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What is your favorite way to build a sci-fi setting?

raz

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Star Army's Welcome Message said:
Star ArmyⓇ is a landmark of forum roleplaying. Opened in 2002, Star Army is like an internet clubhouse for people who love roleplaying, art, and worldbuilding... Note: This is a play-by-post RPG site.
The Star Army Wiki said:
Star Army® is a creative community of role-players, writers, and sci-fi fans that have been world-building our own unique setting since 2002.

There are a lot of ways to create a setting and build fictional worlds. The wiki's 13,000+ articles and this forum's 365,000+ posts are a magnificent testament to that. Our "role-players, writers, and sci-fi fans" make the great SARPiverse and its content possible and, whether prolific contributors or occasional enjoyers, all do it in our own unique way.

There's a spectrum of extremes between roleplaying and writing that everyone falls into. "Spontaneous or planned RP?" is a preference we're all asked to tell upon an (optional) introduction. Some players enjoy telling stories of great heroes and others enjoy the simple pleasures of an everyman. And when it comes to the wiki, some writers are all about managing fleets and making spreadsheets while others create beefy tech articles to give rich detail to even the smallest bolt on a starship — and then others still find satisfaction in archiving what's already been written here on the forum and are great interpretative custodians of the lore.

So, as the title says, what is your favorite way to build a sci-fi setting? Specifically this sci-fi setting, the Star Army Roleplay Universe? This question isn't because of anything needing to be reconciled or changed, nor is it a suggestion that things should lean more in one direction or another. There's no poll or up/downvotes here. Because the site's Staff has made it clear in Star Army's two-plus decades that all sorts of worldbuilding is welcome on Star Army. But rather, it's a question worth being asked so that everyone has the opportunity share what has worked for them because perhaps outlining your ideal method somewhere out-of-character will inspire good works in others so that the setting can continue to grow for 20 more years.

+++⭐🌟⭐+++​

As for me, I find myself at a mid-point between adversarial roleplay against a GM and pure writing. Which is to say that I like a thread or plot arc to be planned out with major beats and moments agreed upon in advance while the journey to those moments is a collaborative writing experience between all involved. And I enjoy writing larger-than-life heroes, be they starship royalty or unknown shadow warriors, because even the hardest sci-fi has room for such characters (just like how many such exceptional individuals can be seen throughout real life history). Beyond that, it's important for me to be immersed in a plot. It can be hard to keep focused when I'm not typing about someone with a whole wealth of life behind them, either roleplayed over the years or just some simple pre-RP notes. Whether a plot I'm participating in leans toward hard or soft sci-fi doesn't particularly matter to me because references to technology serve the story rather than define it.

On the wiki, I'm a big lover of detailing unique parts of a larger whole. This is why I'm so into making really extensive unit articles or updating histories for the Star Army's bits, such as Legion 777, SAINT, or the Third Fleet (and creating the Ninth all the way back in YE 30). I've got an RPG background like most of us do, but I've also got a bigger wargaming background, so particularly find pleasure in making things like my Legion. It's like painting the details on a Warhammer miniature: my Space Marines have bone white armor with blue purity seals, and my Rikugun soldiers wear bits of red on their Mindys to respect their samurai heritage.
 
A lot of what I like will intersect with what you like! But, I like planning RP a lot. It's what I do best. I like the responsibility of rising to a challenge. But the types you mentioned each have their reasons for being that challenge to me.

Doing a lot of the adversarial GM stuff where I posted enemies, orders, and the like feels like writing a choose your own adventure book. When GMing a large group the path to your story beats and end is an unclear one. The challenge is presented during the action of writing while herding the group towards the goal. It makes it so that keeping your clear story beats and end as they were planned difficult. Sure there can be thinking on your feet and changing it up, but they lend to plot holes and I don't really like the missions where I've done that. So for me I enjoy seeing if I can get a group of characters to work together towards a common goal and from an outside perspective have done it. If I can do that, I'll be proud for years.

Pre-planned RP feels more like writing stories in a novel. I like brainstorming and saying, "The characters could go through this and decide on and learn such and such, which leads to this." Like Modori's start or even Kamiwaza a bit. In Fuyubi it's been more about, "The Legion has these assets available to it, what can we do to utilize them best and also meet Uesu's needs?" In this very controlled pre-planned RP I know most of the general narrative but the details are what can lend to the surprises and interest for me as a writer. The main thought process goes into the planning stages and the legwork of writing it out is less of an obstacle for the mind and more of one for the will. I haven't done this as much as the former style of adversarial GMing so I don't yet know where the satisfaction lies and how to push past the speedbumps to get to that fulfillment, but I enjoy it for being able to be truly character-driven or narrative focused and less of a free-for-all. I like that my GM NPCs like Hoshi can grow and learn since the spotlight is less on the huge cast of characters and I can focus on her and others in the planning stages.

