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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.

Jobs & Your Project

Community, Game Design No Responses »

Jan 252010

One of the most difficult parts of designing an RPG or doing any other project is the necessity of working another job on the side. Lately I have been working a contract; doing design and project management on a Nintendo DS title and is severely limiting my bandwidth for Free Spacer.

On breaks at work and in the evenings after work I find it incredibly difficult to get into work mode, even to write a blog. It is like changing from 2^nd to 5^th gear, I stall. Fixing this is not easy; working harder isn’t always possible I need to develop another strategy. So what is my problem? Is it a time management issue? Or something else?

There is a lot of information out there on Time management and as I did research and found lots of info on time management for writing. While these experiments seemed like they would be very informative, any long term use of time management techniques could in themselves be quite a time waste. These techniques have not solved the issue, but may have led me to the answer.

Some people work out or go to classes, I myself have been able to do this. The difference seems to be, the schedule, responsibility, and deadline. I am scheduled to be there at a particular time and I feel guilty if I skip it. Is it as simple as scheduling the time and insuring that there is a goal to meet? That is the new plan; I’ll give it a try, schedule it, and get the work done.

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.

Dawn of a Space Roleplaying Game

Game Design No Responses »

Nov 262009

It all began Christmas 2008, I was Game Mastering and modding so much that friends we’re asking, “Why don’t you just make your own game?” I am professional game designer in Vancouver (Ex- EA: Blackbox and Backbone Vancouver) so I understand the consequences of making my own game. Knowing, somewhat, what I was getting into I decided to jump into the void and build Free Spacer.

Now, eleven month later, everything is going to plan. Honest… of course, I didn’t have a plan when I started, except the lofty goal of creating the Science Fiction Roleplaying game, I‘d always wanted. There is a lot more to designing a RPG than a lofty goal.

Currently I am on Stage 7 on my ten stages of game design:

Idea; this is the fun part. Brainstorm and come up with a list. Answer the question, “What do I want in a Game? What do I want in a RPG world?”
Validate; Eliminate the junk and find a core concept. Remember it is a game, not a story. It needs to be the cradle of great things, not the baby. If you want to have babies, Game Master, we all need more Game Masters.
Structure; Create a skeleton with your core concept as the base, design goals as the limbs, and your core mechanic as the spine.
Build; Build up from the core concept toward you design goals. You mechanics should support the needs of your game. Is your game about underwater combat? Parliamentary Scheming? Create game mechanics to do what you want characters to do in your game.
World; Develop a game world or setting that supports your desired Gameplay. Create a vast underwater battlefield for your underwater combat game or a complicated Bureaucracy of intrigue for your Parliamentary Scheming game.
Playtest; Once you believe your game works get people to start trying it.
Repeat stage 4 to 6; Expect to change things, but change them to stem from your core concept and fulfill your design goals, as long as you hold on to that skeleton the strange places solutions take your game can only make it stronger.
Write; It is fine to have a great game, but you need to make it clear, concise, and understandable. Explain it well and you’ll discover holes.
Edit; Yes, fix spelling and grammar, it is embarrassing if you don’t, but make sure everything you need is in the game and nothing that isn’t. You can always make supplements or split the books like D&D. The most important thing is a clear understandable core book.
Layout; You are going to need to layout your book for print or digital distribution. Layout will make it understandable and easy to read as a whole.

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