GalaxyCraft or Farthest Star?

[Mister Andersen]

I suspect it will turn out looking something like World on Fire

[Morgenstern]

Pure toolkits really aren't practical when it comes to sci-fi, because every setting has different conceits, particularly when it comes to space travel. The Honor Harrington series has some fine writing, but it leaps through some awesome hoops to create an environment were relativistic and FTL combat resemble old style naval engagements. Anyone who has dealt with the Star Wars universe as a free form environment rather than a runs-on-rails experience immediately notices that the hyperdrives move at exactly the speed of plot.

Farthest Star has picked a set of conceits designed to be "firm" sci-fi (remaining close to known physics any time breaking them isn't required to make the universe fun), but that's not going to be universally appealing to people's tastes. I unveiled an adventure at GenCon and have had some arguments with Pat about artificial gravity (and the lack of it in the setting) already. So believe me, I've abandoned trying to be all things to all people. It's going to be a thoughtful look at what people might do with their lives and the universe around them given a few more tools than we have today. Those people have rejected some possible advances that show up in fiction these days (particularly this strange obsession the current crop of authors have with us screwing ourselves beyond all recognition with technology), and they have embraced others. Those tools will be portable to other settings, but I'm not going to waste time trying to present all possible tools - for example the setting doesn't particularly focus on cyberware, which will be appearing later in Shatterpunk anyway. Slugthrowers are still the primary means of killing one another (sorry, not a lot of ray guns or blasters, whch curiously in the movies are generally far inferior to real life guns...). I talked a lot about the thoughts that guide the world design at our last seminar, which I believe is still available on line .

[Mister Andersen]

One of the things I really liked about Bab5 was that people moved to using energy weapons in-setting because they dramatically decreased the chance of blowing a hole through the side of your starship/space station/neighbour's wall.

[spinningdice]

I like 40K's approach, Lasguns are rubbish, but you can recharge them anywhere - if bullets were virtually free even for a naff gun it suddenly becomes worthwhile.

[Morgenstern]

One of the things I really liked about Bab5 was that people moved to using energy weapons in-setting because they dramatically decreased the chance of blowing a hole through the side of your starship/space station/neighbour's wall.

Even the B5 guns are embassingly poor substitutes for modern firearms - often for the sake of camera appeal. The projectiles are slow enough to see meaning they are gonna be terrible for hitting erraticaly moving targets beyond about 30 feet. The make a tremendous amount of noise. they are easy to back track so every shot gives away your location. They have a delay as they power up. There's just not a lot good to say about them unless (entirely unmentioned) the traditional security body armor is nigh invulnerable to slugs, and even then they'd still be inferior for shooting up civies.

Not penetrating a hull is something we solved a while ago for slug throwers (since people -even armored people- are still a lot softer than hulls), so pretty much everything else about the weapon is a step backwards except maybe for size-to-stopping power (rarely a major concern in the handgun spectrum) and possibly lighter shots per pound of ammo.

The fundamental personal firearm of Farthest Star is the Imp (impulse gun), a traditional low caliber high velocity railgun. caseless bullets made a comeback once materials science for the frame of the gun overcame the heat dissipation issues. Plain old cartrige and bullet weapons are still around and fairly effective also (though armor has improved quite a bit). Rippers could be called an energy weapon, but they are really more of an advanced taser. Blazers are laser-based and probably the closest to the basic fictional blaster, but they really don't send cute little colored bolts of FX down range so much as act like speed-of-light invisible flamethrowers. Everything else runs into the sad truth that air does not like to conduct exotic radiation or super-heated materials and resists almost as savagely as water puts the dampers on projectile fire. Space-based weaponry is a different scale and a different story. Most of Farthest Star's fun perosnal weapons utilize smart material self-editing rounds and/or Xpertise systems in the weapon. The canister rifle, affectionately known as the 'do anything gun' was well received in demos .

