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.

Playing the Game: Why combat meters byte

Note: I started this quite a while ago, then got wrapped up in other things and forgot to finish it until now.

Yeah, I know, mildly provocative title. But I've never made a secret of not being a fan of First Person Shooter style combat in Secondlife. It all comes back to SL being a Virtual Reality simulator and not a Combat simulator. Seriously, if you are into serious FPS combat, go play Unreal or Halo or Counterstrike, or any of the many other games that do a far, far, better job of simulating combat. It's what they were designed for.

Secondlife has its own built in combat system, which is usually left off in most sims. It has one advantage of being integrated into the server itself, but has some serious flaws. Not the least of which is that when you "die" you're teleported back to your Home location. Obvious drawback there. As far as I can tell from the little research I've done, they included it more or less as an afterthought because some people really wanted it. It's just not all that good.

From my own observations, the most commonly used Combat Meter system in Secondlife is DCS2, the Dynamic Combat System. DCS2 is, admittedly, a versatile system but, in my not entirely humble opinion, suffers from some glaring flaws. Though, to be fair, the flaws aren't unique to DCS.

Like many other systems, DCS is biased towards a Class and Level sort of setup. Characters fall into a class of one type or another which gives them a default set of "skills" or "powers" within the DCS context. They level up with experience and, as they level get, to add more skills and stats. Experience can be based on time in game (common, but lame), combat kills (also common, and lame for other reasons) or by GM fiat (less common, but actually appropriate). There's a limited mechanism for other players to award someone experience for good RP, but that's really it.

I don't mean to rip on DCS, not even for their 'setting up a sim to use it is free, but we charge for the meter' model. They've got to pay for the server that hosts their back end, after all. The problems I see with it are common to any sort of game mechanic that uses character classes and levels, something I glossed over in the post on Cooperative Storytelling. Essentially, Secondlife lends it self much more to a Freeform style of RP than to a hard and fast Game Mechanic based model. When meters are level based, you're automatically tied into whatever sort of character progression the meter's designers thought was best. Even when character progression is secondary to story progression.

On a purely operational level, separate from the game mechanics, there's the issue of making any meter clean and fast and hard to cheat.

There's two main "models" combat meters used in SL, not counting SL's own built in version. The first I'll call "Avatar Local." In these, the AV has an attachment that handles everything: Damage tracking, healing, special effects, are all handled locally on the participating avatar. These are usually feature limited, but are fast and don't have a major impact on sim performance or suffer from external sources of lag.

The second major model I'll call "Remote Server." These use an external server somewhere in a sort of client/server model. When you're hit, the meter on your AV calls the remote server and has it process the damage based on whatever mechanics it has set up. The server then kicks back the results and your meter is updated. This is the model DCS2 and FFRP both use. There are a number of advantages, like being able to modify things on the server side and have the changes come into play without having to update everyone's client. The biggest disadvantage, and one I've always found glaring, is that you're now adding a set of calls to an external system. This adds in another layer of latency and lag, not to mention potential security concerns.

I don't particularly like this model.

Where does this leave us?

Well, given my preference for text based interaction rather than FPS combat, or at least a mix, and my opinion of current alternatives, I'm going to come up with a Wish List of sorts of features that would make a good Combat Meter system. It's essentially a combination of the best features of the above models.

1. A client / server model that lives entirely on the local Secondlife simulator. While it will increase the load on the server somewhat, it will reduce possible security risks and make sure Meter-based lag affects everyone equally.
   
2. Open source for both the client and the server.
   
3. Anti-cheating functions that are compatible with it being open source. It is possible. It just takes a little extra work.
4. Compatibility with most, if not all, weapons available in SL, including freebies and "enhanced" weapons designed for other combat systems.
5. Optional recognition of enhanced weapons, where there's an available API.
6. Inclusion of a simple game mechanic that lets players customize their characters, but is both fair and easy to implement.
7. Optional experience systems, or at least a way for players to update their characters as they develop.
8. A way to let the same combat meter work across different sims using the same character.
9. A way to play different characters from the same account. (e.g. Alternate AV's representing different characters, rather than creating separate accounts.)
   
10. Optionally recognize armor and special weapons types, like sniper rifles or heavy weapons. (Armor appears to be unknown in most of the systems I've looked at.)
    
