Posted March 09, 2024 by David J Prokopetz
The most consistent piece of playtest feedback I've been getting on Space Gerbils is that the Action Phase sucks, on two counts:
There've also been reports, where drafts 0.1 and 0.2 would often become unplayable due to the play grid filling up with broken stations, drafts 0.3 and 0.4 have swung too far in the opposite direction and made complications too easy to mitigate. It's unclear whether this is due to the Action Phase's mechanics not throwing complications frequently enough, or due to the Fallout Phase not assessing those complications harshly enough; probably it's a mix of both.
Fortunately, the game's modular nature means that it's actually fairly trivial to rip out the current Action Phase procedures and replace them with something else; very little of the rest of the system would have to change. The trick is figuring out what that should look like.
The most obvious routes involve introducing individual actions in the Action Phase, but that's exactly what we don't want; mechanically, because we just made each gerbil perform a tactical action in the Operations Phase, and doing it twice in a row would double the handling time of an already ponderous system; and thematically, because acting "as" the gerbils' singular assumed persona after doing all that setup as individuals is kind of the whole point!
In balance, this is a good problem to have, because I enjoy designing stupid minigames.
As for what that hypothetical Action Phase minigame might look like, I keep coming back to the idea of taking a page from Gone to Hell and formalising the presently-optional rule that the players should take turns "being" the bounty hunter persona in each Action Phase. That would definitely help with sorting out the forthcoming rules for GMless play, since the players whose "turn" it isn't could step into the encounter management roll. However, that leaves the off-turn players twiddling their thumbs every Action Phase in GMful play, which in turns means either having two separate sets of Action Phase procedures for GMful and GMless play, or biting the bullet and making Space Gerbils exclusively GMless, neither of which terribly appeals.
This post is mostly just me thinking out loud, so I don't expect anyone to have an opinion, but as always, I'm open to suggestions!