mdlake.net

(Apoligies for this being late; we had some trouble with the site on Friday, so I'm posting this now.)

Our current RPG campaign is drawing to a close, perhaps in another three months’ time. That means we’re already thinking about what we’ll be doing next, especially the GM, who has a lot of planning to do before the first die hits the table. We’ve settled on a relatively low-powered space opera, one that occasionally bows to modern science instead of treating technology as a magic wand.

Later, once the ground rules are set, ascendancy passes to the improvisational acting. A couple of my fellow players feel that we can’t reach this stage soon enough, that discussing technology is both boring and a waste of effort. In their minds, the story remains the same with different costumes, and technology doesn’t truly dictate the shape of anything meaningful, in our fictional world or the real one.

Of course, they’re deeply wrong on both counts, though hand-waving can conceal just how absurd the proposition is. Yes, empires rise and fall, but British hegemony in 19th century Europe, built on steam, coal, and iron, was very different in human terms as well as power-political ones from the German hegemony of the 20th century, built on electricity, oil, and steel. The human condition was fundamentally changed by the plow, the printing press, and the assembly line.

Fiction, of course, has the luxury of pretending that, as the French would have it, the more things change, the more they stay the same. But only so far. When Mr. Spock offers some screwball rubber physics explanation to Captain Kirk about why the aliens on this planet look and act like humans from classical Greece, he sounds stupid, especially if he said something flatly contradictory in the last episode. Our characters, and the space opera world they inhabit, would look equally stupid if it were possible to travel faster than light one week, but not the next. So we need to think about the science of our space opera ahead of time.

Most of the burden falls to Dave, who will occupy the GM’s seat, and therefore must create a setting where his desired (and partially hidden) plotlines can survive, but I’m helping where I can. The trick lies in choosing which scientific/technical limitations to break, and Larry Niven showed us how to make those decisions in his outstanding essay “The Theory and Practice of Teleportation.”

I’ve mentioned that essay before. In it, Niven explores the ramifications of teleportation under various constraints: what if teleportation requires a sending unit, but no receiving unit? A receiver but no sender? Both receiver and sender? What if teleporting long distances is expensive, but teleporting short distances cheap? What if the cost is constant at any distance, and expensive? Constant and cheap? What if the cost varies with the mass of the teleported body? What if teleporting to a different height changes the temperature of the teleporting body, to conserve the potential kinetic energy (k=mgh)? Different constraints give different socioeconomic results.

The same is true with space travel. Our RPG earth has interplanetary travel, and settlements on the moon, Mars, and in the asteroid belet. It also has an alien empire, which recently discovered us. They FTL travel, and they won’t share. Our solar system has suddenly become the third world of a much larger universe, complete with patronizing foreign “investors” and an unwanted colony draining Jupiter of its hydrogen.

Just how much our heroes can do to change the situation and rescue humanity from exploitation depends heavily on further assumptions about space travel, and their implications. We have space travel, but is it cheap enough to compete with alien trade ships, even within our own solar system? If we had the secret of FTL travel, could we implement it, or would we lack necessary support industries, like Yanomami tribesmen given blueprints for a helicopter? The aliens want things we have, but can they be interested in something other than our (irreplaceable) raw materials? While our heroes operate their tramp freighter and look for opportunity, they’ll be competing with human bulk freighters. In which trades can they compete effectively? The answer will determine where they could reasonably go. If, for example, per-cargo-ton fuel costs to get out of the gravity well of earth are prohibitive for small craft, we won’t be going to earth, which cuts off a lot of potential adventures. For that matter, how cheap is the fuel to get out of any gravity well? If it’s cheap, we can haul all kinds of cargos; if it’s expensive, only high-value cargoes are worth it. Cheap cargoes get ignored, but expensive cargoes means piracy. The existence of space pirates is important to characters in an adventure RPG. How easy is it to hit a jump point at the right velocity? The answer has huge implications for the viability of a plan to grab something (say, the secrets of cheap matter transmutation) and run. This in turn affects what character designs would be interesting to play; a character designed to snatch something and run is a lot less interesting in a world where that tactic won’t work.

So two words of warning to any players out there who decide that the “boring” parts (e.g., physics, economics, politics) of your adventure world aren’t important: They are. If you care about your character’s effectiveness in your fictional world, or about whether your schemes will work, the time to consider these questions is right up front, when the GM is hashing them out. Think about what you want to be able to do, and help him by telling him so. Only with a bit of forethought can those choices be viable.