The Lost Universe: NASA's Tabletop Role-Playing Game Adventure
science.nasa.gov
science.nasa.gov
This is a tabletop game jam sparked by the NASA release. It is mildly snarky about D&D. The challenge is to write a TTRPG adventure that centers at least one NASA image. itch.io tabletop game jams often produce some cool stuff so I think it's worth watching.
What does that mean? Or is it just a grammar thing and they mean centres on, focuses on, is built around…
It's at _best_ very awkwardly worded. It's probably just a mistake.
> A Major Museum’s Attempt to Center Native American Voices
> Yet, the story of man’s redemption, the gospel, is one that always centers God
The second noun definition[1] and first verb definition[2], but only after expansion, google gave me[3] match.
The second verb definition[4] on merriam-webster.com, similar on dictionary.com, second noun definition on cambridge.org, but mostly missing, in an example but not definition for some reason, in the verb section.
[1] the point from which an activity or process is directed, or on which it is focused. "the city was a center of discontent"
[2]occur mainly in or around (a specified place). "the mercantile association was centered in northern Germany" have or cause to have (a specified concern or theme). "the case centers around the couple's adopted children"
[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=define+center
[4] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/center#dictionary... to give a central focus or basis centers her hopes on her son the plot was centered on espionage
Truly one of the most obnoxious aspects of online RPG discourse.
Though that’s somewhat inside baseball consumer-corporate drama.
If I show you a random group of gamers playing an RPG and you guess they are playing DnD then you'll be correct more often than not.
Check out https://5e.tools/ for an example of a good free, self-hostable resource.
But the explosive success of 5E has brought that out, and it's not entirely the fault of the people being snarky about D&D. Some of it is 'eternal september' quasi-nostalgia, some of it is people pushing about against something being popular, but a lot of it is that D&D discussion has invaded all sorts of other places that were either specifically about alternative systems, or were intended to be balanced in what was being discussed. The relative newness for a lot people in the overall hobby, along with Wizards very much pushing it as a lifestyle/identity choice has also resulted in a lot of people discussing D&D on the internet being some mixture of hostile/dismissive/etc. of any discourse that isn't about 5E.
I've lost count of the number of conversations I've witnessed where people are talking about something they dislike in D&D or asking how to homebrew a system on top of it to do a certain thing, and someone will politely say "Hey this is pretty core to how 5E functions and is part of the primary gameplay loop, you might want to look into X system because it handles Y thing in Z way, which seems to align with your needs here," and they get a rather rude dismissal. With the release of the One D&D rules, I saw lots of conversations where criticism of them, even from 5E players, were taken as some sort of personal attack on a core values of people who were fans.
There are plenty of assholes in the OSR, storygaming, etc. scenes. Toxicity sure isn't limited to the 5E players. But the sheer number of them, coupled with the previously mentioned Wizards marketing strategy, has resulted in a lot of the rest of the TTRPG community stuck with their hackles raised and feeling like they always have to be on the defensive. And that leads to the snark.
There are lots of media fandoms out there where certain parts of the fandom get much, much more fan interest than others. There have always been popular blockbuster movies, books are dominated by bestsellers, anime and manga have always been dominated by shounen works which have fandoms much larger than all the other anime and manga debuting in the year combined. Those fandoms don't seem to have their hackles raised permanently when discussing the popular properties. Instead fans of the broader medium recognize that they are a fan of the medium as a whole instead of the most popular properties. The TTRPG space seems uniquely bitter.
Even aside from the silly 5E spat, the loudest TTRPG voices tend to strongly prefer story games and the old Forge forum had a legacy of using hyperbolic language to criticize adjacent styles that were mostly a matter of taste. In my experience, TTRPG discourse is quite bad and mostly involves talking up your preferences and criticizing others'. I enjoy the hobby but really hate the childish, camp-obsessed discourse. I tend to stick to the spaces of systems I like because there's less us-vs-them going on.
The anti-D&D snark at the NASA adventure is a great example. I can think of 4 non-D&D-lineage (so non-OSR) systems that the adventure is trivial to convert to. But instead of producing translations of the adventure or thanking the NASA folks for releasing a free adventure, the TTRPG world seems to be yet again trying to find the smallest thing they can to get angry over.
