Transcendentals (as story elements)

Summary:

Some musings about the roles of Transcendentals in my games.

Transcendentals (as story elements)

TauCeti 18 Mar 2012 20:59

Tantavalist's most recent comments on the “To the Stars” setting got me thinking about the Transcendentals, and what they actually are. Not in a in-universe sense, but in a story and gaming sense. I figured that I should share my ideas, so here goes:

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First, the Transcendentals are a framing story. They're Scheherazade talking to the King; well, sort of.

The thing is, most games (indeed, most stories) have an unfortunate elephant in the room, namely, why do these crazy things keep happening to these characters? Some games ignore the question (breaking my suspension of disbelief once the third less-than-a-million-odds crazy thing happens). Some assume that the PCs are some brand of “adventurer” or “shadowrunner” and thus actively seeks crazy situations, which works, but it also limits the kinds of personalities that those characters can have (namely, thrillseekers and mercenaries).

Others make the characters special in some way (you're a werewolf!) and more-or-less state that crazy things happen to characters who are special in your way, but unless the population of special folk is small, one is left with either an absurd amount of crazy, or just a bunch of werewolves doing werewolfy things, while your characters are having adventures. The alternate, a low population of special whatsits, again restricts the possible characterization (this time, you simply can't have someone who is “normal” by any definition). And again, one is left wondering why being special makes crazy things happen to your characters. Why can't your werewolf retire from adventuring, get a job at a 7-11, and maybe chain himself in his basement every full moon?

There's one other solution, and that is that there is an active force in the universe seeking to make crazy things happen to your characters. In Scion it's literally Fate and it ensures that you always walk in on situations at the most plot-crazy time.

In SA, the Transcendentals handle that. Whatever happens, the T's are probably (very indirectly) causing it. They're setting you up to end up in a crazy situation, without backup or information, because you can (probably) handle it. And, being pan-temporal, their reasons only need to be clear in hindsight. So, you go on paid vacation, and craziness happens. You get sent to deal with a patent infringement, and craziness happens. No suspension of disbelief; just the PCs railing against the T's for being jerks.

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This brings up another thing. The Transcendentals don't exist to solve the PCs problems (and any GM who uses them thus is an idiot). The PCs exist to solve the Transcendental's problems. Which means that I, as the GM, can toss the PCs into situations where the problems are much, much larger than they are. Namely, problems which are scaled for a T. So saving entire planets is on the table, as is existential crises.

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And third, they're the subtly laid tracks for a hint of railroading. Not of the “you must follow my path” variety, but of the “you shouldn't stop moving; ideally forward but I'll take what I can get” variety. By being present, and by giving (nearly) useless instructions, they ensure that the PCs keep going until those instructions actually make sense. So, if I set up some sabotage that clearly wouldn't work, the players keep digging; trying to figure out how it could work, because they know that something is going to go wrong. As opposed to, I don't know, fixing the immediate problem and declaring themselves “victorious” because nothing else appears to be going wrong. Or Nick can hand the PCs a character who was clearly not kidnapped, and the PCs will continue trying to figure out how the character was kidnapped anyway. In another setting, the PCs would look at the situation, conclude that nothing was going on, and wander away having missed, well, everything.

Most games can get away without this for two reasons. First: most game's plots are much, much simpler (maybe one layer of indirection, at most). And second: there's always the tried and true method of hammering important facts at my players repeatedly (never be subtle!). SA is the one game where I can really get away with incredibly subtle, convoluted plots.

SA can't take those short cuts because of Comprehension. If your plot has no levels of indirection, Comprehension becomes useless (and the PCs win in 5 seconds and 1 twist use; boring). So, SA plots are necessarily complex. And that means that the PCs need the drive to keep digging, even when there isn't anything obviously going on. The Transcendentals, with the ability to see the future, give that drive. I'm not sure anything else could.

Last edited on 19 Mar 2012 15:21 by TauCeti Show more

Re: Transcendentals (as story elements)

Tantavalist 23 Mar 2012 02:54

Having sat down and thought about it, I think I've finally managed to pin down why I hate the idea of the Transcendetals so much. I really like the idea of the Minds in Iain M Banks Culture books, so why do I hate the SA counterparts?

Well…

I hate prophecies. I loathe them. They're a pointless and lazy plot device used as a crutch by writers who can't think of a better way to make their plots work out and haven't fully thought out the implications. If a prophecy works, then it means the future is set and immutable, and therefore everything was always going to happen that way. It renders pointless every action by everyone- it's all pre-destined, so free will is only an illusion.

