Space Travel?

[Paul Farquhar]

I don't consider the Mandalorian well enough made to inform canon in much of any way

It’s better than the vest majority of Star Wars not called Andor.

Even if we cite the terribly made later seasons of the Mandalorian as realistic

Star Wars is fantasy, it’s not supposed to be realistic.

 

[Celebrim]

It’s better than the vest majority of Star Wars not called Andor.

It's got about 5 good episodes - the first 3 of the first season and the last 2 of the second season. It's got maybe three other episodes that are watchable. Beyond that, it might as well be Book of Boba Fett or Obi Wan Kenobi.

Star Wars is fantasy, it’s not supposed to be realistic.

It would perhaps capture the idea I'm going for here to say it was "gameable" or "internally coherent". "Realistic" as I was using the term in the sentence was intended from the perspective of the fiction itself. It's similar to asking questions like, "How big was the Rebel fleet at Endor actually?" And the answer being, "Probably larger than is implied by the special effects shots in the movie." rather than "Just count the number of ships that appear on screen." Or we can ask questions like, "Why was the Imperial fleet at Endor so small given the resources of a Galaxy spanning empire?" The point is we are trying to obtain a narrative where the things that happen in the story aren't merely serving the story, but the logical result of the setting.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Interesting. Just catching up on the thread.

I do NOT think that the solution to making space travel more interesting is either ship to ship combat, or more/better ship-related skills.

As far as combat goes, in the fantasy genre I don't think combat makes overland travel more engaging, in the sense of requiring interesting decision-making. It sometimes interrupts the overland travel with an activity that is possibly engaging, but it doesn't in itself make the process of traveling more engaging.

And I think that ship-related skills (piloting, navigation, engineering, gunnery, etc.) would tend to just lead to dice-rolling instead of decision-making.

 

[Celebrim]

And I think that ship-related skills (piloting, navigation, engineering, gunnery, etc.) would tend to just lead to dice-rolling instead of decision-making.

More precisely, the problem is that most ship related skills are merely pass/fail maintenance of the ship that only involve dice-rolling when abstracted but offer no interesting decisions to the player.

Even getting past the question of in a cooperative game is the dominate personality allowing the other players to make choices, in a simulation of a ship in combat players assigned to shields or engineering or even gunnery stations are generally only rolling to see if they can do the task in abstract and don't have any interesting choices to make when performing that task. The pilot or captain may be deciding where to move but everyone else is just doing the same thing over and over again.

I have no solution for this, and I think it's relevant to the thread because a party travelling can be abstracted to a ship regardless of the mode of travel. There are "stations" or "roles" in the travel where pass/fail can improve the party's chances of success, but there aren't a lot of choices to make. The navigator doesn't have a lot of choices to make in abstract. Try not to get lost. Try to get unlost once you've become lost. It's not playing a game; it's just performing a task.

One of the most interesting mass combat simulations I ever encountered was in the game "Puzzle Pirates" (of all places). The MMORPG had a lot going for it, but the central game everything was built around was an abstraction of ship combat that involved hundreds of participants in a "crew". The crew had jobs repairing the ship, manning the sails, or loading the cannons. Each crew station was represented by a different casual puzzle to solve (think Tetris or Bejeweled Blitz). Loading cannons meant that when the ship fired a broadside, it had more weight of metal available. Repairing the ship kept it from sinking. Manning the sails delivered more movement choices to the Captain of the ship. When the ship took damage, the crew stations would all get penalties that would make the job harder. At the top of this was the Captain who was the only one however playing the ship game (or even much aware of what was going on). The Captain made all the tactical choices, with the resources he had available being created by the crew's ability to solve puzzles quickly.

If we remove the video game puzzles that the crew were playing, they had no real choices to make and nothing interesting to do. If we abstracted their tasks to dice rolls, then the player in that position as crew would be reduced from playing a game to merely performing a task and observing it with no more input on anything than a player of Candyland.

My concern is that attempts at making travel interesting by having roles and resources to manage tend to just have the same effect. No one is making really any interesting choices. As long as you abstract out "foraging" or "scouting" or "navigation" to just a die roll, the player is merely an observer. But at the same time, it's pretty clear playing out such tasks isn't a game either.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

"A game is a series of interesting choices" is one approach I like, and I guess that's the problem - what are the choices to make for space travel?

I think you could probably create a space travel system that might have interesting choices, but it might not resemble anything you're familiar with established fiction, so it's not plug & play.

Maybe the closest thing would be something where you cannot travel directly to your location and have to pick way points, and sometimes you might need to refuel, pay tariffs for crossing borders, deal with space anomalies, or meet 'interesting' people.

That might require more game and play time then you want to devote to travel sometimes, though.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It’s better than the vest majority of Star Wars not called Andor.

Star Wars is fantasy, it’s not supposed to be realistic.

That depends on who's making what. I would argue that it's not "supposed" to be anything, and what you're actually arguing is what you prefer in regards to the franchise.

 

[Thomas Shey]

More precisely, the problem is that most ship related skills are merely pass/fail maintenance of the ship that only involve dice-rolling when abstracted but offer no interesting decisions to the player.

I've gone on record as suggesting this is the problem with most skills outside combat (and sometimes within) in general in most games. At best any decisions are a case of a guessing game of what the GM thinks are a good idea.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I've gone on record as suggesting this is the problem with most skills outside combat (and sometimes within) in general in most games. At best any decisions are a case of a guessing game of what the GM thinks are a good idea.

How else should it be handled then, without getting into narrative mechanics and/or player input into the setting on the fly? Players get their information about the setting from the GM in traditional games, which means it's a matter of how well that information is conveyed by the GM, and what questions the players ask.

 

[Bill Zebub]

"A game is a series of interesting choices" is one approach I like, and I guess that's the problem - what are the choices to make for space travel?

With the caveat that I don't know what the actual implementation would be, I think the model here is not combat but dungeon exploration: going back to early D&D (or current OSR) the process of exploring a new dungeon...not even including combat...was (is) exciting, and depended on group decision-making, not skill-based "roles" like trap-disarmer, door-opener, secret-door-finder, etc.

 

[Thomas Shey]

How else should it be handled then, without getting into narrative mechanics and/or player input into the setting on the fly?

Mechanical options within the field of operation the skill covers.

For example, you could construct a subsystem for climbing that dealt with various factors and how you could do tradeoffs for speed or safety depending on the climbing surface.

Yes, by the time you'd done this thoroughly, you'd have a lot of subsystems. But without it, it makes every skill roll a simple binary check with, at best, a guessing game.

Players get their information about the setting from the GM in traditional games, which means it's a matter of how well that information is conveyed by the GM, and what questions the players ask.

If I've got a battle board out, I've got a lot more information than you have in almost any other situation in traditional games. Kindly remember I'm primarily a trad game GM, but that does not mean I have not recognized the limitations of the fact that you only really get to make informed decisions that mean anything with combat (if that). If you're really lucky, maybe you have something like magic or hacking that goes into some kind of detail. With others you're lucky if you get a table of modifiers.

(As an aside, it'd be nice if you didn't jump to assuming everything you don't understand has to do with narrative games. This couldn't have less to do with that, and if anything, most narrative games are even worse about this. At the very least you ought to know by now that's not where I'm coming from.)