Excellent, thanks for thinking through this issue!
soypunk (he/him)
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Looking forward to this! I find myself nodding along with a lot of your observations and those in the comments.
I'll heartily second the ask for procedures for Trade - or perhaps more broadly what a lot of CRPGs cram into the "starport bulletin board" area: bounties, cargo delivery, passenger transport, escort missions, etc. These things tend to be rather template-y and fit nicely into the procedural framework ethos you have for hex-crawls or point-craws.
The other thing that might be handy would be "Patron" missions - where a randomly generated NPC offers a randomly generated mission ("mission target, mission activity, mission location, mission reward".) You could probably tie this into an expanded Faction procedures section - so the missions roll up to the Faction's goals, etc.
Wow, wow wow! Excited to see these resources. For whatever reasons, West End Games, Wizards, & Fantasy Flight/Edge choose not to include a lot of random tables in their materials. There are a handful of them scattered through maybe a dozen books and two books in particular - the WEG Planets Book and the Galactic Campaign Guide from WoTC. So for folks looking to run a sandbox or play gm-less (coop/solo) it is a bit of challenge to find the right random tables to get the ideas flowing. (Starforged's tables are good, but not a perfect fit. Stars Without Numbers' tables don't work at all for me. A handful of things in Traveller are helpful for Edge of The Empire or Age of Rebellion games but not much.)
My apologies, it was definitely meant with the best of intentions. I'll restate: The atmosphere the work implies looks incredibly compelling, even to someone not well versed in the subject matter or genre. I love the idea of presenting the setting as in-world newspaper and it rekindles memories of playing some of my favorite childhood video games where the setting assumptions were revealed through in-world communication mediums (such as newspapers.) It is making rethink how I present setting information in my own games.
Well it is a late reply but I thought it worth sharing: having playtested a bit I think the following is workable as a general purpose outline of how one can extend mole.mole without adding too much complexity.
Vehicles have an Agility rating (1-3) that grant the piloting character the equivalent number of rerolls for a check. In my games Agility was the most important factor in whether I felt a PC should get some kind of bonus to their actions based on the quality of the vehicle. Just setting position alone was not quite capturing the nuance of vehicle engagements.
Vehicles have a Role such as "fighter", "transport", etc. Mostly used for the fiction (setting position, thinking about obstacles, determining complications, etc.)
Vehicles have 4-6 Strain (4-Small, 5-Medium, 6-Large) which is used to track damage but can also be spent like Drive to access a Vehicle's Stunts via their Talent. (I think calling an attribute Drive for a Vehicle is confusing hence the rename.)
Vehicle Talents are:
- Mobile (fast, agile, all-terrain, etc.)
- Armored (heavy armor, shielded, etc.)
- Weaponized (bristling with multiple weapon systems)
- Versatile (can be reconfigured or perform more than one type of job)
- Carrier (transports people, cargo, or other types of vehicles)
- Smart (magically enhanced, advanced sensors, AI companion, etc.)
Vehicles don't need to posses the Armored or Weaponized Talent to have these things but it just means they have the basic type of thing they would have for their Role. Having one of those Talents means they have a particularly amazing variant of them. Some basic Vehicles may not have a Talent, use your judgment.
Vehicles in play may be grouped together for bookkeeping and story reasons. If you are being attacked by a group of similarly built light starfighters just treat them like one entity that attacks and operates together and assign them a Strain equal to their numbers. A flight of 4 starfighters has 4 Strain.
Players should question whether particularly large Vehicles should even be created using this system. The galaxy's largest moon-sized battle station is not going to use this system. This is for games where ship-to-ship combat or frequent chases are occurring and you want to provide a little bit of structure for your play.
All of this is intended to keep the focus on the PC(s) controlling the vehicle rather than spotlight vehicles but some settings I think need the additional flavor.
There's obviously a lot of ways to tweak this to work to your preferences or genre assumptions... for example you could also do "Racing Clocks" if you want to stick to Forged in The Dark mechanics. Probably the "cleanest" way to do this would be to make the Extended Challenge check and add 4 to the result (anydice odds: https://anydice.com/program/27385) That gives you a spread of 5 to 10 which seems pretty reasonable for a "progress bar." Then you just track your progress vs. your opposition progress:
- PC Progress: [X] [X] [ ] [ ] [ ] - Opposition Progress: [X] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]
It occurs me to I've overlooked that mole.mole's Extended Challenges can be "nested" - that is:
- Make an Extended Challenge check that represents how many "acts" you need to complete a Mission. Follow the steps on "playing" to get the Mission's Danger & theme (Oracles 3 & 4.)
- Within an Act, make an Extended Challenge check that represents how many Scenes you need to complete that Act. Remember to use the guidance for determining the where, what, why, who, and how of a scene.
- Of course if within a Scene you determine you need another Extended Challenge you make another a check.
I found I needed a little more structure than just a single level of "Scenes" though to really resolve a Mission - Missions have "investigative phases", "conflict phases" as the sides start to come into opposition, and then "action phases" as the various threads start to resolve themselves. (Sometimes one might even flashback to the investigative stage to pick up more clues or information...)
Anyway, this was helpful for me to put a little more story structure over my sessions, hope it sparks some ideas with others as well.