I Read Too Much Science Fiction, And It Shows

How well would it work to have the PCs all play individuals who were part of a greater "over-person?" This is basically a trans/post-humanist concept, worlds where the basic unit of society isn't individual humans, but groups connected chemically or psychically or what-have-you. It works pretty well in fiction, and I think it's a cool idea just on a pure conceptual level, but I wonder how it would work in a game setting?

Partially, it would just allow the game world to really process what happens at a table naturally. Characters can have close to perfect information about what their fellow party members are up to, even in the heat of battle, when when separated by time and space.

But the concept would logically demand less character conflict than most of the games I've seen actually end up with, and are fun with. If the characters are all basically the same person, why would they have different, sometimes conflicting goals? There's probably a way to build an architecture that supports some of that, and still makes sense, but it would probably require some thought to get the reasonable/playable balance right.

Would this be worth it? Or would it be just an intellectual exercise? Seems like something that might make a good hook for a one-shot.

The Best Books Are a Dollar Twenty-Five

I have a new favorite book: Spacehawk, Inc. by Ron Goulart.

It's about Kip Bundy, Space Engineer! He builds robots, mostly, and has to go to Malagra to fix a bunch of robot butlers who have gone kablooie and have high potential surliness ratings. And he has to fix them without letting their owners know, because it might cause an international incident, somehow.

Mostly, it's got catmen, and lizardmen, (who you can shoot, no one minds) and the Boyscout Liberation Army, a talking car, a robot revolutionary who glues on his beard, and all manner of equally wacky happenings.

It's the kind of book that you figure out very quickly, because there's really only one kind of book where the protagonist is named "Kip Bundy."

Extra Late Sci-Fi Rant Response

You may have read John Harrison's rant on how world-building is useless and counterproductive.

My initial reaction to this is, "Er . . . isn't world-building kind of the defining point of science fiction?" The point of a science fiction story--the reason you'd write a given story in a science fiction setting, rather than a contemporary or historical one--is that the world allows you to do something that would be impossible in a normal, real world milieu.

Maybe he's using a different definition of "world-building" than I am. He implies that "world-building" somehow involves exhaustively categorizing every feature of a world. I don't know of any writer, ever, who's done that. Even Tolkien didn't do that. As an example -- he never actually "finished" his languages.

But he created enough to give his world an underlying structure. Enough so that he could name things "Morgoth" and "Mordor," or "Minas Tirith" and "Minas Morgul," and have a reason for it. The reader need never even find out what the pattern means, but the fact that it's there lends the world verisimilitude.

The feeling of being real. Which is why we read science fiction.

Children of Men

Children of Men was better than I thought it'd be.

See, I have this love-hate relationship with science fiction movies. I love science fiction. I hate science fiction movies. They always get it wrong.

Science fiction is about extrapolation. You start with "what if?" and you work from there. The complications need to tie into the world, what makes it different from the real world, what makes it science fiction.

Otherwise, it's not science fiction. If it could work in a different setting--if your story is "a western, in space," it's not science fiction. It's got the trappings, but not the mechanics.

Note that this doesn't mean that shows like Firefly aren't science fiction. (I use "western" because it's traditional, when making this particular point.) Firefly is actually an example of the reverse of this phenomena. It's got western flavor, but develops its plots in a science fictional manner: pick an aspect of the setting, figure out how that aspect could cause problems for the protagonists.

Science fiction movies--or rather, the movies people call science fiction--don't generally do this. Or they don't do it well. They tend to be too concerned with blowing things up and making philosophical points.

The Matrix is an example. I loathe this movie, with a totally unwarranted passion. And I mean the original, not the latter two--haven't even seen the third. People think it's deep, and they think it's science fiction. It's not. It (or rather, it's hack writers/directors) starts with a philosophical point it wants to make, and then puts together a patchwork setting that exists only to make this point. It's got no depth, except for some idiocy about vitamins. And that doesn't even count, because it was old hat when Asimov was writing robot novels.

I guess that's what I like about Children of Men, at least now, before I've had the chance to really think about it. It's got depth. It's got a number of different challenges and plot twists, all based on the setting. It brings up things that are never fully explained ("your parents were in New York when it happened") because they don't need to be, but they still make sense.

It's got a sense of verisimilitude. The story comes from the world, not the other way around.

And I liked the music--felt all future-y without being stupid, and there was a lot of Beetles, which made sense in the context of the world.