So over here at Aurora, we've just finished the Ships Book, which is some 400-odd pages of game material on ships -- design, specs, stats, shipboard life, etc. <End blatant plug>

We're now starting the long job of writing the Species Reference books, and some issues came up among the design crew. In light of a couple of recent posts, I wonder what you all think.

Here's the relevant part of one of the posts, from Ron:

It's important to remember as well that text is not the act of role-playing, by which I mean that its first priority should be to act as a springboard into play rather than as an absorbing read for one person. A lot of game texts fall into the trap of simply being huge absorbing reads that could not possibly be transferred to others for purposes of play (Feng Shui is probably the most glaring example I can think of). Fvlminata, on the other hand, is an excellent example of a game with an extremely distinctive, locked-on setting that is nonetheless very easy to pick up and get into without much stress.

By the way, I want to applaud your idea of having the setting information be a readable object by itself. I like reading games, of course, but I really like sitting down and simply reading straight through a setting; the rules I'll deal with when I'm actually going to play the thing, or when I want to think about how the game works. Having a little book that simply says, "Welcome to the setting, get yerself a cup of tea, here we go" is just exactly what I'd like to see a lot more of in RPGs.

Somewhere in-between, I think.

I want to be able to easily locate facts, but "dissertations on the tea-drinking habits of the people of ponunga," and anything written from the perspective of an NPC are immediate turn-offs.

(Except for bits of Color text here and there...but it should not be central)

Give me overview information I can use and get funky with immediately.

For example, "Graspons are an honorable warrior-race; they are governed by a sixteen person council of great warriors." are good top-level items. Adding detail and fleshing out all this junk should come later, or in paragraph sized chunks, with the theme-statement as the first sentence of each paragraph.

I'd suggest Drill-down presentation wherever possible. This requires HTML or somesuch, however, and so will not be possible for something that's going to see print.

BTW, your viewpoint and Ron's are not conflicting. You want the book to be consumable by the reader, and enjoyable to read. Ron wouldn't have it any other way, I'm sure. What he's saying is problematic is that, often, once you've read and consumed the information, what you've absorbed just doesn't ever to come up in terms of making the game go. That is, if we do get the tea ceremony details, unless the game is about social rituals, it's never going to come up in play, and was pointless for the GM to have absorbed.

What you want is information that's pertinent to getting people into some sort of action. So, is the game about interstellar trade? Then the most pertinent data is going to be the economic needs of the species in question. The tea ceremony only needs to be mentioned if it's important to getting in through the doors to trade.

So, what's play in Aurora about? Make info that makes that play possible the most easy to reference.

Mike

greyorm wrote:

For example, "Graspons are an honorable warrior-race; they are governed by a sixteen person council of great warriors." are good top-level items. Adding detail and fleshing out all this junk should come later, or in paragraph sized chunks, with the theme-statement as the first sentence of each paragraph.

So, what's play in Aurora about? Make info that makes that play possible the most easy to reference.

I could speak to the notion of having no Premise. But I will assume that you've already looked at that.

Given your choices, I think that you have to go with the easy read presentation. Hopefully the GM will read through everything and have a lot of retention. Because the method that involves referring is problematic. I can see people creating information on the fly, and then researching, only to find that what they've created contradicts canon. They need to have a deep understanding up front. If it's laid out well enough, then that might happen. Further, someone who's read the book thouroughly will hopefully have a better idea of where to look for information forgotten.

I don't suppose that, at this late date, you'd be willing to look at your assumptions again, would you?

Mike

I think it should be possible to satisfy most people in this, with an organizational model like this:

Each Species has its own Chapter.

Begin the chapter with a 1 paragraph to 1 page quick "what you need to know" synopsis of the race. Follow this with the game system information for the race. Then have your intense multi-page discussion on the Race itself. Possibly from 1 or 2 different perspectives.

