I’ve spent much of this week playing Elden Ring: Nightreign working through my Space Gits bug tracker, trying to iron out some of the final wrinkles in the game before it’s frozen forever in dead-tree format. I want to give you a quick braindump of what I’ve been working on, the changes I’m making and why.
Let’s take a look at some of the SPACE GITS rules changes I’ve made this week. If they survive playtesting, these rules changes will be in the final PDF you receive in July.
If you didn’t get in on the Space Gits Kickstarter, worry not: I’m about to open the pledge manager, and you’ll be able to get in over the summer via a late pledge.
Leg It & Ending The Game
This is the biggest area of change. Or perhaps the area that took the most thought and carries the most risk.
In my playtesting, I’ve been stuck with how swingy the end of the game is, and how heavy the decision to leg-it has been with calculation at times. I want the decision to leg-it to be a meaningful one. Right now the prize for being the last boss standing can be pretty significant, and the punishment for legging it can be pretty harsh. That disincentivises legging it, which is good: you don’t want to incentivise disengagement. But it might be a shade too much of a swing.
Currently, the punishments were:
- Other boss gets all the in-play caps
- Your boys drop some caps (potentially only if they are fallen)
- You can’t collect any more caps (but others can)
- You can’t participate in the game anymore
This one took many pages of notes, several attempted rules fixes, and a long conversation with Glenn to figure out. To cut to the punchline, here’s the new rules:
Time, gentlemen: Once the timer is up, you cannot BOOT any more.
Call the cops: When it is your turn to activate, you can CALL THE COPS, and you have to CALL THE COPS if you have nothing left that can activate. When you CALL THE COPS, everyone gets one final activation (starting with you), and then the game ends. Scoop up any bottle caps that are still in-play and share them out equally among the bosses that didn’t call the cops. Discard any that cannot be shared equally.
A weiner is you: The winner of the game is the boss that walked away with the most new caps in this game (e.g. ignoring what was in their stash at the start of the game) or whatever the scenario says (once I release some scenarios).
This makes a couple of really meaningful changes:
- The game ends as soon as one player is eliminated, not when the last player remains. This doesn’t change the 2-player game, but it makes 3+ player games snappier and removes any player elimination from the game, which is a massive plus.
- You no longer lose caps as a result of bottling out, you just don’t gain any of the in-play ones. This reduces the swing away from the eliminated player.
- Everyone gets one final activation to grab a final cap or two. I’ve been wanting to add some kind of “everyone gets one more activation” rule to reduce the payoff of slow-play. Not that anyone would slow-play, but it makes it that much less tempting as a gotcha.
- As you are calling in the end of the game, I changed the name of the rule to reflect that thematically. You aren’t running away, you are breaking up the party.
I could probably write a dissertation on this design decision, and playtesting is needed to confirm it’s the right solution, but I feel good about it right now.
Cover
I’ve removed the cover rules. Originally, the game didn’t have a cover rule. During playtesting, a few people suggested some ideas. I tried a couple of variations, and included one in the last beta rulebook, but I’m taking it out again. The reason is twofold: (1) cover is already emergent from the shooting rule; (2) the game is very two-dimensional, and all the suggested and experimented-with cover rules broke that pattern, and introduced an unwanted third dimension.
In particular, any cover rule that allows you to shoot “over” terrain requires new terrain traits to exist to make it clear what terrain you can shoot over (like low walls and barrels) versus what terrain you can’t (like tall walls and vending machines). This forces a third dimension to be defined in the rules, simply for this one situational cover rule. And the cover rule likely makes shooting less effective, so it overall slows the game down. Shooting is already hard enough with your drunken orc wild-firing towards the bullet dice.
In this picture, Officer Krunk is partially obscured by terrain from the perspective of the chef. Chef opens fire, and some of the bullets fall where they are obstructed by terrain and “miss”, some find a clear line and hit. See: we have a cover rule already! Now, this does mean that all terrain is ‘infinitely tall’ and you can’t shoot over barrels, but you have to make abstractions somewhere.
Putting The Boot In
A few folks have commented that once a downed git gets separated from their pals, the “put the boot in” rule starts to feel pretty harsh: essentially turning your helpless git into an ATM from which your opponent can drain all your VP.
After messing around with a few variations on the rule, Glenn came up with an awesome suggestion: after your helpless git gets booted by an enemy, you get to move them up to 2” in any direction (stopping if you hit terrain).
