If anyone runs Meteor please give your feedback here!
I'd like to know what module you ran (if any), how character creation felt, how players took to the system, and if there were any sticking points or confusion anywhere in the process. Plus any other thoughts or opinions!
I'm especially interested in feedback on ship navigation and combat, since I've playtested that the least.
Now that one is in that as an obscure sci fi reference and should really be taken out.
It’s from the book Voyage of the Space Beagle by A. E. van Vogt which I believe to be a direct inspiration for the film Alien (although everyone involved with the movie denies this and also the book is honestly pretty bad).
Nexialism is described as being sort of the “meta science”, the idea that all other fields of science are merely a small part of a larger whole, and nexialism is the generalist study of that larger thing. Honestly not sure how you’d use it in play, since it’s either worthless or way too broad. When I was making the original Skills list I was having some trouble filling out the full 36 so some of the entries are weaker, or merely references to things, and this is one of them.
I finally had a chance to run Meteor as a one shot. We ran through Moonbase Blues and everyone had a blast. I'll keep scenario specifics vague to avoid spoilers.
We had a Labcoat, Synth, and Wrench, all at mid to low stat ranges. At character creation, we got a bit unlucky as nobody rolled any Cybernetics aside from the 4 arms for our Synth. As such, we didn't have much interaction with augments and the fatigue subsystem. There were also a few rerolls on the random skill table as two players rolled nexialism.
Undefined skills were an interesting concept but it did seem like a get out of jail free card for some of the players. They had a few situations where they bypassed some complex problems by just cashing in a new skill. This also led to players avoiding the use of their background abilities. Defined skills are likely to have more use in a module and had less of a concrete cost than the resolve needed for abilities. That said, the subsystem helped with pacing, and tied in well with the module's themes of amnesia, even if things were a bit anticlimactic at times. I feel that these may have been better served in a longer term game.
Stress was an odd one. It may have been my pacing, the players' use of undefined skills over background abilities, or my reliance in resolve saves for stress damage but we only had one instance of panic in our two 3-hour sessions. It was right at the very end of the scenario and led to a memorable finale as a player turned in his companion. How does stress flow from your experience? The system seemed to have much less buildup than our group's experience with games like Alien and MOSH. Just straight 0-100 but oh boy was that quite a trip.
It may sound overly critical but we did have a ton of fun. Characters were up and running in no time and the tables gave a ton of useful flavor. We are looking forward to the expanded materials and will definitely be giving Meteor another go in the future.
Hey, thanks so much for this detailed feedback! I really appreciate you taking the time to write all this up.
First, think you for reminding me I need to update the random skills table to remove my “cute” reference skills and replace them with something actually useful.
Undefined skills do have that danger of being so flexible everything feels too easy. It’s hard to split the difference between “interesting specificity” and keeping things fast and flexible enough that you don’t get bogged down making decisions during character creation. It might be dialed a bit too far towards flexibility currently, especially because the tables I usually playtest with tend to spend them as often on jokes as on useful skills.
The stress system is another one that I’m not sure is dialed in properly. I honestly don’t engage with it in every Meteor game I run, just ones that are intended to focus on stress and horror. When I have used it, I felt the pacing went okay, but it’s so heavily dependent on the scenario, dice rolls, and GM calls that it could go in a lot of ways. If nothing else it would probably benefit from expanded GM guidance to help with dialing it in to the proper pace at a given table. My intent is sort of a slow simmer until it suddenly boils over in a dramatic explosion, but that transition might be too sudden.
Glad it went well overall and everyone had fun though! This is good feedback and will give me things to chew on as I start digging back into the design of Meteor.
I'm looking forward to what you add going forward.!
For Stress, if you're familiar with the module, it was 1d6-1d8 inflicted after a resolve save for each new encounter with the Meteor-mad colonists. ~1-3 checks per room depending on their interactions. Severity depended on how "unnatural" the NPCs were. Direct interactions with the module's "bad thing" were 1d10. Overall it felt like there were quite a few lucky rolls with passed saves and low stress damage.
On another note, I was wondering how you rule firearm combat inside spacecraft. We did have a shootout inside of a lander module as part of the finale. With no to-hit rolls in most MotO games, I just wasn't sure on how to incorporate thar additional risk of collateral damage without it feeling forced or excessive.
Yeah, currently the stress system is very swingy, which is very in line with general ITO/Cairn mechanics but might be more all or nothing than is optimal. Really just needs more play testing generally to dial in.
Firefight inside a ship is a good question. Usually I’d just assume that hand weapons can’t hurt a ship, but in this case I think it’d be fun to play up the risk.
My first thought was to say that rolling max damage on any attack roll causes damage to the ship (or maybe 6+ damage). Or a luck roll on every attack unless they’re specifically being careful (and therefore impairing the rolls). This does make me realize I haven’t actually included the luck roll as an explicit mechanic in Meteor. Gotta put that on the to do list.
