Sci Fi/Opera Originality

EMDA

Like to be brutally honest, theme almost doesn't matter all that much in the big scheme of things. The overwhelming majority of us have probably RP'd in a wide range of settings. The initial experience of, 'Did I have fun RP when I logged in', that's pretty much all that matters whether something catches on, and theme is just a subset of that. A game runner that's super active and tells fun stories will probably make anything work all right.

Yeah. I think it's safe to say that theme is a pretty big factor for getting people to give a game a shot and actually log in, but does almost nothing to keep them playing. Once you're on the smoothness of the mechanics, activity on the game, and RP style all matter way more.

Sci-fi is my one true love and I would be head over heels for a well-polished game that someone (else) slaved over to make happen. IMO I think the smaller in scope you make a game like that the more successful you'll be. If you spin up a game about a group (or groups) trapped on a space station going into lockdown, or a specific city/embassy/outpost on the frontier, or something similar, you both cut back on the need to explain every detail about how things work for handfuls of planets and wide ranges of technology and allow yourself to shunt some of those explanations into plot elements to encourage the mystery/exploration aspects of plots, which I think any science fiction game worth its salt ought to have.

Apos

@emda The temptation of anyone creating their own theme is trying to tell everything about it all at once. People make a setting. They are understandably excited about the setting. They want to share their excitement.

Can't do it. Need to approach it from what's important, and fill in details as they are asked. Yes, someone will desperately want to know whatever excruciatingly minor pedantic detail they obsess over and there's a million of those but have to focus on what are the core story elements, even if a huge percentage of that will be hidden and just slowly come out as the stories are told.

surreality

@apos While I agree with you in theory, sci-fi really is its own animal in this regard, and is substantially different from creating a fantasy-based setting. @faraday is not wrong on the lottery comparison, and every world-building guide for creating a world for fiction (interactive or otherwise) under the sun (or from the moon?) will tell you this explicitly, too. The expectations and requirements are substantially different, as is the required knowledge base.

I have played on many excellent original theme (and/or system) games, sometimes for years, quite happily.

None of them were sci-fi games.

Not because I wouldn't have been interested, but because they weren't there. By the time I'd hear they existed, they'd typically be down to two people logging in ever, and on their way to their demise.

Apos

@surreality There's pacing though. Like take the first episode of any sci fi series or the first hundred pages of a sci fi novel. It doesn't have to all be there from the get go, and I think people want to answer every possible question before they get going and that cripples their ability to get going at all.

Sci fi differs because intrinsic to the setting people want to very clearly illustrate how it's different from the real world. You do that, but in measured strokes or else you will drown in it.

Edit to add: Imo people wanna say, 'Here's a setting I'm making, and I can tell stories in it', when they need to approach it from, 'Here's stories I wanna tell, and this is a setting I can set those in.'

surreality

@apos I don't disagree with what you are saying as it regards writing fiction, or even creating a game world in any other genre. (Or even in a more fantasy-based sci-fi genre to some extent, like Dune, or the Martian Chronicles.)

I vehemently disagree with what you are saying as it pertains to a MUX on which players are going to be making characters that have expertise in some area or another that you have to define as existing in the first place, what it entails, and why it's the difference between life and death when you're living on a space ship.

Regarding the edit, that's the problem: that is not something that can be done as easily in sci-fi.

There is a non-trivial reason that 'world building guides' even for non-interactive fiction in which there is only one (or a small duo or trio) of authors at work cover more or less everything -- and then have a whole additional book specifically for sci-fi settings. The audience expectations are that intrinsically different.

ETA: Pacing to reveal things to a reader or viewer is way, way different than necessary exposition for players to be able to create the characters they want to play in sci-fi. As a passive consumer of fiction, you may not know the ship runs on a warp drive that uses byzantium217 hydrocores on day one, but the person playing the ship's engineer? Needs to know this.

Lotherio

@apos said in Sci Fi/Opera Originality:

Imo people wanna say, 'Here's a setting I'm making, and I can tell stories in it', when they need to approach it from, 'Here's stories I wanna tell, and this is a setting I can set those in.'

