Breaking the Heart of the Universe

[M. J. Young]

As a genre, Science Fiction is not about spaceships, technology, aliens, or the future. Science fiction, much moreso than fantasy, is about dealing with modern humans and modern or timeless issues. The "futuristic setting" that comes with them is a stage, rather than the point.

I feel like this is exactly the same argument as the one Harlan Ellison makes when he says that there's a difference between Science Fiction and Sci-fi. He wants to say that sci-fi is all the schlock that's out there, and science fiction is the good literature. I think you can't do that.

Sure, the great works of science fiction are all about issues which are best expressed in a futuristic setting. Yet how many science fiction stories have little or nothing of that in them? Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Battlestar Galactica (originally described as "Wagon Train in Space") and other churned out episode after episode of action-adventure in a futuristic setting, and for the fans it was about the heroics and the gadgets.

Of course a good science fiction story uses the setting elements as central to the issues involved. I think Millennium Man might be a good example of that (although I have a lot of complaints about that film). But when it comes down to it, what really makes Outland, Terminator, Alien, Back to the Future, Millennium, Farscape, Space Above and Beyond, 12 Monkeys, Bill & Ted, Flight of the Navigator, and Minority Report Science Fiction is the setting: they contain elements of futuristic science and technology.

Sure, you can argue that taking the Klingons out of their place in the Cold War makes them meaningless; but then, Star Trek continued to include Klingons after the Cold War ended, and didn't even really redefine them all that much. Science fiction is a setting, or rather a set of characteristics which in various combinations define a setting. To say that it must be about the issues it addresses is to make exactly the same argument Ellison makes: if it's not good literature, it doesn't get to call itself science fiction. He's wrong. He doesn't get to make that rule. If it uses technology or science that doesn't exist today, it's science fiction.

Now, if the argument is that science fiction role playing games are heartbreakers because they don't produce great literature and that's what science fiction fans want, that's an entirely different argument--but what it means is that a sci-fi heartbreaker is any sci-fi game that is designed to support setting or the adventure instead of premise, which translates into sim or gam versus nar rather directly. It's saying that if this is not a narrativist game, it can't be science fiction, because good science fiction is about exploring the issues not the setting. That's a stupid argument (I apologize, but it is), because frankly good fantasy is about the issues, not the setting, and the same can be said for good westerns, good spy stories, and any other sort of literature. There still exist other entries in every field that are just about the setting or the adventure, and they are still fantasy, or westerns, or whatever they're supposed to be, despite being lousy literature--or in the RPG case, not narrativist.

On the question of the seminal games for sci-fi heartbreakers, let me suggest that we're looking in the wrong place. The template for science fiction games isn't Traveler or Star Frontiers or Metamorphosis Alpha or all of them together. The template game for sci-fi heartbreakers is Dungeons & Dragons. People are trying to make a game that does D&D in a science fiction setting. That's why Traveler can be a sci fi heartbreaker despite being the first successful game in the genre (if it is): it's attempting to do D&D in space, and so is locked into certain assumptions from D&D. (Perhaps this is what Gareth was saying.)

--M. J. Young

[John Kim]

Then surely what needs to happen in the discussion is to refine Bryan's points?  Not that we've heard from him in a while, but...

1. Alien (or other) monocultures
2. "Beam down and deal with a situation in a box"
3. "Welcome to my world"

Might these be typical qualities of the heartbreaker?  It's been a long time since I read Traveller; does any of this fit that model?  If not, where does it come from -- just from Star Trek and the like?  Does this have a game model that's being reiterated?

I'm not sure of the approach you're going for here.  Are you assuming that there is a known list of heartbreakers and you're trying to say what the typical qualities of them are?  Or are you proposing a set of qualities and asking which games fit it?  I guess I could make a list of SF RPGs which I am familiar with, and say how the above apply to them.  On the other hand, as I said I'm not familiar with most of Brian's list, and there are a ton more besides.  My list would be:

Aftermath, Aurora, The Babylon Project, Blue Planet (1st Ed), Cadillacs & Dinosaurs, Cyberpunk, Dark Conspiracy, Dream Park, Gamma World, GURPS (Autoduel, Cyberpunk, The Prisoner, Psionics, Space, Time Travel, Transhuman Space), Manhunter, Mechwarrior, Mekton II, Millenium's End, Morrow Project, Nexus: The Infinite City, Paranoia, Prime Directive, Shadowrun, Shatterzone, Skyrealms of Jorune, Space 1889, Space Opera, Star Frontiers, Star Hero, Star Trek (FASA & Decipher), Star Wars (d6 & d20), Teenagers From Outer Space, Time After Time, TimeLords, Time Lord, Traveller, Traveller: The New Era, Traveller 2300, Universe

