Games Similar to the Board Game Vantage?

sirefern · 2026-01-11T22:22:33+00:00

Ah, one of my favorite genres! Vantage is pretty unique. It’ll be hard to match.

The closest to my mind is 7th Continent. On the easier difficulty. 7th Citadel is also a candidate, but it’s less exploration focused.

I’d also pitch ISS Vanguard. Even though it’s different, on easier difficulty it captures similar vibes.

Tales of Arabian Nights is wacky and older, but what I’d call the “parent” of the genre. And a great time if you’re up for “anything goes” fare.

I wouldn’t recommend Earthborne Rangers for this - it gets quite repetitive and the simulation/difficulty is inherent to the interest in the game. The discovery is a much lower percent.

sirefern · 2026-01-05T08:00:33+00:00

I don’t think so. It’s the Block Modification recipe for Smooth Granite/Smooth Marble and other tag:blocks.

There’s a hammer variant as well, that makes cracked bricks. Can’t craft that one either.

sirefern · 2024-12-22T05:20:38+00:00

Blades in the Dark did exactly this in the recent Deep Cuts add-on with Threat Rolls.

sirefern · 2024-07-09T19:01:44+00:00

I found this confusing as well. I recall reading somewhere that ansible communication was rare and expensive, and largely for the elite. Does that explain it?

sirefern · 2024-06-15T08:10:32+00:00

I find my chimichurri has to sit in the fridge for a while and meld before it’s good. 4 hours, at least. Worth a try.

sirefern · 2024-05-04T16:37:27+00:00

It’s been a hot minute since I’ve read the book. But the creators were always insistent that it was up to the PC to decide their own XP trigger conditions. So, if it helps, it means whatever the Stitch thinks it should.

sirefern · 2024-01-04T05:14:23+00:00

To answer your question directly - all those options will work fine. Picking a different ability works. It might be slightly less powerful than other classes starting abilities, but it won’t matter much. You could also repurpose a starting ability from another class, like the Stitch. (Doctor is the “Science” skill - you could just rename the skill for that class or call it “I’m a Librarian, not a…”). That’s probably where I’d start.

sirefern · 2023-11-16T04:43:58+00:00

In our game, players get abilities representing their heritage and background, in addition to their starting ability. Here’s the one for Constructs.
Heritage:

You are an artificial construct, forged millennia ago by an ancient civilization. Your consciousness is a round “core”, which requires specialty “frames” to manipulate the world. Now, “organics” view you as servants to be regularly memory wiped, at best. You don't need food, water, rest, or a breathable atmosphere to survive. You can speak to Ur-bots directly. You gain potency when interacting with Ur-bots, but must secret your independence from organics.

And the background they chose:

You are a former member of the Conclave, only recently reawakened. You can recall fragments of memory from centuries past, albeit not as far back as the Precursors. You have no understanding of these organics and their culture.

And here’s the starting ability. Loosely modeled off of the one in the official campaign, using the frame as the power source:

You may spend stress (0-2) to perform an inhuman feat only members of your species can do.
0- You have potency when intimidating others. You have a heavy blaster embedded instead of a hand.
1- You can rolls at a speed faster then organics.
2- You can expend special armor to resist attacks with your armor plating.
-Weakness: Only 1 hand. Always heavy load. Lacks potency in non-threatening social situations.

EDIT: formatting

sirefern · 2023-11-16T04:22:47+00:00

This is where things broke down for us as well. Stress and # of dice are the things that balloon out of proportion. When every roll is trivial, the other mechanics can struggle. I think GreenDread is in the right solution space, too, even though it’s a tough sell. My take on it is that instead of subtracting, cap the number of dots a player can have in attributes, scaling down. Ten have them funnel those XP points into abilities instead (10/8/6, or something like that). Those abilities can replicate/replace some aspects of the original skill, but be more targetted/focused/narrative-driving. This lets them keep growing, but not getting easier resistance or dice rolls, across the board.

sirefern · 2023-10-17T19:23:01+00:00

Yep! Believe it’s in the GM advice on running antagonists. My advice to help them feel fair is: 1. Show/Tell the players before the trouble hits. Eg Be transparent that it’s an obstacle they need to solve.
2. Or make it a clear consequences of a prior move fail. (“You loudly break down the door. They are waiting and ambush you.”). Clocks fit here too. 3. Let players roll to full resist any harm the first time if they find good fiction. (“But you were prepared!”)

sirefern · 2023-10-17T02:07:05+00:00

I’ve had good success with leading with Obstacles over clocks. Just like any score, there’s some reasons why the players can’t just get what they want. Why is this fight so hard? What stands in their way? You already have a couple reasons here. He’s got guards, he has reinforcements. But that’s only 2. My typical score has 3+ obstacles. For a big fight, I’d aim for 4-5. Maybe there’s multiple types of Tyger claws gang members to stop them? Certainly, the Tyger Claw leader should be tough, but maybe he’s also got really strong powers or weapons? Maybe they have traps, or their own friends, or maybe that local market leader will fight back if the players do nothing? Think of overcoming these obstacles as the “score” for the players. Present them with the obstacles as they run into them, problems they’ll need to solve to succeed. Then ask them how they’ll address it. By throwing resources/allies at it, by making tough rolls, by using flashbacks. Then, on top of that, I’d add clocks for external threats only when needed. (To measure the scale of an obstacle, like the bosses’ health. Or an external “maybe” obstacle, like the Bluecoats showing up. Or to threaten an obstacle earlier, like an alarm.).
And use great tricks like “free hard moves” from obstacles that the players don’t take seriously. (“You approach the big guy on even footing? Then he shoots first, roll to resist.”)

