World Building » Free Spacer

Creation of Free Spacer Aliens

Game Design, World Building 2 Responses »

May 202010

Last Post I told you all about aliens and my journey to bring aliens into Free Spacer. I was asked to tell you more about “the method used to design your aliens… …How did you determine your desired criteria for what was acceptable and what wasn’t”.

Random Alien Generator

One of the Pillars of Design for Free Spacer is that the game allows the Gamemaster & Players to be the authors of their own adventures. To espouse this design goal I am using the same tools that I am creating for the Gamemaster. The core setting tool, under development, is the Sector Generator. This tool will allow the Gamemaster to create an entire sector from the system to the life inhabiting it including fully playable Alien Sophonts.

The Sector Generator will be a group of unconnected charts allowing the Gamemaster to create a full Sector quickly from any direction.

When the aliens were originally designed, only the Sophont Generator segment of the Sector Generator was complete. After a lot of research and testing I decided against some of the standard categorisations, such as mammal and reptile, judging them too earth-centric. Instead I divided the Sophont generator into four categories: Structure, Diet, Reproduction, and Details. I then figured out the most probable options for each category.

For example, the structure charts determine the number of limbs, percentage of these that are manipulators, type of Skelton, type of locomotion, and average mass and length.

I made each chart to return the most likely outcome and restricted the stranger outcomes to those that are usable in the world.

For example, the most common number of limbs on a Sophont is five (includes tail) with the highest number at eight and the lowest at 3.

The generator is designed that the most common return will not be human; instead the most common return will be strangely average being not too different or hard to understand.

The Chart also returns a set of natural Skill augmentations that allow aliens to be mechanically different without taking over individual characters choices in life. One of our design goals was to make aliens that were not typecast into particular roles like Klingons.

Societies

One choice I made early in the design process, is that Alien species would not dictate the Society the aliens were a member of. In Free Spacer there is no Human Federation or Alien Empire. Instead all major powers are multispecies, a particular species may establish, be more common, or even dominate the society, but there would be very few mono-species societies. This decision had huge repercussions; it made characterising both species and societies far more difficult. It also made it much more difficult to explain the alien species to players. Still this decision had its desired effect, much more believable societies and species that would believably function.

Making Aliens

When making the aliens we used a combination of Random rolls and inspiration based choices to build up the list of ten aliens. To ensure our aliens were not ridiculous assortment we created two directly from humans and created a few guidelines to help us through the process:

Cannot be too similar to one another
Must be able to fit inside a Starship
Cannot be one animal in bipedal form
Must be memorable, fun to play, and a bit awesome.
Must be able to manipulate objects with its hand or other type of manipulator.
Must have a face to allow emotions.

While these simple rules seem obvious, they were much more difficult to implement then you might think, especially during the art phase. People have a tendency to generalise an alien. I would often hear players say things like “Lizard guy”, “Armadillo Guy”, or “Plant lady” and art concepts would initially come out as generalised.

Result

After all this work my art director is currently inking and colouring the Alien concepts. While it is still easily possible to generalise the aliens as “Armadillo Guy” or whatnot, but if you think about it, Avatar Aliens are just big blue cat people. Still Free Spacer Aliens are different enough to give them more depth than that. I think they look great and would love to hear what you all have to say. An upcoming post will introduce you to one of the aliens and explain their specific design process.

Aliens: Wrinkled Foreheads vs. Tentacles

Game Design, World Building 4 Responses »

May 102010

Aliens are integral to the setting of my upcoming Space RPG Free Spacer. When I began to create the Free Spacer setting, I had many decisions to make about the people that would populate the Milky Way Galaxy. Would I have Aliens and, if so, what sort do I have? Here are my choices and their emergent repercussions.

Life out there…

The first and foremost question is: Do we have aliens or not? This is mainly a choice based on the possibility of life in our Galaxy. How plentiful is life and how evolved is it? Our current scientific research shows a lot of potential for basic life, even in our own solar system. With this great potential for life, Free Spacer needs to have aliens. So what about alien people? It is conceited to believe that humans are the most evolved life form in the galaxy. So amongst the billions of different life forms in the galaxy some must be at least as evolved as humans.

What to call them?

There are three standard terms used in science and Sci-fi intelligent alien life forms, Sentience, Sapience, and Sophonts:

Sentience is a capacity to sense and/or perceive subjectively.

Sapience is often defined as wisdom, or the ability of an organism or entity to act with appropriate judgment.

Sophont: An intelligent being; a being with a base reasoning capacity roughly equivalent to or greater than that of a human being. The word does not apply to machines unless they have true artificial intelligence, rather than mere processing capacity.

So using these definitions Sentience is out, not particularly rigorous. It could as easily apply to a great ape or maybe even a cat, as they sense the outside world subjectively. This leaves Sapience and Sophont. Personally I like the word Sophont, it was coined during the golden age of Science Fiction by Poul Anderson and used by the great Spider Robinson. Sapient is a useful word as nearly everyone knows what it means. I’m going to use both with Sophont as the noun and Sapient as the adverb.

