Scope and format of entries in "Forty Exotic Worlds"

Role-playing games Flat Black
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81

Well, it’s clear that the entry on Arcolais is unclear and needs a complete re-write. And you know what? I am not going to do it now. I’m going to defy my paralysing habit of polishing before I have finished the draft. Tomorrow I will go on, probably to Nahal.

There remains a question of scope and format. Should I be more consistent in the way I compare the tabbed data of these worlds to the corresponding figures for Earth?

I have some figures in SI with a conversion to Earth-based trivial units: diameter and gravity. The easiest way to be more consistent would be to leave out the values on Earth diameters and gee and note the values in the key.

The year length is presented in local days and in Earth-based trivial units, with nary a megasecond in sight. But I represent that Earth’s year is acting as a standard unit of time here, not as a comparison.

I have some figures in SI or other standard units, with a note in the key as to what Earth’s value is. Atmospheric scale height, ocean coverage, tidal range, average surface temperature, (obliquity ought to be in here but it seems I left it out of the key entirely), escape speed, altitude of low orbit, period of low orbit, population, and population density. There really isn’t room to add equivalent values in Earth comparison to all of these.

Barometric pressure is given in an Earth equivalent, with the SI value Earth’s barometric pressure noted in the key. The partial pressure of oxygen is given in terms ot Earth’s total barometric pressure, the SI value for Earth being noted in the key but no value for planet in terms or Earth’s actual equivalent being offered.

The level of illumination is given in an Earth equivalent, with no conversion to lux anywhere.

That is a bit of a mess, though all the decisions seemed good at the time.

Giving values in SI and equivalents as a multiple of Earth’s corresponding value for every datum for which a comparison is meaningful would not be practical. There isn’t space in a column.

Giving values in SI (or other standard scales such as hours, years, and °C) only, with Earth’s diameter and gravity added to the key, would be consistent. But it would mean becoming rather more obscure to American readers (I am not going to add US Customary equivalents), beside which pascals aren’t all that well-known in the rest of the Anglosphere, and lux are obscure even to me.

Advice?

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82

It is my premise for Flat Black that continued improvements in transport and communications, travel, migration, intermarriage, cultural exchange, loss of faith, and death of languages, on Earth before emigration began in earnest, obscured current distinctions of race, language, nationality, culture, and religion. One of the ways that I signify that is to employ some consistency in the cultural references of old colonies in the Core, but completely scramble the signifiers for worlds in the periphery and fringe.

Besides. Is “Arcolais” French? I coined it by changing one letter in a place-name from Vance’s Dying Earth. Would it help if I changed it back to “Ascolais”?

83

No. Not at all. For some reason I have the greatest difficulty in conveying this point, except to players in my campaigns. I don’t know what I have written that conveys that impression so strongly.

Typical players in Flat Black operate on a scope at least six or seven orders of magnitude too small to change the society of a planet. Social reform of a planetary society in Flat Black is a heartbreaking slog on which thousands of people expend their entire careers, it is not a thing that a starfleet captain could do any week whenever he dared to defy the Prime Directive.

In a typical mission in Flat Black a team of players arrest one murderer. Or they rescue one journalist from a repressive regime’s Island of Living Death. Or they recover one stolen painting. Or they plant one piece of fake evidence into the haul of an archaeological looting expedition. Or they recruit one informant, Or get one train-full of civilians safely across a subcontinent during the outbreak of a civil war. Little stuff. The scale of personal adventure, not space-operatic grandiosity.

Getting to take down a nasty crime family that controls quarter of a city, or to discredit or assassinate the leader of a nascent authoritarian populist movement is a rare treat. Things of such importance usually fall into player characters’ laps only if they crop up unexpectedly in the course of something else.

I might like the people and cultures to have some features that inspire sympathy or even hope. I might even like some worlds to have some admirable elements that the blunt instruments of imperial policy are in danger of crushing.

That’s an excellent point, and one that I must keep in mind.

84

The utility of any particular set of units will surely depend to some extent on what game system people are using the thing with: for example, GURPS wants gravity in earth G (and I think every game I’ve played that cared about gravity at all did too), so I’d retain that no matter what else goes.

What GURPS wants for atmospheres (the ones that don’t actively kill you) blends together absolute pressure and ppO₂ into a single descriptive category. In fact breaking those out might be a nice short piece for The Path of Cunning – thanks.

