Drake Equation and SF

[subplotkudzu]

While the votes are still no where near being in, I am noodling with what I might do with a 'start from scratch' Traveller game. One idea that came to mind is how one could model various SF series based on where they weight the Drake Equation. (an additional factor might be added for those who have obtaoed FTL travel).

The Foundation Series, for example, effectively zeroes out the number of planets other than Earth develop intelligent life.

Pournelle's CoDominion, what I know if it, is very close to that, with only one other sentient species (the Moties) appearing.

Known Space, on the other hand, has moderately high numbers across the board, with several communcation-capable intelligent species, but several more habitable but non-sentient race worlds for those species to colonize. 

Stephen Baxter's Xeelee stories keep the "viable planets that will develop life" at 100%, but greatly expands the definition of 'viable' so there are living ice creatures in the ice on pluto and elsewhere across the Sol system.
 
Jack McDevit's Priscilla Hutchens novels, while they have a low number of habitable worlds per star, focus on the low length of time any civilization survives to send messages into space, so our heroes find several artifact rich dead worlds or peoples collapsed back to a pre-gasoline tech level.

This is just me playing with an idea, but has anyone ever seen this discussed in an RPG context.

Comments

[notthebuddha.livejournal.com]

ISTR The Traveller Book mentioned alien-less games as possibilities to suit the refree's preferences, along with religion-less settings or more medieval-toned feudalism.

[mylescorcoran]

I can't think of any games that address it explicitly or implicitly. Licensed properties, like GURPS Vorkosigan say, absorb the assumptions of the original work, like the all human setting of the Vorkosigan novels.

I'm fascinated by SF outworkings of the Fermi Paradox, like Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space or Karl Schroeder's Permanence but most SFRPGs seem to assume that a multiplicity of alien species is a good thing, and treat them much like 'races' in D&D.

[(Anonymous)]

It's also interesting how very few, if any, SF writers adopt the "rare life" position. There are always tons of planets with basically Earthlike environments and even native life people can eat, even if humans are the only intelligent (or technological) species.

I'd like to see a setting in which _life_ is common but _multicellular_ life is vanishingly rare. So there are plenty of worlds where the oceans are a soup of single-celled organisms but the land is barren and erosion-scarred. Humans could move right in, but they'd have to do a lot of terraforming to make the place livable.

Cambias

[mylescorcoran]

Now you've got me thinking about a SF game where the story revolves around a group of seeders, people out in space streaking near light between the stars seeding worlds with life and arcing round on million and billion year timescales to see how things develop. You get to change parameters in the Drake equation as a consequence of play.