Hi everyone! I am the current GM in a game of Coriolis. We are quite new to the game; before this we played Tales from the Loop for about a year and really liked it. So far we have played through the adventure in the core book (The Statuette of Zhar & Terenganu Valley) and The Dying Ship, which ended in an epic space fight where the party had to board the mercenaries ship in order to stop the Djinn from escaping to Kua on it. It was pretty awesome.
And yet, I am hesitating whether I actually want to continue the campaign. The problem I have is not with the setting which is great and very evocative, I could see myself running several long-term campaigns in it. Rather after coming from TftL, many of the mechanics of Coriolis left a sour taste. Below are some of the pain points we encountered:
- The choice of skills does not match well with how we played the game: several skills were basically never used (Survival, Dexterity, Science), while others were used all the time. In particular, Manipulation was the all-mighty god skill that was used to resolve >50% of high-stakes situations.
- Several of the "advanced" skills don't feel like they should be limited to trained characters only, in particular for Culture and Medicurgy I got the reaction "wait what why wouldn't my character be able to know/do this?" several times.
- The equipment lists are just way too long and badly organized, which actually stops us from improvising and having fun. It's just no fun to have to look up each time whether a particular item is something that would just make sense for a character in this world to have, or something important/expensive they should've thought of buying.
- The combat system is brutal (which I don't mind) but also felt quite boring (which I do mind) since there are often not many choice points beyond which enemy to target. Instead there's a lot of fiddly modifiers to attack rolls and damage that take time to calculate but don't really make it any more interesting. I either want a combat system with some actual tactical choice (e.g. D&D 4E) or a more abstract system where the whole combat is over in one or two rolls (e.g. TftL). (This is not a complaint about the spaceship combat, which we only did once but I actually quite liked since it has some interesting tactical choice.)
- The questions to gain XP all felt weird and/or vague to us, which lead to answers like "Uhm, I guess you can get an XP for this?" or "I don't think like I deserve an XP for this, but I'm not sure". Especially the last question ("Did you act in accordance with your Icon?") we never knew because nowhere it is spelled out what each Icon actually stands for or what kinds of actions they would approve of.
- Darkness Points felt like a great mechanic at first, however they tend to cause a negative downwards spiral: when the PCs are in a desperate situation they would pray on every failed roll out of necessity, which in turn flooded me with DP to spend, which ended up making the situation even more desperate. This goes counter to my usual style of DMing where I add more complications when things are going easy, but tend to go a little easier on the party when they are already having a hard time.
In the end, most of these complaints boil down to me hoping that Coriolis would be like Tales from the Loop but in space with cool spaceships and perhaps a bit more crunchy combat, and it not really being that game. Despite that I really did enjoy playing it and would like to continue to do so. So here are a few questions for you:
1. Do you recognize any of the problems I listed above in your own games?
2. Are we doing something importantly wrong in how we play the game, or did we miss any important rules?
3. Do you have any suggestions on parts of the rules we could change/replace/ignore to increase out enjoyment without that breaking the essence of the game?
I'm curious to hear your thoughts!