“It's... fine? I mean, it's pretty obviously written for D&D and games operating in the same space, with similar expectations for what a TTRPG adventure looks like (meet some fantasy people, go to a dungeon, dodge the traps, fight the enemies, beat up a boss, go home).”
This doesn’t seem all that angry to me. It doesn’t say that D&D is bad. It doesn’t say that the adventure is useless for any non-D&D game; it says that the adventure is oriented towards the traditional and popular idea of what an adventure should look like. That’s true!
Then they compliment all the images NASA has produced over the years and offer a way to do something else cool with them. That seems pretty cool to me.
I would agree that, on the whole, there is more interest in alternate systems because D&D has gotten so popular.
to control for that I had this general idea to have a grounded hidden truth to anchor the llm, things like having the scenario written and ground all player outcomes to the hidden secnario. that worked well in terms of pushback, but gpt are far too optimistic - i.e. it was impossible to lose a game, or to even die or have permanent wounds. gpt also allowed any kind of problem solving if narrated well enough - common sample, you can just keep drinking healing potion regardless of whatever situation you are in and just reset the game.
next step was to keep track of item consumption outside of the gpt, so I built a database and a few shot instructions system. gpt still doesn't push back on a player trying to cheat, but there's nothing much I can do there. also, I needed to lead gpt into negative outcomes, so I outsurced skill rolls. that eventually led to a massive engine to run the game, with llm just describing outcomes, where the pipeline is natural input > llm convert to structured json describing the action > engine ask for an action for every npc in the zone > llm map structure to game rules > engine executes the rules and update game world state > llm pick output and describe the result to the player - and the world is in a hierarchical structure, so only few npc get executed but the world state is tracked as the player explore and return to past locations
now, this is not it. this is a smaller engine that just take the skill roll and a simpler version of the item tracking, and instead of being the game controller, is referenced from a gpt for most of the game. as I said this approach is a fair bit weaker, but can provide a good enough result, if you are compliant with the narrative (i.e. willing and honest participant to the game) and will absolutely break apart if you challenge it too much
this is the originating gpt to which I added the nasa context: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-bLhy3K71r-gpt-and-paper and this is the engine, in all it's semplicity: https://pastebin.com/GQuJtEqf
With a little effort, you could work this into a Cyberpunk campaign, as Night City is set in the United States after all. Or you could just create a more story appropriate version of Hubble in the world of your choice.
I read through the campaign, and it seems fun enough if done right.
The real world and fantasy world interacting is a trope that has existed for centuries.
A friend of mine played a D&D game where the party got sent to real world Earth. None of their magic worked. After they killed the first cop that stopped them, the half-orc barbarian promptly accident shot himself and died while examining the dead cop’s gun.
My friend said the adventure was hilarious.
There's not much difference to a common denizen of a fantasy world between a wand that shoots bolts of lightning and polished chrome laser pistol tube, or between a flying carpet and hover car. It's all the same to them, and the whole "our ancestral civilizations were so knowledgeable in the lost occult arts that they could shape magic into common objects" when it's really just forgotten high tech sciences is always a fun bit of world building.
This kind of material absolutely belongs in fantasy and I really hope that someday sci-fantasy makes a big comeback, some of my favorite reading books and inspiration for tabletop material have come out of them.
Hard to be a God was a good read I enjoyed and feels like it falls into this category as well, from the point of the "higher beings."
A lot of famous early pulp fantasy didn't make as much of a concrete distinction between science fiction and fantasy either and tended to blend the two freely. I think most people would think of Conan as pure fantasy but there were a handful of stories about him encountering otherworldly alien beings and sci-fi technology, or ancient highly advanced civilizations whose progress is incomprehensible to (in Conan's world) modern inhabitants. IIRC there was at least one Fahfrd and the Grey Mouser story where they come across an interdimensional traveler.
If other people have recommendations too I'd love for them to chime in. It's a genre I feel is definitely underrepresented.
Michael Moorcock is another writer who often mixed fantasy and SF. His Dancers at the End of Time series is brilliant and hilarious. Or more straight-faced and pulpy, the Hawkwind and Elric stories are great.
And Jack Vance, of course. As well as The Dying Earth, he did a bunch of comedy-oriented stories in the same setting, starring Cugel the Clever and Rhialto the Marvellous.
That there are some systems that do not have a Perception style mechanism does not mean that the adventure is "DND-centric", that just means you're running a system that probably doesn't act as a simple translation target for the adventure.