Gearhead 2: Revisited

[Crucifix]

4: Leaving the area should have a prompt.

Okay, without autosave, this is a swear and reload, with autosave, this is a major design flaw. I go forwards very quickly, I have a turret and do not need to turn around every shot. The fact that momentum carries me forwards out of the arbitrary combat area is both annoying and inconvenient. I've also done it on a fungus mission (you do end up facing a random direction, including towards the stairs), a simple prompt would solve this without having to remove arbitrary arena size limits.

As a suggested user friendliness feature, making "<" automatically leave an outdoor mecha mission area would be awesome, if I win whilst heavily damaged and haywire'd it frequently takes an age to get to the edge of the map.


5: Haywire is nasty.

Seriously, this sucker beats out every other for sheer unfairness. Haywire lasts "forever", or at least long enough to ruin your full mission (and potentially walk of shame back to the spinner too). Getting hit with Haywire is frequently a loss, because with auto-targetting working the way it does you can easily get stuck turning for a good two minutes or more. This is worse since you're so frequently outnumbered (on 22 reputation I've faced eight opponents).

Alternatively to toning it down, this is potentially remedied by introduction of mecha-scale instant "near instant" restore items, at half a ton each, they could even be put onto important NPC mecha as standard to help them present more of a challenge (same as having Mechanics carry mecha repair kits would be a neat addition).

6: Movement and shooting should be divided or fractioned.

A slow mecha travels one space. It's very slow, it takes ten minutes. An enemy flies in circles and shoots it ten times.

This is a tad annoying - if you want to fire whilst travelling at full speed, you need to first travel at full speed (hence ten minutes of "immobility"), if you're already travelling at full speed, whilst it may take ten minutes to move a square, you can continue to fire at normal speed.

I realise that solving this is awkward - if you make the player hold + for long periods just to move one space, it's just as bad as having them automatically forfeit all their turns in the process of moving that space. What about having an (optional) interrupt on attack? Whenever something attacks you, any automatic behaviour (turn and shoot, move full square) is ceased and you can then attack/move accordingly?

7: Autoloot?

This was, if I recall, a standard feature of Gearhead - win a combat, loot everything. In space, flying around trying to snag hurtling debris, or losing out on a custom mecha's gear because it flew out of the arbitrary combat area is a tad tiresome.

Honestly if there were an illusory Loot "mecha" you automatically shunted new collected items over to this would save hours of flailing around, whilst making selling all that loot a whole lot easier (and removing the painful "hold down sell, accidentally sell mecha since it defaults to yes" issue).

8: You dance so well, you must have had professional training.

Damn right I did. Three bad luck failures in a row (Skill 12-16, Difficulty 10) plus automatic lockout of the skill roll until the skill improves means I spent 250k on training Athletics, and had to gain another point by running to the trainer. A lot of effort for one dance really.

[Telok]

I'll put this here because it's similar to, and complements, Crucifix's stuff.

1. Rape-A-Merc.
AKA "How to get Saga Armor and a laser cannon for 25k." There's really nothing more to say about this.

2. Slow mecha, fast guns.
I've seen a couple of places where the movement system is described as a throttle setting. That would be nice because right now it's a hybrid of a throttle system and a move/wait system. Stopping, turning, and cruising are handled on throttle while acceleration is handled on move/wait. Makes it so that slow mecha can't fight in crowded terrain like cities because they have to turn and then go into stasis mode for several turns to start moving again.

3. Status effects.
As Toughness/Medicine is resist/cure to personal status effects so Electronic Warfare/Repair is resist/cure for mecha status effects. Also I find that being on fire is less onerous then being taunted,overloaded, or sickened. Haywire also notably only affects movement, not shooting. Turreted and long range weapons are still dangerous on haywire mecha. I've personally stopped using haywire weapons in favor of overload weapons, but haywire is still about the worst thing for the player to get hit with.

4. Science rocks.
Save-scumming the Robotics talent can replace Awareness, Code Breaking, Ranged Combat, Repair, Mecha Engineering, and Medicine. Plus it gets you goodies out of rubble in the mines and spare parts out of robots. The only downside is that if you skip on Repair as a personal skill you can't probably won't survive a hit with haywire or other status effects in mecha combat.

Science suggestions.
Instead of a 3 robot hard limit on you followers put a point value limit on them. something like a 4000 build point limit. Increase the limit by linking it to Science skill, another 800 build points per Science. Then add some feedback, a message when you build the bot that you won't be able to control it, and a continue/abort dialogue.

