Here we are in December of 2007 and I have no idea where I am going or, more correctly, where we are going. 2007 was a year of tumultuous change in for me, and 2008 looks to be a year of tumultuous change for America. It is not surprising that it should also be a time of change for the industry. The 800-pound gorilla in the room is definitely D&D 4th Edition – but what else is coming up in RPGs? I think the future may be the future, or more succinctly Science Fiction.
Now this is not a discussion of any specific subgenre of Science Fiction; or as we will abbreviate, SF. This is a discussion of the big overarching constants of “capital S” Science Fiction. Spaceships, big helmets, inexorably gorgeous women dressed in amazingly diaphanous anti-gravity costumes. From Space Opera to New Wave to the Hard SF of 2007.
Serenity will continue to sell and the debut of the first half of the final season of Battlestar Galactica will doubtless kick-start the sales of the RPG. Well, kick-start is probably the wrong term; sales appear to have been brisk with so little competition in the market space, RIFTS™ notwithstanding. Please note that my mention of RIFTS™ does not challenge the intellectual property rights of Kevin Siembieda or Palladium Books.
The Science Fiction RPG space is about to get much more exciting. I was expecting SFRPGs to undergo something of a renaissance at the turn of the millennium. I underestimated the polarizing nostalgia coupled with the twin juggernauts of Lord of the Rings and D&D 3rd Edition. That pushed fantasy to the vanguard for almost a decade. There were some decent SF games; but none that I would call either complete or successful. Now we have two possibly huge announcements in only a few weeks that could radically change the SFRPG landscape.
The first is the announcement of a new Robotech RPG from Palladium Books. It is no secret that Palladium has had a metaphorical seven years of bad luck beginning with the departure of Maryann Siembieda in 2002. Maryann is one of the genuinely nicest people I have ever met in the industry, and that cannot have been easy on anyone. Some time in 2006, there was an evidently huge episode of embezzlement and misappropriation rocked the company at its very core. A success with the Robotech Shadow Chronicles RPG might not put the company back where it was, but it would place it on much surer financial footing.
Robotech shares with Palladium Books a loyal and committed fan-base. In the 1980s Robotech was Palladium Book’s biggest seller. With the success of the Transformers revival and the talk of a new live-action Robotech movie, there are all of the ingredients for synchronicity.
The second announcement comes from Mongoose publishing. It seems that Mongoose is either co-developing or parallel developing a new version of Traveller with Marc Miller. Details are sketchy, or a lot less clear than I would like to see. From the press release, I gather that the products will be compatible on some level and probably at very different price points.
From the shadowy corridors and smoke-filled offices of the “gaming intelligentsia” come the rumors there are several other major companies working on SFRPGs. Exactly what they are and if they ever see the harsh light of day remains to be seen. There is a great deal of debate as to whether this is a good idea.
There has not been a real renaissance in SFRPGs since the awarding of the original Star Wars license to West End Games. Several of the major players in RPGs at the time had fully developed games competing for that license. Several contenders were excellent games in their own right. Renegade Legion comes immediately to mind. Consisting of the related games: Legionnaire, Interceptor, Centurion, and Prefect; it was the most fully developed of any of the one-time contenders. My memory is not as good as it once was. The others do not come immediately to mind, but I will not belabor the point.
Let me paint this picture. There was MegaTraveller, Star Wars, Renegade Legion, GURPS Space, Star Hero, SpaceMaster, and many others SFRPGs all actively in print and being actively developed. As an unabashed fan of both roleplaying and Science Fiction, it was the best time in the world for me to be a gamer. With the number of games increasing on a regular basis the market became more and more fragmented. As good as many of the later games were, they simply were too late. I am thinking specifically of games like High Colonies, but that brings up another point.
During this heyday, specifically 1985-1990, there was a lot going on in Science Fiction literature that did not have anything to do with SFRPGs as they had previously been conceived. Small groups of writers were telling stories in radical new ways. They used complex prose styles and seemed to come to many of the same conclusions from wildly different angles. They were known by many names, but the one that stuck was cyberpunk. I have written extensively about cyberpunk roleplaying before, and I won’t repeat myself here; but it did put a bullet in the head of “space opera SF roleplaying” for almost twenty years.