11. Compatibility with, or integration with, a vehicle combat system.
    
12. Expandability to incorporate special features as needed.
13. A way for individual sims to tweak things to suit their needs while still being cross-sim compatible.

Not really all that much of a list? Ok, so it is. But none of it can't be done and none of it wasn't in mind when I started my initial work on a cross-sim in-world combat meter system. There's more I'd like to see, but I think that Baker's Dozen is a good start.

Does this meter exist? Given the vast resource jungle that is SecondLife, it's entirely possible. I just haven't found it. Could I code this myself? Technically, yes. I could actually get this to work, though there are other folks in our group who're more skilled coders. The question, of course, would be whether I had the time to write this beast. And the answer to that is, "probably not."

Players will use whatever combat system suits them best, whether it's a meter or text based or the delicate balance of both. Some sims in the collective 'Verse will require one or the other, but with one possible exception, I'm pretty sure that none of them will force someone into combat if they don't want to participate. If a sim owner decides to force the issue that Meter/No-Meter is mandatory on their part of the grid, and combat is not optional, then the simple solution is to simply not play there.

Ultimately, what happens to your character should never be forced upon you by the limitations of some arbitrary combat meter system.

Playing the Game: Virtual Worlds

After an initial burst of activity I've somewhat neglected this blog. There was a lot to be said about Canon in the Firefly/Serenity 'Verse, at least from our perspective as gamers in Secondlife. There's been a bit of disagreement and fractioning of the community over Canon too. Pat of that, of course, comes from folk having the own perspectives on what should and shouldn't be in canon and what should and shouldn't be allowed in game.

I tried to address a lot of those issues in previous posts. It's hard to have strict canon with only 14 episodes, one feature length movie, and a few comic books that tie things together. There's just not enough information to go on. Doesn't stop people from arguing about it though. Just watch the Trekkers going at it some time.

In a restricted pencil and paper gaming environment, you have the luxury of setting canon for you and your group and not having to worry about accommodating a broader crowd. As I tried to get across, an open environment like Secondlife provides doesn't afford that luxury. Unless you plan to be snobbish about it, of course. In that case, go ahead and be as restrictive as you like.

But this post isn't about that. It's about dealing with the vagaries of translating our games into the realm of virtual worlds. Specifically, Secondlife.

In the last post I talked about cooperative story telling. The concepts there apply whether you're playing a game in Secondlife, on a forum, in IRC, or pretty much anywhere else that there's an ongoing give and take between players. Work together. Build on each other's stories, and everyone has a grand time.

But what about assembling the environment you're playing in?

I remember some years ago, lounging around a friend's room at a gaming con, one of the better game masters, a fellow computer geek, talking about how he'd really like to have adaptive voice changing software for everyone. That way you could speak as the character or NPC or whatever, and people would hear that voice. The scared little kid. The angry cop. The megalomaniac bad guy. This has to be 15 or 18 years ago when the technology was close, but not quite there. The conversation went on to what would be really cool, and described something like a cross between Secondlife, Neverwinter Nights, and Halflife.

We're actually fairly close to that 'really cool' state with Secondlife. But it has its limitations. Some of them are pretty glaring limitations and often lead to issues that actually affect the RP as it's happening.

One of the biggest limitations in SL is the footprint problem. A standard region (sim) is 256 meters on a side. Virtual, scale, meters. That's really not a lot. While it's usually enough for the kinds of combat most RPG's simulate - melee, close quarters gunfights, urban brawls, jungle ambushes, etc., - it's not an awfully big space. Yes, you could drop, say, Candlestick Park into a single sim, but you couldn't include the parking lot. On a 'city' scale, a sim is roughly a city block or so square.

I'd say it's enough for in-game combat because most RPG firefights take place over fairly short ranges. But not military ranges. Once you're out of an Urban or Jungle setting, engagement ranges go up dramatically. And we won't eve talk about snipers. The current world record for a confirmed sniper shot would cross 11 full sims.

The small footprint precludes exploring large areas unless you either layer vertically, since the sim is four kilometers high (effectively - you can go higher, but can't really build above 4Km), which has it's own issues, or you get multiple sims and spread out. The problem with that, of course, is the sheer cost of it. Sims run in cost from less than $100 a month for an "Open space" to around $300 for a full performance version. That's a lot of money to dedicate to gaming.