5. Communication skills.
When I started watching the Roll screen (shift-R) I discovered that the Conversation skill wasn't the end-all of the interactions. Sometimes skills like Mysticism, Intimidate, and Science are used with appropriate NPCs. This is good, this is a wonderful thing. By playing with the basic character generation I also discovered that if you don't have Conversation and/or enough other social skills and charm to force through rumors, missions, and conversation options, then you can't play the game. While this is accurate and true to life (been there, done that, better now) it's also just about as much fun in a game as it is in real life. Actually it may be less fun. Sometimes it seems that plot encounters and missions are sometimes only put on the map after the player gets the rumor. So if you can't get the rumor then you can't do the mission.

6. Cayley Rock Exp Hack.
Start a character on Cayley with a good Dodge skill and a flight-only mecha, a Shard or Wraith. Start-scum until you can grab a couple of missions to roust bandits from "abandoned mines". Buy a flight suit and a scythe, you don't need melee skill for this but Spot Weakness is awesome. Save before you enter the mission...

Because you're entering an indoor area with a flying mecha the game kicks you out of your mecha and makes you foot-slog the mission, moving around in there will take forever. Because of the accuracy differences in scale factor 0 and 2 you are very hard to hit and will hit most of the time, any hit will kill you but the rewards are worth it. Experience is partially based off of the difference between the point value of your gear and the point value of your opponents, you're taking this to an extreme.

...I've build some low end mecha for GH, around 115000 points, some of these missions will have up to three of those at Renown = 0. With a flight suit and Hap Ki Do Those mecha are worth 10k experience each, Buru Buru seem to be about 8k, Condors and Harpy Chicks run about 1000 each.

That's all for now.

[Crucifix]

Ooo, others talking, lovely.

1: I actually love this "feature". You can even "?" them to check their gear before saying yes, then leave the area if it's no good, and reenter until it's at least Skinsuit-grade. Works for the plot lancemates as well, which is nice since it's zero save-scumming whilst still avoiding Flak armour wearers. Possibly this can be handled with "flags" though. Can't drop/transfer "owned" gear from the character?

Later on, of course, it's "how to get a Savin for 200k", so it's always worth restricting yourself to 1 or 2 spinners until you hit 50+ reknown just so you can get the maximum out of your subplots/mercenaries across the rest of the spinners.

2: Two additionals to this, would it be possible for speed to be maintained whilst turning somehow? At least non-spacewise? If I'm running past someone at top speed everything's fine, but the moment I have to turn 45 degrees I'm at zero speed, about to die if anyone's able to fire because speed = everything. So yeah, a throttle "set your speed" would be awesome:

+/- increase/decrease your speed, "5" is a zero-action "go forward/backwards without firing for one space". You could, if you had the space, pull a U-ey at top speed.

4: I've actually taken to skipping taking three particular skills in character creation - Science, Repair, and Mecha Engineering. You pick up Polymath at character creation (it's basically a mandatory talent anyway), so 25k at Galconde Spinner means you can invest the points into making Medicine and Code Breaking/Insight/Survival 5 or 6 points. You can't train those after all.
This said, Science is incredible though, especially since Spare Parts, unlike Meat, are always useful, sell for a modest amount if you don't have repair (yet), and are *weightless*. Until survival starts providing free weightless medical supplies (Space Fungus antibiotics?) it just can't compare.

I typically run through Theles Spire to harvest around fifty at a time, and leave a multiscanner in front of the Galconde Physics Bench just for that one check, only Perform comes anywhere close to science.

Robotics-wise, you can always just make the bots in your Home, and have an army of robot servant buddies out of all your rejected minions (though don't forget your multiscanner). This said, I'm not sure I agree with the need to have extra bot buddies (unless we're talking "pet-bots" which are borderline useless). The strongest thing available in GH is a lancemate, if only as an extra "free" target for your enemies, so even weakling humanoid bot with 4 or 5 in their combat skills would be a major advantage, the kind you'd otherwise spend a whole talent on getting just the one.

5: Without Conversation, you pretty well cannot get perform skills. Without Intimidate or Conversation (Apparently "hey, I'm looking for a job, know anything?" is an intimidate check) you will get maybe one job in twenty. Getting a rumour is comparatively pretty easy, but Charm is still almost mandatory (1 point of charm is a serious difference in reaction scores), without conversation (or start-scumming for a Teacher/Nurse lancemate) you're pretty much signing up for a lame game experience.

