I am working on rules for colony design for a science fiction game I am working on. I have set up prices on prefabricated buildings so the players know the cost of building a colony. What need is to come up with is random events that colonists would encounter on a new world.

I would also like to handle colony design like creating a character using archtypes such as mining colony, agricultural colony, manufacturing colony, colony hub, and military outpost. The colony would have life points that show if colony is thriving or on its way to becoming a futuristic ghost town. Colonies would have strengths and weaknesses for the players to add character and adventure seeds. So any suggestions would be very welcome.

Thanks,

Dan R. Stevenson

A good idea might be to look at what a real builder could run into here on earth. Theres always a variety of soil types, how the foundation will settle, maybe some environmental factors like marsh or flood zone or such. Make a list of things you can think of here on earth. You might have more then enough to work with then. Also try putting the word space in front of everything. So when you talk about a soil type you could say "space clay", which sounds better then just "clay" (only joking about that):P

Cool Idea!

Now for a few questions:

Are you going for a Hard SF or a Social SF feel?

Do you intend for these colonies to be on planets much like earth - terraformed or otherwise - or are you also considering orbital and hostile environment habitats?

Have you looked into the real world history of colonization, such as the European colonies along the American & African seaboards, the Greek & Phoenician colonies in antiquity, and/or the American Westward Expansion? (Your mention of ghost towns makes me believe you are concentrating on the latter, which is good.)

Have you conjured up some examples from the Science Fiction literature? Robinson's Red Mars trilogy is probably a great example.

How does the game design look?
It seems you have a solid equipment list with all the relevant info for the players - you can actually think of those as "item cards" - and now you're working on putting together a deck of "event cards". We would probably have to know how you intend to use these event cards before we can really help.

Sempiternity wrote:
Are you going for a Hard SF or a Social SF feel?

Sempiternity wrote:
Do you intend for these colonies to be on planets much like earth - terraformed or otherwise - or are you also considering orbital and hostile environment habitats?

Sempiternity wrote:
Have you looked into the real world history of colonization, such as the European colonies along the American & African seaboards, the Greek & Phoenician colonies in antiquity, and/or the American Westward Expansion? (Your mention of ghost towns makes me believe you are concentrating on the latter, which is good.)

Sempiternity wrote:
It seems you have a solid equipment list with all the relevant info for the players - you can actually think of those as "item cards" - and now you're working on putting together a deck of "event cards". We would probably have to know how you intend to use these event cards before we can really help.

k, some more questions:

I take it the players are playing the role of colony managers/governors/VIPs? Are they competing with each other, working together, or both?

Is the goal of the game to grow the best, or biggest, colony? Or are the colonies just setting elements that are built in play?

Do you have provision for colonizing alien planets - that is, planets with advanced native biospheres? Is that what "Gaia" colonies are like?

And i take it that each colony is equated with an entire planet (or equivalent orbital zone)?

Sci-fi fantasy - so like Star Trek, Babylon 5, Stargate, Master of Orion, Alpha Centauri, etc?

Actually this a roleplaying game. The players can start a colony if they wish acting as managers or colonists. The game is mostly centered around espionage but I want options for mechant, colonial, archaelogical, and mining campaigns if the players want to run in that direction. I believe a colony campaign could allow the players to have the opertunity to create and run a colony providing them with addtional plot hooks. Not to mention a cover for their espionage operations.

Gaia worlds are planets with multiple environments like the one we are currently inhabiting. There will be worlds with with a only a single environment or just a couple useable environments. Do you have any ideas for advanced bio-spheres?

There will be rules for interaction with sentient primative natives and their reactions to the more advanced colonists. There will also be rules for the colonists coming into contact with aliens that are as advanced or more advanced as the colonists.

You are right on the money for sci-fi fantasy.

Roleplaying games can be lots of things! ;)

(My personal working definition is that rpgs are games you play through the powers/situation of a character, but that is a school of thought being shaken up by the indie veterans.)

So you want to make the game about espionage. Don't worry much about the other stuff, until you have that down.