Illumination is only really covered in any sort of detail in GURPS Powers - Enhanced Senses, and that uses lux (imposing penalties at 20). But I think that that’s not a “first class” parameter – it feeds into how well agriculture and solar power plants (but I repeat myself) work, but it doesn’t directly affect most things PCs want to do or how the planet feels.

So those are the numbers a GURPS GM would be looking for…

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85

Well, on one hand, “arc” could be an element in a French word (consider arc-en-ciel, rainbow), and on the other, lots and lots of French words end in “-ais” (with a silent s).

However, it looks as if it isn’t an existing French word or name anyway. The closest I can find is arcolai, an Italian plural noun apparently meaning “wool winders.”

86

Oh, by all means. But I think you are overstating the magnitude of the problems, anyway. In my case, at least, many of my comments amounted to “Is this what you meant?” (and by and large it was). My main suggestion has been that you could make the underlying duality of prudery and license more explicit in the straight descriptive text, and that’s a matter of emphasis more than substance.

I think your resolve to move forward is sound. I have read about how much time Tolkien wasted in responding to criticism of his drafts by going back and rewriting the whole thing . . .

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87

I guess the only specific RPG that I am likely to use and that treats such things mechanically in ForeSight, which wants gravity in gees and temperatures in Celsius, uses local rather than global conditions for its local-environment rules, and describes atmospheres with one word denoting a category of pressures and another denoting the protective gear required.

Though relevant, the needs of RPG rules aren’t the only consideration; I use these figures to communicate to the players, and hesitate to make my readers learn how big (for a planet) 12 500 km is, how much gravity 9.8 m/s² is, how thick 101 kPa of air is, how stifling or invigorating 21 kPa of O₂ is, how warm (for a planet) an average surface temperature of 15 °C is, how bright a planet is when its solar luminous constant is 128 klx, how crowded a planet is when its population density is 59 people/km². Some of my players have been and presumably will be Americans. Few people anywhere understand how bright a lux is; many are in addition unfamiliar with kilometers and celsius, and affronted at being asked to deal with the SI.

As for illuminance being irrelevant to how a planet feels, in Australia the solar illuminance is about twice as bright as in the UK, and a lot of people remark that that makes a big and sudden difference to how they feel. London is nothing like as dim as 20 lux, but I’ve known a lot of people remark on disembarking from their planes in Sydney, or relate of steaming into the Bay of Biscay on a ship from Southampton, that they suddenly felt much happier because the sunlight was bright.

It’s not just the agriculture and the sunglasses, or the different feelings evoked by a “shady” and a “murky” verandah. I’m keeping illuminance. The question is whether to report it as “128 klx” or “100% as bright as Earth”.

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88

I’ve given some thought to presenting all the data in terms of Earth equivalents, without any standard units. That would be okay for gravity, year length, barometric pressure, partial pressure of oxygen, tidal range, and illumination. But it would be awkward for day length, scale height of the atmosphere, ocean cover, average temperature (though a Celsius difference from Earth would be okay), escape speed, altitude and period of low orbit, population, and population density. Duplicating every figure would take too much room, and a lot of those would still be awkward.

That being the case, slaying this balrog would involve deleting the figures for diameter, gravity, and year length in D♁, g♁, and a♁, giving barometric pressure and partial pressure of oxygen in kPa instead of bar, and illuminance in klx instead of a percentage of Earth’s. Then I would have to teach in the key that Earth’s diameter is 12 742 km, its gravity 9.8 m/s², its atmospheric pressure 101.3 kPa, its ppO₂ 21 kPa (and the breathable limits about 11 kPa to 40 kPa), and its solar illuminance at the top of the atmosphere 128 klx.

Who here feels that they would be better served by that?

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By “straight descriptive text” you mean the main section of the running text, right? Not the tabbed data?

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Right. The stuff with tabs I would not call “text.” I mean the stuff after the tabbed data and before the Attractions subhead.

91

Ah, no. I actually feel more that I would be better served by having more things in units where Earth is 1.00. If actual metric units are wanted, they can be explained at the front of the book, in a master key, and anyone who has a physical science orientation can punch buttons on their calculator to determine that 1.19 g x 9.8 m s^(-2) g^(-1) = 11.7 m s^(-2).

