Re: (TFT) Space travel

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

Oops...
I went off on a little "pet" topic of mine and forgot to mention space
and space travel.
Explicitly at least.
In a plotted campaign it's usually sufficient to pick a "style" and
describe it in pretty broad strokes.
It's still a very good idea to describe the areas where the players
actually interface with space travel.
Running a campaign featuring dogfights requires a pretty detailed
description of the craft and armaments involved for example.
Elseif you end up trying to explain why introducing a "proton" torpedo
into a 6 foot wide thermal vent would blow up a station approaching
100 miles in diameter with a reactor many miles across rather than
producing a result similar to dropping twigs down a chimney in an
attempt to melt the fireplace (and if you up the warhead yield too
much it becomes the old thermo-nuke hand grenade problem).
In a normal open campaign players have options that require more
detail about the current state of the art as well as a pretty good
idea of where it's going in the future.
The fighter pilot may not care just how the Ion drive on his fighter
was produced as long as he knows the crafts performance specs but in
open campaigns the resources required to build a drive can be highly
strategic.
Similarly scientific research and where Ion drive tech sits on the
"tree" can become important considerations, especially in games that
have a strong focus on downtime action and can also serve to limit the
map edge issue by locking the scale down to a solar system, local
group, or etc.
Then you have the really high-powered campaign stuff.
Time travel, alternate universes, gates, hyperspace, and similar fare
is rough stuff to do open.
After trying a whole bunch of stuff I'm pretty convinced that the only
approach that comes close to offering players free choice ends up
being the old "Choose Your Own Adventure" idea.
>From a computer game standpoint this is like saving a turn-based game
every turn or after every action.
The past, present, and future exist as a gestalt.
>From a space flight perspective an open apotheosis campaign means that
at some point in play players are going to have full access to
everything involved in space flight within the limits of the
game-universe/s.
In other words the whole concept has to be laid out in toto at least
in the fundamentals.
There really isn't too much in the way of plots that can avoid the
need for this in a game-world with Mnoren.
Timelimits don't really apply to a group of time-travelers for example.
Again, this doesn't mean that the game-world can't be designed in such
a way as to make casual time-travel impossible or etc. but it all
needs to be worked out before play begins in this type of campaign.
It isn't about right or wrong answers here but rather about keeping
things fair and consistent in the game-world as much as is reasonably
possible.
Pointing out holes in reasoning in most mediums is a different
experience than having one affect you while playing a RPG.
If nothing else there's a certain amount of (smug in my case)
satisfaction in finding a discrepancy in something where my only
participation is reading/watching the thing.
Back to the Death Star I note that there was apparently at least one
instance in the X-wing books where a fighter survived a double torpedo
hit.
If I was fresh off blowing up the Death Star and my next torpedo hit
failed to blow up a fighter I'm going to start asking a few questions.
I notice Star Trek replicator tech has evolved over the years.
It's still riddled with issues (at least the Wikipedia page
description) and that's because the technology was about as well
conceptualized to start with as the magic was on Charmed.
It's one thing to make fun of the stupidity of setting up Unobtainium
mining operations on the ground of Pandora when there are great chunks
of the stuff floating free in the atmosphere when considering the
movie but it's something else entirely to tell a player that they
can't just haul off the floating islands pretty much because that
would "ruin the plot".
I'm here to play a game... not roll dice in service of some plot that
overrides my choice/luck when it isn't "convenient" for the story.
In that case just write the story down and I'll read it, don't tell me
I'm participating in any very meaningful way that might actually
effect the way the whole thing wraps up.
That's like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book that gives you no real
options at the cusp moments and only has one ending.
The choices players make during play create a story, not serve one.

"If you hit a midget on the head with a stick, he turns into 40 gold coins."
Patton Oswalt
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