RPGs set in Utopias

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There is a good utopian book Don't Bite the Sun, and its sequel Drinking Sapphire Wine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Bite_the_Sun
drinking sapphire wine.jpg

Though I think every conversation about utopias should talk about Plato's Cave too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave
I call "Solis People of the Sun" a Heterotopia, or someplace different, though I stole it from Delaney's Triton. The core worlds are more idyllic, or going that way, though the future isn't evenly distributed, and many places are far from utopian.
 
Utopias are a bit like heaven. Can you imagine a place where nobody is trying to take advantage of you so you don't have to be cauteous? Where nobody is trying to tear you down to build themselves up so you don't have to be guarded? Where nobody's trying to screw you over, so you don't need to be paranoid? Where everyone is willing to help but not trying to shove their ideas down your throat while claiming to be helpful? Where you can help people without being screwed over? Where you can be yourself and nobody will judge you? How much more heaven do you really need?

And yet, with even a little doubt, that can be come nightmare fuel. Why is everyone being so nice? What's wrong with everyone? What's wrong with me? Am I going crazy?

In one of my campaigns the PCs encountered an AI managed Oneil cylinder habitat called Heaven. It was run by an AI named God Complex and its robot drones and it was trying very hard to get the PCs to stay a while, stay forever. New colonies are desperate for genetic divesity afterall.
 
Giganotosaurus said:
My mind wandered in the shower and got me wondering if there are any RPGs set in utopias. Has anyone heard of any? If not, pitch an idea of how one would work.
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What's a utopia? Let's go with the wikipedia definition:
"A utopia typically describes an imaginary community or society that possesses highly desirable or near-perfect qualities for its members."

I.e. a society that has very good quality of life from the point of view of the people actually living there. I think there is no need to raise the bar to absurd heights beyond this and I don't get why so many people are keen on doing that. An utopia does not have to be absolutely stupidly perfect ('was anyone's feewings hurt at anytime anywhere ever') and it does not need to be very good from every conceivable point of view ('do people eat broccoli? I hate broccoli!').

Okay, with these tempered requirements in mind, what does this mean for the utopia as a workable setting? I often see people object to utopian settings because they allow no conflict (usually right after they personally raised that aforementioned bar sky-high), so let's see what types of conflict are absent in an utopia by definition. First, an utopia probably does not have very divisive or violent internal conflict (let's ignore the loophole where the fictional citizens like internal conflict). Limited internal conflict or differences of opinion are fine, if these can be settled in some agreeable way. Second, though the definition doesn't directly touch on it, an utopia needs to be able to supply the resources and circumstances to make its people happy. Not necessarily completely post-scarcity, but no shortages of the important stuff and enough extra's to make life comfortable. Beyond that, the place also needs a healthy social fabric and probably some ways for people to find fulfillment in life.

And I think that's the extent of the imposed limits: No big internal conflict and no misery. This leaves open all other sources and types of conflict that one could want. People can still clash or compete on an individual level, there can be outside threats to the utopia, and the utopia can still change over time (either to a not-utopia or a different utopia).
 
The problem with utopian settings is that they don't provide an obvious answer for one of the basic questions that any rpgs should answer. What do the PCs do in this setting? More specifically, what do they do that would be interesting to depict in a game? If there is no source of conflict or stakes, there is no answer to this question. There has to be some sort of external threat or snake in the garden.
 
David Johansen said:
Nobody has five chronicle points maybe you're thinking of momentum.
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No. I meant it that way. It is a "polite' way of saying, "you have a chance to do it, but probably not".

Now if everyone at the table sacrificed their points for them, for favors to be determined later...
(The last time the players did that with their drama points, I made sure there was an emergent encounter that they sure needed those points...)
 
Star Trek and Lancer both have post-scarcity utopian societies but the action takes place on the frontiers.

