(08-12-2018, 06:56 AM)robkelk Wrote: We may be overthinking this.
There's no way we're going to be able to get together and game this out on a tactical hex grid - this has to be done over the Net. The simpler the rules, the faster the gaming-out will go... but the more people will have to trust the GM to not be a dick when making things up on the fly.
Where do people feel comfortable on the rule-complexity scale?
Actually, I've had some thoughts in regards to this.
What if we treated this more as a quest (similar to the ones run on SB/SV/QQ) than an online gathering for a tabletop game?
That is, instead of everyone spending a lot of time hashing out individual characters moves, one of us runs the characters through an entire battle, then dumps the resulting chain of events onto the pirate pad where the rest of us fills in the details, such as dialogue, body language, thoughts of the characters, other prose in general.
And to help spread the work around, things that involve more than one author's characters - such as the dungeon crawl through the senshi castles - can be where each author takes turns running through battle scenes.
Though honestly, I wish I knew a good programming language for this. This is exactly the sort of thing I would obsess over - creating something that we simply plug in the characters and the battle field, and the program uses a built-in RNG die roller function to run through the battle, letting you input the character's actions at each turn. I mean, really. It's doable - all RPG rules sets that I know of boil down to boolean logic. And it's not like we need a GUI for it - we just want the log that shows the sequence of events.
Anyhow, the thing is that this would work because we already have an idea of which way we want things to go. We just run through the battle system until we get the scenario we feel works best for the story. This also introduces an element of random chance to help keep things.... 'fresh' I suppose?
And that brings us back around again to what level of complexity everyone feels comfortable with.
For my part, I don't mind as long as everyone's happy with the results - my big thing is having a system that will let us faithfully portray the characters so we aren't left going, "Uhm yeah, that's not how it works..."