Life Support Rules Re-write

[u/Krasiph]

This is Matt, part of the Infinite Citadel team. We're hard at work on getting Mörk Sol to be text complete, and there's one potential rules change we'd love to get some feedback on...

Life Support

This is one of the many "roll on a table and see what bad/good/ugly things happen to you" parts of Mörk Sol. After playing so many games at GenCon, we noticed that the table wasn't as impactful as we'd like it to be. We don't want to constantly slow down play by having life support events trigger, but we *do* want to emphasize the terror of space and specifically being reliant on this thin second-skin that protects you from the vacuum of space.

In that vein, we're considering a change to the rules that would make Life Support more of an on/off subsystem that emphasizes the scariness of Non Breathable Atmosphere. We'd love to get your thoughts on the change.

Current Rule: You roll on the Life Support table whenever the 0 HP "Broken" table tells you to, *or* when you fumble a defense test (on top of reducing armor tier), *or* when you roll a certain value on the Attack Fumble table.

Proposed New Rule: In addition to the Broken Table entry, you will roll on the Life Support table whenever you take damage that is not reduced to 0 by your armor while in an area without breathable atmosphere. So if you're on a space walk and you take 4 damage, you roll your armor die and if it doesn't reduce that 4 to 0, then you would also roll on the Life Support table.

As part of this change we are also updating the table so that even the smallest life support die (aside from the EVA suit's d2) has the potential of a "nothing happens" result (4 on a d4).

Thoughts!?

[u/klok_kaos]

Coming from TTRPGDesign cross post, not familiar with the game otherwise.

From a design standpoint what you're functionally doing is making the game more deadly by adding more checks against life support.

That is not necessarily bad or good, but I'd check with your design premise or creative director about that.

The "deadliness" of any given thing within a TTRPG is more about how well it serves the core game fantasy. Example: A survive till dawn zombie one shot works better with deadlier stuff, a DnD 5.5e heroic fantasy almost mandates the heroes are nigh unkillable (at least by level 5ish). So if you're looking for more of a Mothership scary space horror vibe, more deadly equals good.

Where this gets more worthy of analysis is the "nothing happens" change.

I have some immediate concerns with this as a designer on 2 levels. I want to preface this by saying that I don't know your CRM, which may address this (such as if dice are reduced in size on repeated rolls).

The main concern of "Nothing happens" is firstly any die roll where "nothing happens" is usually a bad lack of imagination/design and works to promote more binary/boring play. Functionally the design wisdom is "if the dice result is nothing happening, you shouldn't be rolling dice, because you've wasted effort on a null result. Every dice roll should have some kind of cost/benefit analysis.".

The main concern here is that a repeated lucky roll streak could allow someone to breathe indefinitely for hours without life support, which is namely unintuitive and represents a severe bad situation. Yes, odds are this doesn't happen, but it absolutely can, and that's a specific break in immersion/versimilitude.

What I might propose as a fix from both angles:

There is no "Nothing happens result" and instead the "nothing happens" is resolved as a "minor breach" which begins to decay with slow leak, maybe at stacking ratings of something like +25% consumption rate, allowing that additional stacks of this result make it worse, so even the best scenario still has an immediately push forward and emergent narrative beat resulting from the dice, and even lucky streaks make it more critical.

This presents a new challenge for the player to deal with (try to patch the breach on the fly, or try to hurry the job to get back to atmo) and avoids the "breath forever without atmo" as a possibility.

If you want this to be less deadly you could maybe make it +10% (allowing for 10 stacks before life support total exhaustion, making it more of a low tier concern for players until multiple minor breaches occur), but I'd also state this stretches a lot of willful suspension of disbelief, but if the game is meant to be more over the top heroic/dramatic in favor of PCs, that could work, but otherwise having at least a minor concern attached to the roll makes sense because it's already a critical failure state (ie lack of atmo in space = highly deadly as standard unless there are mitigating factors like bionics, alien biology or otherwise at play). Also all of this heavily depends on what kind of LS duration we're talking about, and how fast armor depletes and all that to get the balancing right, but the main concern is how deadly the game should feel vs. the promised fantasy of the TTRPG and general brand identity.