That way system info is limited to 1 page (back and front) for each race but its easy to find because it is clearly marked at the beginning of each chapter.

thats just my suggestion

Sean
ADGBoss

Rapidly searchable and indexed and all that good stuff is definitely the way to go.

In my case, being a Gamer of Very Little Brain, I will read through all the material one year and then promptly forget much of it when I want to run the game the next year.

Discrete chunks of text that are complete in and of themselves ("Stockpiled weapons in Pargit Enclaves" as a subsection of "Pargin Enclaves" and referenced under "The Pargin and Conflict") will provide a satisfying read, alone or taken together with other sections. A reading pattern like a stone skipped over a pond shouldn't overly disrupt the reader looking for a nice long afternoon with the Uhrmina.

When I read your initial post, an approach occurred to me: framing some of the information through one or a series of species "Premises" or central lenses that inform play. ("How much change can my culture embrace without compromising its religious foundations?") This can hopefully provide the obverse and reverse of the coin of Race X: what it's like to play as a member of that race, and what it's like to encounter them.

Hi there,

I'll reiterate a point from the text you quoted, which is to look at Fvlminata closely, as a text. I'm still astonished at how well, cleanly, and usably Jason and Michael presented the setting material.

Best,
Ron

Mike Holmes wrote:

I don't suppose that, at this late date, you'd be willing to look at your assumptions again, would you?

First off, I think we may be using Premise differently, or have different notions of what each other means. So I'll stay away from that term.

However, what Aurora looks like, at least on first glance, is a big setting in which the characters "can do anything". That is, there isn't any specific sort of thing that the game has defined for them to do particularly. Unlike, say, Call of Cthulhu, where we know exactly what the PCs will be up to, investigating the occult. Or as opposed to supers role-playing where everybody understands that things are going to revolve around being a hero and pounding bad guys. Or your standard fantasy game (D&D) where we will be going where the monsters are so we can kill them.

All these sorts of games have in their designs an answer to the question "what do the characters do?". When the answer to that question is "anything" you get a couple of problems. It's not that a GM and/or players can't figure out what they might want to do in such a setting. It's just that, not knowing what the players are going to be doing, the game can't do anything to support that sort of play.

Actually, the game does say one thing about what characters should be doing, looking at the free quick-start rules. It says that they will be getting into combat, and that combat is a focus of the game. Which is interesting given that the text also says that the combat "isn't slanted towards the PCs". Which means that, not only will they be getting into combat, but they'll be getting killed a lot too. Which means that most sim GMs will be doing a lot of fudging to keep characters alive.

OK, I'm using a sort of ironic tone, here. But the point is that the system will inform the GM and players what sort of activities should take place. For some reason all RPGs assume that Combat will play an essential part, somehow. I personally think that this is an assumption that should be looked at carefully (See Mike's Standard Rant #3, Combat Systems).

I've played, oh, about a bezillion hours of Traveller. Why, oh god why, would they bother putting in rules for a gun that does 16d6 damage when the average character can only take 21 points of damage before croaking? Traveller always had this strong schitzophrenic streak in that it wanted to be Star Wars with all it's heroic fighting, but yet wanted to be "realistic" at the same time. Which are horribly incompatible ideals.

Aurora is going right down the same road. Combat so realistically lethal that only a madman would participate. And no other area of the game with as many rules. This is what Ron's taling about. The data in the game should be such that the GM looking at it, and the players reading it (or having it described by the GM), should give them an idea of what to do. Such that they don't end up being some Star Wars stereotype, and getting fried by the "realistic" rules.

Sorry, ranting again. And not to beat up on the game. It looks like it has some really cool stuff. But, while I wouldn't call it a Sci-Fi Heartbreaker, quite, it does seem to me to suffer from not having looked at what has happened to other games like it that have come out since Traveller. Even a game like Fading Suns, rife with problems though it may be, gives me a clearer idea of what the game is going to be about (read the section on Morality Plays). What makes Steve's game better than, say, Scatterzone? Or Ravenstar? Or, god forbid, BattleLords of the 23rd Century? The "realism" level? What, you're FTL is more "realistic" than anyone elses? Besides which, even if you can prove it true, that still tells me nothing about how the game is going to be fun (is realistic obviously more fun)?

