Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 dementedwombat Jun 05, 2009 21:23:55	I'm thinking of running a scifi "ship of death" run-and-gun in the vein of Dead Space or Alien Syndrome. I'm not entirely sure how long the game would last, it might just be a fun one-shot with me and a friend, but I'd like to plan it out fully just in case it turns into something ongoing. How would you modify the Modern rules to make a solo (one player) campaign more fun? Obviously there would have to be an advanced level start (I was thinking around lvl 10, just to give a round number). In D&D there's talk about combining the aspects of two classes into one. It's overpowered in a normal game, but in this solo it might be nice to have a soldier that's also a melee monster, or an explosives expert/engineer (just to give a couple examples). has anyone adapted this to Modern? I suppose I could just "double class", have the player get the full bonus from two classes each time he levels up, but that's just plain crazy. I was also thinking of importing a couple rules from 4e (and the crowd stands up and boos :P ), namely minions and healing surges. I don't know how much you know about 4e, so I'll explain them briefly below. Minions are monsters who have 1hp. They are designed to be roadblocks more than anything else, and let the player feel powerful by cutting through hordes of enemies. It would allow me to throw many more buggers at the player than normal and also allow the monsters to hit the player more often than on a lucky 20 (which would happen if I used low-level creatures). Healing would also have to be readily available. If there's only one player then he'll have to take all of the hits. Rather than throwing "magic potions" around the levels I wanted to it the 4e way. Healing surges basically give the player hit points equal to 1/4 his total value each time he spends one. I could explain this by giving the player a suit of power armor that enhances his biological abilities. Speaking of this suit, I'd like to do something kind of different with it. The suit would "level up" with the player, gaining a higher AC, damage reduction, or other benefits as the player increases in level (a D&D supplement called "weapons of legacy" introduced the idea to me). Another mechanic I'd like to try is a biological enhancement system. It would kick the character's metabolism into overdrive, doing things like boosting strength and constitution or giving the character an extra action per turn. The catch would be that each of these features cost a certain number of hit points per turn to maintain. That's what I have so far, what do you think?
#2 TheRealOrion Jun 05, 2009 22:29:18	Seems really fun! Have you checked out any of the Future rules for ideas about how to enhance your PC? You might not need to worry about designing a suit from scratch if you leave bits of armour and tech around the ship. In fact, depending on what/who the PC is fighting, you could just have him go up against "monsters" with better and better armour (but crap HPs) and then wear their stuff, so that by the time he faces off against the Big Bad/Dragon Mom/Fleat Commander/Whatever, he's totally decked out in all of the their tech. That'd be sweat. As for the leveling up, you could so something as dead simple as doubling all the XP rewards? That way, he's shooting up in levels fast enough that he can just multi-class, Smart/Strong and then Tech/Soldier or something like that. Gaining two levels at once will give him a kind of jagged progression, but rapid multi-classing would be smooth and fun. Sounds like a fun little game to run through. Maybe you could post the stats once you have them? (Just not here, because then you lose your copyrights.)