Back to Traveller, it was remarked to me recently that with so many failures in recent times that Mongoose could well manage to do what no one else has ever managed – to kill Traveller as a viable setting. Personally, I think this was simply misdirected anger and a few sour grapes. While it is true that Mongoose has had some spectacular failures, it is also true that there are many opportunities for both companies to fail. That is the case with any game, truly, and there is nothing to make these an exception.
No matter what the outcome, I do think that Traveller will continue to be the best SF setting of any RPG. Even with this caveat, Mongoose has almost no room for error. It would not be surprising that if the game misses the mark, then Mongoose well may be history. Certainly, no one with any sense would trust them with another license. Similarly, I do not see that Palladium has any room for error with Robotech Shadow Chronicles. With the fragile nature of Palladium Books’ business over the last few years, any major gaffs likely mean a disastrous end to one of the oldest publishers in the business.
An RPG is not just a set of rules. While there are rules to write, there are many other rules to follow for the publisher of a new SF RPG. There are things they have to include, things even more important than the Big Hats and Red Shirts. SFRPGs are not like fantasy RPGs. Some things just do not work. Not because the games are different, on some level we are all just roleplaying. The perceptions and expectations of the audience are so much different that the game must also be different. Here is the “Close to the Edit Things” a SFRPG Must Have!
With so many thousands of volumes of SF as inspiration, it might seem silly to see only a few things as necessary or important. This list is cribbed from decades of purely anecdotal research into discovering why SF games succeed and fail. More directly, this is my opinion, and possibly no one else’s. We can start out with the rules and talk about both task resolution and characters.
While both Classic Traveller and Robotech come from another line of thinking in another time, I think any new SF game has to look at the mechanics with fresh eyes. Task resolution, conflict, and getting things done using a die mechanic need to be unified and complete. When I say unified, I mean that all of the different types of conflicts and tasks use the same mechanics and the same steps. There may be some variation in special cases, but for the most part social conflict, combat, research, invention; or any type of conflict needs to be handled by the rules in the same way.
The mechanics, whatever they may be, also need to identify and reinforce genre tropes that they are intending to model. If we want the orphaned farm boy to become the mystic warrior we need to establish their role in play and establish rules that make that role important. If we want the nomadic tribe to be the finest warriors in the galaxy, we need rules to reinforce that as well. Also, if we are building a generic system for realizing multiple styles within the genre, that needs to be strongly delineated; and we need to have rules for creating these reinforcements within each subgenre.
All of these mechanics also need to be informed by things like the Power 19 and the three-fold model/GNS, even if they actively choose to ignore parts of them. The games need to be aware that appealing to all of these audiences will increase their market and their sales. Finally, the rules need to be good for telling the kinds of pulpy SF stories that made the original Traveller and Robotech great games. A related aside, the days of myriad tables and charts are completely and totally past. Running through options and such should be simple, intuitive, and not cumbersome. A game system that has too many obstacles to storytelling will fail not just commercially, but also as an RPG.
Let me also interject that I generally dislike dice pools. They seem to be of very limited utility for any kind of game system based in verite’ or realism. For similar reasons SFRPGs should generally have a skill-base rather than a stat-base. The reasoning is petty simple. Any game revolving in so many ways around technology needs to be cognizant of the skills necessary to live in a technological society. A society not simply technologically advanced as we are now, but also aware and capable of interacting with various culture and technologies that may be possibly either more or less advanced than they are.
Dealing with a technically advanced human society is always a challenge in SF roleplaying. While many games focus solely on physical conflicts, characters must also be able to resolve intellectual conflicts and social conflicts as well.
The “lifepath”, or whatever you choose to call your timeline-based character generation system, came directly from Classic Traveller. Paul Jacquays’ books, “Heroes of Legend”, “Heroes Now”, and “Heroes of Tomorrow,” expanded on those ideas most profoundly; although many others had significant contributions too. I think it is, by far, the best option for this kind of SF game. Yes, it has negatives for both extremely experienced and inexperienced players, but of the vast majority of us, it is a good place to start.