The Trancendentals are a machine whose sole purpose is to spam Prophecies all over the setting at as high a rate as their trans-temporal bandwidth will allow. Their mere existence is a Deus Ex machina that disproves the concept of Free Will.

But, since Colin is enamoured with the idea of them, maybe I should try to reconcile them with a version I can live with, even if I'm only going to come up with my own SA2 setting when the time to play finally comes.

The only version of predicting the future that I've worked with is the Branching Possibilities idea. There are two possible futures based on which choice you make now. The next time you make a choice, this branches again- four of them. And so on, for every possible outcome of every event at every scale. Precognition consists of looking ahead to view these possibilities- but the further ahead you look, the more outcomes there are and the more confusing it becomes. But you can guess that since in 90% of the versions where you take the left passage you seem to live, and the reverse if true for the right passage, you probably should take the left one to escape the Villain-of-the-week's lair.

If the Trancendentals have trans-temporal communication, then they're receiving it from all these possible versions of themselves- which does fit very well with the bandwidth problem. So, I could live with a Godmind supercomputer having access to precognition like that.

I also accept that if you're struggling for rationales and motivations for the PCs, having some super-mind nudging things in the background works well. I just think that a GM should be able to manage these things without that. I believe that most GMs try to run the sort of games they'd like to be in if they were players. And as a player, nothing kills a game faster for me than spotting the rails. The Transcendentals are railroading incarnate.

Re: Transcendentals (as story elements)

TauCeti 23 Mar 2012 15:58

Edited for length (the original was two full pages; blah):

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Yeah, you're right to loath prophecies, especially for your reasons. That said, I love time travel stories, which I'll define as anything where temporality and causality aren't tied together. (When I was seven, what my parents called “make believe” I called “time distortion”).

I don't have the Ts spewing prophecies by your definition. They never tell the PCs what will happen, or what they will do. They tell the PCs what might happen (often, what would happen if they fail), or give them some tidbit of information about something that has already happened, but should have been completely secret information. The RAW prohibits the Ts from telling the PCs their own future, as the PCs could explicitly make choices that change those events.

For me, Free Will exists so long as there aren't any true causal loops (temporal shenanigans are allowed). If you can tell me what I'm going to do, and I have to do it anyway, then I don't have free will. If someone somewhere knows what I'm going to do and I do it, then time runs in one direction and causality in the other, but Free Will survives (no causal loop). By the rules, Ts are prohibited from the first and permitted the second.

Your Branching Possibilities idea is exactly how I run my games. I believe that it is very close to the cannon model.

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Pre-edit, I had the full background to Regatta listed here, followed by asking you how you'd run it (presumably sans Ts). Mostly, it was a hurried defense against 'struggling for rationales and motivations for the PCs'. If you want, I'll post it. Mostly, if there is a way I can improve as a GM, I'd like to hear about it.

Last edited on 23 Mar 2012 15:59 by TauCeti Show more

Re: Transcendentals (as story elements)

Tantavalist 24 Mar 2012 00:02

By all means feel free to post the full version. I'm honestly curious about what sort of scenarios you're running and players you're running them for, if you feel that you need Trancendentals in the game to keep things moving.

Generally I've found that all you need is a universe of NPCs if things slow down. Follow the Raymond Chandler school of plot development- "If things are slowing down, have a man with a gun in his hand step through the door". Start action sequence. Don't tell your players why this happened. They'll want to know, and start looking- so have a clue point them toward the plot. Then, in between sessions, sit down and work out after the fact what the clever and perfectly plausible reason for the Man With The Gun Walking Through The Door was.

The PCs don't see behind the curtain, so as far as they know, faction X always was planning to do whatever this was.

Really, the only way you need Ts or the equivalent is if you pay too much attention to what's happening behind the curtain yourself.

Re: Transcendentals (as story elements)

TauCeti 24 Mar 2012 00:41

Really, the only way you need Ts or the equivalent is if you pay too much attention to what's happening behind the curtain yourself.

Hmm, mayhap. Part of my problem may be that I've spent much of my gaining-GM-skill years running a massive campaign with multiple opposing PC parties (often with only one PC in a party). The upshot was that most things “behind the curtain” for one player were “in front of the curtain and in direct PC control” for someone else. I tended to restrict my “there's only fluid smoke behind the curtain” times for when the PCs were up against something that had, say, transtemporal information, or could out think and out maneuver them to a nearly impossible degree. (In SA, a T or equivalent, or an Aia).