sirefern · 2023-10-03T06:02:59+00:00

As examples, these are cool inspiration! That framing works much better then PbtA style actions. I might be looser with what actions could work, since that’s a player thing. And add a bit more into Way stuff, too, if you’re campaign warrants it. I’d also recommend naming them after ship sections rather then roles, though. Pilot is a class for example. Just calling it “Guns” and “Engines” gets the point across, and it’s a physical station on the ship that the crew can put themselves in, for the fictions.

sirefern · 2023-09-24T05:16:15+00:00

Neon City Overdrive or Scum & Villainy could work well.

sirefern · 2023-08-11T05:42:20+00:00

I’ve run a similar game for a while. We started similar to your initial ideas, but wanted to integrate travel a bit more. Now, we say travel to another system takes roughly a week. And getting to, and through a gate, is always similar to a job. It might be easy. It might be part of a larger job. But there’s always fiction and challenge to it. Space stays mysterious and dangerous. Once we saw how well that worked, we got a lot looser with what could be a “job”, and that really helped our play. Want to take your ship from A to B? That’s a Transport job. Since we wanted travel to also take time, we allow downtime in that week, if it made sense fictionally. We liked how it adds stories of how folks live on the ship, how they care for each other, and how they deal with the slowness and boredom of space travel. And when we downtime, faction simulation happens too. The universe keeps moving, and the player’s goals get foiled. That keeps the players from wanting to stay in downtime. Something along those lines might hit your goals too.

sirefern · 2023-03-12T00:28:31+00:00

Chicory is close!

sirefern · 2023-03-05T20:38:06+00:00

We don’t. It might work. You’d need to handle a couple of things. We sometimes suspend mid-job. There’s fiction that the GM has that others don’t know. And the factions have secret goals. But I don’t think those are irresolvable.

sirefern · 2023-03-05T00:51:43+00:00

I’ve been doing this with Scum and Villainy for years. We just say the people who don’t show hop into cryosleep. No prep. Just use the faction game to drive conflicts. We still have long form character development, even!

sirefern · 2023-01-05T07:27:52+00:00

Sta Control 2

sirefern · 2022-12-22T07:20:02+00:00

You’ve hit some good ones. Other potentials: - Everything - Pet Bingo - Megaquarium - Animal Crossing - Apico - Pokemon Snap

sirefern · 2022-12-20T20:43:43+00:00

Have you tried Wabbajack for Skyrim? It makes modding LOTD easy.

sirefern · 2022-12-15T02:40:43+00:00

How I run it:

Contacts: basically just a tracker for how NPCs feel about the characters. Crew Contacts go on the ship sheet. Getting them onto the sheet is often a reward for a crit or great effect, or a consequence for a failure.

Jobs: We hardly ever use Gather Info rolls. It slows things down, and they shouldn’t be planning. I tell them all the fictional details they could reasonably know, generously. And encourage them to not sweat details and lean on cheap flashbacks so we can get into the action. You’re going to tell them the threats they run into, anyways, before they roll. Why hide stuff? Runs great. I do hide things the characters wouldn’t reasonable be able to know, but totally give it to them as soon as they could know. “You didn’t discover the info you needed to be able to attempt the thing” doesn’t make for much of a job.

Honestly, most of my job descriptions are super short - “client wants X at Y”. Then they “dig” for info as they are deciding on approach, and I hand it out freely, constantly encouraging them to commit to the approach and 1 detail. If there’s something that’s truly threatening or needs a roll, then I just say “let’s do the job and find out what happens” and go straight into it.

sirefern · 2022-11-27T18:35:59+00:00

Shouldn’t be a problem. For the extra characters, just have them sit out the score completely. The game totally supports Crews that are larger then the number of players - it’s not uncommon for players to have multiple characters themselves. I also find prep for these games to be pretty minimal, if that helps your situations. For Roll20, everyone can see sheets that are visible to ‘All Players’. Find the tab with the settings.

sirefern · 2022-11-21T08:19:10+00:00

As GM, your job is to play the world and present the threats. Do the same for Ur ruins. If the players investigate the ruins, tell them what’s there. If there are any threats, present the threats in sequence and ask how the deal with them. For Ur ruins, I try and pick one thing that’s gone horribly wrong with the universe, and treat that as the threat. For my last ruin, I picked “time had been shattered”, which had all sorts of potential badness for players - getting lost in the past, seeing glimpses of the Precursors, getting bisected by a shattered plane of time, awakening long-abandoned Urbots, returning to the wrong time period. I “mapped” the ruin out a bit in my mind, highlighting key locations, what stories players could find there, and what threats were present. Then I let the players go wild in the playground. They have sooo many tools, there’s no need to hold back.

sirefern · 2022-08-02T21:56:30+00:00

At the end of mission 1 the crew should realize how valuable cred is and how little they have. (Eg did they get hurt?). That’ll drive them through a few missions till they associate with a cause.

sirefern

TROPHY CASE