Update on the Right Stuff RPG

Back in 2012, I mused for a few posts (here and here) about an idea for a new game that allows players to recreate the excitement of not only the 1960s space race, but also the way things "could have been" in the succeeding decades -- moon bases, orbiting agricultural colonies, terraforming Mars, and so on.

Anyway, I just learned about a fascinating new game, just published this year, that covers some of this territory.  I admit that my first thought was along the lines of "Oh no, have I been scooped?!"  However, reading its rules has been a huge help in figuring out what I want my game to be, and what I don't really want it to be.

Leaving Earth is a tabletop board game written by Joseph Fatula and published by the Lumenaris Group.  Each player takes the role of a space agency, and the goal is to plan missions, build spacecraft, manage risk, and reach for the stars!  In itself, this isn't a new concept.  A year or so ago I also came across a much more detailed game/simulation on the same topic: Phil Eklund's High Frontier.  But Leaving Earth aims to shave off enough of the scientific and engineering crunchiness to make it a fun experience for players of all backgrounds.  It's essentially the same level of complexity that I'm looking to hit in my game.

Despite my love of all the techy goodness of space mission planning -- and I say that without an ounce of irony -- I think that my original "Right Stuff RPG" (name to be changed to avoid getting in trouble) wasn't really about that, um, stuff.  I was always thinking more about the personalities of the astronauts and the ways that they made larger-than-life history.  You can see even in my placeholder name that I consider it a Role Playing Game first and foremost.

I want each player to really get into their chosen astronaut characters, to care about them as people.  And, of course, to inject something of themselves into their characters, too.  Balancing the first (play acting) with the second (wish fulfillment?) is a juggling act that tabletop RPGs have been trying to perfect for more than 40 years now.  I'd love to prod players toward that goal, but traditional RPGs like D&D have an open-endedness of "plot" that requires a knowledgeable DM to manage it all.

Thus, the big question is:  How much of that experience can be programmed into a more casual kind of game?  I still have no answer to that, but I'm always open to inspiration...  :-)

Dude, where's my L5 colony?

(Insert standard blogger apology for not posting more frequently... my teaching this semester is rewarding, but it's taking up a huge chunk of time.)

In the last post I began outlining a new game concept where players take on the roles of 1960s astronauts.  We follow both the missions and the personal lives of our intrepid sky pilots, and each success helps them "improve" in various ways.  They can spend their down time honing their technical skills, or they can choose to do things that may benefit them in other ways (who wants to go on Johnny Carson?).

But if one turn is one year, then players would reach the end of the Apollo period pretty quickly. We all know that things slowed down a bit after 1972.

What if they didn't?

In the comments on the last post, Porky predicted that this game could shift into alternate futures quite easily.  Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I was entranced by the grand goals of the L5 Society...

In the last post I threw out the phrase "engineering positivism" about the gung-ho early NASA period. That was nothing in comparison to the L5 peoples' attitude!  They were planning for the evolution of humanity into a fully spacefaring, space-living race.  I'm overjoyed that their full collection of L5 News PDF files is online... I'm going to read a bunch of them as inspiration for where I'd like to go with the game.

(There's a lot one could say about the sense of disappointment felt by many that these imagined futures didn't come to pass.  That's a whole 'nother post in itself.  I feel it to some degree myself, but I also cringe when I hear people say, even in jest, things like "I was promised a flying car! Where's my flying car?"  Come on... does this really look like a societal contract to anyone?)  :-)

For the game, I'm leaning in the direction of having the players choose from a set of several possible "Event packages."  (I could call them "decks" if I was settled on the use of cards, or "tables" if I was sure the players would all be familiar with D&D-style lookup charts... we'll see!)  These events will contain the possible space missions -- and their progressions and prerequisites -- as well as the "worldly" events that may occur randomly.  I'd also like to include guidelines for players to make up their own packages.  I'm hoping these will get rid of the need for a human "Game Master" (GM) and allow everyone at the table to actually play a character.

Some sets of events will be more "out there" than others.  As I work on these packages, I'll certainly start by emulating history and tracking some of the "retro-future" paths not taken.  But there's nothing stopping the game from containing increasingly sci-fi-ish elements such as alien first contact, self-aware AIs, terraforming Mars, and having to save the Earth from being hit by an asteroid.  It's a cliche, but the sky is the limit!

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...