In SA at least, Comprehension makes an extremely ill-formed “behind the curtain” dangerous for me. A player could just ask me what's back there, and I'd need an answer right fast. And my players aren't terribly forgiving if my plot doesn't hold up tightly (partially since my hints as to what is going on tend to be subtle. If the Man With Gun shows up, my facial expressions had better darn well meet with his backstory, so when they start asking questions they can tell what information he's making up or is surprised by).

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Anyway, here's Regatta's structure, as near as I can make it to what I had before I ran the session. At the time, I had left a lot of details out (like, I knew that Aurora was extremely well defended, but I invented exactly how as I was running the session).

We have a moon, Aurora, in an incredibly strong magnetic field. It uses a Faraday cage to draw power from that field and protect itself from it, and it has so much excess power that it can export it. This makes Aurora incredibly rich. Aurora has an organized crime underclass, and its government is composed of several competing corporations (with a representative government draped over that). So, it's a bright shiny world with a dark underside, but even the darkness has reasons for what it does (it's not dark just for the sake of being dark).

Given the vulnerability of the Faraday Cage (and the mass disaster if it were to be badly damaged), Aurora invests heavily in layers and layers of protection.

Every year, Aurora hosts a race around its gas giant for magnetically driven ships. Again, security is pretty high, but focused on protecting the Faraday Cage (so, ships won't fly near Aurora at any point during the race, for example).

There is a lot of gambling on the race. Organized Crime run their own gambling, and aren't above throwing the race (although they won't do anything that would risk Aurora itself). Some months ago, they contacted the various teams trying to find a way to sabotage one of them for their own ends. They discovered that one of the team members was unusually open to being bribed, and arranged some (nonlethal) sabotage in their benefit.

Unbeknownst to organized crime, that team member is loyal to the Darwinists and sees Aurora as a hive of corruption. She uses Organized Crime's sabotage plot as cover for a more devious plot; crashing her team's ship into Aurora directly. She's very carefully disabled each of Aurora's defenses that would stop her, making it look like the Crime plot when possible.

The PCs arrive on Aurora some hours before the race, knowing very little of that. The story is about discovery, deciding what to do about it, and then enacting the plan. Or maybe it's about working for Organized Crime or with the Darwinists. Or it could be about trying to escape the planet as everything is burning. Really, there's lots of ways this can go.

(There were a few other details I came up with. The head of the to-be-sabotaged team was detailed, as he was intended to be a red herring. The other teams were also partially detailed, for the same reason.)

Re: Transcendentals (as story elements)

Tantavalist 24 Mar 2012 01:17

Comprehension isn't as big an obstacle to improvisational GMing behind the scenes as you initially think. When the PCs use it to find out who sent the gunsel, you make an answer up and then that becomes the smokescreen to be fully defined later on. Repeat this as many times as the PCs can use comprehension.

Ideally, you'll give an answer that points the PCs in the direction of the next major plot point. He was hired by a known associate of the main villain in the next scene, for example.

As far as the Regatta idea goes- it's very much something that fits in the original SA setting, and as such something that I can see so many holes in. It suffers from that setting's attempts to advance the technology to SA levels while keeping as many attitudes and social constructs from present day intact as possible. This is, of course, as absurd as thinking that modern Europe could have come through the last few centuries with the Feudal social system intact.

The Patent Office, as an artificial means of imposing this false status quo, was my big beef with the setting.

Looking at Regatta I do get what you mean about Ts being a plot element. They can send the PCs to a place, telling them "Bad things will happen", and the PCs known this is true but can't be given details. This is a useful plot device for any GM. So useful, in fact, that I'd say that it should be banned outright as something that will just make GMs lazy.

I gather that you're an experienced GM, TauCeti. I find it hard to believe that you never managed to come up with reasons to get a PC party involved in a scenario without the T-hammer before now.

The single biggest problem is working out the party concept. If they're fantasy Adventurers or Cyberpunk Mercs, you just have someone pay them. If they're Call of Cthulhu Investigators, you drop hints that something evil is going down. And so forth. I think what the problem boils down to is, in a SA setting, you find it hard to get the PCs into a united group and going toward the adventure plots without the Ts or equivalent acting as their bosses.

To get around this, we just need to brainstorm what sort of party concepts would work in an SA setting. That seems to be the big stumbling block of removing them. What happens if there's no Ts, or any other Higher-Ups to take their place?

I have several concepts, but maybe this actually warrants a new thread specifically for that topic…

Re: Transcendentals (as story elements)

TauCeti 24 Mar 2012 13:15

I gather that you're an experienced GM, TauCeti.

Fifteen years, give or take. In another fifteen I'll be looking back on what I'm doing now and laughing at my naivity and inexperience.

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This is a useful plot device for any GM. So useful, in fact, that I'd say that it should be banned outright as something that will just make GMs lazy.

