 March 9, 2018 - 10:24am | Came across my copy of M1 Blizzard Pass today and it got me thinking about solo STar frontier or Frontier Space adventures. Clearly the challenges for an adventure will need to be tailored to the character. For example a Roboticist PC needs robotic challenges not so much combat. where as a miliary PC will engage in combat more readily. So the question is how to craft an adventure. 1. point will be is who is doing the adventure: skills and etc. a low level character will be a greater challenge where as the one solo advneture I wrote up had the PC being a Star Law agent created according to the Dragon article thus even if he was a tech type he was fairly capable of combat. It would be easy to just write another star law adventure using similar parameters as I did in the other one but I'm kind of interested in creating something geared to lower level characters. Thus in the same way Blizzard Pass is geared to a specific class lower level solo adventures probably need to be geared to specific skills ie computers, robotics, demolitions?, medical, environmental, perhaps even psych-social and the final category would be just plain geared toward the military PSA 2. Types and number of challenges: Combat, skill challenges, problem solving, puzzles, role play, assembling clues A timer may be part of the challenge: must complete the mission in so many turns or you fail. This forces players to not commit unlimited amounts of time to solving something. they must ration their time. for non combat types I would present combat opportunities that should and can be avoided- exp bonus for avoiding the combat. 2 maybe 3 of these although maybe one combat encounter that cant be avoided. puzzles are always problematic problem solving can be problematic but offer opportunities for creativeness: you need to patch a whole in the hull but have no plas-steel patches what you gonna do. assembling clues- they need to be developed and seeded amongst the skill, role play, and other challenges. 3. my previous solo adventure in the FE was truly solo: 1 player no referee- done in the style of pic your path books. for simplicity I'm thinking one player and one referee althought any entrerprising reff can certainly adapt to a party. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 March 9, 2018 - 1:09pm | Don't assume you know what skills the player will have. Present challenges that can be overcome with certain skills, but don't require that the challenge be overcome for the adventure to proceed. When investigating a spooky, abandoned base haunted by a ravenous alien, if the player comes upon a robot that might suddenly activate and attack, a roboticist might be able to reprogram it without any trouble, while other characters have to shoot it or find some other way to neutralize it. The roboticist now has a robotic ally, while anyone else just goes on as they were. Basically, skills act as tools to gain advantages or avoid losing resources; they don't act as doorways to further parts of the adventure. |
March 11, 2018 - 10:25am | @ Storm Crow: Your right of course but I was looking at Blizzard Pass for comparison and the D&D modules of this type were designed for a specific starting character class; in Blizzard its a thief and its companion module I believe it was a cleric (I've never seen that one). This model is harder to do in SF as you'd have to do it specifically for a skill like medical, robotics, technician or computers although you could do it for the military PSA because killing stuff is just plain killing stuff it doesn't really matter how you do it. Blizzard Pass is of course a gimmic in that you use the pen to reveal the hidden writing to find out what happens when you make choices in the adventure. I think it might be easiest to do with robotics and med skill. Although, one might do a conversion of the Movie "I, Robot" and use an advanced character ala Star Law agent creation rules. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
March 11, 2018 - 10:43am | Trying to wrap my head around a good concept for this but not really able to pull one together. Unless its the PC is the team leader and directs a team of NPCs: Example MSO team sent to discover the cause of 60% of a community become sick. PC is Team leader and lets say he has medical skill. NPC on the team would be an environmentalist and thus he could be directed to analyze samples and investigate envirnomental factors another NPC is the councilor (psych-social skill) and can be directed to do psych-social things with the patients acting crazy trying to determine triggers and cause. NPCs simply act as an extension of the PC. Or PC has a robotic companion that has a program that lets him cover an skill area that the PC doesn't have. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 March 12, 2018 - 10:09am | What was the Basic solo adventure module? It had an invisible ink pen and was written in choose-your-own-adventure format. That was definitely a universal-class module. |
March 12, 2018 - 9:40pm | What was the Basic solo adventure module? It had an invisible ink pen and was written in choose-your-own-adventure format. That was definitely a universal-class module. MSOLO 2 Maze of the Riddling Minotaur Characters level 1-10 any class. Though from what i read it seems rather dangerous for lower level characters. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 March 21, 2018 - 12:26pm | Recently, an OGL 2D6 Sci-Fi game system called Cepheus Engine has gained a lot of traction with classic 2d6 sci-fi RPG fans. One of the publishers for it, a guy named Paul Elliott writing as Zozer Games has made a very nice solo campaign framework using the trade and combat aspects of Cepheus: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/207164/Solo The fundamentals of Solo would be very easy to adapt to a Star Frontiers/Frontier Space solo campaign engine, especially using the "Tote That Barge" and "Rare Wines and Ready Cash" trade articles from Dragon. |
