Quote from: blakkieNow it isn't as detailed as those works you talk about. It isn't a social simulator, if that is what you are looking for? By that I mean that the game still revolves around a handful of key people, even if they are commanding armies, nations, and fleets and so forth. Maybe you are looking for a scope another step yet away from the personal connection to a character that is normally found in RPGs?

Maybe. I'm willing to be proved wrong on any specific game, but BE certainly gives the impression that it's basically BW in space. Nothing wrong with that as such.

Quote from: JimBobOzI'd be delighted to play or run such a game. I've offered all the gamers I know in person a game based on the excellent BBC mini-series, Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets, about an international expedition which takes a grand tour of the solar system, from Venus to Pluto.

It was recently shown again on cable in the United States.  I'd be willing to play a game like that if the crew was a little bigger and if the characters were interesting because I'd like to play through some of the boring stuff that happens between the exiting landings.

Quote from: JimBobOzI've offered games online, too, but also not enough takers. Take for example my "traveller trading game in the modern day" idea - very popular idea. But there's a difference between getting a bunch of geeks to say, "wow, cool idea, man!" and getting them to actually play the thing. Translating geek enthusiasm to geek action is often difficult.

I actually know people who have engaged in international trade.  It's often cars.  For example, there is a market for gray market Japanese performance and luxury cars in places like Australia (Do I need to tell you that?) and Ireland.  Another friend imported cars into Egypt.  I've also spoken with a woman who handled moving cargo containers for an electronics company via ship.  Yeah, there's finding people and bribes and such but, frankly, they didn't make it sound all that interesting.

Quote from: blakkieBurning Empires is generally quite hard (though hard being a term tha means "what I think is reasonable", so therefore subjective)....and to tie it into that other thread very character bouncing off each other. Ironically for the source material books (Iron Empires) the original author did a lot of nerd stomp worldbuilding, especially considering the relatively small size of the few works.

Dude, I love the Iron Empires (and BE) but it's not Hard SF by any means.  It's a fusion of Military SF and Space Fantasy.  There's no scientific rationale given for a FTL drive that distorts time, nor for Psychology.  Iron Empires is fantastic, but it's about as hard as Dune.

KoOS

Quote from: John MorrowThe problem is that the mathematics of Special Relativity includes a concept called the Light Cone.  The important bit is where it talks about, "In general relativity, the future light cone is the boundary of the causal future of a point and the past light cone is the boundary of its causal past."  See also the links for the Minkowski Diagram and Minkowski Space.

Basically, anything that falls outside of the light cone, which most FTL travel lets you do, can violate causality.  Violating causality is stuff like killing your grandfather or sending yourself a message before you leave.  It's the recipe for creating a paradox.  I think most people assume that physics will prohibit paradoxes and even things that can create potential paradoxes.

There are ways that might possibly allow FTL travel while not violating causality.  They often involve travel from two identical frames of references (roughly, two places in space where time is traveling at the same "speed" -- it's not consistent across space) and  usually requires an instantaneous jump or tunnel, which is why things like wormholes usually come into play as candidates for plausible FTL travel.  But what this ultimately means is that any FTL drive that doesn't involve an instantaneous jump or something like a wormhole between two identical frames of reference (e.g., warp drive, lots of movie hyperdrives, etc.) is pretty much fantasy, not science at this point.

Since most people don't have a relativistic model of the universe in their heads and don't even now what a Lorentz Transformation is, you can often just hand-wave the causality problems away and allow FTL drive.  But science that really ain't.

Or, in summary, most FTL schemes from classic science fiction violate the accepted principles of modern physics.

Well, traveller jump drive still doesn't let you go back in time or kill your grandfather before you were born, so it avoids that.

BTW, physics is always in a state of change. Until recently it was accepted that the universe would eventually implode in on itself and restart the big bang cycle. Now it's accepted that the universe will expand outwards forever and eventually completely disappear thanks to proton decay and unending expansion.

Before the big bang was accepted there was the steady state theory.

Physics change, and I have no doubt that something that circumvents lightspeed is possible. I'd hate to think that there are billions of stas out there and no one can ever travel them, what a sucky universe that would be!

As for the original question, I think this thread has the basic gist of it -- contemporary "literary-hard" SF doesn't immediately lend itself to stock play models, and in what is a recreational hobby the onus is really on the game's designers to make the game's play models transparent.  This IMO is the big failing of Transhuman Space.  I think it's a cool book full of really cool ideas and fascinating worldbuilding... but piss-poor when considered as a game to be played.  (It's also an object lesson in the pitfalls of allowing your playtest process to be dominated by the technofetishist gearhead fringe, but I digress.)

