Playing the Game: Crossing over - part duex

This was actually the last topic I posted on here in the blog - coming quite a few months back. Not counting the unfinished (by request) post that comes in between, of course. I normally wouldn't touch on this subject again, mostly because it's what I did last. But some conversations and incidents in-world and in-story have inspired me to touch on it again and try to clarify a few concepts.

If you're one of the regular readers of this blog, I'm probably preaching to the choir here. You understand the limitations of gaming in Secondlife where we have to take some liberties in how we see the virtual worlds around us and how we interact with people. The folks this, and the last post, is directed at may never see it. Which is kind of unfortunate, since this entire series is intended to help people have fun with us in the shared stories in Secondlife.

I talked about Set Pieces and Crossing Over (without the douchy John Edwards) before, obviously, but one of the things I've realized in hindsight is that crossover, in our context, is kind of a misnomer. A crossover in the Comic or TV series sense, is when characters as themselves show up in a different series. TV shows, for example, use it to launch spinoffs all the time. They also use it when two series can reasonably exist in the same "universe" and share a common continuity.

Crossovers in the Comics are actually closer to what we're talking about than, say, characters from two cop shows on the same network showing up in each other's stories. Superman battles the Incredible Hulk is a real crossover in this respect. They're not from the same campaign. Two wildly different, and mutually exclusives, back stories worked into a comic just to tell a specific story.

I should probably have used a different term in the previous post. Maybe integration would have been better. In the Comic, or Video Game, sense, a Crossover here would really be more like an episode of Star Trek where Enterprise drops through a time-space vortex and has to fight off an Imperial Star Destroyer while trying to find their way back to the Swirly Thing.

For a single story, it works. It really is a cross over between two different campaigns. It's an anomaly for both campaigns, but they've got some kind of explanation that lets it fit into both and become part of the canon.

Ultimately, though, that wasn't what I was referring to in the previous post. What I'd called a crossover, was kind of, I don't know, Crossover Lite, maybe. Or maybe Set Piece Lite. Hard to pin down. You're playing your character, in your campaign, and they're playing their character, in their campaign, and you're just sort of glossing over enough "conflicting details" so it can happen without breaking either story. I don't really have a good term to describe it. But, with a little flexibility on both sides, it can work. Bias goes to the "Locals" so it'd be up to the visitors to adapt, but it's really not that hard. If something seriously conflicts with "your" reality, nod and smile and edit it out of your character's chronicle.

Now, what brought about this revisit, other than not being happy with my own definition of Crossover in the context I was using it, were recent situations where individuals, or groups, were trying to integrate parts of their own character's back stories into our campaign. It's actually a pretty common occurrence. You're wanting to play your character from, say, your pencil and paper Star Wars game in, say, Babylon 5. Obviously, you can't come straight across, but you're a freighter captain, so it's easy to just tweak the details a bit, and viola, you fit in just fine. Your origin may be from somewhere else, but you've tweaked your background so you're appropriate to the campaign.

As mentioned before, some campaigns are much more suitable to this than others. "Big Galaxy" campaigns have a lot more room in them to place "obscure minor races" than do restricted campaigns like Firefly.

So, what is the point of this rehash?

The simple fact is that if you want to integrate into a campaign, rather than just the kind of crossover I was originally referring to, you'll need to adapt. The larger the scale of what you're trying to adapt, the more work it will take. You've been playing the captain of a tramp freighter in Trek, or SW, or Bab 5, and want to play the same ship and crew in Firefly? Simple. Re-image any non-human crew you might have into Human form, drop the FTL drive, and pick a local port of call. Something small scale like that is very easy to do. Individual characters are a piece of cake. But in any case, you're having to make some changes to your back story in order to fit into the existing campaign.

Personal trivia: The original "Seana" character wasn't Human. I adapted her to the Firefly campaign by tweaking around a lot of details in order to fit. I still play an adapted, from a homegrown pencil and paper campaign, non-Human, version of the original, on Bab 5.

There are some concepts that simply won't work. Some things can't be integrated into a given campaign. While you might be able to work the Klingon Ambassador into Babylon 5 by placing Qo'noS somewhere out beyond the edge of known space, you can't do the same in a Firefly campaign. There are just some things that will break the host campaign and the GM's not going to allow it.

There's a couple of things to look at when you're trying to integrate.

