#the watchers are like that. but players aren’t threatening or dangerous to them

[solargeist]

theres something kinda funny abt the fact that Watchers are very smart, like they’re observant and practically stalk players to learn more and more abt them and the worlds-

But they inevitably cannot help seeing them as children, despite all the studying and watching, they will think players are small, cute, and dumb !

The urge to guide and foster them into strong wise warriors is too much. The players need them to survive, surely.

Though seeing them as kids might be too kind to say actually, Watchers look at players like…. Maybe a new puppy… Ready to train, but then if the barking is too much, if they don’t listen, if they cry and they bite.. The Watchers don’t want it anymore.

Really depends on who you ask ! You’re in better luck if the Watcher sees kids over animals tho

[sirpoley]

On Towns in RPGs, Part 5: Building a Playable City

In the first article in this series, I embarked on an ill-defined quest to figure out what, if anything, a town map is actually for in tabletop play.

In the second, I took a look at the common metaphor comparing towns to dungeons—unfavourably.

In the third, I proposed an alternate metaphor: that cities are more like forests than dungeons.

In the fourth, I looked at how forests are used in D&D to see what we could use when thinking about cities.

Now, we're going to get to the nuts and bolts of designing cities for use in D&D.

Think In Terms of Districts, not Distance

No player is ever going to remember, or care about, the actual distance between their current location and the tavern they're trying to get to. Similarly, they won't remember, or care about, the roads they have to cross to get there.

The absolute most you can hope for is that they'll remember and care about some of (but not all of) the neighbourhoods they have to go through. In Terry Pratchet's Ankh-Morpork, the Shades is an extremely memorable and dangerous area. Like Pratchett's characters, players are going to avoid it wherever possible and yet always find that they have to go through it. Planescape: Torment's Hive and Fallout: New Vegas's Freeside have similar qualities. If you grimly tell the players: "the quickest way to the princess is through—oh, dear—the Shades," they'll have a reaction to it.

Don't overdo it with districts; keep the number small enough for them to be memorable. I'd recommend seven as an absolute maximum, but as few as three is perfectly acceptable. Lantzberg, from City of Eternal Rain, only used three (one each for lower, middle, and upper class—end elevation). A district can be as big as you like; feel free to simply scale them up for larger cities.

Forget Thee Not House Hufflepuff

It's no secret that in JK Rowling's Harry Potter series, only two of the four houses matter at all. If you're not Gryffindor or Slytherin, you're lucky to get any screentime at all. However, if they were simply cut from the series, then Hogwarts would feel terribly small, as if it were built solely for Harry to gallivant around in, and not part of a living, breathing world. Your city can't just have people to tell your players who to kill and people to be killed, it needs someone to clean up the mess after, also. From a narrative standpoint, these people don't matter, and will rarely be mentioned, but they can be used to pad your world out. When dividing up your map into districts, include a few that, as far as you're concerned, will never see an adventure, and give it maybe one or two notable characteristics. These are areas that are primarily residential, or involve industries not relevant to adventure (i.e., anyone other than an alchemist, blacksmith, or arcane university). Feel free to leave these places utterly devoid of points of interest.

In the adventure written for Lantzberg, for instance, there's little to no reason to ever visit the castle at the peak of the hill. It's there for verisimilitude (someone has to be in charge) and for the GM to hook later adventures to (which I'll elaborate on in my next point), but mainly it's just there to make the city seem larger. Similarly, most of the buildings in Castleview are manors of rich and important citizens, each one of which might have any number of use for a band of adventurers, but only a handful are actually fleshed out. After all, it would hardly feel like a living, breathing city if every single building was tied into a single adventure, would it?

Gaming is full of Hufflepuff Houses: the 996 Space Marine chapters that aren't lucky enough to be Ultramarines, Blood Angels, Dark Angels, or Space Wolves; D&D fiends that are neither lawful nor chaotic, Morrowind's Houses Dres and Indoril, and any of Homeworld's Kushan other than Kiith S'jet. This isn't laziness; they're there for a reason: they make the world feel larger.

Leave Room to Grow

Try to design a city large enough, and versatile enough, that once the current quest is wrapped up, you can inject some more content into it without serious retconning. This is part of where your Hufflepuff-tier-neighbourhoods come in—maybe one of them has been under the heel of a violent gang the whole time, but the party never found out because they never went there. Once the players have started to clear out your adventure ideas and points of interest, there's still plenty of room to pump some more in without the city bursting like an over-inflated balloon.