Considering these and your three qualities:
1) All of the ones that have described alien cultures pretty much have monocultures.  The closest to exceptions would be Aurora and Star Frontiers.  Then again, alien monocultures have been endemic throughout science fiction in literature since long before Star Trek, and remains true today for literature, film , and RPGs.  Games like Shatterzone and TFOS have aliens without describing their cultures, and many don't have aliens.  
2) "Situation in a box" aka "Planet of the week" is I think a trope from TV series, notably Star Trek but equally true of some other space series.  I think it applies to the space opera games: Traveller and variants, Star Trek, Space Opera, and maybe some others.  
3) "Welcome to my world" I'm not sure.  I think this is a property of play which may not be clear from just the rules.  Most of the space opera games don't encourage generating worlds in all that much detail and they tend to fall into a standard list of types (i.e. this is a type-M planet).  In Traveller, the world is generally backdrop to the jobs which the PCs are hired for.  But there may be some influence of that in later Traveller, which influenced, say, Space Opera.  

I don't know.  I don't have a strong conclusion from this, which is my point.  Within fantasy, there is definitely a noticeable tendency for games to be D&D-derived as some group's attempt at "D&D done right".  I personally don't see the same sort of clumping in SF.  

My main candidate for an actual heartbreaker would be Blue Planet. There is excellent science; fantastic attention to meteorology and geology for an RPG, a stonrgly drawn setting with many implied questions... and yet the stock mode of play appears to be a caribean crime drama on the lines of Magnum PI, or wild west lawlessness on the open frontier. All the science in the setting is pretty much lost, and the opportunity offered by truly non-human PC's wasted.

Actually, I'm not sure what your complaint is here.  I gather you didn't like the wild west frontier default mode of play.  Do you think it should have been less focused, or do you think that it should have had a stock mode of play which focused more on science and on dolphins/orca PCs?  Maybe scientific investigation of the planet's resources?  

2300AD was an offshoot of traveller set in an earlier era, just after the developement of interstellar travel.  It was a much more bounded, purposeful game than Traveller IMO.  It had genuinely interesting aliens, 4 or 5 or so, and apart from the totally weird ones, neither of the two near-human aliens, the Kafer and the Sung, were described as monocultures.  Now the Kafer were truly wierd in that their adrenaline response boosted intelligence and not physical power, which meant they were only really sapient in times of stress.  This is great, truly alien psychology.  Unfortunately the game had a split personality over function - a sizable chunk was oriented around military shipping, and another almost by implication, around the planet on which the war with the Kafer is being conducted.  It was not clear how the Kafer were to be used, nor was the military game much fleshed out in any procedural sense.  What ther game was About was unclear, and it probably would have been better off to focus fully on the war in the manner of Heavy Gear.

Well, the general topic was discussed in the recent thread, http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=13742">So what's my motivation?.  My conclusion, at least, is that different people prefer different amounts of focus from their game.  Some people are fine with very broad games like The Pool, GURPS, or Story Engine.  On the other hand, some people prefer games built around narrow set of intended adventures, like Tunnels & Trolls, My Life With Master, or Dogs in the Vineyard.  I think it's true that the SF RPGs tend to be more broad, but I think the narrowness of focus is a preference issue.  There are some narrow focus games like Prime Directive or Shadowrun, but they're a minority.  

I'm familiar with the earlier edition, Traveller 2300.  This had very little on the war or on the aliens.  From what you say, I think it was even less focused, and they did focus on the war for the renamed edition.

[Ian Charvill]

That's a stupid argument (I apologize, but it is), because frankly good fantasy is about the issues, not the setting, and the same can be said for good westerns, good spy stories, and any other sort of literature.

Aristotle outlined three appeals in rhetoric: logical (i.e. rational), pathetic (i.e. emotional) and ethical (i.e. moral).  It seems to me that a writer's job is to engage the audience -- and by extension a book's job is to engage the audience.  They have precisely three tools to do that with, and they are the same three tools politicians had in the agora.

Now, "narrativists" have an agenda which states: the only worthwhile appeal that can truly grip people is an ethical appeal -- and you seem to be making something of the same argument. However, I don't think this holds for SF.