The one redeeming quality, AFAICT, in this department, is the whole Hammer Effect thingie. At least the PCs are somebody important, and will have the pressures of that put on them.

Now, I don't have aaccess to the whole text. Perhaps there is a lot of direction in there. But if so, then that answers your question about how to present the material (it should support that direction). If not, then I suggest that you follow Ron's advice, and make the setting text all about getting across the idea of what to do in play. Because if nothing does, experience shows that such games are hard to play in a continuous, and coherent manner. My longest Traveller game was all about running the scenarios in a episodic fashion. For all it mattered, I could, and did use GURPS (before GURPS Traveller). The system made no difference, play quality was soley predicated on how well written the scenario was. Which means that I could have just as easily been playing a series of one-shots from and game. IOW, the Traveller rules do nothing for, in fact they detract from, the quality of play in not having a useful focus to the direction that they provide.

Again, apollogies, but I've had this love/hate relationship with Traveller for a long time. I'd like to see some game improve on it, and put a spark again into the cool setting.

Mike

Mike,

No need to apologize; I'm grateful for a considered, intelligent opinion.

I'll give you the more or less official position on these interrelated questions; I should say at the outset that while I find setting design fun for Aurora, I'm not enough of a Sim-type to enjoy the whole experience to the full. Anyway...

If the free materials are giving the impression that combat is important -- and I would like to know where exactly you found that (I don't not believe you, but I think this needs to be fixed) -- then we're giving a wrong impression. Combat in Aurora is pretty lethal, unless non-lethal weaponry is used (which is most of the time); furthermore, it's usually illegal, and the cops are much better armed than the PCs. So in point of fact actual combat is pretty rare, because as you say, you'd have to be nuts to get involved. On top of everything else, there is a distinction made between military and paramilitary weaponry and hardware, such that basically someone with powerful (and probably illegal) weaponry up against a professionally-armed and -trained military dude will die very, very fast. Kind of like trying to have a knife-fight with a Sherman tank.

So if we give the impression that combat matters much in ordinary gaming, we're giving the wrong impression, and that should be fixed.

Now as to the Premise issue, I do think this is something where Aurora is a universe, not a question or set of questions. There are a number of really interesting questions to deal with, but they're not all that foregrounded. This does indeed create the "welcome to our world, do with it as you like" impression, which I agree is not entirely supportive of quick entry into the game.

As to what Stephen's game does better, I think that lies directly in the setting. He's a biochemist, and like many scientists seems to think that if the science is "real science," that solves everything, but I've been working on correcting this impression. The reality, from my point of view, is that if you are interested in really complex cultural interactions, Aurora supports this exceptionally well. The alien species here are not cultures, but species; like the human species, they are extremely varied, and it's just not possible to pigeonhole them as "like this." There aren't any "warrior races" here, and while in a sense the A'wahch could be said to fit that description, they also neatly fit the description "hot water bottles with a weird attitude." Species do not break down into mono-cultures, but into vastly complex and interwoven separate cultures. At the same time, the physiology of these species does interact with their culture-formations, such that (for example) you don't get certain stock human tropes among the A'wahch because they don't have sex and don't have love-bonds.

For my own interests, as a freaky combination of historian, religion scholar, anthropologist, and linguist, I vastly enjoy cranking out enormous and challenging detail about alien cultures. What does philosophy look like if your physiology dictates that you see individual subjectivity as so superior to mutual reflection that you have a severe problem with the Other? To put that in English, if you are a colonial organism which can't get too close to other individuals without what amounts to brain damage (I'm thinking Milrolk here, for Aurora afficionados), you aren't going to valorize "really understanding the other guy" much; this is radically contrary to most human philosophy, which tends (for example, in the West) to valorize speech (talking face-to-face and presumably understanding the other guy) over writing (having to interpret everything indirectly because you don't have a conversation partner). Again, I spend lots of time on the Uhrmina Pargin, because it simultaneously sounds like the Catholic Church at its very height, the Hasidic ghetto-culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and is also extremely welcoming to science and rationalism. So for me, it's a fun way to experiment with inhuman possibilities of old human problems.

