The Nature of Self in Science Fiction Roleplaying

This is going to be an incredibly nerdy discussion of some deep philosophical issues... as they relate to gaming. Specifically, what exactly defines a unique individual as opposed to a copy of an individual, when examining consciousness and soul.

The reason I'm thinking of this is because of a reaction one of my friends had when I described the problem I had with trans-humanism as presented in the Eclipse Phase RPG. He pointed out that the idea of moving a consciousness from one body to another in Eclipse Phase was essentially the same as reincarnation in a fantasy world, and that I had no problems with that concept.

At the time, I wasn't fully able to explain why I felt there was a difference (especially since I'd never realized the contradiction before), but I think I can now. In the typical fantasy world the existence of a soul is not a matter of theological debate, it's provable fact. Not only do people have souls, but they form the core of individuality, and when you take a soul from one body and put it into another, the "self" is obviously attached to the soul and not the body. Characters in such a world can prove this by actually communicating with, or even visiting, the afterlife.

Leaving aside my personal religious beliefs, the idea of a personal soul that forms the core of "self" is NOT a given in a science fiction setting, and even if there is a soul, there's no way of showing that it remains attached to a copied consciousness. Basically, I have the same misgivings expressed by Dr. McCoy in Star Trek when it comes to transporters. If it basically destroys the body in one location and then creates a duplicate in the other, is it really the same person? Didn't the original person actually die while a completely new, yet identical, person came into existence on the other end?

This seems especially problematical when it's possible to make more than one copy of a person. If there's a soul in that case, what happens to it? Does it multiply? Is it divided? Does it only go with one copy while any others remain "souless" (there's an idea for a sci-fi/horror story, if it hasn't already been done)?

This all assumes there's a soul. If there is no soul then it presents a different set of problems. If atheists are right, and our consciousness simply comes to an end when we die, then wouldn't a consciousness "wiped" from a body after being copied into another body simply cease to be? Isn't the copy simply a new consciousness that thinks it had those prior experiences? Has not the original "self" perished?

These are the kinds of issues that bother me about transferring consciousness when applied to science fiction instead of fantasy. I haven't even gone into some of the other tricky areas, like "backup" consciousnesses that are used when the original is lost completely (a common concept in Eclipse Phase).

I thought there might be a way around this using the concept that the body completely replaces the cells within it several times over the average person's lifetime, only that's not entirely true. A big exception is neurons, which you get when you're born, and never get replaced. If our consciousness essentially resides in those neurons, then that actually supports my misgivings rather than providing a way out from them.

So, why does this cause me problems when gaming? After all, I'm not really trying to transfer my own consciousness. The problem is that I nearly always identify somehow with the characters I play. Even if I'm playing a bad guy, I can usually link some darker part of my self to the character and magnify it in order to get that identification. I can play a character that I have no identification with, but it isn't as fun. I can't identify with characters from Eclipse Phase because one of the core concepts of the game is something that I could never accept personally. Voluntarily transferring bodies without physically transferring the brain would be equivalent to suicide in my mind.

I'm curious to know if anyone else thinks along these lines, or if I'm alone in my being uncomfortable with this concept. I'm also curious to know if anyone thinks I've missed some obvious logical alternative to the conclusions I've come to regarding all of this.

Why Eurogamers Need to Take Another Look at Wargames

A while back I learned that my old FLGS has essentially stopped selling wargames. I found this surprising since the store's weekly board gaming event has grown quite a bit in attendance since I left the area, so I assumed that there would have been more interest in wargames, rather than less.

It turns out that it was only myself and a couple of other guys who bought most of the wargames, and all of us stopped doing so for various reasons. The people attending the store's weekly board game night are more interested in eurogames, and have little or no interest in wargames. The shame is that wargame designers have been taking a lot of lessons from eurogame designers, and there are a lot of designs coming out from wargame companies that might appeal more to the eurogamer.

There are still plenty of traditional two player hex and counter wargames coming out, but there are a lot of other types of wargames being produced as well. In fact, the number one game on BoardGameGeek.com as I write this is Twilight Struggle, a wargame from GMT Games! Also in the top 25 is another GMT Game: Dominant Species.

Memoir '44 and the other games in the Commands & Colors line are also wargames, although the most well known in the series have not been published by wargame companies. Most eurogamers seem to think that these games are the exception to the rule, and in the past they would have been correct, but that's increasingly no longer the case.

Twilight Struggle is arguably the best example of a type of wargame known as "card driven". Card driven wargames rely on the play of cards to drive the game, either in addition to or in place of the more traditional roll of the dice. This allows for both more control on the part of the player and more variation in the types of things that can occur in the game. It's been a very successful mechanic and there are several good games out there that use it, many of which don't even get a second glance from most eurogamers.

Part of the problem is that they are all two player games, and many eurogamers play in groups rather than pairs. Wargame designers have only recently started putting out more games that cater to this, but there have been a few such designs in the past as well. One older design that has recently found a new home at Dan Versen Games is the Down In Flames card game. This game features WWII aerial combat and can accommodate up to six players out of the box. The publisher also sells additional decks of cards to allow for even bigger games without having to buy the whole game again. I've found that most gamers willing to give this one a try end up liking it.

