So im imagingin how id run a session entirely in a city and heres what ive got.
*description of the city as you enter it, using some specifics , sites smells, local dress, style of the area you enter (ie business district) and the general layout of streets in the area so they know how to move furthe rinto the city*
-let them ask about businesses they see, or if they cant see them, do gather info checks to find the location of other well known businesses further into the city (or in star wars, hit a computer terminal for info)
- if this lets them see a map, show it, or it might describe various districts of the city, major features they havnt spotted by eye (sure theres the eiffel tower, but theres also the louvre which you cant see so easily just walking into the city)
-have a bunch of random encounters of various sorts ready to hit them with at random times, including plot hooks
- continue describing areas as they enter them (ie moving from one district to another)
Any other major elements im missing?
thanks so much for the help everyone, this is much appreciated!
Day
I think you've got it.
Gather Info is basically just asking people about what's in the city, whether strangers or friends. You can roll or role-play it out. Either way works. I prefer letting the players' actions determine how deep things get.
I should apologize for not realizing you were playing Star Wars and were interested in a system to run Coruscant, a futuristic city and a city-planet at that. What I was posting about is a method to GM non-modern cities like in D&D. Modern and futuristic settings are based upon different principles so exploration like I mentioned is rarely necessary. It would be more of a back up method in case your players' PCs lost their modern tech devices.
In a modern or futuristic urban environment, areas tend to be accurately and prominently displayed along a massive mass transit system, have mass public transportation as well, and include multiple navigational resources for travelers to move about within the city.
Imagine a hand-held device tracking you by satellite, that could give you continuous satellite and local camera video feed of yourself and most other places, numerous types of map details, explanations of all legitimate businesses and residences around you, and could even determine multiple means for finding and traveling to whatever and wherever you want to go. Most of the that many citizens already have in industrialized countries today.
Modern and futuristic worlds simply aren't about exploration so much. They are about working jobs and fulfilling tasks you have been assigned to be functional in those societies. That may not hold true in every individual case, but these worlds themselves aren't so much natural constructions, but the tech the people have made out of the world. In other words, the fun part of exploring those places is exploring the technology. It can't be avoided. Defining the technology will be defining the possibilities to explore in that world. So once you have the impacting technology you will know how your players' characters will be interacting with that world's content.
That's not to say much of the other advice doesn't relate to running a game in a place like Coruscant. It's more that a GM cannot accurately represent such a massive amount of complexity and still give the Players the immediate interactivity a character would experience in such a setting. Computer games have the same limitation. How many 10,000s of species would be on Coruscant under "restaurant type". Could you imagine programmers developing every single one? Talk about improbable.
My own self, I'd look at patterns and descriptions of what is in, say, a billion specie-person quadrant and relay what makes such a place unique. The amount of differentiation in such a place almost seems implausible as a controlled collection of living things. I'd put severe conforming policies in place just for plausibility's sake. Your own opinion may differ on this, but massive complexities don't tend to be governable without greater degrees of enforced conformity. You might choose the flipside and go with lawlessness and explain it all like you might the Great Barrier Reef: a mass of intricate inter-relations, but no control for anyone to have power of any of it. Again, a lot of this is personal belief and preferences. It's hard to say how such a future could actually work.
I'd almost make bigger, more populace places less unique by simplifying them all into locations that partake in every single form of technology you've determined and include the results of all such technology as similar throughout. Perhaps only change the enforced culture slightly between places. In truth, the backwaters and homeworlds would have greater cultural uniqueness and then would need more fleshing out when visited. For gaming, treat these as unique locations with variations of accessible and culture determining technologies. Other vast alien empires in conflict with "the Empire" would almost have to qualify as utterly different Settings. Perhaps with only a little bit of tech overlap. Star Wars is simply not the most plausible futuristic setting, so you may just want to take whatever it has been published for it, present that, and extrapolate from those works.
Rereading the above, I hope I'm offering some help here. Unimaginably massive complexities have a problem with realism as they are predicting a form of collective living that has never existed. Better thought out futures should be more enjoyable to adventure within, but inconsistencies will inevitably creep up no matter which you use - if only because the settings are so far from real world analogues these inconsistencies were never removed through actualization. My only suggestion is: if such a thing comes up, try and make it a culture changing occurrence. Or just gloss over it, plenty of sci-fi does already.
