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Your Questions, Answered
(If not, email your question and we’ll answer it: authors@vanguardrpg.com)
What’s this game about? And why the name "Vanguard?" What does that signify?
It’s about playing characters in the vanguard of a technologically advanced civilization that is moving out into space. The name describes the class of people that we expect most player characters to be. The Vanguard are explorers, inventors, pioneers, leaders, risk-takers, colonists, space-farers; in a word, they are innovators. The Vanguard create new worlds. Instead of clinging to what is comfortable, they reach for a vision of opportunity. So Vanguard is a game about seizing the opportunities and confronting the challenges that arise in a developing interstellar civilization. Thus is a science fiction role-playing game. It also has definite leanings toward "hard" science fiction.
What do you mean by "hard" sci-fi?
It means that in designing the rules and the background, we’ve worked hard to be consistent and to describe a believable world. When we stipulate something about the background, we try our best to follow through on the implications. When we say that a spacecraft can accelerate at 1g, for example, we say this because we’ve decided how much thrust the ship’s rocket can deliver, which was in turn determined by the exhaust velocity and mass. The volume of spacecraft traffic between planets Earth and Elysium is what it is because of the amount of trade between those locations. And so on.
Among science fiction fans, some prefer relatively soft sci-fi, which plays fast and loose with the science. Star Trek is an example of this; characters on Star Trek talk a lot about science, but what they say about it is mostly nonsense. Don’t get us wrong; we enjoy Star Trek. But Vanguard is not designed for Star Trek-flavored adventures. Vanguard is for players who want to play hard sci-fi, who will suspend disbelief long enough to allow for FTL, and who want a game system that is moderately detailed.
Hard science fiction is a genre that strives for a feeling of authenticity, derived from certain key points of congruence between the fictional future world and the "real" world. That is, it attempts to portray a future in a realistic way. However, prophesy is not the project. Neither is science. The scientific realism of hard sci-fi is a rhetorical device to make settings and conflicts more plausible, to enhance the audience’s (or players’) feeling of identification with the characters, and to establish a perception of continuity between the fictional story and the audience’s own life-experiences. The elements of hard science fiction are employed for the purpose of making stories come to life more convincingly.
I’m not a scientist. I don’t even like science. To be honest, I’m not even quite sure what you meant when you talked about a spacecraft accelerating at "1g." Is that a problem?
Not necessarily. The point of science fiction is not to do science. You don’t have to be very scientifically knowledgeable or scientifically inclined to enjoy Vanguard. The point of the "hard" element of hard sci-fi is to make stories more believable and enjoyable by making them consistent and plausible, not to make the genre exclusive. Essentially we want to make the "science" in sci-fi intelligible instead of bizarre fantasy. You will enjoy hard sci-fi role-playing if you like to explore the social implications of technological innovations and if you appreciate systems and worlds that have been thought through in some detail. Such worlds actually give you more power as player because they make it easier for you to make sense of the environment and to anticipate the effects of your character’s actions.
That sounds good. How do I get started?
After you’ve got a copy of Vanguard Free Roleplaying, you start by creating a fictional character to play. There are rules to guide you through each step of this process. You have a lot of freedom here; you can make up just about any sort of character you want, and once you’ve made up your character, you can go ahead and start your adventure with the other players and their characters.
Then what? What kinds of adventures will we play?
Within the science-fiction genre you can do pretty much anything you want. But generally it is desirable for games to provide somewhat more structure than "Do whatever you want." Thus Vanguard is designed with several kinds of adventure in mind. In the full version we provide a chapter with details about running law enforcement, military, exploration, and colonial adventures. In Vanguard Free Roleplaying we’ve included the law enforcement section as its own chapter.
All adventures will share two key elements: characters and mystery. Characters are the focus of the game. They are the imaginary people to whom the events in the game happen, and whose personalities, goals, and foibles the players create and explore. These characters create the basis for the conflicts that most adventures seek to resolve. Mystery is the unknown. The element of mystery can be a formal problem, like a crime that law-enforcement characters want to solve or a research question that explorers want to answer, or it can be an enigmatic personality with whom player characters interact. Either way, the discovery that comes with the unraveling of a mystery is the avenue by which characters grow and adventures progress. Finally, four related, ancillary elements of good role-playing adventures deserve mention. Risk is the danger of disastrous consequences if things do not go as you have planned. The element of risk keeps adventures interesting because it gives characters something to be afraid of, and fear can be a powerful and productive motivator and source of excitement. Opportunity is the potential for some reward to be obtained if characters are clever, persistent, or lucky. Opportunities keep the players hopeful and forward-looking, and they provide goals for the characters to pursue. Surprise is an unanticipated event. Surprises make players continually reevaluate their characters’ situations, so they help keep the adventure exciting and fresh. Finally, setting provides atmosphere in which the adventures take place and establishes the parameters for all of the preceding elements of the story. This book will show you how to cultivate all of these themes in your games.
It sounds like Vanguard is pretty flexible in terms of the kinds of adventures we can play.
Yes, it is, and that’s deliberate. The game system and background are powerful and broad-ranging, so that you can play almost any kind of character and run almost any kind of hard science-fiction adventure in a game of Vanguard: play a police detective and conduct a criminal investigation, play an elite soldier on a special operations mission, play a journalist documenting and reporting the events that are seen in the news, play a surveyor or scientist exploring an alien planet, or play a merchant spacer carrying goods to colony worlds. Many stories in fiction can be adapted to Vanguard, with the added benefit of becoming an interactive story-telling process rather than a solitary reading or passive viewing process. Overall, the game is flexible enough to be adapted to most people’s playing styles, while offering the kind of comprehensive setting and rules to set the stage for many fun adventures.
So let’s get started!
By all means. Click here to download VFR!