Author: Ken Burnside (---.chorus.net)
Date: 01-31-2002 09:05
I'm very much in favor of science being an integral part of science fiction. However, where this breaks from the genre is this:
Most of the literary tension in rigorous science fiction is built off of the thought process of the primary character as they go through some scientific puzzle. This might work in a Ghost Dog-style RPG with a GM and one player. But it really doesn't work for most classic RPGs, where people want to zap the hordes of faceless goons (orcs), swing across the chasm with the Princess clinging to their hip, and duel the big bad guy with flashing laser swords.
Star Wars is fantasy, not science fiction. Everything in Star Wars can be traced back to classic medievaloid fantasy, even the fighter combat (which is really just anime mecha combat, which in turn is just samurais swinging swords at each other.) Star Trek in its earliest incarnations was a series of morality plays, but was, essentially, Outriders To The Stars -- the Enterprise was the old Cavalry Troop on Patrol in the Wild West, with women in green face paint and mini skirts subbing for the evil injuns.
Star Trek Next Generation (and it's various spinoffs, including Enterprise) kept up the morality plays, only updated to a more politically correct consciousness. Instead of the evil injuns, it's the evil white oppressors (often the protagonists of the series), or it's the current bugaboo (corporate McCulture and its assimilation of everything else in the world. I am Ronald of McDonalds. We will assimilate your cultureal uniqueness into the McCollective. Resistance is Futile. We love to see you smile."
We are rapidly approaching a unified world culture, though I suspect it's far less utopian or dystopian than the ones predicted by the classics of SF. One way of looking at the current conflict is that it's really the first wave of the assimilation, with the US serving as the Borg.
Even Babylon 5 was more a political soap opera than a rigorous piece of SF.
Cyberpunk is, for all intents, anti-hero driven dark fantasy dressed up in bits of chrome.
RPGs are driven by characters first, not by plots, and certainly not by plots driven by arcana of science and technology.
There has never BEEN an SF RPG, where the science is as important as the fiction. And there likely never will be; it'd be depressingly dull. Where rigorous science belongs in an game is in a wargame, and even there, it should be presented in such a way that no player ever has to do algebra (or, for that matter, take a square root, do long division or do anything more complicated than the math in a CCG -- which is, actually pretty complex when you think about it as a whole.)
<Shameless Self Promotion>
Delta V is a wargame (with a play-by-internet option) that puts you at the helm of a spacehip. With all the physics done right. Newtonian movement that's fast, accurate and fun. Weapons that follow known physical laws for determining range and damage. Reaction drives that we could build with reasonable extrapolations of existing technology. Optional 3-D movement. A VRML star map of all the stars within 30 light years of Sol that links to the colonization history of the universe. Military (and other types) of SF set in the universe.
And all of this done with nothing more difficult than third grade math. If you can count, compare two numbers and determine if one is more than twice (or four times) the size of the other, and divide by 8 keeping whole number remainders, you can fly a nuclear powered rocketship in 3-D.
I'll be demoing the game at Winter War in Urbana Champaign this coming weekend, and will post conventions I'm at in these forums periodically.
Check it out at http://www.adastragames.com/
</Shameless Self Promotion>
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