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Rules

Page history last edited by Bolthy 4 years, 6 months ago

Boundaries and Desires

Exclude

Harming kids for cheap emotional impact

Body horror

Active shooters

Spiders

Detailed panic attacks

Birds, living or dead

On-screen sexual violence

Trans villains who are bad because they are trans

Acrimonious antagonism between PCs/non-consensual bullying

Eye trauma

Wants

Utter disregard for OSHA standards

Dating aliens

Inter-PC romance

All over the map in terms of gender and species

Witty banter

The future liberals want

Equal amounts fast-talking/fast-shooting

Rules Summary

General Concepts

Crew: Unless it specifies the crew of a specific ship, the rules call the band of player characters the “crew”.
Cred: An abstract unit of money, equal to a month’s income for a normal person.
Stash: Your nest egg and general level of lifestyle. If you have too many creds, they get rolled over to your stash.

Play Structure

The game revolves around going on a mission, the fallout from the mission, and downtime until the next mission.

The Job

Rather than spending hours of real life planning out the mission, the game is designed to drop you straight into the action.

Plan: You come up with a general approach for how you start (“guns a-blazin’”, “conning our way in”, etc) and then make a roll to determine how well things are actually going.
Load: You don’t specify what gear you are bringing, just how much. As it’s necessary, you can pick items from your resources to indicate what you actually brought.
Flashback: During the job, if there’s something that goes wrong you can have a flashback to when your characters were doing prep work. (“This guy that caught us just now? We bribed him in advance.”)

Fallout

After the mission, the following happens.

The crew gets paid.
They pay upkeep for the ship (or roll to see how the ship is doing because you didn’t pay)
The GM determines how much negative attention you’ve attracted
The GM determines if there are any other problems that occur

Downtime

In between jobs, each member of the crew can take two downtime actions. These are time consuming tasks like “healing an injury” or “training” or “working on a long-term project.” Characters can spend money to get more downtime actions.

Free Play

General roleplay that doesn’t count as part of a job or a downtime action is just “free play.” Chewing scenery, visiting family, having a heart to heart with another PC, etc.

Mechanics

Rolling Dice

You will roll one or more 6-sided dice, and take the highest die.

1-3 is failure with consequences
4-5 is success with consequences
6 is a success without consequences
2 6s is a critical success

Actions and Attributes

Most of your rolls will be based on one of these. Even if you have no dots in an action or attribute, you can still roll.

Actions are what other games would call “skills” and are used in conflicts.
Attributes are used to resist harm or other negative consequences, and are derived from the number of actions you have.

Position and Effect

Position is what other games would call “difficulty”. It defines how much you can get with a success and how bad the consequences are.
Effect is how much impact you get out of a successful roll, modified in a guestimate of how much different factors (potence, quality/tier, scale).

Stress

A measure of strain or fatigue. You can take on Stress in order to:

Push Yourself: Gain an extra die on an action roll or get more effect from a success.
Aid an Ally: Give someone else an extra die on an action roll.
Use Xeno Powers: Accomplish superhuman feats if you are an alien.
Flashback: During a job, you may need to take on stress for a flashback.
Resist Harm/Consequences: Take stress in order to avoid something worse.
Power special abilities in your playbook.

If you get too much Stress, you take on Trauma. If you take on too much Trauma, you are forced to retire from the biz. You reduce stress by indulging in your character’s vice.

Gambit

A resource shared by all of the crew, allows members of the crew to get one more die in a roll.

House Rules

House of Cards: Rumors and Secrets

Stolen from an unpublished game:

Part One:

Rumors and Secrets: Each player should generate one rumor about their character, and one secret about their character. The rumor can be something that is either true or untrue, while the secret must be something true. The two things can be related, or they can be totally separate from one another. For example, it might be rumored that the ship's pilot failed out of flight school, while his secret could be that he has a family that he abandoned. Feel free to embellish the hell out of your secret, but keep your rumors somewhat concise. The GM will also need to know whether the rumor that you generate for yourself is true or false.

Part Two:

We will build the relationships between the members of the crew prior to play, so that there is a little bit of backstory to how you all ended up on the ship. In some cases, it may be as simple as the captain hiring a member of the crew. But even in that is a story, as to why the captain chose that crew member over other possibilities. In other cases, there may be a previous friendship or relationship (romantic or family) that caused one crew member to recruit another crew member.

This phase of character creation will involve you and another of the players defining the relationship between your characters, and assigning an additional rumor to each other's character. The relationships will work in a circular fashion: A and B, B and C, C and D, D and E, and E and A. When all is said and done, we'll know how the captain ended up with his or her motley crew, and each character will have three rumors--the one they chose for themselves, and two more assigned by the players of the characters who know them.

The rumors assigned during this part should also be recorded, but in this case, it is unknown whether the rumors are true or false. That's something that will be addressed in play…

Contributions

Players who provide a contribution gets 1xp at the end of the session. Players who provide two or more contributions get an additional 1xp. (So, a max of 2xp per session for contributions.)

Possible contributions could include: