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Trekkin
2017-03-04, 01:33 AM
I've had this idea for a while now -- and I cannot be the only one -- to run a dungeon crawl with no combat whatsoever. Just traps, puzzles, and a mystery story told through the architecture and maybe the notes scrawled on the walls. A fractal puzzle, if you will. Maybe some survival elements when the doors lock behind the party.

I'd turn to D&D for a dungeon crawl out of pure reflex, but D&D has so much material for combat that I can't help but wonder if there's another system with less dead weight. Conversely, I could use, say, FATE for this, but I'm specifically looking for alternatives to story-centric rules-light systems, not out of any aversion to them but because I'm wondering what my options are.

Are there any systems out there that are rules-moderate but aren't built around combat? I'd ideally like something with an encumbrance system and more thought given to environmental hazards than a blanket "the GM may apply penalties as appropriate".

Knaight
2017-03-04, 01:49 AM
Torchbearer works beautifully for this. It does dungeon crawling, it covers a bunch of non-combat stuff, and while combat is by default a significant portion of it it's a much smaller portion than in D&D.

Beneath
2017-03-04, 04:01 AM
I don't know if I'd recommend torchbearer for it, as much as I like it; it's low-combat but the resting check system makes combat, or at least conflicts against some kind of animate opponent, a necessary part of the game.

I'd say figure out what you want to do and go from there. If it's pure puzzles and mystery you don't even really need a system; if you want to have logistics where it wears you down and sometimes you roll dice for how much it wears you down, that's where a system comes in.

NichG
2017-03-04, 05:05 AM
This sounds like a really interesting design challenge. I think I'd look at Dread or even Call of Cthulhu for inspiration, with maybe a dash of Apocalypse World.

Basically the things to answer are:

- What are the sources of tension? What form does success/failure take at the micro level, and how do those chain together to create coherent player reasoning at the macro level. For example, in a system with combat a micro consequence is taking damage, and many instances of damage accumulate into dying, so the tension associated with damage has to do with the anticipation of what damage means in the long run. Without combat, you need some other kind of chainable consequences, and it's best if they feel very natural so it doesn't force the players to spend a lot of time adapting to the idea.

- What are the affordances granted by virtue of having a specific character? This is basically, what are the mechanical interactions you want to give players above and beyond their personal cleverness. This leads into how to make characters feel different, etc.

Grod_The_Giant
2017-03-04, 11:46 AM
I don't know that you really need a system, honestly. None of those things really fit with character-based mechanics, like, at all-- or at least, not in any particularly interesting way I've seen. Solving puzzles and dealing with traps is really only fun when it's you, the player, figuring them out. I'd probably go with something near-totally freeform. "Characters" would just be a list of gear they're carrying, and maybe a special power or two. ("Joe is incredibly strong; Amy has exceptionally nimble fingers," that sort of thing). The players/party get a hero point every time they disarm a trap, solve a puzzle, find a clue, etc, and spend them to get hints, produce plausible-but-unlisted items, and-- most importantly-- not die when they screw up and a trap goes off.

Trekkin
2017-03-04, 12:40 PM
Having bought and read Torchbearer, I can see how its engine needs at least some conflict to drive it. It's certainly going on my list, though.

As far as what I want out of the system on the micro- and macro- levels: On the macro scale, I'd like an essentially economic motivation. The party either extracts enough loot to buy food and supplies, or they starve. See, my group likes coming up with creative solutions to short-circuit puzzles, and I'd like to tacitly encourage that in some cases while making it impractical to blow through all the walls and bridge over the all gaps and never engage with the actual puzzles.

The other half of that is limiting how long they can stay in the dungeon on any given trip. Limiting the food and water they can carry could work for that, as could putting the dungeon underwater or in vacuum. The point is to limit the amount of time they can spend inside, and thus the number of tries they have to solve the puzzles.

Thus, the basic source of tension is the knowledge that every shot at opening more of the dungeon costs them consumables, so if they fail too consistently they're going to lose the ability to keep trying (and, you know, die.) Further, it's possible that not all the doors they open stay open forever, so if they take too many risks, one relocking door could mean they're all going to die of thirst. Of course, if they don't take enough risks, they can't afford water in the first place, and if they fail the wrong puzzle they might just die outright.

So, using that to inform my choice of system:

1. I don't really need a model for physical trauma more detailed than "fine", "not fine", and "dead", although I could make good use of disease rules.
2. Some easy way of tracking consumables would be nice. I probably don't need anything more than a line of boxes for food and water though.
3. Characters can just be sets of skills, gear lists, and statuses.

I don't need skills to pertinent to the individual challenges, since yes, the players will get more fun out of solving them themselves. I could see some role for languages and an equivalent to Knowledge skills, though, for doing things like reading the warning labels on doors and recognizing esoteric cultural references.