The map I posted earlier probably represents the upper limit of how detailed you should make your city. A GM could run a few more adventures out of Lantzberg, but a long-running campaign would probably benefit from a bit more room to breathe.

A Few Key Details

What are the kinds of things a DM really needs to know about a city? D&D3.5 had little statblocks for cities and settlements that broke down the demographics of different areas, but that's probably more granular than is actually necessary. Remember—every bit of detail that you include has the potential to distract the GM from finding the fact they actually need. It isn't for instance, particularly important to know that 12.5% of a neighbourhood's population are halflings while 54% are elves, but it might be useful to know that a neighbourhood has a notably large elf population and an often-overlooked halfling minority.

Who are the Watchmen that the Watchers Watch?

One infamously common thing that comes up in D&D is the city watch. It's shadow looms large over every action the party, and your villains, will take, so it's worth thinking about them a little bit. Its best to err on the side of making them too weak rather than too strong, as a powerful, well-organized law enforcement group can really put a damper on the opportunities for adventure. The counter-argument is that if the city watch isn't strong enough to threaten the party, then the party effectively has the run of the city; my preferred answer to this problem is to give the local lord a powerful knight or champion who can be used as a beat-stick against major threats to law and order (like the PCs) if need be, but can plausibly be busy enough with other problems to leave some for the party to handle.

When deciding who the local authorities are, almost anything you can come up with is more interesting (and historically plausible) than a centralized, professional police force. Here's a few examples:

A militia organized by local guilds

A local gang that provides protection in exchange for money and doesn't want outsiders muscling in on their turf

A semi-legitimate religious militant order

A mercenary group funded by a coalition of wealthy merchants (who just so happen to overlook their own crimes and corruption)

Don't get too bogged down in their stats; just pick a low-level NPC from the back of the Monster Manual and write down who they work for. Different neighbourhoods can share the same organization, but try to prevent a single organization from policing the entire city.

By breaking up law enforcement by district, you also prevent the entire city dogpiling on the party when they break a law, like you see in video games. If the party robs a house in the Ironworker's District, they can lay low in the Lists, where the Ironworkers' Patrol has no jurisdiction, until the heat dies down.

Points of Interest!

All those numbers you see scattered over D&D cities? Now's the time to add them. Each one should correspond to a description in a document somewhere. These descriptions can be as long or as short as you wish. For example, on the short end, #1 from Lantzberg just has this to say:

However, and I won't get into too much detail for fear of spoilers, some of those numbers are elaborate, multi-page dungeons.

While you should endeavour to keep the number of districts low, there is no ceiling to how many points of interest you should put into the city. Don't burn yourself out. If you can come up with six, put in six. If you can come up with fifty, put in fifty.

A point of interest can be anything from a scenic overlook to a toll bridge to an elaborate sewer system packed with kobolds and giant rats and treasure. They can be as fleshed out or as minimal as you are comfortable with. There's a sweet spot that varies from GM to GM, as if you include too much detail you suffer from information overload as the party approaches the point of interest (sixteen pages of description, for instance, for a single shop is less than helpful), while too little information might lead to you having to do too much on the fly. I like maybe one to three sentences per point of interest, or per room in a point of interest if it is important enough to warrant its own map (I typically only map dungeons).

Random Encounters

I'll write a series on handling random encounters later, but for now, breaking up encounters by district is a convenient way to do it. More dangerous districts, for instance, might have muggers or even monsters that attack (especially at night). If you're going to use random encounters in your campaign, creating a table for each district lets you use your local colour to affect actual game mechanics. Castleview, for instance, is very safe due to constant patrols by the Lady-Mayor's Watch, while the flooded Lists are full of man-eating fungi, ghouls, criminals, and who knows what. This lets you follow the age-old advice to "show, don't tell." You don't have to say "this area is full of crime," you can show the players this by throwing some criminals at them.

This post has already gone on way longer than intended. Next time, we'll use what we've learned to answer the original question and make better town maps.

[scifigeneration]

Dear Elon Musk: Your dazzling Mars plan overlooks some big nontechnical hurdles

by Andrew Maynard

Elon Musk has a plan, and it’s about as audacious as they come. Not content with living on our pale blue dot, Musk and his company SpaceX want to colonize Mars, fast. They say they’ll send a duo of supply ships to the red planet within five years. By 2024, they’re aiming to send the first humans. From there they have visions of building a space port, a city and, ultimately, a planet they’d like to “geoengineer” to be as welcoming as a second Earth.

