Apr 3, 2018, 4:47 PM

Apologies in advance if this rambles a bit. I'm writing this from work and I'm having constant interruptions.

I've mostly played on Star Trek games, and those have always had a lot of
enforced IC travel features ranging from simple coded turbolifts to get
around the ship, to transporters for moving between ships, to complex space
travel simulations used to travel between planets. The use of these systems
was absolutely mandatory. Bypassing IC travel restrictions was regarded as
cheating and would get you kicked off a game if you were discovered doing
it. This was do deeply ingrained in me that the first time I ever
encountered a fast travel system on a MUX, I was horrified, and immediately
disconnected from that game and never went back.

It wasn't just Star Trek games that were like this, it was a fairly common design for all sci-fi games back in the day.

A few months ago I started work on an Expanse game. This wasn't a MUSH, it
was an Evennia game that I advertised as a scifi RPI. My original goal was
to create a very realistic, highly detailed space system based on hard
science (the Epstein drive would be the one exception to this). It quickly
became apparent that if I used real distances and realistic speeds, it was
going to take RL months to travel between Earth and The Belt. This was
unacceptable, so I ended up 'compressing' space considerably, shortening
what had been close to 3 months of travel, down to 3 hours. Even this was
considered unacceptable to many of my potential players. People complained
that they didn't want to waste their limited play time on travel. "Fine." I
thought, and dumbed things down again. I dropped the complex power
management. I added an automatic pilot which made travelling from one point
to another as simple as typing 'layin ceres;engage'. With those changes, a
trip from Earth to Ceres took just short of 40 minutes. Even this was too
much for some folks. Eventually I got tired of people asking to have their
character @moved somewhere in order to bypass the travel time, so I ended up
scrapping the entire space system. I replaced it with a simple, instant
fast travel system. I also added a 'Space' advantage to Cgen to give
characters that owned ships, a few perks when using fast travel (that
Advantage was also used by the commerce system, which I also ended up
abandonning because no one used it).

At this point, I lost interest in the game and handed it over to one of my
staffers. It just wasn't the type of game that I wanted. I love space
sims. I love trading sims. I love RP. Unfortunately I seem to be the last
of a dying breed of players that wants all of these things in one game.