Technobabble

[Captain Novaes]

How many of you guys out there actually like/use technobabble when running games ?

It may be a matter of personal taste, but as a budding physicist, I tend to dislike abuse of thecnobabble (and that's one of the reasons I like TOS and DS9 better than TNG/VOY).

Technology is there to create a mood, not to be an excuse for a Deus-Ex-Machina last minute solution... my players use to resort to techobabble "solutions" a lot, and I'm always reminding them to try and think of other approach. What do you think ?

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No matter where you go, there you are.

[Phantom]

I have yet to run a full game of ST;NG,I've only dabbled alittle, but I am envolved on a forum based game and have used the technobable chart a couple of time. Just to add to the mood.

Also I seem to remember quite alot of technobable from both TOS (just about every scene with Scotty, and DS9.

[Captain Novaes]

What I meant is that seems to exist a trend in Trek these days to exaggerate in the babbling. Watch "Insurrection", for instance


Everything that's too much tires. And, from the gaming POV, technobabble breeds simplistic solutions. I don't like simplistic solutions, I like my players to think hard and come up with clever solutions to my puzzles. It's a Sci-Fi game, after all.

For example: in an adventure, there was this strange alien disease infecting the XO and the CMO... the CMO player reclined in the chair and said: "sure, no sweat. I'll use the Transporter Trace to eliminate the virus pattern from my own."

Was that cheating ? No, it was perfectly feasible from the technological setting. But would it be dramatic ? Far from it ! So I told my player: "No, you can't do that. Think of another way to cure the disease."

Of course, that's just me...

Oh, BTW... the player eventually thought of a very beautiful solution !

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No matter where you go, there you are.

[This message has been edited by Captain Novaes (edited 03-06-2001).]

[StyroFoam Man]

This message has been removed on request by the
poster

[qerlin]

We actually try to stick close to more real tech (well...yeah, we use transporters and replicators...) but whenever we are dealing with 'trek tech' I make a point of heavy tongue-in-cheek use of technobabble.

[Fred]

Funny, my problem is exactly the opposite: I think my players don't technobabble enough. Instead of saying "I'll reroute power through the phase inverter and try to boost the shield harmonics to block the subspace pulse phaser", they will probably say "Fred, is there a way to block the subspace pulse phaser. I have Eletronics Ops (Deflector Shields ) 16."

I told them that this is Star Trek and some amount of technobabble is expected. It's slowly getting better.


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"As long as you can laugh, you are not
defeated."

–- Jack Vance

[Joe Dizzy]

That's interesting.

I love technobabble. I think it's the funniest thing ever to come up in any of my gaming sessions.

But I'm TOTALLY against solving adventures with technobabble. Apparently people have been watching too much Voyager lately.

Technobabble is always just an add-on to me. If you make the roll you can use some techno-babble to explain what you're doing. If you need to tell the captain the warp core isn't working properly.. use some techonbabble.
But if I say the shields aren't working and I use technobabble, it means... the shields aren't working - period. Nothing you can do about it. It's the script.

Babble is part of the setting, not something to actively use in the group.
(..hope that makes some kind of sense)

[Captain Novaes]

Originally posted by Fred:
Instead of saying "I'll reroute power through the phase inverter and try to boost the shield harmonics to block the subspace pulse phaser", they will probably say "Fred, is there a way to block the subspace pulse phaser. I have Eletronics Ops (Deflector Shields ) 16."

Yea, that's the whole problem. Too little use of the setting terms, as oposed to too much use of game terms. I myself prefer the usage: "Mr. Sol ! We need more power to the shields ! - Yes sir, I'll try to boost them through the deflector shield."

See ? Simple. What I could never stomach is the trend in Trek these days to put 3 or 4 technobabble terms every phrase.

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No matter where you go, there you are.

[This message has been edited by Captain Novaes (edited 03-07-2001).]

[SIR SIG]

Without TechnoBabble there is no Trek!

Plus when you really know a lot of TB and so does a PC, boy you can have one hell of a gaming session.

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SIR SIG a Aussie TREK Narrator

[Captain Novaes]

I beg to disagree

Of course, it all comes down to a matter of personal choice. When I told my player to think of other solution to the virus infection, I justified my claim by stating that the virus have not been isolated (it had some strange mutating properties), so the pattern analyzer of the transporter could not get a good fix on the bug. Of course, that was using TB against TB...