Having actually typed that, it occurs to me that I could just track time (in and out of the dungeon) spent amassing knowledge bases and use that for skills. The more you, say, decipher ancient Precursor runes, the more quickly and thoroughly you can do so -- which, of course, biases the party towards some doors more than others and emphasizes specific understandings of what happened to the dungeon.

NichG
2017-03-04, 01:06 PM
Having been playing the Numenera CRPG, I'm actually struck by the fact that the pool system would actually be a good fit for this kind of thing. The idea being that you have pools of points that can be used to increase your chances on a roll or retry a failed roll once. There are all sorts of non-combat challenges, and if you roll and succeed things go one way, but if you roll and fail then things go a different way such that you can't 'try again' (e.g. rolls are always only for things which you couldn't logically try until you get it). Deciding how many points a given intermediate objective is worth actually works pretty well for non-combat gameplay with a mechanical touch. An important point of this is that your base success chance doesn't really increase much over the course of the game, so in the end being more powerful = having more points and being able to spend more points at once.

For some reason though, when I played the Numenera system in person, all the players forgot they should be spending points to increase their success chances on rolls. Also, I have the feeling that players tend not to propose actions they don't have a skill on their sheet, even if having the skill is a minor buff compared to what could be achieved by spending points (whereas in the CRPG, you're presented with skill check choices even for skills you don't have or are bad at). So that's something you'd need to address - maybe by being a bit more explicit about check opportunities in a given scene? I feel like the CRPG communicates 'if you try this, something good might happen' whereas the tabletop ends up being more 'even though you came up with this course of action and it makes sense, you could still end up failing'.

Fri
2017-03-04, 01:17 PM
There's a game in development by Penguin King Games (developer of costume fairy adventure) titled "Love and Labyrinth" that might be close to your idea, but once again, still in development. You could google it if you're interested, but there's nothing up yet, just QA thread in rpgnet and previews and whatnot.

The basic idea is that the game is separated into two phase, the out of dungeon phase and in dungeon phase. In out of dungeon phase you gather resources for your dungeon delving phase, and the resource can vary ranging from physical resources or non physical resources like morale or good karma.

The resources are to be used in the dungeon delve, and the most interesting part is that all obstacles including monsters can be solved as same type of challenges, but you can "zoom in" to say, boss monster fights to have a more detailed and nitty gritty fights. Also there are various goals and dangers for you to dungeon delve, so you might want to dungeon delve for money, or renown, and whatnot, and you if you fail defaultly you're assumed to manage to exit or got rescued out but you got physical or mental trauma and you have to "burn" your treasures. But there apparently will be rules about permanent deaths.

Beneath
2017-03-04, 02:29 PM
Numenera might work, though I haven't played it. Writing your own system might be better.

In addition to food and water, you should also track light; dungeons are dark and light sources are a common consumable (and the tension from running out of them can be fun).

In positive recs for video game inspiration, there's the Storynexus game Below (http://below.storynexus.com/s) and the Steam game Out There (http://store.steampowered.com/app/334420/) (which is space, but relevant because it's an exploration game about managing your supplies. In particular there's the thing where to restore any of the three main stats (hull, fuel, oxygen) you have to burn some off the other two (you need to expend fuel and oxygen to go anywhere to mine metal to fix your hull, landing on a world that can restore your oxygen or orbiting a place where you can extract fuel causes hull damage)

While I wouldn't recommend running torchbearer plain since AFAICT running it without conflict opponents puts you into a condition death spiral where you pile on status conditions and never accumulate enough checks to remove them, it's definitely worth looking into especially for the inventory system; strictly limiting inventory space and making you have to choose between tools, food, water, light, and treasure is definitely a plus for this kind of play. Also the torchbearer thing where food and water fill a similar role but water takes more space but can often be replenished during a dungeon but food cannot is clever, though I'm not sure I'd go with it if I can find another way to distinguish between food and water supplies. The various supplies you have should feel different when they drop low and you have to ration.

Trekkin
2017-03-04, 06:30 PM
Actually, Out There is hugely relevant; I'm partial to mid-hard science fiction over fantasy anyway, and had originally planned on having a bunch of astronauts exploring/jury-rigging a derelict generation ship. I just figured, what with the general fear of science fiction, that there'd be some fantasy game I could reskin.

Numenera is an option, although I'd have to remove Glaives.

And yeah, at this point I'm probably just going to DIY a system.

JAL_1138
2017-03-04, 08:04 PM
You could take WEG D6 Star Wars, strip out the Force powers, and just don't use combat encounters. I might go with Revised (or "Revised and Expanded," or whatever it was called, I forget) for this since it has a larger selection of skills. There's also a generic version called D6 Space (I think), that's based on the same system.

JBPuffin
2017-03-04, 09:05 PM
Brent Dedeaux (https://www.rpg.net/columns/list-column.phtml?colname=talesfromtherockethouse) over at RPG.net actually talks about this some; not sure how much of it you'd find useful, but it's there.