There need to be options for constructing characters as well as the more classic random methods favored by earlier versions of Traveller and Robotech. Players entering ongoing games, players who need create characters of specific experience levels, and players who just want a huge helmet all need the capability to build their characters within the boundaries of the published system, and not through a random assortment of house rules and kludges. This is not to say that I do not think there is a place for random generation. There is and it can be a lot of fun. I have heard some positive things coming across the pond about the new version of Traveller having a great random character generation setting that can make generating your team almost be a game session unto itself.
Similarly, if the default setting includes alien races then the default game should include the ability for players to be aliens. The same goes for androids, robots, or whatever. The system does not have to be complete. It can be a basic system that will be expanded later – much like Traveller did in books like the Mercenary, High Guard, Robots, and the Alien modules, and so on. Palladium has done this through many of its products as well. White Wolf uses a similar model for their splatbooks. Introduce a basic idea within the main text, and expand on it in support material. As an aside, White Wolf needs to get into the game as well. I think the new World of Darkness system is ripe for an SF game. If they can avoid the classic trap of “vampires in space” and do a straight SF setting using their system I think it could be a hit. Maybe not on the same level as some of their other products, but a hit nonetheless.
One of the biggest gripes I hear consistently from players of old-school roleplaying games is the technology dilemma. It aggravates me to no end. I frankly just do not understand why so many experienced gamers need to be spoon-fed everything. Back in 1978 when I started playing Traveller, I had three black books. That was all. I would not see any supplements until almost three years later. I had all kinds of supplements for D&D. I had Eldritch Wizardry, I had Greyhawk, Blackmoor, even Gods, Demigods & Heroes. I just never thought to look for Traveller supplements until someone actually showed them to me. I had my own ideas, and they were cool. I had an empire that was far far away, a fleet, my own ideas on Battle Dress and Combat Armor, and a whole lot more. Just from reading Laumer, Haldeman, Heinlein, and a hundred others; and then coming up with my own ideas. I thought the ideas of separate forces in a modern spacefaring military were weak, so I came up with my own order of battle and chain of command. I thought it was silly that so many big ships always had tiny little lasers, so I came up with the idea of Laser Cannons in big fixed mounts. It all made sense in my game because it was internally consistent and had a logical basis.
One of the biggest challenges of SF RPGs is the speed of change we see in technology. Many literalist players and GMs feel that an SF game has to correctly represent current technology, but this is no truer than it is with Alternate History and Fantasy RPGs. In fact, it may be the exact opposite of a problem, it may be a feature.
Too many times we seem to forget that the point of an RPG is telling a story, and not simulating anything. What’s more, most SF RPGs, even Traveller, were using obsolescent technology even 30 years ago. In RPGs we are not dealing with real life, we are dealing with metaphor, character, and events. The challenge of SF RPGs is to create a unified and internally consistent view of technology. This is obvious in places like Starship Design and energy weapons, since we really do not have those yet, but it gets bogged down in things like more modern weapons and casual technology.
If you are interested in simulating stories like those written in Space Viking, by H. Beam Piper then handheld computers with virtual displays and advanced networks do not exist. So as a designer you need to simply decide why they do not exist and make that a constant in your SF world. Maybe you decide that there is something about Faster Than Light travel that requires significant shielding that makes them unusable. Maybe they were never developed in this alternate future; or in the case of stories like Battlestar Galactica, alternate past. Maybe computing went in a different direction.
In Traveller 2300 (later 2300AD) some races chose to develop biologicals before they developed computing because they were more adept at them. This was a perfectly acceptable solution for all but the most dim-witted grognards. Twilight 2000/Mercenary 2000 was another perfectly good game that simply chose the wrong path for the development of tech in the near future, even though their suppositions were perfectly logical at the time. The most important point is not to let the tech get in the way of the story.
