Aurora: New Book and Forthcoming Species References

[Mike Holmes]

To be frank, I find the standard type of encyclopedic setting material useful, in or out of game time, only if it's easier to get from the text exactly what I need, right now, than it is to just make something up myself. Which is to say, practically never.

LMFAO!

That sounds like a Douglas Adams-ism. To paraphrase:
"Then he started to fly in a manner that was exactly how a brick would not."

Um, what Walt said.

Mike

[ADGBoss]

Any supplement to a game, needs to continue the basic premise/theme of the original setting material.

If the game is about Exploration of Setting, then the supplements should continue this even if they take the setting in new directions. That is they need to continue what the basic Exploration of the original setting had started.

If original material sets a tone of exploration of character (per example) and the supplements set the tone of exploration of setting, you have really changed the game.

Supplements should never be taken lightly (I am not saying you are, in fact quite the contrary) and poor followup can kill interest in a game as quickly as poor artwork or poor organization can kill it initially.


Sean
ADGBoss

[clehrich]

Mike wrote:

But shit, don't say that you hadn't thought about play! Gives ammo to the Paul Czege's to say, "See! Nobody actually plays Heavy Setting Sim! They just think about it!" Please, please, please, playtest the sucker.

Don't worry, Mike.  We've playtested this game a great deal; in fact, there's an extended campaign running now with Stephen running things, and another group entirely is running another campaign, and I believe there's also a campaign running in Australia.

What I meant was that I personally have not thought about how I would go about GMing Aurora.  And I need to think about why that is, since it's pretty unusual for me.

Walt,

Many thanks for your comments here.  I quite take your point that if game supplement material is relatively difficult to use, particularly for pinpointing information, then it's usually easier to make things up.  

I also like your idea of restructuring in reverse, of focusing the initial presentation on "what can I do, and then where I go to get the details on how?"  One good way to do this is with a kind of list of, "Suppose you want to have a campaign or session that does X.  Well, sections Y and Z are going to be particularly useful here, and A and B helpful as background."   The difficulty will be coming up with such a list, but that's by no means insurmountable.

Seems to me that a lot of the various concerns raised here about structure would be well addressed by a very carefully thought-out introduction.  This would be entirely from a meta-perspective: if you want to GM this sort of story, if you want to play this sort of character, and so forth.  A draft of this should be the first thing written, and it should also be the last thing completed.  Cross-references (and hyperlinks for the PDF version) will be essential.

Does that seem plausible?

[Walt Freitag]

Yes, it sounds plausible, and potentially invaluable.

I'd caution you, though, that what we're talking about here sounds to me like much more than an introduction. It would be a major component of the actual nuts and bolts content. Perhaps it wouldn't be a large fraction of the overall page count, but it would be rich content, in terms of both its user value and the effort required to create it.

Looking for existing models for this sort of tool, I've come up with only two so far. One is the Encyclopaedia Britannica (at least, my 1994 edition). It has almost an entire volume devoted to an "outline of knowledge" which lists 170 subjects each of which is too broad to be covered by any single encyclopedia entry. Some examples: "Physical Features of the Earth's Surface," "Human Diseases," "The Group Structure of Society," "Indigenous Religions of East Asia: Religions of China, Korea, and Japan," "International Movement, Diplomacy, and War Since 1920," and "History and Foundations of Mathematics." For each subject there's an outline of the major topics within that subject, and a list of references to articles in the encyclopedia (including biographies) relevant to the subject. For example, the about 70 references under "The Group Structure of Society" include adoption, marriage, lobbying, Civil Rights Movement, almshouse, prohibition, crime, old age, and assimilation. All this is separate from and in addition to the conventional two-volume index.

The other familiar example is Cliff's Notes and similar publications. Not the main part of the text which is just a summary of the book, but the additional stuff they throw in, such as chapter-end reviews of the important elements in the chapter, lists of scenes relevant to particular themes, and lists of recommended topics for papers.

What we're talking about doesn't exactly follow either of these models, but might be a sort of combination of the two. Each entry could be a possible X in the question, "My players want to get involved in X, or I want them to stumble upon/into X; what X's exist to explore?" X's would be things like:

AIs
artifacts
assimilation issues
bureaucracy
celebrity
civil war (see also: rebellion)
colonization issues
corrupt authority
crime (see also: organized crime, smuggling, law enforcement)
cultural schizm
dangerous lifeform
ecological crisis
economic crisis
experimental technology
hyper-advanced lifeform
law enforcement
libraries and databases
life, but not as we know it
migrations
military ambition
mind-altering drugs/technology
museums
navigational hazards
new religion or philosophy
new technology
oppressed group
organized crime
piracy
rebellion
religious persecution
religious schizm
scientific research (see also: experimental technology)
secret society
ship breakdown and repair
smuggling
terrorism
threats to balance of power
trade
treaty