• How big is is what you want to integrate, compared to the campaign? It's easy to adapt an individual, single ship, or even small mercenary fire team, without having to make a lot of arduous changes. Businesses are much the same, at least until you're reaching Haliburton or General Motors scale. Your company builds spaceships? Shiny. Unless you're declaring yourself the biggest and best in the galaxy (without having talked to the GM's first), it should be no big deal.
• How much of an impact, in terms of campaign continuity, will it have on the existing campaign? If the answer is "None" than there shouldn't be a problem. If the answer is "it will be a massive change to the host campaign" then chances are you're not going to be able to do it. Adding a small transport company may well alter the RP, but it won't change the overall concept of the campaign. Adding a government to rival the United Alliance of Planets, is a pretty major paradigm shift.
• Finally, how much are you willing to adapt your 'introduction' to fit the existing story? It's your creation, right? Chances are, the GM's understand how much work you've put into your concept and back story. They empathize. But you're trying to integrate into something that already exists - often someone's interpretation of some existing campaign/story/universe and they probably put as much work into creating their campaign and back stories and environment as you did. You're the one that will need to do most of the adaptation. If it's not worth it, then accept that and move on.

In a similar vein, there's the concept of the Incarnation. You have a character that you really like and want to play them everywhere you can. Same name, same AV, same basic character. Problem is, you want to play in Star Wars and Babylon 5 and Firefly and Doctor Who. By forking, or incarnating, the character, you can. While the name and AV are the same, the concept is ever so slightly changed in each separate version so you you can play within the confines of whatever story you're in. In some cases, the differences are so minor between the incarnations that you're doing more Crossover Lite than a fork.

You can do the same thing with back stories. If the homegrown mega-corporation you introduced in the Star Trek story doesn't fit in Firefly, just tweak it a bit. Say, roll back its history so it's a new up-and-comer, rather than the mature Big Dog.

Ultimately, it comes down to this: Most admins are willing to cut people some slack, but unless you're running the show you've got to play by the ground rules the local admins and GM's have set. If you want to play something from "outside" their campaign, it's up to you to not step on their stories. If you want to become part of their stories, be willing to adapt. If you want to do your own thing, understand if you're asked to put it off camera.

Playing the Game: Crossing Over

Yes, crossing over. But not with that douchey John Edwards guy. No, we're talking about stories and characters that flow between campaigns and environments. This is closely related to the post I did back in May about Set Pieces.

One of the recurring issues in using Secondlife for gaming, versus doing it in a pencil and paper "desktop" setting, is that you only have limited control of the environment. Sure, within your own Sim you're essentially god. You can set the rules, build the world, define the backstory, control the main plot arcs, and generally do everything a Game Master does in a conventional RPG. There is nothing wrong with this. It's your sim. You're paying the bills.

If it was a live game, your players would expect nothing less. In a second life region, it's your region. Your visitors need to accept that.

Now, I'm not exactly saying "just go ahead and be as strict as you want," because, if you do, chances are you won't get a lot of visitors. At least not ones that stay very long. Unless they really, really, like your campaign. Which, of course, means you need to allow some flexibility. Find a balance between what you expect from your campaign space and what your players expect to get away with.

There are times when players/characters are going to want to play in a certain environment, but not as a Set Piece. They're going to want to participate in the story that's going on there and then. The difference between crossing over and borrowing a set piece is, often, one of perspective. When you are using a set, it becomes part of your story. When you cross over, you become part of their story.

Examples? When we evacuate the wounded from Hale's Moon to the high tech medical center on Beaumonde and we use the MedLab on the Babylon 5 sim as our set, for that time, to us, Bab 5 is Beaumonde. We're using it not as it is but simply as a set to represent something else. The same goes when the Trekies visit the Mining Colony of Earstwhile 3 and use Hale's Moon as their set. In either case, they've had a quick word with the sim's staff to be sure it's cool, and the event isn't really part of the local story. Local participants are doing so more as actors on the set than "really" being their characters.

The level of "Set" may be different, depending on what's going on and who's playing. When the locals are being themselves, and the visitors are being themselves, you've got more of a crossover.

Different campaign settings, and different story arcs, are more adaptable to allowing crossovers than others. Star Trek and Star Wars, for example, both exist in vast areas of space complete with Aliens and FTL drives. Introducing a new alien race or some distant government is usually pretty easy. As long as you're not directly contradicting established Cannon, it'll probably fit in just fine. The Babylon 5 campaign is also fairly easy to incorporate new Aliens into the mix. Though new Human organizations and governments aren't quite so easy. Bab 5 is more limited in that regard. Finally, campaigns like Firefly are much more restrictive. There's no FTL. No aliens. And everything happens in the same star system.