This brings us to the most contentious point in good SF game design, spacecraft. One of the most constant ideas in SF is the ability for man to travel between worlds. Whether it is travel between the worlds of a single star system, or through the “Big Black” of interstellar space; no SF game can really be successful without a way to design and integrate spacecraft in to the story. In some games, a spacecraft is simply a counter to be advanced across a playing board, and in others it is a significant character unto itself. In any case it is an important element that cannot be ignored.
Johnn Four of roleplaying tips.com did a great article on 14 elements of Starship design. I think this is a great place to start. Obviously, Star Trek with its dozens of engineers mimicking the modern Naval Vessels of the time have a great deal of effect on how spacecraft are perceived by most players. Now we see massive ships plying the waves with only a handful of sailors monitoring systems that practically run themselves. The idea of thousands of ship’s crew manually monitoring anything is archaic. Again, if that is the kind of game that you want to run, then the rationalization needs to be there and be internally consistent. Spacecraft construction, space battles, lost and alien technology. In SF without the ability to travel, the game is very literally going nowhere.
Part of all of these ideas is an overarching technology system that regulates the whole. On of the most frustrating things about Mekton Zeta, as good a fourth generation game as there is, was the complete lack of a technology system for meaningful play. It is always possible to use every option and nothing is simply outside the bounds of the technology. I tried to graft a tech level system on to the game a few dozen times and always failed miserably. This was likewise a failing of a lot of other supposedly SF games. Dealing with cultures and societies both more and less advanced than your own has some interesting challenges, or should in my view of SF. An excellent example is giving a chimp a laptop. The chimp may be wicked smart, and may even be able to sign and communicate with meaningful language, but they would still have zero idea how to boot and surf the web. They can be taught, and probably integrate that into their personal skill-set, but it still does not mean they can eventually code. Many of the things that we take for granted in Middle America are just completely alien to someone who lives in rural Bangladesh -- because they lack the technological baseline. Anyway, I am kind of getting off on a rant so I will make one final point. In Traveller, the difference of one tech level normally meant absolute destruction in war. Occasionally, such as the case with Zhodani Psionics, a difference of only one tech level is nullified by some other advantage, but not often.
One final note on the ideas of technology and spacecraft is artificial beings, like robots. Since the debut of RUR, robots have been a staple of SF. Without Robbie, R2-D2, Model B-9, or Klaatu would SF even be the same? I think not. Added to that we have Androids, Bioroids, Cylons, and other kids of manufactured beings. So what are they exactly?
Wikipedia generally defines robots as artificially created, capable of sensing the environment, and interacting with it, having some degree of intelligence or programming, able to move with one or more axes, can make dexterous coordinated movements, and appears to have intent or agency. Since this is such a broad definition, I will say that not everything covered here needs to be included absolutely. Space: Above & Beyond did a fine job of including the tropes and storylines commonly associated with robots using their artificial humans, called InVitros or more derogatorily “tanks”. So including some artificials to take these tropes is a necessity in my eyes.
Which brings me to my next point, travelling. I mean sure, the neighborhood is great, Games like Transhuman Space have done an awesome job of making the “neighborhood a really interesting and diverse place, but what if we want to go “out”? Different worlds and star systems need to be more than just a collection of airports and bars, or more correctly spaceports and bars. At the same time, it doesn’t need to be a complex mathematics exercise requiring hours of formulae. Both Traveller and Space Opera had taken that approach, and while most players appreciate their attention to detail, it really does nothing for the overall playability of the game. Since many games had related or been built from Wargames
The original version of Traveller tries to address this in text and product. Tarsus comes to mind especially. In the source material like E. C. Tubb’s Dumarest Saga and others, each planet had a society, a specific flavor, and nearly endless possibilities for adventure. Still, as much as they tried the many worlds of Traveller were often no more than a Starport and a few locales.
