I have cleared the decks a little and last night I started to look at Navigator RPG again.
The first thing that would strike you is the limited scope of the game. So far we have three races and five professions, that is it.
My justification for this is twofold. Firstly, I am trying to follow the source material, White Star as closely as possible and that is the full set of player character classes in the book, plus one. I have added in an extra profession, the Mystic. Mystics are what Spacemaster fans would recognise as true and semi-telepaths. I thought they were an important part of Spacemaster and needed to be included.
We have stats. These are d100 rolls, re-roll anything under 21 and if you have no stats over 90 then your two lowest can be elevated to 90.
Potentials are all 101 and stat gain rolls will cost DPs.
DPs are fixed at 50 per level.
Stat bonuses are (Stat-50)/3 so no table needed for stat bonuses.
Character races or Species are built using talents. I have included six talents and one flaw. These serve as a model for 3rd party writers to create a whole spectrum of optional talents and Species.
Mixed Species are easily possible by mixing and matching the talents that define the parents.
We now have seven cultures. Each culture gives 50DPs worth of skills.
We have simple guidelines for creating new cultures.
As I said above we have five professions but we also have the rules for creating new professions. Each profession comes with 50DPs of ‘basic training’ in the professions core skills. We also get Professional skill bonuses. Every profession has individual skill costs.
Things I have borrowed is the idea of Expertise skills that reduce penalties but do not give bonuses. This has allowed me to remove the four individual moving in armour skills.
I have borrowed the fixed 50DPs and I have borrowed the method of creating ‘half races’. In effect the three races I have created could be turned into six different species.
The calculated stat bonuses comes from Hurin.
All skills are going to have three governing stats and the stat bonuses are going to be additive rather than averaged. I just find that easier.
After being given 50DPs of skills from your culture, 50DPs of skills from your basic training you will then have an additional 50DPs to spend as you wish to customise your character. This means that a starting character will be level 1 and have 150DPs of skills in place.
Limited Scope
I said there were two reasons for the limited scope. This whole project is dependent on building a community who will add to the game. The tools for creating new Species, Talents, Flaws, Cultures, Professions and Skills are right there in the core rules and just enough examples are provided to give people what they need to build what they want. A spin off benefit of limited scope is time to completion.
In project management you can decide what you want a project to achieve or when you want to complete a project but you cannot define both. You either ship what you have on completion day your you ship the completed project when it is finished. By limiting the scope of the project the time to completion is going to be much shorter. As it is I am hoping to have the game up to the point where you can create a character by the end of this week.
The most time consuming things I have to deal with this week will be calculating all the skills costs for my five professions and all the skills and then writing all the skill descriptions.
Next…
After that the next set of rules in White Star than need converting are Movement, Skill Resolution and Resistance Rolls. I am hoping that they will be able to be completed in a week although I have a busy couple of weeks coming up.