When "real" is just none big pain in the ...

[rgrove0172]

Im a big fan of 2300AD, in part due to the familiarity with the technology and the realistic feel of the setting. I like the the idea that the stars visited, actually exist and the technologies used are at least theoretical and plausible. "Super far out Space Opera" is fun when watching a movie but not the kind of gaming I enjoy. BUT...

Ill be honest here. A month of regular chatting on this forum has me a little discouraged and taking a step back in my appreciation of "reality" where my gaming is concerned.

Im a fairly weill educated individual but it would appear that in order to game in 2300 one has to have a degree in physics, geology, chemistry, astronomy and a host of others along with considerable expertise in electronics, computer tech, space craft design and on and on an on.

Almost everything in the game is questioned, debated and usually declared "wrong" in some way. The rules and supplements seem to be hopelessly lacking and one gets the feeling that tremendous research should be conducted in order to establish you own 2300 universe, as the one presented is flawed.

With the age of this game I would have thought it fully through threw and supported by the fanst at this point, all the days of ripping it asunder would be over by now. Surely some of you guys actually played this game right? Did you make the massive changes in the setting you discuss here?

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

I don't allow "realistic" players at my table. Hypothetical situations annoy them and role-playing a character is not their thing anyway.

 

[SSWarlock]

Same here. If someone wants "realism", I explain to them that my campaigns _emulate_ reality, not simulate it. If they insist then I recommend they spend their leisure time surfing the Internet and working on goals for Zooniverse (https://www.zooniverse.org/).

 

[Lemnoc]

Inre 2300, I guess I would rather have the physics, assumptions, geopolitics, etc., discussed here rather than endless justifications/enforcements of OTU canon, such as whether the 3I nobles wear yellow on Tuesday. I've learned some things on these boards; and I don't see a lot of pointless MgT rulesmongering.

2300 offers an opportunity for hard science, but it also has some integral assumptions that are just rubbish. The latter you sort have to go with, try to make reasonable, and understand they were created as elements for adventure. Almost all of the political history is rubbish, but is an essential part of the charm of the game.

I think if someone is really going to throw a hissy fit at your table on some picky point about science, when the adventure is otherwise good, you don't want that person at your table.

Did you make the massive changes in the setting you discuss here?

No; in fact, I've tried really hard to mine and make the most of the setting's assumptions.

 

[Wil Mireu]

I am a big fan of realistic settings and keeping them realistic, but it's one thing to discuss it outside of playing the actual game, and another to let it derail the gameplay. I can watch unrealistic SF movies and still enjoy them for what they are, and I can do the same while playing a game. That doesn't stop me from pointing out the issue outside the game though (and fixing the issue if I was to run a game myself). But let's face it, while 2300AD is pretty realistic as far as SF games go, but the "realistic" star map is hopelessly out of date now and there are still issues with planets. But at least it *feels* realistic, which is what is important here I think - as long as that's the case then I can live with the inaccuracies.

It does annoy me is when people claim that realism is "bad" though. It really isn't. It doesn't "remove the fun", it just puts it in different places. And you don't need degrees in the sciences to enjoy the game at all - you may need to have a little more science background than most games to get all the subtleties, but there's nothing wrong with that. You could even be inspired to learn a bit more about science while enjoying the game too, and that is not a bad thing. There's nothing stopping you from playing the game as it is either, but I would say that if it bothers you to know that some of the science is wrong then that's probably a sign that you want to learn more about it to find out how to make it right - so go ahead and read up on it and find out!

 

[Lemnoc]

... [whole thing] ...

+1

 

[rust]

Almost everything in the game is questioned, debated and usually declared "wrong" in some way.