This becomes even more important when addressing the various campaign styles that are common in SF RPGs. The most common by far is the mercenary company or military unit. It is also one of the more common themes in SF. Hammer’s Slammers, The CoDominion, Starship Troopers, Honor Harrington, and so many others. The military unit gives the players ample reason to be together, and clear missions to accomplish, along with opportunities for related adventures and sideplots. Probably the second most common is the exploration campaign. This can be a military unit or a prospecting company. A lost ship in space is also a good example of this kind of series. As an aside it is funny that when I find myself talking about Traveller, or the other SF games I played as a kid, that I find myself falling into the older vernacular of campaigns and scenarios, and not my more modern use of series, and episodes. I wrote about this a little while ago; go here if you want to read it. So if I seem to be contradicting myself, I may well be.
The swashbuckling merchants of the high seas is a common riff we see in SF. The weary traders, the rogue smugglers, the pirates, and more. One of the most brilliant is the Darkstryder Campaign for the Star Wars D6 system, combining espionage, trade, and a search for truth. Another excellent campaign was The Traveller Adventure, published by GDW in the 1980s, and it was the only published campaign I ever ran as a GM. There are other styles as well, but most are riffs on something already mentioned here.
Both Traveller and Robotech have some of the strongest examples of Meta-Story on RPGs. Few ideas are more reviled by many now, and none were as praised for innovation then. I remember enlisting for the Fifth Frontier War, and really feeling a part of the game because of it, even if I did not choose to use the setting in many of my games. I think this is the cognitive dissonance that many players and GMs are caught in. Too many of us are enmeshed in the idea that we have to use everything for the game, and it has to be just the way it is in the books as published. Traveller fans are most guilty of the sin of canon, and many spend considerable time arguing with differing interpretations. Robotech, and Palladium Books have actively pursued many fans who published derivative material online, and even sued publishers for publishing conversions for their games. The most notable was a small publishing company called Wizards of the Coast involving a metasystem called The Primal Order that settled in 1993.
One of the most disheartening announcements was that Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles will be published in November, and may be available by the time this article sees the web. It is disheartening because it means that the game will not have a newer and more modern system, but rely instead on Palladium’s established system, which I think is terribly broken. I think that the Palladium system could stand a significant rewrite, not the least of which to address the spiraling escalation of power levels that has plagued the system almost since inception.
Word from Mongoose, including their new Traveller Playtest Document, is that while they are paying a great deal of respect to the established Classic Traveller system, they have also added significant improvements in my eyes. One of the most exciting is the ability to generate character group relationships in the generation process itself, which eliminates the weary and troublesome “you all meet in a bar” sort of hand waving. I also like the fact that while the system seems to be success motivated, and much more flexible, that it is immediately familiar to players of Traveller to 30 years. Some of the familiarity may be only at the surface, but it does make this “old hand” feel comfortable indeed. Not to be all sweetness and light, I do have some concerns.
Setting the game within the established continuity of the Traveller universe is very problematic. One of the core ideas of a modern RPG is that the players can actually affect changes in the setting. Of course putting them smack in the midst of an established timeline makes this very difficult, because we all know how it is going to end, at least in macrocosm. While I understand that the setting is amazing, and there is ample room for adventure within. I think that Traveller players want to see the story continue, and I think that many are embarrassed by the war of memes and dogmatic discussions about the Rebellion, the Virus, and all of that. My take from auditing the boards and talking to players new and old is that it needs to be settled, and for the last time. I do not think that this steps too far into dogmatic feelings of my own. Yes, I want the metastory, and yes I also want the ability to go off on my own, but I also want to see some of the mistakes of the past corrected in the established setting. So yes, I want my cake, and eat it too, and I do not want any calories either; but I digress.
I also think that many newer players will see this game as something of a failure no matter what. This is not a game for the boutique crowd or the indie community. This is a mainline SF RPG, for the majority of roleplayers. Mongoose has some interesting plans for the rules system that include Strontium Dogs, Starship Troopers, and I think there is room for more. The Fourth Edition of Traveller had several settings within the Imperium, and I hope to see similar ideas in some form in the Mongoose edition.
So there you have it, exciting news, and now I have to go roll up some Traveller characters, look at the second playtest document, and then go off to find some players. See you next time.
