The Lost Universe: NASA's Tabletop Role-Playing Game Adventure

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/multimedia/online-activities/the-lost-universe/

by theshrike79 • 2 years ago

168 52 2 years ago

science.nasa.gov

Nzen• 2 years ago

tl;dr this links to a pdf that provides guidance and world-building for a role-playing game master/referee to run a one-shot adventure that involves an astronomy puzzle, maybe. (I've not read too closely, to avoid spoiling for myself.) The text largely eschews any stats so people can adapt it to their system of choice. The initial conceit seems to involve the literal players astrally projecting into the characters they create, who are denizens of some exoplanet imbued with magic. The players traveled there after our Hubble Telescope disappeared.

BryantD5• 2 years ago

Excellent summary. The adventure is clearly written with D&D in mind and would be harder to adapt to other systems, although it's certainly possible.

RIMR• 2 years ago

My first thought that was D&D wouldn't be a great system, because you have to put the Hubble Space Telescope into the universe, and that really ruins the fantasy world vibe.

With a little effort, you could work this into a Cyberpunk campaign, as Night City is set in the United States after all. Or you could just create a more story appropriate version of Hubble in the world of your choice.

I read through the campaign, and it seems fun enough if done right.

Karrot_Kream4• 2 years ago

There's like 3 things in that whole PDF that have "stats" associated at all (recommended levels, chance of getting hit by some arrows, some damage dice.) Those stats are mostly basic numbers. If you can't convert that to a different system then maybe it's worth learning one RPG system well.

BryantD5• 2 years ago

Perhaps also of interest: https://itch.io/jam/indie-nasa-adventures

This is a tabletop game jam sparked by the NASA release. It is mildly snarky about D&D. The challenge is to write a TTRPG adventure that centers at least one NASA image. itch.io tabletop game jams often produce some cool stuff so I think it's worth watching.

Waterluvian• 2 years ago

that Centers at Least One NASA* Image

What does that mean? Or is it just a grammar thing and they mean centres on, focuses on, is built around…

danparsonson• 2 years ago

No, it's a game about CSS

andruc• 2 years ago

Center. Verb. to direct one's attention on something.

hackeraccount• 2 years ago

Verbing weirds the language.

https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25

Karrot_Kream4• 2 years ago

It is mildly snarky about D&D.

Truly one of the most obnoxious aspects of online RPG discourse.

protocolture• 2 years ago

DND existing, and being referred to as a default system for everything? Yes its very obnoxious.

dallas2• 2 years ago

Indeed. "Why won't more people play the games I like after I've been snarky about the games most people enjoy?"

cthalupa2• 2 years ago

Having been engaged in the online TTRPG/D&D discourse for many years - the general zeitgeist didn't start out as being snarky about D&D, even when they were proponents of alternative systems.

But the explosive success of 5E has brought that out, and it's not entirely the fault of the people being snarky about D&D. Some of it is 'eternal september' quasi-nostalgia, some of it is people pushing about against something being popular, but a lot of it is that D&D discussion has invaded all sorts of other places that were either specifically about alternative systems, or were intended to be balanced in what was being discussed. The relative newness for a lot people in the overall hobby, along with Wizards very much pushing it as a lifestyle/identity choice has also resulted in a lot of people discussing D&D on the internet being some mixture of hostile/dismissive/etc. of any discourse that isn't about 5E.

I've lost count of the number of conversations I've witnessed where people are talking about something they dislike in D&D or asking how to homebrew a system on top of it to do a certain thing, and someone will politely say "Hey this is pretty core to how 5E functions and is part of the primary gameplay loop, you might want to look into X system because it handles Y thing in Z way, which seems to align with your needs here," and they get a rather rude dismissal. With the release of the One D&D rules, I saw lots of conversations where criticism of them, even from 5E players, were taken as some sort of personal attack on a core values of people who were fans.

There are plenty of assholes in the OSR, storygaming, etc. scenes. Toxicity sure isn't limited to the 5E players. But the sheer number of them, coupled with the previously mentioned Wizards marketing strategy, has resulted in a lot of the rest of the TTRPG community stuck with their hackles raised and feeling like they always have to be on the defensive. And that leads to the snark.

ChikkaChiChi• 2 years ago

Time to put on my robe and wizard hat.

0cf8612b2e1e• 2 years ago

Gasp. Is bash.org dead? Internet archive is showing no mirrors in a long time.

Daneel_• 2 years ago

Sadly, yes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38950721

avereveard2• 2 years ago

an attempt to run it trough a GPTs if you need an external master and want to keep some mistery about the world for the first playtrough: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-gVJOtGzZZ-the-lost-universe uses the booklet a knowledge base and a python script to roll checks

ajr0• 2 years ago

I'm interested in how you came up with this, do you have a blog post or something I can peruse?

avereveard2• 2 years ago

I came up with this fairly early around gpt 3.5 release, I started working at a narratie based game, but basically gpt will let people do whatever, see this zero shot adventure example: https://chat.openai.com/share/8b59bbb9-f6a3-42a9-a14e-766195...

to control for that I had this general idea to have a grounded hidden truth to anchor the llm, things like having the scenario written and ground all player outcomes to the hidden secnario. that worked well in terms of pushback, but gpt are far too optimistic - i.e. it was impossible to lose a game, or to even die or have permanent wounds. gpt also allowed any kind of problem solving if narrated well enough - common sample, you can just keep drinking healing potion regardless of whatever situation you are in and just reset the game.

next step was to keep track of item consumption outside of the gpt, so I built a database and a few shot instructions system. gpt still doesn't push back on a player trying to cheat, but there's nothing much I can do there. also, I needed to lead gpt into negative outcomes, so I outsurced skill rolls. that eventually led to a massive engine to run the game, with llm just describing outcomes, where the pipeline is natural input > llm convert to structured json describing the action > engine ask for an action for every npc in the zone > llm map structure to game rules > engine executes the rules and update game world state > llm pick output and describe the result to the player - and the world is in a hierarchical structure, so only few npc get executed but the world state is tracked as the player explore and return to past locations

now, this is not it. this is a smaller engine that just take the skill roll and a simpler version of the item tracking, and instead of being the game controller, is referenced from a gpt for most of the game. as I said this approach is a fair bit weaker, but can provide a good enough result, if you are compliant with the narrative (i.e. willing and honest participant to the game) and will absolutely break apart if you challenge it too much

this is the originating gpt to which I added the nasa context: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-bLhy3K71r-gpt-and-paper and this is the engine, in all it's semplicity: https://pastebin.com/GQuJtEqf

The Lost Universe: NASA's Tabletop Role-Playing Game Adventure

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