As a player, it's usually easier to crossover into a "more open" or "less restrictive" campaign than to shift into a more limited setting. For example, some of our players from the Firefly campaign RP on the Al Raquis and Splintered Rock sims, both of which are set, effectively, on Arakis (Dune), but are open to General SciFi. Because of the nature of the different campaign backgrounds, and the general environment, it's easy for them to do. If a local asks them where they're from, they can say "Zenobia" and when asked "where's that?" they can say "around Georgia," and no one will worry about it. In a Dune campaign, Zenobia is just another world and Georgia is just another star. It only becomes a problem if they (either the locals or visitors) get too heavily into the Big Picture. On the local scale though, not a problem.

As long as the visitors remember where they are and don't try to force their story on the locals, it can work pretty well in most settings. It's only when players try to bring in elements that just can't work that you have a problem.

Where does that leave us as players and Game Masters?

As a player, there's always the caveat of "respect the genre." If you want to become a regular somewhere, figure out how to best fit into the environment. If they're open to crossovers, great. If not so much, then adapt your own background as needed to fit in and enjoy.

As a Game Master, figure out a polite way to deal with crossovers. If they're not making waves, it's probably OK to let them slide. You may get some great RP out of it and you can retcon out any conflicts. If they are making waves, then suggest they either adapt or, perhaps, find another venue.

Anecdotaly, one of the most amusing encounters I ever had with a crossover/on-the-fly-adaptation was when some Trekkers showed up on Babylon 5. They were just visiting but were speaking in character and, when asked about their odd uniforms, quickly ad-libed something about being the crew of a freighter who's captain had an odd fashion sense. It was priceless. How they handled it in their story I never heard, but their quick ad-lib let them fit into Bab5 for the visit without so much as a ripple.

Loading the Canon: Loading the cannon.

I touched on the subject of heavy weapons in a previous entry, but it seems like a good time to touch on it again and expand it a bit. Specifically, I want to focus on vehicle weapons and how they're portrayed in the Firefly 'Verse vs how they work in the real world.

Now, what prompted this post was a brief discussion on the Firefly RP channel involving nuclear weapons and railguns, and I'm going to start with getting some frustration off my chest. Namely: "Look. If it really was as easy as 'Just use a rail gun and blow up the cruiser!' the Indies wouldn't have had their asses handed to them during the war."

Remember something. The Alliance has more, and better, tech than the Indies do, and the resources to deploy it. Seriously. Do you really think you're going to take out a cruiser with a single shot of an essentially unguided projectile?

Previously, we looked at what was actually shown in the series and BDM. In the series, that amounted to "Not very much." There were some missile shots and some auto-cannon and that's really about all we see. The only directed energy weapons we see is a modern Lassiter and the funky stun rifle things. Yes, there is the EtW antique Lassiter, but it's an antique and we never see it fire.

Through the course of the series, we see the Alliance's armed gunboats and a skiff during the flashback to the battle of Serenity Valley. We can safely assume the Cruisers we encounter are more than just carriers and are, themselves, well armed. But we never really see that. It's fairly safe speculation, but speculation nonetheless. Ship to ship combat just wasn't a major factor in the Firefly saga.

What little we see of the vehicle armaments is entirely missile and cannon, which actually makes sense. Kind of. Both weapon systems have one thing in common - they have a largely self contained delivery system. What do I mean by that? The entire store of 'energy needed to get to the target and to put the hurt on said target' is included in the mass of the ammunition.

The specifics of how the hurt is done may change depending on the round (HVAP (High Velocity Armor Penetrating) vs Shaped Charge, for example) but it's all part of a (mostly) self contained system. In the case of cannon shells, the propellant fires in the fixed weapon and spits the shell out the other end at high velocity. Thanks to Mister Newton, there's an equal amount of force imparted into the fixed part of the weapon as there is going into the shell spitting out the far end. Recoil is not, in fact, your friend in this case. The reason the shell leaves the weapon at high velocity and the ship doesn't move much is the relative difference in mass. The shell has a payload which may be anything from some kind of sophisticated explosive with a complex fusing mechanism to a simple solid metallic slug.

Cannon have the advantage of using relatively cheap, and compact, ammunition compared to missiles, and the inherent simplicity of the system. They have the disadvantage of recoil and the static mass of the fixed weapon.

