Space Games and Travel Time? Why? Why Not?

[faraday]

@Lotherio said in Space Games and Travel Time? Why? Why Not?:

Taking onto feeling of big versus actual grid big. Most of those follow one group/crew, there is lots of new planets, but the central focus is a space port or ship or some such.

I think this is an important point. Firefly, Star Trek, Star Wars (within a particular set of movies), etc. - they had the whole galaxy as their playground, sure, but the story being told focused on a group of characters who were together in that playground. (Occasional side quests and away team missions aside.)

There are TV shows that can make disjointed storytelling work - GoT for instance, where characters are quite often in completely different parts of the world doing their own thing. But on a MUSH, that physical separation limits the population of players you can RP with at any moment, and imposes additional burden on the storytelling staff, who now have to manage multiple parallel storylines/casts.

@Ghost said in Space Games and Travel Time? Why? Why Not?:

So if I'm right, this has less to do about the desire for coded space flight, but the desire to move away from light systems in favor of something crunchier and more technical.

I think this is at the heart of the issue, yeah. I was talking to someone about that demo Firefly site I set up, and we got to talking about the fact that it doesn't have a gear system. But the thing is - a gear system can't exist in isolation. What does the gear do? How do you acquire the gear? You go down that rabbit hole and pretty soon you're talking a fully integrated economy/space/weapons system. There's nothing wrong with that, but these systems need to be in balance somehow.

[Lotherio]

@faraday said in Space Games and Travel Time? Why? Why Not?:

You go down that rabbit hole and pretty soon you're talking a fully integrated economy/space/weapons system. There's nothing wrong with that, but these systems need to be in balance somehow.

This here. Agreed, nothing wrong with this. If you go down the rabbit hole, see where it goes! Make it good and make it balanced, but make it the focus, the big picture, the draw. If one's doing all that work, bring it center stage. Leave RP as an ancillary thing to do when one isn't transporting cargo, upgrading their ship,, evading Imperials as a 'smuggle and evade minigame', or calculating the cost of the spice melange on Arrakis following a fremen uprising (and yes, if you're doing space trade, have things like this affect it all somehow). Make it a good simulation of space, don't tack it on to an RPG set in space because you want it. For me, there's plenty of other space strategy games out there for me to get my fix that I don't care much for it when I seek RP; but I do love some good space travel/trading/mining/federation/etc games.

[Ghost]

Super crunchy games with no experience levels like Shadowrun and Cyberpunk have taught us that inventory/economy bases games are pretty easy to break.

With the right influx of cash, a starting player can have god stats through their equipment. Why bother worrying about their 2d6 stat roll when their equipment enhances it to 5d6, for example.

It definitely is a rabbit hole, and so the balancing of this has to happen if you're allowing items and economy. People need to build these systems with balance in mind.

For Example, again, Serenity.

That game had HSpace, great, but with that came equipment economy, etc. People learned fairly early on that the starter pistols and armor at the vendor were outright garbage. At some point, Mal and Inara started making new weapons and armors by tweaking the stat systems on those items. Those items were then given to their friends. Before long everyone knew that the only way to get equipment that mattered was to join an org that had been supplied by Mal and Inara...only people eventually left those factions to start new ones outside of the Mal/Inara favoritism umbrella.

So...then people outside of the Mal/Inara/Pirate favoritism umbrella then had guns/armor comparable to them. Thus, the arms race escalated. They didn't want people who opposed their PCs to have comparable equipment, so new waves of equipment were created that were better than the last wave, and those weapons were given to their friends.

None of these items were available at vendors, and the price of these items was so astronomical that no player could ever afford these items without direct involvement of these orgs.

So....keep this story in mind if you go the full coded ship, space, equipment route. Things that alter the way the game is played need to be carefully balanced, as well as the economy/availability that purchases those things.

This is ultimately why I think low-object RPG works better for mushes. These complicated economy/item systems are easier to keep an eye on at a tabletop game with 4-7 players, but on a mush with 30+ players there's gonna be a lot of wibbley-wobbley in terms of zeroing in on items.

[faraday]

@Ghost That arms race you talk about isn't unique to MUSHes either. (Weirdly corrupt favoritism aside.) You see the same thing in MMOs with coded economies too. People with more time on their hands end up with a decided advantage over casual players pretty quickly. That's what I remember from my brief excursions into sim-based MUs early on -- feeling the grind. Nothing against folks who like that style of game (or want to run that kind of game), but if I want a grind, I'll go play a video game. (Or not, since I don't much like grindy video games either.) I do MUSHes to tell stories.

[Seraphim73]

@faraday said in Space Games and Travel Time? Why? Why Not?:

@Ghost That arms race you talk about isn't unique to MUSHes either.