6: That. Sounds. AWESOME.

I'm going to have to pimp out a combat monkey with max dodge, some smoke grenades and a monowhip (I never field enough body points to make unarmed combat viable and the whip is too good to miss), and just start meleeing me some mecha.


Meanwhile:

I gotta say it, not reloading at all is overall so far an often unrewarding experience.

There, I said it.

Mecha Engineering and having to play for hours to find another Luna because arbitrary destruction of unique, irreplaceable, parts - not fun.

Spending literal hours scrounging parts for (Custom mecha weapons, rare mecha parts, purchased mecha specifically for their computers/weapons (looking at you Roc) and getting a -0/-0/+3 with awesome toys despite various setbacks and parts destruction along the way - Actually yeah, really fun stuff, feels like you've earned your place in the stars.

Losing it all to an unlucky crit and losing everything, despite having wiped out all but one buru buru (damn Gauss rifles), having two, living, lancemates on-hand to polish up in their own mega machines, and probably being a bad enough dude to kill one damaged Buru Buru in personal scale melee combat? I cannot begin to say how un-fun this gets, either of the times it happened. Yeah, I know I'm coming off as hard to please (repair too good! Oh no repair fail! REPAIR TOO BAD!), but seriously this is a painful experience.

Losing an eye to the Exorg Watcher after an epicly one-sided battle - Actually worked out pretty fun. I was nowhere near capable of handling it on the first encounter, left Cayley, came back about two weeks later, spent millions on training Dodge and Close Combat and beat not only that watcher without taking a scratch (same can't exactly be said for my lancemate, though a swift medicine roll saved that), but the two other Exorg Watchers I encountered exploring the Cayley Core. Plus I lost an eye to the Watcher, how cool is that?

Later losing that same character to an unlucky instant death shot from a lucky Atgeir's guided missiles or something (also, presumably, destroying priceless mech #2)? Not really fun. Especially when it takes a good hour or more of dying/loading to start up a new character from scratch.

I can't say it's anything you might avoid with clever forethought or planning, having your mech nuked to death and losing literally everything from it if you fail a repair roll is yet another of those "single-rolls which can ruin whole games" I believe I've talked about in the past. I don't mind losing, or facing a $million repair bill when I do so, but losing all those borderline irreplaceable goodies means that dying in person is frequently better than dying in your mech, and that doesn't make much sense to me.

So how about alleviating some of the pain of random with.... more gameplay? Lose your mecha? Maybe get a rumour: "Juz Tjoshin collects a lot of junk." Talk to Juz, he's found your mech/some of your mecha parts. Now you get an adventure to recover them off him. Or get another rumour "Those pirates who took your mecha were seen in X Interior", fight the pirates to recover your losses. Losing your mecha is way too painful right now, and way too easy to do at higher reknown.

Speaking of new characters:

Even when shopping for a starting character, I've had characters where none of the shops sold any sealed armour - What the hell guys? Sell less spiked bracers nobody ever uses already!

Permanent spinal damage because I opened the wrong door in Hovel Manor and not one of the three police officers there cared to help? Not fun.

Same can be said from permanent damage because of any of the myriad newbie killers - usually Roaches or Armoured Fungus because I wasn't lucky enough to get Trident/Magnet token or a Steel Fan. If I go with Ranged Combat, then it's frequently even more painful facing an out-of-depther with the stones to survive my ranged attacks.

Having a total deadzone for an untrainable skill where I can't succeed at all at anything thanks to one-shots and low roll frequency, leaving me with a choice of wasting precious exp or wasting the skill entirely? This is why you should get either a 5+ in medicine/code breaking/insight or just skip 'em, you'll fail too often and level too slowly for them to be worth the slot if you don't specialise early right now.

It's got so tedious trying to get a fledgling character off the ground through the over abundance of random misfortune that strikes most starter characters that I've just saved myself a starter file after a lucky shop run, I can't face wading through a dozen unhelpful stores again.

A lot of the starter-character blues would be solved if starting gear, like mecha, could be selected at the start of the game. Select your: Spacesuit, Tool, Weapon. It'll still leave holes in your inventory, but it will be a whole lot better than the current chore that surrounds getting set up.

