Intro/Rules - First Post, and also Quest Introduction.
GuyThatRunsAGame
Well-known member
A bit of a jump in the deep end for a first post, but it is what it is.
All of this was pre-written in wordpad, so if the forum eats the formatting, that ain't on me.
So I thought about doing an interest check post, but realized an interest check takes up a thread the same way a introduction post would, and I had most of the background work already done. So if the quest doesn't take of, at least I've tried, and if there is an interest, people will simply join.
Do note that, this being the empire, this will be a villain quest, and not in the "good people, bad boss, so not really villain" way, because most of the good people who was in the empire from inertia has by the time of the game been sidelined by compnor, or deserted to the rebellion.
It was either this or a lead-up-to-clone wars era proto-confederacy quest, but ultimately I was just more interested in gray/white murderwedges than droids.
EXPLAINING THE QUEST
This is going to be an Empire Builder quest set far off in the Unknown Regions, you won't have access to the rest of the Galactic Empire unless you manage to find a way back. The game introduction will start while the Battle of Endor is occurring timeline wise. I will primarily use old material (Legacy) but will happily nick things from the newer stuff if I find it neat and appropriate. Not all Legacy content will apply, not all canon content will apply. It likely won't matter a whole lot for you anyways.
Now, I consider it important to distinguish between what information I give players, and what information characters have available. That's why I am upfront about the Empire Builder aspect, so you don't make a fleet sorely dependent upon Imperial support, and I spring an unknown regions colony adventure on you out of the blue (or, black I suppose, being in space and all). That is the feeling the characters will have, but it wouldn't be fun to players to expect to do huge battles against the Rebel Alliance/New Republic, and then end up nowhere near anything important to the Empire.
So what you as players likely know, and spoilers for an almost 40 year old movie, is that the second death star is destroyed, Vader and the Emperor are dead, and the Empire is fracturing into warlordism. Your fleet will disappear not knowing this has happened. I say this so people will understand why the next part will function as it does. As far as you know, the Empire is victorious, and still runs the galaxy, and you are part of it.
MANAGING EXPECTATIONS AND POSSIBLY CONTENTIOUS MECHANICS
A recurring theme I've seen in quests where you play as the Galactic Empire is that players want to play the Republic but with all the toys of the Empire. That defeats the point of playing as the villains in my opinion, and is why I've added the mechanic of a hidden stat, this being Human High Culture Orthodoxy (henceforth this shall be known as... HHCO). This stat starts relatively low, but certain character creation choices increases it, along with critical successes, while critical failures lower it. If a situation occurrs where moral choices are presented, I will roll against HHCO, and should the roll succeed, options that go against Human High Culture and Imperial Doctrine will not be offered, if the roll critically succeeds, options that just barely toes the line will not be offered. Critical failures on the roll against HHCO will allow decisions in direct violation of Human High Culture and Imperial Doctrine, though this will set you in opposition to several of the groups you depend on.
This means that while your character is in charge, and will over time have chances to change things, it will be difficult and incremental, and in many ways out of character for a loyal Imperial at the time this starts.
While I consider much of the why of this mechanic is obvious, I will nonetheless explain why I thought it especially appropriate for this quest. At the point in time where the Battle of Endor happened, to achieve the rank of Fleet Admiral, you had to be a very certain type of person, and not a particularly nice on at that. Especially to be tagged as reliable enought to reinforce Death Squadron at a critical juncture. The sort of person who truly believes in the Empire, is benefited by its systems, and above all, it loyal. The Empire is a repressive nightmare regime, a monument to Darth Sidious, by Darth Sidious, and with all other things it does being incidental. This is (aside my self-percieved inability to consistently write good female characters) also the reason the main character is only allowed to be a human male. The character will be either a product of said society, or with one of the choices, a reaction to the failures of the previous society.
Setup-wise, I've had to do a number of allowances on the asset side to make it a viable quest, but I don't consider them all that out of character for the Empire in general, nor Imperial Moffs in particular. So why that sort of equipment is available to you despite the actual mission is answered with "Repaying favors" and "Political pressure from your direct superior". And as to personal collections and non-standard custom equipment, when you end up in the level of power a Fleet Admiral in good standing has, many rules and regulations only matter for other people, or if you mess up and your superiors need additional reasons to get rid of you beside "I want to".
MECHANICS AND ROLLS
Mechanics wise, I will do the rolls privately, and if the thread wants it, I can put them up next to the actions, so you know by how much you succeeded or failed. I will do d100 roll under, with the appropriate skill being added to the base success chance. Criticals Successes are on 1s, confirmed against the appropriate skill, Critical Failures are on 100s, confirmed on failure against the appropriate skill. This means it is actually easier to Crit Fail, but both critical results will be rare and appropriately powerful, along with a possible increase in the corresponding skill. As critical results are so rare (or rather, statistically should be), I will be using a degree of success system, meaning low or high rolls still matter, a massive success or massive failure is still that.