As a game, I think Aurora requires a good deal of input from the players (including GM), because there really isn't a lot of pre-set structure to the session or campaign direction. While this is a big problem for some folks, I think there are others who may think the universe is cool and like the fact that they can do whatever the hell the want with it.

Does this make things any clearer, or just make it worse?

clehrich wrote: I'll give you the more or less official position on these interrelated questions; I should say at the outset that while I find setting design fun for Aurora, I'm not enough of a Sim-type to enjoy the whole experience to the full. Anyway...

If the free materials are giving the impression that combat is important -- and I would like to know where exactly you found that (I don't not believe you, but I think this needs to be fixed) -- then we're giving a wrong impression.... So if we give the impression that combat matters much in ordinary gaming, we're giving the wrong impression, and that should be fixed.

Now as to the Premise issue, I do think this is something where Aurora is a universe, not a question or set of questions.

As to what Stephen's game does better, I think that lies directly in the setting. He's a biochemist, and like many scientists seems to think that if the science is "real science," that solves everything, but I've been working on correcting this impression. The reality, from my point of view, is that if you are interested in really complex cultural interactions, Aurora supports this exceptionally well.

The alien species here are not cultures, but species; like the human species, they are extremely varied, and it's just not possible to pigeonhole them as "like this." There aren't any "warrior races" here, and while in a sense the A'wahch could be said to fit that description, they also neatly fit the description "hot water bottles with a weird attitude." Species do not break down into mono-cultures, but into vastly complex and interwoven separate cultures. At the same time, the physiology of these species does interact with their culture-formations, such that (for example) you don't get certain stock human tropes among the A'wahch because they don't have sex and don't have love-bonds.

For my own interests, ...So for me, it's a fun way to experiment with inhuman possibilities of old human problems.

As a game, I think Aurora requires a good deal of input from the players (including GM), because there really isn't a lot of pre-set structure to the session or campaign direction. While this is a big problem for some folks, I think there are others who may think the universe is cool and like the fact that they can do whatever the hell the want with it.

Does this make things any clearer, or just make it worse?

Mike,

Many thanks. Youve given me a lot to mull over, and I will now mull. :)

I almost posted a quick response about system guidance and so forth, but it occurs to me that what really dealing with your concerns will involve is me sitting back and thinking about the game from a new angle (for me). That is, I need to think about what it would be like if I were to run the game, and why I haven't seriously thought about doing so thus far (whereas Stephen has thought about it a lot, and run it). I think there may be a Heartbreaker element here that needs to be dealt with. So, off to my mulling station....

Hi Chris,

I don't want to cut short the discussion of Mike's issues, but I want to go back to the original question of information organization. Hopefully you can multi-task (or multi-mull?) :-)

You wrote: There are a number of really interesting questions to deal with, but they're not all that foregrounded. This does indeed create the "welcome to our world, do with it as you like" impression, which I agree is not entirely supportive of quick entry into the game.

In addition, the fact that the Pargin, in response to past persecutions, have generally got stockpiled armaments within the Enclaves, and are furthermore fairly well in touch with Enclaves in other systems, means that the Pargin could be the basis for an interesting campaign about persecution, militarism, and whatnot.

You're welcome. I hope it does some good.

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. If you need people, come by indie-netgaming and we can try to round folks up.

Mike

wfreitag wrote: 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.

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

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.

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

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.

So in response to me asking about how one might mechanically reward exploration of alien mindsets in play, Chris Edwards wrote in 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.