No Abstract Wealth Please; I'm British

I ran a second session of Diaspora yesterday afternoon. I think my overall feeling is that the jury is still out. Some aspects of the game worked well, but others really didn't (although I have to hold up my hands and say that for some reason I felt really off form, like a striker snatching at chances).

What I dislike most about the system is that it abstracts wealth. The way economics works is, you have a "wealth track" which represents how financially secure you are. If it goes down to zero - you're out forever: fiscally dead, reduced to a lifetime of flipping burgers or serving as a debt slave, or whatever. (This in itself is something I strongly dislike, by the way - as long as a PC is alive I want his player thinking about ways to get out of whatever difficulty he is in. That seems like a large percentage of "the game". I recognise that there is a sort of 'story' oriented view that it is interesting to have available the negative consequence of being removed from the narrative permanently, but death seems to me to be the only genuine way of doing this. Though I digress.)

You take financial 'damage' by failing an assets roll. What this boils down to is, to see if you can afford something, you roll against your assets skill. If you miss the required target, you take hits to your wealth track. You can mitigate this damage by taking consequences - from the minor (you are worried about your finances and it might affect your concentration) to the major (you owe a loan shark a shit load of money), but you always get what you want to buy. This is supposed to represent an interesting choice (either don't take a risk and never get anything, or get whatever you want but take a huge risk, potentially involving what is effectively death, in the process), but at least to my gaming style it feels like it takes away something interesting.

That "something interesting" is that, by keeping wealth concrete and not abstract, you prevent players being able to get all the things they want - and this forces them to do interesting things to get the money they need to do that. Wanting better stuff is one of the key seeds from which adventure sprouts, to use a rather shit metaphor. You want a spaceship but don't have the credits? You go out and do whatever it takes to afford one - or you steal one. You want a sword +5 but you don't have the gold? You know there is one at the bottom of that huge abyssal chasm full of hordes of demons - so you go down. Maybe keeping track of gold pieces is a bit bean-counter-ish to some people (I get the sense the Diaspora designers are that kind of person), but it seems to me to be a vital element in giving the game any sort of engine and stopping the players being reactive.

Perhaps I am misunderstanding something, but I have to confess to feeling as if there is something crucial missing when wealth is abstracted in this way.

Zonal Combat

What do you say we lighten things up around here and talk about abstract mapping?

Diaspora has an interesting approach to combat, which would work equally well with D&D - indeed any game system you can think of with a bit of tinkering. I've been tinkering with it. It goes something like this:

When combat looks likely, the DM draws a map, and then divides it up into zones. Zones are not a grid, and do not represent strict distance. Rather, they represent a combination of space, ease of travel, view, and time to pass through. Thus, an open field might be one zone, but a nearby cottage with three rooms might be made up of three separate zones, because the time it takes to sprint across the open field is the same as the amount of time it would take to move between rooms cluttered with furniture. Likewise, a thick forest full of boulders might be divided up into three zones, whereas an area of light woodland of the same "size" might just be one zone - representing the speed with which one can move through each area.

With me so far?

If there are borders between zones (a hedge, a wall, a ditch, a door) these have numerical ratings indicating how long it takes to pass through them. So a hedge might have a rating of "2", indicating that it takes 2 "zones" worth of effort to cross over. (You can climb over in the same amount of time it would take to cross 2 zones.) This is called the "pass value". 

Pass values can change if there is a doorway. If there is a doorway, the pass value is 0 - unless the door is shut, in which case it costs "zones" to open it, indicated by a number, called the "opening value". (A wall would cost 2 "zones" to climb over, so it has a pass value of 2, but it has a gate which would cost "1" zone to open, or an opening value of 1. So the hedge has a pass value of 2/1.) 

Each turn, the player gets one zone of movement and an action. The zone of movement might consist in eroding pass value (e.g. getting half way over a hedge with a pass value of 2), or opening a doorway (e.g. eroding an opening value from 1 to 0.) The action would be the usual sort of thing (cast a spell, attack, whatever). Or he can give up the action to make two zones' worth of movement.

A turn is however long it would take to cross a zone. This means that combat can scale up and scale down to suit the situation. A fight taking place in an area covering a square mile of countryside, or taking place in a few rooms in a hotel reception, would follow exactly the same pattern - it's just that the zones would represent different levels of abstraction. The zones in the former would probably be bigger by area on average, and a turn would be longer (maybe two minutes in the former as opposed to around 10 seconds in the latter). But the rules are exactly the same. Only two things would really change. First, the larger the zones and the longer the turns, the more abstract attack rolls (the attack roll would represent a period of maneuvering and trading blows), and the smaller the zones and shorter the turns, the less abstract attack rolls would become (the attack roll would represent literal single attacks). The other thing that would change would be pass value. A hedge separating two open fields, each about 100 square yards and represented by a zone each, would perhaps have to have a higher pass value than a hedge separating two small gardens of 10 square yards each.

