Galactic Encounters Role-Playing Game

[artikid]

Eh, me too

[Solomoriah]

First, there is the most simplistic exchange. I agree to spend "x" amount of time doing a thing for you in exchange for you doing or giving me a thing I want. That's pretty straight forward, lets move on.

Second, there is the indebted version of the first exchange. I agree to spend "x" amount of time doing things for you in exchange for things you give me now. This does come with the issues of what happens if you default on paying or if you unexpectedly die before repaying your debt, etc. Ultimately, though this debt is no different than real world debt using dollar bills.

Third, there is the "proxy" version of paying with time spent. In this version we create a unit of "Time Spent", let's call it a "Temporal Credit" (TC). By giving it that one degree of abstraction, we have now opened up a whole universe of possibilities. We can now accumulate unspent TCs and then spend them later. We can also assign TC values items based on the time originally spent to create them. By accumulating the TCs of others one could even become wealthy.

So far, so good. I can easily see building a post-scarcity economy on such a system. But...

If you built a spaceship and it took 18 "months" to build, that would be a base build cost of 72.58 TC. This doesn't cover the costs of the factory it was built in or the material costs themselves, so let's increase it by a factor of four to 290.30 TC.

Materials cost is not necessarily a factor. Those who want to build starships would look for uninhabited systems where their mining/refining bots could produce the necessary materials for free, effectively. It would take some finite period of time for the Von Neumann systems to build up to a sufficient size to provide these materials, but once they are fully operational the flow of materials becomes continuous, at least until the planet or moon or asteroid field is exhausted.

All of the "costs" of building a starship are front-loaded. You need a fabrication facility (spacedock) which must be built, mining and refining capacity, and of course you need the design documents (data files) for the starship you are building. The initial costs are potentially high.

But you can build a second for free. And a third. And a fourth. And so on, (nearly) ad infinitum. Exhaust your material source? Before it runs out, you build a large cargo starship, and when you've finished off the resources you load a "seed set" of fabicators and robots aboard and you move to a new star system, and you start right up again.

This makes the economics... weird.

A musician could put on a live performance of unique variations of their popular songs, guaranteed that none of them would be recorded.

This last bit, not being recorded, is technologically challenging now. There's no reason to think it will ever get easier... likely, it will get harder.

Already existing items could also be assigned a TC cost based on their original time spent to produce. Special accrediting agencies could be used to determine how much time it originally took to produce the item and then valuate it accordingly.

Ignoring the extraordinary difficulty in establishing such agencies in a galactic society, businesses are going to cheat. For competitive advantage, someone will sell below the established price, and once they do someone else will as well, and then everyone is doing it.

I honestly don't think such an economy can survive. Right now, with all of us living on one planet with the resources basically divided up already, yeah, you can legislate scarcity where no scarcity exists. But once people can advance into space faster than political units can expand to follow them, and spread out over such vast distances that it becomes impossible to regulate them, such systems are unsustainable.

[Rutibex]

Hi I read this entire thread and I have a bunch of stuff to say. I love this idea and this kind of Asimov sci-fi universe is exactly my jam. I noticed a few topics that I want to touch on:

Fabricators: These universal replication machines are a great concept, but you don't want to make them too universal. Limitations add to the story telling potential. So I propose you add Quantum DRM. It is possible to create a quantum mechanical system that can not be duplicated, even the finest scanner could never read it without destroying it. In this way you can make single-use fabricator blueprints. This opens up a much wider variety of planets that can exist, poor planets that can not afford the top intellectual property. Devastated worlds who have been cut off from the license server, so now only basic items can be fabricated. Super rich worlds like star trek that have no restrictions (but guard their fabricators jealously for fear the technology will spread, like the Federation).

FTL: Have you considered having no FTL travel? If you want to avoid having any kind of central Galactic Empire authority the best way to do that is to make travel between solar systems take thousands of years! Space Ships traveling a 99.9999% the speed of light experience time dilation. So a space ship crew could travel for a few months in their own time-experience to reach a star, but have actually traveled for 10,000 years of real time. That means any travel between stars is necessarily one way. You might think this would limit the scope of your game, but I don't think it would. A single solar system can have a huge variety of planets for political intrigues (think Firefly). And you can have the solar system hopping exploration of Star Trek. You just can't go back home unless you are prepared for the Planet of the Apes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQnka2wNa_M

[Solomoriah]

These are both discussions that hinge on our respective understanding of time and space, and I have to say I don't think you're seeing the scale here.

Time: I'm not fond of the idea of the "quantum DRM" on the basis that I'm not sure how it is supposed to work, but ignoring that for the moment, it's not sustainable. Over the course of around a thousand years, give or take, people who believe in sharing will have created every model file needed for everything humans depend on to live. Indeed, I don't think it would take more than a century to do this. Copyleft/Open Source solutions always dominate in the long run simply because the lower barrier to entry results in those who can't afford the commercial solution switching to them. Value added solutions (Android, in the real world) may make a mark commercially but they have to remain cheap to hold their position.

Space: Removing FTL would fundamentally change the game, and that's not something I want to do. But it's not that hard to avoid a central galactic authority... the galaxy is bigger than you think. Star Wars, much as I love it, presents such a tiny galaxy compared to reality. The map display from Attack of the Clones didn't look right to me when I first saw it, before I began to grasp just exactly how big a galaxy is. While I love Asimov, it was Vance I was thinking about when I started putting this together. Asimov's Milky Way is big, but Vance's is really, amazingly, tremendously huge. Vance presents just one "empire" and that one rules a globular cluster with a few thousand habitable worlds.

