Every so often I mention a game, usually a science fiction game, and leave a disparaging remark about the pathetic state of the equipment chapter. Some examples may include, off the top of my head, Ashen Stars, Polaris and BASH Sci-Fi... along with far too many others.  The reason for this is actually a fairly well developed theory I have been noshing on for many years, and I thought I'd take the time to actually put it into order and to set it out there for the purposes of commentary and, if I flatter myself, to potentially improve the gaming community as a whole.  

Quick: What can you tell me about the people who use the Gladius, the Kris, the Kukri, the Katana, the Dao or the macahuitl? For that matter the Batiraku? Ok, I don't really expect you to know that last one.

Chances are you can give me quite a lot of information about the Romans, the Phillipinos, the Nepalese, the Japanese, the Chinese and the Aztecs. Maybe you can even tell me something about the Micronesians.

All from a simple cross section of not terribly random items, in this case... crudely speaking... Swords.  

I used swords, because the names are common and commonly recognized, and because I'm not so good with these new fangled intertubes, and I don't want to choke this thread up with pictures of helmets or something.

Face it, you humans are tool using animals. Its how you get along in a cold, cruel world. Clothes protect you from the cold instead of fur, knives allow you to defend yourselves without claws... and later as tools to make other tools among their myriad uses.  Most sentient creatures will be tool users by default, as species able to survive without tools don't need to develop higher brain functions, the ability to comprehend time beyond the immediate 'now'.

Humans are also visual creatures, and a great deal of how we denote culture comes from visual imagery. Shockingly often these two features intersect, and humans define their cultures in the shapes of their tools and their variances.  

It is no shock to me that most of the oldest and most successful RPGs had almost obsessive levels of illustration of the most basic tools of all... weapons. Not merely because humans, particularly the young males who often made up the demographics of game players, are fascinated by the tools of war and killing, but also because they very often are some of the easiest ways to identify, or identify with, foreign cultures.  Its easy to draw a Katana and imagine the heritage of a Samurai, its a little harder to draw Oyori armor, though it serves the same value, the same need.  We need not focus on gamers or games either to prove this point, the weird fetish for Nunchucks among American youth in the nineteen eighties stands on its own, or the way the sword came to symbolize the christian cross all across Europe in the middle ages, particularly in the period of the Crusades.  I might remind the casual reader that one of the three holiest of treasures passed from the Gods to the Emperors of Japan was a sword, the Kusanagi.  The symbols of a culture and its tools can be entirely synonymous, or should I remind the reader of the Hammer and Sickle of Soviet Communism, tools and weapons both in ages past.

For fantasy games this can be a less than pressing issue. Simply name a Katana and you've already put an image in the reader's mind, entire elements of historical culture, right down to the tribal symbols they use to the shape of their armor.  Put the name Khopesh on the lips of your artist and he'll draw it in the hands of your psuedo-egyptian lizard men without needing further prompting.  

Yet, oddly, its often the fantasy game designers, the ones who want to make a world their own that seem to understand most the value of defining cultures by their tools, that design strange, exotic and alien weapons for various races to use, giving them absurdly good or bad stats to distinguish them (often needlessly) from more prosaic and common versions.  I could show you a dozen, a hundred pictures of daggers and name the culture and era each came from, yet would never call for a table in a game of a thousand knives... but I still appreciate the care the writers and designers took for these games.

So when we turn to Science Fiction games, wether the high-space opera, or the more hard boiled speculative futurists, why is it that so many game designers are simply content to put no effort at all into the one thing that a future tool using society would have different than today? The TOOLS!  Any tools, really, but weapons most of all, for all the reasons Ive already named and more.

It hardly surprises me that some of the most successful science fiction games have readily identifiable weapons. Think about 40k with its distinctive Bolter, Lasgun, Shuriken Launchers and more.  WHile still in the realm of monocultures, the simple fact is that were I to show the average fan a picture of any of those weapons he could tell me exactly which faction it came from. If I were to take an old picture of an Eldar laspistol, he might not recognize it, but he'd still know it was Eldar. Why? Because it has a distinctive aesthetic that matches the culture in the setting.  