Base Chance of Success (Will be reorganized into the BCoS abbreviation) will be represented to you in a vague manner, with approximate (but not exactly this every time) numbers being:
BCoS: 10 = Difficult
BCoS: 30 = Challenging
BCoS: 50 = Ordinary
BCoS: 70 = Easy
BCoS: 90 = Routine
These numbers will differ by up to around ten points in either direction, and to this you add the relevant skill value. If you use your personal action to oversee an action, you use your own skill, otherwise, you use the skill of a subordinate.
Do note that this is the Base Chance of Success, not the final score being rolled against.
ACTION ECONOMY
Characters normally only have one action per turn. This means that you will need skilled subordinates to take actions on your behalf. Otherwise you'd only have one action to run your entire realm. By improving your bureaucracy and gaining the loyalty of other officers and administrators, you can increase your available actions. You will of course start with a number of subordinates, giving you a bunch of actions per turn.
If the main character the players design end up with a family or the like, regular "keeping up with the family" and "handling personal relations" will never take up an action slot. This is because that would shift the focus of the game from what it is intended to be. If thread-chatter makes it obvious you want more focus on that, I will probably let you vote on things for that without it impacting the action economy or even requiring rolls, but it is not the core focus of this quest.
TURN LENGTH
The first four turns will represent a week, before going over to monthly turns, if this is to intensive, I might go to quarter-year length later on, but the goal is month long turns. I might also go to month long turns early if you have absurd luck in getting set up quickly.
STARTING VOTES
Normally, I'd give players a bit more play before handing them a massive amount of votes for stuff, but in this case, due to the structure of this quest, It will be rather numbers intensive and honestly, storyless, for the first few updates, this is due to character creation and fleet composition being massive blocks of just numbers more or less. After that is done, you can all expect some actual play to start. I wanted to leave this in the players hands, as I would prefer to have a say in it if I were a player.
I have decided to include votes for guaranteeing certain features for the first system you arrive in, as that honestly will save me a bit of work when rolling up a system.
These votes will change how I write certain things, and as such, I want it done before writing the first actual story post.
All of this was pre-written in wordpad, so if the forum eats the formatting, that ain't on me.
So I thought about doing an interest check post, but realized an interest check takes up a thread the same way a introduction post would, and I had most of the background work already done. So if the quest doesn't take of, at least I've tried, and if there is an interest, people will simply join.
Do note that, this being the empire, this will be a villain quest, and not in the "good people, bad boss, so not really villain" way, because most of the good people who was in the empire from inertia has by the time of the game been sidelined by compnor, or deserted to the rebellion.
It was either this or a lead-up-to-clone wars era proto-confederacy quest, but ultimately I was just more interested in gray/white murderwedges than droids.
EXPLAINING THE QUEST
This is going to be an Empire Builder quest set far off in the Unknown Regions, you won't have access to the rest of the Galactic Empire unless you manage to find a way back. The game introduction will start while the Battle of Endor is occurring timeline wise. I will primarily use old material (Legacy) but will happily nick things from the newer stuff if I find it neat and appropriate. Not all Legacy content will apply, not all canon content will apply. It likely won't matter a whole lot for you anyways.
Now, I consider it important to distinguish between what information I give players, and what information characters have available. That's why I am upfront about the Empire Builder aspect, so you don't make a fleet sorely dependent upon Imperial support, and I spring an unknown regions colony adventure on you out of the blue (or, black I suppose, being in space and all). That is the feeling the characters will have, but it wouldn't be fun to players to expect to do huge battles against the Rebel Alliance/New Republic, and then end up nowhere near anything important to the Empire.
So what you as players likely know, and spoilers for an almost 40 year old movie, is that the second death star is destroyed, Vader and the Emperor are dead, and the Empire is fracturing into warlordism. Your fleet will disappear not knowing this has happened. I say this so people will understand why the next part will function as it does. As far as you know, the Empire is victorious, and still runs the galaxy, and you are part of it.