Even Blue Planet, which I love and which I think is far more accessible than THS, sort of falls down when it comes to the question of defining exactly what a group of players should do with the game.  I think the failure of contemporary hard SFRPGs is to allow this question to be totally eclipsed by the process of defining the world; a good game needs to reconcile the two.

KoOS

Incidentally, have people seen:-

http://www.sunshinedna.com/

http://www.sunshinedna.com/explore/uk/

Skiffy from the people who made 28 days later.

Quote from: droogI know that's your credo, Clash, but it's not the point. Undoubtedly there are people doing this, and as Elliot mentioned, there are such games out there (Transhuman Space gets mentioned a lot, for example).

Balbinus is asking why this sort of SF isn't popular, and I think, implicitly, how it can be made more popular. One of the answers given is that it's hard to do unless you have a doctorate in physics. My point on that was simply that there was a time when SF wasn't about science so much as it was about speculation. It's not a System Matters debate.

Sorry droog - I missed your point entirely, which I agree with. Today is my slow on the uptake day, I guess.

-clash

Quote from: King of Old SchoolDude, I love the Iron Empires (and BE) but it's not Hard SF by any means.  It's a fusion of Military SF and Space Fantasy.  There's no scientific rationale given for a FTL drive that distorts time, nor for Psychology.

Ah right, "Psychology" is in there too. That's funky stuff. Forgot about that. I was thinking on just the tech line alone. My years of gamer training in mentally cutting out sections of a setting that don't particularly interest me.

The rational for the drives in Iron Empires and weapon and such never made it into the book. In fact Moeller has a metric buttload of stuff that didn't go in. They are just thin graphic novels. Having each frame as a separate acrylic handpainting really isn't that great for churning out pages.  And there isn't really a thesis written up on the gravity manipulation for the sleds either (in or out as far as I know). You know, now I'm getting this stiffness of Hard SF more and more. You have to spend so much time explaining the tech details to earn the cred that you run out of room for story.....

Yup, you know what? I'm just the kind of guy that doesn't give a crap as long as you don't slap me in the face with things. Don't make it overly convient and I'll gave it a pass. Take the time to make it more internally consistant and society consistant with it? That's another pass. *shrug*  I guess deep down I cut a lot of slack once you get past a couple of hundred years in the future because Newton would likely have stared blankly if someone told him time wasn't rock solid....and anything with the word 'fiction' in the name I've already assumed has flaws in fact.

Quote from: droogMaybe. I'm willing to be proved wrong on any specific game, but BE certainly gives the impression that it's basically BW in space. Nothing wrong with that as such.

It uses very similar dice mechanics, and the Beliefs, Instincts, and Traits. It also uses Lifepaths. And speed and player-player head butting. But in a lot of ways they are very, very different games.  There are no campaign structure management rules in BW at all, whereas BE is very lockstep. World Burning has a fixed structure in BE that feeds into the campaign management structure.  And then there are the starting character range, their power level. BW is trailing off where BE starts up.  BW is open about plot and senario, BE centers around the fight between humans and aliens that want to be human.  The combat systems are different, with BE modeling a modern battlefield so emphasis is heavily on long ranged and groups and scaling up to fleet levels with hand-to-hand is minor bit.  BW has personal combat only with the details in melee and ranged getting the lighter treatment.

More generally BW is ment to have pieces pulled out and plunked in modularly. BE is not, outside of just excluding things like Psychology or other setting items by not concentrating on them. Yes the level of tech is flexible, from mid-20th century to well advanced past current. Even more crazy advanced (no particular set limit) if you locate your planet in the Void (basically a lone island in a sea of the enemy). But then it is not that extensive in the rules where you say "given this piece of tech the society will look like this", either hardcoded or rules for you to sim it out. Instead the players collectively talk it out and determine that themselves, and then play the characters in the environment.

Quote from: King of Old SchoolAs for the original question, I think this thread has the basic gist of it -- contemporary "literary-hard" SF doesn't immediately lend itself to stock play models, and in what is a recreational hobby the onus is really on the game's designers to make the game's play models transparent.  This IMO is the big failing of Transhuman Space.  I think it's a cool book full of really cool ideas and fascinating worldbuilding... but piss-poor when considered as a game to be played.  (It's also an object lesson in the pitfalls of allowing your playtest process to be dominated by the technofetishist gearhead fringe, but I digress.)

Even Blue Planet, which I love and which I think is far more accessible than THS, sort of falls down when it comes to the question of defining exactly what a group of players should do with the game.  I think the failure of contemporary hard SFRPGs is to allow this question to be totally eclipsed by the process of defining the world; a good game needs to reconcile the two.

KoOS

Yanno, stuff like this makes me start to believe Jimbob really was right about most of RPG Open.

I'm reading the comments here, about THS, and what I'm getting is that it's full of interesting ideas, but that it's not actually all that gameable.

