Leisure in Psi Wars Part 2: Fun and Games

In designing our distancing mechanisms, we need to be careful not to clutter up our setting.  The point of Psi-Wars isn't to explore exotic cultures, but to have exotic cultures as a backdrop for a vast galactic war.  For the most part, the exact nature of these don't matter.  The weird, bug-eyed guy speaks weird gibberish and drinks a weird drink and listens to weird music and, for the most part, that's enough.

Sometimes, however, players will want or need to participate in the weird activity.  This is true of dancing, where knowing the right moves can impress a space princess, and it's definitely true of sports and games, where the plot might turn on the outcome of a game.

Like all other distancing mechanisms, we expect our sports and games to be something exotic and unusual, even if we draw our initial inspiration from a real world sport of game.  But we need to know how our hero might participate in a particular event, and how he might win, especially if the plot turns on that.  At the same time, it's Psi-Wars, not Space Poker, so we need to keep our detail to a minimum.

So what is there to do around here? Leisure and Art in Psi-Wars

For a lot of people "Culture" means the fine arts: ballet, museums full of beautiful paintings, exquisite sculptures and the height of fashion.  Thus, if we speak of a "cultural familiarity," some might expect that this would include at least some discussion of these elements.  In a sense, that's true.  These represent how a culture decorates their environment and themselves, and what they do when they've got time on their hands.  It's also profoundly associated with what they value.  A highly religious culture might exclusively paint iconography or forbid any painting whatsoever!  Another heroic culture might love to retell the stories of their great heroes and features them, performing great deeds, in their art.  Another culture, favoring freedom and self-expression, might routinely challenge all assumptions about what art even is.

For this post, I'm going to skip the discussion of values, but it's something I'll come back to, as it's very fundamental.  What's important to understand here is that art expresses values.

Like food and language and virtually everything else cultural, art and leisure also expresses status.  More expensive art and leisure activities tend to be the exclusive domain of the wealthy, who may well flaunt their collections or knowledge just to display their status for others.  The poor might not be able to do this, or might make of  point of conspicuously avoiding excessive consumption by sticking to cheaper or more practical tasks.

Fine Dining in Psi-Wars: Cuisine and Intoxicants

"So, what are we eating?"

Ever played in an RPG where someone's in a tavern and he goes to order food, then stops and asks what he's ordering?  What indeed!  In a fantasy game, we can just hand-wave away something like turkey legs and beer, but if we're in an exotic location, especially a sci-fi one, players expect that their character's aren't ordering a burger and fries.  What does one eat in Psi-Wars?

The answer should change from region to region.  Rafari's people live off the bounty of his planet and understand what it brings.  Dun's homeworld, Grist, likely offers food as appetizing as its name ("You haven't lived until you've tried fried Chort on a stick from a street vendor." "Chort... isn't that a kind of sewer crab?" "Well, we have to do something with them!").  Like all the rest of our distancing mechanisms, we can use food to push the characters farther from their comfort zone.  In the core, we might have familiar foods, like space burgers with space fries, but on the rim, nothing is recognizable.

Mostly, this just matters for flavor. It's nice to know what people can order, to be able to offer a few quick names and descriptions, but cuisine serves many roles in a setting.  It can act as social lubricant.  What is Carousing or Connoissuer without the right beer or wine?  It can also act as a unique sort of goal ("Where's the cocaine shipment?"), and it can present danger (being drunk during a raid, or working out where to get food while starving on a world).  While we need names and descriptions, sometimes, we need mechanics too!

Psi-Wars Economics: Trade, Exotic Resources and Money

First Ship of the Year by Dress-7

We've already touched on Psi-Wars economics when we looked at Psi-Wars infrastructure.  This time, I'm going to get into a little more specifics, but not too much, for two reasons.  First of all, nobody cares.  That is, Psi-Wars is not a game about counting coins and worrying about trade runs (though you're free to hack such a game out of the Psi-Wars framework).  Rather, we need to know the economics of Psi-Wars so we know what to say we're smuggling, or so we can give bits of flavor and color.  What do we call hyperdrive fuel?  Why would pirates hit that shipment and not some other one?  What do we call money?  And what's for dinner?

