What’s the point?

AKA some basics about the campaign and character creation.

So the basic idea of the campaign is to have a bounded sandbox setting where the players explore the wilderness, visit exotic locales and delve through ancient dungeons. Although possible, I didn’t want to make the game planet-bound, so an additional layer (actually two, but more on than in another post) of wilderness exploration will be spacefaring. A home-base “town” in the tradition of Dungeon Fantasy will also be available, although I won’t necessarily stick to some of the DF tropes like “town is always 100% safe”. We’ll see what the players will prefer during the game.

For the point level I was considering the low 300s ballpark from the start, which was reinforced by deciding that the exact point level will be the same as the point level the players reach when they end the previous campaign, which was still running at that time. Well, it died shortly before its conclusion, and I settled on 330 points with -45 in disadvantages and -5 in quirks. Although the game is influenced by DF, chargen is completely freeform.

CP advancement will happen as in all of my games in recent history. All characters will advance in lockstep, regardless of individual player attendance, and points will be awarded after each session based on how much abstract progress (according to my gut feeling) the party made during the session and how enjoyable the session was. That means 1 point if the session ends being abnormally short or the PCs do nothing useful, up to 5+ for significant progress and very enjoyable sessions.

Lately my players haven’t been interested in running more than one character apiece (with only one for each individual session) so I don’t have to think how I’d distribute points in such a scenario.

I have no special restrictions on how and when the players may spend points, but it must be between sessions and when buying new traits they either need to have access to a source of learning if they can be learned, or a reasonable way to acquire them if it’s stuff which can’t be learned. Cybernetics and biomods (or rather augments, as they are called in Starfinder) will incur both a CP and monetary cost unless the players get them as loot/gifts/rewards, then it’s only CP. I never used impulse buys, and I don’t see a reason for it now.

Allowed races and “classes” are pretty much anything which makes sense within the Starfinder setting, with an explicit no-go only for direct imports from other settings. I’d even allow new races (relative to Starfinder) if a player were to ask, and then we’d write it up together. One of the few required things would be to try and have a reasonably broad spectrum of “usefulness” within the party, so no space marines only. I won’t have a hard requirement, but I will rather strongly suggest that every character has all of the everyman skills as per this excellent post by Kromm: http://forums.sjgames.com/showpost.php?p=369148. 1 point is enough. There’s also a separate list of spaceship-related skills the party would need to have as a whole to avoid troubles in space, but that I’ll leave for another post. There won’t be any kind of a strong focus on spaceships, but they also won’t just be a travel montage. And if the players want to tinker with their own ship, more power to them. They will have their own ship.

Every character will have up to three languages at Native for free:

• Common
• The planetary language where they grew up (if any)
• Their racial language (if any)

Humans who grew up on Absalom Station get Common and one other language of their choice. Languages are per Starfinder default.

We’ll be using the DF flavor of wealth rules, meaning your wealth level determines for how much you can sell loot. In addition to that, we’ll be using RPK’s rules on trading points for money: http://www.mygurps.com/h_money.html.

I will allow up to 4 levels of Status or any kind of Rank. If a character has Rank, they’ll need to have a good reason why they’re able to merrily be adventuring and not performing whatever their Rank implies. Status is also important for the monthly cost of living, which we’ll be using on a per-day basis when in civilization. Yes, even though the game will be strongly DF-influenced, keeping up social appearances will still be a concern. I hope. Well, I know at least one of my players is interested in that.

That’s it for now. I will take a more detailed look at the various house rules and chargen topics in the coming days.