Quote from: WilWell, the same holds true of, say, military operations. The term "hurry up and wait" is there for a reason - you can spend days, or weeks, preparing for an operation that lasts hours. Or, in the case of an extended operation, you could spend days waiting around for nothing to happen only to experience 20 minutes of sheer terror. Or on the technology side you could spend weeks planning a new server deployment that, when you actually do it, takes 5 hours. Things in the real world don't just fall into place like they do in games or fiction, so games that cater towards portraying reality in that light (like some science fiction games) are going to involve a lot of planning, waiting, and not a lot of action.

Yeah. Thus my motto: Realism™ sucks.

Especially considering that a disturbingly large proportion of the times that someone makes up a rule or ruling based primarily on Realism™ it doesn't work out to be a particularly good reflection of reality anyway.

Quote from: RPGObjects_chuckWhen I wrote an adventure for Dragonstar, part of it involved flying through a dangerous asteroid field. A reviewer pinged the module for how UNREALISTIC that was. In Dragonstar.

And you were duly shamed, I'm sure.

!i!

BTW when I'm talking about Realism™ I'm not talking about verisimilitude strongly flavouring a fun experience. I'm talking about driving a bus to Vegas.

The roots of THS aren't Hard SF though... they're post-cyberpunk.  Why is cyberpunk easily playable while post-cyberpunk isn't?

Quote from: RPGObjects_chuckA reviewer pinged the module for how UNREALISTIC that was. In Dragonstar.

I was feeling chastised there for a second, but I went back and looked at my review again, I waved it off as a standard yarn.

The burning spaceship in space plagued me more...

Quote from: Mr. AnalyticalThe roots of THS aren't Hard SF though... they're post-cyberpunk.  Why is cyberpunk easily playable while post-cyberpunk isn't?

Because Cyberpunk (as in the rpg) was taking the trappings of modern society and adding stuff to it, dialed up to 11. That stuff is was usually guns or cyberware. A trip to the shopping center? Guaranteed to involve a milf getting into a gun battle with some guy who cut in front of her in line. Trying to deter car thieves? The alarm doesn't just go off, the car blows up and takes everyone within 50 feet out. Parking enforcement? Involves destroying the offending vehicle. Need an ambulance? They'll not only haul your smoking carcass away but they'll napalm the neighborhood and then gather them up and charge them all for the service. Need to get ahead at the brokerage? Install the field-of-vision stock ticker.

THS is (and I have yet to completely read it, but from what I've read so far) smarter than Cyberpunk was. The same goes for Blue Planet. That smartness comes at a price - dedicated fans of the genre or people who aren't fascinated by the setting aren't going to get that much mileage out of it. It blocks out a majority (of which I'm not sure how large) that just wants a good game.

This brings to mind Advent Rising, a game that was hyped up as being the ultimate in story-based computer games. The world was created and the story written by Orson Scott Card. It looked, from the information I found prerelease, really good. Then I got hold of it - the gameplay sucked ass. I uninstalled it within 30 minutes. Everything else could have been enormously awesome, but the gameplay ruined all of it. Gameplay trumps setting awesomeness almost every time.

On the abstraction angle - I'm all for it. No one really needs that amount of detail in any game. In complex settings it still requires the GM to have a very good grasp of the reasons behind that abstraction. And for the explanation to have any meaning to the players they need some understanding as well. And for the players to actually feel like they're involved in these decisions their PCs are making with die rolls it takes a pretty careful hand.

Quote from: Mr. AnalyticalThe roots of THS aren't Hard SF though... they're post-cyberpunk.  Why is cyberpunk easily playable while post-cyberpunk isn't?

The SR3 rules were bad enough that:
a) it suffered from the, to me, bizzare notion that heaping gobs of byzantine rule's = smart
b) most people didn't play the rules as presented
c) ....frequently without realizing the above due to unintuitive rules
d) inspite of my guilty pleasure in the zanniness of the setting I had stopped playing until SR4 came along.....and I wasn't alone

"It's the rules, stupid."

Yes, but Shadowrun is the bastard offspring of a deformed goat and a mentally retarded pig.  The problem isn't rules... it's setting.  The problems people have highlighted with THS aren't related to GURPS.

I just don't like GURPS.  I like THS by and large.