If he succeeds, Musk could thoroughly transform our relationship with our solar system, inspiring a new generation of scientists and engineers along the way. But between here and success, Musk and SpaceX will need to traverse an unbelievably complex risk landscape.

Many will be technical. The rocket that’s going to take Musk’s colonizers to Mars (code named the “BFR” – no prizes for guessing what that stands for) hasn’t even been built yet. No one knows what hidden hurdles will emerge as testing begins. Musk does have a habit of successfully solving complex engineering problems though; and despite the mountainous technical challenges SpaceX faces, there’s a fair chance they’ll succeed.

As a scholar of risk innovation, what I’m not sure about is how SpaceX will handle some of the less obvious social and political hurdles they face. To give Elon Musk a bit of a head start, here are some of the obstacles I think he should have on his mission-to-Mars checklist.

Musk typically drives hard toward his goals – in this case, Mars. AP Photo/Refugio Ruiz

Planetary protection

Imagine there was once life on Mars, but in our haste to set up shop there, we obliterate any trace of its existence. Or imagine that harmful organisms exist on Mars and spacecraft inadvertently bring them back to Earth.

These are scenarios that keep astrobiologists and planetary protection specialists awake at night. They’ve led to unbelievably stringent international policies around what can and cannot be done on government-sponsored space missions.

Yet Musk’s plans threaten to throw the rule book on planetary protection out the window. As a private company SpaceX isn’t directly bound by international planetary protection policies. And while some governments could wrap the company up in space bureaucracy, they’ll find it hard to impose the same levels of hoop-jumping that NASA missions, for instance, currently need to navigate.

It’s conceivable (but extremely unlikely) that a laissez-faire attitude toward interplanetary contamination could lead to Martian bugs invading Earth. The bigger risk is stymying our chances of ever discovering whether life existed on Mars before human beings and their grubby microbiomes get there. And the last thing Musk needs is a whole community of disgruntled astrobiologists baying for his blood as he tramples over their turf and robs them of their dreams.

Ecoterrorism

Musk’s long-term vision is to terraform Mars – reengineer our neighboring planet as “a nice place to be” – and allow humans to become a multi-planetary species. Sounds awesome – but not to everyone. I’d wager there will be some people sufficiently appalled by the idea that they decide to take illegal action to interfere with it.

Ecoterrorists claimed responsibility in 1998 for burning part of a Colorado ski resort they said threatened animal habitats. Vail Fire Department

The mythology surrounding ecoterrorism makes it hard to pin down how much of it actually happens. But there certainly are individuals and groups like the Earth Liberation Front willing to flout the law in their quest to preserve pristine wildernesses. It’s a fair bet there will be people similarly willing to take extreme action to stop the pristine wilderness of Mars being desecrated by humans.

How this might play out is anyone’s guess, although science fiction novels like Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Mars Trilogy” give an interesting glimpse into what could transpire once we get there. More likely, SpaceX will need to be on the lookout for saboteurs crippling their operations before leaving Earth.

Space politics

Back in the days before private companies were allowed to send rockets into space, international agreements were signed that set out who could do what outside the Earth’s atmosphere. Under the United Nations Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, for instance, states agreed to explore space for the benefit of all humankind, not place weapons of mass destruction on celestial bodies and avoid harmful contamination.

That was back in 1967, four years before Elon Musk was born. With the emergence of ambitious private space companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin and others, though, who’s allowed to do what in the solar system is less clear. It’s good news for companies like SpaceX – at least in the short term. But this uncertainty is eventually going to crystallize into enforceable space policies, laws and regulations that apply to everyone. And when it does, Musk needs to make sure he’s not left out in the cold.

This is of course policy, not politics. But there are powerful players in the global space policy arena. If they’re rubbed the wrong way, it’ll be politics that determines how resulting policies affect SpaceX.

Climate change

Perhaps the biggest danger is that Musk’s vision of colonizing Mars looks too much like a disposable Earth philosophy – we’ve messed up this planet, so time to move on to the next. Of course, this idea may not factor into Musk’s motivation, but in the world of climate change mitigation and adaptation, perceptions matter. The optics of moving to a new planet to escape the mess we’ve made here is not a scenario that’s likely to win too many friends amongst those trying to ensure Earth remains habitable. And these factions wield considerable social and economic power – enough to cause problems for SpaceX if they decide to mobilize over this.