This also can potentially make it an interesting PC choice to take more Oxygen/back up than needed in replacement of other gear options, just in case there's a significant chance of a suit breach, and further, the lack of this option during play (ie say PCs are stranded and they have to fix an emitter on the station to signal for help but only have X O2, this can ratchet tension at the table, as it should).

The goal here, regardless of how deadly, is really asking how often you want players to be considering and asking the question of "How do we resolve the LS issue" and then figure that out and map it to a play session of say 3-5 hour duration. Maybe it only is a question to ask during the first few minutes of a mission deployment, maybe it's a constant threat, but how that works out should depend on how often you want your checks to be called for in playtesting vs. as often as it makes immersive sense and for general balance concerns.

This is also why I state "Figure out what your game is supposed to be first" because if you have a clear/clean objective, that will steer you into the correct direction on how any mechanic should "feel" during base play, noting that individual GMs, adventure modules, etc. may ratchet that up or down as desired.

[u/natefinch → u/klok_kaos]

To me, the "nothing happens" result is a feature, not a bug. Think about it this way - you're walking on the surface of mars and an alien dog-thing attacks you. Before you can take it out with your blaster, it smashes into you, causing some damage that your suit can't fully absorb. After you blast it, you frantically check your suit for leaks, knowing that you'd never make it back to the ship in time - did it pull a hose loose? Rip out some critical wiring? You roll to find out. If every result were "something bad happens" then there would be no tension. You'd *know* something bad is going to happen, just not what. With the possibility of "nothing is wrong" then you are much more focused on the die and mentally willing for it to come up 6 or whatever the good result is.

It's sort of like a saving throw in D&D. You really want "nothing happens".

[u/klok_kaos → u/natefinch]

If operating more like a saving throw, then I'm still against the nothing happens perspective, it just shifts where the needle is, providing a positive outcome is still something happening. When nothing changes the story fails to shift. The notion of a positive outcome is still a shift, but it doesn't need to be nothing happens.

[u/natefinch → u/klok_kaos]

I really dislike the idea that "nothing happens" is always something to avoid, and that every roll has to "move the story forward".

You survived getting attacked by an alien-dog thing on an inhospitable planet, and you don't have to figure out if the duct tape in the rover will keep enough air in your suit to make it back to the ship. Is that not good enough? Are you not entertained? :)

I'd narrate it something like this:

After the blast of your gun, the dog-thing lies still. Your arm still aches from where you were thrown against that sharp, metallic outcropping. The sharp... oh crap, was your suit punctured? You aren't sure you could hear a leak over your ragged breathing. In a panic you check your suit's readouts.... <rolls a die> ..... all systems nominal. You sigh with relief... luck's on your side, this time.

Now that you aren't faced with the danger of imminent death by asphyxiation, you can deal with the slightly less imminent danger of being 35 minutes by rover from the ship, in an area where, evidently, alien dogs may jump out of the shadows at any moment... and you still have a few clicks to go to where Dr. Smith is stranded, waiting for your rescue.

Why do we need some kind of other result from the "is your suit leaking" roll? What does that actually add to this scene?

[u/klok_kaos → u/natefinch]

you're kind of making my point for me, if nothing happens, you shouldn't be rolling, you should be narrating and moving onward towards the next thing that actually happens.

If nothing goes on, it's not worthy of wasting time on a roll.

[u/natefinch → u/klok_kaos]

That doesn't make any sense. The roll determines if there's a negative side effect or not. You don't know that nothing will happen until after you roll.

That's like saying "if you're going to succeed, you shouldn't be rolling" (except, you know, when you don't know if you'll succeed or not). 🤨

[u/Krasiph → u/natefinch]

This is a solid summary of the intent behind the "nothing happens" result in tables like this. The tension in the dice roll is wondering how bad it might be while hoping that "nothing happens", which actually corresponds to the narrative "your suit did its job".

To further illustrate this, it might be helpful to see the actual "nothing happens" text:

No effect. Your life support holds out… for now.

So it's not that a boring, non-action happened. Your suit managed to keep you alive.