My Actifit Report Card: January 25 2022
Really a weak day, but I’m going to take the excuse of having a day off after so much crunch and not really taking much time off after wrapping the Kenoma Quickstart release on Saturday.
Not much exercise. I had a slow morning, and by the time I was ready to go out it was already too hot (in January!) for me to feel like going for a three-mile walk. I’ve been wondering whether I’ve been getting sick or not, and that means that I’ve been more hesitant to go outside. It’s probably just allergies, since lots of things are happy about our warmth right now, but I don’t want to spread anything around.
Did a little work on one book, but I don’t think it’ll stick (mostly). Then I did a little fiction writing and about a thousand words on the Kenoma core rulebook.
The part that’s hard is that I need to get into work on the 10% of stuff that people aren’t going to use very often as far as the core ruleset goes.
Pareto is a cruel master.
The problem is that these are going to come up very infrequently, so finding good playtesting opportunities is hard. It might seem fairly obvious that one could just set out to deliberately test them, but it’s not so simple.
I can run players through things, or do the napkin math myself with characters in a simulation, but the problem is that I have to accurately predict what the circumstances around those events will be. For instance, with the way combat works, 90% of combats in Kenoma are skirmishes. The remaining 10% are melees (e.g. no distance between fighters), battles (long distance between fighters) and extended (fighters nowhere near each other).
Melees are the most common alternate form, but they don’t have a ton of special rules other than people taking penalties for using certain weapons (ranged weapons suffer a -5*Bulk penalty right now, might adjust that).
Battles range-out melee fighters, and skirmish weapons require their users to expose themselves in ways that typically will end badly for them in the context of a battle. Sufficiently well-equipped characters may have a way around this.
Extended combat is basically a fancy way of saying that you can strike with impunity. There are going to be rules for it, but it’s more abstract than other combat and basically amounts to figuring out how the cat-and-mouse game gets played. It’s worth noting that this is how you would handle something like submarine warfare as well.
This will also apply to things like a bunch of the character options, some of the origins, etc. They’re niche enough that I can’t count on people taking them.
One element to this is that the setting is not equal. Pariahs are incredibly “powerful” because they have psionic powers, but they’re physically frail and lack much worldliness (because they’re child soldiers, though they physically mature quickly enough and it’s impolite enough to discuss that this is unspoken knowledge). Heresiarchs have psionic powers too, and they can survive things they just flat out shouldn’t be able to.
Then you have the contamms, who are basically the unfortunates who nobody left in their will when the universe decided to die. They don’t have any special powers other than being fortunate enough to linger at the bottom of society’s ladder.
Each faction has their own balancing act. Heresiarchs, contamms, and pariahs all get practically no gear. Within each faction, each origin has its own niche. Overseers are contamms who get a couple nice things, while Zealots play up Heresiarch asceticism and become walking tanks.
On a less professional, but still tabletop roleplaying related note, I got to play in my first session of Traveller today. It’s a little different in this edition than the classic edition I fell in love with but never found anyone to play with, but overall I think it’s still quite good.
My character is Aotki (pronounced out-key), and he’s basically a space lion general (though he belongs to the Imperium, not the normal space lion faction).
Traveller’s character creation is notorious for being random, so I started him off going through the military academy and into the marines, where he got blown up in his first term of service.
He recovered and went straight into the army, where a series of good rolls wound up letting him become a general in the minimum amount of time (all-in-all, seven terms, which meant that he had very limited aging effects). By the time he had his mid-life crisis and retired, he’d gotten legendary at sensors operations and reconnaissance (a skill rating of 4 in each, which is practically good enough to write the book on it!). He’s really more of a stealth ambusher than a general, despite spending his whole career as a commissioned officer, and his skills reflect that. He’s mediocre at fighting, but has good stealth and the sorts of skills you’d want from someone leading a small squad (with some administrative skills he picked up on peacekeeping duty).
When you’re rolling +5 on a 2d6 roll, you’re in very good shape, and Aotki’s looking like he’ll be pretty scary for some bad guys in the future.
This report was published via Actifit app (Android | iOS). Check out the original version here on actifit.io
