[Interest Check, maybe] High stakes space drama

For a while now I've been thinking of running a game for a small number of players (2-3) about future humans fighting an uphill battle against a technologically superior foe in space. Babylon 5 and The Expanse meet Rinne no Lagrange, Starship Operators, a little bit of Carole and Tuesday, and a lot of Third Aerial Girls Squad. And, of course, a happy ending in this one will be unlikely. I have the story and the setting, and I know that there has to be a number of key features:

1. There must be tactical combat where every advantage requires a proportional (and sometimes disproportional) sacrifice. For example, you can accelerate faster but damage or destabilize your craft. You can fire from a longer range but reveal your position and allow the target to evade. You can let a friend die to score a hit on the enemy cruiser's reactor. Perhaps you can wish everyone very, very good luck and ram the enemy flagship.

2. The dice roll should be predictable or absent entirely. That is, flat d20 won't be an option, but something like 3d6 will be fine because of the bell curve. Alternatively, I wouldn't mind if it played like an entirely deterministic logical game where encounters can simply be "solved" like a chess puzzle, because the sacrifice mechanic should take the lead role.

3. All characters will be space fighter pilots, and space technology should be of a grounded variety with flimsy hulls, approximated orbital mechanics, and light speed lag which means that actions must be planed in advance and a projectile won't hit immediately. So, no blasters and practically no FTL-drives (the enemy has them, but players won't).

4. Everyone dies tragically in the end, but lives long enough to complete their story (or maybe cheat fate and survive).

While I'm certain that these are the features that absolutely must be in the game for the story to feel as intended, I'm not sure what system would be best to use for it. Worse still, I don't feel comfortable running a game with a system that I barely know. Because of that, the game isn't in that stage yet when it would be appropriate to discuss the story and character concepts in more detail. I will be curious to read your suggestions, though, just to see if any could or should be added to the game in the future.

Mostly, however, I want to know if it's possible to find a consultant-GM of sorts who'd know the system that would fit, handle the numbers, and teach me how to run it myself eventually. I'm open to suggestions. Of course, I don't really expect much, because who'd want to bother managing the numbers of somebody else's story? But I had a choice between letting this idea die in the drawer and putting it out here. So here we are.

inb4: "niche of a niche", "I liked it until I noticed the tiny text, now OP is a horrible person"

The first system that pops into my head for this is Traveller. I'm not sure it's the best system for what you want, but you can do a lot with it. It's not the easiest system, but it gives you a lot to work with. You can really simulate a wide range of starship battles with it, led me to think of it; you can build custom ships with it, and I believe at least in the newer editions, I'm not sure about Classic, you can build a non-Jump Drive type of ship, and calculate the propulsion. I'm not sure about third party, i.e. Mongoose, they are a brand of generally more mainstream rules, so they might not allow for as complex designs.

It's hard to approach Traveller from a Ref or player perspective, so I don't know if you'd want to take it on. There's an alternative called Cepheus Engine, I think, which has an SRD, but I don't know how extensive that is.

As for the plotting of the story where people just die tragically; that's for the Ref/Players to handle, but Traveller is more of a gritty system so characters are not OP by any means. Death is something that can happen pretty easily.

Anyway just a suggestion. It's not too difficult to pick up the basics of Traveller especially from Classic, but some of the starship building and combat stuff is pretty complex because it uses physics to guide the rules because it tries to model things pretty realistic as possible. You might be able to find your system of sacrifices by parsing through the rules and seeing what tactical options you want to restrict players to, and having certain builds will do that anyway, I think. Good luck.

Take a look at Stars Without Number. I think it fits all your criteria, maybe except the bell curve. It uses 2d6 for skill checks, but saving throws are swingier with 1d20 rolled. It has a free edition that runs for 250+ pages.

Another probably less popular option is Cortex Prime. It's like FATE on steroids. The selling point is that it's highly modular. If you have the time and patience, you can shape it to be exactly the game you want it to be.

Edit: I recommend watching this video for Cortex Prime: https://youtu.be/K3Pnlgls97E

You know, a lot of this sounds like Coriolis! They have ship-to-ship combat with some consequences, and pushing your luck gives the GM more meta currency to play with! It would be pretty easy to add more interconnectivity between the ship systems.

