Sufficiently Advanced

[Colin Fredericks]

Hi everyone.

Much like everyone else, I'm working on a new game. The working title is "Sufficiently Advanced," which plays off Clarke's Third Law ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.") The idea is to have a setting that uses the most incredible technology I can imagine, while still keeping to "hard science" as much as I can. Characters play agents of the Transcendental AIs (who can send themselves messages from the future), and attempt to keep humanity from ruining itself for the future while still allowing technological advance.

Below is a link to the livejournal I use for updates and thinking about the game. Since it's a journal, if you're interested in looking through it, you probably want to start reading from the bottom.

http://www.livejournal.com/community/suffadv/

My main questions for you are:
1. Does this sound like a viable game to actually play, or am I going too far past the "Nobilis edge" in terms of oddball plots and background? (perhaps that should be the next journal post: a play example as suggested in the "structured game design" thread.)
2. I've been waffling a little about dice vs. diceless. I've chosen diceless for simplicity and to reinforce the mild feeling of predestination in the game. Do you think it'll work?
3. And, of course, I'm interested in peoples' reactions in general, things you'd like more explanation about, suggested readings, etc.

Thanks for your time.

--Colin Fredericks
http://www.valentgames.com

[Andrew Cooper]

I'll just address #2.

There are plenty of good reasons to choose diceless play but I'm not sure simplicity in itself is a defining feature of diceless.  I can't think of anything much simpler than "roll some d6s and if there is a 1 you succeed", which is essentially the mechanic in The Pool.  Diceless doesn't have to be simple either.  Some of the systems are but not all of them.

Keeping a feeling of predestination seems like a better reason to go that route.  Will it work?  Not sure but if you are using a diceless Karma mechanic it definately might promote that sense if done correctly.

[Harlequin]

It sounds neat.  You're covering a lot of ground here, and basically would need to put a lot of work into the essential question of "But what do the PCs do... and how?"

A couple of additional book and game recommendations.  For sure read Transhuman Space; possibly also do some research on the Extropian Society and other current-day transhumanist resources.  (Email me and I can help with that if you're having trouble.)  Add Dan Simmons' Illium to your reading list, it's if anything more apt to what you've got here than the Hyperion series was.  And lastly, especially with regards to the idea of sending themselves messages from the future, GM a short campaign of Continuum.  Just reading it won't suffice.

And if you do decide to go with a dice-ful system, I'll freely toss you the idea I'm planning to implement for Continuum if I ever run it again using its native system... use a stopwatch with a millisecond timer.  The last digit is analogous to a d10 roll, but captures the spirit of the game.  Would work for your game almost as well as for Continuum, I think.

- Eric

[Walt Freitag]

There's some interesting stuff here, and I think the effort to build a playable setting based on more recent SF (leaving the Star Wars tropes behind and using more up to date notions of advanced technology that go beyond bigger and bigger spaceships) is commendable. Some elements of course seem very sketchy right now -- the Masqueraders, for instance, are very undefined; in a universe where human-derived lifeforms range from unmodified human bodies to scanned data images, wearing masks seems a rather uninformative detail to base a whole culture on. So far.

Looking especially at the example mission scenarios, the whole thing brings to mind, for me, Old Star Trek, especially in its "fix the broken culture while paying enough lip service to the Prime Directive to avoid court marial" episodes. When player-characters have the powers this game is giving them, the interesting problems are going to be the culture conflicts, as most of your adventure examples attest. For every "stop the bomb from going off" scenario, you've got several cases of resolving ethical problems related to culture clashes and/or tech proliferation. Am I wrong in seeing an Old Trek flavor (though of course in a quite differently conceived setting) here?

The problem with mission-oriented role playing is designing and handling the adversity in the missions. If it's entirely the GM's job to create a big tangled problem-ball and throw it at the PCs, and then stall as best he can while the PCs use their powers to unravel it until the issue at its center is reached and resolved -- well, that would be just like lots of other mission-oriented game systems, and would work okay, if the GM is good enough and willing to create lots of information about the mission in advance. (You might find more reliance on combat than you'd planned for, since that tends to be the handiest way of stalling the unraveling of a problem-ball.) But you'll get better results with a system that gets the players contributing creatively to the complication of the situation, such as by having some results in the resolution system that call for them to invent and introduce their own complications when plot powers are used. If you take that approach, you will probably not want to go completely diceless. In such systems, besides (or instead of) success or failure, the dice results indicate such things as whether, and what kind of, complications are introduced, and who has final say in narrating them. Some risk and randomness along the way appears to spur creativity.

