[Bad Minigames] Particle Accelerator Tracks
My thought process here: Particle interaction diagrams look pretty and I enjoy Sky Team and I enjoy the Mind. Can these be combined into a Mothership minigame? Absolutely perhaps they can!
I often find myself trying to think of minigames when I run RPGs, and nearly always I scrap them because they aren't fun or they are too complicated or something similar. However, that doesn't mean I shouldn't keep trying! This first minigame is for when scientists are interacting with some high energy physics device and you want a little bit of collaborative tension to see if the players get things working.
The Conditions of a Good Mini Game
Some quick thoughts on what I think makes a good minigame for a TTRPG there are basically three main tenets:
- It should be simple and quick.
- It should involve as much of the table as possible.
- It should interact with the existing game mechanics.
There are bonuses if the game can cause friendly arguments, show boating or something else at the table, but keeping those three in mind should get you pretty far.
Mothership Mechanics
So, what mechanics in Mothership do we have to play with for our minigames? We have:
- Stress and Panic.
- Stat and Save rolls + skills.
- Health and wounds.
In the past I have created minigames that are completely divorced from these mechanics and the players have asked (and rightly!) what benefits do my stats and skills give to this? And when I said none, well, they looked very disappointed indeed because the minigame is now totally testing the player and not the character at all! A good minigame therefore should be testing a bit of both.
The Minigame
They're waiting for you Gordon, in the test chamber.
- Half-life.
This minigame will be about interacting with some high-energy physics device and will be led primarily by the scientist or android rolls. How it works is the players will turn on the "Big Scifi Box" and then follow this procedure:
- Everyone rolls 6d10.
- If the "tens" value if less or equal to your INT+Skill then keep the die, else discard it.
- Reveal one of the cards above so all the players can see.
- Then, without talking, all players place dice on the card to try and meet the condition in the middle.
- Repeat step 4 until all cards are completed or the players are out of dice.
Example of step 2: Jon is a scientist and has 49 INT and the hyperspace expert skill giving him +20 for a total of 69. He rolls 6d10 and gets: 0, 4, 4, 6, 7, 9. He discards 7 and 9 because they are higher than the tens value of his INT+Skill, and keeps 0, 4, 4, and 6.
Another example of step 2: Sophie is a teamster with and has 39 INT and no relevant skills. She rolls the same as Jon: 0, 4, 4, 6, 7, 9. She keeps only the 0.
The idea here being that Scientists and Androids will naturally keep more dice, and be able to help more on this problem than Teamsters and Marines. Yet at the same time all players would be able to contribute something to the minigame.
Resolving what happens if players fail one or all of the tests is up to the Warden. Just write down a couple of interesting situations/challenges that come up from failure, one being bad and one being really, really bad and you are good to go! Cya.