Dark Nova, a new Space RPG

[Aramil Swingblade]

Ok, first things first. I'm not the creator, writer, or developer of this game. Just someone who has played it and LOVES IT.

Now, Dark Nova is a furtuistic sci-fi space fantasy game set in the 24th century. The human race has been forced to expand through out the stars after a disastor and war devestated the earth. Through the course of history we discover a number of new races each with it's own pros, cons, and in depth history.
The game also includes a variety of jobs (classes) that you can choose from to play as ranging from starship to fighter pilot, mercanary to professional soldier, grease monkey, engineer and many more.
Now, since this is a new game only the core book is out so far. But more expansions and mods are expected to come out later in the year and next year.
If you'd like the main site for more information is here: http://darknovagames.net/
And for a taste of some of the game play, read this here: http://www.obsidianportal.com/campai.../adventure-log

Let me know what you think.

[Arch Lich Thoth-Amon]

Being a scifi rpg fan, I'll check it out. The 411 is appreciated, Aramil.

Can you give us more information on your play experience with this game. I cant speak for anyone else, but I will always be hesitant to purchase anything w/o seeing the book/s firsthand or hearing about a game in great detail by someone who has played it. Thanks.

[Aramil Swingblade]

I play a Namarian Engineer on the good ship 'Glory Daze' under Captain Grant Marque, lol. Well im thankful that the writer is our GM so he does a wonderful job. But in our game we have a crew of privateers and we basically do work for anyone that'll pay to a point. The system is definately different from what you're used to, in this you have all your skill values but to pass the skill you need to roll 3d10 and have the total equal under what your skill value is. What kind of questions do you have about this? I'm not that good at giving information unless its asked, not sure why.

[nijineko]

mechanics is a good start, but also some of your adventures, too.

is the entire system 3d10 based?

how is combat handled?

how is non-combat conflict resolution handled?

does the system try to represent (very little, some, lots, all) rp via mechanics, or is that left to player desc?

how involved is character creation?

rules lite, heavy, in between?

complexity of rules, am i going to have to read a big book, lots of little books, what?

learning curve, how long did it take different people to pick it up?

that should be good for now. ^^

[Aramil Swingblade]

Thank you nijineko, i'm not really good about discribing anything unless someone asks questions about it.

He took the 6 main characters you have with D&D (str, dex, etc.) and expanded a little on them. There are 9 to choose from including how pretty your guy looks, how well he can talk (ties into charisma) balance and agility, dexterity. Each class has it's own benefits and penalties to the 9 scores, the creator choose these based off the environment of where the race grew up and characteristics of what they are. Example, theres a race of cat people that have a natural ability to agility (i wonder why that is lol).

is the entire system 3d10 based?
The skill system that's used to see if you pass and fail at piloting, hacking, lying, negotiating on the price of a stolen battleship cannon that you want to buy for your ship is 3d10s. You take the score of your skill, roll the dice and attempt to roll underneath that number. Ex- i play a mechanic, my cold fusion reactor repair skill is a 23. i roll 3d10 and rolled a 19. barely passed the skill and fixed the reactor before it blew up, but i did it. Ex-our captain came out of a jump to close to the planets orbit, needed to make a successful piloting check to stabelize the ship before the gravity took over, he rolled a 30. Critical fail, and we went plummiting into the ocean, GM said "and the ship flew into the ocean like a lawdart falling from the sky"

how is combat handled?
Combat is handled exactly like D&D, you have an agility bonus (initiative) you roll a d20 hope to hit the target with your rifle, missle, grenades etc etc. if you hit you roll the dice your weapon specifies that the damage is. In this game there's three types of measuring life. A person will have Hit Points (HP), a vehichle will have VP vehichle points 1 VP=100 HPs, then there are Hull Points, mainly for ships. 1 hull point=100 VP. This system is to help simulate the difference between a pistol you'll be carrying with you everywhere, the Anti-tank missle launcher you might pick up and try to destroy a Walker with, and the main guns on your vessel.

how is non-combat conflict resolution handled?
not sure if i understand this question. if you can give me a situation in D&D or another RPG that this has happend to you i'll try to relate it as best i can
does the system try to represent (very little, some, lots, all) rp via mechanics, or is that left to player desc?
this system does a lot to represent Rp, but like almost all RPGs thats up to how much the players and GM want to really go into it. My GM was the creator of the game, there was a ton of it, but the more there was the more enjoyable it seemed to be.

