I think you might be misinterpreting/overcomplicating my initial point. What I'm proposing is basically a section near the placement (or maybe not, depends) of the sheet its reference. This section has the little "title three to four sentences" layout found in table result explanations throughout the rulebooks, with the title being the section of the sheet, and the explanation telling you its importance/where to look for it. for example(s):
(Mission Record Sheet)
Faction Events Events- triggered in the Mission Plan chapter of This Space Intentionally or through Trouble- that relate to changes in the factions of 60 Years In Space.
(Faction Record Sheet)
Doctrines Major and minor ideological concepts that make up the ideology of a colonist faction, found in the Primary Colonist chapter of the Crewed Rules.
It wouldn't be as much of a digital player aid as it would be part of the book itself. They really only need to be a sentence long. I'd do them all myself if I could, but this whole thing is being brought up cause there's some stuff on the record sheets that I have no idea what they are used for even after countless searches and over a year of learning this game.
Tbh, I feel stuff like this is the biggest thing holding the game back right now. Its such a massive plethora of rules, that it has to be written in a way where you can navigate the rules instead of learning them. But it currently doesn't have all the infrastructure it needs to do that. There are things are referenced, shown, etc etc, with no 'address' (though obviously this is not the case for everything, I'd say around 35% of the rules/mechanics have this problem, so not a ton, but enough to impact the quality of the game) and the reader is then left wandering around hoping to come across the answer, which could be in another book entirely!
I was creating an earthside colonist faction earlier for my latest game (since I've been bored out of my mind and want to try out the new exoglobalization stuff- though still starting in upported) and when I got to the part of generating the name for the colony (the independent guys, forget their 'full' name), it talked about how you roll on the table on the next page. But then it started talking about generating nationalities, and religions, etc etc. And i was like 'huh, where do I put all this stuff on the faction record sheet? its in the same paragraph as the name, so surely it goes on the same sheet' and it took me a long while to realize that it doesnt go on any sheet and is really only brought up if another mechanic asks for those pieces of data. I had quickly ctrl+f'd through all six books to see if i recorded them anywhere else and found nothing. which was fine, took me maybe a minute. but if someone was using these books physically, or didnt have access to something like ctrl+f, thats now 2,000 pages that they have to look through manually. now of course there is the appendix but ive found thats not always super helpful either.
another example, is that me and my tiny niche group of like two friends that also like this game, are constantly bickering over what qualifies as Chrome, because the rulebook constantly switches between rules and fluff, and its hard to tell which is which. so when the rulebook says that equipment you own is chrome, my brain sees the crunchy-ness of the rulebook and thinks 'oh there must be some list of equipment and how its used so that chrome-usage is balanced. but nah, you just gotta logic your way through if you should have chrome or not half the time. which id imagine can be pretty unhelpful when the person trying to decide is someone who is not well versed in what the action they are doing actually is. like sure i know that i get chrome on my raygun prospect op because im using analytical data from the sat to determine potential useful chemicals and minerals in the regolith. cause im literally majoring in that! but if thats stated anywhere in the rulebook, its buried in fluff and not clear, and anyone who isnt me (and doesnt have a general knowledge of how space industrialization works) is not gonna know whats going on.
so to an extent, i feel like reference aids like pitched above go beyond simply just making the game 'easier' to learn, and are more of a crucial aspect of the rulebook that is (partially, 35%) missing. though of course im aware that this is just you doing all this, 2000 pages is absolutely mindboggling to do alone, so im not trying to say its your fault or that you are being lazy or something, cause its apparent by how quick (relative to the content itself) you put out massive updates that you are indeed the least laziest ttrpg designer lol. instead, i say this all because i desperately want this game to grow and succeed, and as your target audience, this is what i think needs to happen to open up the system to more people.
Cliffypancake18
Recent community posts
100% agreed, but I think the difficulty is worth it for how much it helps players learn the game. I feel like a solid 70% of my time playing this game is scouring the rulebooks for singular keywords that I see in one place but am unsure how important it is. This game would be impossible without ctrl+f haha.