Topics could be broken into (possibly overlapping) subtopics, such as:

dangerous lifeform
-- planetside
-- space-borne
-- -- vacuum
-- -- shipboard
-- big/nasty
-- small/swarming
-- plant
-- microscopic
-- bearing toxin or disease

Subtopics would also allow inclusion of topics too general in and of themselves, such as "diplomacy," "politics," or "cultural event."

diplomacy
-- human
-- Xor
-- Jeotsu
-- Uhrima
-- A'wahch
-- Milrok
-- non-spacefaring sentient species
-- distant contacts
-- first contact possibilities
-- Ignorer dialog attempts

I agree fully with the "first thing written, last thing completed" idea. It's possible that establishing the reference structure could affect the writing or editing of the main content, because it could cause authors or editors to be think more about what the content could be used for in play.

- Walt

[clehrich]

Walt,

Thanks!  That's a good start, and gives me a lot of ideas for how to get cracking on actually putting this introduction together.  I'm going to try to digest this and discuss it with Stephen.  With luck, this is going to make the Species References actually useful and worthwhile.

Many thanks to everyone.  If you have more suggestions, I'd love to hear them; otherwise, I think this thread is pretty much done.

[clehrich]

So in response to me asking about how one might mechanically reward exploration of alien mindsets in play, Chris Edwards wrote in http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=5223&start=0" target="blank">this thread:

Well, from a scenario design perspective, if the players don't take the various aspects of an alien species and aspects of its individual cultures into account and that lack causes serious (read: bad for characters) consequences then hopefully the players will come to understand how important such details are to their characters success. Learning about alien species and cultures would turn into something that the players actively pursue. At least, that's the idea.

In reverse, if a player is portraying one of these eloquently crafted aliens there should be a mechanism in place that rewards them for an equally eloquent portrayal. Social Commentary as mechanic?

Quote (from me):
Might such mechanics also reward the use of such species and cultures for reflecting on our own society (this seems to me less essential, but interesting)?  

That seems to be what you are inferring. A mechanism to reward players for throwing alien and human cultures into contrast. Hmm...

...ok, just did a quick scan of the Aurora Quickstart. Offhand, I would suggest linking it to Xeno-Psychology somehow. Perhaps an inverted reward scale, whenever the GM deems that a character's actions or portrayal justify a roll the GM calls for a Xeno-Psych roll. The reward for success (some sort of advancement points I assume) would be lower the higher the Xeno-Psych skill, vice-versa for failure. With the caveat that a fraction of those points gained have to be fed back into Xeno-Psychology.

My only problem with this as stated (I realize it was tossed on the table late) is that it seems like the GM is going to be adjudicating who's "got it right" all the time.  Maybe I'm misunderstanding.

But that got me thinking.  Suppose I were to take the Aurora setting and design entirely new mechanics, but with some overlap to the standing mechanics so as not to cause excessive confusion.  Somwhere in the new version, you'd still have this Xeno-Psychology thing.  This score would have a strong correlation to Director-Stance (or Author-Stance, I'm never sure which is which) control.  So if my Jeotsu Xeno-Psych. is high, that allows me to dictate a certain amount of what's really going on in the heads of those Jeotsu over there.  Presumably you'd have to succeed against a difficulty, so the lower the skill the less control and/or less chance of getting such control.

This, it seems to me, would encourage players to make use of Xeno-Psych. as a significant dynamic in the game.

The problem that immediately arises, however, is that either you have to be quite loose about the setting (which is sort of not the point here) or you have to trust the player's interpretation of the setting to a degree commensurate to the Xeno-Psych. score.  So if you have a player who doesn't want to read the Uhrmina materials at all, that player's character cannot be allowed to have a high Uhrmina Xeno-Psych.

I think there is some way to navigate between these shoals.  For one thing, there need to be more mechanics than just this one.  More importantly, there needs to be some sort of overruling mechanic, such that a player whose character has a high Xeno-Psych cannot simply distort the aliens in question entirely out of alignment.  At the same time, the ideal case would have players actually using their Xeno-Psych. to deepen and complicate existing alien cultures; that is, where the GM's construction of the culture is not overruled but complicated by the Xeno-Psych narration.

Please note: if this sort of mechanic were simply tacked on to the current Aurora mechanics, you'd have incoherence.  I'm imagining here that I may try to formulate an alternative set of mechanics, aimed at encouraging different play priorities and goals.