What's the best #ttrpg for a #solarpunk campaign?
@peterdrake I have been thinking about this for a while now, and I believe I finally have an answer that I'm satisfied with: Twilight 2000.
I know, you're confused. You're wondering why a game like T2K would even remotely be considered #solarpunk. It's very simple.
In T2K, you as protagonist characters have the opportunity to make a better future from a collapsed and fallen one. The pieces are all around you to do so.
But also, unlike most solarpunk games, there is no predefined definition of what "better" actually means. You are free to decide for yourself and given your situation what better is.
Not only that, you are free to decide what mechanisms you bring to bear in order to make that better world come about. Some threats won't be amenable to a simple conversation and a small meal.
Some threats you have to have heavy artillery and a couple of flanking infantry units to deal with. Not everybody will be on board with your idea of the perfect solarpunk future.
You want to build an outpost of civilization amidst the fallen ruins of the old, the latest edition has all the tools you need to make that happen. But it also includes all of the mechanics that tell you why it's very, very hard. And will always be a struggle.
@lextenebris Interesting. I had the impression that T2K focused almost entirely on combat operations.
@lextenebris Again, interesting. I do like the idea of having detailed (but not incredibly fiddly) rules for simulating resource/infrastructure issues. Are there more modern games that do this, or are the "simulation" players all running these and other old-school games like Traveller and GURPS?
From the artwork, these all seem pretty grim -- there's been a horror apocalypse and everybody is packing multiple guns. I'm not saying I want to run a game where anthropomorphic woodland creatures sit around drinking tea and talking about their feelings, but I'd like to see a world the players want to live in and protect.
I know opinions vary wildly, but I'm imagining solarpunk as being about (1) imagining a plausible world we'd like to live in, then (2) figuring how to get there. With climate dread and specter of galloping christofascism, people need to see any path to hope.
Have you listened to the @SolarpunkPrompts podcast?
@peterdrake @SolarpunkPrompts There are two prongs of modern games that focus on things like building communities, developing towns, etc. One of my favorite third-party supplements is Ironsworn: Reign, which plugs in some really excellent evolutionary mechanics to #Ironsworn , letting you do anything from build up your local tavern to assemble and command the assault of a major army against an enemy force.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/419256/Ironsworn-Reign
The Quiet Year is an extremely modern game which centers on building out the little map of a community after its collapse and then you play through the next year inspired narratively by car draws it sounds very mechanical but in practice a story emerges naturally from the process, inevitably, inexorably. #TheQuietYear
https://buriedwithoutceremony.com/the-quiet-year
Band of Blades is a game in which you play simultaneously an army in retreat, the members of the command staff deciding what happens, and the grunts on the front lines fighting and dying for their brothers. Building and maintaining both the material and the moral support structures of the army is extremely vital and necessary work. #BandOfBlades
@lextenebris I've got (but haven't played) both Ironsworn: Starforged and The Quiet Year. I'm intrigued, but nervous about what seem like a series of creative writing prompts that then leave it up to the players and GM to decide what happens. On the other hand, it's very easy for a simulation to become busywork that detracts from the story.
@peterdrake I maintain that #Starforged is the best RPG released in the last several years and I would be open to the argument that it is the best RPG released in the last decade, and this is coming from someone who literally lives in a TTRPG library with about 40 feet of shelving (and that's not an exaggeration) full of RPGs dating back to the beginning of the hobby and some texts predating the hobby as it's currently known. When I give high praise, I really mean it. It's an incredible game design in the fact that it has an open license means that there are tons of third-party supplements and tools that expand things in amazing directions. Though I haven't seen anyone retrofitted onto hard-core wargaming with a map focus, which I want to tinker with at some point.
Seriously, it's that good.
What you want to grab onto if you're looking for structure in the Ironsworn-lineage of design is not to look at the oracles as a source of creative writing prompts. The most important rule is thus:
"Do what is the most interesting and obvious. If you have a question about something that is not obvious, then go to an Oracle."
@peterdrake Realistically in every #TTRPG, the whole experience is either a series of creative writing prompts or someone cramming a story down your throat that you had no part in really choosing. If we must decide between the starkest of contrasts, I'll go with creative writing prompts every time. Otherwise I'm going to get stuck being the GM for another series of decades and I'm not doing that. I want to play with my friends, I don't want the responsibility of entertaining my friends. I want to facilitate, I don't want to run. Nor do I want to be run.