I think though, if you want to future proof it due to the dev pipeline, just leave out the page numbers. Keep it to just the chapter/section name and the blurb/sentence of why its important. that way while yes you'll occasionally need to go back and change them, its a lot less than every time info changes pages. plus, its most important for the sheets found in the crewed rules and this space intentionally only, so that could cut down on development time a lot.
though of course with all this said, you are the developer and if you think other things need more priority then so be it, the game is still very much playable, just takes longer :p
highjacking this post because i dont wanna make an entirely new post for a single comment, but it would be nice to see some example or table or something that tells you where to 'determine' each aspect of a record sheet. For example, with the Mission Control Folio, the MCSU can be found on page 37 of the Crewed Rules, and perhaps a small blurb about its importance in the folio.
basically, while the sheets are referenced multiple times, theres no 'rundown' which can be confusing when you dont know where you should put something, or even if you should put something down. the biggest offender of this imo is the Faction Record Sheet. whats the 'notes' for? why is 'spectral types' there? (i know the answer to that one but a new player wouldnt). Whats a 'component' and how is it different than a doctrine? these are all things explained independently throughout the rules, but their interactions and hierarchy are not, which leads to confusion.
The way I'd imagine orbital warfare working in 60YIS would be some abstracted orbit tracker where your actual orbit and the one of your opponent(s) is never 100% defined, but you know how it is relative to theirs, as that's really what matters.
For an example, you get some political mission to take out an H-Class spacecraft orbiting the moon. It's already orbiting, so maybe you roll 1d6 to see what distance its at (basically heliocentric zones but the target planet/moon is the star). You have a printed sheet that shows six 'layers' that are the zones and you place the enemy token- represented by a colored counter- on, say, the 5th layer cause you rolled a 5. You enter the Moon's SOI with a skewed orbit (probably determined by a pilot roll) that puts you on a special space that links the 6th and 3rd layer (there would need to be one for every combo). From there, it becomes turn based. It'll take you one burn (less than a map-scale burn though) to change to a 5th-to-3rd connection- since its only one difference from 6th to 5th-, however you have to wait Xd6 hours/days/months (dependent on the size of the target body) to abstract waiting for the proper time to burn. Or you could could spend double fuel plus maybe another pilot roll (or another skill, idk off the top of my head) to go directly for an intercept. From there, you- the designer- would need to determine some 'tactics doctrine' for opposing crafts as to if they want to spend their own fuel to dissolve your intercept, or try to point-defense their way through it and save on fuel. I'd imagine this would also be a table that also is used for the enemy sending orbital missiles to your ship as well. The intercepts themselves I'd imagine would be decently basic, choosing weapon(s) to shoot during the intercept- most likely determined by the robonaut(s) the ship has on hand- and damaging parts from some sort of damage table. Though of course that would require modified enemy ship sheets. Really the biggest problem this faces is added granularity for a ship that will (hopefully) be destroyed in a couple turns anyways. But I guess that could be abstracted away pretty decently, especially with those new mini-ship cards in the crewed rules.
Of course there's a million other ways this can be done, this was just one that came off the top of my head while writing this post. I think keeping it within a single sheet of paper is important since that follows the rest of the game's design philosophy- as opposed to a dedicated battle map like my wargame has- but its also important to touch on the unique tactics that are the whole reason to have this combat to this granularity in the first place.
> attacking factories to impede production
Yeah the whole point of orbital warfare is for orbital superiority to do stuff like that, or rather stop it from happening. Orbital warfare takes a loooong time, so being able to have on-site aid is extremely important, and even more reason for the enemy to try to take that away from you. Time for some dropstones! lol
> would love someone else to write it
I'd volunteer! I'm actually currently working on my own hard-scifi orbital warfare wargame, though its a bit more grounded than the cyber/bio-punk aesthetic 60YIS leans into a bit. Focusing on making your opponent spend fuel, ultra-violet laser point defense, stuff like that instead of like, grey goo plague pods and interplanetary rod-of-gods. I'd assume whatever ideas you have planned for how combat resolves would be a bit abstract to fit with the rest of the game and not require some battle map or something though?
> were so much better then standing on the flight deck that I’m focusing on those parts of the game first.
100% agree, but its still nice to have those little things. This game is all about granularity and choosing your own scale, so I guess it is just a little jarring to have this major mechanic (space travel) be an exception to the granularity. Though ofc thats just me.