While there are alternatives to Secondlife using OpenSim, the open source version of the Secondlife server, there's not a lot of people there and you'd have to recreate many of the objects, textures, scripts, etc., that we have in the main Secondlife grid. The upside would be the fact that sims are dirt cheap, like $50 a month for full performance, or less if you have the capability of running your own.

Yes, I've considered it.

Cost aside, there's the issues of physics, limited prim counts, limited terraforming, lag issues, player limits, and all the other issues we've come to know and "love" in Secondlife.

Now, it may sound like I'm just bitching about the limitations of Secondlife, and I'm not. Well, not exclusively. I'm ultimately pointing out some of the known issues that keep it from being the ultimate RP platform. On the plus side, there's the radical customizability of your avatar, a very versatile (though limited in some key areas that would be useful to us) scripting system, and the ability to build some pretty elaborate sets to suit your needs.

How does this relate to us as players in a virtual environment?

The most important thing to remember is that what you see may not really be what you get. Examples?

• The entrance to the mines are really a couple kilometers away, rather than 120 meters from the bar.
• The tunnels leading from the mines actually go out into the wilderness, and go deep, rather than running under the church as they appear to.
• There really are four hundred people living in town and not just the dozen or so player characters you see.
  
• Some doors are locked, whether they're coded that way or not.
• Just because someone's combat meter says "Noble" or "Mutant" or "Mercenary" doesn't necessarily mean your character knows that - or it's even accurate.
  
• The Colonial Viper isn't really a Colonial Viper. It just looks like one - because it's what we have.
• The person's name you see floating over their head may not be who they're actually playing at the moment. Remember, not everyone is going to create a different avatar for each character they play.
• The space station is really in orbit and not at 2500 meters as it appears.
• The completely out of place Darth Vader avatar isn't really there (unless someone's wearing a Vader costume in-character. Which would just be weird.)

You get the idea. We have to adapt what we see to what should actually be there. When it's something obvious it's usually easy to treat it as the Designer/GM/Admin intended, rather than what you're seeing on screen. When it's more subtle it can be harder. But that's where the GM's and the experienced players come in.

Secondlife gave us a versatile but limited platform. It's up to us as players, and GM's, work within those limitations and create an environment we can all share in. Even when it means ignoring what we see on screen and accepting what we're told is real.

Playing the Game: Cooperative Storytelling

It's been a while since I've done an entry here, and I admit it's overdue. Of course, I haven't done an entry in Children of Earth in a while either. But that's neither here nor there. This is about gaming and now I'm going to shift away from Firefly Canon for a post or two and talk about Role Playing in a collective environment like Secondlife.

Role Playing in Secondlife ain't your grandpa's RPG.

Every RPG rule book has a little blurb in the beginning that talks about what Role Playing is and what you can expect from that particular game. It usually runs at least a couple paragraphs, up to a couple pages, and is the same real concept no matter who's writing it or what setting they're in. It boils down to you're one character in a cooperatively told story, and the Game Master is directing the action for everyone.

Simple, really.

Most pencil and paper RPG's also come with a ton of back story, resource materiel, game mechanics, and everything else you need to play a coordinated, cooperative, story with your friends. In our Secondlife setting, we don't have all that.

While the overall campaign setting is based on the 'Verse and its Canon, which I've been writing about, our individual settings are unique and were developed by a number of very creative people. Like a lot of conventional games, we've taken what was originally published and run with it in various directions.

What we're usually lacking, is game mechanics. While some areas might use a dedicated "combat meter" for first person combat, many areas, and players, don't. Game mechanics, such as they are, are usually very abstract and revolve around agreements not to metagame, god mod, be a dick, etc. It puts an emphasis on the Cooperative part of Cooperative Storytelling. It's a style of gaming sometimes referred to as Freeforming.

Another aspect that puts an emphasis on Cooperative is that the role of the Game Master is often very different in a Freeform environment. Where the GM in a conventional RPG is effectively required, in our's they serve more as moderator when a disagreement arises between players than as the driving force of most stories.