Actually Alien, but Understandable

Now that I have decided to have Aliens and what to call them, how alien do I make my Sophonts? The alieness of a Sophont can be gauged on a scale between Star Trek style wrinkled forehead humans to completely incomprehensible.

Gene Roddenberry chose to use the wrinkled forehead aliens to let his audience see the actor’s eyes. He wanted his audience to understand the aliens and identify with them. This idea is just as important in an RPG, players need to understand the Alien they are playing. Still it is unlikely that life out there will look just like humans. I want my Aliens to be much more alien than that.

One of the other pillars of design for Free Spacer is that the stories told are the Gamemasters stories. This pillar meant that I needed to have an Alien Generator to let Gamemasters easily create their own Aliens.

Having these very alien Sophonts in Free Spacer immediately ran into problems. The first issue was that highly variable Sophonts made the size of rooms and the use of devices impossible to design. So I had to create guidelines, for sapient life. These guidelines are integrated into every aspect of Free Spacer’s Milky Way. Technology, conveniences, ship design, and even social practices between societies are based on what my aliens are like.

Post-mortem

Although my aliens are not much stranger than those in Star Wars, their alieness had an interesting repercussion, explaining them. When telling players about the aliens or hiring an artist to do alien concepts, it was difficult to describe these very alien Sophonts without reverting to a silly simplification. Still now that it is done, the extra work describing these aliens seems to be working out. I have ten very different original alien species and they are looking great.

Rules are the basis of Setting

Community, Game Mastery, World Building No Responses »

Mar 282010

Can you play a social game with 4^th edition? Or use WoD for a dungeon crawl? Does System Matter? Of course, you can use any system to play any sort of game, but should you?

Cross Purposes

Is it so bad to play at cross purposes; most systems are designed to have mechanics to handle any situation. So why does it matter?

Well, take D&D 4e for example; when you perform non-tactical combat actions you use a secondary system to perform skill challenges. If your game uses mostly this light unrefined quick skill challenge rule set, PCs will wander around with a great many relatively useless detailed powers while they use an under powered and unbalance system instead.

Would it not be better to use a system that did what you wanted it to?

House Rules

Many GMs solve this issue with house rules. House rules are a double edge sword as a good house rule can sometimes make thing work just the way you want, but house rules may also have horrible side effects. Well designed games are balanced for a specific array of gameplay and a bad house rule can often change this balance having many unforeseen effects.

Ironically, house rules seem to show how much system does matter; for the group to have type of fun they want, the GM has to change the rules. The system provides the structure for the setting. The rules give players abilities and tasks they can perform. Combat heavy ruled games structure encounter creation to produce many of opportunity to fight.

Generic Systems

Does any of this really matter in a generic system game though? Is it possible to create a rules system that allows players to do anything and GMs to create many different settings without the breaking the system. A game like GURPS seems to head in that direction, but the GURPS rules still set the underlying reality. Due to the way GURPS systems work, GURPS settings tend to have similar deadliness and allow PCs to do the things in the same ways. It seems to me that the system, while broad, has a great deal of effect on the play setting.

Rules Light

Story games and rules light systems are all the rage now. Games like Inspectres or FUDGE have simple rules, a small list of character attributes, and a list of special skills you get to make up yourself. You roll one dice that results in the story moving forward. Less framework, more imagination. This affects the setting and gameplay a great deal. The game is less consistent and relies on GM/player views rather than a codified system. Gameplay slows to examine a moment of Roleplaying rather skill testing, combat, or caper planning clearly making that the most important aspect of the game.

Indeed, Systems do matter and the system you choose should concentrate on the type of gameplay that fits your group’s preferences. The perfect system is the one that supports the essential aspect of the setting with its core mechanics.

Escapism & Suspension of Disbelief

Community, World Building 1 Response »

Mar 162010

Ever since film school I have disliked the terms: Escapism and Suspension of Disbelief. I believe that they are used to dismiss philosophic and speculative pursuits. These ideas have a direct connection to rigorous thought on Roleplaying Games.

Escapism is defined as using a mental diversion, as an “escape” from the banal aspects of daily life. Who has not heard RPGs, Sci-fi, or Fantasy referred to as Escapist? My retort is that no hobby, pastime, or other work can be essentially escapist. Any activity, no matter its perceived essential nature, can be used by an individual as an escape and therefore any activity, no matter its perceived banality, can be used for non-escapist reasons.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the phrase “willing suspension of disbelief” to explain how the viewer can enjoy, identify, and believe fantastic plays, films, novels, or games. His idea is that the viewer must mentally convince themselves to believe the fantastic before them that they would otherwise disbelieve. I think this is exactly the opposite of the truth. In reality, viewers automatically believe whatever is before them.

In his work The Allegory of the Cave, Plato postulated his theory that education and wisdom would allow the viewer of the world to disbelieve that which was presented to them and see the world for what it was. Although Plato is talking about the eternal forms, rather than the separation between fantasy and realism, the point is there. It is education that brings disbelief, rather than the ability to believe. Ask any older brother, little kids believe anything you tell them until they learn better.