Heck, it goes beyond even video games: CCGs and CMGs work off similar systems. The company wants you to buy the new product, so it has to be better/more useful than the old product. Stat Creep is a real and horrible thing.

[Ghost]

Another thing.

Every game I've played on that has had coded ships has had one thing in common: It was hard to actually get ships.

Keep this in mind when designing a game with coded ship objects: I perceived that the main reason ships were either so expensive or limited on these games was because staff didn't want a grid covered with orphaned ship objects. Not to bring up Serenity again, but it's a good example. I want to say that there were...maybe 10-15(?) actual coded ships on the grid.

I think there was wisdom behind limiting how many ACTUAL ships are on grid. It forces RP to those ships and controls the RP zones so to speak. If everyone had their own ship, you very well could end up with 30 players, 30 ships, and a lot of isolation.

But Serenity (again) also showed us where this could be a problem.

With a limited number of ships being handed out, there was some favoritism involved in who actually got to captain these ships. As a result, you had a limited number of ships and some ships were very competitive in terms of who got to be a part of the crew. I don't want to use the term clique because the ability to fire a crew member helped keep creepers off of ships, but it also kept new players off of the most exciting crews, too.

So when creating a ship-based system, you have to ponder your philosophy behind IF you're going to limit ships, and IF you're going to limit ships, then HOW do you choose WHO gets the ships and WHAT your expectation of ship-owners is.

Serenity and SW1 are probably the greatest examples to ask people about when it comes to learning how ship ownership and item economy can affect a MU.

[Sparks]

@Arkandel said in Space Games and Travel Time? Why? Why Not?:

I guess I was never into sci-fi for roleplaying purposes although I read a lot of it and I certainly enjoy science fiction movies and shows.

The sole exception to that is playing Force users because lightsabers.

pops up like prairie dog

Did someone say lightsabers???

[Bad at Lurking]

I agree with the points about coded travel systems putting arbitrary and silly limits on player engagement. Few people have the time to wait around and do random RP until they are allowed to actually do something meaningful, plot or character-wise, these days.

But one point I haven't see addressed is that those systems don't even do a good job of emulating the genres and franchises most people want to play with. Travel in most novels and all TV shows and movies happens at exactly the speed of plot. Which is to say that if the writers need it to take a while it does and if they don't, it doesn't.

When you start adding layers of complexity to a setting that is REALLY sketchy in the way even the source material handles travel, like Firefly or Star Trek, you're not just missing the point of the narrative structure of those shows, you're wandering away from genre fidelity.

It's kind of like report RP in Star Trek games. Sure, in real life, Starfleet officers are up to their oh-so-toned unitard-clad asses in electronic paperwork. But in terms of an actual episode, that's not a thing unless the plot needs to be a thing.

[faraday]

@Bad-at-Lurking said in Space Games and Travel Time? Why? Why Not?:

Travel in most novels and all TV shows and movies happens at exactly the speed of plot. Which is to say that if the writers need it to take a while it does and if they don't, it doesn't.

That's not entirely true though. TV shows have a sense of continuity. If in one episode the writers establish that it takes 7 days to get from Persephone to Ariel, then good writer teams will stick to that moving forward.

Nobody's perfect of course, and they might change things. When you're doing a TV show, you can own your plot holes, retcon whatever you like, and it doesn't really affect anybody else. But changing the continuity for a community-driven game like a MUSH has ripples that affect everybody.

[Arkandel]

At some point it's down to players to not be idiots about it and not about space travel. If you're in a D&D campaign and you continuously split the party up just to travel you're probably not being a good sport, and if you're on a Mage game set in Maine but you and your buddies spend most of the time living in Manhattan then why are you even on that game?

It's the same thing for sci-fi. There shouldn't need to be artificial barriers keeping you to a certain geographical location - just the reasonable OOC obligation to be a responsible player who contributes to the MU*. Games are free to play, the least we can do in return is make our characters available for others to meet.

[faraday]

@Arkandel said in Space Games and Travel Time? Why? Why Not?:

if you're on a Mage game set in Maine but you and your buddies spend most of the time living in Manhattan then why are you even on that game?

But if staff has gone out of their way to build Manhattan and tout it as an active faction, then it's hardly your fault for making a character who's based there.

That has happened to me so many times on multi-planet sci-fi games it's not even funny.

[Arkandel]

@faraday Oh, sure, if staff went ahead and made Manhattan (or Zonix 6) a viable place to play away from their 'home' then they can't complain the playerbase is spread out.

But although I think that's a bad choice to make, it's still a choice for game makers.