Trivia: When the venerable A10 Warthog fires it's GAU8 30mm Gattling cannon, the recoil is slightly more than the thrust from one of the aircraft's two turbofan engines.

Missiles are remarkably similar, but rather than doing all the acceleration before they leave the vehicle, they take their engine with them. They have an even broader range of payloads than cannon do and don't have the rather annoying recoil. In fact, missiles potentially have much higher terminal velocities than shells do, carrying much greater kinetic energy to target. Missiles are also usually guided, so they can maneuver to hit, or otherwise inconvenience, their targets. Down side is larger, heavier, and more expensive ammunition.

As I said before, these are perfectly rational weapon choices given the levels of technology shown in the series. The BDM changed things up a bit with the addition of directed energy weapons on the Alliance spacecraft, and even a few being seen on the Reaver boats. Most notably, the directed EMP weapon they used on Serenity.

We don't really know much about the energy weapons we see - other than the classic SciFi 'visible beam' thing. Since the fight took place in the upper atmosphere of Mister Universe's private planet, we can assume the reason we see the beams is because of atmospheric ionization and not because they have crappy beam collimators.

Energy weapons have some interesting trade-offs with more conventional weaponry. The first advantage being an effective time-of-flight of Zero, followed closely by an absolute line of sight accuracy. It is much easier to put a beam of light on target than a physical object. Want an example? Take a laser pointer with you to the range next time and see how much easier it is to hit the bullseye.

Regardless. Energy weapons also have some disadvantages, many of which are blithely ignored in most Science Fiction. First, there is the matter of power. While it's entirely possible to use some kind of self contained "cartridge" to fire the energy weapons, akin to the Nuclear Pumped X-Ray Laser developed in the 20th century, it's almost never seen implemented or even implied. In nearly every case, the power for the weapons is drawn from the ship's main power supply, often routed through some sort of accumulator, then used to put hurt on the target.

Then there's waste heat. This is something else that's usually ignored, at least in general SciFi. Nothing is going to be 100% efficient. There's always conversation losses. That's why your car has a radiator: the engine only converts a fraction of the heat energy in the fuel into motion. The rest is lost as waste heat. Energy weapons have the same problem. Only part of the energy that goes into the weapon comes out the other end to form the beam, so the rest of that energy needs to be dissipated by the ship somehow. Unlike cars that can use convection to dump heat into the surrounding air, spacecraft have only two ways to get rid of excess heat: radiation and mass transfer. I'll save a discussion of that for a later LtC post, but it's an issue for directed energy weapons.

Now, how does this all tie back to Nuclear Weapons and Railguns? Good question.

"Railgun" refers to a specific form of electromagnetic projectile launcher. They're technically neither gun, nor 'cannon,' but are similar in that the launcher remains static while the projectile is sent down range at high velocity. In theory, they're relatively simple to make, but the engineering for an actual "weapons grade" system is quite complex. And, while they can achieve much higher velocities than a conventional gun, they have some of the same limitations of both conventional guns and directed energy weapons.

There's nothing specifically saying that these weapons couldn't be developed in the Firefly campaign. After all, the concept goes back to the early part of the 20th century and, by the early 21st, they were being considered as shipboard and tank weapons. But from what we see in-story in both the series and the BDM, they're never used.

Why not?

With a purely "This is fiction" perspective, it's fairly safe to say that they were never used because Joss never thought to use them. At least never in a place where we see them. It's possible the Rollers Zoe mentioned were armed with railguns, but we really don't know. We do know they used cannon. We know they used Directed Energy Weapons. We know they used Missiles. But railguns are pure speculation.

From the perspective that started this topic, namely "an easy way to take out a Cruiser" perspective, it comes back to Tactical, Engineering, and Physics issues.

The idea of a railgun being an easy way to take out a capital ship ignores a slew of issues. How exactly do you get the resources to build it? How do you power it? How do you deploy it? How do you aim it so you hit a moving target 500 kilometers off? How do you get the shot off before the Cruiser and her escorts turn your converted freighter to wreckage? How can you be sure you won't just spall off the Cruiser's existing anti-meteroid shielding?

As a Game Master, would I let my players do it? Yes. I would. If they went in with an attitude of "Just get a rail gun and shoot them down!" I'd hand them their asses just like the Alliance handed the Indies their asses at the Battle of Serenity Valley. If they actually worked out a plan and covered enough of the bases to make it a good story, it would be a different situation. They might still get their asses handed to them, but they wouldn't be blase about taking on a capital ship.