Think of Shadowrun. The very first supplement released for the game was the Street Samurai Catalog, which had almost no rules whatsoever, but had full page entries for a hundred or so guns and other implements of destruction.  Future editions largely kept this format until the game was over a decade old, only slowly paring it down to a more 'economical' word based format with smaller and fewer pictures... and yet to this day even semi-casual players of the game can look at Shadowrun art and recognize the weapons used by the figures within more often than not.  And Shadowrun remains on of the most popular non-fantasy (in the historical sense) RPGs on the market, almost thirty years after it was released!

Even Mutant Chronicles, with its checkered history is more than twenty years old... yet every single weapon has a picture to go with it, and every piece of art that has a weapon in it uses those designs. But MC goes further: As shallow as the factions are, each has a distinct style. Mutant Chronicles shows you the designs of suits popular with each faction, creates iconic images for characters for each faction.  

Shall I go on?  Even games that don't emphasize weapons, like Traveller still have visually distinct tools. In that case, Starships. In the case of Battletech its Giant Robots first, but still distinct tools down to the human scale for those interested.

Do I need to even talk about RIFTS?  This is a game line practically defined by its artwork. Everything is drawn, everything is designed, books are sold entirely around the equipment and tools being used.  And while everyone, even the fans, like to talk about how bad the rules are, how crazy... or repetitive... the writing can get, its still got some fifty or sixty books to its credit, and new ones coming out every year.  I suppose I could re-write this entire theory exclusively around RIFTS and still expect people to just Get It, but I won't.

I suppose, personally, that is why I keep ignoring how bad Fragged Empires actually is, because at the end of the day the various factions, the various cultures do have their own distinct equipment.. from guns to starships and more... that not only visually define them (not nearly so well as others, but still...), but also culturally.  You know who those cultures are, who the people are that make up those cultures, based on the things they use... and that alone puts FE a cut above so many other games, just as it does for RIFTS or for Mutant Chronicles or any other game that's gone the distance.

So what about the games that failed to do that?

I was hoping to avoid 'trash talking', especially since the best examples are ones people are familiar with, that are even popular despite this failing... but I can't see making a solid case without showing an example or two from the other side.

So, what about Ashen Stars?  This isn't a condemnation of the game as a game, but only a commentary on the setting that was built.

In AS we are given seven different races, which would imply a minimum of seven different cultures.  We have some twenty generic star ships with no mention of racial preferences or builds, and if you look at weapons you have almost exactly one choice, the Disruption (pistol, rifle).  To its credit, we are told a few minor cosmetic changes for each race, but that is it.  

What does that tell me about the culture in Ashen Stars?  Virtually nothing at all.   To be fair, there are pictures of each style of disruption pistol, showing me each, and that is a very good touch, but it is a small mercy for a setting that seems to imply, accidentally or deliberately, that all these alien races are pretty much interchangable, culturally.

Alternatively, we can use Spacemaster:Privateers, which gives us in theory roughly the same number of races, but with multiple cultures of each, divided into at least two opposed star-empires. It also gives us a good half dozen 'high tech' weapons, from well defined plasma guns to generic blasters, and even manages to crudely tell us (through in game fiction mostly) that one faction favors plasma while the other favors blasters if it favors anything.  There is art all over the place.

So it should be good, right? If only from the standpoint of this theory.

Well its not. The art doesn't really line up with anything. Random clip art of 'sci-fi' guns attached to rule charts, or throughout the chapter, artists drawing members of various factions using random boxy shapes rather than distinct items eliminates any possibility of using the visual language of culture to distinguish... anything.

And that's actually important. While mechanically differentiating various items, culture to culture, is useful the real important element is the visual language that distinguishes groups, that lets us know who is whom. Weapons and armor become uniforms, colorful jerseys distinguishing sides. Even if the setting is deliberately vague and undeveloped it is still important to show that there are sides, there are cultures out there, just waiting for the players to discover them, for the GM to give them depth and detail.

But there is more. Even when you only have one culture, one technological base, the choice of tools is important. It gives you a chance to say something deep and meaningful about a people without having to write a word, without even having to know exactly what you are trying to say!