There is another risk here too, thanks to a proposed terrestrial use of SpaceX’s BFR as a hyperfast transport between cities on Earth. Musk has recently titillated tech watchers with plans to use commercial rocket flights to make any city on Earth less than an hour’s travel from any other. This is part of a larger plan to make the BFR profitable, and help cover the costs of planetary exploration. It’s a crazy idea – that just might work. But what about the environmental impact?

Even though the BFR will spew out tons of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, the impacts may not be much greater than current global air travel (depending how many flights end up happening). And there’s always the dream of creating the fuel – methane and oxygen – using solar power and atmospheric gases. The BFR could even conceivably be carbon-neutral one day.

But at a time when humanity should be doing everything in our power to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the optics aren’t great. And this could well lead to a damaging backlash before rocket-commuting even gets off the ground.

When the USSR launched Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957, it also launched the space race. AP Photo

Inspiring – or infuriating?

Sixty years ago, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite – and changed the world. It was the dawn of the space age, forcing nations to rethink their technical education programs and inspiring a generation of scientists and engineers.

We may well be standing at a similar technological tipping point as researchers develop the vision and technologies that could launch humanity into the solar system. But for this to be a new generation’s Sputnik moment, we’ll need to be smart in navigating the many social and political hurdles between where we are now and where we could be.

Imagine the possibilities…. SpaceX, CC BY

These nontechnical hurdles come down to whether society writ large grants SpaceX and Elon Musk the freedom to boldly go where no one has gone before. It’s tempting to think of planetary entrepreneurialism as simply getting the technology right and finding a way to pay for it. But if enough people feel SpaceX is threatening what they value (such as the environment – here or there), or disadvantaging them in some way (for example, by allowing rich people to move to another planet and abandoning the rest of us here), they’ll make life difficult for the company.

This is where Musk and SpaceX need to be as socially adept as they are technically talented. Discounting these hidden hurdles could spell disaster for Elon Musk’s Mars in the long run. Engaging with them up front could lead to the first people living and thriving on another planet in my lifetime.

Andrew Maynard is the Director of the Risk Innovation Lab at Arizona State University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. 

[djgblogger-blog]

Dear Elon Musk: Your dazzling Mars plan overlooks some big nontechnical hurdles

http://bit.ly/2x7UPaA

Will it be only a few decades before Mars tourism is a reality? SpaceX, CC BY

Elon Musk has a plan, and it’s about as audacious as they come. Not content with living on our pale blue dot, Musk and his company SpaceX want to colonize Mars, fast. They say they’ll send a duo of supply ships to the red planet within five years. By 2024, they’re aiming to send the first humans. From there they have visions of building a space port, a city and, ultimately, a planet they’d like to “geoengineer” to be as welcoming as a second Earth.

If he succeeds, Musk could thoroughly transform our relationship with our solar system, inspiring a new generation of scientists and engineers along the way. But between here and success, Musk and SpaceX will need to traverse an unbelievably complex risk landscape.

Many will be technical. The rocket that’s going to take Musk’s colonizers to Mars (code named the “BFR” – no prizes for guessing what that stands for) hasn’t even been built yet. No one knows what hidden hurdles will emerge as testing begins. Musk does have a habit of successfully solving complex engineering problems though; and despite the mountainous technical challenges SpaceX faces, there’s a fair chance they’ll succeed.

As a scholar of risk innovation, what I’m not sure about is how SpaceX will handle some of the less obvious social and political hurdles they face. To give Elon Musk a bit of a head start, here are some of the obstacles I think he should have on his mission-to-Mars checklist.

Musk typically drives hard toward his goals – in this case, Mars. AP Photo/Refugio Ruiz

Planetary protection

Imagine there was once life on Mars, but in our haste to set up shop there, we obliterate any trace of its existence. Or imagine that harmful organisms exist on Mars and spacecraft inadvertently bring them back to Earth.

These are scenarios that keep astrobiologists and planetary protection specialists awake at night. They’ve led to unbelievably stringent international policies around what can and cannot be done on government-sponsored space missions.

Yet Musk’s plans threaten to throw the rule book on planetary protection out the window. As a private company SpaceX isn’t directly bound by international planetary protection policies. And while some governments could wrap the company up in space bureaucracy, they’ll find it hard to impose the same levels of hoop-jumping that NASA missions, for instance, currently need to navigate.

It’s conceivable (but extremely unlikely) that a laissez-faire attitude toward interplanetary contamination could lead to Martian bugs invading Earth. The bigger risk is stymying our chances of ever discovering whether life existed on Mars before human beings and their grubby microbiomes get there. And the last thing Musk needs is a whole community of disgruntled astrobiologists baying for his blood as he tramples over their turf and robs them of their dreams.