As for the nukes? This is already too long, so I'll have to get to that on another entry.

Loading the Canon: Economics 425b

This is another one of those entries that will span a bit of both Firefly Canon and gaming. Economics is something that most gamers really just don't want to deal with and, I suspect, Joss didn't want to deal with very much in the course of writing for the 'Verse. Numbers didn't make for good story, while glossing it over made it easy to write.

In fact, it seemed he liked to employ the classic Game Master trick of keeping his characters poor as a motivation to get them onto the next job. We saw a lot of that in the series. Serenity's crew was always living on the raggedy edge of being dead broke. It didn't matter how much the take was on the last job. The money never lasted long. They would take whatever job came their way, rather than running the boat either as a strictly mercantile operation or as a strictly mercenary operation. For Player Characters, that actually makes sense. It lets you tell a broader range of stories and that is what Firefly was all about.

The problem is, it gave us a very murky view of what the economy of the 'verse actually was. We know, for example, that a lot of commerce on the Rim and Border worlds was done in cash rather than through credit. The 'coin of the realm,' so to speak, being small Platinum tokens. There was also scrip, and credit, and probably several other forms of currency we didn't see come into play on-screen. What's important, is that it appears that the 'credit' was a consistent unit of currency across the worlds we see.

There was never a case where we see, or it's even implied, that they are changing from one form of currency to another. We don't have Pounds Sterling on Londinium, Marks on Ariel, Yen on Beaumonde, Dollars on Blackburne, or Sheckles on Persephone. It's all the same currency. It's implied that the costs for various items would change across worlds, but you'd be paying for it with the same units of cashey money. They were evidently on the Platinum standard.

The problem is, we don't know what the relative values are for the money we see changing hands. For example, the ultra-concentrated food Our Heroes salvage from the derelict in the pilot was worthless to Badger because of it's Alliance markings. The assumption being he couldn't fence it or sell it off himself if it had such obvious markings. That leaves Mal to sell it to Patience for a bag of coin. We have to assume that the coin was at least as much as Badger was going to pay them for going out and getting it, otherwise it makes no sense for Mal to sell it to her.

There are numerous other examples of these low margin jobs and crimes that, quite honestly, don't make a lot of sense except as a way to keep our characters poor and searching for the next job.

And people wonder why Firefly is so attractive to Gamers?

Anyway, Joss didn't give us a lot to work on when it comes to figuring out the actual values involved in the Firefly economy. Realistically, we can probably treat the economy like we treat the science: It made Joss's head hurt, so whatever worked for the story is going to be the way it is. We don't really worry about the details so much.

I'm sure someone who's an actual economist can shed more light on the subject, but the fact is Firefly Canon is vague on Firefly Economics and we're going to have to wing it. Though, to be sure, I'm going to hit a few implications later in this piece.

Unfortunately, that's really not very satisfying. Worse, as gamers, we're kind of stuck with trying trying to make this vague backstory fit in with a concrete set of numbers in our Second Life reality. A GM can toss out something vague like "It's a heafty chunk of change" without needing to specify a number, where a couple of players trying to haggle out a price are going to want some kind of actual number.

While I don't have a specific conversion of Plats to Dollars to use in game, we do have some basic real-world economics to work from which we can extrapolate into something we can work with in game.

At it's most basic, economics is easy:

1. Acquire or produce a product.
2. Sell it for more than it cost you to acquire or produce it.
3. Profit.
4. Wash, rinse, repeat.

That's it. Seriously. There's a whole lot of ways to interpret the word 'product' in this case. It may be an actual object, like guns, bombs, food, or fuel. Or it may be a service, like transporting said food, fuel, guns, or bombs. Our Heroes were in the service industry most of the time. Either providing transportation or firepower for someone else.

It's when you add layers that things get complicated. For example, between the linked stories in Shindig and Safe, we see just how complex this can be, and see just how difficult it is to get a good handle on Firefly economics.

The premise is that Badger has hooked Mal up with a local Persephone Noble who wants to get some livestock off-world where they can be sold at a greater profit and with lower taxes than they can be sold locally. Simple. But what are the implications?

Badger, as we know, is, as well as being a snarky little twerp, a ruthless profiteer. He's going to be taking a Finder's Fee from whatever Mal gets paid for the mission. We can surmise that Badger's going to want to cover the costs, be it in favor or cash, for the tickets to the Shindig. How much is that going to be? We never really know.