I believe I mentioned it as a possibility already, but the Shopping skill letting you find more stuff would help a lot too (heck, do like the GH1 tutorial, which I loved, and allow shopping to refresh the stock once per 5 points in it). Refreshing stock repeatedly for a few $1k (bribe money to "check the back?) would again help reduce the random.

Anyway, back to character #37, who I have high hopes of matching epic-mech guy and maybe even completing the plot with, even if I have to stay in Theles/Galconde for fifty days before advancing the plot any.


Near completely unrelated:

"Mission" idea: Rich corporation opens up Dungeoneer, a new reality televid show. Each week they host a new dungeon with a new environment, a random  prize at the bottom, and a random depth depending on your reputation, complete with a dungeon boss to defeat for fabulous prizes.

Mainly this is an excuse for infinite personal scale dungeon content (beyond abusing bounty-hide outs and fungus runs), whilst being in keeping with the setting as to *why* this was happening - the producers make up a new dungeon costing them a few $million each time, then make a fortune from running their insanely popular tv show.

The people who lose have to pay for their own medical care from the studio and signed a waiver anyway, the people who win get to keep a few artifact trinkets, but the vast majority of stuff (like gold nuggets or geodes) they actually sell back to the studio shop for a fraction of what they're worth, allowing the studio to keep running each dungeon with the same recycled booty.

Dungeons include:

Earth Adventure! - Grass, imported Earth monsters, all the trees and trappings, and presumably exofungus running around everywhere.
Urban Warfare! - Urban setting, imported criminals on suspended death sentences, robots, security systems and the like.
Dino Hunt! - Dinosaurs everywhere, ratings rejoice.
Cave Adventure! - Head into a vacuum filled asteroid cave with simulated mine features such as "rocks" and "murder fungi from beyond the stars"!

Shame that the game's being rewritten or I'd be sorely tempted to invest the time in making it, since I can't imagine how it wouldn't be awesome.

Edit: Alright, having just punched two mecha to death with an unarmed kung fu master, I have to repeat my above complaint that I auto-lose on eject. Hopefully one day my dreams of mecha-punching becoming accepted in modern society will come true.

[Telok]

Edit: Alright, having just punched two mecha to death with an unarmed kung fu master, I have to repeat my above complaint that I auto-lose on eject. Hopefully one day my dreams of mecha-punching becoming accepted in modern society will come true.

Hahahahah! Welcome to the dark side, here's your cookie.

I'm playing Know-10 Sci/Robot guys without Polymath and doing really well right now. Robots open up at 5, 10, and 15 skill for arachnoids, androbots, and android lancemates. Put in a DIY robot parts kit that had 10/10 computer/power harness and a class 10 shield for the body shell, added about 8 mass to each so that nobody would try to use them. Buy 8 kits and sell back 6 of the body shells, it's costly but worth it. The androids tend to start with 20s in most stats, 30 to 40 body, 30ish points of armor and 70+health, skills around 10. And that's if you don't ace your Science roll. Even the arachnoids tend to start out tougher and better than starting characters.

Science seriously blows away skills like Survival and Mysticism through sheer usefulness. But it's also completely logical and realistic in the applications too. I think that some of the lesser skills may need to be increased. I'll see about adding no-weight medical loot to survival looting of some animals. I remember that not seeming to be to hard to do.

At 50 renown I tend to start thinking about taking Polymath or investing Knowledge up from 10 to 15 just so I can get Repair skill for removing status effects from my mecha in combat. However if I don't use Robotics then I absolutely do need Polymath and a high Knowledge to have enough skills without experience penalties.

[Telok]

I did it. Antibiotic/poison loot added to the shils.

WMON_space.txt
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U6wRLSYEVmfzq-WnHQ6BgxxCywwRHcPBdL9ZGfN9zrc/edit?hl=en_US

STD_default.txt
https://docs.google.com/document/d/13rGr5QZ-RmRBrDdi9HOcPSesMpvKxmF7CpGTYx1FTo0/edit?hl=en_US

Put these in your /Series directory overwriting the current files. The loot is the only change in the STC and the critter loot code is in the shils in the WMON. The good news is that this also lets me put any loot on any monster. I may add feathers as zero weight minor loot to the birds, or long pig meat to the punks and bandits. I'll have to look into adding a point of Villainy to eating that meat.

If GoogleDoc is an issue the code is here.