> I’ve already developed life path rules that work while you travel
Glad to hear that! Even if on a yearly scale, something is better than nothing, but this basically loops into my point above.
Was there ever a potential future supplement called Black Silicon about more in-depth spacecraft combat? I swear I remember reading about it in a little excerpt in one of the books, but now I can't find it anywhere so I'm doubting my own thoughts lol. On the topic, I would love to see some supplement/mechanic where you can zoom in on your ship (including mid-flight) to give way for fun granular play while traveling, such as maintenance and recreation. In combat, it would be fun to infiltrate enemy ships and fight in the craft's internals on that granular scale, or be able to lean into the unique tactics birthed from orbital warfare. By far my biggest gripe about 60YIS currently is that the spacecraft and how its used is largely 'skipped' narratively. I'd imagine the ships the players are on are more akin to one you'd find in Children Of A Dead Earth rather than, say, Interstellar, due to the pure tonnage possible in 60YIS. Because of this, it would stand to reason that you could have a lot happen on/to ships, especially when at the interstellar tech level.
Of course! This game is an amazing passion project and I'd love to see it reach more people, so this is my way of contributing :) I'm a solo developer myself (though I focus more on board games than ttrpgs), so I understand the difficulties inherent to developing something massive by yourself. People see things in ways you never thought to see them, break things in ways you never thought could be broken; and that's an important step in any game design.
Yeah, if only because this game seems to sway back and forth between numerical objectivity and 'do what you want' pretty rapidly, which can get a bit confusing when you are trying to interpret rules, and are left wondering if something truly is left up to you, or if its just hiding somewhere else in the rulebook.
It makes sense that you roll, but roll what? Crewed Rules says 3d6 for ability and 2d6 for skill, but does the required skill/ability entirely depend on what the player thinks fits the best? I'm not entirely against that seeing how there's so many different actions the game offers, but I guess this leads into the response I posted to your recent action post.
I'd say yes, however this is such a big game that its definitely something that would take a lot of time. It might require some new skills, and definitely require you to go through every book and add a required skill for the action, which then requires everything to have a time it takes to do it (which I know most do already but still)(maybe it just takes an amount of time equal to the time scale?). With that said, however, I think that would be how I would do it, as people play tabletop games for the physicality, for the ability to roll dice and see the outcomes. And while you have that for the larger scales in 60YIS, smaller scales feel more like following an instruction manual than playing a game. Which to an extent is the appeal, but still I think more utilization of skill rolling at smaller scales would be a benefit. Though of course others might think differently.
First of all thank you for all the in depth replies! A lot of stuff is cleared up but I have a couple small things:
> But generally once you've placed a card, you shouldn't really have to zoom into it to build on the zoomed in card as far as I can tell
The landing site goes from the rocket token to a card at the complex scale if there is a factory or colony present. I must've read it as just changing it to a card no matter what, so that was on me. A structure shouldn't have been created.
> Operations are also year long and will "resolve" with trouble
So a couple things with this whole paragraph: So basically, at smaller scales, triggering Trouble makes you resolve the Mission Plan, including an operations? If the trouble triggers in June 2055, does the resolution end in June 2056, or January 1st 2056? Same question if I purposefully go to year-scale and decide to do an operation.
This leads into my final point. Trouble occurs from rolling for actions, however rolling for actions at any scale except Yearly seems pretty rare from what I've seen/played. Things like the base building actions reference penalties for a lack of workers which seem to infer rolls but I couldn't find anything more on what would be rolled? I could just be missing something in the Crewed Rules?
Anyways thank you again for replying to my tsunami of questions!
I plan to write out post-year comments for each year along with any relevant pictures :) My aim is to go for as long as the system allows (including A Lot Of Zeroes), although I'm not exactly fast due to still trying to learn how to play the game. I've spent the past week trying to learn base building and I'm still not entirely knowledgeable on it lol. It does help that I'm an avid fan of High Frontier though, cause that's a whole ruleset I don't have to learn since I already know it.