It seems to me that day length is very easily stated in Earth days; “its day is 37.2 Earth days” is easily understood. Scale height relative to Earth’s would have the merit of telling readers that planet P’s atmosphere reaches low pressures very quickly, and planet Q’s very slowly, whereas hardly anyone will remember the scale height of Earth’s atmosphere or have an intuitive sense of what “scale height 3.2 km” is telling them. I’m not sure how many of the others this would work for, though your suggestion for average temperature has merit; perhaps escape speed would work, as a way of suggesting whether it’s easier or harder to get into orbit. Population and population density certainly should not be given relative to Earth, as they are not even approximately constant, having changed by a nonnegligible in my and your lifetimes.

In warning against the balrog of big minds I don’t mean to suggest that all inconsistencies are careless.

92

Hmm. That makes some of the units hard to express succinctly, and if they are unstated in the entries the material becomes less accessible, even with explanations in the key.

Besides, I feel some aesthetic disquiet at relying heavily on Earth as a standard in a setting in which Earth is not familiar to the characters. This is not a Watsonian document, but that is too obvious it draws attention to the artifice.

93

My resolve failed. There is a new draft entry on Arcolais at the old URL. I have simplified the layout of the tabbed data and revised it for consistent use of standard units. And I re-wrote the text (1) to emphasise that the licence for artists allows some easement of the society’s prudery, (2) to make it clear that Arcolais does not have able administrators or an efficient economy, and (3) to reduce the possibility of confusion between the Academy of Art and the government.

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94

I’m with whswhs on this. Assuming you’ll be giving the conversions anyway, “relative to Earth” lets the reader get an immediate feel for what’s going on, and then they can do the conversion if the exact number matters. But I do think that pushing everything to Earth-comparison units would be too much.

Erratum: “the live” → “they live”

95

I don’t dispute that. “Just because I say I like sea bathing, I don’t mean I want to be pickled in brine.” I’m trying to look for things where “how does this compare to Earth?” will have an answer that helps the Doylist readers of the document (the actual people in our actual universe who are likely to game with it) get a feel for how their characters experience the particular planet.

Though in Watsonian terms: If there were one planet whose people made up the great majority of potential player characters, or was the primary source for Imperial recruits and thus likely to be used as a reference in Imperial documents, it would make sense for those documents to use units relative to that planet—for example, to say “surface gravity is 1.1 times the surface gravity of Tau.” But I don’t think there can be such a planet. On the other hand, Earth could have been used as a reference planet by the first generation of settled planets, and could be kept on as such out of tradition, and also as a symbolic commemoration of “Earth That Was.” Indeed it seems that measuring years in Earth years fits such a pattern. So using Earth as a standard may not be impossible to justify in Watsonian terms.

But I do think that Watsonian terms are secondary in this case.

96

I don’t like being pickled in brine either, and if consistency is not in fact the goal I’ll go back to using the units that I find convenient, with conversion to Earth-equivalents where I think they are helpful. But I’ll add illuminance in kilolux as a corroborative detail. That leaves @RogerBW and @whswhs dissatisfied on the points of day length, atmospheric scale height, tidal range, obliquity, escape speed, and the altitude and period of low orbit not being given in terms of Earth’s values.

I’m sorry to ask your advice and then not take it, but I just dislike funky ad-hoc units and tortured unit conversions.

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For day length I feel that “divide by 24 hours” is not a high bar. For the other things I at least would be plugging them into some other calculation anyway, so probably SI is what I want.

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At last he rose and shook his mantle blue
Tomorrow to fresh fields and pastures new.

99

I might change my mind later about tidal range. Obliquity? I can see an argument for dividing it by 23.5° for a “more seasonal or less seasonal than Earth” index, but I think the direct use as a latitude trumps that.

But anyway, I have to make a decision about this and move on.

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100

What you have in the way of stats I can live with. I still would rather see scale height relative to Earth’s, but I’m not sure how much role scale height will play in an actual campaign; it seems likely to be rare that protagonists will ever climb to so great an altitude, on any planet that has humanly endurable gravity. Nor is scale height useful to the GM by itself; ascending to scale height x1.5 means something different if the surface pressure is 180 kPa and if it is 50 kPa. (On the other hand, when I ran a minicampaign using one of the settings in GURPS Mars, I realized if atmospheric pressure at ground level on northern Mars was breathable, southern Mars was so much higher as to be humanly lethal without breathing apparatus.)

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