Yes, there are some stories that are Game Master run, but overall most of the story arcs we encounter were spawned by other players.

Getting good Player Generated story arcs can be somewhat tricky, since there's no one Game Master to maintain a balance between keeping everyone involved, maintaining the flow, and making it exciting for everyone. Again, it comes back to the whole cooperation thing. Working with people behind the scenes and telling whoever's "in charge" of the environment - be they a server admin or GM - can go a long way to making the story work for all involved.

But those points are important. Most players have a natural desire to tell their character's stories, where a Game Master is usually telling a broader story. Properly done, gaming is more like a well developed TV show, where there may be a star, but the rest of the cast is important too. The difference, of course, is that an actual Game Master has a responsibility to keep everyone interested and involved where a Player generating Story doesn't. What the 'Player as GM' should be doing, is giving people the opportunity to get involved and have the flexibility to let the story flow as more people add their characters to the mix.

It's not always easy.

Tips? First and foremost, be flexible. Sure, you may have things that're important to the arc you're working on and you may not want to let another character mess that up, whether it's rescuing you from the baddie, taking a bullet, or killing the baddie in his sleep. Sometimes, your carefully laid plan gets a crowbar tossed in it. When it does, think like a Game Master, not a Player. It's not just your story.

Another option is to bring the other player(s) in on your arc. If they know that you need to be shot, or kidnapped, or lost in space, or something, they.re much more willing to work with you than if you keep them in the dark and treat them as Extras.

Also, there's things that can be taken off-camera. Sure, you were rescued by the Other Heroes and that messed up the kidnapping that was part of the larger arc, but you can work around that. While it may not be as exciting in real-time, from a story perspective it's just as workable to have the baddies somehow execute their plan while everyone else is asleep. You snuck out and went for a walk and didn't tell anyone and bang, you're caught. Story goes on, and the other characters don't feel like props.

Loading the Canon: A leaf on the wind

"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."

"What does that even mean?"

Unlike a lot of Role Playing Gamers, my home genre, so to speak, was Science Fiction, not Fantasy. While I'd been exposed to classic Fantasy fare like AD&D, I cut my gaming teeth on SciFi. To me, one of the best things about Firefly from a story standpoint was that I was able to easily suspend disbelief and get into the story in spite of the SciFi aspects of it being peripheral to the story.

As I've noted in other posts in this series, the Science, when we see it, is actually fairly well done. Silence in space. EVA suits. Ships that feel like more than just a backdrop. Honestly, I would take Serenity over Enterprise any day of the week. The details, when they had any, were nicely done. For someone who actually liked messing around with the details, it said a lot that I fell in love with the series without them.

But then, it was about the characters and not about the ships.

Ships though, are the main topic of this post. Last time, we talked about Electronic Warfare and communications. This time, I'm going to touch on ships and how they maneuver. Or don't, as the case may be.

In the pilot episode, we see Serenity cross paths with a Reaver transport on a run between worlds. When you watch the scene, the crossing velocities appear to be pretty slow. Now, that's a requirement of dramatic television. If we showed the actual crossing velocities, you'd miss it if you blinked. That's how fast the ships must be going to cover any sort of distance in useful time frames.

This is actually somewhat contradictory because we know Serenity's main drive (The "Boom! drive" as I like to call it) gives a pretty impressive initial kick. Though, it appears that may be ALL it gives. At least from what we see. They spin up the core and dump it all at once in a massive pulse, giving the characteristic "Boom!" and then they coast for the rest of the flight. Why I say it's contradictory in the pilot image, is because the crossing speed should be a good deal higher than it appears.

Why do I say that? Simple. Visually, it looks like the boats are crossing at maybe fifty miles an hour. Tops. Possibly a lot slower. For an interplanetary trip, the ships have to be moving a LOT more than 50 miles an hour. They really need to be moving at thousands, if not tens, or hundreds, of thousands of miles an hour.

For the ships to have an apparent crossing speed of even a hundred miles an hour, they would have to be flying in pretty much the same direction! As an audience, of course, we ignore it. We're used to seeing it in SciFi TV shows and movies. We suspend disbelief and accept that the Reavers are cruising past at low speed and we don't care.