I think this is all to say that I like contributing through the storytelling. But for me those two challenging aspects of either herding a large group towards the goal during writing or brainstorming something interesting that fits the needs of the plot before writing are where I find the most fun. I like a challenge.

I think locations are also how I worldbuild here. When I need a plot idea, I look at planets or systems or begin to make up my own. When my characters need a break, I go to the locations I've built up for as much. When I needed to wrap up the Kuvexian war arc for the plotship, I made a place to memorialize it. I think that's how I like to contribute to the already very rich lore of SARP as it's how I like to appreciate my real life and existence, through places and experiencing them.

PS:
references to technology serve the story rather than define it
I really agree with this and just wanted to say it resonated with me a lot when I read it!
 
I prefer the almost opposite direction: spontaneous. If it's known, I don't see a lot of utility exploring scenes I know the outcome of. Planning out moments is cool, but I really do like the idea that the plot isn't set, that it's much more collaborative.
 
I'm with Kylindra. Planned RP outside of solo threads is self-defeating in my opinion. There's not much point in collaborative writing if it's not reactive to what your collaborators do. Reacting to what other player characters do in the moment is one of the primary responsibilities of being a GM or even a player, otherwise the thread could be on autopilot because none of the player actions would affect the planned outcome. You'd just be walking on a treadmill for long enough to justify stepping off to your planned ending.

I think that spontaneity keeps things fresh and engaging because you're always wondering what will happen next. When I ran Task Force Inquisition, I played it exactly as a D&D DM would. You have a broad mission parameter set at this start, a predetermined number of enemies and map features and that's it. Let the players discover them naturally and figure out their own solution to the mission parameters.

Players are really smart and often have more creative and inventive ways of completing a mission than you planned. Railroading people into your ending causes a lot of creative value to be lost. That's one of the reasons that GMNPCs in captaincy or NCO positions should almost always delegate command to players and take a back seat. Micromanagement via GMNPC doesn't engage players, they need to feel like they can affect things themselves.

React to their choices and allow that to make large macro changes where you go away and ponder how those actions will have affected the next mission. By doing that in Task Force Inquisition, it was so engaging to players that it had the most players characters of any plot on the site back in the day, up against some serious competition.

Sadly it was never designed for just one GM, so it was hard to keep up on, but that's beside the point.

The other thing is that I personally am a big advocate of adversarial RP, again similar to the tried and tested D&D system of convincing the DM that you can do something that affects the plot. In Yamatai especially, there's no reason to pull punches. Very few people die in Yamatai and healthcare is almost instant for those who don't, and if not there's STs. In one manner of thinking, dying could be seen more as a "timeout" box from a thread than anything more significant than that.

Therefore, one of the best ways to spice up combat that would otherwise be "mow down all the enemies without any real danger", which can get pretty repetitive, is to actually kill player characters, or make the scene more dangerous, when characters do things that might disadvantage their situation. In Task Force Inquisition, I blew up a whole squadron of ships just to show that the player's side weren't invincible unlike may be the case in other plots.

Struggling towards an objective from an adversarial DM and winning makes for a much more worthwhile experience than jaunting over the finish line and getting a participation medal because you were always planned to win regardless of what you did. It's the difference between playing D&D and playing solitaire, in my opinion.
 
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My style of building a sci fi setting, is literally building. If there's an established lore, such as here on SARP, I look around at what I feel is needed in the setting, and see what I can do to fill that need. I also love to make things that everyone can use. When I'm more active, designing and building things, I'm always looking for collaboration and feedback. While ultimately I will make something that's my style, I will always try to add features that others asked for, or include things made by others, and I love to put a lot of care into what I make to ensure that someone can pick it up, know exactly what it does and how and why, and roll with it. Origin has been extremely successful in that regard. nearly everything I've built has been used, almost every faction has been touched by Origin, or used its products, and often times I'll hear other tech designers using Origin as their standard that they compare against. That always makes me feel great, and I also love that so many people have made wonderful contributions to it over the years, so I know it isn't just me, but rather a collaboration of myself and all the people I've brought together, which has stood the test of time, lasting over fifteen years, and at one point being the third largest faction by playerbase, because so many people were interested in what delving into the tech and the stories that revolve around it could bring.

When I GM, however, I am very adversarial, as others have said. I always have a start and an end in mind, with obstacles placed for the players to overcome, but I want to make sure the players try their best. I want them to collaborate and work hard and use everything available to them to succeed against odds that are more often than not against them, and I want them to know that it was because of what they had done that they won. Sure, my GMPCs will guide them, give directions when needed, or help them out, but ultimately I want it to be their victory over me and my efforts, rather than just beating them down, or just letting them roll over everything. I have killed player characters, I've had my obstacles blown away much faster than anticipated, and everything in between, and I think that getting players to work together was what made the good parts work, and players refusing to work together was what caused the most hardships.
 
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