"Not enough weird stuff in SF wargames" Topic

I've long felt that SF Wargames aren't creative enough about alien environments. A handful have had a stab at representing different gravity or some slightly unusual weather but that's about it.

Are there any resources that describe potentially real alien environments or, better still, rulesets that try to recreate them?

My thinking was summed up in this clip of the BBC's Sky at Night where Korben Dallas suggests SF writers aren't imaginative enough given our understanding of exoplanets:

link

Not nearly enough :)

I think part of the challenge is that it will tend to become the dominating factor, overshadowing the actual troops fighting.
It's hard to pull off in an interesting, balanced fashion.

I'd love to see anyone's scenarios doing this stuff.

If the environment is sufficiently weird, there is no point fighting for or in it. Baboon troops don't try to move in on dolphin pods nor vice versa.

I disagree. What if there are resources in the weird environment?

Baboons and dolphins don't have the technical know-how to encroach on each other's territory (maybe Al Reynolds' baboons and Douglas Adams' dolphins). Humans, however, encroach on both these environments to gain resources.

True about lack of imagination – from recent sci-fi films and shows it appears that most aliens are bipeds with funny foreheads/ears/noses

If you want imagination, try Hal Clement – Mission of Gravity is hard-core hard sci-fi; the main character is a centipede living on a planet whose gravity can be 700 G

link

Are there any resources that describe potentially real alien environments or, better still, rulesets that try to recreate them?

There's a draft supplement book in process for 5150: Star Army by Two Hour Wargames that introduces combat rules for Zero-G, hostile atmospheres and high Gravity worlds.

I am put in mind of the "training exercise" in the Forever War where Haldeman goes to great lengths about how fighting on a cold ice-moon can be as lethal as facing an opponent. The environment literally is your enemy.

Yes we need more strange environments in sci-fi games.

Vor:The Maelstrom had a constantly shifting battlefield environment.

VOR is such a great game, original setting and races. Love me some Growlers!

(now I need to bust them out and get another game in)

Yeah, Vor was great. Still is, really. It's just hard to find opponents. I still have a good Union and a wicked Pharon force taking up carry case space…

BaldLea 23 Nov 2015 12:16 p.m. PST:

My thinking was summed up in this clip of the BBC's Sky at Night where Korben Dallas suggests SF writers aren't imaginative enough given our understanding of exoplanets

Depending on what Korben meant by "SF writers", I think I disagree somewhat. Sure in scifi visual media and games (well, miniature games at least) the writers seem to be a little unimaginative, in the first instance largely because of budgetary constraints (especially in the case of small screen). The where-its-at of science fiction however is still, even in this day and age, literature (to an extent that a "real" science fiction fan remains first and foremost an avid reader) and there I find the lack of imagination argument rather less persuasive.

On the subject of miniature games, I tend to agree with a caveat. Many if not most games do pay lip service at least to the unusual conditions that might be found on alien worlds, but the rules writers no doubt constrain themselves to rather generic battlefield terrain rules because approaching from really exotic and specific angle would limit their audience. That I suspect even more conservative in this regard, at least when it comes to aesthetics of the battlefield: city fighting takes place in space Stalingrad and forests of an alien planet are directly lifted from an average episode of Stargte SG-1.

Part of the practical issue is how the really cool stuff gets represented by the rules; too many special rules and it overshadows the actual fighting part of the game, as Weasel points out. Also a LOT of possible effects are probably easily represented by rules like 'All Wounds count as Kills' or similar effects, which a LOT of rule sets already cover in their Hostile Environment rules.

So while it would no doubt be cool to have a rules set specifically covering fighting in the middle of a Gas Storm on Titan or among the volcanic plumes of Io, the practical effects of both environment is probably just 'suit breach = KIA'.

All that said, unusual environment effects are also potentially extremely cool scenario balancing factors. I recall there was a Microgame (from Dwarfstar?) where it has about 12 power-armored Space Marines vs. hordes of primitive natives. But the catch was that the planet was plagued by unusual electric dust storms which messed up the power-armor in various ways, and the natives could exploit this.

-Will

Gamewise, Traveller describes combat in hostile environments well. In my universe, it's humans fighting humans – humans spread throughout the universe millenia ago and just like on earth, now fight for leibensraum, resources, etc. There are alien creatures, but none as capable as humans.

wminsing 25 Nov 2015 5:15 a.m. PST

Also a LOT of possible effects are probably easily represented by rules like 'All Wounds count as Kills' or similar effects, which a LOT of rule sets already cover in their Hostile Environment rules

Indeed if you don't want to steer the players into using specific kind of terrain with its own fiddly rules, at the average abstraction level it is immaterial if the ground melts below your power armoured trooper's feet and swallows him up because of a methane monsoon on a frigid Titanian or because he's stepped into a patch of quicksand on a dry desert world. Or whathavewe.

@BaldLea – thanks for the link to the video – was good!

The more subtle, part was that the volume went to 11…

What if there are resources in the weird environment?

We'll trade.

If we are capable of space travel to fight wars, we will have solved the "plentiful energy" issue. So we won't need to fight about that.

Nonsense like unobtanium aside, there are only limited elements to find. We can trade for them, as we do now.

The scarce resource will be the friendly environments themselves. They will be the only thing worth fighting about at ground level (since nuking it would destroy the point).

@Mark Plant: You are forgetting that access to the trading markets is another potentially-limited resource, though that is more likely fought out in orbit than on the ground.