Problems running a hard sci-fi game

[SWBaxter]

Hard sf really does call for a group that's interested in science. They don't have to all be PhD astrophysicists, but players who think Newton's laws of motion are too difficult probably won't be much interested in a hard sf game. The game doesn't have to revolve around science - most of the best hard sf I've read has a distinct bias towards social conundrums, exploring how humans would react to genetic engineering or quantum computing or whatever - but the science does need to form a solid background.

The real problem is this sometimes kills off what many see as the fun parts of sf - FTL is usually off-limits, aliens are so weird as to make it impossible to relate to them, spacecraft have about as much maneuverability as a freight train and travel speeds make space combat less of a dogfight and more of a high-speed skeet shooting competition. So the tough part is finding something else for PCs to do, in an age where many associate sf with space battles and aliens. Focusing on social issues works well in an RPG, too, but not everybody's into that sort of thing.

 

[Urizen]

This is just my opinion, but I'd make players watch Alien 1 & 2 to get ideas about what goes on in a hard sci-fi game, maybe even Pitch Black. I don't think Chronicles of Riddick qualifies.

I'm sure there are a bunch of other outside sources as well, but I'm drawing blanks right now.

 

[Roger]

1) We lose the flavor of scifi - if the roll is just changed from "spellcraft" to "nuclear engineering", the game doesn't feel very distinctive.

I wouldn't rely too strongly on mechanical changes to provide distinctive colour, especially within the d20 family of games. I think with some care that your game would be distinctive enough.

2) We'll have physics arguments anyway.

Here's how I would handle that sort of thing:

GM: Hey guys! Here's the setting bible for that hard-sf game we'll be starting in a couple weeks...

Player: Dude, that FTL drive would never work! It violates every rule of physics out there!

GM: Okay. How would you write up the starship drive for this setting?​

There's a couple different ways this could go, of course:

Player: Well, the main problem is with the power supply -- there's just not enough of it. But if we use, say, antimatter, I guess it'd be alright.

GM: Cool. Let's write that into the setting.​

Or it might go something like this:

Player: Dude, FTL travel is impossible! If we want to travel 100 lightyears, it's going to take us at least a hundred years. Heck, let's say 500.

GM: Alright. So what sort of system would we need for that?

Player: Well, we could use some sort of hibernation setup. I think that's the way they did it in those Aliens movies.

GM: That could be pretty cool. I'll need to fiddle with a few plotlines if your travel time is going to be in centuries instead of weeks, but that opens up some really interesting possibilities... hey, you seem pretty into this sort of thing. Wanna write up that chapter for the setting bible?​

That's how I would try to approach it, anyway.


Cheers,
Roger

 

[Roger]

This is drifting the thread a little bit, but I think it's a useful conversation to have.

I disagree. We all know what a sword is or what an arrow is. Spells I can agree with.

I'm not entirely convinced of this... I mean, we have a D&D Rules FAQ that's dozens of pages long, and a whole lot of forum posts that consist of people thrashing around about exactly these sorts of things.

But yeah, in general, one kinda needs a level of consensus among all the players with respect to this imaginary consensual reality.

Of course, this consensual reality doesn't necessarily have a lot to do with real reality. Otherwise all these people who "know" what a longbow is wouldn't walk around with them strung all day, et cetera et cetera. But it's enough that everyone agrees that, yeah, in this game, you can do that.

The PCs have skills. If they want to solve a technical problem, tell the player to make a roll.

No, that makes the uses of skills reactive, nothing more.

I'm not really sure if I understand what you mean by "reactive" here. I mean, yeah, in general, skill use (and everything else) by players is reactive to DM input. You get stabbed with a sword, and you react to that by making a Heal check.

But some player can just spontaneously decide that he wants to make a Sense Motive check on that alien embassador who is trying to board his ship. That's reacting to the DM's input, sure, but it's fairly active in and of itself.

It's worse if they're just rolling a Repair check and don't even know anything but the technobabble the GM is telling them.

I think this level of abstraction is required in pretty much all d20 games, whether fantasy or hard-sf or whatever. Here's some examples that I hope will illustrate what I mean by this:

You're in a dungeon and you get shot by an arrow. The party medic makes a Heal check on you. Most DMs I know don't require that medic's player to explain that they're removing the arrow with forceps and stemming the flow of blood and setting up a blood transfusion from the half-orc. They just make a roll, you get back 3 hit points or whatever, and the game goes on.

You're on your way to the village when your wagon breaks. The gnome makes a Craft check to repair the wagon. Most DMs don't require that player to explain that he's replacing the transaxle with a freshly-cut tree and swapping out wheel spokes to rebalance the rims. They just make a roll.