how involved is character creation?
Let me put it this way, the character sheet i filled out, is 5 pages long. 2 of those were nothing but skills. The character creation is seriously in depth with a TON of options to customize your guy to just about anything you can imagine doing in the year 2300.

rules lite, heavy, in between?
The rules are somewhat inbetween. The creator who wrote this game spent about 3 years studying the theory and science behind everything in the game. He put a lot of detail into it and it's supposed to be if it was that time period this is what we'd be doing. So there are rules but a lot of them are common sense stuff. Like if you use your gun to open a door during a snatch and grap kidnapping mission, you will be heard.

complexity of rules, am i going to have to read a big book, lots of little books, what?
Right now, theres the Core rule book. Which is about 700 pages. I know it sounds like a lot but about 200 of them is fluff and story about the how the human race got to this point in time. Information on all the races, wars, home planets, how the races came to be floating in the stars like they are.

learning curve, how long did it take different people to pick it up?
This isn't really a fair question to answer, we had a bunch of people try it and pick it up fairly easy. But again we had the creator to run it, still i think it's pretty easy to pick up. If you're good at picking up new RPGs to run a party with you should be able to pick this one up fairly easy too.

[nijineko]

non-combat conflict resolution... think opposed skill checks, or negotiation with npcs, ect.

having the creator be gm does skew variables a bit. ^^

[Aramil Swingblade]

right, most of the time it was a straight pass or fail. and depending on how much you passed or failed by determined his/her reaction. Once i found out that the cannon in the arms shop was stolen from it's electronic identification tag i quietly explained that to my captain, so he threatend the dealer that he'd tell the authoritys about it and shut down his opperation, so the player rolled his check and managed to pass by a lot, so the GM gave us a good deal.

The first game that we played started off we were floating in space waiting for a call about this job. everyone else was bored as hell not doing much of anything, being the only mechanic on the ship however i was busy checking on everything that was going on making sure that the ship was running properly. Long last the captain finally gets the call he's been waiting for. Appearently the wedding of a major fuel rod baren's daughter didn't go as well as he hoped, she was kidnapped at the alter as well as 2 full shipping crates of fuel rods. Our fee for getting her back, 5 million credits and one of the creates. First thing we had to do was investigate the scene of the kidnapping, so we flew to the planets surface, our medic checked the digestive system of one of the dead kidnappers to see what he had eatin in the last 48 hours. The special forces mercanary we hired checked around for what kind of weapons they were using, our captain was asking about what everyone saw, i was checking particel trails to see if i can get as approximate vector of where they went. We were able to determine that they were eating real meat, not nanite replicated stuff which is only available at certain places. The weapons the used were very common with a pirate group that was famous for kidnappings and ransoms. And questioning the attendants of the wedding gave us a description of the ships used in the attack. Atfer ploting this information into the ships computer we narrowed the search to three possible locations on where to find them. Which one would you choose to find pirates? A luxury spaceport that caters to the richests of clients and is protected by military forces? An outpost that has a no tolerence for illegal acts and if your ship is discoverd you'd be blown out of the sky, or a spaceport where almost anything goes? We headed there first and spoke to the space port manager, told him if he sees the ship to come find us in the local hotel. So we waited in the hotel till the door bell rang, our captain went to answer it but thankfully he was slow in doing so. as he approached to see who it was the door exploded knocking him back and leaving his ears ringing. after a brief shootout, and by shoot out i mean destroying the entire penthouse level of the hotel, the pirates were dead, we looted thier bodies and found a few grenades a few rifles a data drive. By this time the authorities have showed up and everyone was evacuating the hotel. now in the future everyone evacuated just by jumping out of the nearest window and landing in a anti-gravity bubble when they get close to the ground to cushion their fall. we needed a distracion, we couldn't go downt the stairs because they were already coming up to get us, if we jumped from here they would arrest us as soon as we landed. Thinking quickly we threw a dead bodie out of the window with a live grenade attach to him, then ran and jumped out the other side. The exploding bodie seemed to work great for a distraction and we successfully bluffed our way past the police and ran back to our ship. Of course just as we were leaving the security forces were seen trying to board our ship.
Thats were we ended for the time being. i'll post the second part after i get home from work