Brainstorming on describing the environment, the Powers that Be acting within it, and their motivations. Also who the players are, why there are so many of them (we hope), and what there is to do in the game, but more importantly why.

Constraints: Characterization of the Environment

Discussion elsewhere is split between using one star system as the initial environment, or using a fairly extensive volume of space to work with from the get-go. When this gels, we'll have some important questions to answer about the history of human expansion.

Regardless of the extent of the environment, we'll want to look at how humans got where they have so far - and what degree of technology we are working with. Level of technology is going to be a very important story and background consideration, because it will feed back on gameplay and how much "science-fantasy" we include versus "hard science" in terms of available equipment, ship designs, and extent of habitation, among many other things, including even the look-and-feel of the game itself.

Here's an example: I might like to see ship designs that look "industrial", like say the Eagle craft from Space: 1999 (have I revealed my age yet? DJH I watched first-run episodes of Star Trek, and Dan's got me beat by a couple of years ;-) IstvanOK, I guess I'm forced to admit my first exposure to Trek was only reruns in the 70's....). That's not very high-tech (In fact, that type of ship might be more of a non-player non-atmospheric shuttle/lander...). Is that model state-of-the-art, or decrepit junk?

I'd like to see an old enough spacefaring society such that we've got second-order economic processes. By that I mean that not only are raw materials shipped from space to planets, and manufactured goods made available at station markets, but also that salvage and used equipment, even whole or partial ships, is a factor in the day-to-day economy. That kind of reuse of "second-order resources" arguably would be vital anyway, just because of the environmental barriers inherent in space to having manufactured goods easily distributed to all points (yah, I'm slamming Jumpgate a little here), but I'm also interested in getting that kind of look-and-feel. Not just to build a gritty "make do with what we've got", "no free lunch" environment, but also to allow for the Han Solo-"you came here in that thing?" effect, in which players might cobble together a pretty great ship from all sorts of components and a beat-up hull.

DWM I really like these ideas!

Society and Politics

Istvan Assuming a single star system (doubly assuming it's ours), my default approach is going to be to start babbling ideas that I'd associated with Ecliptic and its sociopolitical model (which let me emphasize are open to discussion and change). However, even before I open that tin of worms, I have a gallon jug of bait I'd like to smear around: If the game is not terribly far future, do we want to use "real" governments as political entities?

For example, we could candy-coat our environment, and make up "EarthGov" (which might rule the Moon, too), and "MarsGov" and a couple others we find apropos. I was basically headed in this direction with Ecliptic and there are certainly ways to make it interesting.

Or. We could live dangerously and use real nations, or nation-blocs, in which case our backstory does not have to mystically unify the government of our fractious planet. This was a design decision in Traveller:2300 (GDW, 1980's) that I admit impressed me. In that post-WWIII game (designed in the Reagan era, you understand), we have star travel, but nation-states still squabble. France, Germany, Britain, China and an Australian-American alliance were the larger spacefaring powers. It made for interesting politics, with a mix of the familar with the futuristic.

DJH Traveller had an advantage that we don't: a GM that 1) guided players to places where sufficient preparations had been made and 2) could make rules up on the fly to accommodate inadequecies in the preparations. Supporting nations is not impossible. Given the current theme of keeping the game within a single system, supporting nations may be a necessity. It may mean we need to include some support for travelling across hostile borders on the ground as well as in space, even if the players themselves can't actually do it. For example, players nay need to negotiate with some loose coalition of nations to gain access to planetary-scale space, and then negotiate for access again for space above particular nations. It may be that players must reach orbit and change orbital airspace to move between nations (even next-door-neighbors) rather than using sub-orbital flight. But ground-based transports owned by the players have no such restrictions.

Istvan Actually, I am still operating on the assumption that we won't handle planetary surfaces - player-ships entering an atmosphere are destroyed. Players would operate out of stations and facilities owned by the nation-states. Perhaps China and India have a major presence on Luna, and the EU and the CanAm confederacy own Mars....

For our own game, I'd suggest choosing large nation-blocs as the Big Powers, with possibly some singletons: the European Union for sure, Mercosur (Latin America), China, possibly a Russian(-led?) Confederation, an African Union (founded last year, though nobody noticed), and some variant on a US-Canada or North American consortium. Other nations not falling into one of these supranational Orgs might still be represented by a semi-functional United Nations, which might register ships under its own flag (kind of like the Nonaligned Worlds in Babylon 5, though I hadn't really meant to make that a deep parallel). The fundamental question is, do we want to go here at all, and risk social issues deriving from modernity entering the game? We know there will be trash and hate talk in the player community no matter what we do. I wonder whether it's more idealistic to side with simulationist realism, or to strive for a utopian view instead, in the hope it will preclude some of our planet's historical troubles.

Nature of Warfare

Related both to the history of spaceflight, and to politics, is the history, or lack thereof, of armed conflict in space. Dedicated military equipment is expensive. We might find we need that kind of drain on the economy for balance, but it might also be interesting to assume that there are few or no dedicated warships in our environment. Instead, fleets might be made up of vessels built for other purposes and converted for war, some of which might now effectively be dedicated warships, but which still look like transports or whatnot. This thinking also carries into the realm of weapons. Larry Niven's "Known Space" short stories, particularly early ones, have good examples of the use of improvised armaments in space combat. Things like an oversized communications laser, rocket pods converted into simple missiles, fusion-reaction motors, and well, nukes, all make useful weapons in a pinch. Niven and Pournelle's <u>Footfall</u>, in which a modern Earth tries to defend itself against not-too-advanced Centaurans using improvised weapons (a cobbled-together Project Orion type vessel, using: gamma-ray lasers pumped by nukes, space shuttles with their cargo bays full of missile launchers, and the main turrets off a New Jersey-class battleship as light armament) is also inspirational, but slightly lower-tech than I'd want at minimum.

In order to make gameplay opportunities, I propose a fairly unsophisticated approach to space war. The major governmental powers should each have a few advanced, dedicated vessels, which serve for power projection and as a naval core cadre. Most "warships", though, would be privately owned, but commissioned by a navy for various duties. Players can sign their ships up for tours of duty, and might get access to certain specialized equipment for the duration of the tour. Players would get paid for service, obviously, should gain reputation advantages for good service, and might get credits toward leasing or purchase of advanced equipment when they muster out of the service (after several exemplary tours). This last idea is derived from the venerable paper-and-pencil sci-fi RPG "Traveller", in which gameplay begins with the characters leaving a military service after years of duty, and mustering out with the sort of equipment needed for adventure among the stars.

To help keep the game environment active and dynamic, I suggest that there should be one or more low-level conflicts between governments or corporations at all times. By conflict, I mean "a high probability of a small skirmish". These should, however, be events with objectives, rather than the random noise seen in the Jumpgate environment. Large fleet actions and similar drama should be provided for, but should be reserved for events that create significant change in the environment - such as an ownership change for a chunk of real estate.

I visualize most of the military resources of a government as being defensive in nature. These forces would have security missions, and would not necessarily be large vessels. Rather, they would be player-scale vessels with missions that look more like "police" than "military" - such as customs cutters based at or near space stations that do cargo inspection and local patrols, or fast, deepspace SAR pinnaces, whose usual mission is to rescue derelict vessels or pick up lifepods. One of the principal gameplay roles of the military forces will be enforcement of environmental rules - such as simulation of laws that we set up to prevent overt grief play. The secondary role of the military will be to execute tasks set by the sociopolitical engine. The tertiary role will probably be to look cool.