[Cura]

@SG said in Space Games and Travel Time? Why? Why Not?:

Anyways, design a setting with this in mind, I guess.

I quoted because this is a good springboard into my thoughts about it.

Most games with huge settings compromise by doing this by offering a central hub location that's equally accessible to all factions/nations/whatever, to make it easy/logical for people to congregate, and then having 'everywhere else' available on the side. The game I'm working on at a snail's pace does this, because the setting is Absolutely Gigantic.

I could choose to limit the setting to strictly that space station hub, sure. @faraday chose a very concentrated setting for BSG:U and that degree of purity in setting works very well for how she wanted her game to work. For the kind of game I want to make, there are aspects of Space Opera as a genre that bring a lot to the table for RP, though, even if it makes the question of travel time something you then have to consider.

It's a grand, over-the-top genre, and invites plots that are both of those things. If I want players who feel free to flex their storytelling itches, a game where I can say 'yes' to people who ask me about a plot they want to run more often than I say 'no' out of a need to safeguard my theme, it's a GREAT genre. Space being absolutely gigantic means there's room for a lot of stuff to be happening at once without necessarily ruining anybody else's day in the process, no matter how many explosions you want your plot to involve. You can break the setting, but it's harder to do because even something as shockingly serious as destroying an entire planet doesn't have to be game-breaking anymore.

It does mean there need to be some clear lines to describe the boundaries of the theme, to avoid it becoming a sandbox with no cohesion at all, if you want a cohesive game.

As some others have mentioned previously, worrying about travel time only matters if your game has elements of intrigue or pvp. Mine is intended to, so it's relevant. There's no cut-and-dry solution, because:

@Arkandel said in Space Games and Travel Time? Why? Why Not?:

It's the same thing for sci-fi. There shouldn't need to be artificial barriers keeping you to a certain geographical location - just the reasonable OOC obligation to be a responsible player who contributes to the MU*.

Putting hard rules on travel time doesn't appeal to me. I like flexibility to accommodate players and like at least one person in the thread has already said, removing barriers to people actually getting RP is hugely important. It means being willing to accept that some people will probably push the envelope. If you have a big enough game (I should be so lucky!), you're never going to be able to keep track of where everyone is and what they're doing. You can put people on the honor system, but how well that works depends entirely on your players. I do think that players running plots in which the presence (or absence) of individuals matters are likely to report problematic time-travel behavior, though, so it's probably not a huuuuuge worry, as long as you establish that you expect people to be reasonable about not being everywhere at once.

I think RL:IC time compression can be a good partial answer, depending on just how much travel time you need. I've been on games with a 1:2 compression ratio -- one RL day being 2 IC days -- and that was hugely useful. It gave players the ability to backdate things easily enough, or slot them in one day ahead if they were indisposed IC, but still needed to get something in.

I've thought recently that experimenting with extending that window might be interesting. What if one RL week is one IC week, but a player gets to RP those days however they like in each window, like the proverbial stretchy rubber sheet of time? It would put characters on different days within their given weeks, but that may not actually be any more problematic than leaving them to fudge things a bit in the name of getting RP in, and it would make people think about how they wanted to spend their time.

It's still more regulation than I personally care to do, and probably won't, but I think about these things a lot now.

[faraday]

@Cura said in Space Games and Travel Time? Why? Why Not?:

I've thought recently that experimenting with extending that window might be interesting. What if one RL week is one IC week, but a player gets to RP those days however they like in each window, like the proverbial stretchy rubber sheet of time? It would put characters on different days within their given weeks, but that may not actually be any more problematic than leaving them to fudge things a bit in the name of getting RP in, and it would make people think about how they wanted to spend their time.

It's an interesting idea. I've actually been on a couple of games that did this. It... kinda works?

The issue you get into is sequencing scenes. If there's no general agreement on which day it is ICly, you can get things like: "Well, Bob thinks this happens on Tuesday in his timeline but Suzy was in Paris on Tuesday and Liam got shot on Monday so..."

With traditional IC time systems we have that problem with backscenes. When you have a hazy IC time system, you have to do that dance no every scene.

[Cura]

@faraday Yep, pretty much. That's what I meant about characters being on different days. Nobody would ever be spending them precisely the same. It's not the kind of thing you'd be able to draw hard lines in the sand with at any point other than at the weekly mark. I mean...I honestly think anytime you let people fudge timelines significantly enough to allow for something like space travel, they're doing that, anyway -- they're just not thinking or worrying about what that means, most of the time. (Which is totally easier, and why I don't intend to implement stretchy weeks -- but then, I'm not too anxious about finding a way to put restrictions on people, either.)

