Post by WarpZone in Fully Automated! Solarpunk TTRPG comments

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An intriguing look at a post-scarcity future. I have to say, though, I don't understand where the lack of corruption comes from. Call me terminally modern, if you must, I realize that it's intended as escapism, but the whole thing feels realistically very flimsy, given even five minutes reading the news in our real world. 2030 already happened in 2016, and 2080 happened in 2019!

I guess all those sentient machines are hell-bent on reporting absolutely every whiff of corruption to those enforcement agencies and the media, including the machines run by the enforcement agencies and the media??? You'd also need to sink any boats or shoot down any fliers attempting to leave the Lord of the Flies exile islands, while somehow preventing this from becoming the only thing people watch online.

It's nothing that couldn't be fixed with an expansion covering whatever covert agencies, incentive structuring bodies, and fantastical technologies are secretly (virtuously!) working behind the scenes to keep society ticking over.

I'm sorry to say, but real life has done nothing but beat into my head over and over again for the last 40 years that the society you describe and each individual component of it are sitting ducks for the first third-world dictator that comes along with a two-bit disinformation campaign.

Humans are dumb. We need help. And the book doesn't explicitly say where the help comes from, how it works, or when it happened. It's just implied, in the technologies that the players do know exist, and the things that mysteriously haven't happened for at least a generation.

Not a complaint. Just an observation. I'll dig deeper into the support materials and see if I missed something important. Maybe I'm just not in the right mood, right now, to engage with the game on its terms. If so, that's on me.

I give it a gradually increasing number of stars out of ten, distributed first by need, then uniformly to maintain a certain basic star-rating, with the excess selectively doled out to reward productivity. The lowest-rated member of society gets a higher number of stars than the average game published in our real world by 2123, with the median per-capita number of stars exceeding ten by the 2240s.

Fully Automated RPG66 days ago (1 edit)

Thanks for taking a look!

Incredulity is not uncommon. Rather than try to debate against it, my standing response is to point out that the game is designed to accommodate diverse tastes, so it can work surprisingly well even when played with a cynical eye. All the problems you mention just sound like interesting adventures to me! Tell stories are about trying to prop up a fragile society. Maybe in your hands, it's a flimsy, false utopia rife with unaddressed systemic problems. That's fine with us!

If you are interested in holding a discourse over these questions though, drop into our Discord! I think the questions you raise could make for great discussion!

Also, if you haven't yet done so, may I suggest you skim the starter adventure? It happens to be about investigating corruption! Perhaps it'll interest you.

WarpZone65 days ago (2 edits)

This is a really good response. Thanks for the advice! I'll look into it. :)

It's not so much that it's a false Utopia, I just feel like you're rooting everything in political systems, culture, and some sort of pre-existing fundamental goodwill, when a more robust system would need to be rooted in managing the expectations and motivations of the people, as well as structuring systems where the paths-of-least-resistance make compliance with the spirit of the law quick, easy and profitable, while simultaneously making disinformation, corruption, and fraud slow, painful and expensive.

It's not that hard to imagine. Just take all the existing tools and technology that modern corporations already use, and instead of using them to prop up 1980s-style banking, civil, and communications systems rife with exploitable attack surface in the name of unattainable infinite growth and short-term profits, use them to streamline and harden the intended use of those systems against malicious actors in the name of stability and long-term prosperity. If we can protect a military base, we can protect your credit cards. We just don't. But it gets even easier once you sprinkle a few gee-whiz sci-fi technologies in there.

The concept is great, it's just the approach feels so wrong-headed. If all it took was a generation of young people who had never known war or strife, the 1990s would have lasted forever.

itch.io

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