Started a thread over in the GMs section primarily about storyline of what I'm working on, figured I'd post another here to specifically deal with house-rules or in-game constructs as I've come up with them
Background: Seeing as we're playing primarily for fun with folks I either know from work or friends I've known forever, and these folks have kids/family so they can't make every game... I've instituted an XP pooling system similar to how some of the D&D RPGs (Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter, etc) did in regards to players not in the immediate ingame party:
House rule #1 - Meta-XP pool: Each session, I take the average XP gained per player and add ~75-90% that to the meta-XP pool. Anyone joining the campaign or finally able to play after a long absence returns to the group with XP equivalent to the meta-XP pool. While can kinda suck from a few perspectives, it prevents people from quitting the group simply because they'd be rank 2 while everyone is rank 7.
Background: After the first 3-4 sessions, I figured out who were going to be my reliable-attendance players and who wasn't. I also figured out whose character/player combinations fit for leadership positions, etc. To work with the storyline and add a bit of urgency, help the party coalesce, etc after their first few Inquisitor-driven sessions, I had the Inquisitor suddenly depart on "urgent" business, leaving the most senior/capable player 'in charge.' I spoke with the player (Seneschal) prior to this event to make sure he understood that this was primarily for storyline purposes, and it was up to the party to accept any leadership he displayed. I made sure everyone else understood that this wasn't GM saying "Thou shalt" but was more the Inquisitor appointing him to act as her second until she could return (which I guess, in hind-sight, for the players who actually knew the fluff, this might as well be the same thing
) ... but the main thrust of this is that I knew I had a few very veteran RPG players, but only one person (at the time) who was big on fluff besides me, and I wanted to open things up and keep things interesting. This also entailed the Inquisitor keeping tabs on the players, the senechal making reports, etc to keep things moving.
House rule #2 - Free-form investigation
Version 1 started off doing a web-diagram on a sheet of paper outlining the places they'd been so far, things they'd seen, misc. info they'd uncovered, and linked it all together in a nice package, saying that this is the information the inquisitor had left them and until she got back, it was up to them to select where they'd go next... do they investigate a specific location? Pay information gatherers part of the small slush fund the inquisitor left them (with explicit instructions that it was to grease the wheels of the investigation, not line their pockets)? Shadow a few people from an organization? Tap phone lines/intercept vox traffic? The sky was pretty much the limit. Eventually as to stay ahead of my players, I ended up using MS Visio to round out a pretty intricate web of the primary conspiracy they were picking at, complete with locations, entities (corporate, criminal, government, military, etc), motives, names, the works. Took me a fair amount of time and effort, but now the name "Applied Genomics, Inc." is a dirty word to my party
By the end of the second session with this mechanic in place, they understood that they'd have to pay attention, use their search/intimidate/interrogation/etc skills to gain info, write that stuff down, and find out where it worked into the part of the web they'd discovered. Using my visio diagram, I was free to improvise at will against the backdrop of ongoing events I'd planned. Sometimes this made life a bit hard, like when the second Arbitor tossed a frag into a storage room that had explosives and a drum of promethium in it and the resulting explosion took out more than a few people I figured would lead them farther on. Regardless though, it worked well enough.
Version 2 - Last month, they'd managed to vaporize a large portion of the conspiracy located on the original planet (along with the planet too, but that's another story) and were hunting down the one off-planet lead they had found before: a rogue trader who was seemingly nowhere to be found. The players deduced that the easiest way to find him was to make him come to them. They arranged transport to the world the rogue trader had set up a corporation to handle his more mundane business issues on, and set about trying to ferret out more information about this guy: Who was he? What did he like? Did he run only this one corp? What were his business interests? Did he have a retinue? Who were they? etc etc etc.
To make this a bit easier on me, as this was a "I'm not prepared for crap tonight!" night, I winged version 2 into existence. Version 2 introduced 'information gathering mode' where the players would be taking strategic turns lasting 1 month in-game (which I'm likely to shorten to 1 week next session) that represented all their information gathering attempts over that time period. Each player rolled skill checks against any/all skills they possessed capable of being part of a concerted effort to gather information, and the combination of skill used and degrees of success/failure determined the outcome.
Possible outcomes were: Answers, new contacts, and/or a skill-rated outcome.
Contacts had one major stat, quality, determined by a 1d5 + degrees of success on the roll obtaining them (figuring on making this a 1-100 scale instead of a 1-10 scale soon) Once per turn, contacts could be tested against using their quality level as part of the skill check (e.g. a quality level 4 contact was essentially a roll check against 40, modified by fellowship bonus) possible results are answers, favors, misc things like items/equipment. It is also possible to gain new contacts through a pre-existing contact.
Answers are meta-game constructs, representing information in its raw form - gained or lost based on degrees of success/failure
Skill-rated outcomes are appropriate to the skill being used, commerce checks can net a decent amount of thrones, deep discounts on gear, 'free' gear, etc. Our Seneschal was working with a rogue trader who worked frequently with the inquisitor, so he had access to a small, small portion of the RT's accounts, one of his commerce checks netted the party a beat-up ?salamander? APC (don't remember the specific model) ... one party member's search check revealed a hidden las-pistol someone had squirreled away. Our assassin failed an interrogation check, killing the subject, and I had him make an int check to hide the body opposed by the local Arbites/law enforcement's ambient patrol levels... you get the point
Favors are pretty obvious, they start off small, like pass a message, etc. One of our party members burnt his favors with the local PD to reduce the chances of them getting caught, as they'd flubbed a few rolls and done a few things that had heightened police presence (oops!) As they get bigger, it could be a number of different things... I'd scaled things to where they could ask for a number of different favors, but warned them that the likelihood of the NPC saying 'yes' was dependent on who the NPC was, what they did, and how much in the line of favors the party member was willing to spend on this task. You'd never get an NPC to do something likely to get him fired or arrested with a simple small favor, but upgrade that a few steps up, and you might. Also, if the player was willing, I gave them the option of making a fellowship test to modify the effectiveness of the favors they were calling due, degrees of success making things more effective, failures the opposite. It is also possible for the players to owe NPCs favors.
I worked out an exchange rate for favors and answers: 10 simple : 1 large, 5 large : 1 major, 3 majors : 1 great; 3 greats : 1 grand -- Skill/contact checks when successful award simples.
Monty Haul - Let's make a deal! I threw this bit into version 2 half way through the night to add a small amount of entertainment, allowing the players to feed their contacts answers, favors, gear, etc for the chance of getting more than what they gave in return. Or as I put it (sounding like the gameshow host from the movie UHF: "That's a fine lascannon you have. Do you keep your lascannon or do you go for what is in the box? What is in the box? I don't know! You're taking the box? Let's see what's in the box *dice roll* There is ... Nothing! NOTHING IS IN THE BOX! YOU SO STUPID!" Needless to say, this was more of an entertainment gig, but it did work to speed things up every now and then, simulating contacts that asked for stuff, bribery, etc.
Note that at any time they were free, as a party, to drop back into free-form investigation mode to go "hands-on" to do stuff.
Anyway, I figure that's enough for now. I'm sure something else will come to mind or I'll make something up on Saturday that I'd like to get an opinion on