Sim approach to speculative, short story-based sci-fi?

[M. J. Young]

Just as a thought, the solution to this problem might be

[*]Have the first scientific advance be in gerontological research which enables the player characters to live for hundreds of years and[*]Use a Pendragon-like time progression, where you do something this year, and then make a few arrangements that constitute the advance to the next year.[/list:u]
Just a thought.

--M. J. Young

[contracycle]

I agree that time progressio/scene construction will have to play a role here, but that is not enough IMO.  Mainly becuase I have not had any success conceptualising a working system that can use it.

One approach might be that of micro-games.  I have begun to feel that the singular system approach has reached its limits.  Maybe such a sim exploration needs to relate to the setting in different ways by building scenarios that are themselves miniature games.

Lets propose a common event in SF, responding to decompression.  Its the kind of stock trauma that ships in high adventure encounter.  Then we build a mini-game that is exclusively "Evacuation".  A game of Evacuation can be invoked by other events in the game space., whatever events lead to your need to leave in a hurry.  A game of Evacuation is like a single extended contest governed by a set of special, non-universal rules that are not used anywhere else, such as that any failure of any stage results in being unable to evacuate, or rules describing how easy it is to traverse a part of the ships interior.

Hmm, expanding that for a moment,  lets say the basic structure is that each section of ship requires a movement test to get through it fast enough.  The more cluttered and crammed the ship, the higher the difficulty to traverse.

Now in terms of game design, what Evacuation needs is a set of modifiers and so on, some "stock encounters" for the GM to expand and riff on, some special and unusual hazards to introduce variety.  It is at this level of developement that the hard science would be introduced, with discussions of movement in microgravity, movement under acceleration, movement in spun pseudo-gravity.  Types of materials that might be found in ships and why and how they can be hazardous.  Forms of escape device like pods and shuttles, launch protocols, the thousand and one things that could go wrong in conditions of extreme crisis.  And of course, what happens exactly when things go wrong.

All of this would contribute to the sense of exploration, of being exposed to the problems we speculate are likely to be encountered by people living in space.  There is no story here  inherent to the game of Evacuation, but of course the game of Evacuation might be invoked in a Situation which already has story properties and thus exhibit people having to prioritise their grudges or their survival prospects, or who perhaps plot to sabotage an enemies escape attempt.