Meme Machine

• hyperlinked collaborations: the ability to group-produce documents, images, systems, narratives, in real-time with multiple contributors.  Kind of a multiway conversation where everyone's utterance is not only recorded, but available for sequential playback.  
• non-time-restricted conversation: up to now, joining a human conversation (virtual or not) has been a question of trying to work out what everyone's saying and maybe asking for a summary.  No longer: conversations are no longer fixed in time; new participants can come and "replay" the whole conversation before joining in.  Most amazingly from the human cognitive standpoint, participants in conversations can actually *go back in time* and thread off new topics and conversations from previous utterances.  A conversation becomes a 4-dimensional object shared between an unlimited number of participants - the full implications of that are yet to dawn on us.
• increased cyborging: many of us webheads (and I include portable iHeads and txtHds in that too :-) ) are already accustomed to being cyborgs to one degree or another. We go through life dimly aware that in the back of our minds there's this virtual socket into the Web where almost unlimited knowledge waits. Few of us say or think "bugger, I don't know the answer" any more - we say "I don't know - hang on, I'll find out", and look it up.  We're cyborgs already.  With Wave, the cyborging goes to a new level: it's become ACTIVE.  Passive connection to knowledge is one thing: active connection to a infosphere of multidimensional (and multidimensionally *connected*) constantly changing conversational exchange and *creation* with ceaselessly regenerating content and changing participants is something our primate brains have NEVER had to cope with before.  No wonder we're getting some instinctive kickback; this is a WEIRD experience which no human being has ever had before.  Again - full implications a few years down the line.
• privacy concepts challenged: this is one I experienced pretty quickly in Wave.  I'd been having a conversation with someone, one-to-one, and suddenly a bunch of other people got invited. Fine, but the unexpected corollary was that everything I'd said *up to that point* was also available for them to "listen to", not just everything we were going to say after.  Talking via Wave, you have to assume that *anybody*, any where, any time, may be able to replay your words *and interact with them*.  It's not just a Forum: it's like having your email open for everyone to read, anytime, anywhere.  
• embed fun and games: here's the coolness right now for me, immediate future.  Imagine an RPG Wave demoing a particular game or scenario.  You've got participants, etc, even lurkers watching it unfold.  All good.  Now, you can EMBED that Wave directly in your game's product page on the net, next to demo docs, download links, purchase buttons, videos, promos, graphics, the whole thing.  And the Wave will update in real time.  Imagine that: all of your PAST AND PRESENT gaming experience and convos about a system become part of your marketing material.  Transparency is always a challenge - but the potential is awesome.

I've been writing a lot of Starblazer scenarios and campaign stuff recently, for the upcoming Mindjammer book, and I've been struck by what a different experience it is from writing scenarios for more "traditional" RPGs.  Starblazer by its nature plays as a fast, furious, and inventive game, rollicking good fun with a hell of a lot of player involvement, but often it still just feels like a normal RPG.  But it's not.

The whole player participation thing radically changes how you construct your campaigns and scenarios.  In The Olden Days (and still now with more traditional RPGs), scenario writing is/was about providing a good, solid description of places, people, and critters, and also presenting enough plot detail that the GM could grasp the whole intended structure and "learn" it, before gradually revealing it to the players in the course of play.  Pretty much any scenario would have this “implied plot”.  Even if you avoid railroading in a scenario with a clear plot structure (no mean feat), a lot of the game involves the players trying to work out what the GM knows, and then navigate the scenario using that information.

Starblazer blows that out of the water.  At any point, players can make Declarations, etc, and invent elements of the narrative out of whole cloth, which the GM then makes best efforts to incorporate.  It's a bad GM in Starblazer who turns down player declarations because they don't "fit" the story / plot structure he's created; instead, you turn down your planned plot structure *in favour of* the player-created innovation.

It takes a few moments to realize what that does to your "planned" campaign.  In fact, you can't really plan it at all, nor should you.  In writing a scenario, for example, what I find myself doing is detailing the "starting assumptions" of the scenario - the status quo before the PCs turn up.  That involves sketches of locations and people, sure, and also statistics - but the understanding is that all these are provisional, and subject to complete change during the course of play.  A given bad guy may suddenly turn out to be a good guy, and vice versa, based on player narrative control.  This means that although you have some control over how a scenario starts, you really have no idea of how it’s going to go as soon as it’s out of the gate.  In a science-fiction campaign, this has major implications; imagine a first contact situation.  You've set up the aliens to be basically friendly, but incomprehensible, and the "starting assumptions" are that the PCs (as the contact team) are going to aim to do a good job and bring the aliens into the fold as friends and allies.  That’s what’s expected.

In Starblazer, you have almost no control, as GM, over how things go from there.  The players may suddenly declare that the aliens are actually inimical, perhaps they want to eat people, maybe they have some terrible disease, or that there's already ANOTHER contact team down there who've gone insane in Colonel Kurtz fashion and are killing the natives.  By the end of the scenario the entire planet may be a smouldering ruin, or your star empire may have a war - even a civil war! - on its hands.

