Wednesday, September 19, 2012

The Right Stuff RPG

A few months ago, I made a cryptic post about a new game idea I was starting to develop.  I didn't give any real details, since I wanted to give it some time to gel before releasing it into the world.  I admit that I still haven't done a huge amount of work on this thing, but I had a change of heart about discussing it.  I'm hoping that working through my ideas on the blog will be more helpful for (a) prodding me to accomplish some real work on it, and (b) improving it via either external feedback or my own process of just writing it down.  :-)

So, you've seen the working title above.  The idea is to have players play the roles of test pilots and astronauts at the dawn of the space age.

You know the 7, but do you know the 13 ?
There are other games with semi-related themes, but I haven't seen one that focuses on the test pilot culture, the friendly rivalries, and the overall sense of "We Can Do It" engineering positivism that Tom Wolfe famously wrote about.  (Of course, The Right Stuff is a copyrighted property, and my game will have a different name and will be based purely on our common public history and my own extrapolations!)

All of the games that I've seen that attempt to evoke or simulate this period of history focus mainly on the "Space Race" aspect -- i.e., one player is the Americans, another is the Russians, and they compete to see who can get to the Moon first, or whatever.  Fritz Bonner's Liftoff is one example.  Prolific DIY game designer Lloyd Krassner has another.

The overall idea, as it stands right now, is that each "turn" of the game will correspond to a time period of something like one year.  The big events are the space missions, of course -- which can go well or badly, depending on the roll of the dice.  But the astronauts can attempt to do other things in their "down time" to improve their lot, too -- training, publicity, research, and so on.  Semi-random "events" can happen to them in each year: some personal (divorce? broken leg while water skiing off Cocoa Beach?), and some worldly (what did those Russians just do?).

I'm still not clear on how the game is won.  Maybe there should be multiple options.  A clearly defined "victory condition" would be nice for a version that could be played out in just an hour or two -- a casual party game.  But I'd also like to enable people to be able to role-play an open ended long-term RPG-type campaign.  (I'm in awe of what Greg Stafford has done with the Great Pendragon Campaign, for example.)  To play John Glenn first going into space in 1962, then again in 1998, could be quite an experience!

Anyway, in future posts I hope to discuss more of the details that have been swirling around my brain about this game.  The next post, for example, will describe how this game may just be something MORE than nostalgic historical simulation...

11 comments:

  1. 'The big events are the space missions, of course -- which can go well or badly, depending on the roll of the dice.'

    You say this so easily and yet the sentence itself sort of made my gut lurch!

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    1. This is actually spot-on feedback for the game design. I've got to make sure that "playing out" a space mission actually conveys some fraction of that gut-lurching, life-and-death concern, instead of being a mere few seconds of dull die rolling!

      Though I think the actual possibility of a life-ending mishap will be lower than it was in real life. RPG players usually expect a good bit more "agency" (i.e., control over their situation) than actual 1960s astronauts really had.

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    2. Did you watch the film based on the Wolfe novel? It was excellent and speaking to the lack of agency the '60s astronauts experienced, the amount of sympathy I felt for Grissom after that dramatic portrayal is off the charts.

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    3. Love that movie. (We're also huge Fred Ward fans, too... what's not to adore about Remo Williams or Tremors?)

      If this were a different age, Aeschylus or Sophocles -- or maybe the Beowulf poet -- would've written their best work on the matter of Gus Grissom.

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  2. I love the idea more reading the specifics of where you want to go with it. The scope is massive, for exploring alternate histories and maybe encouraging more of the right stuff today.

    I recommend a look at these posts for some more inspiration on psychology, and also those ready to step up who rarely got the call...

    Psych. pt. 1 - http://www.starshipreckless.com/blog/?p=6925
    Psych. pt. 2 - http://www.starshipnivan.com/blog/?p=6938

    The others - http://www.starshipreckless.com/blog/?p=6618

    There's also this interesting blog on paths not taken...

    http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/beyondapollo/

    Depending on how you approach the mechanics, individual elements could even be useful for other systems and settings.

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    1. Thanks for all the links, Porky. I'll comb through them as soon as I can.

      With your "alternate histories" line, you espied my secret plan for the next post... :-)

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    2. By funny coincidence, just a few weeks ago I watched an old favorite movie of mine that touches on many of the psychological issues in that review. It's an exceedingly silly movie -- being a Jerry Lewis vehicle -- but it's got both the extremes of psychology hinted at by the Nowak affair (and the earlier Soviet cases) as well as some evocative early-60s visual set designs.

      I can't truly recommend that anyone spend their time or money on viewing a schlockfest like Way Way Out, but it is a nostaglic fave for me.

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    3. A pleasure. Thanks for the suggestion in turn - it's new to me, but the overview makes it sound like a lot of fun. I can see how you might work some of that in too. A project like this could be used in a lot of different ways, especially if somehow the level of reality in the mechanisms could be made scaleable.

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  3. Being British, and a British Interplanetary Society member, I loved the hint about the old BIS Moonship, designed by R A Smith! I've always thought that a good RPG setting would be a world in which the R A Smith stuff was the British space programme, and the Chesley Bonestell/Wernher von Braun stuff was the American space programme! If you need any help with this stuff, let me know!
    Grif

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    1. I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't know the artist or designer for that last picture I posted... it just had the perfect feel for where I'd like to go with this.

      Ah, JBIS. If there was one scientific journal for which one could apply the blanket term "cool," that would be it. If I ever decide to do an issue-by-issue retrospective on a historically important periodical (like grognardia just concluded with Ares), I'd be forced to pick JBIS.

      Some future incarnation of JBIS must also be what Scotty was talking about when he said he had to "catch up on his technical journals!" :-)

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  4. The actual artist for that piece is David Hardy - take a look at his website, there's a great image of a 1950s shuttle lifting off - but the designer was R A Smith, who did the illustrations for Arthur C Clarke's "The Exploration of the Moon". The BIS Moonship had three versions - a pre-war solid fuel version, a post-war atomic-boosted version with a chemical lander/earth-return vehicle, and the all-chemical version in "The Exploration of the Moon" which refueled in earth orbit from two tanker rockets. If I can help on this stuff...
    Grif

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