[Chimera]

I suspect it will turn out looking something like World on Fire

Pure toolkits really aren't practical when it comes to sci-fi, because every setting has different conceits, particularly when it comes to space travel. The Honor Harrington series has some fine writing, but it leaps through some awesome hoops to create an environment were relativistic and FTL combat resemble old style naval engagements. Anyone who has dealt with the Star Wars universe as a free form environment rather than a runs-on-rails experience immediately notices that the hyperdrives move at exactly the speed of plot.

Farthest Star has picked a set of conceits designed to be "firm" sci-fi (remaining close to known physics any time breaking them isn't required to make the universe fun), but that's not going to be universally appealing to people's tastes. I unveiled an adventure at GenCon and have had some arguments with Pat about artificial gravity (and the lack of it in the setting) already. So believe me, I've abandoned trying to be all things to all people. It's going to be a thoughtful look at what people might do with their lives and the universe around them given a few more tools than we have today. Those people have rejected some possible advances that show up in fiction these days (particularly this strange obsession the current crop of authors have with us screwing ourselves beyond all recognition with technology), and they have embraced others. Those tools will be portable to other settings, but I'm not going to waste time trying to present all possible tools - for example the setting doesn't particularly focus on cyberware, which will be appearing later in Shatterpunk anyway. Slugthrowers are still the primary means of killing one another (sorry, not a lot of ray guns or blasters, whch curiously in the movies are generally far inferior to real life guns...). I talked a lot about the thoughts that guide the world design at our last seminar, which I believe is still available on line .

I was really looking forward to World on Fire before I heard some reviews that suggested that only 60 or so pages of the 160+ page book dealt with actual game mechanics and was usuable in their campaigns.  If I could just get the mechanics - New skills, feats, gear, etc., I would be all over it, but I'm not really looking for a pre-generated world setting complete with a list of important NPCs and agencies.  I would just much rather have the tools I need to design my own so that they balance with everything else rather than trying to remember the details of somebody else's storyline.

I am looking forward to Farthest Star and Shatterpunk, but if they are gong to force the GM into working with a set storyline, I'm not so sure they are for me.  Why can't a Sci-fi supplement offer a variety of options for building the galaxies as the GM and Players want?  I'm not suggesting that everything be covered, but instead list the majority of popular options that are in actuality limited to a handful of concepts.  Cover the basics and offer the tools necessary for GMs and Players to design their own if the basicss don't cover what they're looking for.

[Mortadelo]

I was really looking forward to World on Fire before I heard some reviews that suggested that only 60 or so pages of the 160+ page book dealt with actual game mechanics and was usuable in their campaigns.  If I could just get the mechanics - New skills, feats, gear, etc., I would be all over it, but I'm not really looking for a pre-generated world setting complete with a list of important NPCs and agencies.  I would just much rather have the tools I need to design my own so that they balance with everything else rather than trying to remember the details of somebody else's storyline.

The Tradecraft chapter is also useful, so there is 100+ pages non-related with the setting. And the setting is, at least, inspiring.

[Morgenstern]

Why can't a Sci-fi supplement offer a variety of options for building the galaxies as the GM and Players want?  I'm not suggesting that everything be covered, but instead list the majority of popular options that are in actuality limited to a handful of concepts.  Cover the basics and offer the tools necessary for GMs and Players to design their own if the basicss don't cover what they're looking for.

Because when you define "the basics" as "you know, the thing I want" it sounds short, but when you define "the basics" as "the topics I can come up with in ten minutes after reading sci-fi all my life" it becomes pretty obvious that 'the basics' of sci-fi would be longer than the 2.0 core book was. Sci-fi is such a wide range of possibilities that trying to satisfy everyone individually is just beyond the scope. Should I cover transporters? Space to surface shuttles? Beanstalks and skyhooks? Time travel? Time weaponry? Probability fields? Force fields? Lasers? Masers? Phasers? Phasing out? Geneticaly engineering your own species? Cloaking devices? Shading devices? Sensors (oh, now there is an unending deluge...)? Reaction/reactionless/impulse/gravity drives? To FTL or not FTL? Hyperdrives? Jump drives? Wormhole networks? Ancient gates?Generation ships? Recreational chemistry? Recreational genetics? recreational surgery? M-class planets? Anomalies? Body armor? Power armor? Mecha? Planet sized ships (that's no moon...)? Planetbuster weapons? Mysticism in the future? AI as tools? AI as players? AI as the enemy of all that is organic and good? imaginary substances as the basis of trade? The list doesn't just go on, it goes on functionally forever. And most of that is still pretty much 'the basics'.