Example:

Here, the open spaces are fields and easier to cross than the woodland areas, so their zones are spatially larger. The stream and hedges have a PV (pass value) of 2. The barn in the middle is its own zone, full of bales of hay. Red lines indicate zonal boundaries; green lines are hedges; blue is the stream; the black line is a road.

Creation by Question

I ran a first session of Diaspora today; it was entirely comprised of setting- and character generation, which went well - so far, the system looks interesting, and I can't wait to get it started and see how it works in practice.

What struck me while playing is that it's important for lots of questions to be asked during the game. That sounds like a banal observation, but it isn't: I'm not talking about the necessary sort of questions that players have to ask ("Where is the exit?" "What are the orcs carrying?" etc.) but questions which spur the questionee to think, and thereby create.

For instance, I was describing one of the worlds, in one of the systems we were creating, as being a water world, populated by Melnibonean-esque decadent epicureans. One of the players cut in, "Do they live on the surface in big floating cities, or under the water, or what?" And I was forced to think, "Well, where do they live?" And in answering the question more detail was added to the setting: creation by question in action.

There is a lot of power in this, and it applies not just during shared setting-creation type games like Diaspora: it applies in any kind of game - I'm reminded of a Yoon-Suin session I ran online in which one of the players asked whether hijras existed, and I had to think, "Well, do they?" The answer was yes, and another detail was added to the world. But it just as frequently happens during character generation too: "My character is about six feet, built like a brick-shit house, and he's carrying a glaive." "What does the glaive look like?" "Well....It's engraved with runic patterns." "What do they mean?" "Er...he doesn't know, it's a family heirloom and it's a mystery." And so on: questions have power.

I think this comes from the fact that, like using random generators, questions spur creativity through restricting the options. It is the same adage that I've used before: give a man a paper and pencil and say "write a story" and he'll take 10 times as long to come up with something than he would if you'd said "write a story about a murder", and it'll probably be 10 times less interesting. Likewise, saying to somebody "Come up with a world" is a thoroughly different proposition to saying to him: "What is the geography of your world like? Is there a desert? What kind of people live there? Are they warlike? Do they do drugs?" By restricting his creativity, you give it legs.

Moons of Jupiter Planetcrawl

A long, long time ago (I can still remember how those blog entries used to make me smile) I wrote about the Solar System and its vastness, pondering:

In light of [the sheer size of space], and the fact that the solar system contains 8 planets, 5 dwarf planets, 335 moons and millions of asteroids, minor planets, comets, trojans, centaurs and the like, you really have to wonder why science fiction has obsessed for so long about interstellar and intergalactic empires. Isn't the solar system big enough? 

It strikes me now that the answer is fairly obvious: aliens. There aren't any in the solar system, or at least not ones we can wage war on/fuck/misunderstand, so SF authors by necessity need to look beyond it if they want Klingons.

But the fact remains: the Solar System is massive. Consider this for a second: the distance between Jupiter and Saturn is from 600 million kilometres to 2 billion kilometres. Jupiter has, at current count, 66 moons. Saturn has 62. Uranus and Neptune have another 40 between them. There have been 1,200 Transneptunian Objects recorded. There is a lot of stuff out there to get lost in. Indeed, the question I am currently considering is not so much "Why bother with what's outside the Solar System?" as "Couldn't you just set a game among the moons of Jupiter or Saturn?"

The moons of Jupiter vary hugely in size - from massive rocky Ganymede, bigger than Mercury, to tiny Cyllene, only 3km in diameter. They also vary in character: Icy Europa may have a great warm ocean beneath its surface which harbours life, while Io is a world of magma and volcanoes. Probably only 4 - the Galilean moons of Ganymede, Europa, Io and Callisto - are "settle-able" in the SF sense, but think of the potential in the 58 others. Secret bases for space pirates. Impossibly ancient and haunted alien monuments. Mines to be warred over. Space stations right and left. Orbital rigs for siphoning gas from Jupiter itself, built on construction bases bigger than cities, that circle elliptically around Callisto.

The thing about the Moons of Jupiter Planetcrawl is that the distances make sense. These moons are generally about 200,000 km apart at their closest (although of course, at the opposite ends of their ellipses, they are a heck of a lot further), which is traversable in a few hours at the speed of, say, Voyager 1. An inter-lunar craft would probably be a lot slower, because Voyager 1 is a big fat cheat and has the benefit of decades of acceleration, but still - it's the sort of travel that is do-able in the Star Trek "set a course for Ganymede and we'll be there by Friday" sense, and is imaginable without too much handwaving if you want your SF hard. And since your scope is somewhat restricted, you can actually flesh out your locations in a lot of detail - you don't end up with Traveller-esque abstraction in which each solar system has a single interesting planet about which there is a single interesting fact and a single culture. You can go deep: what's going on with Callisto? How does that affect what's going on with Io? What's with the planetary war on Europa and will the Jovian orbiters get involved?

I happen to have recently bought Diaspora. Maybe the planets are aligning.