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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8469976" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 80: February 1993part 4/5The Living Galaxy: Roger decides to take a more lengthy look at a specific topic. What happens when your PC's land on a less technologically advanced planet? If you're playing it anything like D&D, a whole load of killing and taking of stuff. But there are a whole lot of subtleties that could come into play. They could be spiritually advanced beings who've evolved past the need for obvious technology, quite capable of crushing you psychically if you step out of line. They could be smarter than you, but limited by the resources on their planet or their own physiology - an underwater civilisation is never going to unlock the fire tech tree, for example, but they can take advantage of visitors to leapfrog the bits they can't do alone. Even if they came from the stars, a civilisation might slip back to barbarism due to lacking crucial resources or war; a newly terraformed planet in particular is going to be short on oil, coal and similar nonrenewable power sources, and even missing certain rare earth elements could make computers irreplaceable when they break down and cause a long term decline & loss of knowledge. There's also the weirder scenarios where they're kept in a state of artificial technological stasis by some other force like a zoo, and interfering with the planet will make those overlords angry. Basically, watch lots of Star Trek, as it has examples of all of these, and the protagonists usually try to engage in an ethical manner rather than rapacious violence, even if the right course of action isn't always clear. If they can keep on finding new worlds to explore and new ethical dilemmas to struggle with over more than 50 years now, you can definitely do the same with your own campaign, particularly if you aren't limited to wrapping each challenge up in 45 minutes, but can make it an arc for a whole season. This is all pretty useful stuff. Sometimes, the obvious sources are the best, as that's how they got big and lasted. Trying to be more hipster than thou all the time can be a serious impediment to actually getting things done. Hey Rocky: As is often the case, we have a bit of basic roleplaying advice, this time aimed at judges for their tournament games. Read the modules before you play them! Check the stats, think about what tactics the NPC's would use, how to roleplay them, which bits are important and which are merely flavour. Don't just turn up on the day and read each individual encounter as the players get to it, making each scene completely disconnected and without any kind of intelligent interaction between the PC's and NPC's. That just creates a vicious cycle where the tournament writers intentionally make their adventures even more short and linear to make sure they're idiot proof, on the premise that consistently mediocre gaming is better than an adventure that could be good or bad depending on which GM you get this time, and is definitely much easier to score for. This must be a fairly common problem for them, and shows why their adventures have wound up the way they have, with the desire for standardisation being more important than actually having fun, and downplaying the open-ended improvisational element that really distinguishes RPG's from computer or board games. It's a good reminder of why tournament gaming is really not my scene. I want that detailed consistent worldbuilding and long-term progression they just can't provide, try as they might with the Raven's Bluff articles.</blockquote>

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