I've looked at Coriolis in the past and when I asked LLMs that same question about which system to choose, they suggested it at some point too. However, despite that the themes and mechanics generally fit, the problem, as I understood it, was that Coriolis is not intended for space dogfights and a one-player-per-craft set up. As Grok explained it to me, it can still be done with some tweaking. But then I would have to tweak a system I never tried before and I suspect it will just make a mess of things. Another system that was mentioned then was The Expanse RPG and apparently there was the same problem with it.

I'd like to play Stars Without Number myself, but for this particular game the saving throw is a deal-breaker. Having a saving throw in general goes against that tactical trade-off mechanic that I want to focus on, and the saving throw also being a d20 makes things even worse. So while it's certainly a system that I'm personally interested in, it won't work with this game idea. Compare to how Godbound has Effort that can be spent to negate an enemy attack. That is a sort of feature I'd like to have instead of saving throws.

I am currently reading Cortex Prime. I must say that FATE seemed like the most promising approach to the sacrifice mechanic from what I knew about it at the time, and I initially wanted to just find some FATE hack designed primarily for space combat. The problem back then was that it lacked in-depth tactical combat or veered off into mechanics I didn't want. So something that is described as "highly modular FATE on steroids" sounds like a good choice. I'll read the book, watch the video, and see if it works for me.

Traveler… I do want to try traveler. To play it at least. With a lot of hand-holding. It scares me, tbh.

Classic Traveller with the 3 Basic Black books isn't too scary the Starships book would be of the most interesting, and then the rest forms a pretty solid RPG that you could get what you're looking for, I think. The Traveller⁵ Big Black Books go into more scary sprawling detail than I would hope...mainly because they include the Classic supplements, alien books, etc, and mash them into three books for some reason with dozens of custom builder systems that go into intricate detail for each aspect of play. That said, it's a bit more generic and build your own, than the story based Classic Traveller. That might be better or worse...there's no real good way to ease yourself in except to dive in, I found, but I understand why you feel that way.

Maybe I should consider running a Traveller campaign if it would garner the interest enough. I just need to get used to the GMing interface around here. I'm still not used to that.

Fate-powered space combat: check both versions of Bulldogs, Diaspora, Elysium Flare, and, probably more pertinent here, Tachyon Squadron. (Camelot Trigger could be modded, too.)

Jovian Chronicles could be bent to shape as well, but that's an old and out of print game.

PbtA games generally are far from tactical; they are probably out of scope?

I was thinking about PbtA as well. Are there any good sci-fi PbtA games out there?

I've watched those videos on Cortex Prime and found a bit of time to skim through the book. First of all, I've got the impression that it is still too random for this game's purposes. Both opposed challenges and hitches go against the initial idea of predictability and inevitability. Cortex Prime also seems to only provide tactics in dice management (which I think is fun, but not suitable for this game) but it completely lacks any kind of tactical map aspects: no chess board to position pieces on. I suppose a lot of it can be easily modded, home-ruled, and added to, but if I'll be doing custom modding of a system, then I might as well just write my own system which would only have the absolutely necessary features. I don't want to do that because in my experience most players prefer rules written and published by a third party than those written by their GM.

I'm interested in PbtA in general, but I don't think any of those systems can ever work for this game. Now, if I was running a mystery, then PbtA would be a great choice. But for a tactical combat? Umm. No.

And regarding vanilla FATE and its hacks, like I said before, the problem is that they lack in-depth tactical combat or veer off into mechanics I don't want. On top of that, many hacks like Tachyon Squadron are placed behind a paywall, and since I already have serious doubts that systems of that family can work for this game, buying it just to dismiss it after reading seems excessive. And they still lack the aforementioned "board" to maneuver on, be it an actual map or a set of coordinates and vectors.

Just shooting in the dark, but there's the notorious Palladium system which has Robotech and Mechanoids which, have future humans under the gun against a technologically superior foe. The combat is somewhere along the lines of a disjointed D&D-esque/Rolemaster-like slog, with a few less charts.

