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« Show all entries for FEBRUARY 2004
Wednesday, 11 February 2004 01:23:39
An English teacher friend of mine recently asked me to take htree days and teach her High-school Creative Writing class about Sci-fi. Like an idiot I accepted.:crap: Now Im stuck doing this next week and I really dont have any idea how to teach sci-fi. Naturally Im going to take the first two days to show episodes of Firefly that demonstrate what sci-fi ussualy is represented as and what it can be (Ariel & Shindig respectively). The third day however is going to be something of a problem. I know what I want to do but have to spend around sixty minutes doing it so unless they ask a lot of questions Im going to run way short. As such I thought Id ask here and see if anyone had any experience with this kind of thing and could offer any suggestions or activities. Thanks in advance. -Dracos
Wednesday, 11 February 2004 03:26:30
I was going to keep plugging away at the backstory but I think we have enough base in technology and history to work on game mechanics for a bit. I think you need a base of tech and story to do the mechanics because I agree with Marc W. Miller (the guy who designed Traveller) that game mechanics are based on basic large scale assumptions. MWM earned an MA in Sociology before he designed Traveller, and I think part of the reason the game is so good is that he understood that Character Generation in an RPG is a model of how society affects people’s lives. You have to have a picture of how the society works before you can make rules about what kind of people it produces. Characters in Traveller are not 18 year olds setting out to conquer the Universe. They are adults, with years of experience behind them, trying to survive in the Universe (sounds a lot like the crew of Serenity). So, to generate characters I think the basic Classic Traveller with one tweek from Mega-Traveller is pretty much on target for the Firefly ‘verse. This system breaks a characters life down into 4 year blocks of ‘prior service’ to give them the skills they need to survive. This site has a good basic outline of how it works with the tables you need to generate the original 6 character backgrounds: