An Interview by Markus

One of our amazing backers, Markus, approached us a few days ago and asked if we would answer a series of questions for him and some of his friends in the German RPG community. We said we would be delighted and so below you will find his questions (and others) and our answers.

Thank you Markus and others in the German RPG community for putting these together.

Why do you think your game is fun?

Okay. So its up to others to decide if the game is fun. We all want to create fun games, but what makes something fun is different for all of us. For me I like the game’s speed and the fact that you are able to act outside your turn so often. It stops that feeling of “well, that’s the end of my go, I’ll just pop the kettle on and check my phone whilst everyone else takes their own turn. Hey, Mike, if I get hit could you take the damage off for me?”

Having a fast turn speed and having to react during other’s turns means that you are more likely to be engaged in the drama. At least that has been my experience.

What is your unique selling point?

So the obvious one is that this is a role playing game based on the very moorish Elite: Dangerous universe. I’ll talk more about that later. As an RPG by itself I think the main appeal is that everyone has their own spaceship, and by extension things like their own vehicle, equipment, career, partners and goals. You still join up with other players, but as equals. No one is the captain, by default. Why do you think you need a P&P version of the PC game?

Elite: Dangerous is begging for an RPG. Ever since the release of the original in ’84 everyone has wanted to get out of the cockpit and look around. In Elite: Dangerous you are teasingly shown the interior of the space stations, but this just makes you want to get out even more! A galaxy where everyone is armed, that is full of interstellar politics and stuffed with so much high tech gadgetry … it’s the perfect adventure setting!

What makes the experience unique?

Well, one of the nice things about Elite: Dangerous is that it isn’t really any one thing, or rather it is many different things to many people. You can’t sum it up as a horror survival game, a game of knife-edged politics or a desperate fight against an evil tyranny – but it can be all these things and more depending on what the players and GM’s want to do. The goal of the Core Book is to give you the tools to make the kind of adventure you want. The supplements allow you to specialise a little bit, focusing on specifically Military, Espionage, Exploration or Trading goals. What is the unique thing about your setting/mood/theme?

The Elite Dangerous setting is the unique theme in the game, something that, for those who are familiar with the computer game will instantly recognise and for those who are new to the system, will have plenty of online references to call upon.

I like the simplicity of the core mechanic! But why did you choose it to be like this?

So, when I was a teenager my brother would GM me a lot of West End Game’s Star Wars system. He was an amateur film-maker and so enjoyed making everything cinematic and very, very fast, which is ideal for Star Wars. We loved the system, but it did slow down a little when you had experienced characters rolling 13 dice for their lightsabre skill and 12 dice for a dodge. Lots and lots of addition!

The D10 mechanic achieves three things. Firstly it’s ‘swingy’, it means that unexpected events frequently occur in high stress situations. Secondly it scales – it doesn’t get much more complicated as you increase in power and experience. It’s always fast. It’s still good to have strong stats, but you should never feel completely okay about standing in front of a guy with a shotgun at close range. Winning battles is about covering your weaknesses in space combat and careful placement in personal combat. Thirdly – it’s fast. It allows swift skill and combat resolution so you know the result of that heroic speech, or attempt at hacking a lock quickly. The dream would be to have a system that works in real time. It’s not quite that fast – but it’s pretty quick! What is your vision about the game? In best case scenario, where would it be in 5 years?

You can see a fairly complete plan on the Kickstarter page. In an ideal world we get a sudden rush on and me and the team would be writing well into next year and beyond. For the game mechanics having all the crunch books would give the game: 60 playable ships and multiple ship launched fighters, hundreds of pieces of equipment from armour and weapons to drugs and cosmetics, dozens of vehicles from trikes to subs, a version of the game for 10-14 year olds, and an alternate rule set for more complex play, ship building and space station ownership.

Completing the Kickstarter would also make our game very lore rich, as we could employ the main lore writers of Elite: Dangerous to write books for us. Mike Brooks, the executive producer, and Allen Stroud who scribbled together the ED lore documents would be out authors. It would make EDRPG one of the most complete role playing systems out there, whilst not being so flabby that there is no room for personal interpretation of the galaxy. How much anticipation of the community do you want?

I’m assuming you mean ‘participation’? So the Elite: Dangerous fan base is very active, though at the moment they don’t have much to work with. Once the core book is out I would be delighted for people to make their own fan websites, alternate rules and ships. Obviously this is on the understanding that everything would be free and that fans couldn’t make money on their efforts. It’s the same kind of rules that cover things like Star Trek and Star Wars for example.

Is it easy to mod it?

