Scott Parker
Scott is a generally okay human
He writes on this website sometimes
scottparker.co
I hate to clutter up my tabletop with more than I absolutely must. Making full, two-page character sheets for each NPC drove me mad as a new Edge of the Empire GM. Much of the information on a character sheet is irrelevant to an NPC (no one cares about your obligations, CSA Viceprex). All of this just makes for wasted tabletop space.
To fix this problem, I made a compact NPC sheet: just the critical information I needed on NPCs that I could print on half of an 8.5x11 sheet of paper. In addition to displaying information more compactly, it also calculates skill and attack rolls as well as displaying a small reference on opposed social skill checks (I always forget that Charm is opposed by Cool, unlike most other social skills which are opposed by Discipline).
Here it is in action with the stats for a lowly droid my players encountered awhile back:
A few notes about this sheet:
Changes or suggestions are welcome! All the tools I used to make this are free to use, and all the original materials are available for download or modification in the Github repository. Pull requests are welcome!
I’m working on something similar for NPC Vehicles. I’ll post it on this blog when it’s ready.
Happy GMing!
We’re doing a Netrunner draft at Braintree soon after the New Year. I wanted to send the new drafters a cheatsheet on their first draft. Since I couldn’t find any online, I wrote my own.
What follows is one person’s opinion on Netrunner drafting after having gone through a few drafts. I have yet to win a draft tournament so take with a grain of salt.
When the draft starts, all players will pick up the first set of 10 cards in front of them. They will each pick one card and pass the rest of the cards to their right. This means that each player will now receive the 9 cards the person on their left didn’t pick. Each player will pick one card from that 9, and pass the remaining cards to the right again. This continues until you are passed one card. When you receive one card from the player on your left, you will keep that card automatically and this round of the draft is over.
We will do this 4 times for Corporation cards and 4 times for Runner cards. This means you will draft 40 cards for each side. When you add these to your starter pack, you’ll have about 50 cards total for each side. Of these you will put roughly 30 (for Runner) or 34 (for Corp) into your deck. You can make changes to your deck from this pool of 50 between games.
There are three pillars to the Corp Draft - Agendas, ICE, and Econ. There are other powerful cards that you should consider grabbing but you’ll be in trouble if you don’t cover these bases.
The corp is required to have a certain number of “agenda points” based on how many total cards you have in your deck including agendas. If you have 30-34 cards total in your deck, you must have agendas worth a total of 14-15 points. If you have 35-39 cards, you must have 16-17 points of agendas. Conventional wisdom is that you want as few agenda points as possible in your deck while having the most cards total (to minimize the odds of a runner stealing agendas), so shoot for a 34-card deck with 14-15 points of agendas.
Your starter pack will contain about 17 points of agendas, but this doesn’t mean you should avoid choosing agendas in the draft! A diverse set of agendas gives you many options in how and when you score, not to mention the effects of each agenda. 3/2 agendas (that is, agendas that require three advancements to score and are worth 2 points) and 2/1 agendas are particularly powerful weapons for the corp to sneak out quick advancements!
ICE should generally make up about 30-45% of the cards in your deck. Usually you’ll want at least half of that ICE to have an “End the Run” subroutine and you’ll want at least half to be less than 5 credits to rez (not necessarily the same half though). Doing this ensures you have ICE you can rez in the early game and that makes a good defense.
Assuming you have a 34 card deck, this means that you want 11-16 pieces of ICE in it with at least 6 “End the Run” ICE. This isn’t a hard rule, but it’s a good starting point.
Diversity is often the key to a great ICE lineup. You’ll want a good mixture of Sentry, Barrier, and Code Gate ICE to prevent one kind of icebreaker from ruining your game. The same goes for ICE strengths. A variety of strengths creates a variety of challenges to the runner - higher strength isn’t always better.
“End the Run” ICE can be surprisingly rare in the draft. It’s not wrong to take “boring” ICE like Wall of Static or Ice Wall as an early-round draft pick. Aside from that, draft what seems interesting to you while keeping your ICE diversity and card synergy in mind. it’s no good to have a ton of tag-the-runner ICE if you lack the other cards to capitalize on it.
Great cards are only great when you can afford them. You’ll want a number of cards that generate credits in your deck. These cards can take a variety of forms - agendas like Geothermal Fracking or Hostile Takeover that provide credits when scored, assets like PAD Campaign or Adonis Campaign that provide a steady stream of credits each turn, or operations like Hedge Fund or Medical Fundraiser that provide an instant influx of cash.
Usually having 15-33% of your deck generate income is good, but this isn’t as hard a rule as with agendas and ICE. Your starter pack will contain some solid econ cards, but you’ll likely want more. If you have a 34-card deck, you’ll want about 6-11 econ cards.
One thing to keep in mind with these: the more your economic strategy relies on assets or scoring agendas, the more end-the-run ICE you’ll need to keep the runner out or else you run the risk of easily being credit-starved.
At this point you may have a deck that looks something like this:
In general you want your Runner deck to be as small as possible so that you are more likely to get the cards you need. 30 is the minimum in the draft - you should probably plan on having about that many cards.
We draft the Runner second so you should already have some idea of the Corp cards you’ll be up against. In particular, when you see a bunch of ICE that has some specific strength of vulnerability then you can use that to your advantage as the Runner when drafting. Don’t go overboard though - as your draft group is larger, the likelihood that there are great Corp cards in the pool that you didn’t see increases.
At least 25-33% of your deck should be econ cards. In a 30 card deck, this means about 7-11 cards for econ. Like the corp, diversity is good. Resource cards are often powerful credit generators but can be destroyed by any tag-heavy Corp deck.