As a genre, SF -- along with the detective novel after the model of Poe, and some others -- has a great tradition of using logical appeals.  So-called 'hard science fiction' is predicated upon them.  You can learn a lot of science reading Clarke and Asimov*, as they go about engaging the reader with carefully wrought extrapolations of future worlds.  Shifting genre slightly, Michael Crighton's literary style revolves around the infodump.  He masterfully uses blocks of scientific exposition to misdirect the audience away from basic implausibility of his narratives.  Look, he says, how much I know a lot about chaos math -- don't you think I'm telling you the truth about these dinosaurs.

A large part of science fiction has, as a sine qua none, to be about the logical appeal.  One would expect a writer after that to use the other two appeals to round out the effect.  Pathetic appeals -- which is to say emotional appeals -- seem to work best for the cheap seats; ethical appeals -- which is to say the issues, man -- seem to work best for the ivory towers.

Regards,
Ian

* Asimov, interestingly, wrote a strand of detective stories, about some kind of mystery solving dinner club, which were pure delights of ratiocination.

[Alan]

Hi Ian,

I have some doubts about the primacy of logos in SF.  It seems to me that the core of both detective and much hard sf is the ethics of information - with subsets of ethics of truth and ethics of technology - not the logic of argument or the coheranceof a puzzle.  

Look at The Big Sleep.  Though I've never found the flaws myself, I've heard that there are logical holes in the plot.  But that doesn't matter, because it's focus is the consequences of secrets, not setting a challenge to the reader.  I think we'll find this true of any successful detective novel.

Likewise Ringworld or Jurrasic Park. Their cores are the ethical question: what do we do with huge secret projects that will influence the survival of the human race?

I begin to suspect that ethos is one of the required criteria for calling a piece of fiction good.  Take any great book and ask: what happens if I take away the ethical dimension?  I think you'll see that the book loses it's greatness.  On the other hand, even in detective and SF, both logos and pathos can be forgiven to some degree or another.  However, this doesn't mean that they aren't held to higher standards in SF or detective novels.

[Marco]

It may be instructive to reveiw the description of a heartbreaker.

1/ The are deriviative a very narrow category of science fiction concepts.
2/ They are derivative of a narrow base of gaming concepts.
3/ They are produced with great naivete' about the marketplace.
4/ They are produced as a labor of love by amatuers.

I don't think 'instructive' is the right word here. This is a revised defintion based, I think in large measure, on the discussion that followed. It is not using the term the way Ron did, nor is it, by quite some measure, using the term in the way your original essay did.

If you're going to add several new elements to your Heartbreaker defintion, you might want to discuss them in the next essay.

'Marco' seems very concerned that I'm misusing the heartbreaker label to mearly diss the genre. I don't know what to say except I don't have much affection for the dominant approach rpgs have taken to SF. If that makes my use of the term doubtful then I guess I'll have to live with that. Perhaps he'll see more affection in part 2.

Well, although you shouldn't do it for me, another option would be to tone down the snark in your essay. Traveler's trade system is not objectively dull, for example. It was only your experience that made you decide that 'nothing other than combat was fun' (in Traveler, too, which you include) and a good many games on your list don't contain a 'Bell and Book' magic system so it's clearly possible to make a game without them, despite what you say.

None of this is analysis, Brian, it's just trashin'. It's your essay, but since you are, by your own admission, missing the affection Ron had for his specific chosen titles, what you have isn't a Science Fiction Heartbreakers essay--it's just a "look at those silly roll-playin' games" piece using a convinent term.

-Marco

[Snowden]

I think it's worth re-emphasizing that fantasy literature doesn't have the kind of dual nature that science fiction has; I've never seen a discussion of fantasy split down the middle over whether the genre is defined by "world building" or "conceptual exploration," but this is very common (in my experience) when sci-fi buffs start talking shop.

From what I can see the interaction between RPGs and sci-fi is overwhelmingly located on the world-building side of the equation; has anyone seen a game attempt "The Martian Chronicles," or J.G. Ballard, or "Brave New World," or "Clockwork Orange," or "Childhood's End," or Philip K. Dick, or Asimov's "Robot" stories?  In contrast, "fantasy" RPGs have been able to draw from authors across the spectrum from Tolkein to Howard to Lieber to Vance to Beowulf to Homer to Mallory and so on.

