Re: (TFT) Space travel

[Jay Carlisle <maou.tsaou@gmail.com>]

Okay...
Switched ISP's and the transition could have been... smoother.
Thanks for the replies all, the differing views are really helpful too
me at this stage.

I generally agree that fantasy does not require complete and total
adherence to "reality".
It does rely MUCH more on reality than most folks seem to think however.
And I also note that "reality" is not a very strongly defined term either.

I completely agree that a plot can frame a campaign in such a way that
bigger questions are moot.
Privates in the military don't get much in the way of choice for example.
There's any number of plot devices that can limit things like this but
I find that when players are restricted in this manner the "plot"
itself needs to be strong and consistent with a beginning, middle, and
ending.
Privates drafted into a war situation are going to expect either the
war to end or at least their tour at some point.
There's nothing wrong with plots IMO, that's all I've actually done
over the last... well quite a few years actually.
A plot by its nature precludes an "open" campaign though.
A plot can ignore or gloss over stuff outside of the focus of its
frame because of its ending.
It's that ending that can be the real bugbear in all of this.
What would be a plot in any other "story" medium doesn't work that way
in open RPG's.
The typical dungeon crawl scenario would be a strong plot if it
weren't for treasure and experience.
In the movie the hero slays the baddie, claims the treasure, and gets
the girl in short order as the heroic music swells and then the
credits roll.
In the book there may be a brief postlogue, but the protagonist has
pretty clearly reached the end of the plot once they've dispatched the
antagonist and grabbed the loot.
Try that after a RPG dungeon crawl and your likely to get lynched, or
at least leave the players feeling pretty cheated unless you made the
situation crystal clear from the get go.
Players clean out dungeons to get equipment (and loot to get
equipment) so they can go into deeper dungeons to get even better
equipment...
Ad infinitum?
I prefer the idea of limits here.
...
Ad infinitum is suggested by stuff like Greyhawk and Cidri.
If you run out of modules on this map there are always the unknown
lands beyond the maps edges to explore.
Fair enough, but it's kinda assumed that the players aren't gonna make
a beeline for the map edge but rather exhaust the local holes before
moving onward.
It really sucks to buy Greyhawk and a bunch of modules only to have
the players ignore all of it to head for something you don't even have
a map for much less "adventures".
It's worse if you wrote the stuff and they head for the unknown but
the point is at some point issues like this are gonna pop up and a
good design has already answered these questions sufficiently enough
to get through the travel time in a play session while the parties
intentions become clear and provide enough framework to allow the GM
to prepare for the next session without a ground up build of the
unknown area.
In other words, if the game-world is a planet then you need at least a
basic idea of the planet as a whole for an open game.
Limits on travel time can buy you some sessions for more detailed prep
of the new areas.
Making the whole thing up as you go along is a pretty sure sign for
disaster mostly in an open campaign.

"He rather liked people.  It was a major failing in a demon.  Oh, he
did his best to make their short lives miserable because that was his
job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they
thought up themselves.  They seemed to have a talent for it.  It was
built into the design, somehow.  They were born into a world that was
against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their
energies to making it worse...  There had been times, over the past
millennium, when he'd felt like sending a message back Below saying
Look, we may as well give up right now...there's nothing we can do to
them that they don't do themselves and they do things we've never even
thought of, often involving electrodes.  They've got what we lack.
They've got imagination.  And electricity, of course....And just when
you'd think they were more malignant than Hell ever could be, they
could occasionally show more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of.  Often
the same individual was involved.  It was this free-will thing of
course.  It was a bugger..."
-Good Omens

A player with an open free-will is dangerous.
One with New Followers is a real threat.
Add Business Sense and a GM should attack that Figure with EXTREME prejudice.
Unless of course the GM's just making it up as they go along in which
case just because Nigel's go to eleven they just have the next NPC run
a 12 or whatever.
No matter what Nigel does there will always be something just a bit
better, he'll never be Grand Master of Flowers.
There are ample enough situations where a GM has to describe things on
the fly without pulling NPCs or whole geographical regions outta their
neathers on top of it.

So that brings me back to the point that fantasy necessarily depends on reality.
I'm all for high concept fantasy stuff like air in space but you
actually have to put MUCH more work into something like that than you
would just tweaking "reality" a bit.
Much Sci-Fi and a surprising amount of Fantasy fiction uses ma Earth
as the background and even stuff like Middle Earth assumes earth
normal physics and environment for its game-world.
Reality sounds like the more complex and difficult way to go but in
fact a well thought out and consistent fantasy concept takes
significantly more work in an open campaign setting.
Similarly it doesn't take a very large plot to start requiring more
work than it takes to describe an area and its limits in a more
general fashion.
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