If you err on the supremely tactical, and feel like kit-bashing there's Phoenix Command's Living Steel. It's a future setting, and I don't think there's ships, but power armor. You'd have to adapt the weaponry to ships based around, perhaps the power armor, but maybe that would work good around single seater concepts, and the charts are already set for the combat basics, and none of the stuff really jumps to light speed or anything, so you could handwave the jump drives.

Otherwise my previous suggestion of Traveller does seem like the only decent option to get all that you want. Perhaps if I can muster the time I can run a campaign, and your idea can inspire the campaign? Usually things are left a little sandboxy, but that doesn't mean a background struggle need not be present too.

PbtA tends to focus on narrower themes than what is being discussed here, that can make it quite hard to fit it to an existing idea without either getting very lucky or having to make significant changes to the idea or the game rules.

The 'humans fighting an uphill battle against a technologically superior foe in space' sounds like Last Fleet, which is Battlestar Galactica with the serial numbers rubbed off. But that —as with the show— is mainly about the emotional toll on the characters and not overly 'tactical'.

I would think the closest fit would be Impulse Drive (which has all the rules for free (the paid version has 'professional' art and layout)). It is flexible and is about as 'tactical' as PbtA gets, but I doubt it would fit the original idea, one would need to shoehorn in battlemaps and such at a minimum.

Apocalypse World is still my main go-to for this sort of thing, I have used it for Firefly and Star Wars and many other 'space' ideas. It needs some tweaking, but the playbooks can often be adapted without needing more than a name change (if you have Patreon access, see Apocalypse World: Fallen Empires for this 'name-change' being done for 'fantasy').

That has been my disappointment with Cortex Prime, the players end up focusing on the (rather good) dice mechanics and what they are doing rather than on the characters and what they are doing. :(
It seems most games these days lack a tactical map. You may need to focus your efforts on finding a tactical game first and bolt on some role play rules to match?

PbP may be the wrong forum for 'tactical' games, though, so you may end up with a lot of suggestions skewed away from what you are asking for, here.
That would have been my suggestion. Take the simplest tactical system and the simplest RPG system you can find, mod them both to fit each other?

But, as you say, that can be a lot of work, and selling players on 'my own system' is hard.

That would probably be the optimal solution. When you'll get the time, PM me and I'll send the setting and story. I will also need the list of all the books required for the game…
Perhaps. But I don't really see the point in making it in a format other than PbP. My goal is to let players make all decisions and then have them explore how the consequences feel. It has to be a tactical game because PCs under pressure and not the dice have to make those decisions. If the combat is too simple, then the pressure doesn't build-up gradually enough or at all. And if it's not PbP, then a lot of drama gets skipped or remains shallow. I'm not saying that drama can't be role-played at a real table, but there has to be an abundance of time for the players to process events and figure out how to best role-play them, especially when character's friends are dying left and right. PbP is simply the only format that allows that time, and being a writer myself it's also the only format I feel comfortable playing.

It should feel like a chess game at times. You've left your king open, and now it's a check. And you didn't think of where the king can escape to, so now you have to put a piece in the path of that check. And so you move a rook to block a check from a bishop, and the rook is taken. It's pretty bad already, but here's the gut punch: the rook was also your childhood friend. Obviously it wouldn't be fair to create such situations with dice rolls or pure narrative, because it would diminish player's agency and allow excuses like "it's not my fault, it was a bad roll" and "GM is being unfair".

I'm wondering if straight up, one of the Traveller games ny GDW with a little bit of set dressing makes more sense to run than even Traveller. Traveller itself still relies on dice as it's an RPG so while it has maneuvering and so on, dice resolve combat in the end, which can seem kind of random and not like chess.

The starship rules are the most tactical laid out rules a specific laid out process how everything goes, but in the end, things still rely on dice. Even in the games, I believe everything relies on dice. It isn't diceless like chess, where it's straight maneuvers only. With fixed moves and captures determining how things may "die". So even Traveller might leave you disappointed.

You can limit movement to an extent due to ship design, but I don't know how precise it gets between the ships with the maneuver drives, as I'm not sure there are super agile craft like fighters against bombers really. There are small craft that are like scout craft and then capital ship sizes really is the difference, but they don't really do carrier warships with fighter craft, if I'm not mistaken. So it would be harder to simulate that without just going up an order of magnitude and improvising.