You're on your way to Gamma Sector and the FTL drive malfunctions. Welshie makes a Repair check. He either succeeds or fails. It seems odd to require the player to explain that he's bridging the anti-matter flux capacitor through the ship's water closet to make that happen. Especially when the party medic just makes a Heal check to fix your injured party members.

Sure, any particular group isn't required to play like this. If they find it really fun to let that one player with the Linguistics degree really get into what he's doing when he makes that Decipher Script roll, heck, more power to them.

The default way d20 works, as far as I know, is this:
1) The players tell the DM what they're trying to do.
2) The DM determines the relevant resolution mechanic and target difficulties.
3) The players roll some dice.
4) The DM tells them whether they succeeded or failed.
5) The responsibility to narrate what that roll actually means in the imaginary space is generally shared, but fairly often falls on the DM's shoulders.

Heroes should be able to come up with interesting plans to solve a problem, not just roll dice.

Absolutely! This style of play absolutely supports heroes coming up with interesting plans. The DM, or the players, or both, can narrate all sorts of interesting actions that show what that die roll actually meant and what's happening in the imaginary space.



Cheers,
Roger

 

[buzz]

Roger: I find you ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

 

[RangerJim]

Quote:
Heroes should be able to come up with interesting plans to solve a problem, not just roll dice.

Absolutely! This style of play absolutely supports heroes coming up with interesting plans. The DM, or the players, or both, can narrate all sorts of interesting actions that show what that die roll actually meant and what's happening in the imaginary space.

I explain it to my players this way: If I come up with the "interesting plans" for doing what they want to do, then I base the DC on the mechanics based upon those "interesting plans". If they also come up with an "interesting plan" they might come up with an easier way of doing what they want to do and therefore the DC might be easier.

Usually we collaborate on the "interesting plan" unless it is part of the problem they need to figure out for the game.

-RangerJim

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

This is drifting the thread a little bit, but I think it's a useful conversation to have.


I'm not entirely convinced of this... I mean, we have a D&D Rules FAQ that's dozens of pages long, and a whole lot of forum posts that consist of people thrashing around about exactly these sorts of things.

I think I missed most of those :/

Of course, this consensual reality doesn't necessarily have a lot to do with real reality. Otherwise all these people who "know" what a longbow is wouldn't walk around with them strung all day, et cetera et cetera. But it's enough that everyone agrees that, yeah, in this game, you can do that.

Just like the knight code. I barely made my Will save not to jump on that one in the paladin thread...

I'm not really sure if I understand what you mean by "reactive" here. I mean, yeah, in general, skill use (and everything else) by players is reactive to DM input. You get stabbed with a sword, and you react to that by making a Heal check.

No, I disagree. Players can proactively use a lot of skills, like Gather Information. In my last two sessions, my PCs proactively gathered information, went looking for contacts, made make-shift mortars, and even tried to negotiate with psychotic terrorists. And then there was the Mexican standoff, inspired acting that forced me to think quick. (My players forced me to solve a problem instead of the other way around!) To some extent the skills would be useless without an interesting campaign setting, but on that note, they still decided how they would solve the problem.

I read a sci-fi novel called Altered Carbon, as an example. In that setting, humans have developed the technology to transfer their brains from one body to another. A perfect electronic copy of the brain is stored in a "stack" at the base of the brain. It can be transferred to another "sleeve", as bodies are called. Having said that, most people can only get the transfer done once (there's a risk of madness, and I think it's really expensive).

Near the beginning the hero is attacked by a man and a woman in a hotel (an AI-run hotel)... he determines they're the same person, copied (and the original person is still out there). I felt a bit cheated. Later, the hero finds one of the villains, shoots him, decapitates him, and burns the body in such a way it looked like he deliberately burned out the head and stack. But that was wrong. He took the stack to the hotetl AI and had the AI torture the stack. I was under the impression (given earlier) that a stack is a stasised copy of your brain (with the occasional update) that he might read. But of course I was wrong... the author knows the campaign setting way better than I did.

It felt like a deus ex machina, even though it wasn't. I felt a bit cheated. There's no way I would have figured that out without help.

By this point, unless the players know the setting as well as I do, I basically have to hold their hand and tell them what do to.

You're in a dungeon and you get shot by an arrow. The party medic makes a Heal check on you. Most DMs I know don't require that medic's player to explain that they're removing the arrow with forceps and stemming the flow of blood and setting up a blood transfusion from the half-orc. They just make a roll, you get back 3 hit points or whatever, and the game goes on.

You're on your way to the village when your wagon breaks. The gnome makes a Craft check to repair the wagon. Most DMs don't require that player to explain that he's replacing the transaxle with a freshly-cut tree and swapping out wheel spokes to rebalance the rims. They just make a roll.