One thing I'm noticing is that some people who are posting here (not just you, Rutibex) are having trouble imagining how to run a game without major economic drivers for adventure writing. The fact is, most worlds in this game would have the resources to be as prosperous as they want. The only actual economic limitation is elemental... fabricators can make almost anything, but they can't fabricate elements. (Well, technically they could fabricate devices that can do that, but the energy cost of such devices would be astronomical. Literally, as stars do it.) If a device needs uranium, you must find uranium somewhere. If a device needs antimatter, well, given enough time robots and fabricators can build an antimatter foundry, but it needs an awesome amount of power and that still has to come from somewhere. But almost every world has a star, and if you don't have a world but need a star, there are very very many stars that don't have habitable worlds where you could go and set up a habitat.

Element shortages and energy sources are basically the economic limiting factors... unless humans do something stupid, which we do from time to time. I can absolutely imagine an impoverished world ruled by some kind of dictatorship or theocracy where fabricators are contraband and almost everyone other than the ruling class is forced to engage in what amounts to slave labor. It's not hard to imagine at all, in fact. And I can imagine player characters with a starship repeatedly fabricating fabricators and then making dangerous runs to the planet to distribute them.

For the majority of the galaxy, the only economically valuable "things" other than rare elements are historical or artistic artifacts. Proving provenance is important here, and I'll grant that the resolution of most fabricators wouldn't be good enough to fool an expert with a proper scanner. But even this kind of thing has a time limit... at some point it might become virtually impossible to technologically prove the provenance of an artifact.

I actually have the sketch of an idea for an adventure related to this. On a planet named Malta a reclusive genius with access to an original artifact created a multilayered model to manufacture more of that artifact. The replication does not use the normal fabricator method (i.e. the fabricator makes the thing); rather, a fabricator makes robots, then vintage or vintage-like machine tools, and finally directs the robots to make the artifact the old fashioned way. The result actually is machined, cast, assembled, painted, and polished, and in the last phase the fabricator makes the chemical fuel that powers the ancient device. But the genius never shared his model, and had the machine tools and robots recycled, leaving only the original artifact and one shiny new copy of it. The player characters would be tasked with finding the model wherever he hid it. What is this antique machine? A Ford Falcon, 1963 model year.

[Rutibex]

You make a good point about Quantum DRM being cracked eventually, and open source becoming the norm. I guess it depends on how you want to view technology in this setting. Have humans reached the absolute pinnacle of technology possible? Or are new technologies being discovered? At some point Artificial Intelligences would surpass humans and it wouldn't be a human centered sci-fi universe any more. Is there some kind of Dune or Warhammer 40k prohibition against developing AI beyond a certain point? I think quantum DRM gives you more space to work with as a game designer, as far as loot and treasures. There is an online game EVE online where fabricators exist. The most basic designs are open for everyone, but the top corporations put DRM on their new designs so that people can't fabricate them freely. But failing this, really advanced fabricator designs should have such enormous file sizes that they require big physical disks. It might require a design that is precise to the atom, and that could not be compressed. So the blueprint needs to have at least as many atoms in it as the final object.

https://universe.eveonline.com/lore/blueprints

As for FTL I would vote for very large space based Star Gates being the only way to travel between stars. Giving individual space ships their own FTL drives makes things too open. From a game design perspective there is more you can do if its limited. Its also prevents the players from using their FTL drives as doomsday weapons or time machines.

[Solomoriah]

You make a good point about Quantum DRM being cracked eventually, and open source becoming the norm.

It doesn't have to be cracked. The Company sells a one-time-use model for something you might want to fabricate; someone else engineers the same thing and gives the model away for free. So sensibly, many people choose the free model. Better, once someone shares a free model, other people improve on it, until you have so many choices of how to make the thing that the Company's offering seems anemic by comparison.

I sell servers right now that have 0% proprietary software on them, and for the most part the software is good... and commercial software is, honestly, no better. Computers have existed for less than a century... what does ten centuries of development look like?

[Hernes Son]

I just sort of stumbled across this, as I was thinking earlier "Hey, using BFRPG as the chassis for different genres like Sci-Fi, Science Fantasy, etc. would be pretty cool. Wonder if anyone's done anything like that?"

So just figured I'd chime in and say everything I read in this thread, and the pre-pre-beta draft of the game looks pretty fab, and I'd totally play this thing if it were ever finished.

I know Solomoriah and the whole BFRPG community has other pressing things right now, but I'd love to see this project become an actual game at some point.

[Wing_department]

I've been looking for an OSR science-fiction system. The original Traveller has the same spirit but doesn't really have a character progression system. Plus, the text of the rules is slightly confusing at times (though nothing's as hard to read as the 3 little brown booklets) while BFRPG is very readable.
I might support this project with proofreading and art but I haven't read the "appendix N", so I don't know what is the go-to feel of the system.

[Solomoriah]

My literary inspiration is Jack Vance's science fiction, particularly the Cadwal, Alastor Cluster, and Demon Princes books.

[Rutibex]

My literary inspiration is Jack Vance's science fiction, particularly the Cadwal, Alastor Cluster, and Demon Princes books.

Not Dying Earth?