[friarzen]

Huh, I'm surprised to realize how good a setting like Stargate Universe is for this. A single "giant" ship as "game/grid hub" that moves through different star-systems-of-the-week, shuttles for any space-sim minigames wanted, and stargates for instant travel whenever the plot needs it.

[faraday]

@friarzen Yeah I think that's the same effect you see on a Trek or Battlestar game. Everyone's together, but you can still venture out for missions to get the "space is big" feel. It works really well in a MUSH environment.

[Sparks]

@friarzen said in Space Games and Travel Time? Why? Why Not?:

Huh, I'm surprised to realize how good a setting like Stargate Universe is for this. A single "giant" ship as "game/grid hub" that moves through different star-systems-of-the-week, shuttles for any space-sim minigames wanted, and stargates for instant travel whenever the plot needs it.

I actually had a MUSH I put together—and then never opened—based around Stargate Command. There were little 'soundstages' for any given planet, which would each be linked to a gate address, and the gate could then be dialed to re-link the gate exit in the game room to that particular little set of rooms.

The idea was that all the 'downtime' RP was at the SGC, so everyone was in one place. There would be a 'season-long' arc overseen by staff, but a lot of the actual meat would be individual offworld missions run as PRPs. You'd get together an SG team, dial the gate, poof to whatever little set the PRP runner needed, they'd run things for you there, and then you'd dial home and go back to the SGC.

When I had no other staffers, though, I decided I was not up to running a game solo and put it aside. Years later, I considered using the same MUSH codebase for an SG:A game instead of SGC, but didn't end up doing so.

Several years ago, I ended up playing on a Mass Effect game which had a similar setup; the playerbase were a mercenary crew based on Omega (a former mining station turned sort of lawless outpost). All the downtime and day-to-day RP happened on Omega, and then staff or a player would run a 'mission' that the mercs would be hired for, and a team would be put together, leave Omega, do stuff, and come back. (And a lot of the staff-run missions tied together into a given metaplot arc, while the PRPs were usually more standalone.) So even though there was a whole galaxy that the mercs could end up taking jobs in, everyone would still be together at 'home base' as it were.

I think if you're doing a game with a huge multi-planet scope, something like that makes more sense to do if you want the playerbase to actually have any cohesion and excuse to all interact with each other.

[Cura]

An afterthought that occurred to me as a 'oh, right -- duh' when I woke up: In space, time acts differently for people depending on circumstances.

Traveling at luminal speeds makes time pass more slowly for the person doing that traveling than it does for someone who isn't doing that, because PHYSICS~!

And the 24-hour day is an Earth-specific convention that doesn't apply once you go rocketing off into a void where 'day' and 'night' have no meaning other than the one we ascribe to it. Most sci-fi settings try to work with 24-hour days based on the very real consideration that we're a diurnal creature that evolved to live on that schedule (though non-24 sleepers like myself might have a small bone to pick with the assumption that this is an inflexible habit, but I digress). In practice, that would probably change regionally to make easier whatever a local lifestyle might be (and I think the Expanse books get it right: we'd be living in shifts, and it would always be someone's 'daytime' and someone's 'night time' in the same location).

Throw these things at a space-based setting and it does a lot to help fuzz up the lines of 'what day even is it right now?' -- because nobody is going to keep track of what day it is EVERYwhere (or at least, I'm sure as hell not), and if Zapp Brannigan is just getting into town from somewhere else in the spiral arm and for him it's Tuesday, and Zaphod Beeblebrox has been on Earth getting wasted for a week and says he's pretty sure it's Friday, well...that's probably business as usual.

Especially for those two.

[BetterJudgment]

@Ganymede said in Space Games and Travel Time? Why? Why Not?:

Have a code-bit that creates a "transit room" for players to enter that represents their ship in travel when a trip is initiated, and essentially locks it down for a period of time equal to the "real time" travel time.

Something like this was done on Elendor so that groups could travel from one culture to another on their gigantic grid where travel times were strictly enforced and where intercultural contact happened almost entirely through staff-run plots. The object used was a "tent." When you set out, everyone got in the tent, which was taken by the person leading the plot. That person would then drop the tent in rooms on the grid along the route throughout the period of travel, which could last for a week OOC.

Characters could leave the tent, RP in that location, then get back in the tent. (Or be transported to the right spot the next time they logged in if they forgot to get back in.) Things could be planned along the way. Once you got to the destination, everyone would RP there for the duration of the event, then get back in the tent for the return journey. Want to go traveling but can't be there when everyone sets out two evenings hence? Just log out in the tent, which is set up in a public room, before the departure.

Maybe this is dead ordinary, but I always thought it worked well in that particularly restrictive setting.