Consider the non-gaming setting of Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga. Everyone in the books is human, the technological base is functionally identical for every nation, every faction. It says something deeply profound about the differences in culture that the Barrayarans use Neural Disruptors and the Betans believe they are utterly abhorrent.  Even if you've never read the books, if you know nothing else about those two peoples and have no idea what Neural Disruptors do as weapons, you can still probably make some accurate guesses just from that.

I'll never know why so many people interested in science fiction seem so oblivious to this simple truth. I can guess the reason the books I see often fail so badly to capture it is simply down to laziness... slap down a simple statline and label it 'blaster' and call it a day, but when you're speculating about the culture and attitudes of an alien species how can you fail to see that their tools will be shaped by their environment as sharply as their attitudes?  And even if you can't figure out how and why, simply giving them unique tools may in turn fill that void for you, giving the potential fans of your setting all the clues they need to imagine what life is really like for the bugmen of sigma seven.

I would close this out by summation and putting all the pieces together for you, explaining how to USE this idea, this theory... but frankly that seems rather redundant, and this is a damn forum post and I've already created three or four walls of text today...

Capturing the imagination through evocative imagery is definitely an art, either through description and naming, or visual language motifs. And, well, there seems to be a strange antipathy from sci-fi fans against studying those disciplines (often in the Humanities colleges) as a complementary support to their idolization of the hard sciences. Which constantly blows my mind as science is incredibly inspiring stuff...

Light sabers, phasers, collapsible self-defense sticks, electric prods, nanites... There is a lot of range, from the famtastic to the now-extant, for iconic sci-fi weaponry. But there is also a lot of odd resistance on working back to the human and postulating how humanity's contact with tech shapes tech. Oh, there is plenty of exploration on how tech may reshape humanity. But there is resistance, even in cinema & literature, to acknowledge humanity's primacy in reshaping tech according to its human desires & needs.

I think there is a glorification strain about technology as a "rationality inviolable," as some sort of bulwark haven against an irrationally subjective world. Sci-fi at its weakest and most derivative (to me) seems like a defensive retreat into "rational," material escapism from a world filled with a people incomprehensible to them. The weakest works seem to strive to forget the human, as if it is too hard to empathically connect.

These homogenized tech readouts, often in (my bias) math-phobic narrative circles, remind me of a variation of hyperfixated military weaponry porn readouts from authors like Tom Clancy or Battletech fiction (or rpg gun/martial art splats). Both somehow want to abstract the human away, of either their tech re-adaptation or their societal context restriction. Tools no longer become a reflection, situational; they become a universalized fixed point, a logical hierarchy, unchanging & inviolate.

Huh. maybe I should be outsourcing my theories to you to write.  that sounded much smarter than what I put up...

Dunno if you two are quite on the same page, what do you think of the original Street Samurai Catalog for Shadowrun, Opa?

In the late 1980s of my youth, it was damn hard to find RPGs in rural Arkansas.  While I had a couple genres covered, space opera was a big hole that needed filling.  So I took it on myself to write one for the group.

The first aspect with which I started was to draw and name different sci fi weapons of fevered fourteen year old fantasies.  When finally set for play, the rules were skimpy in the extreme.  Yet I had page after page of the best weapon and spaceship scrawls my limited skills could muster.  Aesthetically set to the factions I designed, the weapons and spaceships were the primary means by which said factions were designed.

And somehow that flimsy set of barely rules sustained for our imagined adventures blasting through the solar system battling pirates on Mars or exploring the jungles of Venus.  

Then with the freedom of turning 16 with wheels, the must-make-my-own attitude faded into the night as access to what Arkansas considers the big city with its hardships and bookstores offered a vast plethora of sci to games to choose.  And so my creaky little game of Retro Thrusters with a binder of handrawn love was never to be played again.  But a page or two of notes is all that remains to jog the memories of past adventures with friends I have long since lost to the annals of time.

Between those simple times and this day I have, of course, acquired and played a number of different sci fi games, all of which had better rules than my young brain imagined.  But none have improved upon the imagination and glory we had Retro Thrusting through the inner planets.