As a designer I have to settle on creating something that is interesting in it's own right, grounded in a number of recognizable forms to make it intuitive and easy to explain - me to the first customer, him to his circle of players - and (hopefully) easily broken down into parts that can be transplanted to other people's creations beceasue we know and love that people do dismantle our stuff for parts. We don't attach stuff to settings because we delight insticking you (the do-it-yourself setting designer) with 'useless fluff', we do it to give focus to a vast nebulous field of maybe's and to demonstrate how those tools and parts can weld into a cohesive whole.

[Chimera]

Because when you define "the basics" as "you know, the thing I want" it sounds short, but when you define "the basics" as "the topics I can come up with in ten minutes after reading sci-fi all my life" it becomes pretty obvious that 'the basics' of sci-fi would be longer than the 2.0 core book was. Sci-fi is such a wide range of possibilities that trying to satisfy everyone individually is just beyond the scope. Should I cover transporters? Space to surface shuttles? Beanstalks and skyhooks? Time travel? Time weaponry? Probability fields? Force fields? Lasers? Masers? Phasers? Phasing out? Geneticaly engineering your own species? Cloaking devices? Shading devices? Sensors (oh, now there is an unending deluge...)? Reaction/reactionless/impulse/gravity drives? To FTL or not FTL? Hyperdrives? Jump drives? Wormhole networks? Ancient gates?Generation ships? Recreational chemistry? Recreational genetics? recreational surgery? M-class planets? Anomalies? Body armor? Power armor? Mecha? Planet sized ships (that's no moon...)? Planetbuster weapons? Mysticism in the future? AI as tools? AI as players? AI as the enemy of all that is organic and good? imaginary substances as the basis of trade? The list doesn't just go on, it goes on functionally forever. And most of that is still pretty much 'the basics'.

As a designer I have to settle on creating something that is interesting in it's own right, grounded in a number of recognizable forms to make it intuitive and easy to explain - me to the first customer, him to his circle of players - and (hopefully) easily broken down into parts that can be transplanted to other people's creations beceasue we know and love that people do dismantle our stuff for parts. We don't attach stuff to settings because we delight insticking you (the do-it-yourself setting designer) with 'useless fluff', we do it to give focus to a vast nebulous field of maybe's and to demonstrate how those tools and parts can weld into a cohesive whole.

Is it really any easier to narrow the scope to what you, as designers, feel is relevant?

Is the game setting of choice similar to Andromeda, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, Blade Runner, Buck Rogers, Farscape, Firefly, The Matrix, RoboCop, Time Cop, Star Wars, Star Trek, Starship Troopers, complete with Terminators (Both kinds), Aliens, and Predators (Oh My!) or is it going to be a mix of all of these to create something new and different? 

I'm willing to bet its going to be a mix because if you base your design around any one of the titles listed above, alot of Sci-fi fans are going to feel cheated.  Why would I ever buy a book based in the Farscape universe when all I really want is Firefly?  The short answer is, "I won't".  And I'm sure I'm not alone in that decision.

But I'm not telling you anything new.  As a designer, I'm sure that you are already planning on breaking down and removing the fluff from your top picks, creating something that combines your favorite elements in a cohesive manner, and eventually creating an entirely new contender in the vast demographic of Sci-Fi.  And it is going to be great!  Shiny and new, at least for awhile.  Then, just like all of the other examples listed above, it will become old news.  Instead of having the setting become stagnant, why not give GMs the tools to continue expanding the Spycraft engine to form their own vision of the future? 