Knaight
2017-03-05, 12:33 PM
Actually, Out There is hugely relevant; I'm partial to mid-hard science fiction over fantasy anyway, and had originally planned on having a bunch of astronauts exploring/jury-rigging a derelict generation ship. I just figured, what with the general fear of science fiction, that there'd be some fantasy game I could reskin.
That changes the parameters of the search a bit - there are absolutely science fiction RPGs. Sci-fi dungeoncrawling is a bit of a harder case, largely because dungeon crawling at all usually means following the D&D tradition and sci-fi games tend to jump ship from D&D traditions*. There's nothing to run straight, and I do suspect you'll have to homebrew, but that doesn't mean there's nothing useful to steal mechanics or setting stuff from. Take Torchbearer's inventory system, hit up Eclipse Phase, Traveler, ICAR, and/or Shadowrun for equipment lists (ICAR is also free, so there's that), take a look at GURPS Space for all sorts of stuff.

*I also dislike D&D, so it's entirely possible I just never noticed the ones that fit better in the first place due to disinterest.

Trekkin
2017-03-05, 05:12 PM
I haven't found that to be the case, I'm afraid. Space opera and science fantasy RPGs, sure; we have Star Wars/Trek variants for days, and of course there's Shadowrun and Eclipse Phase like you've said. I haven't seen nearly as many harder-than-rubber sci-fi RPGs, though, which is a shame when I'm trying to build a game about luckless folks in leaky space suits concussing themselves against module walls while trying to find the airlock codes before their suit power runs out.

That said, I can probably cobble together a gear list out of ICAR, Traveller, Jovian Chronicles, the less magical parts of Shadowrun and maybe some of Eclipse Phase's cheaper gear. Thanks for the recommendations!

kyoryu
2017-03-06, 11:24 AM
Old school D&D! It's got all the rules you'd need for resource consumption, traps, and all the other nasty stuff you'd find in a dungeon.

And GP for XP means that fighting monsters is unnecessary, just stock the dungeon with treasure and you're good to go. Fighters might feel a bit useless, but everyone else would have a role.

The only wonky thing would be some of the negative pressures in the game revolving around wandering monsters as a reason to not just keep trying things over and over, but that's about it.

Algeh
2017-03-07, 12:53 AM
I'd use GURPS. Sure, it has an overly-detailed combat system that you won't be using, but you and your players can skip reading those chapters and spend all of your time pouring over the skill list instead.

I haven't played or GM'd since their 3rd edition (I bought the 4th ed books but haven't been able to set aside the time to find a group, and I have been completely unable to find a GURPS game at the local SF con), but I once ran a GURPS game that lasted for over 2 years real-time with no combat (except for the time some of the players decided to run a pillow fight using the advanced combat rules to see what would happen, which really doesn't count).

It has a really detailed skill system, so it could be useful for having different characters know different things. The only thing I don't like about it is that it only has one mental stat (IQ), which can lead to some weirdness with generically "smart" characters being good at a really broad base of things that don't usually all go together. This is mostly a problem at higher point levels when someone chooses to spend a solid chunk of their character points raising IQ to a really high level. (I also had problems with the way they used the skill system to model learning foreign languages, but the prominence of that issue was probably specific to the group I was playing with and the specific game we were playing.)

daniel_ream
2017-03-07, 01:26 AM
The players/party get a hero point every time they disarm a trap, solve a puzzle, find a clue, etc, and spend them to get hints, produce plausible-but-unlisted items, and-- most importantly-- not die when they screw up and a trap goes off.

This almost makes me think of GUMSHOE.

kyoryu
2017-03-07, 11:50 AM
it only has one mental stat (IQ)

GURPS is a weird mix of incredibly fine detail and painting with very broad strokes.

daniel_ream
2017-03-07, 07:20 PM
GURPS is a weird mix of incredibly fine detail and painting with very broad strokes.

It's The Fantasy Trip (a rules-light dungeon crawling game) with thirty years of accumulated house rules.

thedanster7000
2017-03-09, 02:45 AM
Yeah GURPS is excellent for survival and detailed injury but a tad-rules heavy for what it sounds like you want.

Knaight
2017-03-09, 04:30 AM
It's The Fantasy Trip (a rules-light dungeon crawling game) with thirty years of accumulated house rules.

The Fantasy Trip wasn't exactly light to begin with, and it also shows a lot of Steve Jackson's design - minimal attributes, convoluted grid combat system, and while it doesn't have skills per se it has a long list of traits instead.

Trekkin
2017-03-09, 12:07 PM
Yeah GURPS is excellent for survival and detailed injury but a tad-rules heavy for what it sounds like you want.

That is one of the things vexing me, yes. I can make some use of systemic illness rules, but not so much physical trauma; I'd rather not have the players track which of their ankles got twisted and so forth. Besides, I was the players to feel small and vulnerable, and multiple injury locations can interfere with that.

kyoryu
2017-03-10, 03:19 PM
It's The Fantasy Trip (a rules-light dungeon crawling game) with thirty years of accumulated house rules.