In STC_default.txt

Code: [Select]

% ************************************

Food 0
name <Medicinal Fungal Body>
desig <HEALSHROOM-1>
FoodFX:CureStatus
FoodMod:Sickness

Food 0
name <Medicinal Fungal Body>
desig <HEALSHROOM-2>
FoodFX:CureStatus
FoodMod:Poison
FoodFX:CureStatus
FoodMod:Sickness

% ************************************
In the scarlet shil text in WMON_Space.txt

Code: [Select]

CLUE_SURVIVAL <ifSurvival 18 else GoFail Mental V= 1 1 Print 1 GiveSTC .mushroom>

.mushroom <HEALSHROOM-2>

GoFail <Print 2>
Msg1 <You find a parasitic fungus growing on this creature. These things are supposed to be really good for your health.>
Msg2 <You don't find anything, this time.>

Duplicate the shil code into the silver shil using <HEALSHROOM-1>. I put it in just after the stat line for the monsters.

[Daemonward]

It's got so tedious trying to get a fledgling character off the ground through the over abundance of random misfortune that strikes most starter characters that I've just saved myself a starter file after a lucky shop run, I can't face wading through a dozen unhelpful stores again.

A lot of the starter-character blues would be solved if starting gear, like mecha, could be selected at the start of the game. Select your: Spacesuit, Tool, Weapon. It'll still leave holes in your inventory, but it will be a whole lot better than the current chore that surrounds getting set up.

I believe I mentioned it as a possibility already, but the Shopping skill letting you find more stuff would help a lot too (heck, do like the GH1 tutorial, which I loved, and allow shopping to refresh the stock once per 5 points in it). Refreshing stock repeatedly for a few $1k (bribe money to "check the back?) would again help reduce the random.

If you don't mind compiling GH2, you can adjust things like restock time, number of items available, and type of items available (legality, value, tags, customized mecha, etc.) by editing the services.pp file. If you go overboard, shopping can get really boring, but if you just want the shopkeepers to stock a few more items or to restock more frequently, then it can make shopping less of a hassle.

[Crucifix]

Code

Ooo, nice, I looked at the code myself and laziness took hold, thanks Telok. Now Shils are actually useful. Comparatively.

I've actually been taking a survival specialist through my last game and all I got out of it, other than a concentration skill in the high 20s, was a few extra $k here and there, quickly outclassed by my much more reliable/regular mission rewards. That said, I did pick up a tanksuit from a Mercenary that game and wow is it ever worth the 25k I paid for it, just after beating Theles Arena...

If you don't mind compiling GH2, you can adjust things like restock time, number of items available, and type of items available (legality, value, tags, customized mecha, etc.) by editing the services.pp file. If you go overboard, shopping can get really boring, but if you just want the shopkeepers to stock a few more items or to restock more frequently, then it can make shopping less of a hassle.

I could sort of accept shopping being boring, shopping is ultimately nothing but another barrier between me and getting my character how I want them, it's not really an "adventure" when Fabrianne refuses to stock arc thrusters for ten days in a row when I'm trying to build up my Icarus, it's just inconvenient. Unfortunately coding is a bit of a blind spot for me, and I've never been able to compile a file in my life.


Bug: Student with Loans - Not only does paying the loan yourself deny you an awesome battle with Aigaion, but doing the sponsor quest leaves the quest in place, allowing you to then pay the loan yourself for a lancemate, or to just do the sponsor result again for free heroism.

As an unrelated point, exploring the spinners early on at low reknown ruins the game forever since quests like Aigaion's lair just don't spawn unless you delay and slowly accumulate your 50 reputation before switching spinners. Is it possible to get the neat reknown centric quests to generate but just remain inert until the requisite reknown? Or even better, not make interesting things dependent on the player to exist?

[Joseph Hewitt]

Crucifix- Thanks for all of this commentary. I haven't read everything yet, but one common thread I'm seeing is "less catastrophic randomness". This applies to instakills, store reloading, failed Mech Eng rolls, lancemates with useless equipment.

Here's an idea for protecting your ultra-customized mecha: Allow the player to buy insurance. As long as your mech is insured it will never be lost in combat, but once the insurance is used it must be renewed (can be done by phone or at the mechanic's shop when the mecha is restored from "Out of Action" to "OK"), and the more often it's lost the higher the price gets.

