How Hard is your Science Fiction?

[Crakkerjakk]

Generally hard, although if it's interstellar I prefer FTL. Also fine with running rubber science stuff, but when I'm day dreaming, it's generally about hard sci-fi "what if" scenarios.

[Kaldrin]

I've only run one SF game and it was considerably rubbery. I don't particularly like hard SF because it seems quite ordinary to me.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Kaldrin

I've only run one SF game and it was considerably rubbery. I don't particularly like hard SF because it seems quite ordinary to me.

This depends on how you feel about constraints in relation to creativity. Robert Frost famously said that writing free verse was like playing tennis without a net. I've written metrical verse, and I find that the effort to make a word fit the scansion limits word choice in a way that adds intensity to the creative focus of writing. And of course playing within limits is the essence of many games.

I tend to feel that a measure of respect for scientific plausibility, and the careful working out of implications of a purported new invention or natural phenomenon, creates a constraint on fiction that has some of the same payoffs as writing verse that scans, or drawing or painting with perspective. It's not the only way to do it, but I often like the results.

[khorboth]

I am all over the place.

I'll play Star Wars where ships close enough go "woosh!" as the zoom by and star fighters can take out large ships with a lucky shot.

I'll also play transhuman space where we have prices for lbs lifted to orbit and all the tech is very plausable.

I've pondered everything from Foundation-era hard to Hyperion-style wacky.

The important thing is to stay consistent with whatever you are doing.

[Lord Carnifex]

I have a fondness for Cyberpunk/Transhumanist hard SF, and have run campaigns in such. But when it comes to roleplaying, I'm a lot like Gold & Appel Inc. I'm willing to suspend disbelief to go so far as things like FTL travel, FTL communication, and reactionless thrusters. Usually taking the out of "uses scientific principles we have not yet discovered".

Mostly, it's because I want "strange new worlds" and "epic interstellar adventures" without having to deal with things like relativity or lightspeed. I want my shuttle craft to pop up and down off the planet's surface without worrying about fuel-energy densities, carefully hoarded delta-V, or spending hours with GURPS vehicles only to discover that a single stage to orbit craft is impossible with my tech assumptions.

On the other hand, I like it when most stuff has plausable sounding technical explanations, and is kept from careening too far into superscience. Ships are powered by fusion or antimatter, weapons are "realistic" for their tech level: lasers, gauss guns, xasers, particle beams. Stuff that outright breaks the rules as laid down by the inital campaign assumptions is few and far between, and mostly there for a sense of wonder and the unknown.

[RevBob]

Originally Posted by Lord Carnifex

I like it when most stuff has plausable sounding technical explanations, and is kept from careening too far into superscience. Ships are powered by fusion or antimatter, weapons are "realistic" for their tech level: lasers, gauss guns, xasers, particle beams.

(Emphasis mine.)

That's about my speed, too. Most of the time, I have sort of an unspoken agreement with my players: they don't point out the wires, and I don't use 'em too often. :)

Actually, one "set of wires" in an oWOD game years ago wound up developing from a bit of hyperbole into a minor plot point. The party would pile into the limo to go somewhere, and the travel times just wound up getting shorter and shorter. I eventually justified it by a parallel to Mrs. Todd's Shortcut - the NPC driver had started taking shortcuts through the Umbra to save time. That, in turn, led to certain revelations about the driver himself....

[Mark Skarr]

Sci-fi games are easy for me. I'm good at improv and my players are along for the game, not a thesis on technology.

I let the story dictate how hard the science is in my games.

If it's a story like Star Wars where the science takes a third-car-back-seat to the story, then I don't bring it up much. In a story like this it's just not important to know that the Heap O' Junk can perform the Kanonbal Run in 7.3 light-hours. What's important is "does it fit the story that they make it in time, or that they do not? Have they done everything they possibly can to get there on time? Would a failure at this point make for a better story?" The hard-facts of the ship just aren't important.

If the story requires much more attention to detail, say based on Man versus Environment, the science will probably be very hard and hand waving will be kept to a minimum. My first-generation Mars Colony game worked along these lines.

However, the majority of my games fall somewhere in the middle. It's important for the technology that the players interact with regularly to be fairly well defined, but the majority of the technology, they're just not going to care about. "Does the life support work? Yes? Good!" "Why is there artificial gravity?" "Because I don't want to have to deal with 3d, 0g movement in combat."

Internal consistancy is very important to me though. A lack of it will quickly ruin a game for me. My Hero GM has a cyberpunk world where there are no real space assets (satellites, but no stations) because no one is interested in space at this point. However, he has advanced "contragravity" and a Grav APC can make a run to Neptune in 17 minutes with only about five minutes to convert it to space travel with an off-the-shelf kit. But nobody goes into space because it's too expensive and there's nothing out there worth having. Not even the corporations. Not even a little.

Gnnh!-*************-Boom!

That was the sound of my head exploding.

I've found the MST3K Mantra (can't get a link to actually get there the first try) and the Catgirl Conundrum to be powerful tools when gaming.

[Sydney]

I'm more in the area of Buck Rogers, I don't care about the science or lack of (I'd probably not notice the differnce anyway) as long as there's consistancy and continuity in it.

But then, I'm also writing a series of stories set on a 1930s Earth with a city that floats in the sky by way of diamagnetics...

[Pmandrekar]

Originally Posted by Pmandrekar

I like running Science Fiction. And I am alternately hot and cool towards running gritty, "Hard" SF with a lot of hard science, as opposed to running Buck Rogers type campaigns with "ray guns" and 'flying cars'

I've played across the spectrum. Star Trek the RPG (FASA), Traveller, Star Frontiers, Paranoia.

The big variable from my standpoint seems to be what my fellow players do with the material. I can plead with people that this isn't going to be a graduate seminar on astrophysics, and yet some of them will stop play to argue every little point and what last month's issue of Physics Rev. B just came up with. That's what has tended to stop my hard SF games in their tracks. There is no such thing as *completely* Hard SF, to my mind. All SF takes a little bit of liberty with the core science material.

Genetic Engineering of traits seems like it would be a logical extension of what we can manipulate now, and yet, in humans, there are still some traits that we don't know enough about, and the conservative scientist in me says that if we don't know if we can do something for certain, there is *always* a chance that we will learn that there is a reason that we can't, even if we can't forsee it.

So, all science fiction needs a little bit of 'rubber'. If it had none, it would actually be science fact, and we'd probably have people locking down how that system works in the labs.

And to me, that loses why I'm gaming in Science Fiction, to play in a world that I'm not currently in. I work in the world of science fact. 45 hours a week, in fact.

If the players I'm playing with (the ones I'm gaming with now are playing a 3.5 Dungeon Crawl- so we're making a *Lot* of handwaving arguments already about why we keep going into these dungeons) can play along with the premise, then I've had a lot of fun playing, really, silly Science Fiction Campaigns.

-P.

[jspade]

Mine runs the gamut. I've run Star Trek-based campaigns so rubberized they gained energy with each bounce, and at one campaign that fell apart when I found out I'd made a fundamental error in my assumptions (I broke my own suspension of disbelief, bad when you're GMing). I almost always include some form of FTL, but not always -- the campaign science broke didn't have one, for instance, and neither did my long-running future cops game.

In creating my own settings, I generally start out not allowing any superscience or fantastic elements, and only allow them in once I've satisfied myself there's no way to get the setting I want without them. For example, my space marines campaign was originally intended to use slower-than-light drives and cold sleep for interstellar travel; only when I concluded that it would break the social setup I wanted did I relent and allow FTL drives.