Modding EDRPG is pretty easy. In the core book there are already lots of Variant Rules that you can use if you are finding certain aspects of the game not to your liking. It’s pretty simple to add your own. Adding ships from the Elite: Dangerous computer game is very easy. The outfitting system is virtually identical! You will eventually get all the ships from the game into the RPG through the four supplements (the ones we are definitely making).

Is there gonna be a German version? (French, Spanish, Chinese... )

So foreign language translations are something we are looking into. I don’t mean that in a brush off kind of way – we really are actually, seriously looking into it. The main difficulties are costs. To get the books done professionally is about £20k. If you look at the Kickstarter you’ll see that’s a huge chunk of income. We’ve been offered profit share arrangements, but there are difficulties in accepting since we are licence holders and not the IP owners. It’s complicated.

However, we are really, really aware of Elite: Dangerous’ international reach. If we are unsuccessful at finding a commercial settlement, we may try a community based approach. Any route we take has to satisfy Frontier, make financial sense for us, and will be after the books have been released in English. How long have you played roleplay games?

I was introduced to proper RPG’s when I was nine. Before that I was an avid fan of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. AD&D was my first game. I played once as a player and after that was forced to be the DM. I was greatly pleased to buy Frank Mentzer’s Basic D&D game which actually taught me how a game of D&D is structured. It’s why I’m so keen to do the rules lite version of EDRPG, EDRPG Academy, to sort of honour that work.

I’ve played dozens of systems, but I won’t do a rollcall of them all because I can’t remember them all!

When did you decide to make your own and based on elite?

When I was 11. Seriously I did make an Elite RPG at that age. The game is burned into my consciousness, from its angular asthetic to the mystery of what lies beyond the docking ports of its iconic Coriolis stations.

However, if you are referring to the more recent business decision to make EDRPG, Jon and I decided to begin work on that in September 2015. It has been in continual playtest since December 2015. We played your Playtest adventure which is very combat based, we missed some rpg potential but we had our fun and could get a feeling for your rules and system. Do you plan more free adventures or maybe a campaign to buy?

To be frank it’s not realistically on the horizon at the moment. Partly this is a money thing (adventures don’t tend to sell too well unless a game is very well established – even then its normally beginning level adventures. D&D 5th’s adventure stories all cleverly start at 1st level). The other is a conscious decision based on the idea that I think everyone will want to basically make the galaxy their own.

The trend towards sandbox gaming and a rebellion against linear storytelling makes creating adventures a serious, serious page commitment. The playtest has been criticized for being linear, even though it includes three combat systems, eight pages of pre-generated characters and a full adventure arc. I’m not quite sure what more we could have busted between fifty expensive pages with no cash return.

Instead I embrace the sandbox ideal, but very much put the onus on the players and GM to create the kind of galaxy they want. There’s loads of stuff in EDRPG for all types of play, but it is you who will have to mesh it together into something whole. To help we have the Random Generation System (RGS) that allows you create missions, plot twists and planetary systems on the fly. The game comes with two regions for new players to start in and explore, which is as large a hand hold as the game’s philosophy will bear. If you think about an average player group, what will they experience in your world of elite? what will be their most epic adventure? Will Players become legend or is the universe endless so nobody will care about them? what's their place in your world? what impact can they have on everything?

A thing to know about Elite: Dangerous is that no is really a hero, and no one is a clown. The huge population of the galaxy swamps your ability to be ‘well-known’ except in the most unusual of circumstances. However, the sheer scale of the galaxy can make many of your adventures ‘epic’ in the sense we would use it today, even though it would be quite ordinary for your characters. Imagine dashing through the guts of a space station’s reactor room, a great cavernous hold supported by flying robots that are fixing the place even while you are engaged in a dangerous firefight inside it. Or clambering onto the roof of a mega-skyscraper, so tall that you need breathing equipment to survive in the minimal atmosphere. Wars in space involve thousands of ships in a whirlwind of destruction. However, you are ordinary people amongst it – accountants, ex-soldiers, community support officers or ex-teachers trying to scrape a few credits after your school has been closed down. You hold down multiple jobs and live an itinerant lifestyle. You’re normal – but you do extraordinary things. Your rule set seems to have a high percentage to fail a test? if you have an average difficulty of 7 and a bonus of +2 you have a 50% failure chance? is it intended? are there plans to get this tasks auto-succeeded for some classes/powers?

Yes, it’s fair to say that most checks have a reasonable chance of failure (actually a 60% pass rate is a bit more common). This is in-keeping with an idea about skill checks having meaning. I won’t go into it too much here, but essentially the advice in the book is that you shouldn’t set a skill check unless it’s actually worth doing. Often there are several players who can attempt the same skill check, so it’s rarely as life or death as it seems.