I haven't done much work on Spaceship 47 recently as I've dived back into Breath of the Wild after months of ignoring it. However, I realised that I never wrote a post about the last thing that I did do to Spaceship 47. So here we are.
In 90s sci-fi TV shows, the main characters generally didn't die unless it was a season finale or something special. To recreate this feeling I have removed death from the game. With no character death, the emphasis is on succeeding or failing the missions. If there is no death then there is no point in having hit points/health. However, I still need enemies to hinder the Heroes in their attempts to succeed the missions. So I have decided that I will lean heavily on conditions - placing a state on a character that negatively effects their contribution to completing the mission. In the current iteration of Spaceship 47 there are six conditions: Weakened, Slowed, Blinded, Distracted, Frightened and Charmed.
Each condition is actually a track containing four stages, with stage 1 being the weakest and stage 4 being the most severe. When an enemy attacks a Hero and succeeds in putting a condition on the Hero, they increase the stage of the condition track the Hero is on. At the end of each round, players roll to try and move down the condition track. If the condition reaches stage 0, then that means that the Hero is no longer suffering from the condition. However, a bad roll will increase the stage of the condition - hampering the Hero even more.
SIDE NOTE: Those of you that know my love of D&D 4th edition disease tracks will probably be thinking "he finally got them in his game!"
Rather than having tokens that denote the condition and having to remember:
What condition the particular token represents
What the condition does to the Hero
Each condition track is on a card. Examples can be seen below.
These cards are unique to each character as each Hero is affected slightly differently by the different conditions. These cards serve as as reminder to the player that their character is suffering from a condition and also explains to the player what the effect of the condition is on their character. The cards tuck underneath the player board, only exposing the stage the character is suffering from as well as any stages lower than that. The character suffers from the effect of the current stage and any stages below it. To change stages, the card is moved up and down so that the player board covers the stages that the character is not affected by.
The chequered flag on Stage 1 of the Charmed effect for the Officer denotes that the effect is applied at the end of the round. On the turn order tracker, the end of the round tells players to apply end of round effects denoted by the chequered flag and then roll saving throws against the conditions.
The conditions mentioned in this post are general for the whole game. Enemies will also be doing mission specific things to hamper the Heroes, such as trying to kill the NPC that the Heroes are escorting from A to B; pushing the Heroes away from the object they are trying to retrieve, or even destroying the object outright.
So there we go, conditions. What do you think?