Orbit Design Guide

This page adapts the design notes from the Orbit workspace into the same site format as the rest of the website.

Table of Contents

Why Orbit

Orbit needs tailoring. That means it takes a little bit of effort. It also means that there’s no excess cloth. Unlike other generic systems like GURPS (which I adore, to be clear, no shade), the tailoring aims to still be founded on minimalism. This should result in a fast building experience for the GM, and a simple, but expressive system for the players.

Flexible

The core (or the star, if you will) of Orbit is the resolution system. It links with the other systems through the metacurrency, which you are free to name for your setting. Different subsystems use different names for it and you’re free to use them or take them as inspiration.

Hackable

It’s very easy to design a subsystem, or hack away at one to get something more to your liking, and in fact I’d encourage it!

How to Tailor Orbit

First, take the resolution system.

Now, you can think about what you need: do you need magic? Guns? Horse-riding? Latch onto the system the magic subsystem, the guns subsystem, the horse-riding subsystem. Not there? Invent one. The simplest subsystem might just be a skill. Let me explain.

Take for example horse-riding. We can choose to make it a very complicated subsystem, with three custom skills, one for caring, one for taming wild horses, and one for riding. Or we can choose to keep it simple, as I did in the example Western system, and just have riding be a Ride ability.

There’s a few systems you probably need to add:

Why not add them by default? I hear you ask?

Well, a damage / hp system can be more or less lethal. It can rely on hp or wounds. A skill system can be granular or paint in broad strokes. I’ll provide modules, but it’s up to you whether your game needs the one or the other.

Mechanically, how do I tailor Orbit

The system is written in typst. You can pretty much just concatenate the contents of the files (ie: copy paste the texts) and it all should pretty much work, to be honest. I’ll work to try to make it as seamless as possible. Contributions are welcome. Or you can just take the pdfs of different submodules and use those separately. There’s also the main file in the repo. That pretty much just squashes the module files together. Good starting point.

Designing custom modules

There’s a few example core modules alongside this document, but they’ll never be extensive. I couldn’t have predicted that you, wanted to play a weird sci-fi noir version of cat-in-a-hat. Thankfully, it’s a simple fix.

The main steps in designing a new submodule are

  1. Cut yourself some slack. This is officially homebrew, you can change it if you notice there’s hiccups. If your players complain change them, help them understand that you are a human being that can make mistakes, and that it’s in their best interest that you all be chill friends about it and move on.
  2. Your system likely already has a set of skills you picked. Find pain points. Don’t like how swingy a single roll of persuasion is and how that invalidates player agency? That’s a (common) pain point.
  3. Look for inspiration, either from other games, or from real life.
  4. trial and error from there :)

To make a practical example, I’ll make a negotiation system right now. It’s likely to be similar to that of Draw Steel!, because I remember hearing about it and thinking it was very cool. To be fair to you, I’ll not look it up right now, up to copy it, and just roughly go from memory1 1I pinky promise and imagination.

In real life, much like in Draw Steel, we don’t start every negotiation being a neutral blank canvas. We have a mix of interest, predisposition, and natural patience that set us up for different outcomes.

In that spirit, a GM might change a DC, trying to estimate an appropriate difficulty, given the state of the NPC. However, that always feels wrong. We know that a negotiation is a back-and-forth. A metaphorical race against the clock (how long the other side is going to bear with us), to try to move the other side to a more favourable position.

Negotiations have a starting point and an end point, true, but the journey between the two might be non-linear, and surely not always behave like a massive jump, which is what it feels when there’s a single roll, regardless of when that happens. Using a single charisma roll sets the scene up for a narratively unsatisfying pace.

This feels like it needs more rolls, does it not? After all, think of when we argue with people. Important discussions are rarely handled with a single short quip and a walk-away.

So lets say we borrow a word from Pathfinder, and have a set of victory points. The PCs get what they want if they succeed, say, 3 times. And lets borrow a word from real life (and blades in the dark) and understand that if we both immediately walked away, we’d still have a result. That’s our baseline result. Each times the PCs succeed or fail, they move up or down different levels of “it’s better” or “it’s worse” than baseline.

Now lets borrow a notion from real life. We don’t have infinite time, neither do our characters, and neither of us has infinite patience. Lets say that on each partial success or failure, some timer moves forward. How long that timer is should depend on what the predisposition is towards the conversation, like in real life. Approach a guy as they’re raking leaves, and they’re more likely to entertain your silly proposal than if they were mid-call with their significant other.

So lets back up for a moment. We have:

  1. a baseline starting point. If we never talk, this is what happens
  2. We talk
  3. We roll, with the DC depending on starting conditions and the conversation (as we already did before designing a subsystem)
  4. If we succeed, we get a better deal. If we don’t fully succeed, we increase the impatience timer

Now we pretty much start a new loop with a new baseline. The conversation ends either with us getting what we want, or the other side blowing us off because they grew impatient.

The last touch is to remember that we can have strong rolls. It’s a good practice to have them double whatever result they gave us.

And there we have it, that’s a negotiation subsystem done and dusted.

Contact me :3

If you have any questions, shoot me a message

  1. 1I pinky promise