As far as Farthest Star (or any other supplement for that matter) being as large as the core rulebook isn't a problem for me.  If it has to be 500 pages, then so be it.  Better to be 500 pages and cover almost any scenario than be 200 pages and not have what I need when I need it. 

Wizards of the Coast made a good attempt at covering "the basics" with D20 Future in a book that was less than 200 pages, but the rules failed them.  After switching from D20 Modern to Spycraft, I can say without a doubt that I believe the Spycraft engine would not suffer the same fate. 

[Morgenstern]

Is it really any easier to narrow the scope to what you, as designers, feel is relevant?

Absolutely. Picking one method of FTL (one I felt would be highly game-able), one method of slower than light propulsion (giving me a common baseline for travel times), and creating a society that rejects most of the currently popular singularity-inducing technologies (thus avoiding a whole slew of unrecognizable social environments) let me trim back the scope of the rules to something that can be sensibly attempted from the writting side of the equation . One of the BIG goals is that I be able to finish my work on the beast in a timely fashion .

Don't get me wrong. Portability and even flexibility is a crucial goal with me. I'm considering the inclussion of a number of builder's guidelines and supporting commentary, so that you can maybe make your own races and ships from the ground up. Those tools seem to be near-universal in the local genre-space and valuable to GCs working thair home brew. I'm just not planning to expound upon lots of technologies and concepts that aren't part of the setting.

Is the game setting of choice similar to Andromeda, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, Blade Runner, Buck Rogers, Farscape, Firefly, The Matrix, RoboCop, Time Cop, Star Wars, Star Trek, Starship Troopers, complete with Terminators (Both kinds), Aliens, and Predators (Oh My!) or is it going to be a mix of all of these to create something new and different? I'm willing to bet its going to be a mix because if you base your design around any one of the titles listed above, alot of Sci-fi fans are going to feel cheated.  Why would I ever buy a book based in the Farscape universe when all I really want is Firefly?  The short answer is, "I won't".  And I'm sure I'm not alone in that decision.

But I'm not telling you anything new.  As a designer, I'm sure that you are already planning on breaking down and removing the fluff from your top picks, creating something that combines your favorite elements in a cohesive manner, and eventually creating an entirely new contender in the vast demographic of Sci-Fi.

 

Heehee. Actually I don't obsess over 'new, exciting, and unique' quite as much as some. I'm more of an 'interesting and plausible' guy. Those tend to hold up better when folks start to analyze it to use for their own tables. Always design with the actual play experience in mind .

And it is going to be great! Shiny and new, at least for awhile.  Then, just like all of the other examples listed above, it will become old news.

That's sort of the natural fate of any setting. Especially sci fi, which is a killer medium to work in without becoming dated. Cordwainer Smith is on my legendary authors list because he wrote sci-fi in the 50s that is still not dated or tired, but even a generic tool kits is gonna face some degredation over time. Anyway, my point is my world-designing ego doesn't demand that it be a work to endure for all time. If it's a source of enjoyment for about 20-25 months I'll be perfectly happy .

Instead of having the setting become stagnant, why not give GMs the tools to continue expanding the Spycraft engine to form their own vision of the future?

 

I'd say some of Farthest Star's tools will be useful in that fashion. We'll all be able to have a lot more cogent conversations about ship building with an established baseline that people are tweaking to match a favorite movie/series or to fulfil their own vision for example. But trying to out guess all the ways even a small sampling of gamers will want to jump for their starting point (much less where they'll want to go in a year when they launch a new campaign) is a good way to bog down to where the product will never occur at all. OTOH, once Farthest Star is out, it's also easier to tackle individual topics of futuristic-gaming interest in individual .pdfs. Different business requirements there. A well built universal toolkit promises to be at most 20% useful to anyone, because you know going in you're gonna ignore 4 out of 5 of the options offered. That's a threshold that gets books (and the company/game line that makes them) killed. A pdf can get around that by being 100% useful to 20% of the interested players, meaning it sells. Maybe not magnificently, but it sells. Lower buy in threshold. And sometimes .pdfs happen because the Muse commands it, rather than any finacial concern .

