the icons to reroll any dice in your roll. These are gods kind of like the seven of Westeros; the gambler, the deckhand, the dancer etc etc. When you do this, the GM gets a darkness point. Darkness points are to be a physical item like a black dice or something that you leave on display for your players.

You can reroll any roll you want and each time a dice is added to the pool. The DM has a list of ways they can spend points to influence the story and kinda screw over players both mechanically and narratively (like I think two spent after a player fires a gun means they run out of ammo as on example).

So these are visibly and the more they build up the more you kind of get a sense of dread building up that something will go seriously south. The DM can horde these for as long as they like and even between games. So if you keep re-rolling during a session and they get saved toward the end for the inevitable chase, shootout, hostage situation, alien horror, boss, well, you know something bad will happen.

(2) I find with most boardgames where there are tough enemis and it overall has a tough difficulty level having event cards. Or events in most board games. They all always tend to be bad and take effect when the last thing you need as a group in a tough cooperative play game is for something else to make it more difficult. They rarely add to a game or feel like events are happening cos it isnt ‘oh no what a harsh reality we live in’ its more ‘seven hells whats going to screw us over now’. Like, a boss appearing to murder you early is not an event, nor is an ambush. Mordheim did this well with Random Encounters but most board games have it tend to be something bad, bad, bad…. BAD.

(3) 40k objective cards drawn in casual play with a friend. Basically, if one is impossible (being super difficult does not count) like… I cannot remember anything real right now, but say one cannot be done, we would discard that card and draw another. Makes sense imho.