A couple of questions about the game itself:

What kind of play are you imagining by "espionage"?
Straight-forward data-retrieval & rumour mongering? Thrilling James Bond-style action? Or something more general & complex, like political intrigue & machination?

How does that style of play then fit into the idea of colony design & events? Do the events and colony elements serve as a structure upon which the game is played?

Environments:
I'm more of the Hard SF type - the idea i was toying with was that planets with "simple" alien life are (much) easier to terraform than planets without life, but also easier to terraform than planets with "complex" alien life. But i'm using a very limited definition of terraforming! You are probably thinking of something closer to the "Shake & Bake" terraformed colonies mentioned in the (excellent) movie Aliens.

There is a series, or a book, I guess there is a book where the earth sent out probes to find worlds to colonize. But the probe only checked where it landed. S in one location it landed on the top of a mountain above the poisonous atmosphere. The colony showed up and couldn't return, so they had to inhabit the mountain peak. Maybe something like  this could be used. How large of an area the players survey before they set up the colony.

Sempiternity wrote:
What kind of play are you imagining by "espionage"?
Straight-forward data-retrieval & rumour mongering? Thrilling James Bond-style action? Or something more general & complex, like political intrigue & machination?

Sempiternity wrote:
How does that style of play then fit into the idea of colony design & events? Do the events and colony elements serve as a structure upon which the game is played?

Sempiternity wrote:
Environments:
I'm more of the Hard SF type - the idea i was toying with was that planets with "simple" alien life are (much) easier to terraform than planets without life, but also easier to terraform than planets with "complex" alien life. But i'm using a very limited definition of terraforming! You are probably thinking of something closer to the "Shake & Bake" terraformed colonies mentioned in the (excellent) movie Aliens.

timopod wrote:
There is a series, or a book, I guess there is a book where the earth sent out probes to find worlds to colonize. But the probe only checked where it landed. S in one location it landed on the top of a mountain above the poisonous atmosphere. The colony showed up and couldn't return, so they had to inhabit the mountain peak. Maybe something like  this could be used. How large of an area the players survey before they set up the colony.

K. I'm still trying to figure out what you intend this game to be about, & what it is like to play it.

That second to last post makes it sound like you play a member of a one of those classic "emergency action teams", this one having set up shop out in the colonies, where the trouble is going to be. Play would consist of the GM crafting some situation, and then the characters having to ship out to resolve it. Is that close?

How do you intend the "setting up a colony/outpost for cover" aspect of the game to play out? You mentioned something about attracting and repelling colonists - is the idea of the game that you play the people charged with protecting a new colony, and how you perform that task determines whether the colony grows or fails?
So here play would conisist of colaboratively managing a colony - which would also be the play space - while also acting to resolve challenges that arrise from pressures to it - pirates, claim jumpers, embargoes, natural disasters, etc.

I like that second option better - it also seems to be what the design issues you've brought up are pointing toward, rather than the simpler "action team" style of game. 

You're designing the game here - you want to make it your mission to make sure your players don't get bored with your game! Don't worry about what happens if they do.

I hope you don't mind if i steal that second idea for myself?

(It ties in with this city-game idea i've been toying with ever since reading this <A HREF="http://www.lumpley.com/comment.php?entry=86">Ars Magica-esque</A> design of Vincent's.)

Sempiternity wrote:
How do you intend the "setting up a colony/outpost for cover" aspect of the game to play out? You mentioned something about attracting and repelling colonists - is the idea of the game that you play the people charged with protecting a new colony, and how you perform that task determines whether the colony grows or fails?
So here play would conisist of colaboratively managing a colony - which would also be the play space - while also acting to resolve challenges that arrise from pressures to it - pirates, claim jumpers, embargoes, natural disasters, etc.

So, it seems what you are going for with this is more on the order of giving the GM-player a straight-forward way to create - and change - setting elements (colonies) in play.

I take it this is supposed to work both as part of the setup for the situation the PCs are challenged by, and as part of the fallout that occurs in response to their performance in the challenge. Not only are the PCs affected by their actions, but also the people in colony around them. Something like that?

