http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2007/07/back_to_2320ad.html
By Anders Sandberg, who is fairly well known in transhumanist circles
By Anders Sandberg, who is fairly well known in transhumanist circles
Transhumanist review of 2320AD
- Thread starter Colin
- Start date
Well, at that point I had not tried the setting, just read it. And the geometry nerd in me took over halfway through the review 
Now, after having run some games I think I can say more. Most of it very positive:
I like the consistency of the setting, both with the past 2300AD universe and internally as the "current" universe. That helps interpolate things needed in the game. At the same time being consistent locks one in, which makes it necessary to have an overview of previous material. 2320AD is a great start by including much of the Colonial Atlas - at first I thought that was unnecessary, but now I realize that it is necessary for giving the right flavor to the setting.
Despite being a transhumanist (whatever that actually means) I actually like the macrotech setting a lot. Most "transhumanist sf" (again, whatever that means) tend towards the microscale - everything is digital, biotech and nano, which enables lots of cool possibilities but also make the PCs unable to handle the building blocks of technoreality. Sure, a PC could be a nanotech engineer, but just like deckers in cyberpunk this can be very limiting. How fun is a game session where most of the time is spent by one character fiddling with CAD designs for an improved flash-freeze disassembler to catch how the enemy nanodevice is inserting those rubidium atoms into the good guy's assembler?
A setting where most devices are of a macro kind puts more emphasis on the shared human level of interaction and struggle. And it enables all sorts of fun problems with dirty machines or devices in need for recharging - problems that will no doubt have counterparts in nanobiotech but would be awfully hard to describe in the game ("Your nanocytes seem to have downloaded a bad patch, and they are all manufacturing mannitol").
I'm allergic to level-based game systems, so I had to drop the game system to run the setting. I don't think this is a major problem since it is the setting that is great. It just causes me irritation that I have to figure out ways of recalculating stuff on the fly when it suddenly matters how much armour a roton rocket has.
Classic 2300AD was a world with very little ideology, religion or culture of any kind. I always had a feeling people were all engineers in coveralls or paramilitaries on a mission: there was not much civilian society. 2320AD tries to fix this (and I love the description of the stressful leisure society of the Core) but there is still lots to be done. For example, how does frontier mentality and culture really work? We get some interesting hints in the old Aurore and Ranger books, but more is clearly needed.
In the end, I think 2320AD's greatest success has been to turn stable old 2300AD - change occurred over decades - into something more vital where dramatic events happen every year. As a transhumanist GM I do not require a setting to have an inevitable rush towards singularity to be interesting (it is noteworthy that Gurps Transhuman Space is also so far singularity-free), but I want a setting where people and institutions can change the rules.
Now, after having run some games I think I can say more. Most of it very positive:
I like the consistency of the setting, both with the past 2300AD universe and internally as the "current" universe. That helps interpolate things needed in the game. At the same time being consistent locks one in, which makes it necessary to have an overview of previous material. 2320AD is a great start by including much of the Colonial Atlas - at first I thought that was unnecessary, but now I realize that it is necessary for giving the right flavor to the setting.
Despite being a transhumanist (whatever that actually means) I actually like the macrotech setting a lot. Most "transhumanist sf" (again, whatever that means) tend towards the microscale - everything is digital, biotech and nano, which enables lots of cool possibilities but also make the PCs unable to handle the building blocks of technoreality. Sure, a PC could be a nanotech engineer, but just like deckers in cyberpunk this can be very limiting. How fun is a game session where most of the time is spent by one character fiddling with CAD designs for an improved flash-freeze disassembler to catch how the enemy nanodevice is inserting those rubidium atoms into the good guy's assembler?
A setting where most devices are of a macro kind puts more emphasis on the shared human level of interaction and struggle. And it enables all sorts of fun problems with dirty machines or devices in need for recharging - problems that will no doubt have counterparts in nanobiotech but would be awfully hard to describe in the game ("Your nanocytes seem to have downloaded a bad patch, and they are all manufacturing mannitol").
I'm allergic to level-based game systems, so I had to drop the game system to run the setting. I don't think this is a major problem since it is the setting that is great. It just causes me irritation that I have to figure out ways of recalculating stuff on the fly when it suddenly matters how much armour a roton rocket has.
Classic 2300AD was a world with very little ideology, religion or culture of any kind. I always had a feeling people were all engineers in coveralls or paramilitaries on a mission: there was not much civilian society. 2320AD tries to fix this (and I love the description of the stressful leisure society of the Core) but there is still lots to be done. For example, how does frontier mentality and culture really work? We get some interesting hints in the old Aurore and Ranger books, but more is clearly needed.
In the end, I think 2320AD's greatest success has been to turn stable old 2300AD - change occurred over decades - into something more vital where dramatic events happen every year. As a transhumanist GM I do not require a setting to have an inevitable rush towards singularity to be interesting (it is noteworthy that Gurps Transhuman Space is also so far singularity-free), but I want a setting where people and institutions can change the rules.