Ecoterrorism

Musk’s long-term vision is to terraform Mars – reengineer our neighboring planet as “a nice place to be” – and allow humans to become a multi-planetary species. Sounds awesome – but not to everyone. I’d wager there will be some people sufficiently appalled by the idea that they decide to take illegal action to interfere with it.

Ecoterrorists claimed responsibility in 1998 for burning part of a Colorado ski resort they said threatened animal habitats. Vail Fire Department

The mythology surrounding ecoterrorism makes it hard to pin down how much of it actually happens. But there certainly are individuals and groups like the Earth Liberation Front willing to flout the law in their quest to preserve pristine wildernesses. It’s a fair bet there will be people similarly willing to take extreme action to stop the pristine wilderness of Mars being desecrated by humans.

How this might play out is anyone’s guess, although science fiction novels like Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Mars Trilogy” give an interesting glimpse into what could transpire once we get there. More likely, SpaceX will need to be on the lookout for saboteurs crippling their operations before leaving Earth.

Space politics

Back in the days before private companies were allowed to send rockets into space, international agreements were signed that set out who could do what outside the Earth’s atmosphere. Under the United Nations Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, for instance, states agreed to explore space for the benefit of all humankind, not place weapons of mass destruction on celestial bodies and avoid harmful contamination.

That was back in 1967, four years before Elon Musk was born. With the emergence of ambitious private space companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin and others, though, who’s allowed to do what in the solar system is less clear. It’s good news for companies like SpaceX – at least in the short term. But this uncertainty is eventually going to crystallize into enforceable space policies, laws and regulations that apply to everyone. And when it does, Musk needs to make sure he’s not left out in the cold.

This is of course policy, not politics. But there are powerful players in the global space policy arena. If they’re rubbed the wrong way, it’ll be politics that determines how resulting policies affect SpaceX.

Climate change

Perhaps the biggest danger is that Musk’s vision of colonizing Mars looks too much like a disposable Earth philosophy – we’ve messed up this planet, so time to move on to the next. Of course, this idea may not factor into Musk’s motivation, but in the world of climate change mitigation and adaptation, perceptions matter. The optics of moving to a new planet to escape the mess we’ve made here is not a scenario that’s likely to win too many friends amongst those trying to ensure Earth remains habitable. And these factions wield considerable social and economic power – enough to cause problems for SpaceX if they decide to mobilize over this.

There is another risk here too, thanks to a proposed terrestrial use of SpaceX’s BFR as a hyperfast transport between cities on Earth. Musk has recently titillated tech watchers with plans to use commercial rocket flights to make any city on Earth less than an hour’s travel from any other. This is part of a larger plan to make the BFR profitable, and help cover the costs of planetary exploration. It’s a crazy idea – that just might work. But what about the environmental impact?

Even though the BFR will spew out tons of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, the impacts may not be much greater than current global air travel (depending how many flights end up happening). And there’s always the dream of creating the fuel – methane and oxygen – using solar power and atmospheric gases. The BFR could even conceivably be carbon-neutral one day.

But at a time when humanity should be doing everything in our power to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the optics aren’t great. And this could well lead to a damaging backlash before rocket-commuting even gets off the ground.

When the USSR launched Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957, it also launched the space race. AP Photo

Inspiring – or infuriating?

Sixty years ago, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite – and changed the world. It was the dawn of the space age, forcing nations to rethink their technical education programs and inspiring a generation of scientists and engineers.

We may well be standing at a similar technological tipping point as researchers develop the vision and technologies that could launch humanity into the solar system. But for this to be a new generation’s Sputnik moment, we’ll need to be smart in navigating the many social and political hurdles between where we are now and where we could be.

Imagine the possibilities…. SpaceX, CC BY

These nontechnical hurdles come down to whether society writ large grants SpaceX and Elon Musk the freedom to boldly go where no one has gone before. It’s tempting to think of planetary entrepreneurialism as simply getting the technology right and finding a way to pay for it. But if enough people feel SpaceX is threatening what they value (such as the environment – here or there), or disadvantaging them in some way (for example, by allowing rich people to move to another planet and abandoning the rest of us here), they’ll make life difficult for the company.

This is where Musk and SpaceX need to be as socially adept as they are technically talented. Discounting these hidden hurdles could spell disaster for Elon Musk’s Mars in the long run. Engaging with them up front could lead to the first people living and thriving on another planet in my lifetime.

Andrew Maynard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.