I used to feel this way about rules and dice. Back in those same gaining-GM-skill years, my view was exactly thus:

“Rules are a crutch. For those learning to walk, they're indispensable. When you're trying to run, they can only act to trip you up.”

I eventually changed my mind. Certainly, I can make better, more consistent rulings than any book-bound set of rules and dice can. And, when I'm doing that, the players can apply real-world scientific methods to trying to figure out what the laws of physics I'm running the game on are, which is awesome for my crowd. But, that takes an immense amount of time and effort for me to run, and is extremely mentally exhausting. SA 1.0 was something of an eye opener for me, when I found just how much easier it is to run a game with rules and dice. It freed up my time and energy to focus on things other than the results of individual actions, which meant more time to put into plot and pacing and epicness.

My view of the Ts as a stylistic shortcut are similar. Sure, I can write my plots such that they don't need them. This involves more set up time to get the PCs involved, and more thought on how to tie them into the plot. The Ts let me skip those steps, and thus invest more time into making the plot better (and more session time into digging into the plot; less into setup).

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Here's another session I ran in the same campaign that you might like better:

Off Line

At this point in the campaign, the Ts have been entirely taken out. Their last instructions to the PCs were some three sessions earlier and boiled down to “Fix everything. You're on your own.” At this point, the PCs are opening wormholes to worlds and trying to repair the fallout (mostly from the loss of FTL travel and communication). The players have been picking worlds at the end of the session, and I've been spending the time between sessions coming up with something to throw at them. I had also been working out the deep campaign plot, at this time.

My prep work was as follows:
Grid-7 is a mechanican world. When everything fell apart, there was an Inspector team here, consisting of a Mechanican, crazy-good-programmer Stored, and an Old Worlder. The world crashed into civil war (high string + low meta = planet burning). The Old Worlder recommended “turning off” everyone, and after some initial incredulity that's what the stored and mechanican did. Months later, the PCs arrive on the scene.

I had several goals, in decreasing order:

• Have a really creepy world full of people frozen in mid-action, burned out cities and others with the first signs of decay (leaves everywhere, mostly). Basically, a Twilight Zone story.
• Demonstrate that there are other inspector teams out there, acting like PC parties, and they are worse off than the actual PCs.
• Demonstrate why the Ts hire Old Worlders (other people would have been too busy thinking of the Mechanicans as people and seeing the situation as a social problem to come up with the trivial solution of “they're robots; turn them off”).

The players rushed through that in half the time I had allotted, so they went to investigate another world, which had been sterilized by the Skotadi. After learning more about the situation, they ended up having a long and extremely confusing conversation with those Skotadi.

The Skotadi were the core campaign plot. They had created a T-equivelent (called simply the Causal Loop) which could predict the future and had extremely good control over the Skotadi, but lacked sentience or even real intelligence. Basically, it was a perfect problem solving algorithm that was solving the wrong problem.

I needed the Skotadi to be alien, so I modeled their mental processes and society using a “metal state space” analogy, which is pretty far from how people think. They fixate on complex ideals incessently and their abilities reflect their focus (instead of being independent, as with humans). They can and do change focus, but only when under “stress” (not our notion of stress). I had put a lot of work into designing them to be very alien, and had actively avoided naming their concepts to avoid building human-style boxes around them in my brain. As you can probably tell, I still have problems trying to explain how they think in English.

The second half of the session was about the PCs learning what was really going on (in language that they couldn't quite follow). It worked well, in that the players were at a loss after the conversation, but by the end of the campaign they re-read what was said and found that the Skotadi were telling them exactly what was happening and what needed to be done, in the plainest possible language.

It was also set up for my next “Man With a Gun Walks In” moment: the attempted destruction of Aurora and with it the bulk of the PC's support.

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It suffers from that setting's attempts to advance the technology to SA levels while keeping as many attitudes and social constructs from present day intact as possible.

I think I'm missing something fundamental. I can imagine arbitrarily alien societies, but I can't see them being easy for my players to RP in. For example, the Skotadi above are definitely not "modern" in their thoughts, and neither are the Aia. But I doubt that most of my players would want to play a Skotadi or Aia in their own environment. When "I get a sandwich" takes as much thought to understand and enact as most of my full sessions, the story slows to a crawl. (I do have one player who loves this sort of thing, but then I'm not so enamored with the slow pace of the plot.)

I admit to having read far too little Transhuman SF. The closest I've read is Brin's Diaspora, which covers anything higher level than single characters in broad strokes. Not enough detail for me to run my kind of plot in.