Heh, the most old-school game I've played in was TFT heavily house-ruled and with a bunch of 1e AD&D stuff bolted on.

It was glorious.

CharonsHelper
2017-03-10, 03:38 PM
I haven't found that to be the case, I'm afraid. Space opera and science fantasy RPGs, sure; we have Star Wars/Trek variants for days, and of course there's Shadowrun and Eclipse Phase like you've said. I haven't seen nearly as many harder-than-rubber sci-fi RPGs, though, which is a shame when I'm trying to build a game about luckless folks in leaky space suits concussing themselves against module walls while trying to find the airlock codes before their suit power runs out.

That said, I can probably cobble together a gear list out of ICAR, Traveller, Jovian Chronicles, the less magical parts of Shadowrun and maybe some of Eclipse Phase's cheaper gear. Thanks for the recommendations!

How hard of sci-fi are you going for - on a spectrum from Star Wars (total future fantasy) to Asimov? (though much of Asimov feels goofy now, especially what he wrote in the 50's like Foundation, it was a decent extrapolation at the time)

I'd say that there are some decent RPGs in the middle of the spectrum - though I'll agree that there are no truly hard sci-fi games. Where would you say a game like Mass Effect is on the spectrum? I'd argue that while it's not as far over as Asimov, it's solidly on the hard sci-fi end. (Sure there's a lot of guesswork - but that's true of any sci-fi where the tech is more than a few decades ahead.)

Trekkin
2017-03-11, 01:40 AM
How hard of sci-fi are you going for - on a spectrum from Star Wars (total future fantasy) to Asimov? (though much of Asimov feels goofy now, especially what he wrote in the 50's like Foundation, it was a decent extrapolation at the time)

I'd say that there are some decent RPGs in the middle of the spectrum - though I'll agree that there are no truly hard sci-fi games. Where would you say a game like Mass Effect is on the spectrum? I'd argue that while it's not as far over as Asimov, it's solidly on the hard sci-fi end. (Sure there's a lot of guesswork - but that's true of any sci-fi where the tech is more than a few decades ahead.)

Somewhere beyond Asimov, I think, toward the hopelessly optimistic white paper end of the science fiction spectrum. In general, I can grit my teeth and wave my hands and add portal FTL that doesn't violate any of the presumptions about wormholes that the PCs can get close enough to test, build a causality-respecting portal dag, and call that "how you all got all the way out to the Big Interesting Object, please don't poke it too hard, here's a map". I can also gloss over some of the myriad complexities involved in actual space flight operations and just assume the PCs have their tank stirrers and so forth on automatic. I want them all dead, sure, but not by boredom.

I will not, however, waltz merrily past all the science either I or my audience might fail to understand, scribble in whatever magic makes my story easier to tell, and relentlessly bray "Clarke's Third Law! Sufficiently advanced!" at anyone who happens to notice, and I'm not going to include magic rocks that make the setting do whatever I want.

Mass Effect is not hard science fiction. The entire setting runs on magic rocks. Magic rocks power the wizards with their purple fuzzy crackling. Magic rocks make the improbably shaped spaceships fly and have gravity. They can't even build a handgun without needing some magic rocks. I'd say it's just one big pervasive departure from reality, but the magic rocks do all these things by different mechanisms.

Mass Effect is a standard sci-fi space battle setting about space dogfights and spacemen firing spaceguns at space aliens on distant worlds while Sufficiently Advanced Precursors get on with facilitating explosions and one-liners. It just vomits frankly awful technobabble at the player in the hope that complicated nonsense sounds enough like science to suspend your disbelief between exploding aliens. Space fantasy doesn't really work for my purposes here, sadly.

Mostly, I just want a setting hard enough not to conform to what "everyone knows." Everyone knows hydrogen is the best propellant, full stop, so if you use anything other than hydrogen anywhere it must be wrong -- but in reality, propellant has to be stored before it's used and hydrogen is bad at that. Similarly, everyone knows you can smash diamonds with a hammer, but tetrahedral carbon compounds can be very tough. When I have a setting where aphorisms like that will get a PC killed, I will be happy.

Frozen_Feet
2017-03-11, 05:08 AM
I use Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Neither the system nor my games are designed as zero-combat, but individual sessions do end up like that frequently.

LotFP has the benefits of having a nifty encumberance system and being rules light. It has quick, easy to resolve rules for common activities like searching, checking architechture, digging, forcing open doors, figuring out dead languages etc. and supplies such as food, water and lamps are easy to track.

