What do you want in a Transhuman Space game (as a player)?

[Keiko]

I've seen the sentiment "This isn't want I want from a Transhuman Space game" expressed quite a few times in response to campaign and scenario proposals (to me more than once...). So I'm curious what is wanted from a Transhuman Space game? What would your ideal campaign be like?

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Keiko

I've seen the sentiment "This isn't want I want from a Transhuman Space game" expressed quite a few times in response to campaign and scenario proposals (to me more than once...). So I'm curious what is wanted from a Transhuman Space game? What would your ideal campaign be like?

I want it to be something that uses the stuff that's new to THS. I don't want a game that could be played now, or in Victorian England, with the future setting being no more than exotic costuming and scenery. Nor do I want a simple allegory of problems we have now projected onto the future. Give me an attempt to envision the future, identify problems that will distress its people, and build plots and scenarios on that.

I'm not primarily interested in combat, especially large-scale military combat. I'm fine with having it included, but I want drama as well as action.

[johndallman]

I agree with Bill. To refine it a bit, I want to experience the sheer strangeness of the setting. Alternating that with the parts that are familiar both emphasises the strangeness, and provides something to cling to when the strangeness gets too much, for a while. But I want to learn to cope with the strangeness, and live within it, moving on to new and weirder levels.

All this tends to mean that the stories need to grow out of the new things in the society. Some of them may have basic human motives behind them, manifested in new ways, but others will start with some strange new idea. The neatest example of this I've played was a scenario that happened because of the strange self-organising properties of the large amounts of smart gift-wrapping paper that had been thrown away in a particular Martian settlement.

[whswhs]

For example, in my first THS campaign, one of the PCs was a ghost in a bioshell: He had been uploaded into a tiny computer and implanted in a bioshell cloned from his original body. (This had odd effects, in that he was a Modern Catholic and believed that he had died when his organic brain was destroyed and gone on to purgatory or heaven or hell; he regarded himself as a soulless simulacrum of the true person.) In the first investigation, they had to deal with a young woman who was very smart, but lacked confidence about physical things like dancing and sex; so she had had her VII wired to be able to control her body, and relied on the VII for physical skills, while she rode along and observed and experienced. The PC managed to encounter her in a club, dance with her, or end up going home with her for the night. But being cautious, he asked one of his teammates to keep in touch with him remotely and be prepared to step in and operate his body if he got in trouble. Well, he got up and visited the bathroom, and when he engaged with the house computer, a hidden layer in his internal computer tried to probe it without his knowledge, and it alerted his hostess, who had her VII take over and try to physically subdue him, whereupon he called for help and had his own body operated by his friend. She imitated his accent and asks, "Wha'd ye do that for?" and the whole thing was resolved peacefully, more or less.

But the thing is, aside from not knowing about the hidden layer of the first PC's digital self, the entire group of PCs followed the series of transactions and exchanges just fine. At that point I knew the campaign was viable.

[Clancy]

I'd like to play in the smaller events which eventually will cause the THS world movement/adaptation to the new conditions. Next tech/social crysis, leading not to utter destruction, but rather to revolution. But this should be perceived in the small scale of events.

[RogerBW]

I'm inclined to agree with Bill and John. If the motive for whatever's going on is conventionally human, the nefarious plot itself needs to be strange and TS-specific; if the plot is normal, the motives need to be odd. If both are odd, so much the better.

I want transhumanism, and I want space. That doesn't mean the campaign has to take place in space or deal exclusively with uploads and uplifts, but both need to be at least visible in the background.

[Keiko]

And to pile on extra layer sometimes two different people can read the same canon and get entirely different impressions.

[Keiko]

Originally Posted by Owen Smith

Oh absolutely. Only two people? I reckon an entire group can read the same thing and all come away with different impressions.

Any two people. IOW, different people might get different impressions from the same text.