I simply do not like simplistic solutions to puzzles. If the "cure a disease by beaming over" schtick is used once, it can be used ANY time, for instance. As a narrator, I try to limit such abuses. If it means to limit, or even overrule certain uses of available tech, so be it.

But, YMMV, as always.



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No matter where you go, there you are.

[Captain Novaes]

And while we're at it...

How many of you out there try using REAL science babble ?

As I have indicated before, I'm a serious science buff, and I've discovered that it's quite more satisfactory to put real science puzzles, or puzzles that could exist in the real world inside the game.



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No matter where you go, there you are.

[Aldaron]

I'm actually in the process of writing up an adventure at the moment, inspired by a second season episode of Stargate: SG-1.

In it, the Crew hear a strange signal emanating from a black hole in a neighbouring sector. On investigation, they find an old Daedalus class vessel, the USS Cochrane trapped near the event horizon of the BH.

Due to time-dilation, the Cochrane's crew have only experienced a few hours since their entrapment, and their close-to-failing shields / SIF have thus far protected them against the tidal forces; but from outside the gravity well, over two hundred years have passed.

I haven't worked out all the details yet, but the adventure will involved the Crew having to rescue the crew of the Cochrane, plus deal with a complication that there are 22nd century Romulans on board from a Romulan ship which was trapped (maybe on the other side of the hole, or something). And, of course, the Romulans have sent their own ship to investigate what is going on.

Now the idea is that I can tie in the black hole with the quantum singularity drive of the arriving warbird, forcing the Starfleet and Romulan crews to cooperate to rescue those trapped, and that some kind of interaction between the Romulans QS drive and the black hole will allow them to either a) pull off the rescue, or b) cause some kind of temporal distortion that will lead to a time-travel adventure.

The upshot is that I'm having to pore over a heap of astrophysics books at the moment, trying to keep straight in my head the difference between an event horizon and an accretion disk, and Einsteinian time-dilation and a Chadraskar (sp?) limit!!!

So, I'll be using a good mix of "real" science technobabble and a good dash of good ol' Treknobabble in the adventure.

Now...why was I writing this in the first place? I should have used "reply with quote", 'cos I've forgotten what my point was!

Never mind...I'm sure it'll come to me!

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"May I find you with peace, and leave you with hope."

[StyroFoam Man]

This message has been removed on request by the
poster

[Captain Novaes]

Originally posted by StyroFoam Man:
Make sure there isn't a hole in your event horzion!!! (arrrrrgggggghhhhhh!)

That has to be one of the STUPIDEST examples of technobabble I have ever herd.

Here, here !

Hey, I'd love to read the follow-up of this adventure !

In the mean time, take a look at this; I scooped from the review at Rpg.net on Blue Planet RPG

Most of the time, especially in television, films, or gaming products, "science fiction" or "sci-fi" is just a label given to anything with props of the genre, such as robots, aliens, space travel or high technology. Unfortunately, most of the time, there is no science behind the fiction, such as the computer virus in "Independence Day" infecting an alien computer system, or the technobabble that explains nothing in "Star Trek," or the unrealistic effects of explosive decompression in most movies (hint: people do not explode when exposed to vacuum). Although science-fantasy can sometimes work right (like "Star Wars"), I've often wished for more realistic, hardcore, science fiction.


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No matter where you go, there you are.

[Salinger]

As I see it, technobabble is flavor.

Given the choice between:

A.)"I reroute the particle flow through the tertiary EPS relay shunt to set up a recursive feedback loop. Once we've generated three thousand cochranes worth of power, we engage the warp engines at warp one and redirect the stored power to the deflector array. That should be enough to generate a polarized repulsor beam that will defect the asteroid so it won't hit the planet."

and,

B.) "We use the tractor beam to push the asteroid out of the way so it won't hit the planet."

I'd rather have a player give me A every time. It shows creativity and uses the conventions of the show. The technology shouldn't solve all the problems, but when it's used, for me, I'd rather it not be boring.

Now, if the solution to the problem is one that requires diplomacy to solve (the aliens inside the astroid controlling it through psionic means), then no amount of technobabble or pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo should solve the problem.

It all comes down to what methods are acceptible for resolving the conflict. If technology comes into play, I think it should reflect the setting.

I also don't think a player should ever be told "that won't work, think of something else." Let them try it, let them experience the failure of their attempt, and then let them try to come up with something new.

Just my thoughts.

.Sal

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Salinger/TheDuck

"If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and talks like a duck...it's probably Salinger." -Quack!