(It occurs to me that in those old Trek episodes, some of the types of complications and concessions that occur are repeated between episodes often enough that they could be systematized. Communicators and phasers get taken away or deactivated; a landing party member is mind-altered to join the opposing side; ship's systems fail or are subverted; a time limit is imposed or tightened; orders from higher ranks rule out certain effective options; and so forth. It's interesting to think about such things as the imposition of a time limit, or a restrictive order from highers-up, being treated as forms of "damage" in the resolution system.)

I think you're correct that a play example should be your next journal entry, or at least posted here. To be constructive, comments like these should really be referenced to what you intend play to be like.

- Walt

[Colin Fredericks]

Eric - Continuum is indeed a wonderful game. I've hurt a few of my friends' heads with it. :) A lot of inspiration for the Transcendentals came from how the Societies work and the "further information" clause. I'll try to track down Illium and a cheap copy of Transhuman Space.

Walt - I hadn't made the connection to old Trek plots, but it does seem somewhat appropriate now that you mention it. I like the idea of player-induced complications; I'll have to roll that around a little in my head before posting the example of play. It would change things significantly. Perhaps the plot points would change somewhat: your score could be how effective your plot changes are, and you get points to spend when you give yourself complications (either because of a failed important roll, or by turning a successful important roll into a failed one).

I had a dice system for the game before; it went like this: die type is determined by attribute (they went 1-5 before, so dice went d4 through d12). You roll your attribute and skill dice and keep the higher one. You can spend a point of reserve to re-roll one die or add +1 to a maxed-out roll.

Hmm... Things to think about. I'll be back. :)

--Colin

[Sydney Freedberg]

In case you haven't seen it, I'd strongly recommend Orion's Arm, a hard science-fiction collaborative project with wormholes, near-universal genetic and cybernetic upgrades, and godlike Artificial Intelligences that name themselves after kabbalistic concepts.

Oh, and

...working title is "Sufficiently Advanced," which plays off Clarke's Third Law ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.")

If I were skimming titles in a game shop (physical or online), I think Indistinguishable from Magic would jump out at me more, actually.

[Sydney Freedberg]

Oh, and (reprise):

Iain Banks' "Culture" series, about an ultra-libertarian/socialist society (yes, I know that contradicts) of pretty recognizable humans who enjoy perpetual leisure and genetically engineered drug glands, living alongside artificially intelligent "drones" and more-or-less ruled by the starship- and space-colony-administering "minds." All of them feature special operatives on critical, if morally ambiguous, missions. Consider Phlebas is the love/war tragedy, Use of Weapons is all war tragedy, Player of Games is about advanced social science and a gigantic board game, and Excession is the weakest artistically but goes the deepest into some unconventional aliens and how the AI Minds actually think.

[Allan]

If I were skimming titles in a game shop (physical or online), I think Indistinguishable from Magic would jump out at me more, actually.

Indistinguishable is too long and hard to say.  In practise, it would just get appreviated all the time.  I see Sydney's point, but "Sufficiently Advanced" at least makes me sufficiently curious.  What about "Clarke's Third Law"?  C3L?  Even just "Third Law".  The subtitle, or the back cover says what it means.

I like the setting.  How much predestination do you want?  How much freedom do you want to give the characters?

Once in a Sweet Dreams testgame, I skipped 3 months of game time and had the characters all lose their memories.  One had a broken arm, one had a unicorn in her closet, one was dating a vampire, none of them knew how or why.  Then they beat the monster that had stolen their memories, and we went back and played through the missing 3 months.  The characters didn't know what was going to happen, but the players did.  The fun then was for the players to find ways to get their characters to sacrifice an arm in a fight, shelter a fugitive unicorn, and date that vampire.  Of course, there were a lot of surprises along the way that hadn't been predicted, but they knew that the predicted events had to occur.  The next few game sessions were some of the best in years of playtesting.   The idea never really made it into the Sweet Dreams rules, but I wonder if something like that could work for your precgnitive AIs?

For example, the PCs get an assignment from the Transcendentals, who tell them "we know that you will succeed in your mission.  We also know that at some point you will require cold weather gear, and a pocket clonomatic, and that one of you will be court-martiale as a result" (or whatever).  Now it's up to the players to figure out how that happens.

[Colin Fredericks]

I think naming it something like that might get me sued by Clarke himself (or possibly his estate by the time I have this game finished), which, while great for publicity...

I like the plot idea. As a rule the Ts don't tell people if they're going to fail or succeed, but the other items would be interesting. The PCs would be asking themselves all game why these pieces of information were important enough to send back in time. :)

As far as predestination, I need to write an entry about the observer effect. Anything the Ts directly meddle in is subject to change. For instance, if someone asks them, "What will I say next," the T can't predict it because it depends on their own response. However, they could say one thing and print out an answer in a different room, and as long as the person didn't see the printout, the prediction would be correct.

The first half of the sample of play is up. I need to write the second half at some point (which will involve much more "crunch").

--Colin