Sempiternity wrote:
Have you looked into the real world history of colonization, such as the European colonies along the American & African seaboards, the Greek & Phoenician colonies in antiquity, and/or the American Westward Expansion? (Your mention of ghost towns makes me believe you are concentrating on the latter, which is good.)

Hi!
  I think I "get" what you are building. BUT, it can go many ways:
1) Dirty Pair - Comedic, over the top, interesting mysteries
2) Thunderbirds - Heroic, manufactured, head to head against evil
3) A-Team/McGuyver - Solving problems, helping others and Proving themselves
4) SEAL Team/Green Berets - Covert Operations, Foreign training programs, advance recon
5) James Bond - The final blow in a web of Espionage activity
6) CIA/KGB - Finding spies, handling drops, counter espionage
7) Something else..?
  What are you going for? What is the ideal theme of the perfect campaign?

Good luck man! Seems like  a cool idea...

If you are looking for a laundry list of possible colony events, then you can pretty much have every possible event that could happen in an isolated Earth-based town or city with a similar population. Riots, epidemic, crime, factionalism, sociopathy, wonky cultism, you name it. And those are just bad events; isn't there possible RP fodder in the occassional happy event?

Add to that (HUGE) list things that can happen as a result of life support and environmental system failures. Algae blooms, low/bad air, radiation sickness, malnutrition, poisoning; anything that can screw with human biology, basically.

Add to that list things that can happen based on managing an extensive facility in a unique environment. Micrometeorite impacts, accretion of ices on solar panels, tectonic forces damaging foundations/caverns, stresses caused by huge temperature variances due to slow/complex day cycles; take any Earth-based builder's nightmares and compound them with each hostile environmental condition.

Add to that list (you see where I'm going?) the things that can happen based on all the aforementioned aboriginal conflicts, and you are talking about a seriously major section of the game rules, if codified.

That's where my suggestion takes over (yep, I got a point): Perhaps you should try to first develop a classification method for "events." In other words, a sort of "meta-events list" that could be codified for game mechanical impacts (population, cost of operations, other elements of your System). Rather than, say, an exhaustive table of all events with their commensurate System-impacting mechanics.

Look to systems like Hero, I say. They don't make a list of all powers a hero could have; they make a list of all game effects that could be had by a character, and provide means to weight them that are Color-independant.

So, for your colony event list, you'd have stuff like this:
Population Threat - An event that will decrease population by x per <insert cost mechanic> or per <insert randomizer>.
Support System Threat - For each <insert colony disadvantages system here> that the colony has, there is a <insert mechanic> decrease in efficiency/increase in cost of operations.
Biological Threat - The colony's <insert population needs mechanic> is unstable due to unbalanced management or infection: <insert pop needs cost mechanic>
Sociological Threat - Some percentage of the population is nonconformist with regards to a critical support system management requirement (varies by colony <insert colony disadvantage system>).
...and so forth.

In summary, try to abstract, out of the probably infinite variations of "events," those event types or categories which directly couple to the System that you want to make for colony creation, management, and conflict resolution. And as System stems from Agenda, you need to ask yourself now you see people "best" playing your colony elements. To use a computer game metaphor, are you seeing this as SimCity or Age of Empires? Hmmm, maybe that's not illuminating. Do you see this as a high-level management and strategy (being the mayor, sitting on the solar system council) style of play or more of a low-level politicking and tactics (repair team leading, defensive forces leading, bureaucrats versus workers) focus?

Keep it up, whatever you decide. The world needs more interesting sci fi source material and games!
David

Hello,
This is my first post to The Forge.
Based on your original idea and the replies, it seem that creating structured colonization rules in a hard sci-fi setting while keeping the RPG dynamics appears to be very tricky. I think the strategies and challenges for players can outweigh the RPG aspect, however fun it may be.