The number of Icebreakers in a Runner deck varies wildly but you should consider having at least 6-7 in your deck and no more than 15-16. The runner starter kit will include some number of AI Icebreakers (icebreakers that apply to any kind of ICE) but you shouldn’t rely on these alone without a backup plan. Some ICE are particularly strong against AI icebreakers or even immune to them.
On the flipside, you may not need an icebreaker for every kind of ICE either. A strong set of universal/AI icebreakers combined with some powerful “niche” icebreakers like Ninja or Corroder is often sufficient for a draft runner deck. These niche icebreakers are usually the most credit-efficient way past ICE of their type.
There’s much more freedom in building a Runner deck than a Corp deck which means there’s less advice to provide. If you want to go program-heavy (say, a bunch of viruses or exotic utility programs like Sneakdoor Beta), make sure you have the memory unit cards to install them. Don’t underestimate events either - just one play of Maker’s Eye or Inside Job can swing a game in your favor.
Runners have an easier time of connecting combos in the draft than the corp does since they have more flexibility in card draw. Since you’re unlikely to get more than two copies of any great card, favor combo cards that can create many solid-to-good synergies rather than a single, powerful combination.
Card draw is generally more important for the Runner than the Corp. Cards like Test Run that let you search your stack for an icebreaker or program can be very powerful for the Runner - these cards mean you can find the right tool just as you need it. Other cards that provide a boost to card drawing like Diesel (event: draw three cards) provide similar benefits for the runner.
One last tip: as soon as the drafting begins, a smart drafter is observing their opponents for any clues about the decks others are building. For instance, invariably people at the table will complain about seeing many copies of a few “underpowered” cards. This means that if you can think of a way to make that card work, it will be easy to draft 3+ copies of it. In our first such draft, everyone bemoaned the excess numbers of Underworld Contacts they were passed only for someone to steal a horde of them and make a monster econ, untraceable Runner deck with them.
If you have any feedback or tips from your own draft experiences, please get in touch and share them! Happy hacking!
SP
Unfortunately I didn’t have enough time this weekend to participate in this round of Ludum Dare so I’m sketching out what I would have attempted given the chance.
The theme is “Entire Game on One Screen.” I thought about screens for awhile and how they are just a simplified view of an underlying system, similar in nature to Plato’s allegory of the Cave. I wanted to make something that really exploited that and provided imperfect information to the player.
COMBINED ARMS is a two-player co-operative mini-RTS that simulates the ground invasion of a city supported by a fleet of ships in orbit.
One player is the Fleet Admiral and sees an interface like so:
This player can see the entire map and the current status of all objectives. A number of control points have to be held before the capital (large building in top left) can be taken by friendly troops. The orbital commander can also take various strategic actions on a time delay (simulating the delay between launching something from orbit and seeing its effects). These actions include:
Except for the moments after a scan, the Fleet Admiral lives in fog of war. The player can see the theatre of battle but doesn’t really understand any specific situation on the ground except as relayed by the ground commander.
The other player is the Ground Commander. The ground commander has a more typical third-person view of a small squad of units.
The Ground Commander is massively outnumbered by hostile troops and must use the power of the orbital fleet to even the odds. The Ground Commander has an almost perfect understanding of their immediate surroundings, but no strategic view of the city or objectives.
The Commander controls 4-6 units at a time. As units are lost, the Admiral can send in replacements but they are slow to arrive, and the fleet is otherwise useless while preparing them.
The war on the ground is relatively simple - units come in three flavors: tanks, walkers, and fliers. Tanks are slow, strong, excellent versus walkers, and can slowly destroy buildings. Fliers are fast, frail, excellent versus tanks, and ignore all but the tallest buildings. Walkers are a middle-of-the-road choice which are excellent versus fliers and can slowly move through buildings.
The “game” of Combined Arms is as much a game of memory and communication as it is tactics and strategy. It blatantly steals some of my favorite bits of Wargame, World in Conflict, and Full Spectrum Warrior and I make no claim of it being original (indeed, you could say it’s just a strategy take on Clandestine).
While I don’t have time this LD to do much more than make fake screenshots, this might be an idea I visit in the future.
I’ve claimed to have several spirit animals in the past, but in reality it’s definitely Tim Gunn.
Now that I have a basic prototype that adheres to the plan outlined in Part I-A, it’s time to build a server to support this game.
A longstanding (and totally hilarious) joke of mine is that I’ll play any game with a “Next Turn” button. As such, I plan to build a server that can support not just Clans but any future turn-based strategy games I build. Ideally I’d even love to open-source the server portion and allow other, less technical developers to start making this kind of game so that I can start playing them. =)
As such, here are my design goals for this:
So then, architecture: I initially plan to build this out as a rails-api application that primarily exists to persist game and chat state. The server will authenticate users and apps via OAuth2 password grants with each game as a different client.
While I’d be tempted to store game states on disk, serializing them to Postgres is the easiest solution for now since I plan to deploy to Heroku. I reserve the right to introduce a more sensible document store down the road however.
I haven’t found a way to incorporate Redis into this solution yet so let’s fix that. I’ll probably use it to store in-game chats as sorted sets per-user. Initially chat will only be global within a session so chats per-user is overkill. Eventually I’d love to support user-to-user chat as well though. Even if this turns out to be YAGNI1, it will be YAGNIBIIF?2
This wraps up most of my planning materials. Once I have a Trello board for Clans, I’ll add a link to it here. (edit: here is that Trello board)
Next up, I’ll share what are becoming my current “best practices” for code organization in Unity. This has long been a sticking point for me as projects grow, but I’ve come across a style that seems to be the least painful.