Another one of the lessons we've learned by doing is that we get dinged and lose a lot of sales for not including a fully realized working example of the rules. Spellbound's Channeler was presented in straight up toolkit form because I thought it would be obvious that with such a clean and white set of bones you could do anything with it. The rulz iz what they iz. Instead that was the number one stumbling block for many, many people. So even if the parts and tools are there, intended to be unbolted and carried off to secret GC labs around the world to be repurposed into their own opus, we have learned our lesson that tools need to be shown in a working environment at least once .

As far as Farthest Star (or any other supplement for that matter) being as large as the core rulebook isn't a problem for me.  If it has to be 500 pages, then so be it.  Better to be 500 pages and cover almost any scenario than be 200 pages and not have what I need when I need it.

*Chuckle* I ain't doing 500 pages books again. Damn near killed me the first time. And really the whole point of that one was to create a basic physics engine that could be addapted to other environements with a LOT less hassle and that accepted plug-ins for various uses easily. Farthest Star should be a collection of those plug ins, and they'll cover a fair range of choices, but it would be wrong of me to promise that its a universal space opera tool set. An intersting and occassionaly inventive one that actually works is a pretty high bar to start with .

Wizards of the Coast made a good attempt at covering "the basics" with D20 Future in a book that was less than 200 pages...

I was re-reading that today. I think my reaction remains the same as my initial one: meh. The follow on books were IMO both considerably better, largely because of the focus they offered rather than the 1 inch of top-soil survey that the hardbound represented . It tried to do 6-8 sci-fi things (still little more than an appetizer platter) and devoted 5 whole pages to each of them. There are individual gems and nuggets, but the overall structure worked against it.

...but the rules failed them.  After switching from D20 Modern to Spycraft, I can say without a doubt that I believe the Spycraft engine would not suffer the same fate.

I tend to agree, but I may be biased .

[TheAuldGrump]

Not that I would mind seeing a series of toolkits.... (Book 1: This is My Plasma Gun TL 16 Man Portable...)
Personal Weapons
Starship Tech
Starship Weapons
Alien Races
Cybertech
and so on and so forth.

Mind you, in many ways I see SpyCraft better suited for 'space opera' than for 'hard SF' - I do not think that it would be well served with a math heavy tech book in the theme of Fire, Fusion, & Steel (though I dearly love that book - it was what sold me on T:tNE, not for the Imperial tech, but for all the stuff that it had for building your own setting ) Something closer to Plug & Play would be better in this instance.

What it comes down to is that I trust myself to design my own settings more than I trust others to come up with a setting to my tastes.

The Auld Grump

[Chimera]

Don't get me wrong. Portability and even flexibility is a crucial goal with me. I'm considering the inclussion of a number of builder's guidelines and supporting commentary, so that you can maybe make your own races and ships from the ground up. Those tools seem to be near-universal in the local genre-space and valuable to GCs working thair home brew. I'm just not planning to expound upon lots of technologies and concepts that aren't part of the setting.

I'd say some of Farthest Star's tools will be useful in that fashion. We'll all be able to have a lot more cogent conversations about ship building with an established baseline that people are tweaking to match a favorite movie/series or to fulfil their own vision for example. But trying to out guess all the ways even a small sampling of gamers will want to jump for their starting point (much less where they'll want to go in a year when they launch a new campaign) is a good way to bog down to where the product will never occur at all. OTOH, once Farthest Star is out, it's also easier to tackle individual topics of futuristic-gaming interest in individual .pdfs. Different business requirements there. A well built universal toolkit promises to be at most 20% useful to anyone, because you know going in you're gonna ignore 4 out of 5 of the options offered. That's a threshold that gets books (and the company/game line that makes them) killed. A pdf can get around that by being 100% useful to 20% of the interested players, meaning it sells. Maybe not magnificently, but it sells. Lower buy in threshold. And sometimes .pdfs happen because the Muse commands it, rather than any finacial concern .

