Doing science
- Thread starter Morrus
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I think that's relative... how many tech problems have you solved in a crisis?
How long did it take? How many D&D turns was that (at 6 seconds a turn)?
TV makes those engineering scenes go quickly, but the actual pacing is minutes if not hours.
Mastermind (good observation Umbran) plays with 4 colors in 4 positions if I recall. Your tech list has quite a few more combinations...
I agree, it might take to win a game of Mastermind (10-20 rounds) might be longer than other players want to wait, but verisimilitude wise, it's kind of spot on for what a real engineer is doing. Which is trying changing one variable at a time, from the last test for a solution.
So we might have found a neat idea for simulating "problem solving engineering" but it's not necessarily "fun" for all players to sit through.
That's where I thought my tile idea would help, because it's tangible, and as a player, I can sort out valid combinations faster with my hands and eyes until I present a plausible solution on the table to the GM. Likely in real time minutes, which given 30+ seconds per player to take their actual turn, means it could be solved by the time you ask me what my PC does.
From a "feel" standpoint, I still think it is important that the player choose the combinations of the technobabble. It helps the player feel like they are "inventing" the solution. If you just say "make a science check" and I roll a 15, so you tell me "Rehydrating the fermostat with tachyon bursts solves the problem" all you've done is created a random NPC Name generator for tech.
Personally, if I play the Chief Engineer on a Star Trek game, I want to feel as if I am actually solving problems like on the TV show. That means some semblance of understanding the parts involved and how they connect (which is really just lists of nouns and their relationships and possible alternative connections). Maybe that's a goal for somebody else's game (not Morrus's thought experiment), but it'd be nice if some of that idea is reflected.
I do like Morrus's idea for custom sheets for topic/setting (steampunk, medical, sci-fi), that links to possibilities on what I'd like the idea to do.
Maybe a different viewpoint might be needed. Consider what is actually going on in a Trek engineering scene:
a good chunk of the time, it is about Rerouting Something From the XYZ to the ABC
Which is really trying to find a substitute from what we have, to fill in a gap on something we lack.
For instance, caught in a gravity well, we don't have enough power to break free. So we are lacking "more power". Somebody will think of alternate sources of "more power" like Life Support and something else, and viola, we have a plausible solution.
Another common tech problem is trying to find the right pattern, signature or energy type to satisfy the anomalies need/trap.
We might have tetryon, tachyon, neutrion sources. We need to figure out which one will work to satisfy the need.
Sounds like the same pattern I described previously. We need X, we have X,Y, and Z. Pick one of those to fulfill X. (gee, thats X).
So let's game that up.
Technologically, the parts of a machine are about inputs and outputs. Needs and Haves. We have stuff that outputs energy (by type, blood, water, steam, radio frequency range, mechanical force). And stuff that needs those energy types. Generally one thing supplies an energy type, another thing needs it. You could get fancy and assume that each thing has an input, and each thing has an output, but let's get to that later.
Let's say that We codified all the energy types by color (ex. Blue=electricity, green=gamma radiation, red=tachyons, black=neutrinos, white=plasma). I just made this stuff up, don't quote me on any of it.
Now we make a tech list of Things that either Supply or Need X units of a given color. We also make up some Inverter or Combiner tech that can flip the color or combine 2 colors to make a new one (I chose RGB for a reason, I ain't stupid). Which means we might have tech that needs Yellow. Or Cyan.
You ship should have the obvious parts that need obvious power sources (the engine, the warp core, the dylithium chamber, the deflector dish, etc). Throw in some inverts and Combiners as spare parts and the players should be able to mix and match things until they satisfy the Warp Core's need for 5 Purple when the Dylithium chamber is damaged (and thus not supplying 5 purple directly anymore).
Or when the space Leech is slurping off our hull. It turns out Yellow energy repels it. How do we make some of that using the parts we have?
Yup. From the basic Morrus concept, maybe the random rolling is on the big list, to create the short list of "possible" solutions that are given to the player to figure out what's valid to use.
I'm really struggling to follow that! But it sounds like every device/problem would need to be custom designed, which is exactly the opposite of my goal here. You've described the exact parts that the ship has, for example. I can certainly custom design problems and their solutions during game prep; this is for generic off-the-cuff problems.
