Warning TEXT, some sillyness:
Oh shit I'm actually responsible for something. Umm... okay just do what I always do when I GM have a vague plan and make shit up (oh and take notes of everything you make up that's important!)
All joking aside, IIRC the last vote was tallied so I'll go hunt that down and work on that ETA End of this week at worst if not sooner. I expect I'll be tossing up a new thread when that's done and I'll toss a link here.
But first some stuff I wanna talk about:
Okay so let's be honest ME comes with a fairly nice pre-made end game boss. Based on data from the ME timeline (
here) I'm led to conclude that the Reaper armada has at least if not far more that 20,000 (higher estimates place that number at ten times as much) warships most of which are dreadnought+ class (though the larger estimates have a lower portion of dreadnoughts). For comparison the Citadel races in total had around a hundred dreadnought hulls when ME1 rolled around, and well maybe 120ish when ME3 was a thing. The grand total of all the races fleet might total to near the reaper numbers. Given the time limit given its going to take a lot of effort to save even one race let alone all of them.
While that great and all that's late game. Right now I'm pegging this quest to be in the first part of the mid-game. The early game kinks are out of the way, you're established and it'll take more then one catastrophe to take you out. (Well barring major bullshit like stars blowing up.) The issues is that there aren't any mid game rivals/foes/challenges showing up. Just the long haul to build up to the reapers. Sure others might be a threat at times, but Revy has no peers, no rivals, no secret organizations to strive against. So Questers here's what I want to know, how do you want to be challenged?
The Iron Man story w/o any villains is more or less the story of Tony Stark making humanity a transcendent race, with some minor footnotes about how he got drunk a lot and him sleeping around a lot. I think there's a comic about that actually. (Both of which are not things Revy is inclined toward) Iron Man works because there are people in the setting who look at the Iron Man suit and go, "Yah, I can take that". Hell they might also say the same about an army of the suits, and they might be right. Or there are organizations that can mess with Stark Industries or steal some of Tony's tech and turn it back on him. On the less hostile from there are other scientists in the marvel setting that can compete with Tony, but they work for other companies or have they're own thing they do. On top of that Tony has his own character flaws and history he needs to keep fighting against, which done well can keep things interesting.
So ideas to keep thing interesting outside of some of the stuff that was going to happen anyway (STG, Asari, etc):
- Even normal people can get stuff done sometimes: every now and again I could semi-randomly take a tech (this may include unresearched tech or just tech you didn't release/patent) and say that the otherwise normal scientists of this universe researched it on their own. Meaning that someone else has access to the tech and they may or may not patent it. Meaning you then have to convince them to sell it to you if you want to buy it. Most of the Iron Man specific techs will be safe unless they get copies to work from.
- A rival corporation appears! Someone else has their own own super tech and they want a slice of the same high tech pie PI is getting. May also grab techs from the tree and patent them, but they may also introduce their own techs. Also likely to cheerfully steal contracts if you can't keep up. Also if I do this what should I base their tech on? More ME stuff? (Corporation with a Prothean database? Or maybe the also have a super genius?) Maybe tech cameoing from another setting? (Dues Ex, Xcom, ideas welcome).
- More Marvel stuff. Loki shows up looking for some Tesseract thingy. Maybe Shepard found a funny glowing blue cube that inspired Arc-Reactor tech. Its currently being used as a novelty paper weight in Shepard's office. (I will point out that my Marvel information is a extremely limited so help would be nice if I used this, on the other hand IIRC enough Marvel stuff has been published that I could just claim that any oddities are due to it being from that one other continuity )
- A supervillain begins terrorizing the galaxy! Will the Citadel security forces look even remotely competent? Will the Spectre forces have enough spare time from secretly running multi-million/billion credit companies to try to stop this threat? Will the supervillain waste technology and skills that could make him millions robbing jewelery stores? Will Rebecca Shepard even notice given the amount of SCIENCE! that needs to be done?
- The Cabal of Volus Biotic Gods has determined that you are a threat to their plans for galactic domination! Or more seriously some secret organization has it out for you. Possible effects: stolen tech, raids on your stuff, assassination attempts, political attacks, etc.
Okay I'm getting a little silly and that means I'm out of ideas for now. Basically what makes a game a game is the challenge. Without the challenge this is basically Economy Simulator 20XX (Ten out of ten, would take everyone's money again), and frankly you've won that part of the game. You have the best stuff, you can sell it at affordable prices and anyone that tries to get in the way of you making money is most likely going to get run over. If you guys don't want more short term challenges and just want to work on preping for the Reapers then I feel its my job as GM to make that,
interesting,
War with the Batarians grade interesting maybe. So ideas, comments, issues, anything else you want to say?
On a different note I don't recall this quest having an existing bad end mechanic, I don't expect it to matter to soon but:
[] It's the end we lost.
[] Infinite retries (Reset to a point were you can recover from)
[] X Retries (How many?)
I suppose I could use the Benny system I was thinking of for other quests but meh more mechanics.
@Hoyr I'm more than willing to be an editor/brainstormer/other writing/quest-running related helper for you too!
Wait his position comes with minions?
More seriously thanks, I'm kinda letting some open brainstorming happen right now, but I love a good idea, and someone to beta check me is great.