Now, Lord Harrow needs to get his herd of cows to Jiangyin, where they can be cunningly concealed before being subsequently sold. Why is he moving them there? Because he can turn a greater profit by selling them there, of course. That's after paying Mal for transporting them there too. So we can assume that the local taxes on Persephone are high and the profit margins are pretty thin.

We also can surmise that Mal was able to at least turn a modest profit on this mission, or at least break even, even after paying for food, fuel, maintenance, and everything else it takes to keep Serenity in the air.

Now, to come back to the real world for a moment, basic economics tells us that for it to be worthwhile to transport any product anywhere for sale, it has to cost less to produce in Location A and transport it to Location B for sale than it does to produce and sell locally at Location B. There's issues of availability of course. If A is the only source, it will be a matter of transport it or do without. But the point is the Producer needs to make their profit. The transporter needs to make their profit. The final seller needs to make their profit. At each step, someone needs their cut and at each step there's people trying to cut costs.

This is why Maersk operates massive container ships rather than a bunch of small freighters. Economy of scale.

So, before this gets too freaking long (OK, I know, it already is too freaking long), I'll bring it back to what it means to us as gamers.

One: Firefly Canon doesn't give us a lot to go on for what constitutes "a lot of money" vs "barely breaking even." The numbers are abstract at best.

Two: This campaign 'verse is about Characters, not economics. A character's motivation may be to turn a healthy profit, but we don't need specific numbers to do that.

Third: Everyone is going to have a different idea of what's valuable, what something is worth, and how much is "a lot." We can use real world prices to figure out a range, with, just to grab some numbers based on what we've done so far, say $10 = 1 Plat - Subject to a great deal of variation depending on who's story we're in and other factors.

Forth: Second Life currency (L$) is, effectively, real money. Negotiate game pay, in either direction, at your own risk.

Fifth: FFRP currency is useful for giving real numbers to in-story transactions, but may or may not be suitable for all occasions.

Sixth: There is no number six, because he is number one. (Oatie bar to whoever gets the reference)

I know what you're thinking now. "Is she done yet?"

Yes, Virginia. I am.

For now.

Loading the Canon: The United Alliance of Planets

This is another entry that I've been working on for a while. Hence the fairly broad span between the 'Posted' date and when you may actually see it here.

One of the great things about the Firefly campaign is the perspective of the Characters. We see the 'Verse through the eyes of Mal and his crew, each of whom had a different perspective on the Alliance, Unification, and what they wanted out of life. Mal and Zoe were both ex-soldiers who fought for Independence. Jayne didn't care. Simon and River were young and living in the Core and probably didn't have a lot of exposure - much like 'Nam would have been for children of the 60's, or Desert Storm to children of the 80's, or the current wars to children of the 90's. Inara was actually for Unification.

Different characters, different perspectives. For the audience, it was mostly Mal's perspective. He didn't really seem to consider the Alliance as Evil. He just wanted to be left alone to go his own way. We could easily imagine that if the show was about characters on the IAV Magellan we'd have a very different view of the United Alliance of Planets.

In-Series and BDM Canon is fairly vague about what the Alliance is really about. We know they're referred to as Federals, thus implying some kind of Federal government. We also know they're main governing body is a Parliament, suggesting some sort of democracy. Given that the Alliance was founded on the shoulders of "Earth's two last Superpowers: China and the United States" it's hard to imagine just what sort of unified government is running the show. The United States was (well, at least is now) a Two Party state with elected leaders, while China is (was) a One Party Communist state with a heavy Capitalistic influence. Given my early 21st century perspective on these things, the only sort of state I can see coming out of that is, well, kinda messed up.

Where'd the Parliament come from? Who knows. Parliamentary democracies are popular in Europe and some Asian states, but don't really tie back to the founding super powers. Given the context, like other things in the 'Verse campaign, we just take it as something that is, consider it Canon, and move on.

See how I glossed over that?

The Series doesn't really give us much more than the existence of the Alliance. There's no specifics other than the implication that regional commanders have a fair amount of autonomy and various officials are somewhat limited in their scope of operations. The BDM gives us only a little more to go on, introducing 'The Parliament" as something who's power could be broken. I always took that to mean the sitting government, rather than the body itself. Like the Tory's or Labor or the Rhino Party. Whoever's in charge will face the wrath of the voters and have to deal with the fallout.

