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.
@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
@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 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.
@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 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.
@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.