Could they have been traveling in the same direction, so the crossing speed was what it appeared to be? Of course they could have. But common convention has the nose of the ship pointing in the direction of travel. That's standard, and we see no reason to break it here. The Reaver looks like it's on a crossing course, not flying backwards on a very similar course, which is reinforced in later dialog.

Earlier in the pilot, when Serenity has just escaped from the Dortmunder, we get the impression that the Alliance gunboats lack the performance to real in the escaping Firefly and still catch up with the Cruiser that's about to mosey off to answer a distress call. There's actually a number implications in that scene that are significant from a technical/gamer standpoint, but were obviously done to advance the plot.

Other examples of "Drama > Reality" in the 'Verse are several of the scenes involving the Reaver fleet in the BDM. When Serenity first encounters the Swarm, they cruise through the midst of it at what looks like freeway speed at best. Never mind they should be decelerating into their approach for Miranda. In that scene they're going slow and in a nose first attitude, indicating they're in standard Coast Mode flight - having established the Boost and Coast flight model in the series itself.

There's a lot of implications that were ignored for Story sake. Serenity needed to do the low speed pass to establish how large the fleet was, give us a chance to see them tearing other people's boats apart, and generally add a bit to the overall Reaver creepiness factor. The scene worked from a plot standpoint, if not a technical one. We could probably over-analyze this, or make up all sorts of technical reasons it was still "right," but we're not going to. We're going to admit that Joss got the science wrong, because he didn't care and the plot was more important, and the scene was there strictly for Story and not because it was technically accurate.

One the way out from Miranda, we see a couple of things. One: the "Itty bitty cannon" is capable of blowing a Reaver ship to bits with a single hit at close range. We DO mean close range too. Mal is barrel sighting that shot. It really is as close as it looks. Which kind of makes you wonder why the Reaver pilot wasn't saying "Ai ya, hwai leh! They've got a Gorram cannon!" They were close enough he should have seen the bloody thing!

In any case, none of the Reaver boats return fire after that first shot. Wash just punches it and then, point two: The entire Reaver fleet takes off after them. Watch that scene again, and for amusement sake, notice the one Reaver boat that seems to be doing a wheelie when it punches it, and then notice how little time it takes for what whole fleet to drag up and tear off after Serenity. It's like the entire squadron was ready for them to play rabbit. While it's implied the Reavers like to run down their prey, it seems a bit much to expect that entire fleet to go off after them!

But that was part of the story. Mal said it: "They won't see this coming." Story here demands the entire Reaver fleet take off after them and they do. So it is written, so it shall be.

Finally, the third point here. When they arrive at Mister Universe's "private planet" the Reaver fleet is still in more or less the same relative position they were in when the punched out of Miranda's orbit. Or Lagrange point. Or wherever the hell they were floating around sending out raiding parties. The point being they never closed the gap with Serenity and, notable for a number of reasons, the entire formation seems to be pretty much intact. It's like they ALL had exactly the same acceleration impulse and kept the same relative position through the entire flight.

From a story standpoint, it made perfect sense and led to the closest thing to an epic space battle we ever see in the 'Verse. From a technical standpoint, it made absolutely no sense. There was absolutely no reason ever presented for the ships to have the same acceleration, same "cruise speed," and same overall performance. It's another example of "The story is more important than technical accuracy." And you know something? I don't mind. I love the movie anyway. But from a technical gaming standpoint? Ugh.

Where does this leave us for Canon as gamers?

If we were doing this as a pencil and paper or a moderated on-line game, we could easily incorporate ships moving at different speeds, having different performance levels, ranges, accelerations, etc. It's how I would run a game live. Some ships would be faster than others, and you might find yourself having to deal with getting some place ahead of or behind someone else. Chases might matter.

But then, they might not. We'd want to keep the focus on the characters and their interactions and not on the ships. So the solution becomes something like this. . .

In most cases, flight speed doesn't matter. Characters will arrive when they need to for Story sake.

If there is a chase, there's three options.
1: If story demands the "guys being chased" need to escape, they escape.
2: If story demands the "guys being chased" need to be caught, they get caught.
3: If story demands the "guys being chased" don't quite get away, both sides arrive at the final destination at roughly the same time, so as to increase dramatic tension.

