Storytelling through Violence in Mothership RPG
I messed up the last post - apologies!
I wrote a little thing about how combat works in Mothership and how it functions more like a storygame when things are trying to kill the PCs.
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Glad you enjoyed Mothership. It’s one of my favorite systems.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a bad “violent encounter” in Mothership. Bad things happen, but it’s always interesting, always dynamic. Each player has freedom to respond however they please, as opposed to just casting magic missile, because it auto hits, or lean on a their sword’s multiattack because it’s statistically optimal.
Depending on their action, a player could have an impactful turn without even rolling dice.
I’ve run a lot of sessions of Mothership, and I’ve noticed players are generally very eager to buy into “actions have logistical consequences”, and if they choose a wild idea they’ll gladly live with those consequences.
I think the only difference between “violent encounter” time and normal exploring time, is that time slows down, and we break down the moments beat by beat. Because the consequences are more present and urgent(you might die), it’s important to break it down so everyone feels they had a reasonable chance at dealing with it.
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Love me some Mothership. When it comes to violent encounters I keep the initiative rule from 0e out of personal taste, mainly because I find when I run the game I have 5 or 6 players, so resolving a round as “everyone declare and then we resolve” doesn’t always work best.
I find of all the rules in Mothership, those that leaned the most into creating a narrative are those in the Warden’s Operations Manual. The combat rules are fine and work well enough, though it is a bit of an annoyance that the system doesn’t declare how to resolve attacks from enemies.
I like how combat in AGON 2e takes place, where the person who rolled the lowest declares what happened first and then the next highest gets to riff off that, up to the one who rolled highest and won the fight. That’s really influenced how I run violent encounters in MoSh quite a bit.
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