I think I'm different here. If I'm making a setting, I'm looking at it as, here is something I'd enjoy playing in, both writing stories and reacting too. And I look at it more as, I want players that look at it and say, "I can tell stories here, it seems ripe for exploration/plotting/storytelling." If I go some place that seems like the creators have a story to tell and I'm just going to be a part of their story, I tend to shy away myself. Then again, I prefer open ended rather than heavy specific plots and meta arcs (Mr. Invincible, "No matter how many times you save the world, it always manages to get in jeopardy again")

Crawfish

oh god please do this I would play the ever-loving fuck out of a game like this. Please.

surreality

@lotherio Pretty much this. I'm not the only one telling stories in the world, even if I am the world's creator. I want to create the tools required to enable and encourage people to tell their own stories in it as well, that are meaningful to them, and this requires providing them with information and tools that enable them to do that.

This may mean having all of the information about everything available from day one, with 'what you know IC' clearly marked out and 'what you will want to look at if you want to start crafting plots based in X aspect of the setting' marked as necessary (that isn't required for the non-scene-running player to know, or for the characters to know; in many cases this is stuff the characters explicitly do not know!) for that purpose, and so on. This creates a cohesive framework onto which others can build.

"What the players need to know about the world because their characters would know it" is a bigger pile of text in sci-fi than it is for nearly anything else, particularly if they are interacting with technology in almost any way.

Lithium

The problem with original theme anything is that it can make it difficult for others to feel capable of helping to create the story and the world. With most published games, everyone has a common ground to go on, and knows what may or may not be allowed just by virtue of how in depth the setting is. If you are creating your own setting you /have/ to have enough detail for people to feel that they know the world, have a grasp of it, and are comfortable with telling their own stories in it.

It's a tricky thing to balance, and it is doubly hard when so many games are just unwilling to allow the players any agency and ability to change anything.

That said, I love sci fi. I don't actually feel Star Wars is Sci Fi that much because there is to many magic elements to it (The Force) where as with Star Trek, most games seem to large to really have much an impact on, or the game runners simply do not allow things to go off their carefully planned rails.

I would love an original themed sci fi game, but, you have to keep it fairly small in setting with the possibility of one offs that can impact things.

Something like... a colony ship using some sort of FTL drive system that goes out of wack, nobody really knows how to fix it for whatever reason (The right techies are still in hypersleep, they don't have the parts for the type of damage, the damage makes the room inaccessible, something...) Maybe the FTL system makes hops and has to recharge, so you have breaks in the jumps, and sometimes there are alien worlds or alien wrecks, or who knows what outside and you've got to scavenge for supplies. People can try alternate means to try and get to the engine to get it fixed, etc.

That way people can have their PrP's, they might even be able to fix the bloody ship, who knows, maybe it just /stops/ and the people are in unknown space, maybe a whole other galaxy, maybe in dark space...

Anyways the setting needs to allow for people to tell their own stories, and still feel engaged in the setting so that it doesn't taper off and die without constant staff storytelling.

faraday

@surreality said in Sci Fi/Opera Originality:

I vehemently disagree with what you are saying as it pertains to a MUX on which players are going to be making characters that have expertise in some area or another that you have to define as existing in the first place, what it entails, and why it's the difference between life and death when you're living on a space ship.

Yeah I agree with this. Take Firefly for instance. It was definitely a "dole out theme as needed" sort of thing, because it was an intensely focused story with a very limited number of characters. It didn't matter what Bellerophon was like - or even that it existed! - until they got there. Everything Kaylee did with the engines was a level of Handwavium that frankly most MU sci-fi players wouldn't tolerate.

That is an extremely different animal than a MU, where you have a widely diverse group of characters doing a widely diverse set of things with a whole different set of expectations.

Fantasy settings often get around this by having everyone be from the same kingdom - and travel isn't as easy / important to the setting. Plus the audience is a bit more tolerant of "eh it's magic, just go with it" than sci-fi folks tend to be.

surreality

@faraday Modern or historical-feel fantasy settings also build on mostly established knowledge in ways future settings don't.

Nobody's going to be asking 'what's a horse?' or 'what's a sword?' -- they may ask 'what's a bloorglebeast' if that's what everyone's riding in your world, but you can tell them, "It's kinda like a horse with scales and feathery bits instead of a mane!" and that's going to cover 99% of anything anyone is ever going to need to know about the noble bloorglebeast.

You have to tell people what a phaser is, and what it does, if all of your players playing security personnel are going to be armed with them.

