[RPG]: Cold Space, reviewed by Kyle (4/3) [Archive]

flyingmice

06-02-2006, 08:30 AM

Hi Kyle!

Some points:

First, a factual error I should clear up. You misunderstood initiative,which is, of course, my fault. I should have explained it better. Initiative, chance of success AKA "To Hit" in combat, and quality of success AKA "Damage" in combat, all use the same distribution - percentile. You can trade points between them, pushing your initiative faster by hurrying your shot and taking a penalty to your chance, or taking your time, going on a later initiative to add a bonus to your chance or your quality, or taking a more difficult shot with a penalty to your chance and applying the points as a bonus to your quality, or whatever combination you want to pursue. Only PCs can do this, givng them an advantage.

The following were design decisions. These are given to show why we did what we did.

The template charaters are primarily intended as quick NPCs which you can also use as PCs if you want, thus they are in the NPC section. By the way, in the sequel game, FTL Now, we placed the Template characters in the Chargen section, as they are designed to be used primarily as PCs, though you can create NPCs with them as well. The change is basically in emphasis.

When you open a game book, you can usually tell what the game is about by looking at the emphasis placed on various points. Looking at the weapons list, you can see that Cold Space is not primarily about fighting. The largest, most comprehensive section is on character generation, which is, indeed, what the game is about - the characters. The weapons in Cold Space are very bland and generic on purpose - they are meant to be abstract. The basics are covered, and that's all we cared about. The StarCluster Weapons Design Guide supplement allows you to customize these weapons if you wish a bit more variety, but it's not something we wanted to emphasize in the core book. Far too often, the endless lists of weapons with minor variations comes to resemble gun porn rather than equipment choices.

It's unfortunate about the maps in the printed version. That is an artifact of the printing resolution in greyscale, and was pretty much unavoidable. Printing the book in color in low quantities would have resulted in a book which was too expensive for anyone to buy.

As for the distances between stars, it was, unfortunately, assumed you'd use the AstroSynthesis file included with the pdf - and available from our website for print customers. We got smarter in the sequel - FTL Now includes distances to the Solar System from each of the settled stars in the core book.

As for the costs for spaceships - they are all way too expensive for anyone but a government or a multinational to purchase, thus we decided costs were useless - no PC is going to own his or her own spaceship anyway. The GM and players should just create what they want regardless of costs. That's the way governments work. :D

All in all, an excellent review - detailed, in depth, and thorough. Wonderful job! Thank you!

-clash