I'll have to look and see. There's a lot of Traveller and not a lot of me, so I'll search and see if there's something about ship to ship combat, because that seems to be what you're focused on, and a lot of what Traveller focuses on with the basic books is adventures that aren't high flying starship books, because ships are expensive, so it's rare that abd all-navy group gets a ship, or is aboard a ship and fighting for their lives in wartime.

So far the most promising approach seems to be a roll for Action Points each turn and then players make choices with that budget when different actions have different costs. Attacks are delayed for several turns, so instead of to-hit rolls, it's a matter of the target moving while the projectile is en route. And since movement requires AP, and too much high-G burns strain the pilot, you might just fail to dodge. Inevitably, I decided to see what kind of "my own system" I can come up with.

If there's a system that you mostly like but it's too random, you can consider removing the randomness by making each action do the expected value (average) of the rolls.

For example, imagine a system that uses a d20 attack roll and a damage roll. Perhaps a starfighter's laser canon has an attack roll of (1d20 > 15) to hit and damage roll of 1d10. The expected value of that is 0.75 (probability of attack roll success) X 5.5 (average damage roll) = 4.125. So instead of rolling, if the starfighter uses their laser canon, they just always do 4.125 damage.

If it's a system with saves, you could factor it in like the attack roll, or you can do something a bit different but similar and convert to an expected frequency. The save would be automatic followed by a "recharge" to mimic the same outcome without the variability. For example, d20 saves: Imagine a starfighter has some way to dodge an attack (countermeasures, evasive actions, etc) that normally uses a save: 1d20 > 10. On average you'd save once every second roll, so you can mimic the save without the randomness by allowing it to be automatic the first time and then setting a recharge of 1 hit, i.e. it can't dodge again until it takes 1 hit. Creates an interesting choice, "should I dodge this hit, or wait for the next one, which might be worse!" For a save of 1d20 > 15, that's 1 every 4 times, then the recharge would be 3 hits. For 1d20 > 5, that's an expected frequency of 3 saves every 4 hits, so you could dodge 3 times before having to take 1 hit. Same average frequency as the dice but no randomness.

I'm interested in where this discussion is headed

I belive that the game system should support the flavor of the game you want to play.
Do you want something with existential horror and investigation, then look to Call of Chathulu.
Do you want something that simulates combat really well, go with a d20 system

The list goes on, but hopefully you get the gist.

You'll have to be more clear on what you mean. So far your post doesn't seem relevant to anything being discussed here.
That's one way to do it, I suppose, but It would be an entirely different system then. Same balance, sure, but if you take d20 away from most of d20 systems, will there be enough left to make it fun? And what should I do to systems that have a dice pool?

Probably depends on the system and person. Everyone has different tastes. I think it would make the battles feel more like chess, and some people like chess. You mentioned that Stars without Number was a game you might like except for the d20 saves. Maybe removing the randomness from the saves would be enough of an adjustment and it might be an easier conversion than completely making up a system from scratch, but maybe not. I don't know anything about that system.
Depends on the mechanics of the dice pool, but you could do something similar. For example, if the dice pool is an attack roll to check whether you hit, then you'd do the same thing that I described for a d20 attack roll. Calculate the probability and multiply the damage (e.g. Roll Xd6 and you need at least one 6 to hit: then the probability would be 1d6 = 0.17, 2d6 = 0.31, 3d6 = 0.42, 4d6 = 0.52, 5d6 = 0.6, 6d6 = 0.67, ...). If the pool is used more like damage, (ie. Xd6, with number of dice > 3 being the amount of damage, then on average 1d6 = 0.5 damage, 2d6 = 1 damage, 3d6 = 1.5 damage, 4d6 = 2 damage, 5d6 = 2.5 damage, 6d6 = 3 damage, ...)

Anyways, just a suggestion because you mentioned that you wanted to minimize randomness and this is one way to do that.

I would have to agree with PlebeianG as Traveller seems to match what you are looking for in mechanics. IMHO the dice rolls should be a form to determine task checks, not to guide the play or the story.

It also sounds like you want/wish the story-arc of "tragic or heroic narratives".

The 3 Little Black Books (LBB) of traveller should help. You can get the LBB on line at Drive Through for free!!!

I would be willing to sign-up if your project moves forward.