CharonsHelper
2017-03-11, 08:58 AM
Mass Effect is not hard science fiction. The entire setting runs on magic rocks. Magic rocks power the wizards with their purple fuzzy crackling. Magic rocks make the improbably shaped spaceships fly and have gravity. They can't even build a handgun without needing some magic rocks. I'd say it's just one big pervasive departure from reality, but the magic rocks do all these things by different mechanisms.

No - it's not hard - but it's not as soft as Star Wars or Final Fantasy. It's middling.

Once it has it's crazy future techs & and added the future fuel etc. - it stays pretty internally consistent.

daniel_ream
2017-03-12, 06:03 PM
though I'll agree that there are no truly hard sci-fi games.

There are a couple of supplements for Mongoose Traveller - Orbital and Outpost Mars. c. 2100 solar system freighting/colonization. 2300 AD was close but still had FTL. Diaspora tries to stay reasonably close to cutting edge hard SF but that still means wormholes for interstellar travel.

Cluedrew
2017-03-12, 06:57 PM
I will not, however, waltz merrily past all the science either I or my audience might fail to understand, scribble in whatever magic makes my story easier to tell, and relentlessly bray "Clarke's Third Law! Sufficiently advanced!" at anyone who happens to notice, and I'm not going to include magic rocks that make the setting do whatever I want.Man, now I want to read that again. But yes I understand your general approach to science. From what I can see, I would say grab a generic systems and put your own setting down on top of it. I'm not sure what generic system I would recommend though.

Hey if your really desperate, rip out your favourite skill, encumbrance and health systems and go free-form outside of that. Your game seems (correct me if I'm wrong) to be about in-world interaction and exploration than system mastery. I don't think you actually need a system for that.

CharonsHelper
2017-03-12, 07:27 PM
There are a couple of supplements for Mongoose Traveller - Orbital and Outpost Mars. c. 2100 solar system freighting/colonization. 2300 AD was close but still had FTL. Diaspora tries to stay reasonably close to cutting edge hard SF but that still means wormholes for interstellar travel.

Actually - warp travel is theoretically possible - and doesn't even take the crazy amount of energy that initial calculations implied. http://www.space.com/17628-warp-drive-possible-interstellar-spaceflight.html

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2016/09/08/star-treks-warp-drive-might-become-a-reality/#754004dc5410

Trekkin
2017-03-13, 07:24 AM
Theoretically possible if you elide the requirement for negative energy density and negative mass, perhaps, and feasible if you allow for your ships to store literal tons of antimatter. We have no idea how to do any of that at the requisite scale, which is why all the popular articles about "warp drive" start with Star Trek references and never get any deeper from there. It's a blatantly aphysical black box.

This is, I feel, a massive problem in the context of a roleplaying game, because as soon as the PCs shoot through or melt the warp drive -- and in my experience this is inevitable -- we're back to making up magic for the sake of the story. Wormhole FTL at least has the advantage that a sufficiently perturbed wormhole can plausibly collapse into a singularity and thus be kept safely away from prying eyes, and a wormhole terminus is a superficially physical object that the PCs can chuck around.

And yes, I'm working on a system that's mostly concerned with encumbrance and skills. I'd have used Torchbearer's slot approach, but it feels wrong to limit the amount of mass/volume that can be moved in microgravity instead of it simply becoming continually harder to move and more expensive in terms of propellant as mass increases.

CharonsHelper
2017-03-13, 07:52 AM
Theoretically possible if you elide the requirement for negative energy density and negative mass, perhaps, and feasible if you allow for your ships to store literal tons of antimatter. We have no idea how to do any of that at the requisite scale, which is why all the popular articles about "warp drive" start with Star Trek references and never get any deeper from there. It's a blatantly aphysical black box.

The first article I linked especially DOES go into somewhat more depth.

And of COURSE they start with Star Trek references. That's the hook.

And where the heck was antimatter even referenced? (Not that I'm anything like a physicist.)

Trekkin
2017-03-13, 11:00 AM
I did read the space.com article. Quite apart from it being critically wrong, I see only details, not depth. The article is completely devoid of mathematics, with the closest we get being a prosaic description of the energy requirements of a flat ring of aphysical matter versus a torus of aphysical matter. The one is the "mass-energy" of Jupiter, while the other is the mass of Voyager. Those aren't numbers, though. (It also calls the above energy requirement "the only problem" with warp drive. If only.) The rest of the article is built on interviews with Drs. Harold White and Richard Obousy, again with no mathematics in sight. (There's also no discussion of the impossibility of steering/stopping the field or surviving the heat dumped into the flat region by Hawking radiation, but I can forgive that.)

That isn't an understanding of how warp drive works in any manipulable sense; there's no reasoning behind any of the figures. Had I come into that article with no knowledge of the metric Alcubierre described, I would have left with none -- and so, if I were to put "Alcubierre drives" into my game, I would be reduced to making stuff up as soon as a player, say, rammed something at FTL speeds or kicked somebody out the back of the ship or whatever.

