Quick review of the game system
Quick review of the game system
When there's a new RPG on the block claiming to do #Solarpunk, I'm obviously interested. Recently, @[email protected] made its way to me via @[email protected] so I'm giving it a look. What does it want to do? It wants to be a kind of D&D for Solarpunk – a big kitchen sink game that...
A bit negative, but I kind of agree that combat should probably have less emphasis in a Solarpunk RPG. I remember from the old days that the Paranoia RPG had a similar situation where combat really wasn't the focus of the game, so they pretty much kept it out of the rulebook and left it to the game master to flesh out if needed.
Without having read the rulebook myself, I was thinking if there is a need for "action", maybe that should rather take place as some form of "fight" with the environment due to natural disasters? There are actually many interesting examples of real-world simulation exercises for disaster relief groups, so maybe this could be a bit stream-lined into a more fun game concept?
First, I'd love to get your impression on the actual manual: Fully Automated! RPG manual
Take a gander. Let me know how it comes across to you.
I welcome the diversity of opinion, but I think the game is best viewed through its artistic intention and principles. This game is in the style of "Old School Revival", or OSR games.
OSR games are very flexible. They're often light on rules, and light on math. And you'll see this throughout the rule book. Do you want to convince a community leader to provide some resource, like access to a deceased person's private data? First, you roleplay it or describe how you'd like to convince them. And then you roll the dice. And a GM just does what feels appropriate. We don't even have strict pass-fail value. We suggest 21ish, but tell the GM to just describe an outcome. and not even worry about categorizing things as either a "success" or "failure", but rather an assortment of possibilities that range from great to terrible insteaad.
Combat has strictly defined rules while most of the game doesn't because we don't like games with rules, but we felt combat as a minigame demanded this. That's really all there is to it. It's a rules-light social game with a structured combat minigame included to make combat events brief and easy to get past, because the folks who made this happen to find combat to be a big headache and an exception to our preferred rules-light style of play that we'd rather just move past.
Through this lens, I think the game achieved our aims.
Recently, in other threads, we were talking about the history of solarpunk as a genre. I have this impression that what underpins it seems to vary a bit by where on the Internet you find it, and the majority politics of the people there. But I don't have much understanding of the philosophical underpinnings, and political movements that each flavor of solarpunk is derived from.
When I first got into this genre (after believing it was a sort of generic utopia thing based on the art for a few years) I started realizing there was a real movement with real answers to how we currently do things, and I started digging into all the alternatives presented by different communities here. And as I started worldbuilding for my own settings, I started looking at the source movements for alternatives to governments, state violence, prisons, etc.
I suspect that this space leans more anarchist and more on the punk scene than other solarpunk spaces but I don't know that for sure.
There seems to be a sizable contingent on the subreddit and on Mastodon who believe that violence is already too prevalent in our thinking so we just shouldn't talk about it, especially in solarpunk spaces. That doing so deprives us of practice thinking of alternatives. Maybe I'm too trapped in the world as it is to imagine a future where violence doesn't come up. But I want answers to violence that seem workable, and from the little bit I've seen, anarchy, communism, they're pretty blunt about the use of violence, probably because they're revolutionary political structures with some real world history. And the punk scene didn't kick out the Nazi punks by pretending they weren't there.
So I guess I'm kind of wondering where this streak of pacifism comes from, and how workable it really is. It was something that bugged me in the beginning of the book Walkaway, questions of what do you do when walking away from everything you've built, letting the aggressors have it, isn't enough to get you out of violence. What do you do when what they want is to hurt or kill you, or for your sexuality, your race, your gender, your beliefs to stop existing? The book actually has some creative answers later on, but I don't think it's a solved problem at this point.
Its a set of questions I've been generally kind of skittish of asking in the movement because I know it's not a popular one, but I'm interested in solarpunk as a roadmap, and I think we'll need good answers to this. I keep wanting to bring them to the Anarchism community but they already have so many academic resources available on there I always feel like I should read those first, then get bogged down in them.
Fully Automated is largely a setting without bigots trying to hurt people, without capitalism trying to crush and comodify competing systems. It doesn't provide answers for those fights. But a lot of the world building has been built around answering questions around fixing/replacing the justice system, and handling people who would hurt others if they could, with as little force as possible. I feel like it's perhaps a safe spot to start exploring some of those questions and looking for better solutions.
I don't think the critique is in inclusion of violence itself, but rather on how much space the mechanics for it take up in the rule book/character sheets and how that indirectly nudges players to seek violent solutions to problems.
My guess is that this is a "trap" of using an existing RPG rule book as a base, since most classical RPGs are rather combat simulators with "roleplay" bolted on top (the mentioned Paranoia RPG being one of the few notable exceptions).
@poVoq @JacobCoffinWrites Yes, it is a matter of weight. The website says that role-playing combat “doesn’t work. It’s completely subjective. It takes an incredibly skilled GM to make it interesting or coherent.” And I just think the same holds for social dynamics, economy, moral choice or research. But due to the history of how role playing games came about, often we have combat mechanics (they just seems like a must have for RPG), and rarely is there even advice for those other topics.
That's a legit point, I'll admit I'd been thinking of other interactions like this one as well https://writing.exchange/@jacobcoffin/111006966154956384 in regards to the emphasis I've seen on avoiding violence as a subject and trying to disincentivise it through mechanics rather than setting.