In the last post, I covered a bit of the terror I felt when trying the whole “public playtest” thing again at Petries’ Family Games. Sure, Cameron was helping out by offering a space and telling folks about it on the website as well as on Facebook, but would it be enough?
Well, apparently it was! John appeared out of nowhere and I think we hit it off. We had a good chat and he must have decided to give it a shot because he had to go back to his car to get his dice and such, and still came back to the table. 🙂
Character Creation
Definitely Not the Drone John Built
He was able to pretty quickly go through the character creation process. He got bogged down picking a second trait, so that’s something we definitely need to look at as far as streamlining. Trait selection seems to be a sticking point.
He picked Roboticist and Robotic Savant, which is fine. Roboticist is a trait in the Technician career and Robotic Savant requires Roboticist — so that works. (Looking at it later, it appears I made “Bits & Bytes” a prereq for “Roboticist” so that’s a small glitch during the character creation process we’ll iron out moving forward.)
Once his character was done, he created a drone. And he took a good amount of time working through some of the traits for the drone as well, though it’s a much shorter list. He went with “Divide & Conquer” and “Lob Weapon” with the intent of being able to arm the drone later (with a knife) and then toss it at an enemy. We also discussed having a spinning blade drone at speed plow through a group of enemies and chop them off at the ankles. It was a good time.
With the drone finished, he grabbed some items. We need to figure out costs for items and a reasonable marketplace — how much does a room cost for the night came up as an example. Is it 500 credits? Tough to pay for when a character starts out with 10x presence (13-18 means 130-180 credits to start with). But he was able to grab the standard list of goodies – combat armor, a pistol and clips, a combat knife, and a toolbox.
Adventuring
Art by Peter Saga
With just a single player, we chose three of the pre-created characters — the medic and two space marines — to accompany him. We decided that one of the space marines had some binoculars that could see heat signatures and they discovered that there were three non-humans and a human signature.
John sent his character (Sean Samsonite) and his drone ( S.S. Prototype 1 ) down to the crater floor. His character rode the drone, which implies an interesting size differential. I had in mind a Roomba-sized drone and he was thinking something large enough to actually ride. 🙂 But it was an impressive entrance — a man standing in full combat armor, feet firmly planted on a rolling platform of potential death and destruction!
That said, he and his group discovered an alien ship, a habitat of some sort, and an antenna. Outside the habitat was a device of some sort (a 6’ x 6’ box with a jar of green goo attached and lots of blinking lights). The technician decided he really wanted that goo!
We’ll continue the action in the next post!
