New Transhuman game?

[David J Prokopetz]

Originally Posted by jsnead

I can guarantee that the "only-humans-are-capable-of-morality schtick" is manifestly not true in EP.

I don't mean to imply was - I was responding to Mr. DagobahDave's suggestion.

[nfb]

The thing I dig about reading Alastair Reynolds and Charles Stross is that when they decide it'd be a good idea to turf out all that hard SF (which I love) and do something cool, they just do it. I can totally respect that.

So I'm going to watch EP closely, even if it isn't as hard as the (completely awesome) THS. Perhaps especially because it isn't as hard as THS; something different, you know? There's room for two (or even three -- how did I miss Sufficiently Advanced's release?!) SF RPGs on my shelf!

(Having said that, I'm not in love with psi in SF without a pseudo-scientific, probably nanotech-related explanation. But hey, if there's a bit of EP that doesn't gel perfectly with what I want, I'll edit it out. I Have The Power!)

[Pilgrim]

Rob, Adam and Kylleran,
Thanks!
Now, I just have to be patient and wait.
Looking forward to it.

[GregH]

Originally Posted by nfb

(Having said that, I'm not in love with psi in SF without a pseudo-scientific, probably nanotech-related explanation. But hey, if there's a bit of EP that doesn't gel perfectly with what I want, I'll edit it out. I Have The Power!)

Wise words and great attitude that any gamer should approach to any game...

[GregH]

Originally Posted by jsnead

Most definitely.

Since most gates are on planetary surfaces and non-huge, there are definitely difficulties in doing this.

There was a time once when I would have hated this approach as one tends to think of the FTL spacecraft as a sort of traveling home that one needs to have to visit any space-faring universe in...

...but after reading Hamilton's "Pandora's Star" I can see the oppurtunity here. Outside of the Sol System is there any travel into space on these colony worlds. If it's still pretty small there could be anything out there in the night skies...

[Pelorus]

Originally Posted by jsnead

I can guarantee that the "only-humans-are-capable-of-morality schtick" is manifestly not true in EP.

Aha, but what about tears...

Is Mankind the only race....WHO KNOWS HOW TO CRY.....

(What? C'mon, it's a Sci-Fi schtick used a dozen times...)

[Iozz-Sothoth]

Originally Posted by robboyle

* I don't want to delve into the psi too much here, as it's still being tweaked, but it's low level and primarily concerned with enhanced cognitive functions.

On the level of the ESP implant in Blue Planet that largely (99.9%, IIRC) enhances intuitive subconcious processess, or a bit more? That actually sounds really rather reasonable...

[Apocryphile]

Originally Posted by Balbinus

Or our understanding of physics is fundamentally wrong in some, possibly many, particulars.

Which is cool and all for a game, but not so much for a game which is based on authors who mostly extrapolate based on our current understanding of physics.

I came across a great passage in a book I'm reading where one of the characters says they love to read 19th Century Science books (and remember that in the 19th century popular opinion was that everything had been worked out, and there were no more "big discoverys to be made).

The character knows the science is wrong, but that's not the point. This isn't the end of history, and it's not the end of scientific advancement.

We're all wrong! Just as wrong as the 19th century stuff.

I'm sure in 100 years people will look back at our current scientific paradigm and giggle. Assuming we haven't wiped ourselves out by then of course!

[Iozz-Sothoth]

Originally Posted by mindstalk

Wormholes and Alcubierre warp drives are further out, in that there are physics papers about the possibility of them, but their existence would raise relativity/causality issues; also even using them has practicality problems not on the order of "this is complex" (AI) but "you need special matter we've never seen exist outside of odd solutions to equations, plus we're not sure if stopping the Alcubierre drive is even possible."

I am tempted to say that 'you need special matter we've never seen exist outside of odd solutions to equations' is close enough to 'magic' or 'wishful thinking' for government work... [1]

Mind you, I also haven't seen a treatment of AI that I actually liked in ages, but that's probably down to a philosophical quirk of mine. ('Yes, AI is probably possible, but please stop using those bloody terrible hardware-software analogies or I'll beat you to death with my copy of Peskin and Schroeder!')

(Oddly enough, the main reason that transhuman type games appeal to me is that they're the closest thing in gaming to something that resembles the rather odd societies of Samuel Delany's space operas or Cordwainer Smith, not the hardness of the science. It's probably a bit odd that the thing I like about guys like Alaistair Reynolds isn't that they're original, as such -- it's just that the focus of concern of hard sf has shifted slightly so that it can now include that tradition as well [2].)

[1] You can imagine me saying something rude about cosmologists here, if you want.

[2] And a sprinkling of Lovecraftian 'wierd', in the case of Reynolds. Those elder weapons that look 'wrong' and devour space time through principles that no-one really wants to understand come to mind. Or the Exordium: the Cojoiner's precognitive group-mind/quantum computer set up (if I suggested that to our resident quantum information specialist, he'd give me a look). Or that Higgs field manipulating drive that can hop universes by erasing people from the timeline, with the implication that the novel begins in a different one from which it started [3]. Y'know, if this is more towards the Reynolds end of the the spectrum than, say, Stross [4], the issue with psi is more whether it can be bullshitted in a convincingly cool way, rather than its absence.

[3] No, AFAIK, he is just making that up. Bloody awesome, though.

[4] I'm not really familiar enough with MacLeod's work to comment on him.

[Balbinus]

Originally Posted by Apocryphile

I came across a great passage in a book I'm reading where one of the characters says they love to read 19th Century Science books (and remember that in the 19th century popular opinion was that everything had been worked out, and there were no more "big discoverys to be made).

The character knows the science is wrong, but that's not the point. This isn't the end of history, and it's not the end of scientific advancement.

We're all wrong! Just as wrong as the 19th century stuff.

I'm sure in 100 years people will look back at our current scientific paradigm and giggle. Assuming we haven't wiped ourselves out by then of course!

Are you agreeing with me? That was sort of my point, that if psi exists it means we are wrong in some important particulars of our understanding of science.

Which is a fine premise for a game, but not one based on particular authors whose work is based on our understanding of physics being essentially right.

It would be the equivalent of an rpg based on the scientific romances of the Victorian and Edwardian era incorporating contemporary views on physics. It might be a fun rpg, it might even be more realistic, but I would question how faithful it was to the source fiction.

My point was that this is a game inspired by particular authors and a particular literary trend, and the inclusion of psi does not fit with the universe as presented by those authors. Now, it may still work really well in the game, we don't know yet, but it is a bit odd as an inclusion in a game inspired by those literary works.