[Diaspora] Using Diaspora for a 'Revelation Space'/'Counting to Infinity'-type game (long)

[Kenneth Coble]

I think I mentioned something like this on the old Spirit of the Far
Future list, so apologies for the repetition.  But some of the people
I play boardgames with are talking about starting up some role-playing
again in the next few months, and one of the suggestions getting the
most traction is Diaspora (hooray)!  Now, my copy of the game is lent
out in an effort to stump up support for this idea, so I'm going to be
sort of vague here, but I'd really appreciate some feedback and
suggestions on this concept, particularly on game-mechanical stuff.
I'll do this in blocks so (hopefully) as not to overwhelm the list
with one giant wall of text; here's hoping that a few smaller walls of
text over the next few days will go over better!

Issue the First: Clusters and Travel
If you're not familiar with Alastair Reynolds' 'Revelation Space' or
haven't seen the 'Counting to Infinity' thread it inspired on RPG.net
here:

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=294175

then very briefly, the concept is that there are a few human-colonized
worlds, loosely connected by STL ships.  The fastest of these ships
(or maybe the 'only' of these, depending on what the table wants out
of the game) are the 'lighthuggers,' which as the name implies travel
really close to lightspeed using barely-understood
borderline-Transcendent engine technology.  In a lighthugger Diaspora
game cluster creation builds the little pocket of worlds in the PCs'
known universe in mostly the same way it would for a normal game.  The
first main difference is that the connections map, rather than showing
which worlds have slip points connecting them, shows you very roughly
how far apart the inhabited systems are, in terms of 'average travel
legs' or something.

That leads directly into the second difference.  Right now, the
concept is that for each 'jump' link travelled, X number of years pass
(still working on what X should be), and for each iteration of X (or
2X? 3X? still an open question) that goes by, you roll 4dF again for
each of the world's three statistics, to model the ever-changing
nature of travelling on a lighthugger.  For you it's been a year or
three, minus a chunk of time spent hibernating; but by the time you
get back to Secaucus VII after 4 'legs' of near-lightspeed flight,
there's been two wars, a massive failure of the terraforming plan, and
the survivors have either reverted to stone-age savagery or
accidentally Transcended using some of the crap you sold them last
time and you can't quite tell which it was.  And there's no real way
for you to know any of this crap happened until you get there!

PROBLEM #1: I want to keep the 'table-centric' nature of cluster
creation going, rather than turning this into some bookkeeping
exercise for a single GM.  The problem is that again, there's no real
way for the PCs to know what's happening at the opposite end of the
cluster until they get there, but having the whole group roll up the
changes for every world they know for each tick of the notional clock
about seems like it might detract from the 'wtf' factor of arriving at
the place they got chased out of 100 years ago to discover they've
been canonized in the meantime.  Right now, I'm thinking of two ways
to handle this:
1a) only roll once upon arrival, no matter how long you've been gone;
trusting in the relative flatness of the 4dF curve to simulate the
cumulative changes either dampening themselves out (getting a 0
result) or spiking (++++ or ----) while you were away.  This is
simplest, and the one I'm thinking we'll probably use unless you folks
help me see a big flaw with it.
1b) keep a 'campaign clock' running of how long the PCs have been
travelling since the game's start; then if you go to a planet, see how
long it's been since you've been there last, and roll 4dF that many
times. This might give you a neat background to all the stuff that's
happened while you were gone, but as lighthugger crew why should you
give a damn?  Also, while I'm no statistician, this seems like it
would make the final results even flatter than the single 4dF roll,
which is probably not what we want.

THING THAT LOOKS LIKE A PROBLEM BUT ISN'T #1: planets Transcending
while you're gone will bring a nice touch of Vernor Vinge's "Marooned
in Realtime" to the setting.  Anything less than that (bottoming out
on Resources, Tech or Environment) doesn't have to destroy the planet
(unless the table wants for it to), and could conceivably be rectified
by some bit of near-godlike technology you've got kicking around in
one of the ten thousand disused cargo holds on your lighthugger

PROBLEM #2: I'd like to come up with some way for the players to be
able to buy some degree of control over the rolls for a given system
if they want to - either via explicit PC actions ("We're going to prop
up the local kleptocracy so hopefully there's someone who can afford
our stuff next time we stop here")  or by fallout effects ("Cap'n Joe
don't care if selling them this Archive pushes them into
Transcendence; it's taking up space in the break room and they
probably won't be able to work it anyway").  I'm still not comfortable
enough with FATE to figure out how to best handle this, however.  My
tentative first idea is that the PC or PCs in question find some way
to place a new Aspect on a world, and then if one of them chooses to
tag that Aspect, they can move 2 points around on the world's 'update'
reroll next time they return there.  The problem here is I'm trying to
figure out how difficult (or how easy) it should be for the PCs (who
are, in this type of setting, possibly at a level of power and caprice
roughly on par with a Greek god) to place that Aspect.  I like the
notion of it being a Fixed difficulty unless one of your shipmates has
plans of her own, in which case it turns into an Opposed roll between
the two players; it fits at least some of the source materials'
depiction of the relationship between ultranauts and the planets they
interact with.  Will this approach be too powerful, or not powerful
enough?

Again, any feedback will be appreciated.  Sometime later this week
I'll post about my second issue - how to handle the powerful,
borderline transhuman creepy bastards that are ultranauts (and
therefore our default PCs) in FATE terms!

Ken