If anything, I'd say an overwhelming number of SFRPGs are "heartbreakers" in the sense that they appear to unthinkingly repeat the fundamental assumption that Dune/Ringworld/Star Wars/Starship Troopers are the only way to "do" science fiction.  In other words, the "world-building" model of sci-fi literature is to SF heartbreakers as the D&D model of fantasy gaming is to fantasy heartbreakers.

[b_bankhead]

It may be instructive to reveiw the description of a heartbreaker.

1/ The are deriviative a very narrow category of science fiction concepts.
2/ They are derivative of a narrow base of gaming concepts.
3/ They are produced with great naivete' about the marketplace.
4/ They are produced as a labor of love by amatuers.

I don't think 'instructive' is the right word here. This is a revised defintion based, I think in large measure, on the discussion that followed. It is not using the term the way Ron did, nor is it, by quite some measure, using the term in the way your original essay did.

Wrong. If you examine the essay you will find it to be a direct cut and paste from the original.

[John Kim]

If you examine the essay you will find it to be a direct cut and paste from the original.

Well, there you listed it as a "pattern" which heartbreakers happen to fall it.  I at least wasn't clear that this is the definition.  

Is there somewhere further you want to go with this thread?  Like Marco, I tend to dislike the word "heartbreaker" as a label, since your points here describe games which I approve of and want to encourage.  But if it's just semantics I can live with it.  I like games being focused on a narrow set of concepts, rather than trying to make a broad "everything in sci-fi" RPG.  And while I don't approve of naivity per se, I approve of free RPGs which willfully ignore what is most profitable.  I also am fond of space opera, and the last major scifi RPG I GMed was a set of three Star Trek campaigns (using a homebrew based on CORPS).

[Marco]

Wrong. If you examine the essay you will find it to be a direct cut and paste from the original.

That's true--I was mistaken about it being a revision. Your text does appear in the original.

If you clean up some of the condescending opinion in your essay it will, however, be a big improvement, IMO.

Although those traits may, in some way, apply to Fantasy Heartbreakers, it was not what earned them the name and was not meant in the same way you use it.

-Marco

[epweissengruber]

Traveller is far from being a Sci-Fi Heartbreaker.  There is a considerable fan community that has followed it through all of its iterations.  We have home-brewed software for generating spaceships, javascript trade analysis programs, and several boardgames for analyzing combat.

The heartbreak in sci seems to consist of several well-intentioned attempts to bring simulations of alternative realities into game play.  Traveller has a wonderful series of games designed to simulate individual character adventures, tactical action on starships, tactical and strategic warfare on planets, tactical and strategic space warfare, etc.  

But in roleplay you end up solving intrigues like weird space drug dealers or spies.  

How do you bring the simulation of scientific speculation or possible futures into game play.  

That is the heartbreak of all sci-fi gaming.  The mechanics of Traveller or GURPS are systematic and balanced.  There is no heartbreak or half-asserey here.  But the essence of sci-fi, the "what if?" is missing.

[daMoose_Neo]

Traveller is far from being a Sci-Fi Heartbreaker.  There is a considerable fan community that has followed it through all of its iterations.  We have home-brewed software for generating spaceships, javascript trade analysis programs, and several boardgames for analyzing combat.
...
The mechanics of Traveller or GURPS are systematic and balanced.  There is no heartbreak or half-asserey here.

Thats all well and good, but look at it from a design standpoint.

Looking at the Nuts & Bolts of Sci-Fi is the same as looking at the Nuts & Bolts of Magic. Because both are (in essence) theoretical, you have a lot of leeway in what you can do, only requirement being that its semi-plausable. How does Mystical teleportation work? Will of the Gods. Translating your life esence into energy, joining the Force of Nature, which is everywhere, and manifesting the energy again in the other location. How does a Teleporter work? Breaking down your body on a molecular level, transmitting these molocules along a tight sub-space frequency, and using a recieving teleporter on the other end to reassemble your molocules.

Maybe these games HAVE tackled the nuts & bolts of Sci-Fi and can recreate the Teleporter or tractor beam. But thats the same as explaining how a Teleportation spell works in a Arabic fantasy as opposed to a European fantasy. Traditional Fantasy is all about grand heroes and adventures, right against might, good vs. evil. D&D does this in its own way, and too many systems duplicate D&D...but in space. D20 is D20, if its on Earth, Mars, Middle Earth or Tatooine.

So, from a design and a mechanics standpoint, these are replicating High Fantasy, just calling it different. And when you hit the nail on the head though about the absense of the "what if?", you have a heartbreaker. A game, well designed, that you really really want to like, that just doesn't live up to its promise dispite good intentions, some real gems, and a lot of hard work.

