Thu 13 Jun 2019, 16:50
I've finally managed to listen to all three episodes, as I mainly only listen when I commute (or do the dishes). Excusing the audio quality because it was recorded at the pub has to be the most English thing ever! I didn't have any problems hearing what was said, but I listened with headphones so maybe it's more difficult on speakers.
I made some notes, unfortunately without detailed timestamps:
* I enjoyed the episodes a lot. You sound like a fun group that I'd like to play with, given the chance, with the right balance between jokes and seriousness. I'd love to see a report from the convention games, or perhaps an episode where you discuss them. It would be neat to see how new players took to the system and scenario.
* Designing a sentry gun that shoots litmus paper to detect acid blood should be both a heavy machinery *and* a comtech roll.
* If you explained the rules for the players it would have been nice to listen to that as well. Perhaps you had playtested the system with them before so they already knew it? Someone listening to the podcast that don't know the rules is really thrown into the deep end of the pool, trying to figure out the game system.
* In part 1, a PC panicked (7+ on the roll, but under 10+) and it sounded like it was treated as an automatic fail on the task. That's only on 10+ in the latest iteration of the rules. But I may misremember and perhaps no successes were rolled to begin with. In part 3 there were multiple panics, but I don't think you gave out automatic failures then, so I'm not sure which version of the rules you used.
* I think it adds a lot if pushed rolls are introduced into the fiction and not just handled in a game-mechanical fashion by rolling new dice. I like to describe how the character attempts something and temporarily fails or doesn't reach all the way, and then the pushed roll is described by how they with increasing desperation attempt again. A pushed roll for ranged combat would make the PC more and more frantic for each shot, hopefully hitting at last, or a pushed comtech roll would mean that the PC wipes sweat from their forehead or bangs the keyboard keys violently. You usually just rerolled the dice and narrated a single successful action, which I think misses out on some of the fun of pushing rolls.
* You regularly skipped stunts on skill rolls even though the players rolled multiple successes. I prefer to always have the players pick stunts, because it can lead to more interesting situations than a binary pass-fail. At the com array in part 3, I think a player rolled 3 successes, but only got to know that they succeeded. Stunts could have made them finish in half the time, or have given them a +1 on a later roll, or something. In the beginning, it slows down the game a bit to look up stunts all the time, but after a short while you all know what they are and don't have to refer to the tables.
* For panic result nervous twitch, you made an interesting (and not incorrect) interpretation when the panicking PC didn't spread any stress because they were hiding. This is something I've been thinking about. I think that other PCs were in short range, that is, in the same zone, but since the first PC was hiding they didn't transmit any stress. I've been considering such line of sight rules for spreading stress, but it becomes weird if the players describe how their PCs never look at each other from fear of receiving stress. I think your interpretation was fine in this case, but it's hard to formulate a general rule that works all the time. The rules just say "all friendly PCs in short range of you" without mentioning line of sight. One option is to add a panicked sound element to *all* panic results, because everyone in the same zone would hear each other (and it would also enable spreading stress between people on a spacewalk where you can't see the other person directly), but if you're successfully hiding it's also weird if the panic roll forces you to make a sound. Still, I would like stress spreading to be the default and would use any explanation as to why, rather than saving the PCs from the effect.
* I think the ending of starting the distress beacon works fine even if one of the players found it more logical for everyone to just accept their fates and die alone in space. Perhaps that would make more sense because we know what happens in Aliens, but I still think that the colonists would like help being sent or at least that someone should know that the colony has been attacked.
All of the above is minor stuff, just some things I noticed that was interesting to me. Thanks a lot to the whole group for recording and sharing this!