Why the Astral Web is "Fake" & "Flat"

Last week I mentioned that I had hoped that a community would form around the Astral Web, but it never generated any interest. What I didn't mention is that a few people did email me. In my eagerness to build a community I felt that I had to incorporate all their ideas into the project, and that was a critical mistake.

One comment was something like “Why are there no aliens? I find that games without aliens are just about human issues in space.” This guy felt that we needed a multi-species society, so I spent time developing some more alien races.¹ They weren’t bad², but they changed the feel of the setting.

Another comment was “Why are you using a made up map? You can just use the Gliese Catalogue.” I set out to redo the map to match the real universe’s stars. This destroyed the setting.

I pointed out before that too much “color” is bad for a game. The flip side of the coin is also true: too much realism is bad for a game. Indeed, there is a common sentiment amongst gamers about the futility of arguing about realism in a game where your wizard is attacking a dragon.

Reason #1: Space is Big

According to the Gliese Catalogue, there are over 3,500 stars within 25 parsecs of Earth. I don’t want the “universe” to be that big. I have several reason for this:

• It’s too unwieldy.
• It’s too much information for GMs to keep track of.
• It’s too much for me to write.
• It makes the “this is the only planet with eludium on it” plot device less believable.

For these reasons, I think it is best to abandon the real stars and go back to using a few handfuls of made up ones.

Reason #2: Paper is Flat

Space exists in three dimensions, but the printed page is only two. This isn’t insurmountable. Gamers far smarter than I came up with three dimensional star maps long ago. They tend to look something like this:

A sample "3D" map showing three planets

The numbers in parenthesis represent how far above or below the star is from the “galactic plane.” In the sample above, the star Pinto is 2 parsecs³ below the galactic plane, and the star Badger is 4 parsecs above the galactic plane.

But what if there was another star at the same X and Y coordinates as Badger, but located 2 parsecs beneath it? I can think of several ways to display that on the map, but things get messy.

Reason #3: Too Much Math

In space games you often need to worry about how much fuel it takes to move from system to system. Typically, the further apart two worlds are, the more fuel it will take.

Using the original Astral Web mapping technique (shown in last week’s post), the distance is simply the number of jumps it takes to get from World A to World B (with each connecting line being a single jump).

Using the three dimensional map above, the distance is calculated using math:

So, if the players are at Mongold (coordinates +1, -2, -3) and want to travel to Pinto (coordinates +1, -1, -2), but only have 4 parsecs of fuel, can they make it? To find out, they have to perform to following:

So from Mongold to Pinto is 3.74 parsecs. They can make it. But, in my opinion, it took too much work to figure that out. Worse yet, imagine the situation where the players didn’t have enough fuel to make the trip, so they have to pick another destination and recalculate.

I don’t think a gaming session should resemble geometry homework.

Reason #4: Counter-Intuitive Maps

You might argue that the players would just look at the map and pick a closer destination. In the map above, Mongold and Pinto are shown far apart, but Badger is shown right next to Mongold. But let’s do the Mongold to Badger math:

So Mongold to Badger is 7.07 parsecs.

On the map, the Pinto "dot" is 3.6 times further away from the Mongold "dot" than the Badger "dot" is, yet the Badger system is almost twice as far.  If you can’t look at a map a determine the distance easily, is the map really useful?

Summary

For those reasons I like the original Astral Web system better. It’s not nearly as realistic, but for my gaming style it is way more playable.

With a sufficient in-game rationale (that I’ll share in a future post), the lack of realism can be hand-waved. It won’t stand up to scientific scrutiny, but it will be enough to make the game universe internally consistent and let the players suspend disbelief.

That’s my hope at least. What do you think?

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1. The Astral Web has always had an alien species called the Miltrani, but they were shadowy foes from history and a spooky threat for the future.↩

2. I particularly liked the Arth–my race of noble warriors who are physically weak and brittle.↩

3. I’m using parsecs for these examples. It could be light years, sectors, megaflumps, or whatever.↩