Fuck the King of Space: Post Mortem

We played the last session of Fuck the King of Space on December 29th, 2018. The game ran for about a year, with a total of 23 sessions played.

I decided to end the campaign for a few reasons. The biggest of which was just my available energy. I said during my original campaign pitch that it was a stupid idea for me to agree to run a second campaign, and I was right. I already struggle to find enough time to make ORWA a good game. I never managed to devote much at all to FKOS, and play suffered because of that. Within just a few months the game went from weekly to biweekly. That helped a lot–and thanks are due to Chris H. for offering to run during my off weeks!–but even with that help I wasn’t keeping up.

There were other factors as well. My intent had been for FKOS to be vastly different from ORWA. I wanted some variety on my end. In practice my work wound up being pretty much the same. Not because ORWA’s back end systems were a good fit for FKOS, but because I never worked out what FKOS’s own back end systems should look like. There were also interpersonal conflicts, personal tragedies, and lots of folks being seriously overworked, which made it difficult to get enough people together for a session during the latter half of 2018.

That’s not to say it was a bad campaign; all good things must end. We enjoyed 23 entertaining sessions which I was mostly pretty happy with. That said; campaigns never end because of what did work about them. So now is as good a time as there will ever bo to look back over what didn’t work so it can be improved if I ever attempt the game again.

There’s Too Much Space in Space. I never realized before running FKOS how much of a blessing ORWA’s intensely confined spaces are. When the entire game takes place within a 6-mile dome it makes sense to run the world like a megadungeon. Of course there’s some weird new thing lurking around every corner, behind every door, and beneath every manhole cover. The world is built on that kind of density, and I’ve come to rely on it for how I run my game.

That doesn’t work in space, but I did it anyway. Players constantly stumbled across lost planets, weird phenomena, other starships, and it always felt hacky. I failed to leverage the gameplay to communicate the setting. Space shouldn’t be empty–we are playing an adventure game after all–but it shouldn’t feel crowded either.

When the players have an interstellar space ship with an advanced FTL drive, it makes it difficult to:

1. Communicate the scale of the distances traveled.
2. Have them encounter the unexpected.

The first point can be mitigated somewhat with fuel consumption, but “You expend 30 fuel getting there” still feels like hand waving. Perhaps ships should need to refuel more often, thus forcing the players to interact with environments along the way. Alternately, “Travel Turns” might be added as a sort of limited version of the Haven Turn. The players have a lot of downtime, but their resources are limited to whatever is with them on the ship.

Encountering the unexpected during travel might be something I need to mostly give up on. It could still happen now and again, but I don’t think it ought to be a primary driver of play. Instead of using random encounters as a way of hooking players into adventures, I could use similar tables to generate rumors and job offers at various ports. It’s less interesting to hear “there’s a dragon over that hill” than it is to simply bump into a dragon while you’re in the hills, but it’s probably a better fit for space.

Even with my later revisions, Space Ships did not work. As I always do I started out with something that was way more complicated than it needed to be, and over the last year have learned how unnecessary most of it was. It’s a habit I need to break myself of. Writing complicated rules I’ll never use is not an efficient use of my time.

Turning “Space” and “Power” into resources was more trouble than it was worth, and I could never figure out how to make either into an effective limit on the player’s desires. Hull points offered too much protection between the party and any real danger to their ship. The codified modules were just…too much. I really should have known better.

If I were to redesign the system there’d be no hull points. Each hit in combat would reduce the ship’s functionality in some way. Many of the things on the modules list would become assumed parts of the ship (cockpits, engines, crew quarters), and modifications like adding a science lab would be handled in a more ad-hoc manner.

Weapons didn’t work in kinda the same way Space Ships didn’t. I had an over-complicated approach. Unlike Space Ships, the downfall of the system is that I never codified fukkin’ anything. The players were walking around with weapons that supposedly had quirks and special purposes, but neither they nor I had any idea what those were. Like I said above, I just never had the energy to give this game the attention it deserved. I still think the idea of restricting all weapons to d6 damage is a good one. I’ve certainly seen it work. I also still like the idea of differentiating weapons through their secondary properties, but like space ship modules I think that ought to be handled as an ad-hoc consideration. Your axe doesn’t have the “Also chops trees” special ability. It’s just an axe, and you know how axes work, so if there’s a tree to be chopped down you can say “Hey, I have an axe, can I get a bonus?”

I wonder if part of the issue here is that I tend to work through my problems by writing about them, and I have certain expectations for how long a piece of writing should be, which leads me to over-solve my problems. Something for me to think about.

Magic Words oddly enough, did not work well in this game. It’s a system I’ve used successfully for years, but FKOS put it to a whole new kind of stress test with two highly skilled and efficient players both running as magic users. My sketchy draft for Magic Words 2 was partially written in response to this problem, and I have yet newer ideas I hope to discuss soon.

Finally, The Setting didn’t work, which is again a matter of how little time I was able to spend on it. I’ve got notes somewhere about how the universe breaks down into several factions that all nominally work for the King, but are at odds with each other. There was going to be a powerful university structure called “The League of Distinguished Academics.” “The King’s Loyal Soldiers” were going to be this monstrous military machine without enough enemies to fight. The fact that I can’t remember all six (six?) factions off the top of my head is testament to how poorly they were communicated through he actual play of the game.

This is real disappointing for me. Figuring out how these factions worked with and against one another was what made me most excited about the campaign, and now they may well never be put to any use.

I hope one of these days I have the opportunity to give Fuck the King of Space the attention it really deserved. C’est la vie.