Played our next episode of Galactic yesterday afternoon/evening. We didn’t really get kicking off until an hour and a half into the supposed play time — but it was good socializing fun.
The game? Well, we got through a full cycle of turns, which was an accomplishment. We’re beginning to get a feel for the mechanics. We’re …
Okay, I’m gathering a couple of impressions, albeit tentative ones:
On the good side, Galactic has a great mechanic (crew members) for keeping everyone at the table involved. Part of that may stem from our original generation of crew members, though, with “secrets” (that aspect seems to be downplayed in the current iterations), but it’s still clever. The setting also has some positives.
On the other hand, I think the system is too … many notes. Or, rather, too many mechanics. If I look at all the stuff on the character sheet I need to check off, track, monitor, recover from, etc., and all the things I can bring in at various times in a conflict, it begins to get a bit tricksy. Plus, as Margie points out, any system that calls on you to roll dice low sometimes, high other times, is too clever for its own good.
All of the mechanics, btw, make sense. There’s just a lot of them checked through every conflict.
We’re also still feeling our way through narrating conflicts vs. RP. A drawback to a conflict-based system (aside from more complex mechanics, since it has to account for a bunch of stuff in a given die roll or set thereof) is that you spend a fair amount of time talking around what’s going on — what’s the conflict, what are the stakes, what are we bringing in for different dice (captain and crew and gear and ship and etc.) — vs. actually doing character stuff. And, of course, there’s that story-telling vs role-playing axis kind of thing. I have a better feel now for Amanda Tillotson as a character, but most of that came from my actually playing her than the conflict we generated. The question then becoming, how if that’s what you want, do you RP a conflict and resolve it both well and meaningfully.
Again, there’s still a familiarity factor here. And this is still a playtest, so your (and even my) mileage may vary. And I’m definitely looking forward to further games.
Doyce has the game log, etc., all posted.
And Doyce’s write-up reminded me again that there were bits that I enjoyed a great deal (Amanda’s speaking roles — channeling a young Katherine Janeway, with a bit a gleam in her eye — plus snotty Viktor and laid-back Tam), amongst the mechanics (and the chit-chat).
Only point that rubbed wrong was Doyce taking on Tam, as though he were an NPC, for a certain plot point. I think that’s a — well, not danger, but aspect of the “crew” as “lesser PCs” that’s something that could easily be too easy for the GM to do.
Note: Doyce didn’t have Tam do anything he wouldn’t have done with the right info, and, in fact, that probably saved time (and I didn’t really say anything at the time). But it still felt like my PC got yanked out of my hands, and I don’t think he would have done that with Amanda.