The more I spend my evenings brainstorming ideas for and writing about Trekker. The more I get to know the game, or the concept I am creating on an almost personal level. This has led me to the conclusion that at some point throughout this process I will have to kill my darlings (in a figurative sense) and trim the fat from Trekker. Currently the primary resolution mechanic involves rolling two ten-sided-dice (one for the tens place and one for the ones place) and comparing to see if the result is less than or equal to your characters stat in the respective skill. This is a quick and clean way to move past scenes that require checks at all. I realized though that at some point while writing, “maybe I don’t want for the players and the storyteller to rush past scenes with friction for their characters”.
Games like Mothership use the same system for resolving checks. And that game has been a huge success! Why wouldn’t taking what works in that game and bringing it to Trekker work? And I think that question is kind of loaded. Trekker is just fundamentally different than a lot of its inspirations. And at some point, during my creative process with this game, I lost the plot. I began looking at what is in essence a conversation with some rough guidelines and treating it like a reference document (it is both but for the sake of this post I am ignoring that fact).
During my free time I enjoy climbing as a hobby, which is hopefully evident considering the subject matter of Trekker. And in climbing, specifically bouldering, a particular “route”, or boulder, is referred to as a ‘Problem’. Most of the time, a challenging problem can take anywhere from a few days to months to complete in the intended way. And as I sat thinking about Trekker, and its relationship to climbing, and my interest in climbing, I realized that I had become too focused on the minor aspects of it and that the big picture had become lost on me.
All this to say. I am still hard at work on Trekker, and I hope to be back with more news soon. Thank you, guys, all for your support.