[komradebob]

This struck me ( from daMoose_Neo):

too many systems duplicate D&D...but in space.

and

the absense of the "what if?",

One of the things that seems to be duplicated in many games (of all genres) is a design that assumes that extended campaign play with repeat characters ( whether or not they advance in skills/levels) should be the norm.  Is this one of the barriers to "what if?" that some folks see as being essential in some way to science fiction? For that matter, has campaign play as a conceptual model worked its way into the conciousness of fiction writers as well?

What exactly does extended campaign play emulate, other than the norms of D&D?

Robert

Apologies for going somewhat off topic. Mods please feel free to split this if you feel this is too tangential for this thread.

[John Kim]

So, from a design and a mechanics standpoint, these are replicating High Fantasy, just calling it different. And when you hit the nail on the head though about the absense of the "what if?", you have a heartbreaker. A game, well designed, that you really really want to like, that just doesn't live up to its promise dispite good intentions, some real gems, and a lot of hard work.

I'm not sure what the point is here.  I would agree that Traveller is not about "what if" in, say, the style of Isaac Asimov or Philip K. Dick.  For that matter, I don't think that Star Wars does this either.  In my opinion, Traveller is not trying to be an emulation of literary SF, but rather is a different animal.  Nor do I see that it is emulating high fantasy in the slightest.  

On the other hand, its science is far from just a gloss.  There is real science contained within the mechanics of original Traveller: the starship kinematics and design, the planetary generation systems, and the other parts.  This is real, and it does not rely on pre-existing player knowledge.  I know, because I read and played Traveller in grade school well before I had my first physics class.  It was, to me, inspirational and insightful -- and in retrospect it was formative (along with "Asimov on Physics") in my love of science which would lead me to go on and get a PhD in physics.  I think my childhood would have been much much poorer if all I had to play was, say, Primetime Adventures and had spent my time learning about television plotting instead of about physics and astronomy.  

Now, I'll admit that this is a personal thing.  Traveller certainly isn't for everyone.  But I don't think it should be judged based on preconceptions about what literary SF is supposed to be.

[Marco]

Something to note about the "science" aspects of the games:

Some discussions on RPG.net have led me to conclude that what is consdiered Hard Sci-Fi has changed over the years. The barrier (and have been convinced there is merrit in this argument even if it is not universally true) is much higher today--we see the horizion of 'the future' pushed much closer and far less speculative technology in 'Hard SF' today (no artificial gravity).

For games produced in the 70's and 80's, drawing from a body of fiction that matured in the 50's-70's, games like Traveler would be considred fairly hard science (and, IMO, was--I contrasted Star Frontiers which seemed, IIRC, far less concerened about the nature of planetary systems of the dynamics of interstellar travel).

Finding fault with Traveler's quaint computers, for example, is using hindsight in a particularly unfair manner. Almost no one foresaw the computer revolution until it hit and that includes most SF authors as well as most major corporations.

Today Known Space can be considered Space Opera--that wasn't the case when it was written (IIRC it was MIT students who discovered, triumphantly, that the ringworld would be unstable due to orbital mechanics prompting the discovery of re-positioning systems in the next book).

I think that using, for example, the fact that these games depict what today looks like Science Fantasy or Space Opera as a categorizing factor in the Heartbreaker definition is like condemning secret agent games (Top Secret, James Bond, MS&PI, etc.) for not doing Horror and Romance genres as well--or, perhaps, for not presenting quite enough post cold-war cynicism for the modern reader.

-Marco

[Caldis]

I think a lot of discussion is still going on debating the merit of some of the big games of sci-fi rather than the actual heartbreakers.  That's all fine but not really on topic.  Traveller, Star Frontiers, Trek, Star Wars, cant be heartbreakers in exactly the way that D&D, Runequest, an Rolemaster are not fantasy heartbreakers.  They all have their own problems and we can discuss the problems with Traveller or D&D  but that should really be done in a different thread.

So back on topic, An interesting phenomenon that I've noticed is how with the sci-fi heartbreakers the elements that draw from previous games tend to be setting material (monoculture aliens, everyone has their own ship,etc)  much more that it was with fantasy which tended to be modelling techniques (hit points, levels, etc.)  I think this relates back to what was expressed earlier, the source material (literature, tv shows, movies) has more emphasis than other gaming sources.