Author’s Diary for August 28, 2020

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Featured Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Well, we’ve finished the Hazards chapter in Covenant’s playtest rules and started the Fighting chapter this week. Find our more below the fold.

We would have finished the Hazards chapter sooner, but we kept adding stuff to it. It now has six sections:

• Falling: How your character takes damage from falls
• Strangulation: How your character takes damage from a lack of oxygen or being exposed to vacuum
• Escaping Restraints: How your character can escape restraints, like handcuffs, ropes, or nets
• Food and Water: How your character takes damage from a lack of food and water
• Survival: How your character takes damage from the environment and can find food and water in the wild
• Exhaustion: How your character takes damage from heavy physical or mental labor or from lack of sleep

Most of these boil down to making a resistance bid against the damage (except for escaping restraints, which is an escape bid). This may point the way to simplifying and compressing these rules in the near future.

Whether players actually need all these rules is anyone’s guess. Sean had in mind a party being marooned on a planet, like the Star Frontiers module Crash on Volturnus, when he was writing these, so they may have some use in a science-fiction game. Only time and playtesting will tell.

We also started work on the Fighting chapter, which is where where most roleplaying games seem to spend 90 percent of their time. We’re hoping to break that trend with Covenant. We want fighting to be just one of many viable options that players have to resolve problems. Sometimes you have to fight, but sometimes you can avoid it.

Anyway, that’s if for today. Talk to you next week!