Before I give my opinions, I'll give some experiences with this kind of game.  I played in a "space-race" game many years ago where Earth was dying and we had to find other places to live. It involved high-level strategy, space combat and role-playing. Bob was the GM (Galaxy Master, no kidding) and liked all kind of games. The game had three arenas of interaction.
1) Explore the area of space given to all players, determine the value of the worlds encountered, assign security forces and build colonies. This part of the game was very quick, introducing random factors, relying on a limited fleet of ships and using resource points. This phase occurred at the beginning of each session and took about 10 minutes of player time. Each player had 4 actions to secretly plan for the game year--one per quarter. The quarter's actions were resolved, then the second, and so on. All players' actions occurred simultaneously. I can't remember all the actions but they were very broad: scout a system, analyze resources, move space ships, build an outpost, send a spy (able to read one action of another player), steal a resource point, set up colony, build a refinery, build a factory, attack another, etc. Each action used a number of resource points. Refineries give you resource points, Factories give you ships. Colonies give you people (security forces). Outposts let you meet an attacker with your own fleet.
2) Space combat occurred between players vying for the same planet. We used Full Thrust and had a great time. If you lost the battle or surrender then you withdraw and the winner takes the planet.
3) The RPG aspect was the most interesting of all. All the players had a Traveller character on the A-Team (Astro Team, still not kidding). To eliminate favoritism, the GM created scenarios (corporate espionage, indigenous aliens, chaotic factions, colony rescue, viral outbreaks, etc.) that would directly affect a player's strategic arena with an extra action, resource points, new technology (woo hoo), etc. However, none of the players knew who would benefit, and completing the mission would provide experience for the characters. So, even when I sucked at strategy and space combat, I had fun with the RPG portion.

I'm not sure what you want your players to achieve and how they will have fun doing it. Event cards are great, but as stated before in another post, you need good as well as bad events. Limit the bookkeeping you and the players need to perform. If you want to look at just the exploration/colonization aspect then look at the big picture and answer these questions:
Why are they going? Flee an enemy. Escape political/religious persecution. Make money. Looking for WMDs. Build a farm and raise jackalopes.
Who are going? All of mankind. The wealthy. The unemployed. Just Texas. Paris Hilton and friends.
What are they doing? All of the work. Build a factory. Mine for iron. Missionary work. Tweak the jump gate. Review and take the credit.
When will this happen? We have unlimited resources--maybe a month. We receive periodic shipments--a year. We're on our own--the next generation will benefit.
How will they do all this? FTL drives are ready and the terraformers are getting bored. Bring out the next batch of hard-working clones. The crews are having a hard time with the basalt. Oy, the instructions are in Chinese. Did you bring a shovel?

Before you start with the rules of colonization, write a story about what happens to these colonists, sponsor corporation and security forces over the course of a game year. Determine the relevant parts of the story, how the colonists survive, what the corporation gains (or loses) and what challenges are posed for security. See what existing rules you've designed can be reused and then identify other rules you absolutely need. Keep it fun!

Good luck and keep us posted!

Hi!
  I think you might want to look at Dogs In The Vineyard. Supposedly the town creation system is REAL good. Seems like you adapt it for your colony creation system...

Not to contradict you, D - Dogs is definately worth checking out - but i'd like to toss in a clarifying point:

With a lot of things, like this colony idea, you have to decide up-front whether you are making Setting or Situation. What's the difference there? Just that Setting is what gives rise to, & constrains Situation, while Situation is what you actually do (resolve) to play the game.

So Towns in Dogs are Situation, set with in a larger Setting of "the old west that never quite was".

Now i don't know whether the Colonies here are supposed to be Setting, Situation, or just Belongings (Character Traits), but i hope that helps paint in the borders of where the potential for design lays, a bit.

tygertyger:

I've seen a couple of space opera games in development amid the Diaspora; you might want to check out <A HREF="http://dogdesign.blogspot.com/2006/02/because-i-want-to-be-like-cool-kids.html">Galactic</A> and <A HREF="http://attacksofopportunity.blogspot.com/2006/02/world-is-darkening.html">The World is Darkening</A> if you haven't already!