[Offworlders] Groundbound

Between Here and There, along the dry riverbed, is the town called Liminus. It's rumored that the Therion government wants to seize the town's gas field and solar array, but the Herite dictatorship is too corrupt to really do much to defend the place. You're there because it's a quiet place to get your hypersonic cruiser repaired without questions, at a fair price. While you're groundbound, you're exploring the town and its people.

This game will use the Offworlders rules, which are PbtA for science fiction.

Because I can't maintain the suspension of disbelief that's necessary for a game with interplanetary or interstellar travel, we're in a universe where pilots guide hypersonic airships among points on the surface of a single world. But the world is plenty vast for adventures and anonymity.

This sounds vaguely reminiscent of the old game of Traveler, which I liked because it was not Star Trek or Star Wars. It was more of a space version of Taipei.

What are you looking to do? What does PbtA mean, and what do you mean by "can't maintain the suspension of disbelief that's necessary?"

PbtA - 'Powered by the Apocalypse' is a tabletop role-playing game design framework developed by Meguey Baker and Vincent Baker for the 2010 game Apocalypse World and later adapted for other indie role-playing games

It's a game working with a kind of "playbooks" for characters. Like the old Chainmail playbooks, but for full play, not only combat.

I mean I just can't get myself to buy into a narrative that features that. It's so ludicrous that I lose interest in the story. You could ask me why I'm ok with dragons but not with jumpships, but I won't be able to answer: it's just a thing for me.

For D&D fans, a metric of what tibbius is talking about could be summed up as such: Dimension Door has a max distance of 500 ft. To get from Earth to the Moon with such a spell would require 2,522,308 max distance jumps, with some kind of habitable jump points at each of those millions of stops. The distance to Mars is more than 586 times that much. I'm using Dimension Door because Teleport has softer rules about range.

Light itself, the fastest possible thing, takes three minutes to get to Mars from here. Something moving at half the speed of light would take roughly six. The Pascal-B test that launched a "manhole cover" into deep space (look it up) actually moved a 1-ton steel cap at a sudden speed of 150 thousand mph. That's six times Earth's escape velocity, in an instant, probably the fastest gross object we've been able to move, and there weren't passengers on it that needed to survive those forces. That speed? Four thousand five hundred and forty-two times slower than light. Nowhere remotely near the half-light I cited that would take several minutes to reach one of our nearest planets.

So when tibbius says it is too ludicrous to consider humans devising survivable interstellar travel, there's some figures to help everyone wrap their brains around the idea. It's fun for crazy stories, but if tibbius is running the logistics of a game, I say "can't blame em" for finding that to be too much.

In comparison, a dragon is a large animal with some interesting properties. Far more plausible.

So, the first question was, "What are you looking to do?"

Absent the ludicrous proposal of what would really happen to matter if propelled at rate necessary for functional interstellar travel, this sounds even more like Traveler or Taipei, which has my interests piqued. Frank Herbert fixed the issue with the fictional idea of "folding space."

a. fellow card cataloguer here !

b. if you've ever played Boot Hill, I'm looking for a similar feel with (what I think are) plausible (near) future tech elements. Lots of interpersonal stuff, if there's combat it's HIGH RISK.

I have played Boot Hill a few times. It never really took off like D&D, but I think it was more to a lack of funding. I liked it.

Not as many people that want to roleplay cowboys. 's why there's such a niche crowd around stuff like Deadlands.