That's an amazing power to unleash at the gaming table - and very exciting for the GM, too, as you really don't know where things are going - but how the hell do you link scenarios together into a campaign in such a game environment?

I don't lay claim to authoritative answers on that point, but here's how I'm handling it: I'm taking a "structuralist" approach.  I'm viewing the elements of a given scenario in largely abstract terms, and although I'm cloaking those abstract structures in setting-specific chrome, it's possible to change that chrome radically without totally trashing the structure.  You can even replace individual elements in the structure, “hot swapping” them with other elements resulting from player narrative intervention, without destroying its structure or utility.  So, in the above example, you've got the following structure:

"Star Empire PCs contact Incomprehensible Aliens on Unexplored World.  During the scenario, the Star Empire modifies the Aliens' life experience, and the Aliens may also modify the Star Empire right back.  By scenario end, there is a Defined Relationship established with the Aliens."

That's very vague and woolly, but it allows me to swap chrome descriptions easily, and even to “hot-swap” large chunks of the scenario structure (people, places, events) and to expect to handle the scenario progress in a certain way.  For example, by the end I know I'll have a status report on how the Star Empire and the Aliens are getting on.  I don't know whether they'll be allies or at war, but I know I’ll be modifying the relationship between the two “polities” based on the scenario outcome.

This is where the Starblazer "fractal" comes in.  By using organizations, etc, you can actually track the relationships between, say, Star Empires and Alien Worlds.  By the end of the above scenario, if there's a developing war, I can actually make the result of the scenario into the first "exchange" of a conflict between the Star Empire and the Aliens *as organizations*.  That's an amazingly powerful tool; it means I don't have to know in advance whether there's a war or not, and I can rely on the game rules to manage that war if there is one.

So what does this mean for writing a campaign setting?  Well, the first thing is to realise that whilst you can present a setting, and indeed loosely-linked scenarios, in a published book, you can't expect *in any way* that individual GM's campaigns are going to look anything like yours.  Events could be *hugely* different.  Imagine this situation: there's been a planetary invasion in the Star Empire by a bunch of bad guys.  The scenario deals with trying to fight them off.  Do the PCs win? 

In Starblazer, you don't know whether the PCs win or not.  You can’t assume anything.  By the end of the scenario, the bad guys could be toast, or they could be the planet's new rulers.  So how do you write a sequel scenario?  Answer: you don't make the scenario dependent on the precise outcome of its predecessor, but you derive it from the predecessor’s *structure*.  We know there's been a planetary invasion, so we know there are bad guys trying to invade planets.  The sequel scenario can base itself off that, and shouldn't rely on precise details of whether the bad guys won or lost in the previous scenario.  Starblazer - with its organizations and rules for cool things like Plot stress, etc - puts enough tools in the GM's hands that you can leave that kind of tracking up to the GM.

Think of it in terms of "layers".  You have your "top" layer in a scenario, which is the abstract plot structure (Planetary Invasion, etc) of the scenario itself.  This has chrome description laid over it, and you present some basic starting points there, but acknowledge the precise detail is up to the GM.  Then you have a "middle" layer, which is the specific, day-to-day events of the scenario, what happens to whom and when and where, etc.  Lastly, you have the "deep" layer, which is the underlying nature of the setting; "there's a Star Empire, and there's some bad guys who are kind of like this. This scenario is going to affect that”.

What this means is that when writing Starblazer campaigns and scenarios, you only write the "top" and "deep" layers.  You don't attempt the middle layer at all; that's up to the players and GMs who run their games.  One set of players could have the entire Star Empire erupt in civil war as a result of their actions; but the scenario you write should be able to fit smoothly in there, drawing on the fundamental setting "deep structure" layer and presenting a "top" layer abstract plot structure which can fit more or less any narrative.

In some ways, this is just good design, period.  For any game, you should always leave the “middle layer” blank.  But it's interesting that Starblazer (and FATE in general) actually *demands* this approach - it's built into the rules.  Scenario plot structure isn’t necessarily completely freeform, but nor can it be clearly defined.  In some ways it owes a lot to the concepts of sandbox and plot point campaigns, but it's more than that - a good Starblazer campaign guide provides a support and an inspiration to GM and player creativity, not a replacement for it.  The Starblazer rules are a toolkit for play; a Starblazer scenario is a toolkit for adventure.

What does this mean in the long run?  Well, I think it means any kind of “one true way” approach to a campaign will forever be absolutely impossible in Starblazer, which is *wonderful* news for GMs.  I don’t think I’m alone in having suffered from that; the urgent need to keep up with everything published for a setting, and also the ever-increasing fear and frustration that if you dare to invent something for a setting, it may - oh, horror! - be contradicted by “official canon”.  I personally HATE that; it stifles creativity something rotten.  In Starblazer, trashing “canon” and “the official word” is a RULES REQUIREMENT!  All any setting or scenario can ever be is a toolkit for adventure, and the creative control remains for ever with the GM.  Long may it stay that way.