The Mad Hatter said:
There's the game FreeMarket, which could be either an utopia or dystopia, depending on viewpoint.
Here's the introduction:

"We are a society of functionally immortal, cybernetically modified, telepathic infovores. Our society is centered on a reputation-based economy in which the basic needs of all, sustenance and shelter, are accounted for. If you wish to do more than just survive, if you wish to create, perform, build or destroy, you must win the approval of your friends and the community at large.
Our “community at large” is currently about 80,000 strong. It is contained in a Stanford Torus-style space station parked at a lagrange point between Tethys, Titan and Saturn. Our habitat was designed to hold 40,000 comfortably. We’ve modified it to accommodate our expanding numbers. Considering that there is no death, no laws and no crime in our society, we think we’re doing a fair job.
You are now one of us. Welcome!"

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I have wanted to play this game for years but 1) I cannot find a hard copy and the pdf alone isn't enough to play 2) the rules are difficult to understand and 3) I don't understand it well enough to sell to others. Would be interested if you shared your experiences.
 
Huh. I started one of these utopia settings as a book, but abandoned it after getting a quarter of the way through.

It's pretty hard to write, and it's necessarily a one-shot (no replayability), but I had a gimmick that allowed otherwise.

Someone posted earlier with a definition and a breakdown. I'm gonna approach the problem similarly.

If a society is perfect, you have to answer, "for whom". A Klingon society isn't going to work for the DOOP. So let's break it down a bit further.

False utopia. Everything is right this way because that's the way it's always been. There's suffering and conflict, but it's there for a reason, and no one argues with that reason even if their life sucks. Until one day.... Think Logan's Run, The Island.

Conceptual utopia. All cultural needs met. There might be external and internal conflict, but it's manageable, controlled. You might have enemies to fight, but everything is cut and dried. No shades of gray. But someone rocks the boat. Think Snowpiercer. Most vanilla DnD.

Practical utopia. All basic needs met. No one has to worry about food, water, shelter. Procreation is either suppressed or unnecessary unless aging is not solved. And what exactly are you supposed to do here? Think The Prisoner.

Cloistered utopia. All internal conflict solved. Everyone still has to apply themselves to sustaining the community and maybe protecting it from outside threats. Think the Eloi from the Time Machine. Or the stereotypical Shaolin temple.

Most utopias are revealed to not be utopias or to be conditional utopias. From an audience point of view, there can be no engaging story without conflict. And when there is no obvious conflict, the only thing left is the conflict of WHY.

Why are things this way? Do I want them to remain so? Why or why not? If I don't want it to remain so, what can I do about it? What will a change mean for the society?

It's not an actual conflict, but a manufactured one. The result of a restless mind. A PUZZLE. it might lead to conflict, but it typically starts with a puzzle. The puzzle of why, for the audience's sake.
 
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No society can be post-scarcity without Sci-Fi tech so ridiculous you need The Beyonder or Dr. Manhattan to do it.
 
I think you really need to get past selfishness and greed before technology can even enter into it. "I earned this matter-energy replicator, I see no reason the peasants should have access to them for free." I also think you could achieve a utopia without the technology, mind you, an ant hill might be considered a utopia at that point.
 
rumble said:
Huh. I started one of these utopia settings as a book, but abandoned it after getting a quarter of the way through.

It's pretty hard to write, and it's necessarily a one-shot (no replayability), but I had a gimmick that allowed otherwise.

Someone posted earlier with a definition and a breakdown. I'm gonna approach the problem similarly.

If a society is perfect, you have to answer, "for whom". A Klingon society isn't going to work for the DOOP. So let's break it down a bit further.

False utopia. Everything is right this way because that's the way it's always been. There's suffering and conflict, but it's there for a reason, and no one argues with that reason even if their life sucks. Until one day.... Think Logan's Run, The Island.

Conceptual utopia. All cultural needs met. There might be external and internal conflict, but it's manageable, controlled. You might have enemies to fight, but everything is cut and dried. No shades of gray. But someone rocks the boat. Think Snowpiercer. Most vanilla DnD.

Practical utopia. All basic needs met. No one has to worry about food, water, shelter. Procreation is either suppressed or unnecessary unless aging is not solved. And what exactly are you supposed to do here? Think The Prisoner.