This forces the enemy to at least move back into contact if they want to shake you down for another cap, risking their dice tower falling if they do, and lets your hapless drunk crawl their way a little close to a friend to help them back on their feet.
Double Pinch
For a while, I’ve had a low-level bee in my bonnet about the situation in which we both throw PINCH in a fight. You take one of my caps, I take one of yours (assuming we both have some), and “nothing happens”. One of my core design principles, and one that influences every rule I write, is replace moments of nothingness with moments of somethingness. The double-pinch situation is a moment of nothingness, a no-op, and I’ve been looking at possible ways to improve it.
Several suggestions have been made: maybe the caps aren’t exchanged, but go into a ‘free parking’ pot? Maybe the pinch doesn’t happen, but the next pinch is doubled? These all add a rules exception that you have to learn and remember during play. I don’t want a solution that requires a rules exception, so if there is a solution, I think it has to be one that changes the way that PINCH itself operates. The best idea I’ve had so far is this:
PINCH 1 bottle cap from the stash of the other model’s boss and place it within 1″ of that model, not touching any model, unless the other boss throws 👊 THUMP.
This is interesting, and creates some emergent tactical stuff, but it also sends the game state backwards a touch, potentially changing a no-op into an undo, which is worse. Also, getting your head about the fighting system and the meaning of the pinch/shove/thump rules is important to the flow of the game: making them more complex by introducing a rules exception feels like a net negative for the game.
So, having looked at lots of options, I’ve decided I’m not going to change the PINCH rules, and just live with the no-op.
While I want to avoid moments of nothingness as much as possible in my games, sometimes you just have to remember that all design is compromise, and there’s rarely a perfect solution. Part of the late stage of a game’s development is figuring out which compromises are most beneficial to the game, and making peace with them.
I’m really pleased with the fighting rules as they stand, and I’m going to make peace with the ‘double pinch’ issue. If people ask about it in the future (like they still ask me about why you can’t shove vehicles during collisions in Gaslands), I’ll just have to point them back here. 🙂
Klankbots, Klank and the Rattle Cannon
I have a nasty habit of writing “miss a go” mechanics. I don’t mean to, but they sometimes sneak in. A few people have pointed to the “Klank” rule on Klankbots and Tanks as a bit unfun. The “klank” rule essentially means that your model can’t activate twice in a row, and different versions of the rule have tried different implementations, but they always end up with you missing a go in some situations.
The reason for the rule existing at all is to attempt to constrain the power of a klankbot or tank in a game in which you can keep activating it over and over, rather than a more ‘normal’ game, where you’d only get to activate it once per round. (There are no rounds in Space Gits, we just keep activating models). The other (minor) reason was to show the klanking, sluggish nature of the model. That latter part is already modelled by its 2D6 move dice stat quite neatly.
I thought more about this, and chatted to Glenn about it. The real problem isn’t that the Klankbot is powerful in and of itself, it’s the fact that it can have two Rattle Cannons and fire them again and again, pumping out 20D6 shots every activation. The Bullorc has this problem too, and it doesn’t have the Klanking rule. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that the problem was the Rattle Cannon, not the Tank or the Klankbot. The “take a swig” system already punishes you for endlessly activating your klankbot.
So… I’ve removed the Klank rule from the game, and I’ve given the Rattle Cannon “slow to reload”, only I’ve renamed it “cooldown”, so it better fits thematically.
In reconsidering the Klankbot, it became clear to me that I could no long find a rationale for the Hunk of Metal and Reboot Button special rules. I think they might have just been “fun ideas” that I added without really considering them. This combo of rules has a problematic interaction with the “no booting after the timer is up” rule, and gives the klankbot a weird ability to run around solo, which is too powerful. I’ve just removed these two rules, and I don’t think they will be missed. Who doesn’t love deleting rules?
Vehicles v3… Coming Soon!
I recently made a couple of revisions to the rules around fighting and vehicles, but during the discussion with Glenn about the end of the game stuff it occurred to me that I’d got a HUGE bug in my vehicle system. I’m going to need to make a fairly substantial re-write to the rules for vehicles (specifically around crew, fighting and wipeouts) to avoid a big problem I just spotted. But… that’s the focus for next week’s design work, so I’ll keep you in suspense until then! (See if you can find it yourself if you like.)
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Thanks for following along, I hope this behind the scenes rules ramble was of interest. If you didn’t get in on the Space Gits Kickstarter, worry not: I’m about to open the pledge manager, and you’ll be able to get in over the summer via a late pledge.