I have strong feelings about this.
If #Starforged seems too narrative, that's why games like Five Leagues from the Borderland exist. They are more mechanical, they are more crunchy, and they focus on what can be more easily mechanized – often combat. It's great fun and you can tell a story through ongoing series of conflicts with some relatively lightweight narrative mechanics stringing them together. That's what adventure wargaming does very well.
When it's not in doubt, the obvious thing happens. Otherwise inject randomness, interpret the runes, and proceed forward.
Unless there is a story already extant outside the sphere of player experience, that's every game. It's what you should want for every game.
@lextenebris Yes -- after the last few games I've run, I've realized that the GM shouldn't create the adventure (locations, NPCs, what the shadowy factions are up to) until after character generation. Make the world about these characters. Pregenerated adventures put the players on a rail, which is bad whether or not they stay on it.
(I've probably only got about 6 feet of TTRPGs, but 1st edition AD&D is in there!)
@peterdrake And even then you're overpreparing. One of my favorite pieces of advice actually started in an RPG I don't like at all, Apocalypse World. It's been inherited throughout all the RPGs which have descended from it, and it is the best piece of knowledge you can have when running a game.
"Play to find out."
That's it. That's why we're at the table. That is why we are spending time together. That is why we are playing a game that involves a narrative. That is why you are creating characters, which theoretically have motivations, desires, and frustrations. We are playing to find out. We are not playing to tell somebody, and we are not playing to be told.
Aside from not wanting to GM anymore, there's a good reason that I have spent the last couple of decades (and it hurts to say how long that's been) specializing in games which are #GMless .
There are games that make this easy and there are games that make this almost impossible. Don't make it harder on yourself than it has to be.
@peterdrake @SolarpunkPrompts I would actually put forth that pretty much every Forged in the Dark game really centers around some sort of community/resource building and expansion, whether it be the army of B.o.B, the shared starship of Scum and Villainy or the court of Court of Blades.
https://bladesinthedark.com/forged-dark
If you want to pop over into what is currently referred to as "adventure wargaming," you can pick up Five Leagues from the Borderlands or 5 Parsecs from Home for fantasy and science fiction respectively and be developing wider narrative structures as part of engaging in some pretty violent combat. #FiveLeaguesFromTheBorderlands
https://modiphius.net/en-us/pages/five-leagues-from-the-borderlands
https://modiphius.net/en-us/pages/five-parsecs
Aspects of community and resource management are almost omnipresent these days in most of the really popular RPGs outside of anything D&D derivative. It's not new. It's not even kind of new.
Most of these games do start with the protagonists on the back foot, giving them a reason to be motivated to make the world a better place. That's not necessarily the case; Ironsworn by default is a harsh world, very pre-dark ages far North European, but is not necessarily a bad place. It's just necessarily a threatening place.
@peterdrake @SolarpunkPrompts This is one of the things I hate about what is portrayed as the core of the #solarpunk ethos: it's neutered. It's always presented as very obvious "what good is", and I find that both infantile and tedious. It leaches out the meaning of choice.
I have a suspicion about the psychology of the people who want to promote it as "interesting," and they often sound a lot like you, terrified about the world which isn't actually as they perceive it so they want to imagine a world free of those conflicts and pressures. But what they don't understand is that a story free of those conflicts and pressures is flat, boring, uninteresting. There are only so many tea parties you can have.
There has to be some pressure, some threat, some negative consequence, if you want to have a really compelling personal experience worth telling a story about, and solarpunk as a genre dispenses with that. It tends to be morally lecturing rather than personally illustrative, hectoring rather than illuminating.
"I don't like it" is what I'm saying.
@peterdrake @SolarpunkPrompts A good game doesn't want to sell you a path to hope. A good game lets you choose your own path to hope. It doesn't go out of its way to tell you you're a good person; it lets you discover if you're a good person all on your own – or whether you want to be a bad person, and if you want to pretend to be a bad person once in a while, you're still a good person, unless you buy into the #solarpunk philosophy in which case every fantasy is a reality in your head because you can't tell the difference.