As for antimatter, when they talk about "mass energy", they mean "mass-energy equivalence", a reflection of the fact that energy and mass interconvert at a ratio described by Einstein's most famous equation. Listed in mass, it's also how much matter and antimatter you need to annihilate in a perfectly (impossibly) efficient reactor to get a given quantity of energy -- and, given the Voyagers' current 700 kg mass, it seems more relevant to quote the required energy as 700 kg of matter-antimatter instead of, say, four petagrams of dry camel dung. ("Literal tons" was my first-order approximation of the actual amount needed given a less than perfectly efficient reactor.)

daniel_ream
2017-03-13, 12:35 PM
The devil, in this case, is not in the details; it's fairly easily demonstrable mathematically that if you can travel faster than light by any means, you can violate causality and create an unresolvable paradox. That's the problem with FTL.

Wormholes sidestep this by connecting two locations in space-time rather than two locations in space, which is why current hard SF writers use them. But they're still something of a handwave.

Cluedrew
2017-03-13, 01:09 PM
Anything beyond Mars (which they are building a spaceship to travel to) is going to involve some hand-wave... because we don't have it working. Although there is a matter of plausibility. For me the more plausible methods of faster than light travel are teleportation. Not wizard teleportation of course, probably something more complex. Say using gravity (which apparently can out pace light because it doesn't actually travel, not sure) to transmit information about something's physical configuration and then reconstruct it at the destination sight at 0.00001:0.00001 scale.

Still all sorts of problems with it of course, many in areas of study I have only scratched, but it sounds better than just going faster than physics seems to say we can.

CharonsHelper
2017-03-13, 03:33 PM
The devil, in this case, is not in the details; it's fairly easily demonstrable mathematically that if you can travel faster than light by any means, you can violate causality and create an unresolvable paradox. That's the problem with FTL.

Wormholes sidestep this by connecting two locations in space-time rather than two locations in space, which is why current hard SF writers use them. But they're still something of a handwave.

Actually - warp also sidesteps FTL issues - because the ship itself isn't actually traveling FTL. It's instead warping the space around it, thinning the space in front and directing it around the ship to thicken behind (in very simplistic terms) so that it's traveling FTL in comparison to the rest of the universe, but it doesn't have to deal with relativistic issues.

I believe that it wasn't proven even theoretically possible until the 90's, and until a few years ago they thought it would take so much energy as to be useless. (not that that puts them any closer to actually DOING it)


I did read the space.com article. Quite apart from it being critically wrong, I see only details, not depth.

Well... yeah. They're pop science articles designed for people like me who don't want to wade through all of the proofs which I probably couldn't decipher anyway.

I haven't taken physics since high school, or pure math since my freshman year of high school - and I only remember a smattering of either. Even if I could wade through the proofs - I don't want to.

It's just a summary of "look at this neat science thing".

daniel_ream
2017-03-13, 04:54 PM
[...] it's traveling FTL in comparison to the rest of the universe

That's the problem. If you can transmit information from one point to another faster than light can travel the intervening distance, it doesn't matter what the method is. It's fairly simple to set up a situation where you can violate causality as a result, and then the universe falls apart.

Unless Einstein is wrong, but if you're going to postulate that you're into Clarke's Third Law territory.

Trekkin
2017-03-13, 04:59 PM
Actually - warp also sidesteps FTL issues - because the ship itself isn't actually traveling FTL. It's instead warping the space around it, thinning the space in front and directing it around the ship to thicken behind (in very simplistic terms) so that it's traveling FTL in comparison to the rest of the universe, but it doesn't have to deal with relativistic issues.


Those issues are separate from the causality violation daniel_ream mentioned, which allows an FTL ship to travel such that it can leave its own future light cone and thus do things like see the receipt of a message before it's sent. Make a set of Minkowski diagrams for an FTL ship travelling between two planets moving away from each other subluminally and exchanging lightspeed messages and you'll see what I mean.

EDIT: As daniel_ream explained above. Sorry!



It's just a summary of "look at this neat science thing".

Yes, it is; I don't like articles like that, but that's beside the point. My point was that such summaries aren't deep enough to be useful for worldbuilding, at least not the way I do it. "Look at this neat science thing" is fine if you know a priori that nobody is going to want to take it off the shelf and play with it. To extend the metaphor, I fully expect my players to pull it apart, run it backwards, light it on fire and whatever else they can come up with. They're not actively intent on sabotage, just curious and scientifically literate.

What I consider "hard science fiction", in this context, hides all the blatantly aphysical bits well enough that we're unlikely to run into them in-game and runs everything else with perfect fidelity to phyiscal laws at the smallest resolution my players are likely to casually calculate. Hiding the magic in unsolved problems works for a time, but dates the work; by contrast, sticking them far away causally and behind closed and spiky doors at least lengthens the amount of time before we drive merrily off the cutting edge of theoretical physics.

So yeah, I haven't found any hard science fiction RPGs.

