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From: jeff@utastro.UUCP (Jeff Brown the Scumbag)
Newsgroups: net.games.frp
Subject: Re: High Tech in AD&D (help).
Message-ID: <300@utastro.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 21-Jan-86 04:16:18 EST
Article-I.D.: utastro.300
Posted: Tue Jan 21 04:16:18 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 22-Jan-86 05:27:54 EST
References: <1277@hpda.UUCP> <101@uvacs.UUCP>
Organization: U. Texas, Astronomy, Austin, TX
Lines: 59
Keywords: High Tech, AD&D

I have found (in my old experience in DMing, which was a while back)
that putting high-tech items into a campaign was a lot of fun.
The fun is not how to run the high-tech items; the fun is watching
the players try to figure out what a high-tech item does and how to
use it!  Come on, people, a bunch of medievals is not going to be
able to figure out a blaster without killing at least one of their
party in the process.  This is especially true if lots of high-tech
items are out of juice, otherwise defective, or just plain non-functional.
(My favorite trick was to have a party find an electric pencil sharpener.
Hours of hilarious things would result: "We point the thing with its
hole toward the trolls and pull the cord.")  I had one crew stumble
on the destruct sequence for a small portable nuclear powerblock, which
had a yield in the kiloton range (and it was NOT an easy thing to find,
but they were being methodical and trying all possible combinations
of the controls trying to get it to do something).  End of Adventure.
And the things that happened when another group found a high-tech field
medical kit....

Instructions may be written in plain sight, but Technic may not succumb
to even magical translators.  And there is the Larry Niven story (with
the Kzinti and the discovery of the tnuctip stasis box) about trying to
figure out devices from a superior technology.  It can be difficult to
be obscure to the player characters so that the players (with their 20th-
century knowledge) don't draw conclusions the medievals can't.  The
only way a player can play an ignorant character is if he (the player)
IS ignorant.  Even then, the medievals are not going to be very good
at using their toys.  Watch somebody trying to drive a car (or ride a
bike) who has ONLY a verbal description of how to do such a thing.

My feeling was that if they found an item that was worth having and 
figured out how to use it without destroying themselves, then they were
welcome to it.  Generally, though, messing with such things was so
dangerous that players rapidly put distance between themselves and
anything that smelled of high technology.

In terms of raw damage a high-tech weapon will produce, keep in mind
that things ought to be functional.  A high-techer's handgun/blaster
is not going to be able to vaporize castles: that big an effect is likely
to include the user in the kill radius.  It should be able dispatch
any reasonable-size creature, and not much more.  Things in the heavy
artillery class will have a (considerable) minimum range.  Personal
force shields should have severe limits on their duration, and certainly
on their range, and there should be either a power limitation or a
side effect that makes it less than a wonderful idea to keep it on all
the time (ozone production?  lack of oxygen/CO2 flow?  sub- or super-
sonic generation?  a glow that attracts undesirable things? a bad smell?).
And how do you turn it off when you don't want it on any more?  Large-
scale defenses will not be very portable, simply because they don't
have to be.

In short, I loved a sprinkling of high-tech as a DM.  I had a saying
which I think is close to the core of the best of frp games: "The best
way to liven up a dull campaign is to come up with a novel way to kill
player characters, and demonstrate its effect."

Jeff Brown the Scumbag
		{allegra,ihnp4}!{noao,ut-sally}!utastro!jeff
		jeff@astro.UTEXAS.EDU
Astronomy Department, U. of Texas, Austin