Cloistered utopia. All internal conflict solved. Everyone still has to apply themselves to sustaining the community and maybe protecting it from outside threats. Think the Eloi from the Time Machine. Or the stereotypical Shaolin temple.

Most utopias are revealed to not be utopias or to be conditional utopias. From an audience point of view, there can be no engaging story without conflict. And when there is no obvious conflict, the only thing left is the conflict of WHY.

Why are things this way? Do I want them to remain so? Why or why not? If I don't want it to remain so, what can I do about it? What will a change mean for the society?

It's not an actual conflict, but a manufactured one. The result of a restless mind. A PUZZLE. it might lead to conflict, but it typically starts with a puzzle. The puzzle of why, for the audience's sake.
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I think Moorcock came up with the most interesting idea for making a utopia interesting.

His Dancers at the End of Time are decadent noble-like people who are in the far, far future and use advanced tech to make themselves essentially immortal, near-God-like beings.

This has created a very strange society with a morality, or amorality, quite different than our own.

Most of the conflict in the stories comes from the nobles encountering people from the past and conspiring against each other in the manner of Laclos' Dangerous Liaisons.
 
Brock Savage said:
I have wanted to play this game for years but 1) I cannot find a hard copy and the pdf alone isn't enough to play 2) the rules are difficult to understand and 3) I don't understand it well enough to sell to others. Would be interested if you shared your experiences.
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I forgot to reply earlier. Freemarket is indeed difficult to understand. I always have trouble with transhumanist settings.
I only got it back then because of the designers involved. Jared A. Sorensen is the designer of two of my favorite narrative rpgs, namely InSpectres and octaNe.
I have run one game of it, but to give a more detailed response I will have to find my notes from back then.
I also think this game needs it's own thread. So I'll make a Let's Read about it early next year, which will also come with comments from the game I ran.
Why not now? Because my life-situation is currently a very big mess, both mentally and in other ways. If you get impatient, you're welcome to send a pm early next year to remind me. I might also forget you know.
 
David Johansen said:
I think you really need to get past selfishness and greed before technology can even enter into it. "I earned this matter-energy replicator, I see no reason the peasants should have access to them for free." I also think you could achieve a utopia without the technology, mind you, an ant hill might be considered a utopia at that point.
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Yep. Though not a full utopia, we could already have a really nice global society if our species wasn't so inclined towards selfishness, greed, tribalism, and short-term thinking. Fear lies at the heart of most of that, ultimately. No amount of technological growth and complexity is going to overcome that.
 
carpocratian said:
No amount of technological growth and complexity is going to overcome that.
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Why do you say that? It seems pretty obvious that the desperate pressure for more that drives people to cheat, steal, and murder would be greatly mitigated in a post scarcity "luxury communism" society such as Star Trek's Federation or Lancer's Union.
 
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Fear will keep the local systems in line! Fear of this economic plan that will make everyone free, equal, well fed, well educated, and able to travel. The people in charge won't like that at all!
 
Brock Savage said:
Why do you say that? It seems pretty obvious that the desperate pressure for more that drives people to cheat, steal, and murder would be greatly mitigated in a post scarcity "luxury communism" society such as Star Trek's Federation or Lancer's Union.
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Because it doesn't address the underlying issue, which is fear. People who have (virtually) unlimited wealth and power in the real world are still fearful, down deep, and that leads them to do bad things. We are a deeply fearful species in general. We already have the technological capacity to live much more luxurious, stable lives than we do, if we enacted some basic sociocultural changes. We ignore that part, though, so our increasing technological sophistication does nothing to bring us any closer to anything like a "utopia."
 
Yes, I very much agree with carpocratian carpocratian - there's always the question, if you let people have Nice Things...how are they going to use their free resources? Are they going to turn them against you, perchance:shock:?

And the worst part is that it's not an unreasonable fear, as history teaches us:shade:!


...of course, that's exactly why I can't run utopias, so feel free to ignore my rumbling, partially provoked by some current events:thumbsup:!
 
