4ed Tech Levels?

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

There's no basis in reality for assigning most of what was in higher TLs in earlier editions (FTL, force fields, etc.) to a TL because it simply can't exist. It all falls under "superscience," and it's up to the GM to decide, based on the needs of his own campaigns, which bits of impossible technology are advanced/recent precursor/distant precursor tech.

Many superscience technologies are given a default TL of introduction (e.g. antigravity), but still marked as superscience so that the GM is aware he'll need to make a decision about them. (In ULTRA-TECH, I think only the superscience power cell doesn't have a suggested TL.)

Yes, the tech scale has got shorter, but I never found the distinctions between high-TL worlds all that meaningful anyway: they go off in different directions based on their own preferences.

[NineDaysDead]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

With 4e, I suspect they decided they wanted 4 TLs per "era:" Low Tech has 1-4,

Nobody loves Tech level 0?

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by NineDaysDead

Nobody loves Tech level 0?

Despite Kromm's promises of a No-Tech book, it has yet to materialize. I, for one, was deeply disappointed. I was looking forward to the chapter on "pointy sticks."

[Phil Masters]

I personally think that the Basic Set and Ultra-Tech might have said a little louder that it's perfectly possible for TLs of 13+ to exist, but these will always be highly setting-specific. But anyway, that's very much the case.

I guess that there might be scope for a PDF of various uber-tech levels, from the conventional Trek/B5 "Everything is constructed of stable force fields, including the people, who've left flesh behind", to Vingean cosmic engineering by short-lived gods and Greg Egan insanely precise micro-engineering across cosmic distances - or just "add the following superscience stuff from Ultra-Tech at the following TLs...

[Vaevictis Asmadi]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

Despite Kromm's promises of a No-Tech book, it has yet to materialize. I, for one, was deeply disappointed. I was looking forward to the chapter on "pointy sticks."

TL 0 is stone age, TL 1 is bronze age. No Tech is for when you're trapped, naked, inside a giant plastic cube with no tools at all.

[lexington]

Originally Posted by Vaevictis Asmadi

TL 0 is stone age, TL 1 is bronze age. No Tech is for when you're trapped, naked, inside a giant plastic cube with no tools at all.

Sounds fetishy.

[Rocket Man]

In a sense, the new layout is consistent with the rules for using TL-based skills ... namely, the ones that say anything more than 3 TLs beyond the character is equally incomprehensible.

We're currently TL 8. In theory, that would put TL 11 at the very edge of what we could possibly comprehend, and that only for the best and brightest. Anything higher than TL 12 may as well be TL 12 for all intents and purposes.

[adm]

For what it is worth, Amarillo Design Bureau's GURPS Prime Directive maintains the old TL system, it is however, heavily limited to their version Star Trek the Original Series outline.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by NineDaysDead

Nobody loves Tech level 0?

GURPS Low-Tech will cover TL0-4; that is, it will address five TLs. GURPS High-Tech is for TL5-8, or four TLs. And GURPS Ultra-Tech covers TL9-12, or four TLs. Number of TLs per supplement had nothing to do with stopping at TL12. We stopped at TL12 because we ran out of extrapolations there and didn't want to set one particular sequence of superscience developments in stone.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

I personally think that the Basic Set and Ultra-Tech might have said a little louder that it's perfectly possible for TLs of 13+ to exist, but these will always be highly setting-specific. But anyway, that's very much the case.

True. Tech level is meant for technologies that exist or at least don't utterly defy extrapolation. For other things, use superscience. A particular setting could certainly stratify superscience and assign it levels, even phase in TL13+ as increasing amounts of superscience. It's just that the choice of what goes at each level past TL12, being superscience, would be a campaign-level decision and not a system-level one.