I would argue that the best extant game which supports the possibility of solarpunk ideas is very much #Kingdom, because it puts see you as players and your pawns in the position of being the leaders, the voices, and the imaginations of communities – but simultaneously forces you to imagine how they can fail, what crises may come to threaten them, why they are in peril and why some kind of action may need to be taken, what may and will happen if those actions fail, and provides critical pressure for why those actions may fail. It does it all without requiring a GM to tell you what the world thinks but instead demand you decide for yourself.
@peterdrake @SolarpunkPrompts For the record, I don't generally go out of my way to listen to a lot of RPG podcasts because for the most part what I'm interested in is playing them.
Just as importantly, I don't need any path to hope. I've got hope. I'm a well-balanced, intelligent, mature adult who is emotionally well regulated (if occasionally irritable). I don't want a game to give me hope. I want a game to let me experience something that I can't in real life.
Adventure. Nobility. Absolute power. Absolute failure. The pleasure of subverting culture with no consequence. The gratification of enforcing culture with no consequence. Being a God. Being a worm.
All those things I can't do. "Have hope" is something I can do on my own, thanks.
@lextenebris @SolarpunkPrompts
Please share some of that hope!
I am preternaturally even-keeled, but there are people around me who look at the climate emergency and see nothing but a slide to Mad Max, who look at the GOP and see nothing but a slide to The Handmaid's Tale. They need stories where the people (not the chosen superwarriors) work together solve these real, pressing, deadly problems. I can't find these stories, but maybe in a game we can create them together.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the other kind of game. I've enjoyed escapist power fantasy games, blood for the blood god and all that. For this particular thread, though, I'm interested in using a game to explore how we can make a better world.
@peterdrake @SolarpunkPrompts The hope is easy. Humanity still exists. Well, if you care about humanity still existing which it's arguable if I do or not, but the species is managed to survive relatively intact for over 250,000 years of cultural evolution, much of which was nasty, brutish, and short. We live in a moment of ridiculous and extreme abundance with very much the sum total of human knowledge at our fingertips, the potential to speak to millions of people on a whim.
And you're telling me that the people around you look at the world and see nothing but somehow the magic ability for humanity to change the output of the sun via sympathetic resonance and the minute swing of the political pendulum between two groups who largely agree on the vast shared elements of the human experience and are almost politically indistinguishable except on three or four points that humanity has differed on throughout its existence?
Those people are stupid. They are looking for a reason to complain because their lives are too good. I have no respect for that.
@peterdrake @SolarpunkPrompts All stories are stories where people who aren't chosen super warriors work together to solve real, pressing, deadly problems. In ways they may not approve of, which is the real problem, isn't it?
It's why solarpunk is so deadly boring to me. It is intentionally conceived as a hyper-political narrative and can't get out of its own head far enough to conceive of opposition to what it imagines to be the perfect good. It knows, upfront, what the perfect good is, and what you should be doing in order to pursue the perfect good. Even in D&D, classic D&D, a game in which morality is literally a physical constant, we as players are capable of imagining that the most strict Lawful Good character is capable of deriving unpleasant consequences while being morally pure.
You don't get that in solarpunk. If you want anything other than what the consensus is, you're bad, definitionally.
We are talking about escapist power fantasy for everything else, we are recognizing that solarpunk at heart is an authoritarian escapist power fantasy for people who pretend not to be authoritarian and not to have power. It's inherently self deceit in terms of concept, and I hate it.
@peterdrake @SolarpunkPrompts You can make a better world in every game. One could make the argument that such is the central conceit of the idea of playing a narrative game. Hell, one could make the argument fairly successfully that it's the central conceit of every single wargame because the idea is to succeed against opposition in order to make the world better, at least theoretically.
Every game qualifies. The question is whether the game itself reifies what you believe to be good as the only possible definition of "good." It shouldn't. Characters should have doubt. Cultures should have doubt. Civilizations should have doubt. Characters, cultures, and civilizations should have failures even and especially when they are pursuing what they (and the author) believe to be "objectively good and better."
Not being able to imagine that, not being able to play with those ideas, to imagine that people that disagree with you might be right, to imagine it people who agree with you might be wrong… That's a larger criticism of society that I probably need another couple of books worth of text to deconstruct, but that's neither here nor there.