A great example is Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, when this film was first shown to a live audience the popular legend is that some in the audience ran away so not to be hit by the train. So even if we just suggest that the audience was shocked, it seems that a viewer/listener automatically believe what is put in front of them and it is their own active disbelief that tells them otherwise.

JRR Tolkien also disagreed with Coleridge; Tolkien wrote his essay On Fairy-Stories suggesting that the author must develop an internal consistency to avoid jarring the viewer/reader from their fantastic world. This seem like the proper approach, besides who am I to disagree with Grandfather Tolkien.

So fight back and save your hobbies, never call them escapist and don’t use the term suspension of disbelief. If you must, you can counter with the term “suspension of belief.” When it come to roleplaying never be a sceptic.

Science Fiction; Setting versus Genre

Game Design, World Building No Responses »

Jan 062010

Science fiction has been around for a long time, in the 2nd century the first Science Fiction story Lucian‘s True History was written and in 1902 the second film ever made was Georges Melies’ A Trip to the Moon. Even with this long history, Science Fiction is generally misunderstood.

The most commonly misunderstood aspect of Sci-fi is the difference between Sci-fi the genre and Sci-fi the setting. Simply put, a setting is the place, time, and world where the story is set, while a genre is the purpose, intention, and raison d’être of a particular work.

I have had people on multiple occasions tell me that they don’t like Sci-fi because it is too scary. These people are confusing genre and setting; they’re talking about the Horror genre in a Sci-fi setting. Another good example is Star Wars; Star Wars is obviously set in a Sci-Fi setting, but the genre is heroic sword and sorcery fantasy.

In Science Fiction setting can be defined by its list of tropes. You can be pretty sure something is a Sci-fi setting if it’s set in the future, different realities, other timelines, elsewhere in the galaxy, or uses nonexistent science and technology. No matter the background variation, the central requirement for the Science Fiction setting is that science or technology is a key aspect.

Science Fiction as a genre is historically difficult to define, but here is my attempt at defining the genre of Science Fiction:

Sci-fi is fundamentally a genre of scientific speculation, change, and tracing the results of theory to answer questions of “what if?”

This definition places works like Star Wars and Jason X outside the Sci-fi genre, but stories like those by Asimov and Bradbury, films and television like Star Trek and Blade Runner, and games like Rifts and Traveller squarely within it.

Sci-fi Warnings, Predictions, & Remembrance

A stalwart tradition of Sci-fi is to warn or predict the outcome of scientific progress or historic repetition; this tradition seems to stem from Science fiction’s tendency to teach, preach, or allegorise. Three classic examples:

Prediction; Jules Verne’s story of a journey to the moon in his, De la Terre à la Lune.
Warning; The Cyber Punk subgenre is a warning of the building powers of corporations and the merging of human and machines.
Remembrance; Nearly every sci-fi show has had at least one episode showing future Nazi’s, warning the audience that once forgotten the mistakes of the past will repeat.

Hard versus Soft Sci-fi

The major division in Science fiction is usually considered to be the Hard versus Soft Sci-fi. The core difference between hard and soft Sci-fi is the difference between hard (physical) and soft (social) sciences, but due to the simultaneous use of both in most contemporary Sci-fi; the difference between Hard and Soft is often cited as the degree of scientific rigor used.

Sci-fi & Space RPGs

Despite the rising popularity of Science Fiction, partially driven by visual effects, Sci-fi RPGs, especially Space RPGs, are a small part of the RPG community. In the world of Sci-fi RPGs there are only a few contenders:

Traveller; The original 1970s Space RPG, the newest version published by Mongoose.
Warhammer 40k RPGs; A long anticipated set of three RPGs(Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, and the upcoming Deathwatch)in the popular 40K war game Universe.
Star Wars; the current Star Wars RPG fits WotC’s semi-4^th edition fantasy rule set to a Tee.
TV & Movie Licensed Games; Made to allow players to experience the film or TV world, tend to be great source books that use a standardised rule set like D20 or the Cortex System.
Rifts & GURPS; These generic systems have space and sci-fi source books with settings and specific mechanics.
Indies; Indie Games and Homebrews are legion. They are abundant on the internet and are often only setting that work with a published game system such as D20 or Fudge. Promoted by sites like The Forge, published on the internet on sites such as IPR or RPGNow, and through publishers such as Mongoose Publishing’s Flaming Cobra Imprint or Studio 2.

Science Fiction & Free Spacer

It is into this relatively small universe of Science Fiction RPGs that that my upcoming Space RPG, Free Spacer, embarks. While designing Free Spacer I rigorously built game mechanics and setting on theoretical hard and a few soft sciences. I used this science as a base with several RPG design goals as guidelines. I projected the effects of these sciences on people and societies and allowed the world to evolve into the distant future creating an internally consistent galaxy with few artificial constraints. My hope is that Technological limits, economies, and customs, will be set by the fictional sciences and will be the basis for an inherently Science Fiction setting and mechanics.