You're on your way to Gamma Sector and the FTL drive malfunctions. Welshie makes a Repair check. He either succeeds or fails. It seems odd to require the player to explain that he's bridging the anti-matter flux capacitor through the ship's water closet to make that happen. Especially when the party medic just makes a Heal check to fix your injured party members.

Reactive skills wouldn't work very differently, depending on the setting, I'll agree with that. I just think it's a lot harder for players to come up with interesting plan when dealing with unfamiliar campaign settings. (Medieval is familiar to everyone, even if they get a lot of details wrong.)

 

[Roger]

No, I disagree. Players can proactively use a lot of skills, like Gather Information.

Sure, but they're still reacting on some level to something the DM provided, is all I'm saying. There's probably a scale of pro-activity/re-activity, with "The wagon is broken and it requires a Craft check to fix it" on one end and "Your brand-new level-1 fighter is in a small town. What do you do?" on the other.


This all kinda reminds me of that well-discussed issue of in-game riddles. Let's say the party runs across this magic door that only opens if they can answer some riddle, which, as the DM, I provide them. There's a couple different ways of handling this.

A player might say, "Alright, I'm a level 12 elven bard with 20 Intelligence, so I'm going to roll to solve the riddle." As a DM, I'm generally inclined to be perfectly happy with that approach. Some DMs and some gaming groups are not.

Alternatively, it might be up to the players to sit around and try to figure out the riddle. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. Some groups may prefer this approach.

It can get a little weird if the player who really likes riddles and generally tends to be the one to solve them is playing some half-orc barbarian with an Intelligence and a Wisdom of 6 each, but I figure if that's the worst problem you have to face at the gaming table, your group is doing pretty well.

Now, specific to this situation, the sense I get from BigCat is that the first approach might be the more useful one. "The players don't know any science" we're informed; to push my analogy a bit further, that's sorta like "The players don't know any riddles." So that's sorta my reasoning behind why I offered the advice I did.


Cheers,
Roger

 

[Arrgh! Mark!]

I don't understand the context of a technical problem as the basis of an adventure. All of my games revolve around some form of interaction. Please give me an example; if you pose a problem to me in astrophysics, you really can't complain when I haven't got a clue. If on the other hand you need me to find the phase converter because the shield battery is kablunkey, so be it; no problem.

I've run a "Hard" SF setting. It involved ancient dead planets, frozen PC's and the wonderful effects of explosive decompression; Alien style. I wouldn't ask my players to work out the mathematics for the remaining fuel supply or even tell me how they fix something. Neither they nor I know anything real about the science that might happen in five hundred years.

An anecdote: I was once playing the most boring game of Traveller I've ever encountered. We did a lot of pissing around starports buying junk, looking for work and so on. No real adventure occured that I could work out. Eventually (4 sessions later) we got on a starship and pissed off to some miserable planet when a bunch of tanks rocked up. My girlfriend (A very, very bored space marine) and me (A very, very bored HUMINT specialist) sat there listening to two guys yap on about potential space travel, the problem of ridding a ship of heat and many other things. Some parts were interesting but mostly just boring.

The whole thing was an excuse to talk about potential spaceships. The very next game had us listening while a bunch of space vikings got really angry at a bunch of planetsiders. For hours.

I "Was too busy to play".


I'd be careful of trying Hard SF. "Hard" SF is a setting and only a possible one at that. Try for an adventure, not a boring conversation.

 

[TheNovaLord]

We play a home written sci fi d20

I guess its not too hard sci-fi (space is so big compared to our real tech its need to be elaborated somewhat). Our FTL is very very FTL.

At the climax of an awesome session today the party tech was trying to save a stricken ship (mostly for salvage )

During the game id mentioned a fire on board caused by a small bomb, cooling coil issues and a few other technical terms. They checked its computer to find a hidden programme had been planted to set of the device. they managed to get fire control and a few other bits n pieces back functional. In the end the whole thing was gonna blow if the techie couldnt get it all back into control.
he need eda DC 30 on his tech roll, which made
and a 25 on his Mechanics which he failed.
The ship blew too pieces.
He took 50 damage on the first round (minus his Dam Red) and had to make a Fort save to live. he made it.
he is then suffering major issues of being in deep space (he has endurance and die hard feats and is 90% cyborg, all which helps). He rolls a save v Fort or dies and makes it again.
The partys ship comes swooping in with a mighty pilot roll and pick him up.
he has 4hp left and is exhausted.

this part of the adventure took maybe an hour. I think if we had tried to explain exactly what we were doing ultra technical terms we would have lost the excitement and rush and it would have taken a lot longer.

they had also had a big space battle and destroyed, crippled or had driven off 5 ships of a similar class to their own.

I think real hard scifi may loose a bit of its fun and feel like work? Already it is harder for the GM to think on his feet than in a fantasy game.

JohnD