Psikerlord
2017-03-13, 05:06 PM
Having bought and read Torchbearer, I can see how its engine needs at least some conflict to drive it. It's certainly going on my list, though.

As far as what I want out of the system on the micro- and macro- levels: On the macro scale, I'd like an essentially economic motivation. The party either extracts enough loot to buy food and supplies, or they starve. See, my group likes coming up with creative solutions to short-circuit puzzles, and I'd like to tacitly encourage that in some cases while making it impractical to blow through all the walls and bridge over the all gaps and never engage with the actual puzzles.

The other half of that is limiting how long they can stay in the dungeon on any given trip. Limiting the food and water they can carry could work for that, as could putting the dungeon underwater or in vacuum. The point is to limit the amount of time they can spend inside, and thus the number of tries they have to solve the puzzles.

Thus, the basic source of tension is the knowledge that every shot at opening more of the dungeon costs them consumables, so if they fail too consistently they're going to lose the ability to keep trying (and, you know, die.) Further, it's possible that not all the doors they open stay open forever, so if they take too many risks, one relocking door could mean they're all going to die of thirst. Of course, if they don't take enough risks, they can't afford water in the first place, and if they fail the wrong puzzle they might just die outright.

So, using that to inform my choice of system:

1. I don't really need a model for physical trauma more detailed than "fine", "not fine", and "dead", although I could make good use of disease rules.
2. Some easy way of tracking consumables would be nice. I probably don't need anything more than a line of boxes for food and water though.
3. Characters can just be sets of skills, gear lists, and statuses.

I don't need skills to pertinent to the individual challenges, since yes, the players will get more fun out of solving them themselves. I could see some role for languages and an equivalent to Knowledge skills, though, for doing things like reading the warning labels on doors and recognizing esoteric cultural references.

Having actually typed that, it occurs to me that I could just track time (in and out of the dungeon) spent amassing knowledge bases and use that for skills. The more you, say, decipher ancient Precursor runes, the more quickly and thoroughly you can do so -- which, of course, biases the party towards some doors more than others and emphasizes specific understandings of what happened to the dungeon.

For fine/not fine/dead you might simply implement a 3 hit tier system, similar to D&D bloodied or not, but with an extra tier?

For easy equipment tracking - how about Black Hack's usage die rule (I think it comes from there). It goes something like when you use a thing roll a d12, on a 1or 2, next time roll a d10, and so on until d4, then whatever it is runs out.

For characters perhaps borrow the 5e skill list and gear section. Or really you could borrow this from anywhere. There's no doubt better gear books out there to throw at your players.

Psikerlord
2017-03-13, 05:08 PM
I use Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Neither the system nor my games are designed as zero-combat, but individual sessions do end up like that frequently.

LotFP has the benefits of having a nifty encumberance system and being rules light. It has quick, easy to resolve rules for common activities like searching, checking architechture, digging, forcing open doors, figuring out dead languages etc. and supplies such as food, water and lamps are easy to track.

Interesting - how does LotfP deal with those common activities?

CharonsHelper
2017-03-13, 05:41 PM
That's the problem. If you can transmit information from one point to another faster than light can travel the intervening distance, it doesn't matter what the method is. It's fairly simple to set up a situation where you can violate causality as a result, and then the universe falls apart.

Unless Einstein is wrong, but if you're going to postulate that you're into Clarke's Third Law territory.

Maybe I'm missing something - but I fail to see how this is more of an issue than a jet going faster than the speed of sound and arriving before it's noise arrives.

And no - it doesn't violate relativity. Relativity never says that stuff can't travel faster than the speed of light through the universe. Quite the opposite. It says that nothing can travel through SPACE faster than the speed of light. It's already been proven that light sometimes travels marginally faster than the speed of light when it's affected by gravity - because the gravity itself warps space-time.

daniel_ream
2017-03-13, 05:52 PM
Maybe I'm missing something - but I fail to see how this is more of an issue than a jet going faster than the speed of sound and arriving before it's noise arrives.

Yes. Yes, you do.


And no - it doesn't violate relativity.

Learn to read.


I haven't taken physics since high school, or pure math since my freshman year of high school - and I only remember a smattering of either.

This.

Cluedrew
2017-03-13, 06:06 PM
Unless Einstein is wrong, but if you're going to postulate that you're into Clarke's Third Law territory.Didn't they have already prove that Einstein was wrong? Maybe not in this area but I'm pretty sure the who reason we have special relativity is because Einstein's general relativity didn't hold in small cases and quantum physics came out of that. And to quote the man himself:

"If an old and learned man tells you something is possible, he is almost certainly correct. If an old and learned man tells you something is impossible, he is almost certainly wrong." Maybe Einstein, lots of things get misattributed to him.

Swordsaged, I would actually like to see an answer to the question about how that violates casualty. Forget the supersonic jet, I don't see how it differs from rolling a ball down a hill and running down to catch it. (Other than the speeds involved of course.) Could we get more information on that?