Quote from: Caesar SlaadI was feeling chastised there for a second, but I went back and looked at my review again, I waved it off as a standard yarn.

The burning spaceship in space plagued me more...

It wasn't you, it was trancejeremy. Unless you mentioned that TOO.

Seriously though, Im not sure what it was about that adventure but it was nitpicked to hell.

People even went so far as to pick at my use of the word "weathered" to describe the landing area, since there's no weather in space. I guess worn would have been more exact but I didnt realize it was a blue-book text.

Quote from: Ian AbsentiaAnd you were duly shamed, I'm sure.

!i!

Given that it was my first actual work in print, I was pretty horrified actually. That was before I had my baptism of fire by having a book submarined by a competing product's playtester in a review (who didn't disclose his biases natch).

Quote from: BalbinusVirtually nobody plays it, the actual play threads I've seen are almost always either one shots or prep for games with no followup to indicate it actually got played.

How do you know few people play it? What's virtually nobody compared to most other settings/games?

There was stuff on the GURPS forums last time I looked. I've seen a few AP reports at RPG.net as well. To be fair, AP threads of all kinds are often unsuccessful to maintain.

I do know of two GMs who have used THS successfully on its own and as a plug-in. Myself I've only used parts of it, not on its own.

Quote from: BalbinusMostly as the game lacks any particularly easy hooks for plots and most of all because to play it the players need to understand the setting and there's a lot of setting to understand.  It's just more work than most people are willing to put in,

Yeah, I can't deny that. THS's design seems rooted into 2nd generation mentality. You know, back when a lot of seriously extensive world design seemed popular. Harn, Shadow World and all that stuff, but before metaplot-mania. That is, very neutral world for the GM and player to explore and do as they pleased, with as much internal consistency as popular.

Now, admittedly, those "old school worlds" were not done with the primary goal of finding out what would be fun for players. Which doesn't mean you can't have fun it them. But it's up to you to decide if you want to put a mercantile twist on your Harn, or warfare, or adventuring, etc...

Quote from: BalbinusIt's telling I think that when I played in a demo ran by Phil Masters, the first thing that happened was that we lost contact with all external information sources and the outside world.  When the game was demoed for me, the setting was basically taken out, that I think speaks volumes.

I have no idea how Phil ran the demo. But I do not think anyone can give you a clear overview of THS in a single demo session.

Again, that may be an issue. A legitimate issue. But I maintain that this is as "gameable" as any of those old worlds we used to have fun in. It just came at a time where such world presentations are not commonplace.

Quote from: RPGObjects_chuckWhen I wrote an adventure for Dragonstar, part of it involved flying through a dangerous asteroid field. A reviewer pinged the module for how UNREALISTIC that was. In Dragonstar.

My personal current hate on is for the stupid fucking braindead cunts who complain about Warhammer 40K not being realistic, or that Games Workshops books tend to be War Porn.

DIE YOU DICKLESS PRATS! THATS WHAT THEY MAKE YOU STUPID, STUPID FUCK!

Why do these geniuses crawl out of the woodwork to impose their worthless 'opinions' on people? Why can you not reach through the internet to strangle them and end their pointless existance?

DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE!


DIE!

Quote from: Consonant DudeAgain, that may be an issue. A legitimate issue. But I maintain that this is as "gameable" as any of those old worlds we used to have fun in. It just came at a time where such world presentations are not commonplace.

You may very well be right. You could do this. I think I could do this. We've both probably read similar books, have similar amounts of experience etc. But the huge pitfall of presenting setting like this is that, without that experience and knowledge, it's really difficult. And/or time-consuming.

That absolutely goes for Harn, Glorantha, Tekumel and all those other ones. Who's playing those things? Grognards like us.

So how can it be more gameable? Can you get speculative SF into a form where somebody can pick it up at least as easily as basic D&D?

Quote from: Consonant DudeAgain, that may be an issue. A legitimate issue. But I maintain that this is as "gameable" as any of those old worlds we used to have fun in. It just came at a time where such world presentations are not commonplace.

Every one of those "old worlds" you mention was an utter commercial failure except Glorantha... which doesn't fit your description anyway because old-school RuneQuest is just as accessible as D&D.

KoOS