Psi-Wars Linguistics

Whoa, lady, I only speak two languages, English and bad English.-Korben Dallas, the Fifth Element

In a campaign, language diversity has two main functions. It provides an obstacle; when explorers encounter a new race, they may not be able to communicate. It also is a source of color; a nonhuman, or a human from a different culture, may have an accent, or a strange way of phrasing things.
-Bill Stoddard, GURPS Fantasy, page 66 

Nobody gives a damn that the alien is speaking twi'lek, except for description. The times where language mattered in Star Wars can be limited to one time in the entire series. C3PO wasted his points on buying 6 million forms of communication.
-Raoul Roulaux, Gentleman Gamer

Raoul is largely right about Star Wars and language.  Where Star Trek or Game of Thrones have internally consistent and largely speakable languages, Star Wars has a series of funny sounds that only sounds like an alien language.  The point of language in Star Wars is like all the other distancing mechanisms in Star Wars: to provide the window dressing of space opera. We expect aliens to speak alien (it would be "unrealistic" for them to speak English), so they jabber on in alien-sounding gibberish.

That doesn't mean we have to do the same in Psi-Wars, of course.  Language serves a purpose, as Bill Stoddard points out.  Moreover, Psi-Wars is based on Action, and Action definitely features language (though often in largely the same way that Star Wars does: It's important that the Middle Eastern terrorist shout things that sound Arabic, to be "realistic" but it's not that important that he's speaking comprehensible Arabic).  Finally, the reasons Star Wars has funny languages remain important.  We still need aliens to sound alien, we still need exotic things to sound exotic, and we still need to give the impression of a sweeping galaxy.

Socially Engineering Psi-Wars: Distancing Mechanisms

The GM’s most important trick in this kind of campaign
is distancing mechanisms: situations, customs, or objects that
are alien and perplexing, both to the PCs and to the players.
It’s best if they aren’t just random weirdness. Not only is it
“playing fair” to come up with logical reasons, working out
the implications of a premise can suggest additional weird
elements, deepening the effect. A campaign of this sort is a
riddle for the players; when they start anticipating the consequences of their characters’ actions, they’ve answered the riddle. At that point – and not before – it’s appropriate for them to buy Cultural Familiarity, freeing their characters of skill
penalties for not knowing how things work.
-Bill Stoddard, GURPS Social Engineering

 This singular paragraph will be the core of most of what I'm doing during this iteration, so let me parse what Mr. Stoddard is talking about.

An alien race, or a strange setting, should feel alien or strange, and that means not everything should work the way it does in our ordinary world.  The whole point of science fiction and fantasy is to visit and explore new and unusual worlds.  They might have a sense of familiarity, but to have a sense of authenticity, something should be alien about them. There should be some element (a mechanism) that helps separate (distance) this "exotic world" from the "ordinary world" that players are more familiar with.

Ideally, these mechanics should logically flow from the nature of the world the players find themselves in. In Dune for example, the natives, the Fremen, have completely blue eyes, obsess over water and worship the sand worms.  This makes sense, though, because the planet is a desert and spice, which causes blue eyes, is one of the few sources of nutrients on the planet.  Once someone understands the logic that underlies the culture of the Fremen makes perfect, internally consistent sense.

These distancing mechanisms represent the hurdle to socializing with another culture.  That is, they are the crux of why you have a -3 for socializing with someone with whom you do not share Cultural Familiarity.  Once you understand the logic of the culture, you have bridged the "distance" and you may purchase Cultural Familiarity.

Psi-Wars and Social Engineering 2: Social Engineering Analyzed

Just as I did with GURPS Action 2, it's worth going over each page of Social Engineering to see if there's anything that leaps out at me as useful, and taking some notes as I go.  I've summarized my notes below, for the tl;dr crowd.

Summary

Understanding our alien worlds require us to create distancing mechanics, unique things that define aliens as other.

We need a reference society, the human-focused “Galactic Core” culture.

We need to better define Rank, including how many levels of it we have, what it grants us, and how it interacts with organizations

We should consider revisiting Status, perhaps even returning it to Psi-Wars.

If we wish to include Social Regard or Social Stigma, it might be worth defining what they are and how one gets them.

Social Engineering contains some rules on how aliens might work differently, though most “Communion-compatible” aliens are essentially human in their psychology, with only cultural differences separating them from humans.

The rules for diplomacy and perhaps some elements of administrative or legislative politics are fairly central to a hypothetical Diplomat template, though they need to be matched with working Action traits (in the same way that the Officer takes Mass Combat traits and makes them useful in a generic
Action game)

Check out the distraction mechanics.