CharonsHelper
2017-03-13, 06:25 PM
Learn to read.

My physics in shaky - but my reading comprehension is fine.


But general relativity offers a possible escape from this constraint: through the malleability of spacetime itself. We might be unable to travel through space itself at speeds greater than 299,792,458 m/s, but if we can lessen the actual distances between two locations (or events), then not only could we travel there very quickly from the crew's perspective, but from the perspective of observers at both the source and the destination... For one, we could ship anything -- from goods to resources to people -- across arbitrarily large distances in arbitrarily small amounts of time. Messages could be delivered of upcoming catastrophes before a light signal could ever arrive, and violating our traditional notions of causality would become a routine game. But most importantly, the development of this technology would mean that humans alive at the time of development would be able to travel across the galaxy, experiencing other stars, other planets, and, if we're lucky, other civilizations.

Trekkin
2017-03-13, 09:26 PM
For fine/not fine/dead you might simply implement a 3 hit tier system, similar to D&D bloodied or not, but with an extra tier?

For easy equipment tracking - how about Black Hack's usage die rule (I think it comes from there). It goes something like when you use a thing roll a d12, on a 1or 2, next time roll a d10, and so on until d4, then whatever it is runs out.

For characters perhaps borrow the 5e skill list and gear section. Or really you could borrow this from anywhere. There's no doubt better gear books out there to throw at your players.

That's a pretty good approach to injury.

As for equipment tracking, one thing I'm working on is a coarse-grained integration of the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation to calculate the propellant costs of recovering from mistimed jumps, which means I need them to track real mass. I'm almost certainly going to use a variant on usage dice for tool wear, though.

And yeah, I might start with the 5e skill section and modernize it. A lot.

Beneath
2017-03-14, 02:07 AM
Basically the reason you can violate causality w/ faster than light is because for things only reachable by faster than light, sequence is undefined (relativity of simultaneity); in other words, if the distance between event A and event B is greater than c times the time between them in any reference frame, then (it is in all reference frames and) an inertial reference frame traveling at a velocity less than c exists where event A happens first, event B happens first, and they happen simultaneously (this is called "spacelike separation" because there is no reference frame where they happen at the same place; the opposite, timelike separation, has a defined sequence but in some reference frame they happen at the same place. the cusp between the two is lightlike separation, where the distance is exactly ct).

From this you can get that if you have a faster-than-light drive that does not have a preferred reference frame (i.e. whatever speed it sends you at, you can go at that speed in any arbitrary reference frame), you can take a round trip and arrive before you left.

A simple way to imagine this in two dimensions, let's use x for space and y for time in ground control's reference frame. Your ship points in some direction within 45 degrees of the y axis (the further off the axis it points, the faster it's moving), and you have an FTL drive that travels vast distances in an instant, in ship time (arrival and departure are simultaneous in the ship's reference frame). Your reference frame's "simultaneous" is the line perpendicular to the way your ship is pointing (remember, your FTL drive works on ship time, not ground control time). The math isn't exactly right here because in some cases you need a skew operation where I'm using a rotation but the principle works out.

Thus you accelerate to a high velocity, teleport to a nearby black hole, fall into a parabolic orbit, reverse your direction, and teleport back. Do this right, and you can arrive before you left. Seeing your doppleganger, you then arm and launch torpedos, shooting them down so that they can't then go back in time and murder your past self.

Did you complete the trip and shoot down your past self before you left, or were you shot down before you left, preventing you from shooting yourself down and thereby freeing you to complete the trip? Relativity does not hand you alternate timelines to play with; everything happens in one universe.

This is one of the points where relativity is weird and unintuitive, because it relies on relativity of simultaneity which is completely outside our everyday experience (in everyday life, speeds are slow enough that relativistic effects are negligible and we can sort-of assume a preferred reference frame); there's a good wikipedia article on that

Closed timelike curves become theoretically possible whenever you allow for spacelike travel, but it may be possible that you can't get any with a specific arrangement of a finite number of distinct wormholes (you can make a closed timelike curve with one, but if you're trying to get rid of them you probably can. If nothing else, you can all make them totally coincidentally more or less follow a preferred reference frame). Even the quoted article says that if you get FTL you get causality violations.

Nupo
2017-03-15, 06:25 PM
I've had this idea for a while now -- and I cannot be the only one -- to run a dungeon crawl with no combat whatsoever. Just traps, puzzles, and a mystery story told through the architecture and maybe the notes scrawled on the walls.Nope you are not the first to think of doing this. Gary Gygax himself thought of it back in 1975 when he wrote "Tomb of Horrors." Yes there is some combat in it, but not much. It's mostly traps and puzzles.

Cluedrew
2017-03-15, 06:29 PM
That is an unfortunate coincidence. Just from some other stories involving the Tomb of Horrors.