[Sotff] Harder sf fate

[Alan Barclay]

Hi Brad,

I certainly understand the desire to streamline. What I liked about the
detailed traveller world generation was the good chance that you'd get a
weird juxtaposition of results -- eg Thick toxic atmosphere with low
gravity. The fun was explaining why this was so. It was a creative trigger.
I hope your system will have something similar.

As for trying to anticipate exoplanetary science (Where's this sim thinking
coming from?) -- fah! Who cares! Just generate interesting worlds. 

- Alan

-----Original Message-----
From: sotff-bounces at phreeow.net [mailto:sotff-bounces at phreeow.net] On Behalf
Of Brad Murray
Sent: Friday, September 26, 2008 2:18 PM
To: Spirit of the Far Future
Subject: Re: [Sotff] Harder sf fate

On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 1:56 PM, Alan Barclay <nitrosyncretic at gmail.com>
wrote:
> I really like the idea of minimizing setting detail. I liked the very
first
> Traveller booklets, before they published much setting material. With
those
> you just generated the worlds and invented your own background and world
> cultures. I'd really like to see that approach for sotff.

We are certainly going this way. Our current world generation
generates only system habitability, resources, and technology.
Everything else is left to the GM (or the players) to elaborate. We
didn't really want to get caught up in detailed physical system
generation (star type, number of planets, etc.) for a couple of
reasons. More than a couple:

1. Not everyone at my table finds it fun.
2. We wanted to build a new cluster for a game rapidly and as a shared
mini-game for all players.
3. Existing knowledge of planetary system formation is only now being
exposed to empirical data from outside the solar system -- almost
everything we think we know is about to change.
4. Abstraction suits Fate/SotC really well

What we playtested last night was fun and built clusters that look fun
to play in, while keeping hard sf tropes I think. Lots of "what do
these numbers MEAN" moments that led to cool systems and cool
interactions between them.

-- 
Brad Murray (halfjack)

All the money's gone -- nowhere to go.
But oh that magic feeling -- nowhere to go.

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