fullyautomated

@andrewrgross Pretty much! To be clear: I'm not saying that all of these need rules, but that trusting the GM/the group to make searches interesting, but not fights, is a massive design choice. Somebody mentioned that #FullyAutomated wants to be an OSR game. For that kind of game, “rules light outside fights” is totally a sensible&obvious design. So I guess I'm just very surprised overall that a Solarpunk game would want to go Old School instead of creating rules for new types of narratives.

Even for interesting and coherent investigation and negotiation (which are topics of the campaigns) the #FullyAutomated GM needs to be “incredibly skilled”. That's before getting to the classical #Solarpunk topics of communities, differing views, social and technological infrastructure, ecology, and transformation. That is despite a multitude of games exploring one or more of these topics in their mechanics in detail. I find this quite disappointing and will not delve further. 8/8

The #FullyAutomated rules make up about 75 pages in the book. Despite the campaign's investigation focus, there is nothing on investigation in the ToC, neither on the player nor on the GM side. Stuff is about 20 pages, the combat and health rules are another 20. Add a general outline for Skidooing (diving into someone's mind) and some generic rules for research in downtime, and that's pretty much the mechanics after character creation. The GM section contains only advice, no rules. 7/8

#FullyAutomated's campaigns (https://drive.google.com/file/d/18SV2sVrwsbT480cAtAQ4G59Ckbyz7c6-/view) talk about various flavors of violence (fight/feud/assassination/abducting) and otherwise focusses on different styles of investigations, from data heists to searching for cures. They have a classical mission structure, with briefings and debriefings and a rather linear structure in between. 6/8

The game looks extremely traditional so far, and that's really not interesting to me. At this point I would give up on a game and not delve deeper – and I haven't even looked at the actual rules yet. But for #FullyAutomated, I'll go a bit further. There is a starter campaign, so I can at least look at the kind of stories it wants to tell; and I can at least skim through the rule book to see whether any interesting things jump out at me that I might want to consider for playing #Solarpunk. 5/8

The character sheet has three pages. The first page indicates a very traditional game with stats and skills, a combat focus, and fluff (though a lot of it) cramped into the remaining space. The second page is pretty redundant with the first one and looks like it has no mechanical effects. The third one is full of combat options with formal terms that strongly assume a hex grid and HP, the interesting thing is that the relevant gear seems to be restricted to 6 double slots. #FullyAutomated 4/8

“Knowing that a fight is possible […] makes the risk of violence more present from the metagame perspective of players.” I don't think I have seen a game where rules are there to not be used, and I have my doubts it can work here. In particular with combat taking up about 1/3 of the 3-page character sheet. Are there effective rules also for other domains where “it doesn’t work. It’s completely subjective. It takes an incredibly skilled GM to make it interesting or coherent.”? #FullyAutomated 3/8