So I had a long conversation about Firmament with Eric yesterday evening, most of which focused on levels, classes, and the way game play was actually structured. I’ll post about the class ideas later, but here’s an overview of some of the mission-related things that come up.

Imagine that there are a number of “mission archetypes” that generally describe the kinds of things that crews do. These include things like:

• Search & Rescue!
• Brawl / Raid!
• Exploration!
• Uncover Mysterious Stuff!
• um, other stuff that I’m less sure about…

And the group picks one to start with, like:

We’re going to do a Challenge 3 Rescue Mission, because our crew fits the necessary minimum requirements to take on such a task (i.e. 2 levels in class X, 1 level in class Y, certain stats or skills, etc). A Challenge 3 is significantly harder because it means whoever we’re rescuing is pretty thoroughly lost. It may even turn out to be the case that they’ve been captured by another crew.

So the crew attempts the mission and there are a number of possible outcomes listed, sort of a “Choose Your Own Adventure” list of “If P happens, turn to Page Q” except that Page Q is, in this case, another mission archetype. Check out my lame-ass example tree below, which very crudely illustrates this:

Now, once the initial mission is over and the crew moves to the next mission, say Exploration, there are also multiple possible outcomes that branch out of that mission. It could even be the case that there is one set Mission Board, like the Sphere Grid in Final Fantasy X. Players choose where their crew starts on the board (presumably by choosing between one of the various Challenge 1 missions that they fit the requirements for) and can advance through the missions in several directions, such as going back to “Rescue 3″ later and choosing to branch off to “Brawl 3″ instead of “Exploration 4.”

So a small section of the Mission Board might look like this:

And what is that if not a star map?

So it may be possible to condense the mission and star maps to be… the same thing? That is to say, if the crew chooses to travel to a certain star or a certain area of the map, there’s a built-in mission/encounter for them to deal with there. Now, if they travel to that star/area and they already have one or more missions active, the encounter may not be sprung immediately. There may be a cap on the number of missions you can be involved in at once. But, if the crew completes a mission, the missions of any new areas that they’ve explored in the meantime may spring on them (one of their crew members gets captured, they encounter some mysterious object, etc.).

I think this could be really interesting, because it uses part of the traditional D&D structure — “random” encounters — but makes it into something pretty different, more fitting for our purposes here. This isn’t to say that I want the book to include a detailed encounter for every star on the star map (which, ideally, will be included in the game somehow), but it could include a mission archetype and an example concept (crew encounters something that looks like writing on an otherwise empty asteroid) for each star cluster.

In any case, just some game-structuring ideas to throw out.