I play solo, and its definitely a 'hard mode' but there's some ways to make it work. The main thing is to give yourself two archetypes. You take the age and ability scores of one, one service history from both, and take all of the skills from both (that your crew quality allows). Duplicate skills take the higher skill level +1. You also start with 1 Glory to make up for the lack of other player's bumps. There's some small niche problems that may arise from playing solo, such as not having the required workers to efficiently build bases at the facility level, so you can either just pretend you have 4 crewmembers when needed, or roll with the punches like I do- which while they tend to make the game harder, you go down avenues not previously thought of. Like in my current game I'm trying to build my first base on the venus aerostat, but since I don't have 4 workers, I'll need emancipated robots since they count as workers. But that requires me to not only emancipate robots- which is a whole game changer- it also encourages me to spec into robots earlier on, as this is literally year 1 of the game., and also get the infrastructure to print them. The whole process takes much longer than a simple Industrialization operation, but its a unique experience that I think is worth the extra time.
Back with more questions (is there an official discord? that might be good for people with questions, though I guess im not sure how much use it would get).
1. I'm reading through building my first base (Venus Aerostat-Xity, painful lol) with the current purpose of building a factory so I can factory refuel my rocket and get back home- and other commodities for long term. I have encountered a problem though in the fact that I'm not sure what would be considered a Factory for the purposes of factory refueling operations- or if I'd even really need one. A-Base D-Landing has 'Factory' as a building function, but under that definition I could technically use a Room-level factory to refuel a 1500 tonne rocket which doesn't make much sense (unless it does? I haven't exactly ran the numbers. But if that was the case, wouldn't larger scale factories make it take less than a year?). Blue-counter Industrial functions perform "fuel liquefication to allow rockets on the card to be refueled using water tanks (WT) created by the crew" which seems like the second half of a puzzle given I can't seem to find where water tanks would be created on-site. I'm aware this could all be avoided by simply staying at the Site scale and doing an Industrialization operation, but where's the fun in that?
2. Building buildings at the facility scale with only 1 person gives 3 penalty to the building action. However, there doesn't seem to be any rolls involved for building bases that I could find. Clarification would be appreciated.
3. Regarding the venus aerostat, I place the 9 Of Diamonds at the complex scale. When I zoom into that card, do I still create a structured map via the Crewed Rules, even though there really shouldn't be much there? I'm aware that my character isn't the first to be here, so it doesn't exactly not make sense, but I thought I'd ask just in case. Also regarding the structured map, I couldn't find anywhere as to what happens if you try to expand beyond the maps borders, for- for example- bootstrapping. The structured map fills up a majority of the map, so it doesn't leave much to build off of. Finally regarding the aerostat specifically, it says they must be bilaterally structured, but via the structured map rules, thats not always entirely possible.
4. The mission plan list in This Space Intentionally confuses me a little bit in terms of when what happens. I've been resolving it where they trigger at the start of every year (which I assume is correct), with the planning phase happening before the players can do anything. Once it gets to the execution phase, I get a bit confused. The interception/combat ops part makes sense, but movement and operations are where it gets weird. It reads like it assumes that the players will never go to a timescale 'below' 1 year turns, therefore assuming the only real action they can do is HF map movement and Operation actions. Although this is obviously not the case as smaller timescales exist. So where within the mission plan are players allowed to actually do stuff? And at these smaller time scales, do you always start on January 1st of the year? Does HF map movement take up any amount of time of the year? What if you start an operation midway through a year? Can you even? Just seems like the mission plan structure conflicts with the rest of the game.
After spending 2 hours creating a character? No thank you LOL. While here though, I did have another smaller question: if a missions is overridden by another mission (most commonly gaining a political mission), is said original mission gone for good? Can you have multiple missions at once? In a similar vein, it would be cool to see most (if not all) missions be timed-missions so that your incentive to get places quickly goes beyond 'I just want to do as much as I can before the last era', which from what I've read/seen is the only real time incentive other than interceptions. I'd imagine determining time would be similar to determining modifiers for rolled destinations.
The Crewed Rules page 41 Missions section states "First, roll for the mission goal, then the destination. Place a claim counter matching the mission control BSU on the destination site if no claim counter or busted (black) counter is present." However, multiple other books reference needing to prospect claims before you can place them- as is such with the board game- such as the Prospecting operation on page 296 of This Space Intentionally. I'd assume that the claim-talk in the Crewed Rules is something that would be disregarded while using This Space Intentionally, but it doesn't say that anywhere. Clarification on this would be greatly appreciated.