*****

I haven't been quite as excited about a set of RPG rules since... well, since the first arrival of Hero Wars, nearly a decade ago.  Starblazer, the Fate system brushed up for rollicking good space opera action, is gradually emerging from a year of speculation to hopefully change the world of SF RPG for good.  Having got my hands finally on a PDF copy just under a week ago, I'm frothing at the mouth ready to play this game with my long-gestated homebrew setting, the New Commonality Era.

Starblazer isn't like any other scifi ruleset I've seen.  There are no rules for how much your ammunition clip costs, or how much it weighs; no rules for how many cubic meters your cargo bay should be, or the wattage of your laser.  No gearhead stuff, no technical specification minutiae and pages of gravity calculation tables which Many Other SF RPGs so proudly display.

So what else is there in 600+ (!) pages of content?  A whole, complete, scifi game, that's what.  It's complete, as is, and arguably more complete than any other SF game: not only do you get characters, worlds, starships, and critters, but you also get rules for playing organizations, empires, humongous space beasts, giant robots, and piles more.  In one book.  A book that could kill someone if dropped from a first floor window, admittedly, but still one book.

I love it to bits.  And that's just the PDF.  It can do MY SETTING!  (YAY!)  Given that my setting is 1: extremely weirded out and 2: extremely far future, that's saying something.  I may have to expand on the Organization Rules slightly, but that's all; I've already been converting my current planetary and starship writeups to the Starblazer system and grinning at the devilishness which the Aspects system brings out in me.  Heh-heh-heh...

Most of all, and the main reason why 600+ pages actually is less of a trawl than, say, the 4e Players Handbook, is that the unified Fate system of Skills, Stunts, and Aspects is used across the board for every "game entity", be it a character, a planet, a starship, or an Empire.  It may feel kinda weird to be enumerating a planet's "Skills" or a starship's "Stunts", but the unified terminology generates piles of synergies and means you learn one single resolution system, and then get creative with it in different contexts.  Lovely - and much easier on the brain.  I get the feeling that even the 600+ page rulesbook will be little referred to once you've played a few sessions - the rules are that intuitive.

So what's missing?  Well, this is what will IMHO split the SF RPG community down the middle.  It's the gearhead stuff.  There really isn't any.  Sure, there are groovy starships, nasty rayguns, enormous spacestations, evil robots, etc: but there is *no* pseudo-scientific gobbledigook provided to explain it all away.  How do FTL drives work?  How long does it take to travel 29.6 Light Years?  What's the exact atmospheric composition of that unbreathable atmosphere?  Starblazer is refreshingly honest about this: for games rules purposes, none of the answers to the above questions actually MATTER.  Quite remarkably, for a book that size, there is very little "chrome".

Now this will upset some people.  However, IMHO, it shouldn't.  If one thing argued Traveller (for example) into a corner, it was its obsession with pseudo-scientific rationalization from day one.  It told you how big a computer was, and how much it could remember; it provided exact restrictions on how jump drive worked; and before you knew it, the OTU was inherent in the rules, and increasingly difficult to disentangle from future products.  More than anything, it got outstripped by current technology advances ridiculously quickly, especially the computer rules, to the extent that the OTU ends up dated as "the Seventies in Space", with no nanotech, no biotech, and computers the size of refrigerators with 64K of memory... (I exaggerate, but you get the point...)  Starblazer stays clear of trying to PHD the scientific descriptions - second-guessing the future is a pretty futile task at best - and as a core rulesbook is a complete playable game out of the box.  But it's also a toolkit for gaming in your own setting of choice.  Yes, you can play in the OTU using Starblazer; you can also play in the Star Trek Federation or the Star Wars galaxy with no real work other than speccing out your ships, planets, and organizations. 

What interests me next is the sort of supplements Starblazer is going to spawn.  It's very possible to please a heckuva lot of people here.  I would suggest two types of supplement will do the trick: first, a pile of scenarios in "generic" Starblazer style, ie with plenty of fun and action and about the same level of chrome (ie not much) as the rules; second, some settings books, with presentations of setting-based chrome contextualising the Starblazer rules.  So, for example, a "Star Trek Setting" book (assuming such were ever possible! :-D) would provide organization sheets for the Klingons, Romulans, Vulcans, Federation, etc, starship sheets for the Enterprise, etc, *and* it would explain that FTL is "Warp Drive", offer examples on how it works, provide descriptions of matter transport and replicators, phasers, etc, tying them all into the Starblazer core rules.  And then, on the other hand, a "Against the Dark Empire" scenario book would provide a suite of scenarios which were playable out of the box, but which could also be easily used in any setting the Story Teller was using Starblazer for.

As a development of the above, too: Starblazer isn't anti-gearhead per se, it's just that the core rulesbook doesn't go mad about it.  A "Star Trek Setting" could easily produce as much gearhead material as it wanted, if the setting demanded it, without upsetting the Starblazer rules.  I'll be very interested to see if we get fan-created weapons lists with weights, costs, and ammo capacity, appearing shortly; wouldn't surprise me at all.

Such is my two-penn'orth, anyway...

Right - back to reading, and writing up those planets and organizations!  Kudos to the Cubicle7 guys for producing a cracking, exciting, science-fiction game!

*****