Space battles have a very similar set of options.
1: If story demands the "good guys" win, then they win.
2: If story demands the "good guys" lose, then they lose.
3: If story demands the"good guys" fight to a draw, then it's a draw.

Noticing a theme here?

The second part of this goes as follows.
1: If the "loser" is a minor NPC (a Mook, or other character no one cares about) they die.
2: If the "loser" is a Player Character or Significant NPC, they limp away to crash land on a conveniently placed asteroid, planet, or moon, in order to lead into the next part of the story.
3: If the "loser" needs to be captured, rather than escaping as above, then they're captured and the story flows from there.

Ok, I admit. This was more GM/Plot focused than Canon focused here, but Canon doesn't really give us much to work with. If we go straight by what we see in the series and movie, we're left with a technically weak "everyone goes the same speed" situation that makes the technical players brain's hurt.

Secondlife itself adds some layers here, since it's almost as bad a flight simulator and space combat simulator as it is an FPS combat simulator. So my take an canon and RP? Just go with the flow. Treat everything in the context of the story and if players want to argue about who's ship is really fastest, let them. A GM can sort it out. Because, ultimately, this isn't about the ships, it's about the characters.

Loading the Canon: Stopping the signal

As has been, and will be, often mentioned, Firefly was a Western in Space. It wasn't a spaceship show. While spaceships sometimes played a very important part of the stories, the tech behind it pretty much didn't matter. "I need that in Captain Dummy talk, Kaylee." was more than an amusing quote. It was the approach to technology in the entire series. Firefly spared us the Treknobabble by simply treating tech they they had in Westerns of old. The Duke never bothered to explain how the Winchester worked. He just pulled the trigger and killed the bad guys.

Now, the lack of detail can be a mixed blessing for Gamers and Technical Geeks alike. On the one hand, you don't get bogged down in the particle of the week and can avoid stories that involve finding creative was to abuse established tech. On the other, you don't have anything to work from when you do need some technical detail and are forced to wing it.

There are a lot of different aspects to technology overall, some of which I've already touched on, and some I'll probably never worry about. But for this entry, I'm going to take a look at one of the vaguer parts of the 'Verse: The world of Electronic Warfare.

Ok, well, technically, it's not really all EW. It's just where it would generally fall on an MOS or Game System skill tree. I'm talking, of course, about sensors and communications.

The flight deck of Serenity, and I would assume any other Firefly of the same vintage, always struck me as looking like the flight deck of a 60's era Soviet bomber. Lots of switches and knobs. Not a lot in the way if fancy displays. In fact, I seem to remember reading somewhere that the flight seat on the Firefly set was actually taken from a Douglas DC6. The feel was very utilitarian.

This utilitarian feel was quite evident in some of the instances where they're sending or receiving a wave from the flight deck. The screens are small, and the images seem to be of fairly low quality. A good example is Mal talking to Patience in the pilot episode.

This might have been something unique to the Firefly class ship, or at least to 'flying delivery van' class transports in general. The displays on the Alliance ships seem to be better, though they actually seem less sophisticated than the displays found in the combat control center of a modern early 21st century warship.

But the relatively primitive displays flow right into what appears to be equally primitive sensors. There's a number of times in the series where it looks like you'll find better radar in a State Trooper's patrol car than you'll find in a typical spaceship. Serenity's sensors seem to be weak, at best. In "Our Mrs Reynolds" the sensor array was able to identify the "Net" not too long before it came into visual range. In the pilot episode, they detect the IAV Dortmunder not too long before she's almost on top of them. How far? We never really know, because this is a Western in Space and they don't usually talk about such things. But the implication was that they were awfully damn close.

In that same episode, we see that the sensor arrays on an Alliance cruiser are, essentially, gao se. They don't pick up Serenity until after Wash has had a chance to power down. To their credit, they do initially pick up the thermal signature, and are then able to quickly identify the class, but still. They're a ship of the line. You'd think they'd have better sensors!

Even worse for the Alliance, is they have absolutely terrible ECCM capabilities. That's Electronic Counter Counter-Measures. Serenity kicks off the Cry Baby and the Dortmunder's sensors are completely fooled. They do the same thing again in the BDM when escaping with Inara, indicating that it's not just the Dortmunder that's got crap for sensors. Either that, or the electronics in the Cry Baby is so far in advance of anything the Alliance has to counter it that the Fleet needs to rethink their whole EW budget.