So, what sorts of setting ideas do you have that meet your criteria of being actually transhuman while being easy enough to understand that I can have an actual plot and story in? Oh, and they need to be fully coherent and internally consistent if I want my plots to hold together. What do I not understand?

To get around this, we just need to brainstorm what sort of party concepts would work in an SA setting. That seems to be the big stumbling block of removing them. What happens if there's no Ts, or any other Higher-Ups to take their place?
I have several concepts, but maybe this actually warrants a new thread specifically for that topic…

This. So much this. Regardless of one's views on the Ts, alternate T-less settings can only add awesome.

Last edited on 24 Mar 2012 16:03 by TauCeti Show more

Re: Transcendentals (as story elements)

Tantavalist 24 Mar 2012 18:40

I think I'm missing something fundamental. I can imagine arbitrarily alien societies, but I can't see them being easy for my players to RP in. For example, the Skotadi above are definitely not "modern" in their thoughts, and neither are the Aia. But I doubt that most of my players would want to play a Skotadi or Aia in their own environment. When "I get a sandwich" takes as much thought to understand and enact as most of my full sessions, the story slows to a crawl. (I do have one player who loves this sort of thing, but then I'm not so enamored with the slow pace of the plot.)

I admit to having read far too little Transhuman SF. The closest I've read is Brin's Diaspora, which covers anything higher level than single characters in broad strokes. Not enough detail for me to run my kind of plot in.

The fundamental shift you have to make is to break free of the Space Opera mindset. The idea that Sci-Fi is just "People like Us in space." This is an absurd idea, of course. As I've said above, given the fundamental changes that technologies have on the societies that use them, picturing the people in an SA setting being Just Like Us, with money and corporations and TV channels, is the same as picturing Steampunk Victorian British spacefarers, or Pulp 30s-through-50s Raygun-wielding All American Astronauts. It can be entertaining to imagine, but it's not likely to happen.

So- look at some technology that's fundamental to the setting. Then think of all the reasons you're coming up with, even without thinking about it, to limit that tech somehow so it doesn't "spoil things". Then take all those limits away, work out how society is changed as a whole, and have that be what you play in.

Take Star Trek as an example. The Transporter/Replicator technology as shown there has so many more applications that it's used for. But it's routinely limited by constraints placed upon it so that writers can still use plots that otherwise would be rendered pointless. Take all those limits away- you can replicate living beings. There is no discernable difference between hand-crafted good and replicated ones. Medical problems can be solved by re-assembling sick or injured people into a healthy state based on previous records. And if an alien shape-shifter can somehow fool a transporter into thinking it's human, then when it appears at the other end, it really is just a human (yes, this is my per peeve with the DS9 Changelings).

Imagine how things would work in Star Trek if that were not the case. Re-create the setting as it would be with Transporters/Replicators working like that.

As far as I'm concerned, any Sci-Fi setting should have the same done for all the technologies present.

The main consideration for altered societies will be that almost any setting without artificial restrictions will evolved into a Post-Scarcity economy. This doesn't, of course, mean that anyone can have anything they want. Something resembling money could still exist purely as a means of rationing resources. Nobody starves, everyone has a comfortable apartment with entertainment, but if you want a Starship or your own private Asteroid Estate, that's going to require some Credits (or whatever). It's believable that a civilisation could supply the basic amenities to all citizens, but not that it could supply anything to everyone.

The big societal difference implicit in an SA-tech setting that I find myself unable to escape from is the re-emergence of a Societal Elite. Since only a certain number of people can have the really big things, then the ones who own them will be in a position of greater power, and thus able to get even more Big Things. How these things are decided will vary from culture to culture. Perhaps one person is democratically elected, with all the citizens who vote for him assigning him a proportionate amount of their planet's excess production. Another might be part of some reborn Noble Family concept, enhanced Posthumans who really are better in every way than their subjects and rule society from a sense of Noblesse Oblige that's been hard-coded into their mind-states.

The PCs will, of course, be a part of this Elite for the simple reason that it's no fun playing Joe Average.

Now, some societies will claim that they have no Elite. The real truth would be that they have no non-Elite. I see a definite divide between societies which have evolved from lower tech levels, thus inheriting a vast surplus population, and those founded by small Elites who went out into the unknown and created a society that was post-scarcity from the start.

Life for non-Elites will be resemble British costume dramas set in the late 19th/Early 20th centuries, with a society that seems to drift through it's leisured existence without any real care- but without any human underclass needed to support them. Life for Elites is probably more like a high-level Corporate type in the modern world. People who relax and sit on their comfortable level of wealth never get beyond a certain point- several of the very richest Billionaires, when people talk about their personal lives, work even harder than their employees. Likewise, to become a member of the Elite, a PC has to either have been born into the class, caught the eye of a powerful Patron, or have really, really wanted it and worked hard to get there. In all cases, failure to live up to whatever is needed to stay in the Elite will mean their eventual fall from power.

