Has the Kitchen closed?

I’ve started writing on Decommissioned again lately.

 Is anyone still in the kitchen? :)

[Decommissioned] System

I received a great deal of feedback on the mechanics I created for my Game Chef entry.  Rather than plod through the dice and how they worked then, I want to tackle my design goals with D-Com (the robots dying version).  Once I have that hammered out, it might be a more effective system.

 1. I want the PCs to be completely bada$$ at character generation.  This will illustrate the fall from power as a system.

2. I want a system where the PCs degenerate over time.  I like the idea of the system enforcing an endgame, pushing the players to act boldly and stay focused towards their stated goals.

3. I like the idea of a Sacred or touchstone.  I want something defined within the rules that acts as a measure of the dedication and spirit of the PC.  The “why they decided to die” should be a stat.  This “stat” should be something the player can swap for a physical stat.  The idea behind this is I want something showing how the will of the robot carries them through the degeneration.

More to come later, work is getting hectic.

[Decommissioned] Introduction

I’m going to begin with the birth of Decommissioned (D-Com) as a concept for me.

I live in a port city, a city in the US with a large Naval port. Recently, a very large ship, one that had been in the Naval fleet for decades, was about to be put away forever.

This ship housed thousands of sailors. These sailors had thousands of family members who depended on them. While the sailors would still have jobs in the Navy, few of them would still be here.

The local news stations had story after story. The people here wanted to know. where do we go from here? What happens to the houses, the money coming in, the businesses built on these thousands of people who are leaving, the schools, the people?

So this was the impetus for the title of the game: Decommissioned.

Now for a bit of a confession: I had been thinking about D-Com before Game Chef. I’d committed nothing to paper, but the kernel was there. I’d been percolating on a sci-fi game about robots created with expiration dates and what they do about it. The original version had robots who were Decommissioned after a long campaign of fighting, were put in stasis and gathered up onto a freighter and were being flown to a place to be destroyed. Then, these robots crash landed on a planet and woke up and figured out they were not long for this universe. That was as far as I got.

But it was strong enough in my mind that I wanted to rework it. I wanted a forum where I could posit ideas and get advice from knowledgeable designers, but I was afraid of The Forge. Game Chef came along and I took a chance.

As for hacking D-Com into Game Chef, I integrated Sacred instead of a thing I was calling Touchstone in my mind and I went with the corporate drone analogy. Plus I created a dice mechanic which didn’t garner much love (or earn it since it wasn’t a set of mechanics created to showcase the story just the first mechanic I could imagine).

So where am I now?

The kernel is still valid in my mind. The Game Chef ingredients weren’t integrated well into the game, as my reviewers astutely noted.

One suggestion that I found interesting was taking the “characters dying” aspect of D-Com and recasting it into the idea of gods dying.

More to come later.