I very much prefer to read about the problems of the game and
about ways to handle them here on the forum instead of being
surprised by them when a player stumbles over them during a
game because they disrupt his suspension of disbelief. For me
this is not about realism but about the verisimilitude of the set-
ting required to enable the players to take their characters' uni-
verse seriously. With players who have at least some nodding
acquaintance of the natural sciences it makes sense to be aware
of what they could find silly enough to ruin the setting for them,
and to think about ways to defuse such mines before a player
could step on one. :wink:

 

[F33D]

... [whole thing] ...

+1

+2

 

[Lemnoc]

None of 2300's planets immediately leap out at me as completely implausible, except King. And there not particularly because it is a super-Earth, which seem common enough in TRW, but that you'd have people in numbers living there. I think the idea there was to push the idea of heavy gravity to its extremes, and I suppose King therefore has its purpose; I really can't imagine adventuring there.

Once you're handed King, though, there's a bunch of assumptions that go along with it—large among them is the physics of how you'd ever get to its surface or from its surface with 2300 tech. Most 2300 tech would be useless, and that leads to another bunch of assumptions. And these lead to scenarios and adventures.

Another planet that grates on me a little bit is Heidelsheimat, a world that is physically bigger than Earth but with a lower gravity and extensive mining going on. One way to reconcile these concepts IMO is to assume they're mining lightweight stuff like lithium or unique hydrocarbons. That opens additional interesting possibilities.

So thinking through some of the concepts helps put flesh on the bones.

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

Don't get me wrong though. I still love a realism of both science and politics in my role-play game. I just don't care for scientific and political ideologues preaching at the table. And I don't want to wait a thousand plus years to terraform a world in my game, even one without a molten iron core.

 

[kermit]

I think the key is, internal consistency within one's own game world. Yes, 2300AD has a lot of problems. King, as Lemnoc mentioned is a pain. So the King in my 2300AD is mined by robots, and the ore is brought into orbit via balloons and a long rotating sky-hook tether. For the geopolitics I added a lot more back history to flesh out the background and make sense of the sillier items. This was important to me because my educational background is in International Politics and History.

Don't let the debates and arguments over reality ruin your love of the game. There are some in the 2300AD community who think that their view of canon is the infallible truth, even though canon has its own contradictions and mistakes. Mongoose 2300AD has sorted some of that out but is stuck preserving other problems as well. Use the background as a basis to work from but fiddle with it to make it enjoyable for you. Once you know what you want from the game setting tweek the rest to maintain consistency.

Benjamin

 

[spirochete]

Almost everything in the game is questioned, debated and usually declared "wrong" in some way. The rules and supplements seem to be hopelessly lacking and one gets the feeling that tremendous research should be conducted in order to establish you own 2300 universe, as the one presented is flawed.

The milieu is great, but the product line lacks scientific reality-checks of any kind.

The early publications (First boxed set, Aurore, Bayern, Nyotekundu) were great. This earlier material is good because it has just the broad outlines of the setting that you get to flesh out on your own. The setting was presented and the technical details of spaceships or worldbuilding were glossed over and left to the referee without canonizing anything wildly implausible.

Later material like 2nd edition box, Ships of the French Arm, Cybertech Sourcebook, Colonial Atlas, et al that *canonized* scientific stupidity like the a world dessicated by insects, the Thorez courier, or the planet King and its colonists. Here you can see that GDW intended 2300 to be another Traveller version, sans levitation and artificial gravity.

 

[spirochete]

Another planet that grates on me a little bit is Heidelsheimat, a world that is physically bigger than Earth but with a lower gravity and extensive mining going on. One way to reconcile these concepts IMO is to assume they're mining lightweight stuff like lithium or unique hydrocarbons.

It's another worldbuilding boondoggle. It's diameter is 14,000 km, yet the surface gravity is only 0.44g, meaning its mean density less than solid rock. A world larger than earth with half of the mass isn't plausible.

It's crap like this that I wish GDW would have just stayed away from. Presenting Heidelsheimat as a low-gravity world would have been sufficient. They stepped in plausability-poop anytime they started getting into specifics.