I suspect this is enough for one post anyway. Maybe I should start a thread later to discuss more concrete setting ideas.

Re: Transcendentals (as story elements)

TauCeti 26 Mar 2012 01:15

So… your idea is that the players are playing some variety of nobility with largely unaugmented people acting as scenery, but not really characters. Hmm… the major challenges to the PCs will be other elite in the same society, natural disasters, elite of other nations, and uprising (or other plots) by those below them seeking social equality (or just a change in conditions from the below-the-poverty-line* living conditions you described). I can see a campaign in such a setting. That said, I'd toss back in SA's level of social diversity (replicants, stored, logicians, and so on) to give it enough flavor; if every society were as you described the setting would be a bit too bland for me to have any interest in playing or GMing in.

*I'm treating “free apartment, food, entertainment, and medical” as below the poverty line for the same reason that someone living like a well-to-do serf (or even merchant) from the middle ages would be considered to be in extreme poverty in a modern developed country.

I find the idea that social mobility, which has been steadily increasing over the last few thousand years, would reverse this trend, rather quaint. The “low-tech-to-high-tech” societies having overpopulation seems to mimic outdated 19th century Malthusian ideas; inverse population pyramids have already become the norm for fully developed nations. Unless “low tech” is substantially below modern levels, population increase is anything but a guarantee. I'm also not sure where you got the idea that a high-population society would be incapable of transitioning to “fully elite”.

Basically, I can certainly see these things happening in some or even many societies, but if you take them as inevitable constraints on the future, then you are even more falling into the pattern of mapping the past on the future than I. Specifically, mapping the 19th century onto the future.

Re: Transcendentals (as story elements)

Tantavalist 26 Mar 2012 17:55

The divergence of society that I proposed isn't due to limits placed on social mobility- or not in all societies, since it's inevitable some will place such limits. Rather, the idea was based on the polarisation of society based on the fact that a large percentage of the human race becomes content once a certain standard of living is achieved. There's nothing inherently wrong with just wanting to drift along enjoying life with friends and family. But if a society can only produce a certain number of, for example, Lighthugger Starships, then it can't just give them to anyone who wants one. There has to be some criteria to decide who gets one, and humans are inherently political beings.

Now, as the resources and technology of a civilisation increase, the minimum level of resources granted to everyone will go up and/or the requirements needed to qualify for something exceptional will come down. Eventually, everyone who wants that Lighthugger Starship can have one. At which point, a society will undergo a Diaspora and the only people staying in the home system will be those content to do so- everyone else has at the vary least migrated to an Asteroid and converted it into their own ideal home, or even gone off to found a new Society based on their own ideas.

My argument as far as star-faring Transhuman cultures go is that the "Nobility and Peasant" model is the only one that would fit a society with a large population. Lacking such a structure, a population would either disperse to form it's own enclaves, or try to enforce its views on the rest of the society.

When you imagine a settlement in a setting with SA levels of technology, the question you need to ask yourself is- "why haven't these people moved somewhere else and set up something they like better"? The limits of economics- "I'd love to move but house prices in other areas are too high" or "I hate my job but the one I'd like to do doesn't pay well enough" no longer apply. So there has to be some reason that these people are here and doing what they do.

In a setting with common FTL tech, I can envisage that large cities no longer exist, especially if it's one with Wormhole tech equivalent to that of the original SA setting (unless it's a city made of parts joined by Wormholes, such as in the Hyperion books). But if FTL is limited or non-existent, then it may not be practical to let a planet with a population in billions spread out at will. This would especially be the case in a sublight-only setting where the local systems have already been colonised.

Re: Transcendentals (as story elements)

TauCeti 28 Mar 2012 16:21

I agree wholeheartedly that “social Diaspora” is a possible, even likely outcome for sufficiently high tech societies. Except that it isn't mandatory.

So there has to be some reason that these people are here and doing what they do.