Of course, it also implied that 'this' government was the same one who was in power when the Pax was originally used. Otherwise, they'd just pass the blame off on their predecessors like the politicians they are.

One thing that the Federal system implies is that the local worlds could have a lot of freedom in just how they handle their own local governance. We see a glimpse of that in the episode "Shindig" where we see that Persephone has an actual Noble class. In other instances, such as "Our Mrs Reynolds" we see that the local elders have a great deal of control, and in the pilot, we have Patience as the de-facto leader of the entire colony. That, incidentally, is where I based the concept of the elected leader of a small colony's main township being the de-facto leader of the entire world.

We see this autonomy in a number of places, but there's also a lot of places where it's kind of confused.

The main 'presence' we see of the Alliance is through their troops and Marshals. In several scenes we see anything from a two man patrol to a platoon strength unit. Sometimes it's soldiers in the classic "Purple Belly" infantry armor. Other times it's the bland gray uniforms. While we never see a lot of them at once, we see them in a lot of different places, which implies a broad presence, if not a major one.

Though, in contrast, and often in the same episodes, we see examples of local law enforcement officers, which again implies some autonomy. Or, at least, the Federals aren't the only game in town. Though, in the BDM, we have the Alliance paying local security companies to handle security duties on some remote colonies. Why don't they have a local Sheriff? Who knows. I put it down to Drama and Joss needing a hook to get Our Heros involved and a vault to hide from the Reavers in.

So, where does that leave us as players?

Good question.

Near as I can tell, "The Alliance" wasn't detailed out enough during the course of the show and movie to give a definitive answer. We do know there were implications of Self Rule for the colonies, with the Alliance sending in some Federal presence to 'show the colors,' so to speak. That leaves us, as Game Masters, a lot of flexibility to run our local sims as we see fit. It also gives us, as players, the flexibility to have our personal experience with the Alliance be what we need it to be. If Mal and Inara could have very different views of the Alliance, it's perfectly acceptable for us to as well.

What is canon here? Hard to be sure, but I would go with: "The Alliance is a Federal system with a varying level of influence depending on where you are. All of the colonies in the Verse are, at least on some level, encompassed by the Federal system, and the Federal presence on any given world could be quite varied: from total control, to the occasional patrol on the ground by Uniforms from the local Cruiser."

Too vague? Maybe. But it's the best we can do given the source material.

Playing the Game: My character is my own

I was actually debating whether to put this entry under the "Loading the Canon" series or under the "Playing the Game" heading. There's elements of both here, but, in the end, I decided it's more about Gaming than specifically Firefly cannon. In fact, what I'm going to touch on here could apply to any campaign setting, not just Firefly.

Over at Chrysalis, my friend Imrhien's Character blog, she did a recent OOC post about players dictating terms to other players. It's well worth a read. The basic gist of it comes down to the only people who can tell you what you can and can't play are the Game Masters / Admins of the sim you're playing in.

In other entries I've talked about Cooperative Story Telling. In an environment like Secondlife, it's all about cooperative story telling. The Firefly sims, more than some of the other genre I've looked at, allow and expect a lot of ebb and flow of characters playing in multiple places. Even when a player doesn't take their character to other sims, all of the sims are treated as existing in the same campaign universe. When Lily Snoodle (a favorite example) spends time on MacLaran's Drift, or Washtown, or Londinium, or Hale's Moon, it's the same Lily Snoodle. Same character, same campaign.

If an individual Admin/GM has an issue with any given character or concept, they can feel free to tell the player that character isn't welcome on their grid, and to personally ignore any story lines involving that character. Or, probably better, since their players may be involved with the character they don't like, they can 'filter' story to better fit their own arcs. It's something I touched on in the post on Set Pieces.

Imrhien's post was about one GM/Player/Admin essentially declaring control over an entire archetype of characters in the 'Verse campaign. Since I don't have any direct experience with the Companion's Guild as it's being run now, though have RP'd with Companion characters in the past, I can't really say anything about how the Guild is run. Though I can say, from multiple perspectives, that anyone declaring they have an over-arching position that affects everyone else's slice of the campaign, is a Bad Idea^(tm).

An example?

Firefly's Canon established that the field commanders have a fair amount of leeway in how they handle their commands. In the Firefly game in Secondlife, that lets Alliance in each sim (or set of cooperating sims) to have the Alliance military act appropriately for their story, without adversely affecting the stories that happen in other people's sims.