More recent designs have come from Clash of Arms games. Their "War Is Hell" series of card games allow for two to four players to refight famous battles in a reasonable time frame. I haven't actually played any of them yet, but have a copy of their Fires of Midway game that uses the system, and am looking forward to giving it a try.

Another reason that many eurogamers don't give wargames a try is the length of time it takes to play the game. Eurogamers generally want a game that at most takes a couple of hours to play. Traditionally, many wargames take several hours, usually lasting over multiple sessions to complete, but most of the games I've mentioned in this post come in at 90 minutes or less. The biggest exception is Twilight Struggle which comes in at three hours, which I've found to be the outside limit for the average game night.

One area where wargames haven't caught up to eurogames yet is quality of production. Dollar for dollar, your average eurogame is going to have higher production value than your average wargame. Most wargames still have cardstock or even paper boards, and cardboard chits that you have to punch out of a sheet, leaving little dangly bits on the corners. The original printings of Twilight Struggle were like this, and it was only the most recent printing that had a mounted board and more attractive counters. Despite this, most wargames cost as much or more than their eurogame counterparts. This is largely due to economies of scale where eurogames sell many more copies than do wargames.

Even this is starting to change though, especially for those games that wargame companies think can do well with eurogamers. I already mentioned Twilight Struggle being reprinted with higher quality components, and there are other games receiving similar treatment.

All of this means that if you are interested in the more complex eurogames, you may want to take another look at some of the games being published by wargame companies.

Black Powder

This is one of those posts I started a while ago, last June to be precise. I read the rules to Black Powder around the same time that the rules for Warhammer Fantasy 8th Edition came out, which is why I make a few comparisons between the two. I like Black Powder a lot, although it's unlikely I'll ever get to play. I'll get into why that's the case later on.

Black Powder is a game covering the black powder era of warfare during the 18th and 19th Centuries. This covers many famous conflicts including the American Revolutionary War, the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War, the Crimean War, the Zulu War, and many others.

The game is written by Rick Priestly and Jervis Johnson, best known for their association with Games Workshop. With this in mind I expected to encounter a typical GW style game, and instead found myself pleasantly surprised to find something quite different. To start with, there's no "buckets o' dice" mechanic here. Most combats look like they won't involve any more than half a dozen dice per side to resolve.

There's also none of the typical "tabletop carnage" involved in GW games, where players find themselves removing models from the table nearly as fast as they put them on there in the first place. Casualties are kept track of by placing tokens next to a unit, not removing models from it. Models don't come off the table until a unit is completely routed, at which point the entire unit is removed. I like this because after taking the time to assemble and paint an army, you want those models to actually stay on the table for a while.

Unfortunately, there are several factors that will keep me from ever playing this game. The biggest one is simply that I don't know anyone else around here who would be enthusiastic enough about playing to keep me enthusiastic enough to build an army. I'm past the point of being able to be the driving force behind generating interest in a new miniatures game. I just don't have the free time to evangelize for a new game.

Second, I don't have an army for the period. I'd love to put together a Civil War force using some of the Perry Miniatures plastics, but without someone to play against I don't really need to start another miniatures project that I would never finish.

Third, I don't have a big enough table. The game calls for tables ranging from 9' x 5' to 12' x 6', which are quite a bit larger than the standard 6' x 4' tables that are available around here. I have the room to put a bigger table in the garage, but would have to assemble it first.

So, why do I want to play this game instead of a more popular "big army" game like Warhammer Fantasy? There's a few reasons. First is the "herohammer" factor. In Fantasy it often all comes down to the character models, and this doesn't appear to be any less true in 8th edition. If I'm playing an army game, I want the army to matter. If I want individuals to be the deciding factor then I'll play a skirmish game.

Second, there's command and control. The one place that individuals should matter, is the one that Fantasy doesn't even model: command and control. With a few special exceptions based on the army you're playing, units in Fantasy do exactly what you want them to. That rarely happened in history, and I've found it's generally more entertaining to play a game where things don't always go according to plan.

I do realize that Warhammer Fantasy has a basic morale system, but as it exists in that game, I don't really count that as command and control. Units still do exactly what you want them to up to the point that they run away after taking too much damage and failing a morale check.

Third, the army construction. I want to play a game where you win on the tabletop, not in a database. I'm really starting to dislike army construction as a part of the game. I'm starting to prefer scenario based games where the forces are either based on history, or simply designated by the scenario designer.

These issues are absent in Black Powder. There are no "heroes" modeled in Black Powder. There is a command and control system that can lead to units not following your orders, and instead doing something else entirely. There are some very basic point values in an appendix for judging balance, but Black Powder is not an army construction game. It's a game intended to be played using individual scenarios either designed by a neutral umpire, or mutually created by the opposing players.

Overall, it's designed to be fun. Invite some friends over, have a few beers, and play out a scenario not to win at all costs, but just to see what happens.

Not that I don't like a competitive game, but it seems like all there is to the Warhammer games most of the time is the competition. Black Powder seems to bring more than that to the table.

