[Diaspora] Fwd: Diaspora for less hard Sci-fi (an answer)

[C. W. Marshall]

I sent this answer earlier, but it  seems to have gone only to the  
OP; it was meant for anybody.

Begin forwarded message:

> From: "C. W. Marshall" <toph at interchange.ubc.ca>
> Date: September 19, 2009 4:54:16 PM PDT (CA)
> To: Darren Brewster <excrusader at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Diaspora] Diaspora for less hard Sci-fi (an answer)
>
>
> Hi Darren,
>
> Great question.  There is no doubt the kickin' awesomeness of over- 
> the-top adventure lineage is there, and it's really not that hard  
> to pull out from Diaspora, I'd have thought. A lot of Space Opera  
> is in tone and ambition, and that's something governed at the  
> table: players decide they want to do back flips while firing and  
> jumping from one craft to another, a difficulty is set, and dice  
> start a-rollin'. A lot of tone just depends where the difficulty  
> gets set, and the stories the players want to tell.
>
> Even as we were designing the game, the temptation to tell less- 
> hard stories crept in, and so we've given rules for psionics,  
> aliens, and fighters -- we even put aliens in our sample sector,  
> just to show we want tables to mess around with the toolkit we've  
> provided. And testing these things out, my sense is that it all  
> plays just as well (of course, I might have been responsible for  
> the genesis of some of these softer things, and so it was my itch  
> being scratched).
>
> Something like Star Trek would be a natural, and the social  
> initiative in the space combat section arose in our imaginations  
> from submarine movies and (of course) the Star Trek original series  
> episode, "Balance of Terror", where the choice to fire involves a  
> calculus, and a real decision from the captain. The spacecraft  
> system is tuned to only a couple of vessels though -- if you wanted  
> to do epic fleet encounters, I'd suggest sing the Social Combat  
> rules instead.
>
> I hope this helps, and encourages you to try it out. If you do,  
> post your AP -- we'll send you some dice!
>
> Toph
>

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