For shops, I was thinking about removing randomness more or less entirely- get rid of the useless items, stock all the items of appropriate type within the shop's quality class. Some specialty stores could still have random inventory- the exotic weapon shop, the gift shop, and so on.

I'm trying to get a demonstration of the Lua system ready for release tonight. Hopefully my plan will drum up some more activity on the forum.

As an unrelated point, exploring the spinners early on at low reknown ruins the game forever since quests like Aigaion's lair just don't spawn unless you delay and slowly accumulate your 50 reputation before switching spinners. Is it possible to get the neat reknown centric quests to generate but just remain inert until the requisite reknown? Or even better, not make interesting things dependent on the player to exist?

They should activate at the correct renown regardless of your travels. For many of them, you may need to be in town for the activation to happen. Or there may be a bug. Since all the story bits are getting rewritten in Lua, it's a moot point.

[Anticheese]

Its been a while since I last posted here, but I'm really excited to see the Lua release getting that little bit closer, and that Gearhead 2 is still growing steadily.

Your proposed changes sound great, but I'm just wondering how you'd visually convey a shop's quality level, especially in ASCII.

[Crucifix]

Oooo, exciting stuff, I'll be waiting in eager anticipation, thanks for your continued efforts.

You've definitely summed up a lot of what I've said perfectly with "Catastrophic Randomness", I like insurance (honestly I dismissed the idea because I didn't think anyone would sell insurance to Cavaliers), and buying protection against Random would be perfect.

Shops: I'd like that. Finding that one hard to come by item would be fine (exotics), but finding a shop that sells spacesuits should be childs-play (actually, in a space-station, would some of those mop-closets contain emergency spacesuits? How secure are people in the spinners in spinner integrity?).

For Quality level, what about investing in a small-business shop (rather than one of the corporate ones) with the Shopping Skill - to increase its quality? Heck, being able to flat out own a business would be awesome too.

Even in graphical, quality level is already a bit esoteric, perhaps a simple text string at the bottom of the talk window with its "number" to start with?

I don't know about the reknown thing, all I know is with my Jericho toon I had him travel to every spinner very early on. He travelled around constantly looking for a trainer, and he never encountered the starving student at all, and the Sentinel in the Basement never appeared either. This could just be random though?

[Joseph Hewitt]

I don't know about the reknown thing, all I know is with my Jericho toon I had him travel to every spinner very early on. He travelled around constantly looking for a trainer, and he never encountered the starving student at all, and the Sentinel in the Basement never appeared either. This could just be random though?

Yeah, those are random quests- there will always be a quest at that place, but it won't necessarily be that one.

[Joseph Hewitt]

Another change that might fix a lot of things: Separate renown scores for mecha combat, personal combat, performance and many of the professional skills. So, appropriate plots can be loaded depending on the PC's level in each. Also, the core story can be directed to not load certain missions unless the PC is qualified for them.

[Crucifix]

Ah alright, that explains it then; I just got unlucky with spawning.

Dividing reputation would be good - It depends how much work there is to it of course; you can easily have:

* Surgeon/Paramedic/Firefighter (Medicine, Science if you want to do a Cyber-surgery job, and whatever it is Firefighters will do to fires, probably using a particular tool or something)
* Performer (Perform)
* Mechanical (Repair, run a mechanic's place whilst he grabs his lunch/other randomly generated reason?)
* Guide (survival?) / Chef (Also survival? Making your own happy-snack foods out of food ingredients like Robotics would be a neat addition to Survival, gotta mix your Flavour Points, Vitamins and Stodge to make the ultimate food, possibly even for cooking contests.)
* Detective/Bounty Hunter (Insight)
* Pilot (Mecha Combat skills)
* Warrior (Personal Combat skills)
* Thievery? (Stealth/Code Breaking/Intimidate?, picking a pocket, mugging a dude, all the way up bank jobs, or the less-illegal espionage jobs)
* Politics? (Conversation? Sway the masses, become a demagogue to impose your whims on the technocracy... Basically attend a lot of parties I guess)
* Spiritualism? (Conversation/Mysticism?)
* Scientist (Low paying science missions could go from examining asteroids or collecting space fungus samples from a particular cave all the way up to mad science)
* Business? (Shopping?)

That's twelve possible reknown scores to track, and I've possibly missed a few. Would it be possible to have purely "themed" core stories by following only specific activities? "Tales of Gearhead: The great Cook Off", thirteen episodes culminating in who can make the perfect dish!.... That would actually be awesome.