You have to tell people what a pod is, and what it does, if that's what your little transit shuttles are called, and you need to establish how many people fit in one and how fast they go and whether they can survive re-entry to serve as landing pods or how long their life support lasts if you're stranded in one or or or or or or or...

...and I'm a very much self-defined not tech-heavy person, but even I could go on and on about the things people would need to know -- because their characters would know it and live it and breathe it every day -- before they even made those characters.

You can't just fudge that base level of required info, and 'what kind of story you want to tell' has absolutely nothing to do with it.

The higher the tech level of a game, the greater any individual character and player's agency is in it, barring the rarest exceptions. (The 100, for instance: all that high tech is useless if it's all broken and scattered as non-functioning debris across the landscape, at which point you're not really telling a sci-fi genre story any more, you're telling a survival genre story set in the future with technology existing solely as plot mcguffins or set dressing. It essentially has more in common with The Walking Dead than it does with Star Wars.)

Apos

I know what people demand. That they want extremely exhaustive answers on how everything works so they can tell their own compelling stories in the setting. I know that if you say, 'Well that's a transporter' that people are going to ask 800 questions on what a transporter is, and exhaustively ask at length why you can or can't use it to create new life or rebuild anything else at the molecular level or a million other things. I get that every engineer character is going to feel they need to know all those.

What I'm saying is it's wrong for a game creator to try to answer them. That it's a mistake to do so.

I think that you should only go very slightly past the knowledge that any general character would have access to. Just a little bit. A few paragraphs at most. You absolutely will never, ever get started if you try to exhaustively define every aspect of the setting. Let me put it another way:

Sure, you'll have phasers or blasters or laser cannons or whatever in the setting. You really don't need to define them past a sentence or two that amounts to 'pew pew'. That's it. If you make other races, and have diplomat characters, you can't write 300 or 400 pages on the hundreds of years of history between the different aliens, and their cultures. There is never going to be a point where you are 'done' there. If you are drawn into rabbit holes away from the baselines, it will never get done, and no one will ever be able to RP in the setting.

Yes, of course I know people have way different demands for sci fi and fantasy. I'm saying it's a mistake for a game designer to try to -meet- those demands initially. It is impossible to do so. And imo the reason why almost no sci fi original theme games exist is because the designers, excited about their settings, want to try to do so. Don't. Say as much as you need, and nothing more.

faraday

@apos I think you're understating the impact of different societies on everyday RP.

For example - when I played on 100 there was this one scene where some of the Arkers were visiting the city and it's like... wait, how does the economy work? Are there restaurants or is it a like a tribal common meal? Can I just go and say "These are my guests, give them food" or do I pay for it or what? Is it some grand faux-pas to bring outsiders to the marketplace? IS there even a marketplace if there's no free economy?

This crap is not easy, and yet it's vital if you want to do scenes beyond: "okay we get food somewhere somehow... handwave handwave handwave"

The same can be said for leisure time, sports, popular media, etc. To say nothing of the complexities if you introduce aliens.

In a fantasy setting everyone pretty much has a shorthand of "DND economy / feudal politics" and you're off to the races. People don't travel as much and it's not like they have the internet, so ignorance is easy to handwave ICly without your character looking like an uneducated bumpkin.

This kind of stuff is way more impactful than someone demanding "tell me all about how a phaser works".

Apos

@faraday Nah man I really think people just are making it hard because of the burning need to explain in exhaustive detail. You can break down different economies into trope approaches too. You can say post-apocalyptic barter, you can say utopian without any effective economy due to needs all being practically met, you can say bladerunner dystopian. People are familiar with the genres of sci fi, if you are making a grimdark warhammer 40k esqe game, they'll get from the get go that it's not utopian. So keep it to broad themes and address questions as necessary.

I think people picture that I'm blithely waving off the questions people will ask. I'm not though. I'm saying most just aren't story critical, and and are generally going to be people having a burning desire to know everything about a setting so they can make their head canon click.

faraday

@apos I'm not saying they're story-critical, I'm saying they're roleplay-critical. I, for one, don't want to be going through every scene feeling like I'm on shifting sands of not knowing the way the world works, nor do I want to be constantly having to interrupt a scene to ask basic life questions.

