Space Hex Games

Gary Gygax had an interesting philosophy about D&D campaigns. That is you use a town as a base of operations, but adventures don’t take place in that town. This is because one of the pillars of D&D is supposed to be exploration.

Coruscant Nights does something very different. First the whole planet is a city. Something like five thousand stories deep. So there is a lot to explore.

The GM in this case often sets the adventure in the neighbourhood of the PCs. They may be at a local diner or pub, and the PCs are encouraged to make up a lot of the story in a way that emerges from game play.

There are a number of ongoing factions through the Coruscant Nights campaign – like the cult of the Dims, or the local casino owned by a Hutt, or the local detachment of clone troopers – but when the PCs go to a local concert they have to tell us all about the concert themselves, and they have to tell us something about the local pub that they like to frequent. Including when one the of the PCs doesn’t really like one of the locals that drink there.

In some ways it is a great mix of the open table and open world concept and in others it is exactly what Gygax tells GMs not to do, but somehow in a SciFi setting it works really well.

The story point mechanic, called Destiny points in Star Wars FFG, are a mechanic where there is a token with player good story element on one side and the other side has a GM bad story element on it.

It adds player agency to a story, a universe balanced between good and evil, or to add boost or bane dice to a roll.

The players come to a cliff and for any reason didn’t write rope in their inventory. They can use a story point to add rope to the story.

As the token flips between the PCs and GM it shows that there is an even balance between good and evil in the game universe.

PCs and GMs can use a destiny point to boost the chance of success of a roll and the GM can use it to add a bane roll to the PCs rolls. This can make what is a low probability of success, more then likely successful and what could be easy seem impossible.

There are parts of this mechanic that I like and other parts of it I think can just be part of game play. Like PCs should be able to add story elements as part of emergent story telling and boons and banes should be done as part of telling the story.

This is a tech noire themed scenario/. campaign set on the planet Coruscant.

This is a solo game, with a GM and one Player Character – Mon Calamari named Karp.

Karp is a conspiracy theorist in the vain of the lone gunmen characters from the X Files.

The scenario is an investigation in the form of an open sandbox emergent story.

Its entertaining to listen to because of the emergent property of the story – Karp takes a friend’s Loth Cat because he’s missing and she doesn’t want anything bad to happen to it. The cat becomes kind of a big to do, but was a sort of GM foot note about the state of the apartment.

It also showcases the use of narrative dice because there isn’t a sort of target number with success or failure glossed over.

Another interesting part of the sessions is that this isn’t really how star wars is set up to play, but it’s certainly how a SciFi space opera should be played – in my opinion.

This video is about seven basic plots for Heroic fictional storytelling.

A Plot is described as the main events in a audio, visual, or written story presented by the author as an interrelated sequence.

A Hero is the protangonist of the story who has a moral code tied to reality which drives to do the right thing.

The story is typically presented through a three act stucture.

The three-act stucture contains five general characteristics:
1. A Call to Action – this is the exciting event that leads the a protagonist towards their adventure.
2. The Mentor – this is the person that guides the hero, or is the moral compass of the story.
3. Tests and Trials – these are the challenges that fill the middle of the story.
4. A Final Confrontation – this is the face to face fight with the enemy.
5. Resolution – this is the reward.

The seven plots are:
1. Overcoming the Monster – this about overcoming a threat to the Hero, or his world.
2. Rags to Riches – an underdog battles the odds to become top dog.
3. The Quest – the Hero seeks a treasure of great value.
4. Voyage and Return – the Hero lands in unfamiliar territory and must learn new rules.
5. Comedy – a goal impeded by funny obstacles.
6. Tragedy – the hero is his own worst enemy and this leads to his downfall.
7. Rebirth – the hero transforms into a new being, literally or figuratively.

These provide principles for Heroic ttrpg scenario design. The problem is this isn’t the only kind of collective story to tell and this isn’t a justification to make a scenario that is a rail road, but it is a framework to design game mechanics that enable this kind of story.