Another example? The vultures operating the Net in Our Mrs Reynolds don't notice the approaching Serenity until she was almost on top of them. Though, given the apparent sophistication of that particular installation, it's no surprise their sensors also sucked. In the episode "War Stories" we get to see just how bad the sensors are on Niska's skyplex. The mook on duty in the control room there didn't get an alert on the approaching Serenity until she was growing rapidly on one of the external cameras. That was kind of like looking out the window to see someone about to drive a semi tractor through your front door.

So, what does this leave us for Canon? Well, it leaves us confused, actually. It appears from everything we see in series that ship's sensors aren't a lot better than they were on Earth that Was in, say, the 1950's. There's a few exceptions here and there, but that only adds to the confusion. It's also an opportunity. From the perspective of a Player/Character/GM, you can usually just assume that everyone's sensors are pretty much crap (including your own) and ignore it. Since nearly everything happening in an SL context is going to be at very short ranges, this works out fine. The only time it would come up is when people are RPing across large swaths of the Black, usually off camera.

There's no reason to assume good sensors and such don't exist. Only that they're not exceptionally common, even on large capital ships. This leaves room to play all sorts of Electronic Warfare games. At least for those so inclined.

Did I mention my personal boat In-Character is the ELINT version?

Now, in contrast to sensor technology, the communications technology is quite sophisticated. Where it's firmly established that there is no FTL travel in the 'Verse (ok, actually, it's firmly established in an interview with Joss Whedon, rather than explicitly in the show or BDM) there is FTL communication. We see several cases of interplanetary communication with no delay, explicitly implying FTL comms.

The Cortex, for its part, is their equivalent of our Internet. I'm sure Joss based the Cortex on the contemporary 21st century Internet when he wrote it. The addition of wireless FTL capability extends it deep into the Black. Though there are a few apparent limitations on where the signal can actually go.

In the series, it's just the cortex and FTL communications. But the BDM introduces us to Mister Universe and the simply massive communications station he calls home. It's evident from the dialog that his station can receive pretty much anything transmitted anywhere in the 'Verse. And why not? The dishes are huge! As a transmitter, the station apparently can reach a large swath of the 'Verse simply by punching the signal out so people can listen to it. This is actually kind of contrary to the Cortex as Internet idea, but is rather like having a direct patch into, say, DirecTV's birds. The report gets out and people can see it whether they want to or not.

The Official Map of the 'Verse also includes various comms relay stations around the 'Verse. My guess, since it's never explained, is that they serve very much the same purpose microwave repeaters do in overland communications networks. They receive a signal from somewhere, then rebroadcast it to wherever it's supposed to end up.

How does that fit in with the rig Mister Universe has? No idea. The BDM, and its antenna farm, predates the official map of the 'Verse. There's nothing contradictory about having both a massive communications system like his and the series of Cortex relays noted in the map. There are some story continuity issues, but most of them are items for another blog entry. In this context, we can ignore the story and just focus on the fact that there are some big honkin' communications facilities in the 'Verse (no reason to believe Mister Universe's is the only one) and they're capable of drawing in vast quantities of traffic from across the 'Verse.

There's also the minor question of personal communication. It seems likely that 'Sending a wave' is the equivalent of sending an email, or IM, or vmail, or VoIP call, or whatever, over the internet now. We see people do that all the time. We also see them using some walkie talkies that look like they came from Radio Shack or something. Not the modern FRS radios. More like those really old hand held CB's. They seem positively huge. But they may also be very long ranged. Just because we only ever see them used up close, it doesn't mean they aren't Firefly's answer to an Iridium phone.

What does all this mean for us as Canon from a Gamer's perspective? We can take away several things from this. FTL flight does not exist. FTL communications does. Communications are normally instantaneous, which fits in perfectly for gaming in Secondlife. They are also normally very reliable. Except when they're not, which is almost always when it's required to advance the story. So as players, if we need to kick off a wave to a friend who's half way across the 'Verse, we can. It may violate the known laws of physics. But it doesn't violate Canon.