Sure, you can boil everything down to tropes. That's basically what I did with BSGU. "It's Space-France with this, or modern-day tech with that." But most sci-fi fans find that lazy and unsatisfying. YMMV.

Apos

@faraday It's impossible to satisfy those guys unless you are their personal GM that doesn't do anything but sit on their shoulder and answer their questions as they go through the setting, though. And while that sounds like hyperbole, I do not believe it is. People are used to approaching things as the protagonist of the story, and sci fi is pretty steeped in discovery, so they want to be the one to do that, and it is impossible to do that for a full player base. If a question isn't really applicable to most of the characters, I just don't think it should be answered at length. If it is applicable to every character, then sure answer it publicly in a way that prevents repetition and the setting gets more fleshed out as questions that apply to everyone come out.

faraday

@apos said in Sci Fi/Opera Originality:

People are used to approaching things as the protagonist of the story, and sci fi is pretty steeped in discovery, so they want to be the one to do that, and it is impossible to do that for a full player base.

That is exactly the sort of thing I'm getting at as to why original sci-fi settings are so hard. Players want to do this. Sure you can try to fight it but you're swimming upstream. Good luck with that.

surreality

@apos said in Sci Fi/Opera Originality:

so they can make their head canon click.

This is sorta the point. Some people are not going to be able to get interested in playing at all unless they are able to wrap their heads around how things work.

This point varies for different people.

Wanting things to make sense in a way they can understand is not a bad thing for someone to want.

ETA: Also, I have to disagree with the 'want to detail every little thing' being the problem. I'm one of those people that loves detailing every little thing -- and I know even my level of Tolkien disease (which is nigh terminal) is not enough for the average sci-fi genre fan if I was going to make an OT sci-fi game.

Apos

@faraday said in Sci Fi/Opera Originality:

@apos said in Sci Fi/Opera Originality:

People are used to approaching things as the protagonist of the story, and sci fi is pretty steeped in discovery, so they want to be the one to do that, and it is impossible to do that for a full player base.

That is exactly the sort of thing I'm getting at as to why original sci-fi settings are so hard. Players want to do this. Sure you can try to fight it but you're swimming upstream. Good luck with that.

I think you're saying that, 'Unless you are willing to accommodate that, a sci fi game will not be successful because it will alienate its fans.' And I'm actually saying the opposite. 'If you -try- to accommodate that, your game will fail. It can only be successful if you are willing to alienate them.'

Anyone wanting to run a sci fi game with an original theme has to be incredibly disciplined in how they approach knowledge because it is a rabbit hole that they might never escape from. They have to be able to be strict when separating the elements they need to get across. They need to be able to divide up fundamental baseline elements that every character must know, from those that are roleplay critical for one person or small group to move a story forward, from those critical for one person, to those that would be nice to know and add flavor to headcanon but are irrelevant for many people in their every day RP.

People creating a game are excited about that setting and they will naturally -want- to answer every question. They should not do this. There will always be more questions than there is time to answer, and they need to approach it in a disciplined way or else their time is going to be dominated by a handful of very curious individuals and their game will fail because they don't make enough story to appeal to people that are less demanding.

It's really about buying time. Someone wanting to make an original theme game has to have it be fun so people are RPing and entertaining one another, so then they get the time necessary to answer the questions that flesh out the world. If they try to do it at the start, they will never, ever get the time, and the people that would be creating activity will drift off, and the people they massively invested in on a personal level will have nothing to do and also leave. So trying to answer all of Engineer Bob's questions about how the warp core actually works before they have vibrant story going is going to destroy their game. And Bob might quit, and that's too bad, but more reasonable Engineer Phil will be okay with getting the answers in 3 or 4 months when things are more stable.

Like, I wrote for the better part of a year before starting Arx. Fantasy games are under much less scrutiny than sci fi, sure. But all told, that was what, maybe novelette length worth in lore? Now there is well up into the thousands of pages, and it's still mostly from me, but it's about buying yourself the time to do that. And it cannot be done by trying to accommodate the neediest people that aren't in turn entertaining others.

faraday

@apos said in Sci Fi/Opera Originality:

I think you're saying that, 'Unless you are willing to accommodate that, a sci fi game will not be successful because it will alienate its fans.'

No that's really not at all what I'm saying, but I'm not sure how to make what I said any clearer without repeating myself so I'm just gonna let it go.