Okay, so we've got the "storyline" in one half of the book and the mechanics in the other.  Would it be possible to keep them separate?  As I mentioned before, the Rifts line was notorious for mixing storyline with rules and I hated trying to weed through the "fluff" to get to what I considered relevant.  Keep it separate, throw in the rules for a few basic constructions such as power armor, robots, vehicles, aliens and planets, and I *should* have enough to work with to keep me happy without having to look elsewhere, as I have already had to do for material not covered in the Spycraft core book and convert it to the Spycraft engine.

Always design with the actual play experience in mind .

I completely agree.

If it's a source of enjoyment for about 20-25 months I'll be perfectly happy .

I guess a 2 year run is pretty good, but wouldn't you really like to be the next flagship of the roleplaying community?  Isn't it about time that Dungeons and Dragons took a back seat to somebody else's brainchild?

I was re-reading that today. I think my reaction remains the same as my initial one: meh. The follow on books were IMO both considerably better, largely because of the focus they offered rather than the 1 inch of top-soil survey that the hardbound represented . It tried to do 6-8 sci-fi things (still little more than an appetizer platter) and devoted 5 whole pages to each of them. There are individual gems and nuggets, but the overall structure worked against it.

I think the only structuring that failed me was the introduction of PL5, PL6, etc.  It failed me because it was an attempt to take control out of the GMs hands.  It was as if Wizards was trying to say, "If you live in a PL5 world, you can't have PL8 technology".  This is a real sore spot for me because I recently went through their offerings along with a great amount of other sources to try and cobble together a decent set of cybernetics rules to use in my Spycraft game.  The next headache I face is the introduction of Psionics.

Not that I would mind seeing a series of toolkits.... (Book 1: This is My Plasma Gun TL 16 Man Portable...)
Personal Weapons
Starship Tech
Starship Weapons
Alien Races
Cybertech
and so on and so forth.

What it comes down to is that I trust myself to design my own settings more than I trust others to come up with a setting to my tastes.

The Auld Grump

I agree completely.

[Agent 333]

Well, Spycraft books have so far (in my experience at least) kept all the new mechanical stuff fairly seperate from the setting material (both in WoF and in 1.0 with SFA). A few mentions here and there and some concessions to the setting (frex, Master Classes and feats based on Allegiances), but mostly the New Rules chapter is plug and play, and the other half of the book doesn't mention rules.

Splitting it into two books is guarunteed to be a losing business model, for sooo many reasons its not funny. The biggest one is the increased production cost of two books over one is large.

[Golden Dragon]

As a designer I have to settle on creating something that is interesting in it's own right, grounded in a number of recognizable forms to make it intuitive and easy to explain - me to the first customer, him to his circle of players - and (hopefully) easily broken down into parts that can be transplanted to other people's creations beceasue we know and love that people do dismantle our stuff for parts. We don't attach stuff to settings because we delight insticking you (the do-it-yourself setting designer) with 'useless fluff', we do it to give focus to a vast nebulous field of maybe's and to demonstrate how those tools and parts can weld into a cohesive whole.

Let me say, as a customer, that I think Morgenstern has this right. GURPS Space tries to cover all the bases, and came across as dry and uninspiring. I want an inspiring setting to give pegs on which we can hang the various rules. I want to be able to imagine what a given class or feat can do.

With the base Spycraft being set in current day, I could easily provide the situations. Science fiction, being a broad spectrum, almost requires that the options be narrowed down. Otherwise I would be left with feats and classes that left me asking "What in the world is that for?"

[spinningdice]

To reiterate what I mentioned earlier, a themed book (e.g. Farthest Star) with a few supplimental add-ons (e.g. FS Toolkit: Super-Massive Starships) or even S&P articles would probably serve both crowds.

Or in other words "Here's our nicely detailed and interesting world with relevent rules, next month we give out some examples to customise this to your setting"

This is all completely disregarding that we tend to be spoilt by having the designers on here, as well as some other fairly talented house-rulers who can probably help you out with nearly whatever you require.