I have been meaning to write about our social combat from last game for a while now and since we played again last night, I thought it was time to dust off the notes and get to work.
“So, there are a couple of techniques we used in making Diaspora Social Combat interesting, gleaned from our years of playing Burning Wheel’s Duel of Wits:
Tangible Effect: The Social Combat has a tangible effect on the in-game fiction. Otherwise, you are just moving pieces around a board for no damned reason. When Storn’s gambler blew the Sars son right out of the combat, there were consequences and in-game stuff happened.
Compromise: There has to be a mechanic for compromise. In this case, I used several different members of the opposing factions, each of which with slightly different goals. The father wanted what was best for the family. The mother wanted to keep the slaves. The son wanted to see the family gain control over the corporation and the daughter wanted profit. By seeing where everyone was positioned at the end, we could see how the combat shook out. If the players had just attempted to destroy every member of the Sars family’s damage track, it would have gone very differently; they might have just liberated the clone-slaves on the spot.
As it was, I was very pleased with how it shook out. The map is a really interesting way to represent the whole abstracted process and it really allowed us to compress a month of game-time into a half hour or so of play. We got to roll dice and be strategic while giving the night a fun, dynamic and interesting conclusion.
Now to write up last night’s game, in which they find out that Anton Kilkenny, in a card-game with Carlov Sars, won a cargo container filled with lost black-ops Void Marine clones, lost since the New Ovid-Vestal war that ended 20 years back…”
EDIT: Storn already wrote up last night’s game. Nice!
“Engineer Log: Lodi Archive docking (I wrote this part)
I think these logs are total waste of time. But to keep our corporate masters happy with the idea we actually read their memos and they read ours, here is my sad attempt.
One heat sink got stuck and would not rotating. Banging on the coupling seemed to do the trick.
Besides that, the Libertine is running very good for a 40+ year old ship.
Upon docking at Archive, met up with Safron Delaney, who is joining our intrepid crew. He is a decent guy for a suit. Picked up some Data Key for Valiance Arms. “
Githyanki Diaspora 