MANAGING EXPECTATIONS AND POSSIBLY CONTENTIOUS MECHANICS
A recurring theme I've seen in quests where you play as the Galactic Empire is that players want to play the Republic but with all the toys of the Empire. That defeats the point of playing as the villains in my opinion, and is why I've added the mechanic of a hidden stat, this being Human High Culture Orthodoxy (henceforth this shall be known as... HHCO). This stat starts relatively low, but certain character creation choices increases it, along with critical successes, while critical failures lower it. If a situation occurrs where moral choices are presented, I will roll against HHCO, and should the roll succeed, options that go against Human High Culture and Imperial Doctrine will not be offered, if the roll critically succeeds, options that just barely toes the line will not be offered. Critical failures on the roll against HHCO will allow decisions in direct violation of Human High Culture and Imperial Doctrine, though this will set you in opposition to several of the groups you depend on.
This means that while your character is in charge, and will over time have chances to change things, it will be difficult and incremental, and in many ways out of character for a loyal Imperial at the time this starts.
While I consider much of the why of this mechanic is obvious, I will nonetheless explain why I thought it especially appropriate for this quest. At the point in time where the Battle of Endor happened, to achieve the rank of Fleet Admiral, you had to be a very certain type of person, and not a particularly nice on at that. Especially to be tagged as reliable enought to reinforce Death Squadron at a critical juncture. The sort of person who truly believes in the Empire, is benefited by its systems, and above all, it loyal. The Empire is a repressive nightmare regime, a monument to Darth Sidious, by Darth Sidious, and with all other things it does being incidental. This is (aside my self-percieved inability to consistently write good female characters) also the reason the main character is only allowed to be a human male. The character will be either a product of said society, or with one of the choices, a reaction to the failures of the previous society.
Setup-wise, I've had to do a number of allowances on the asset side to make it a viable quest, but I don't consider them all that out of character for the Empire in general, nor Imperial Moffs in particular. So why that sort of equipment is available to you despite the actual mission is answered with "Repaying favors" and "Political pressure from your direct superior". And as to personal collections and non-standard custom equipment, when you end up in the level of power a Fleet Admiral in good standing has, many rules and regulations only matter for other people, or if you mess up and your superiors need additional reasons to get rid of you beside "I want to".
MECHANICS AND ROLLS
Mechanics wise, I will do the rolls privately, and if the thread wants it, I can put them up next to the actions, so you know by how much you succeeded or failed. I will do d100 roll under, with the appropriate skill being added to the base success chance. Criticals Successes are on 1s, confirmed against the appropriate skill, Critical Failures are on 100s, confirmed on failure against the appropriate skill. This means it is actually easier to Crit Fail, but both critical results will be rare and appropriately powerful, along with a possible increase in the corresponding skill. As critical results are so rare (or rather, statistically should be), I will be using a degree of success system, meaning low or high rolls still matter, a massive success or massive failure is still that.
Base Chance of Success (Will be reorganized into the BCoS abbreviation) will be represented to you in a vague manner, with approximate (but not exactly this every time) numbers being:
BCoS: 10 = Difficult
BCoS: 30 = Challenging
BCoS: 50 = Ordinary
BCoS: 70 = Easy
BCoS: 90 = Routine
These numbers will differ by up to around ten points in either direction, and to this you add the relevant skill value. If you use your personal action to oversee an action, you use your own skill, otherwise, you use the skill of a subordinate.
Do note that this is the Base Chance of Success, not the final score being rolled against.
ACTION ECONOMY
Characters normally only have one action per turn. This means that you will need skilled subordinates to take actions on your behalf. Otherwise you'd only have one action to run your entire realm. By improving your bureaucracy and gaining the loyalty of other officers and administrators, you can increase your available actions. You will of course start with a number of subordinates, giving you a bunch of actions per turn.
If the main character the players design end up with a family or the like, regular "keeping up with the family" and "handling personal relations" will never take up an action slot. This is because that would shift the focus of the game from what it is intended to be. If thread-chatter makes it obvious you want more focus on that, I will probably let you vote on things for that without it impacting the action economy or even requiring rolls, but it is not the core focus of this quest.
TURN LENGTH
The first four turns will represent a week, before going over to monthly turns, if this is to intensive, I might go to quarter-year length later on, but the goal is month long turns. I might also go to month long turns early if you have absurd luck in getting set up quickly.
STARTING VOTES
Normally, I'd give players a bit more play before handing them a massive amount of votes for stuff, but in this case, due to the structure of this quest, It will be rather numbers intensive and honestly, storyless, for the first few updates, this is due to character creation and fleet composition being massive blocks of just numbers more or less. After that is done, you can all expect some actual play to start. I wanted to leave this in the players hands, as I would prefer to have a say in it if I were a player.
I have decided to include votes for guaranteeing certain features for the first system you arrive in, as that honestly will save me a bit of work when rolling up a system.
These votes will change how I write certain things, and as such, I want it done before writing the first actual story post.