@peterdrake @SolarpunkPrompts You want a game in which you can explore how to make a better world? You need to start with a game in which the world is not better so that you can make it so. The core philosophy of solarpunk denies that.
Go play some Twilight 2K.
@lextenebris @SolarpunkPrompts So ... are you not at all concerned about climate change?
@peterdrake @SolarpunkPrompts Absolutely not. I can do math and understand chemistry. I know what the spectral absorption lines of CO2, CO, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen look like. I know that plants – which produce oxygen – flourish in a high CO2 environment and as a side effect of that pump carbon into the soil. I understand the mechanisms of soil outgassing. I can do a statistical regression analysis of temperatures related to both rural, exurban, and urban areas and how they change over time. And I know a scam when I see it.
It is the height of hubris to believe that human atmospheric activity has a higher magnitude of impact than random solar fluctuation in the absence of reasonable data, and the data that is currently available is more akin to reading tea leaves and wishcasting been doing science.
But it is incredibly profitable. Getting scared people to do things that you want which may not be in their best interest is much easier than getting stable, un-panicked people to do what you want which is not in their best interest.
I'm far more concerned about the fact that the people who are the most up in arms about climate change are the ones who would most like my government to be more like the Chinese government, which produces greenhouse gases more abundantly than the US.
Basic math.
@lextenebris Every year since 2015 has been warmer than any year before then since direct measurement started in 1850. The essentially unanimous prediction of the scientific community is that this warming is going to continue. Do you have a different prediction?
@peterdrake I'm not sure where you're getting your numbers but that is not true. Simply not true. Factually untrue. But let's assume for a moment that it was simply to dispose of it by logical means. And in a perfectly stable climate which has a degree of random variation, is it incomprehensible that you would have runs of a certain monotonic direction both up and down? Of course it isn't. They would be inevitable even with purely random initiatory causes. Also you will want to study your supposedly guides to what temperatures were over the last 30 years and make sure that they aren't abusing the urban heat island effect as previously ex-urban sensor locations become more urban and deal with more concrete and asphalt.
"The essentially unanimous prediction of the scientific community" is extremely easy to get if you simply declare that anyone that disagrees with you is no longer part of the scientific community, isn't it? Which is what we've been seeing along with a strong counter pressure against replication as part of the ongoing massive replication crisis and research particularly atmospheric research.
@peterdrake My prediction? Yeah, that when you stop cooking the numbers and casting the bones, you have to stop taking money to "protect us from" the ravages of the threat only we keep telling you about and make sure to silence anyone who would tell you differently. You have six months to comply or your world burns down.
And then nothing happens. That's my prediction.
@lextenebris @SolarpunkPrompts That complaint is ... not without merit. As someone said, drama happens because someone wants something and for some reason they can't have it. I have seen stories that fail to include any drama.
It's been a while, but I enjoyed this podcast because it provided at least some ideas of how to generate that drama.
@peterdrake @SolarpunkPrompts For a while, my not-quite-a-day-job was being a professional writer, whether it be games journalism, a little script writing, some copyediting for someone that really wanted it and could make a good argument because I hate copyediting, consulting on RPG design, you name it. One of the core things that I have always maintained as critical to being a creator of a good story, no matter who you are, participant or even audience, is understanding the three important questions:
- What does this character want?
- Why can't they have it?
- What are they going to do about it?
Answer those three questions in a reasonable way and you have active tension that the audience will engage with, you will be able to communicate their narrative frustration, and you will know immediately what their next action will be. You know what the character cares about.
If you can answer those three questions, the character's a camera and nobody cares about a camera.
In order for them not to be able to get what they want there has to be some sort of threat, either internally generated, externally observed, or at odds with the facts of the universe. If that can't be the case, if the setup requires comfort, then there's no drama and no investment.
It's that simple.
@peterdrake It does not. There are entire sections on establishing and maintaining a community. Scavenging the surrounding territory in order to find the things that you need in order to build up the necessities. But it's always been that way to one degree or another, even in the previous three editions.
T2K Living Steel, and the Morrow Project are probably the best and oldest examples of futurist community building RPGs, which everyone who says that they are into futurist community-building RPGs immediately disparages or doesn't know about
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Steel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Morrow_Project
#TTRPG #T2k #LivingSteel #MorrowProject