A reflection on a game of Lasers & Feelings I GM'd the other day.

• Lasers & Feelings
• The Scenario
• Preparation
• Review

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Lasers & Feelings

If you're not familiar, L&F is a very simple, free, sci-fi TTRPG. There's only one stat, a point on the spectrum between rationality and emotion, lasers to feelings. Check out the rules, it won't take long. I'm planning a tour of various TTRPG systems and this was first on the cards. So I got 4 friends together on a video call, built some characters in 10 minutes, and off we went.

The Scenario

I stole a simple adventure I found while preparing. The Saladoon Outpost. I would recommend it for a classic Star Trek new form of life vibe. It could fit in The Original Series or The Next Generation era. I was aiming more for Next Generation to emphasise the moral dilemma. This post will contain spoilers!

I especially liked the granularity. I often have difficulty finding the right level of detail in an adventure. L&F comes with an adventure generator which is simply a madlibs style set of random tables. Improvising large chunks of the story is not easy, nor do I think that would be what my players want. It's rather difficult to improvise a mystery, certainly one with any sort of moral as I wanted for a good TNG feel. Published adventures for official Star Trek RPGs that I had considered seemed to run around 15 pages and would take at least 3 sessions of probably 3 hours each, and this was to be a one-shot 2 or so hour affair. I have run Dungeon World before with a collaborative world/adventure creation and complete improv and I think that worked very well, or would have had I had more experience at the time.

Preparation

Plans are useless but planning is indispensable - Eisenhower

...as the saying goes in its various forms and attributions. The point for me is to free up mental capacity during play and stop me stuttering things out. "He's wearing a lab coat... and uh... looks weird... like a weird scientist, uh, eccentric because of... his hair's a mess..."

Tools

I use Workflowy for all my notes. It's a simple hierarchical list tool. I would highly recommend it and I expect I'll make a post some day about why.

Stardate to TNG era

The revised format for this is {century}{season}{arbitrary*3}.{tenth of day}. Stardate definitions change a lot. I went with 42551.6. The 24th century, happening alongside the second season of TNG, roughly half way through, early afternoon.

The captain's mission

I made it so the captain and the rest of the ship will be off doing a diplomatic mission I found elsewhere so that after this session we could, if we so wished, play out a deeper mission as the bridge crew and it would feel connected.

Ranks

I organised the ranks into intersecting NCO (crewman, chief petty officer) and CO (ensign, liutenant junior grade). If you're not familiar, COs always outrank NCOs but aren't necessarily more experienced or better at their jobs. I was hoping it would add a bit of spice if a low ranking and inexperienced CO tries to override a high ranking and experienced NCO, but it didn't really come up. Perhaps in a more serious game.

Locations

I made some very brief notes on the shuttle and rooms in the outpost. Things like sensory information and what happens when first walking in.

• Shuttle
  • Bleep bloop
  • Pilot, co-pilot, everyone else in the back
• Shuttle bay
  • Ortoli 1 meets and leads them to the lab. Then sits down to work.
• Lab
  • White room. Big donut table in 4 arcs full of computers and tools.
  • Martinez
  • {Intro description/speech showing that the Ortoli often don't listen to him and randomly turn things off. He then wishes to escort our crew to their quarters.}
  • Ortoli 1 3 4 are here
  • Scanner data
    • Subquantum radiation in hitherto unseen patterns
• Quarters
  • Martinez
    • {Explains what's happening and asks crew to look into it.}
• Engineering
  • Ortoli 5 6 7 are here
  • Data stored on many many isolinear chips
  • Scanner is here
• Viewing area/observatory
  • Can see the nebula get more agitated with the naked eye.
• Random chance of passing an Ortoli when walking between rooms

NPCs

Some notes on how to portray the NPCs for improv and to get the motivations across.

• Dr. Neil Martinez
  • Visual: Lab coat, grubby long johns, vest, chin strap beard
  • Motivation: Scientific readings MUST be made and preserved
  • Quirk: Keeps zipping off to stare at data
• 6? Ortoli
  • Visual: Tall, skinny, strong, purple. Identical black and grey overalls
  • Motivation: Hide details of themselves
  • Secret motivation: Disable scanner
  • Won't get violent until stopped from turning off something important
  • Reaction to death of crewmate is to clean him away calmly
  • Will be honest that they don't know why they're turning things off other than a sense of being commanded

Events/encounters

Some pre-planned things to happen and brief notes on how to handle them. They all did end up happening close enough to the notes.

• Gravity turns off in engineering sending one of the PCs floating towards some exposed machinery open for maintenance
• Run into number 7
• Scanner starts shutting down
  • Martinez needs the scanner running. Incomplete data is ruinous. Threatens all sorts of diplomatic things if they side with the Ortoli
  • Tries to grab all the data which is impossible to do in time
  • On shutdown, 5 minutes-ish before star is born

Acts

An outline of how this story will roughly fit the 5 act structure taken from the Cepheus EPIC system, which seems based on the classic 5 act structure of Gustav Freytag.

• 5 acts
  • Hook
    • Odd subquantum readings, Ortoli turning things off
  • Escalation
    • Dangerously turning things off, and don't know why they're doing it
  • Complication
    • Disabling scanner would destroy tons of data
    • Not doing so would kill plasma beings/force Ortoli to act until death
  • Climax
    • Timer starts after scanner disabled
  • Reward
    • See star born and plama beings dance

You may note that this assumes the crew will shut down the scanner. It is the Star Trek thing to do, but if they don't then that's fine too. Not everything needs to be planned. This just gives me a path of tension to follow. When the players find themselves dealing with a dangerous situation because the Ortoli have turned something off, then I know I need to get ready to go for the scanner and have Martinez show how much he values data over life. This helps me avoid weird fluctuations in tension, e.g. if things became dangerous then the crew didn't do anything to trigger the next drama for a while, and it didn't occur to me to push for it. We should always be working up towards the climax. I would like the players to be largely in control of things in order to avoid railroading, but as the General Manager it's ultimately my responsibility to make sure everything goes well.

Review

I had anticipated trouble with the Laser Feelings coming up too often but I wanted to play by the book for the first time. Laser Feelings happens when any die you roll is the same value as your stat (which is from 2 to 5), so 1 in 6 for each die, and often 2 or 3 dice are rolled. It turned out ok because we didn't make too many rolls to begin with, and when it did come up it happened to be when a PC was trying to get some information out of someone anyway, so that ended up being the question. Still, I feel it could easily have been a problem, so depending on the kind of game we're playing next time I may go with a 1d10 insight die rolled alongside. A more colaborative story based game would be fine having Laser Feelings pop up often, but my players lean a bit more towards number crunching and being dictated a story to I think.

Other than that it went well for such a simple system. Probabilities felt right. Not too obvious and not too random. The game ended with one magnificent failure against the odds causing one of our crew to die in a heroic action, and then one success also against the odds allowing an unskilled pilot to save the remainder of the crew from annihilation.