Yes. Here's a few possible alternates:

• Increase social connectivity. For example, most people can have about 100 people they really know (about the size of our Paleolithic tribes). Increase this number to millions or billions and you can literally be friends with, say, 10% of everyone on a planet. Do that, and society becomes more interlinked and there is less reason to leave. Also, nepotism and altruism become synonyms, which blows away any sort of “Nobility and Peasant” model.
• Change how decisions are made. In our own society, people with power and wealth make decisions. If everyone can involve themselves in all decisions they care about, resources can be given to those who would do well with them, or simply would most enjoy them. People who actually want a lighthugger starship get one, and everyone else gets what they want instead. If you have a society dedicated to obliterating the concept of a Nobility, then it gets obliterated. (Note: this would be an exceedingly difficult society to set up in the real world; high metatech or cognitech may be required).
• Synonomize fractured enclaves and grand society. Let society shatter into like-minded individuals, but pull them back together in an over-society. If people are physically getting distant from each other, then maintain communication between everyone so they can still make grand decisions together (such as “what do we do with planet #4 in our homesystem”). If the distance is social instead of physical, create an over-society where all of these disparate subcultures can work together to form something larger. For example, in the extreme case of an Open Source (hardware/software/wetware) victory, it becomes increasingly difficult for governments to control people and corporations cease to exist as a concept. People could fracture by social preference and fields of interest (regardless of physical location) and still share their innovations and ideas with one another (remember, Open Source won). The result is a society divided not vertically (along national lines) or horizontally (along class lines) but diagonally (along personal interest lines).
• Increase cultural identity. If the population view themselves as part of a single culture, and that this is paramount, they'll make decisions based on this ideal. Do that, and fracturing becomes unthinkable. This can result in a Nobility & Peasant model, but it doesn't have to, since it'll make nearly any model more stable than it otherwise would be.

As an aside, how the various SA cultures might hold together:
Union – change how decisions are made, and increase cultural identity
Replicants – increase social connectivity (a side effects of multiple instances)
Logicians – changed how their minds work; fell into Nobility & Peasant anyway
Roamers – increase cultural identity; somewhat fractured anyway
Disciples – increase cultural identity; low population; hemorrhaging population anyway
Stardwellers – synonomized fractured enclave and over-society; in the process of fracturing anyway
Stored – trying to change how decisions are being made; are in the process of fracturing anyway
Independents – increased cultural identity. May have Nobility & Peasant. May be trying to spread their culture (to cargo cults) anyway.
Mechanicans – Nobility & Peasant (based on wealth); will likely fall farther into that mindset, or else fracture (unstable).
Masqueraders – ill defined. Synonomized fractured and grand society? Of all the cultures, they're the most likely to have diagonal social lines.
Cargo Cult – Often Nobility & Peasant. Often low population.
Old Worlder – not a single society; low population; not high-tech.

Last edited on 28 Mar 2012 17:34 by TauCeti Show more

Re: Transcendentals (as story elements)

TauCeti 28 Mar 2012 17:29

Rather, the idea was based on the polarisation of society based on the fact that a large percentage of the human race becomes content once a certain standard of living is achieved.

This is nonsense. If it were true, modern Americans would still be using black and white TVs and radio. Why upgrade to the latest iPhone if you are content with what you have? Indeed, substantial increases in standard of living can result in cultural (or actual) revolutions. See Arab Spring for a modern example, or the French Revolution for the 18th century.

Re: Transcendentals (as story elements)

TauCeti 11 Apr 2012 22:51

There's another social element to think about (in the Nobility&Peasants model, although this could work in other models): crowdsourcing / citizen scientist / whatever it is called in gaming.

If you have a large number of people doing very little for society, you have a huge resource pool just waiting to be used. Games can use their players to make content for each other, at no cost to the developer (Spore, Minecraft). Scientists can get large populations of hobbyists (really, anyone interested in the field) to perform analysis in massive parallel, for very little cost.

Given time, this shifts what a “job” really is. Right now, there's lots of competing priorities for one's job. It needs to pay well enough, be in a decent location, and not be a miserable place to work.

With sufficient tech, location is irrelevant (you can work from home) and pay is irrelevant (everything you need is free). What this paradigm can offer its workers is entertainment, plus the feeling of having contributed meaningfully towards something worthy (anything from improving the game you're playing for others, to cancer research).

This creates an unusual economy, that may help bring society together (relative to a full diaspora, at least). A large population of people looking for entertainment is a valuable resource, and not one found in the depths of space.

Re: Transcendentals (as story elements)

TauCeti 28 Mar 2012 17:24

While I would like to continue exploring the above tangent, I figure I should create this branch here for anyone who wants to respond to the original post (i.e. what the Transcendentals do in a story sense).