Your "Alliance Commander" is "An Alliance Commander," not "The Alliance Commander." You want to play a high ranking Alliance Official or Military Officer that isn't directly associated with any particular Sim? Sure. Why not. You'll just be "out of your jurisdiction" and any "power" you have is strictly with the cooperation of the other players. Not to say they won't play along! A lot of our players are quite good and will be willing to run with something new, but they don't have to.

So what does it all mean to us as players?

Ultimately, we have control over our own characters. The only person/people who can make us change anything is the GM/admin for the game we're in, and even that is only in the context of their slice of the 'Verse.

A GM can say "Don't play that here," but they can't say "Don't play that anywhere." Well, they can say it, but they can only enforce it in sims they work with.

Though, I will add that if any of the GM's tell you "your Furry Klingon cyborg hybrid probably doesn't belong in the 'Verse" you might want to heed their advice. A lot of the admins and GM's at least try to work together to make it easier to play across multiple sims. While they may not have authority on other parts of the grid, their opinion may well have some weight.

To be fair, it's probably best to not declare yourself in a position of power over other characters without working with other people first. Declaring yourself Cruiser Captain with an NPC crew, or putting together a PC crew, is one thing. Declaring yourself a Fleet Admiral in control over all the Alliance Military in an entire star system is another.

You get the idea.

Playing the Game: Setting the stage

I thought I'd actually done a post on this previously, but it turns out it was just a series of conversations between myself and a number of other players. When Jai pointed out that I hadn't actually written anything about it in this venue, I decided to rectify that.

It's actually a subject I've been thinking about for a while, but never really known just how to write up. The subject in question is "set pieces."

I've touched on this tangentially in other entries on playing in Secondlife, but never directly: using other people's sims as sets for your own RP. Given the footprint, prim, build skill, imagination, etc., limits, there'll be a lot of times when you simply can't create the set you want for a particular scene. It can take a lot of time, effort, and prims, to build, say, a high tech medical center or really convincing derelict spaceship. When your own sim's set up as a mining colony or City Center, you might not have the resources to build the set.

That's where the use of set pieces comes into play.

The gaming community in Secondlife has created a broad, broad, range of sims for people to RP in. They span the full range from High Fantasy to seriously high tech Science Fiction, with everything else in between. Want a medieval forest? It's there. High tech ship yard? Got it. Run down urban chaos? Yup. Desert? Airless rock? Space station? Derelict ship? High school? Castle? Tavern? All there. Every one of them and probably twenty more I didn't mention.

In many ways, this is a huge opportunity for the players. But it also comes with some serious perils. Each one of these sims was built for a specific reason, usually as the setting for some specific game or RP campaign. Each one of these sims will have its own paradigms, rules, expectations, staff, regular players, etc. Some of these sims will be more welcoming of outsiders than others. Where some are actually designed for general purpose RP in, others can be very hard core about it being their setting.

In general, Rule Number One of using Set Pieces is always respect the staff of whatever sim you want to use. Chances are, if you ask first, they won't mind you coming in and using, say, the MedLab on Babylon 5, to represent a high tech medical facility on some core world. The thing is, ask first.

Rule Number Two should be never interfere with the local RP. If you've followed Rule Number One, the locals may be willing to participate as extras in your plot. If they're familiar with your campaign ('Verse, B5, Trek, Star Wars, etc) they may even be able to do a credible job of it. Even then, if you can keep campaign specific references out of it, you can probably interact without issue.

There are a lot of sims out there that are sparsely populated when the "scheduled game" isn't going on. If you're looking for a set piece, it's often possible to simply borrow a space when no one else is using it. That doesn't supersede rules one and two, but it may well give you the option of popping onto an empty set, doing your piece, and popping out without interfering with anything the locals have going on.

Finally, there's running with a bit of 'temporary integration.' Being a little more flexible in your own RP when you're on someone else's set may open up even more possibilities you wouldn't have otherwise. You can always retcon out the inconsistencies added by the locals when it comes time to move your story on.

For example, from the 'Verse perspective: There's a lot of crossover between the Firefly players and the folks on Al Raqis - a Dune sim. The Firefly players can, for the most part, treat Al Raqis as if it's just another world in the 34 Tauri system and ignore the obvious inconsistencies when they're home.

This is a topic I may return to later. One of the recurring, closely related, themes in some off-screen conversations has been how to best maintain Campaign Consistency, while still allowing enough crossover to keep an active player base. Honestly, it's not something I've entirely figured out but is something I plan to explore in future posts.