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Old 01-05-2017, 11:12 AM   #601
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Default Re: Mailanka's Musings -- GURPS Content Post

For what it's worth, I'm really enjoying the Psi Wars articles on your blog, and I'd be interested in Heroes of the Galactic Frontier if and when that comes along, too (personally I prefer Star Trek to Star Wars). It's interesting to see the decisions you're making and the reasoning behind them, the amount of effort you're putting into this is staggering - and I appreciate you sharing it with us!
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Old 01-05-2017, 12:07 PM   #602
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Crystalline_Entity View Post
For what it's worth, I'm really enjoying the Psi Wars articles on your blog, and I'd be interested in Heroes of the Galactic Frontier if and when that comes along, too (personally I prefer Star Trek to Star Wars). It's interesting to see the decisions you're making and the reasoning behind them, the amount of effort you're putting into this is staggering - and I appreciate you sharing it with us!
At the risk of alienating all of my star wars fans... I do too, especially after working with Star Wars for so long. Star Wars definitely has a blissful simplicity to it, in that it's sort of just "Grab all the tropes, throw them into space, have adventures!", which is nice. But Star Trek does two nice things that I think make it more conducive to sci-fi rp.

First, by having defined crew-tasks, you have natural niches where everyone works together. In Star Wars, its tempting to have the Space Knight go off and do mystical stuff while the smuggler goes off and does criminal stuff (and the Empire Strikes Back gets split right down the middle as a result), but in Star Trek, it's totally natural to have the Engineer, Pilot, Captain and Science Officer all working together to defeat badguys, at least while they're on the ship.

Second, Star Trek celebrates science and technology a lot more than Star Wars does. I'm not going to say that Star Trek is more scientifically accurate than Star Wars (both are pretty rubbish), but Star Trek watches more like the writers got really excited after watching Cosmos than Star Wars does. If you want to make black holes or neutron stars or frozen planets or weird ideas like Bose-Einstein Condensate ghosts central to your story, Star Trek is much more accommodating than Star Wars.

Finally, it should be noted that while I find it much easier to find fan-made Star Wars art than fan-made Star Trek art (a point of a much earlier post), I find it way easier to find generic "not-Star Trek" inspiration. It's hard to picture Star Wars without, say, the Jedi (Firefly, maybe?) and for inspiration, I often turn to non-sci-fi sources, like samurai flicks or history. For Star Trek, though, if I said that FTL or Andromeda or Farscape or Star Gate Universe were "like Star Trek but not Star Trek," I'd get no pushback. In a way, Star Trek is much more embedded in the popular consciousness as "generic Sci-fi" than Star Wars is (which is not to say the latter doesn't have a huge cultural presence, just that its relationship with other knock-offs is different than Star Trek).

Which is to say I'm rather eager to get started, but I want to finish what I began. Psi-Wars first.

Thanks for your comments! I love to hear from you guys.
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Old 01-10-2017, 11:39 PM   #603
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Hey, did you guys miss me? It's been quite a week!

I've been winding up my discussion of social distancing mechanisms, first with a look at the beating heart of what makes them work: Cultural Values. This includes a discussion of do-it-yourself codes of honor.

Then I dug into one of the most complete expressions of a culture, their religion and philosophy, wherein I review GURPS Religion in the context of Psi-Wars.

And today, I wrap it up with a Cultural Checklist, discussing just how much culture we really need
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Old 01-12-2017, 01:33 AM   #604
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Happy GURPS Day! So, I've finished discussing Social Distancing Mechanisms, but there was a purpose to all of this: art, fashion, wine, exotic languages and games of change? These are the domain of the Con-Artist! I've wanted one since Iteration 1, and one of the reasons I dug through all of this material in such detail was to work out the exact mechanics necessary for one.
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Old 01-15-2017, 11:51 PM   #605
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This week, we take a look at organizations, starting with digging into the idea of Pulling Rank and its place in Psi-Wars.
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Old 01-17-2017, 01:53 AM   #606
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Pulling Rank requires organizations. The real world has plenty real examples to choose from, but for a sci-fi game, we need to more carefully describe them. Today, I look at Designing Organizations, a look at the sort of organizations that typically show up in space opera and what, broadly, they tend to look like (from the lens of Pulling Rank)
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Old 01-17-2017, 11:09 PM   #607
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In Psi-Wars, I've ignored Status, because despite the presence of Princesses and Counts in Star Wars, I figure it works like Action, and one's Status is just cosmetic. But what if it wasn't? How might Status be interesting in a GURPS Action context?

I take a look at how in Status as Pulling Rank.
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Old 01-19-2017, 12:04 AM   #608
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All of my posts on social mechanics and organizatoins have been building to this moment: the design and release of the Diplomat, including a discussion of what a diplomat's realistic role would be, and how to make such a character useful in an action-oriented game.
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Old 01-23-2017, 12:04 AM   #609
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Today, I kick off a new series covering planetary terrain, how to feature them in your space opera game, and how Dungeon Fantasy 16 can be useful to us.
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Old 01-23-2017, 10:40 PM   #610
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Part one of the 8 part series, a deeper look at Arctic Terrain and Survival (Arctic) and what sorts of wonders, perils and technology one might infer from arctic terrain.
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