Post by astrokiwi in Starting on Monolith 2nd Edition comments

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Love Monolith, looks like the perfect "Traveller lite" game for me

Here's my thoughts:

- Agree on simplifying weapons. I think a "tag" system where you describe what the weapon does (without giving specific mechanics) might be a good middle ground. Like "slow firing, high calibre" or "armour piercing" etc.

- Very personal to me, but I'd love a bit of a guide on sketching up starship deckplans, just because I think they add a lot to placing the action in a more concrete location, particularly for the player ship where they'll be spending a lot of time

- I think some sort of advice for a narrative advancement system, as in Cairn 2e, would be great - basically, broadening the section on Talents a touch

- Personally I'd make starship combat less crunchy too - the way I run this kind of thing at the table is to make judgement calls on the fly about saves & outcomes of various actions. Something like "give another player an extra turn for 1 fatigue" leans towards the trad board gamey approach for me

- One traditional pillar of space adventure games that's missing is trading, I think something on that might be good, even if it's just a brief section about how GMs should generally judge this sort of thing

- I'd love (maybe as a supplement) a big list of starships. A bestiary would be nice too but isn't so critical as a lot of adversaries are just humans with equipment. I'd just love to launch into running a campaign and have starship encounters without having to stat up anything.

- But overall, the big thing is that I think you've got enough great stuff here that it could be fleshed out into a "full" independent rulebook - currently it's a nice concise summary/reference book that assumes you kind know what you're doing. Again, following Cairn 2e, I'd love a full sized book (or box-set!) with more flavour text, advice on game philosophy, artwork etc. Whenever I sit down and think "Traveller is a bit crunchy, I should make my own space RPG" I realise that what I want to create is pretty much just what Monolith already is!

AdamHensley131 days ago(+1)

Great feedback! And good notes on the Starship Combat, that was the biggest section I wasn't super happy with. The goal was a system in which everyone felt like they had their own role, but it got a little too crunchy, I agree.

astrokiwi131 days ago(+1)

Here's my hot take on starship combat - and starship encounters in general - I think the real trick is about designing starship _encounters_ rather than starship _procedures_. There's a bunch of standard problems with vehicle encounters: the pilot and gunner do all the work, so you invent roles for each character, but then you end up with everyone stuck doing the same action each round because it's the only sensible thing to do (often with one player quarterbacking everything), so you maybe go another level and let players move between stations dynamically, but you still end up with very few viable options, while taking more effort than a simple "take turns shooting at each other" game.

I think the core thing here is that trying to use mechanics to add depth to a simple encounter really just makes it slower and more complex, without adding real choice. Instead, the key is to make the actual encounter complex, and then depth will come naturally. And if the encounter is not complex (e.g. a duel between two ships in open space, particularly where one outpowers the other), then don't drag it out - just quickly do the damage rolls as you normally would.

So, things I would do if I wanted an interesting space combat is have multiple zones with "terrain" (asteroids, opaque gas, moons to hide behind, maybe weird warp field corruption if that fits the setting), have more moving pieces (maybe even, as in the Elite Dangerous RPG, give each player their own ship!), multiple partially conflicting goals (save the civilian ships, grab the ancient artefacts, don't let the pirates escape!), and multiple moving parts (boarding parties, cyberwarfare, multiple enemies etc). And if the scene isn't big enough to justify that sort of thing, then just roll through it quickly. That's the type of advice I would write - maybe even using something like the Cairn 2e quick map generation thing with throwing dice on a piece of paper, to generate quick and fun battlemaps for space combat.

AdamHensley130 days ago

Wow this is some good stuff and a lot of amazing ideas to chew on! Thanks for sharing those thoughts.

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