 

[Lemnoc]

It's another worldbuilding boondoggle. It's diameter is 14,000 km, yet the surface gravity is only 0.44g, meaning its mean density less than solid rock. A world larger than earth with half of the mass isn't plausible.

It's crap...

I'd have to see some data, but I'm not convinced immediately that it is completely outside the realm of the possible. It would certainly have to be almost completely devoid of nickle-iron, volcanism of any sort, in comparison to Earth. But because it does not completely leap out at me as on-the-face-of-it ridiculous, it is a world I can develop scenarios around.

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

My limit in these games are planets that have a trillion or more people on them. Anything else, I can live with probably.

 

[spirochete]

I'd have to see some data, but I'm not convinced immediately that it is completely outside the realm of the possible.

Compare Log(radius)/Log(mass), where radius and mass = 1 for earth. In our solar system, the result is between 0.241 and 0.332 for any solid spherical body. For Heidelsheimat, it's -0.149. That's the second clue it's not scaled right.

I posted about this in detail back on the Massive gravity problem thread: http://forum.mongoosepublishing.com/viewtopic.php?f=89&t=55967&start=15

 

[kermit]

These are valid points but are not real problems. The person who came up with King just didn't take the time to realize how boring a 3.08 G planet would be since no PC would ever go there. Heidelsheimat appears to be an error regarding world diameter or listed gravity. Perhaps the author meant originally to say 10,000 km diameter but mis typed. Or more likely the author just looked at Earth's 12,000 km diameter and added to it while lowering gravity in order to get the super low density world he wanted without doing the number crunching or research needed to see how unbelievable this situation would be. So just change a little bit here and there. How often will it matter what the diameter for Heidelsheimat is to the PCs? I'm betting, pretty much never. And if anyone asks just use a decent world generation system like that found in Traveller Core Rules or better still GURPS Space to find a more believable diameter for the given gravity.

Overall, 2300AD is 10 times more realistic than the Traveller Universe, 1,000 times more realistic than Star Trek, and 1,000,000 times more realistic than Star Wars. And despite the errors and contradictions, most of which arise due to numerous authors who didn't take the time to make sure their material meshed with what others had written, 2300AD is also more logically consistent than all of the above mentioned sci-fi settings by a wide margin.

Benjamin Lecrone

 

[rgrove0172]

Apologies, I just got home and read through my own post, which made from my phone I find is FULL of errors, including the title! Gads... thanks for all the comments though!

 

[Lemnoc]

Overall, 2300AD is 10 times more realistic than the Traveller Universe, 1,000 times more realistic than Star Trek, and 1,000,000 times more realistic than Star Wars. And despite the errors and contradictions, most of which arise due to numerous authors who didn't take the time to make sure their material meshed with what others had written, 2300AD is also more logically consistent than all of the above mentioned sci-fi settings by a wide margin.

+1

 

[Wil Mireu]

It's another worldbuilding boondoggle. It's diameter is 14,000 km, yet the surface gravity is only 0.44g, meaning its mean density less than solid rock. A world larger than earth with half of the mass isn't plausible.

It's crap...

I'd have to see some data, but I'm not convinced immediately that it is completely outside the realm of the possible. It would certainly have to be almost completely devoid of nickle-iron, volcanism of any sort, in comparison to Earth. But because it does not completely leap out at me as on-the-face-of-it ridiculous, it is a world I can develop scenarios around.

oooooh... no, sorry. It's very wrong. A world with 7,000 km radius and only 0.44g gravity needs to have a bulk density of 2250 kg/m³, which is (as spirochete) says way less than any worldforming "rocky material".

The only way you can get lower densities than rock is to either (a) fill it with huge empty spaces (but that only works for asteroids) or (b) counter the rock density with volatiles. The big icy satellites of Jupiter and Saturn have densities around the 2000 kg/m³ mark, and they're about half rock and half ice. If Heidelshemat was a really small water world or a frozen iceball then it might work... but it can't work any other way. So it really can't work as it stands.