While it's unlikely that I'll ever play Black Powder, the designers recently released Hail Caesar, an adaptation of the Black Powder rules to the ancients period. Given that I already have a partly assembled Roman army, it's much more likely that I'll eventually be able to get a game in using Hail Caesar, although it's still a longshot.

I don't have a copy of Hail Caesar yet, but after I get a chance to read it I'll try to post my thoughts on it, and I'll try to do it less than a year after I read it.

Where are my Posts?

My posts have been far less frequent this year than last year, but if anything I've actually been commenting on more things, it just hasn't been here. If you're crazy enough to care about what I have to say you should also check out my posts on goodreads.com and my comments on games on boardgamegeek.com. My comments there are a lot shorter than my posts here, but I try to make at least some comment on every book I read and every game I play.

I also have a number of drafts saved that I haven't posted for one reason or another. Some are simply rants that I had to write, but thought twice about posting. Others have a timeliness factor that has long since passed. Still, there are several that I hope to post once I get around to either finishing them or doing an edit.

One of the reasons that some of these posts are languishing in the draft folder is that I'm more self-conscious about what I post since linking this blog to my Facebook account. Before, only those that chose to subscribe to my blog were hit with updates, but now everyone on my facebook list, a minority of which are gamers, get spammed with my updates. I thought about un-linking the blog, but response I got to that idea indicates that some of my Facebook friends follow the blog through Facebook now, so I'm going to hold off on doing that.

Instead, I'm going to try to get over my self-consciousness and just post to the blog. If you're one of my Facebook friends and you've never found anything posted here interesting, then you may just want to ignore my NetworkedBlogs updates. It should be simple enough to do.

Force on Force

This is an interesting set of skirmish level rules for modern warfare. I'm not sure how accurate my information is on the history of this game, but from what I've seen it appears to have its origins as Ambush Alley. Ambush Alley is apparently a game designed to model the kind of modern asymmetrical conflicts typified by recent US conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, where conventional forces find themselves fighting against irregular insurgents. Force on Force takes those rules and expands them to allow for more conventional conflicts between two regular forces, or conflicts with a mix of regular and irregular forces on either or both sides. The new Force on Force book from Osprey appears to be the second edition of this game, with the first published by Ambush Alley games.

The new book is the same kind of high quality production that Osprey became known for with Field of Glory, at least in terms of materials. Sturdy hardcover binding, full color printing, and lavish illustrations. Although I haven't playtested them, the rules seem just as solid as the physical book. Keep in mind that the game is purely scenario driven, and not point based. The rules are meant to reflect the realities of combat in a playable manner, not provide balanced matchups for tournament play. They appear to have accomplished that goal.

Unfortunately, the book is marred by poor editing. Numerous minor typos can be found scattered throughout the book. There's also a handful of more serious errors that will require errata. Most notably two missing charts which have already been posted on Ambush Alley's site in an errata document. Fortunately, both charts are related to special rules unlikely to come up in the average game.

There are three editors listed, but two of them appear to be one of the author and his wife. I hope that in the future Osprey will consider bringing in a professional game editor to do at least one pass though their core rules, if not every supplement they publish. Such an editor would have caught most of the problems with this book before it went to press.

Still, I'm happy with my purchase. A solid set of rules with all the data you need to play scenarios set in the "modern" era, basically from the first Gulf War forward. Supplements should push this back to WWII. There's already a Vietnam supplement planned for later in the year.

It uses a unique initiative system where one side controls the initiative throughout a turn, while the other side can only react to the actions of the first player. Whether or not the non-initiative side can gain the initiative in the next turn depends on the scenario being played, and the results of the current turn. This appears to result in a game that is much more interactive than the typical igo/ugo, or even that found in alternating unit activations.

The overall design is focused on affects rather than causes. Much of the hardware is abstracted. There are no lists of small arms. What counts is the skill and morale of the soldiers fighting, not their gear. If there is a true disparity in gear (such as a unit with bolt action rifles facing one with assault rifles) that will be reflected in die modifiers, either to the number of dice rolled, or the type of dice rolled.

Speaking of dice, the game does not limit itself to the d6. It uses d6s, d8s, d10s and d12s; and recommends you have at least ten of each. The "nearly universal" mechanic for using these dice is 4+ for success, with the type and number of dice being used the main differentiator in quality, rather than a host of + or - modifiers (although they occasionally creep in).

The core rules are for infantry, but the game also covers vehicles, airmobile operations, air support, artillery, and a host of special situations. These latter include such things as cavalry, IEDs, civilians on the battlefield, and much more.

Admittedly, I'm not sure I'm fully comfortable playing games set in most of this time period. A lot of people have issues with wargames that cover recent conflicts, and my own comfort zone begins roughly a decade in the past. For example, I'm more or less OK with playing out scenarios set in the first Gulf War, but scenarios set during the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (covered by the first scenario book for the game) are still a little iffy for me, while the current conflict in Afghanistan is pretty much right out (covered by the second scenario book out for the game).

As a result, I probably won't get a chance to give this rules set any actual play until they start covering some of the less recent conflicts.