Quote:
Originally Posted by Dammann
The visual vocabulary of most audiences takes artificial gravity for granted. I love science fiction, and a story where well thought out microgravity is the norm would be a bonus for me, but one needs to consider one's audience, I think.
If you are running a game for people who are pretty scientifically literate (specifically with regard to space travel), the absence of artificial gravity could be a pleasant little bonus. It offers opportunities for novel problem solving and grants some verisimilitude (which may get you off the hook with some other impossibility) (but probably not). For people whose relationship with space travel mostly comes by way of movies, freefall will probably be a distraction at best, and one that you need to keep reminding the players of at worst.
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I take a somewhat (I think) minority view on this issue, though. For one thing, I don't find the presence of superscience
per se unrealistic, for a story set more than a modest distance into the future, I find the
absence of it unrealistic. That is, I consider it radically improbable that our current scientific understanding is the last word, any more than Daltonian atomic theory or Newtonian mechanics were that.
Which is not to say that anything and everything goes, only that some things do, and the 'impossibility' should be used consistantly and not be a universal solution to everything.
(Any more than our own technology is. We in 2012 live
surrounded by huge amounts of superscience, as viewed from even as recently as 1912, and by sheer unadulterated
magic as viewed from 1012 A.D., yet our technology still doesn't solve all problems.)