Well, yeah, but TV is our analogy here, not real life. Solving real life tech problems in a realistic time frame isn't a fun game! In a game, we want this to take a few minutes of real time at most. Nobody wants to spend the entire session trying to open a door!
Well, yeah, but TV is our analogy here, not real life. Solving real life tech problems in a realistic time frame isn't a fun game! In a game, we want this to take a few minutes of real time at most. Nobody wants to spend the entire session trying to open a door!
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delericho
Legend
Perhaps rather than starting from a list of "tech bits", you'd be better starting to look at how the problem might be solved. That is, do they try to replace a broken component with a working one? Or bypass some component that's not needed? Or break something that's getting in their way? Or trigger something in the environment to get the system to react (such as triggering a fire alarm to open a security door)? Or something like that.
Figure out a bunch of categories for how the problem could be solved, and fit whatever the PC tries into one of those categories (possibly with a "I didn't think of that!" odd-ball category). When designing the problem, the GM should assign a modifier to each category, indicating how easy it is to solve that way (for example, bypassing the magnetic lock might be +2 difficulty, while triggering the fire alarm is -2, and you can't get past by replacing a broken component since there aren't any).
Roll up the technobabble separately, either with one master table, or with several subtables for the fix/bypass/break/other combinations.
Figure out a bunch of categories for how the problem could be solved, and fit whatever the PC tries into one of those categories (possibly with a "I didn't think of that!" odd-ball category). When designing the problem, the GM should assign a modifier to each category, indicating how easy it is to solve that way (for example, bypassing the magnetic lock might be +2 difficulty, while triggering the fire alarm is -2, and you can't get past by replacing a broken component since there aren't any).
Roll up the technobabble separately, either with one master table, or with several subtables for the fix/bypass/break/other combinations.
No, Morrus' version has fewer.
Standard mastermind is 6 colors with 4 positions (6^4 = 1296 combinations). If the player is working from four lists, and say we narrow those lists to four elements each of babble that's sounds applicable, we have 4^4, which is only 256 combinations. That's about one-fifth the combinations in a standard Mastermind game, so things should go much more quickly.
Edit: Wow, missed a major point:
In Mastermind, there is no grammar. You just have colors and positions, and each turn you tell the player how many colors are right, and how many positions are right.
In Science, we just have colors - positions are fixed by grammar: You are trying to "verb the adjective1 adjective2 noun". We only tell the player the number of things they get right, because they always know the noun is in the last position, for example. This vastly simplifies the game. If they are given lists of four elements, it allows them to brute-force the correct solution in a maximum of 12 guesses or so. If we give them lists of N elements, they can brute-force solutions in a maximum of 4(N-1) guesses or so.
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Yeah, I did say a lot there, and cover a lot of ground and make up a whole mechanic.
Focus on this bit:
That's the crux of all TV engineering problems.
This works for the set-piece, where the GM decides to present a tech problem. It works less well for the proactive player case, where the action starts by askign to do Science on something the GM hadn't thought of using science on, so that you don't have premade lists of how well each approach will work.
However, we can use a modification of this idea to allow the player of choice.
Consider the Mastermind-type game. But, instead of requiring the players to find the *one* solution, which, depending on the player's logic capabilities could take forever, you play mastermind to generate a bonus on the roll.
For each correct element, they get a minor bonus on the final roll to enact the solution. The player now has a choice - how long do I work on this before taking my roll? When there is little time pressure, they are apt to play until they get it right - science tends to work if you have long enough to develop a solution. But, under pressure or time critical situations (say, in the middle of combat), maybe each "turn" of mastermind takes a round, and they may not have time to produce a perfect solution.
That's a good summary of the problem. The player decides he wants to do science to do something unusual; the GM does not have the design of the tech in question. The idea is to facilitate the usage of science at all times, not just at times the GM prepped for.
Yeah. While player ingenuity is something to be encouraged, if they're playing Spock they shouldn't be stumped by simple science problems just because the player is. His high attributes should be a factor. That's why they created a scientist character, after all!
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