social combat in diaspora













Sorry about that, that was bullshit.



7 thoughts on “social combat in diaspora

      1. Would be better with illustrations – and my blog is temporally down.

        In a nutshell, I use diagrams with positions *only*, pretty much like your average hyperspace node map. “Players” can only contest a node from adjacent nodes and can’t be adjacent to each other.

        So Moral High Ground could link to Popularity contested by Party A and Party B.

        [Party A Base] -> Popularity <- [Party B Base]

        But Popularity is also linked to Moral High Ground, which has two connections:

        [Party A Base] – Party A Reputation – Moral High Ground – Party B Reputation. -[Party B Base]

        If Party A gets the Moral High Ground, then Party B is pushed back to its vase , and Party B Reputation becomes contested. Meanwhile, Party A now has two connections to Popularity.

        I resolve this kind of thing through play or narrative, but it could be turned into a more abstracted game.

        Liked by 1 person

  1. I think you’re being too hard on yourself. Scribbling zone maps on the fly is something that both the GM and the players are used to because they reoccur so often in fate or anything where you need to layout a five room dungeon or moon base with little notice. There’s a risk that they end up samey, but that same samey is part of the grammer and vocab of the table’s conversation. You know that when your GM lays things out like A-> (B, C) -> D what the expectations are.

    There is the Pbta/fitd clock system, where each clock is progression along a linear sequence and combinations of which can be equated to navigating through a multi-dimensional space (you have entered the zone where the Emerald Empire has deployed pickets, the Pirate King’s belt is burning and the fat controller has just taken a bullion bribe over that hypertrain upgrade contract. If you don’t act soon there might be a hot war in orbit, the Pirate King might be able to take Moon2 and the fat controller will have suffcient resources to do… something. What do you do?)

    But that’s narrative, not conflict. I think.

    If you have conflict as map and movement only, what design space does that open for special abilities as movement, not dice?

    Liked by 1 person

  2. Second thought.

    The crudest simplest map just measures how far you are away from target, or how far away threat/ interests are from you.

    It’s a dartboard or a 1d vector (like other things in diaspora)

    Liked by 1 person

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