A brief summary:

• Transcendentals are a tool for the GM to skip certain types of plot, especially that involving figuring out why the PCs are involved in the first place. They are also a tool to ensure that the PCs remain motivated towards doing something (although not necessarily what the GM was thinking of). Like all tools, they can trip up a GM, and shouldn't be used if the GM wants to focus on the motivation of the PCs to continue the story.
  • As an aside, Core Values do a good job of increasing character motivation and supplying hooks. My preferred use is to have the T's set up the situation (putting the PCs in it), and let the players and their CVs determine the specific motivations and, as a result, the outcome.
• Trancendentals do not remove free will (see SA 1.0 page 67; everything to do with the Strong Observer Effect). Because of this, they are unable to give prophecies, even ignoring bandwidth limitations. They can predict what might happen (acting as the above tool). A more complete discussion of the temporal physics the Transcendentals work under may be in order, to better clarify what they can and cannot do. Regardless, the inability of the T's to generate predestinies is required for most plots, and to avoid degenerate prophecy-driven plots.

Re: Transcendentals (as story elements)

narfanator 10 Apr 2012 02:20

Ok, I'm still in Melbourne so I'm going to cut corners on this; generally, I am totally in favor of the Ts and, for the most part, the setting itself, and, probably because I matured as an RPGer and started out as a GMer under Tau, I pretty much completely agree with him.

Let's see:

If you don't like _, don't have _ in your plot. Interactions with the Patent Office, and, within that set, interactions with Inspectors, are few and far between. Rather than take the Ts out completely, just figure out the consequences of their having even less overall affect on the world - I'd imagine that each civilization runs a Copyright division, and polices itself, for instance.

I really like skipping the "why is there a party" plot. Mostly, it let me much more easily have multi-cultural teams, but for another, large disparities in Capabilities don't make sense without it. For the most part, a high-capability character can do everything an Old-Worlder can do, they just don't use Plot to do it. It's a trope, or perhaps conceit, in transhumanist SF that good old fashion humans can have something that "just makes them special"; and the Ts do the best job of making that make in-universe sense.

In the same vein, fortune cookie plot hooks are just fantastic and amazingly lazy. I come up with a situation, and then pick an "insertion point", and then come up with the fortune cookie that gets them there. This lets me send them after the 'clearly not kidnapped he's sitting right there' plot, for the weird factor, over the 'somebody's copy-stealing Stored here, go find them' plot.

Then, once I've got plot momentum, I don't actually need the Ts. Literally, my campaign's final arc started with the "fortune cookie briefing" of "the [non-patent-office] NPC doesn't show up" - which ended up being incredibly critical to resolving the core crisis - I had a group of people that completely believed that there *was* free will, until the Ts came along, and then the act of observing the future got rid of it. Doug's character argued - with his strongest point being, "we're on vacation, dammit!" that, as evidenced by the fortune-cookie breifings, free will was what mattered *most* to the Ts.

Once the plot starts running, I keep the Ts way out of it, and I have definitely pulled the "man with a gun walks in" trick. Worked really well.

Finally, I feel like the existence of the Ts as the source of the protagonists lets me make my villains incredibly competent. I don't need to worry about them making mistakes, since that's not what gets them caught. Doing something that effects the world and gets them written down in the history books is what makes them get "caught".

—

Fake PS -
Hell, even if you want to not have the Ts feature but still use a group of Inspectors, reduce the role of the Ts in the Patent Office to begin with. Sometimes they make Inspector teams, and sometimes they give missions, but maybe for the most part, regular NPCs do both of those. Nothing the Ts do has to make sense until after the fact, so you can literally do *anything* with them, including not be there.

—

My two "beefs" with the setting are the apparent low-level of multiculturalism - that is, I get the impression there's not a lot of mixing between civilizations - and that no-one else is playing with what I call "Oracle Buffers", aka, the thing that makes the Ts able to hear the future. So, I added both, in the form of Pirate Bay Node 6, and the NPC It's About Time.

Re: Transcendentals (as story elements)

TauCeti 11 Apr 2012 22:52

I'd like to second Nick's “incredibly competent villains”. In most games, I need the villains to make mistakes for the plot to even start; not so with Ts. I've managed to work around not having Ts in other games by modeling villain information (so, they make no mistakes given everything they know, but their knowledge is incomplete), but in SA I don't even have to do that.

That said, ultimately competent (but incompletely knowledgeable) villains have the problem of being something of a roulette plot. Whether the players notice the subtle hints that an incredibly competent character is concealing lack of knowledge is rather random. Sometimes it works, sometimes I have to steadily dumb down my villain until the players catch on, which is pretty terrible.

Re: Transcendentals (as story elements)

Colin_Fredericks 19 Mar 2012 00:51

I want to note that I absolutely am going to post in this thread, but I don't want to bias anyone with my Game Designer Authority. I want to see what other folks say first.