Whereas I remember the game got notihng but glowing praise over on RPGnet, but never a single bit of discussion about actually playing it, or how it plays . . .

Quote from: J ArcaneYanno, stuff like this makes me start to believe Jimbob really was right about most of RPG Open.

I'm reading the comments here, about THS, and what I'm getting is that it's full of interesting ideas, but that it's not actually all that gameable.

Whereas I remember the game got notihng but glowing praise over on RPGnet, but never a single bit of discussion about actually playing it, or how it plays . . .

That's pretty much true.

Some people use it to play "Ghost in the shell" type settings, and reading a lot of masamune shirow's work can help you, but some of the player types are too weird for most players to grasp.

I mean, playing a digitized ghost of a person in a computer....weird. I can do it, but then again I have a knack for playing non human characters.

Quote from: J ArcaneYanno, stuff like this makes me start to believe Jimbob really was right about most of RPG Open [rpg.net].

I'm reading the comments here, about THS, and what I'm getting is that it's full of interesting ideas, but that it's not actually all that gameable.

I don't think it's a thing exclusive to rpg.net. Everywhere you go and talk to gamer geeks, and it's easy to get the "wooo, cool!" reaction. Just talk about any strictly scientific game world, or pulp, or being a SWAT team - "woo, cool!" Then ask for people to play it, and hear the silence pressing on your ears...

It's any group of geeks. Turning "woo, cool!" into "I'll be there on Thursday!" is a difficult thing. There are certain ideas which catch peope's attention (h4wt chixxorz, k3w1 pw0rz, Nazi flying saucers, etc), and certain ideas which they'll show up to play out (killing things and taking their stuff, angsty monsters with k3w1 pw0rz, etc). The two ain't the same lot of ideas. Basically, I reckon, you need to have a pretty well-established group before they'll try out anything "different" - Dogs in the Vineyard, realistic space travel, whatever.

Quote from: JimBobOzI don't think it's a thing exclusive to rpg.net. Everywhere you go and talk to gamer geeks, and it's easy to get the "wooo, cool!" reaction. Just talk about any strictly scientific game world, or pulp, or being a SWAT team - "woo, cool!" Then ask for people to play it, and hear the silence pressing on your ears...

It's any group of geeks. Turning "woo, cool!" into "I'll be there on Thursday!" is a difficult thing. There are certain ideas which catch peope's attention (h4wt chixxorz, k3w1 pw0rz, Nazi flying saucers, etc), and certain ideas which they'll show up to play out (killing things and taking their stuff, angsty monsters with k3w1 pw0rz, etc). The two ain't the same lot of ideas. Basically, I reckon, you need to have a pretty well-established group before they'll try out anything "different" - Dogs in the Vineyard, realistic space travel, whatever.

Just as an utterly random tangent, I have actually played a SWAT game.  With the guy who wrote GURPS SWAT remarkably enough.  It was awesome.

But despite my efforts to get a game going similar to it with my group, they weren't interested.  Which made me sad.

This is an unfortunate problem I have a lot, so I can understand where you're coming from.  Though, at the same time, you've got it better than I do.  I don't think I'd have ever gotten any of my groups to play something like Tiwesdaeg.  I generally have had great trouble prying them away from the Big Three, or even non-"stock" examples of games in those.

Quote from: J ArcaneThough, at the same time, you've got it better than I do.  I don't think I'd have ever gotten any of my groups to play something like Tiwesdaeg.

Only one of the three groups expressed any level of interest in the details of the campaign. None of them ever asked, "what do we eat?" or "what sort of clothes do we wear?" or "when we swear, what do we say?" I told them that stuff, but only the first group did more than stare blankly, and even the first group only said, "cool."

Most gamers simply aren't interested in learning about some game world, real or imaginary; and many of those who are interested will nitpick it (see the Berkeley Ars Magica list, or the Traveller Mailing list for examples). This leaves you with a small minority who are interested, but won't nitpick - it's a small number. I think that small number are probably those who end up GMing games

I've never tried to run THS because GURPS makes baby Analytical cry but as someone who reads a lot of SF, it doesn't strike me as a particularly difficult setting to game.  There's an economy, there's a criminal/dangerous economy, there's politics... it's all fairly standard stuff.

But I can understand where the idea that it's not easily playable comes from and that's from the fact that the game line itself is all about describing a setting.  I know what to do with the tool kit because I've read the same books the designers have read but if you're coming to the game looking for A SF experience then it can appear like a lot of setting with no obvious ins.

But then, I remember people saying much the same thing about Nephilim and I never had any problems with it whatsoever.  It just struck me as intuitive what kind of adventures you were supposed to play with it.

Even the driest of settings is gameable as long as there's some kind of description of the economics.  Once you have economics you have the possibility for characters to sell things and there you go.