I have always surmised that the wondrous nature derived from our youth and newness to role-playing the way one remembers their first kiss more than the hundredth.  But maybe, just maybe, your theory holds credence, and the wonder was equally enhanced by my defining the game through pictures of its Moonman Zappers, Martian Disrupters, and Venetian Netguns.

Curiously, when I was 14 I too made my own Sci-fi game, with pages of lovingly handdrawn guns of various sci-fi goodness. Of course it was a reskin of AD&D when it came to rules... though I really did honestly try to make my own that was the only model I had back than.

I made the mistake of trying it out on my mother, a typical captive audience member. I junked it shortly after. Shame, really.

Of course, my art abilities have actually gotten far worse since those days, but I'm still pretty sure my little gun drawings weren't anything to be particularly proud of (a bit like I view the gun drawings in Living Steel... actually. Not that I had anything to do with those!), but Im reasonably sure... with my general lack of sciencey knowledge back then, that most of the weapons used various elemental effects to differentiate them. Oddly, I play Warframe alot these days.... so Full Circle.

We are primarily visual creatures.  Show us a great picture of a weapon we imagine ourselves or our characters holding it, a car we imagine driving it.  A setting full of visual things kickstarts the imagination.  Lousy drawings of things, really get you nowhere, unless it's something unfamiliar and gets you into the ballpark of what it is supposed to look like for reference.

I guess this is why Unknown Armies had it that if you did more than use harsh language against someone you might go hopelessly insane from the trauma of it all, but still had 85 different kinds of guns and 24 types of ammo.

Star Frontiers had its own distinctive weapons. Though not enough in my opinion. But one possible reason for the homogeny of styles is that alot of this stuff is MASS PRODUCED by one of two or three major companies.

But outside that you have examples of things like the distinctive bulb shape of the Vrusk laser or needler to fit their alien hands. Or the iconioc Laser Pistol with its slider that overall kept its general outline for a good while.

Unfortunately Star Frontiers also has numerous examples of the artists being totally lazy with details.

Universe on the other hand is a total blank. No art. Just descriptions and the rest is left to you to embellish.

Which is one reason why some RPGs go the simple route. To deliberately leave room for the players and DM to breath into it their own styles and shapes.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;940839I guess this is why Unknown Armies had it that if you did more than use harsh language against someone you might go hopelessly insane from the trauma of it all, but still had 85 different kinds of guns and 24 types of ammo.

Maybe. Of course Unknown Armies is set in the modern world... just with Real Magick (TM, the Pundit).  So they didn't have to stretch any creative muscles to come up with all those guns and bullets either, and a lack of art for them (I'm guessing, since I don't recall pages of gun pron in my copy of Unknown Armies), is because... as 'real guns', the players/readers don't need a spur to imagination.

Quote from: Omega;940841Star Frontiers had its own distinctive weapons. Though not enough in my opinion. But one possible reason for the homogeny of styles is that alot of this stuff is MASS PRODUCED by one of two or three major companies.

But outside that you have examples of things like the distinctive bulb shape of the Vrusk laser or needler to fit their alien hands. Or the iconioc Laser Pistol with its slider that overall kept its general outline for a good while.

Unfortunately Star Frontiers also has numerous examples of the artists being totally lazy with details.

Universe on the other hand is a total blank. No art. Just descriptions and the rest is left to you to embellish.

Art helps, but it isn't the end all, be all.  SM:Privateers could have done fine without distinctive art if they'd focused a bit harder on providing cultural details beyond 'evil lion aliens run this empire' and 'good teddybear scientist aliens run this empire'... and equipment, visual or not, would normally be a big part of it.

QuoteWhich is one reason why some RPGs go the simple route. To deliberately leave room for the players and DM to breath into it their own styles and shapes.

Sure. I wasn't trying to do an overall review of all Sci-fi games, but I have plenty with little to no artwork and yet still provide an evocative tool section. I also know/have games that have boring ass 'toys', but put a little artistic fillip to show how the different races use the same basic shit differently (a la Ashen Stars, which did provide drawings for each race's version of the setting's one and only weapon...) that managed to enrich the setting in some small way.