Brock Savage said:
Why do you say that? It seems pretty obvious that the desperate pressure for more that drives people to cheat, steal, and murder would be greatly mitigated in a post scarcity "luxury communism" society such as Star Trek's Federation or Lancer's Union.
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Would it? The earth contains people who couldn’t possibly spend all their money unless they start buying even more islands then they already own. Doesn’t stop them from wanting more.
 
CRKrueger said:
Would it? The earth contains people who couldn’t possibly spend all their money unless they start buying even more islands then they already own. Doesn’t stop them from wanting more.
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Yeah, this:thumbsup:.

spittingimage said:
The future also has adequate mental healthcare.
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Those people aren't sick, though, so there's nothing to heal...:shade:

Do you seriously plan to outlaw/declare to be "a mental sickness" parts of human nature in order to make your preferred social/political system work:grin:?

...I mean, if you are, I'd advise you to consider it twice what other people might consider a sickness. It might include things that you'd want to protect:devil:!

And keep in mind that the parts you consider a sickness would impact some of the most powerful people in today's world:gunslinger:!

...so yeah, I really don't see your preferred setting as happening in Earth's future. And for a change, I do think that's a good thing.
 
Warhammer 40000 is a utopia for some people. I'm not sure who, but they're bound to be there. Those guys who spend their whole lives isolated in tanks growing Space Marine organs have it made.
 
AsenRG said:
Yeah, this:thumbsup:.


Those people aren't sick, though, so there's nothing to heal...:shade:

Do you seriously plan to outlaw/declare to be "a mental sickness" parts of human nature in order to make your preferred social/political system work:grin:?

...I mean, if you are, I'd advise you to consider it twice what other people might consider a sickness. It might include things that you'd want to protect:devil:!

And keep in mind that the parts you consider a sickness would impact some of the most powerful people in today's world:gunslinger:!

...so yeah, I really don't see your preferred setting as happening in Earth's future. And for a change, I do think that's a good thing.
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It was a throwaway line, dude. Don't read too much into it.
 
I guess it depends where you sit.

We live in a post-scarcity civilisation (we have the technology), we just don’t live in a post-scarcity society. Scarcity is manufacturered.

So are we close to a utopia if we fixed distribution and inequality? Well. Kinda. There would still be people with greed. People who think that the accumulation of “more” is the only purpose of life. I found The Culture’s attitude to that to be entertaining. You can really have what you want. But it’s empty because people generally don’t mingle with people driven by needless accumulation. That is a mental illness.

Is there nothing to do?

Well, assuming that there are areas where the utopia hasn’t spread, there are always the frontiers as others have said.

A few years back, I did a mini documentary on “edges” as a source of fecund diversity as you have three ecosystems. - in this context, you would have the ecosystem of the utopia, the ecosystem of the “barbarians” and then the ecosystem of the people who live on the border.

I also like the Cortex setting Hammerheads (it’s Thunderbirds) though I really can’t grok their system. Rescuing people is a good thing. From natural and man-made (or alien-made) disasters.

And the idea that while it is a utopia, the people are not mindless Eloi. They can have jealousies. Even though the replicators can make anything, they can’t manufacture something created by the hands of humans. It will always just be a copy even if molecule-perfect. Even if you can have your simulacrum sexbot, it’s not the same as the person you love. Authenticity remains.

I like the idea of gaming in a utopia. It’s better than the grubbing around for gold that is the mainstay of fantasy and most modern and sci-fi games. I’ve never been money motivated in games or real life.
 
You know what about Monster Care Squad? Humans and monsters lived together in peace until a sickness began plaguing monsters--PC's job was to capture and cure the monsters. Sure I guess the fact that it has 'trouble' makes it not a true utopia, but it seems like it fits it well enough and still gives the PC's something to do.
 
Silverlion said:
You know what about Monster Care Squad? Humans and monsters lived together in peace until a sickness began plaguing monsters--PC's job was to capture and cure the monsters. Sure I guess the fact that it has 'trouble' makes it not a true utopia, but it seems like it fits it well enough and still gives the PC's something to do.
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I'd play that:thumbsup:!
 
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