Yep, I would play the hell out of that. Finish!
That sounds wonderful. I second mkEngland - get it done!
I find game design almost refreshingly left-brained. After all the strain of world creation, laying out spreadsheets of card interactions is almost relaxing. Is Masters of the Cycle your primary project?
TREMBLE BEFORE THE MIGHT OF MY MULTI-QUOTES!
Well, it's not my primary project - that is my fiction. And dear god, fiction is straightforward next to this sucker.
The basics I've got nailed down.
There are player civilizations (PCs) and a Game Master (GM) who run the game. The PCs want to expand, explore, exploit and exterminate, while the GM mediates and handles the four X-Risks: The Power, the Nature, the Future and the Fringe.
The Power is my game's Antarens (because I love Masters of Orion 2). They're essentially a post-dimensional civilization that ascended to a higher plane of existence before the game begins, and the goal of the players is to eventually hit that same ascension point, while the Power wants to stop them. The Nature is natural disasters (blights, asteroid impacts, that kind of thing), the Future is only unlocked if a race starts buying AI advancements, and represents robot uprisings, gray goo scenarios, that kind of thing. And the Fringe (by far the most common threat), is the fringe elements of your civilization...rebellion, terrorism, piracy.
Each PC is based around their aptitudes, features and flaws and organizations. Those aptitudes are: Heroic Potential, Physical, Social, Mental, X.
HP is your race's luck and pluck factor. Physical, Social, Mental are all self explanatory. X is your ability to interface with and use Power artifacts (which are everywhere.)
The human average is 2, and the peak of natural evolution is 5. Because I like White Wolf.
Features and Flaws are just what they sound like: They determine whether your race is arboreal or aquatic, naturally telepathic or shapeshifters, that sort of thing. Each feature is paired with a flaw, but you don't need to take both.
(E.G, Charismatic's Feature gives you a bonus to Diplomacy missions as your race is so likable. The Flaw makes your Fringe events more likely to be dangerous - due to how charismatic your malcontents are.)
A PC's organization is essentially their "Skill", and like an attribute, it is rated between 1 to 5, with 2 being the average. Organizations, though, are player named and played mandated to handle one or two linked tasks.
(E.G, humanity has an Org called Starfleet that handles exploration and defense. It has a rating of 3 - it is well trained, but not the best in the galaxy.)
So, when a PC wants to accomplish an action, the GM determines how long it will take, and the PC combines a stat and organization to give them a pool of D6s. You roll, the D6s explode on a 6, but the limit to how many times it can explode is your Hero Potential. Any roll that shows a 4, 5, or 6 is a success.
But this is only HALF of the game, you see!
The other half is the Movers!
Each Player Civilization gets 4 "movers", which are basically hero units, like Commander Shepard. They're astoundingly effective and have their own statline (essentially, you start with your racial stats, then add a number of bonus points equal to your HP to your Mover...so, for example, if human's statline was HP: 5, P: 2, M: 2, S: 2, X: 2, then your Movers would have 5 points to distribute among their 4 stats - modeling human flexibility and such.)
Movers also benefit from the bonuses and negatives of their race's Features and Flaws - if your race are arboreal, your movers are Arboreal.
So, Movers are used in two ways: Firstly, they can be used to enhance a task roll. So, if you want to do something REALLY fast and REALLY well, you put a MOver on it.
But the second and far more interesting way that Movers are used is in Flashpoints. These are events caused by the GM's various mucking about, and represent major events in galactic history. When Flashpoints begin, each civilization nominated a Mover that would logically be involved, and they send them in.
The game then focuses down to a more standard RPG - but set in the context of the larger game.
Other rough ideas that I have come up with!
1) Diplomacy and treaties let the players make in universe rules and make sweeping proclamations at each-other.
2) Passive espionage allows you to ask direct questions about enemy plans, while Active Espionage lets you act in enemy areas.
3) When fleet actions occur between two PCs, everyone participates via having everyone take command of at least one ship involved in the action.
4) Technology is bought with XP, to prevent super smart races from beating everyone by just getting the best tech.
5) Wars are possible, and can be encouraged, but wholesale extermination and slavery should be avoided - need to find rules to encourage this.
6) I have a rough ruleset laid out for how you can combine colonized solar systems into subsectors, and then subsectors into sectors, so that you can go from a tiny empire to a HUGE ONE!
But...
There's a looooooot I need to do.
I need to figure out spaceship combat rules, ground combat rules, how the GM rolls for X-risks, how to handle conquest of other players, then I need to make a tech-tree...