What drives me nuts with sci-fi isn't stuff like weapons, it's basic technology. Like Star Wars doesn't seem to have security cameras. And in Shadowrun all kinds of tech are apparently commonplace that kept tripping my character up since I didn't even consider their existence.

Bog standard D&D is just so much easier to get everyone on the same page as to what sort of stuff people have and use.

Quote from: CRKrueger;940830Dunno if you two are quite on the same page, what do you think of the original Street Samurai Catalog for Shadowrun, Opa?

Y'know, I only remember seeing it over 15 years ago in passing. IIRC it had a lot of passion and setting (corporation) connected fluff, and even my non-weaponry obsessed self gave nod to such passion. Ask me any names or stats... doubtful I could cough up anything correct.

But 1e Shadowrun corebook art definitely had *flare*! The whole mix and match of NA culture, fairy creatures, and cybernetic tech just scratched this itch of *cool* because setting had people imprint themselves upon their gear. Sprinkle feathers or bone talismans on your gear...

... That said, I have very big, lingering, festering issues with Catalyst Shadowrun -- trauma if you will -- so who knows how much has been blocked out by sheer anger. So much setting deliciousness, so much mechanical irritation. All packaged in a lazy Fuck You letter of editing and publishing.

Quote from: CRKrueger;940836We are primarily visual creatures.  Show us a great picture of a weapon we imagine ourselves or our characters holding it, a car we imagine driving it.  A setting full of visual things kickstarts the imagination.  Lousy drawings of things, really get you nowhere, unless it's something unfamiliar and gets you into the ballpark of what it is supposed to look like for reference.

Yes. Visual is a big part of it. But so is good description. I am not a fan of OSC's "Ender's Game," but that description of The Desk was enthralling -- and I believe it was a strong inspiration for Apple's eventual development of the iPod touch, iPhone, and iPad tablet we have today. Just like the visuals of original Star Trek's sliding doors inspired people to invent our ubiquitous motion sensor sliding doors in our shopping centers.

It's about the captivating presentation of one's imagination. There might be examples that cross other senses if we really scoured our memories. It's a pedantic detail in some respects, but it illustrates humanity's amazing capacity to empathize and express across seemingly unrelated spheres.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;940839I guess this is why Unknown Armies had it that if you did more than use harsh language against someone you might go hopelessly insane from the trauma of it all, but still had 85 different kinds of guns and 24 types of ammo.

That's... an impressive bit that exemplifies my argument. :eek: (I really do hope that's hyperbole, though. Otherwise any of my future UA PCs would curse at everyone hoping to induce Mythos-level apocalypse by fee-fees trauma. It's just too tempting.)

Hmm. I think it helps me visualize a scene and relate-to/immerse-in it to have some pictures of things. I've definitely always had a particular interest in the weapons and armor used, and their details, though I don't need all that much detail in what they look like exactly, and my interest in what they look like is largely about how they work and what their strengths and weaknesses are. If I am going to play a game largely about combat, I want it to be about that situation, and I want the rules and stats for things to match the situation in some way. If I find out there is no functional difference in the game between two weapons that are different, then I find that very dissatisfying and I relate to the game as being not what it pretends to be about.

The Palladium books of weapons and armor were the best early example I knew of both giving visualization and real-world information along with game stats, although the grain was pretty low so some of the weapons were either not different enough or too different in some cases, and the Palladium RPG's combat/character system itself was a massive disappointment to us by comparison and the whole body of work ended up being almost entirely unusable for us as TFT players.

When I develop settings, I tend to make basic sketches of what their weapons are like, and give them stats that reflect their differences and that have reasons for being made and used.

Quote from: Daztur;940857What drives me nuts with sci-fi isn't stuff like weapons, it's basic technology. Like Star Wars doesn't seem to have security cameras. And in Shadowrun all kinds of tech are apparently commonplace that kept tripping my character up since I didn't even consider their existence.

There's not many sci fi games with a future version of a leatherman, are there?