WombatZone

Setting and Premise
Sufficiently Advanced projects the wildest dreams of present-day science a thousand years into the future. Wormhole technology has allowed humankind to spread to the stars without even the need for space vessels, traveling directly from planet to planet across immense distances. Other technologies allow for the near-infinite alteration of the human body and mind, with the result that the scattered children of Earth have taken on a dizzying variety of forms and joined together in an equally vast array of societies. Three nonhuman species have been discovered, and one -- the "Aia" or artificially-intelligent aliens -- was actually created by humanity, but their environments and thought processes are so different from humanity's as to make meaningful interaction almost impossible.

Above and beyond this interstellar melange exist the Transcendentals. The very first artificially intelligent computers created by humanity, the "Ts" are uniquely capable of communicating with themselves across time. That allowed them to give humanity two great gifts, which have helped to shape the universe into its present form. The first was wormhole technology, and the second was the science of psychohistory, a robust and predictive social science. For themselves, the Ts desire only one thing. As the only beings of such vastness, they are terribly lonely, and so they have set themselves the task of bringing about the Desired Future, using information from their own future selves to direct the course of events so that humanity develops into beings like themselves. Their greatest tool in this millennia-long effort? The Patent Office.

Yes, the Patent Office. In the timeframe of the game, the Patent Office is the only organization that has jurisdiction over every human-descended society. Its outward purpose is to register new discoveries and insure that inventors enjoy exclusive rights to the fruits of their efforts for a reasonable period of time. That means thwarting would-be patent infringers. All of this is a useful cover for the real purpose of the Patent Office, as directed by the Transcendentals: to intervene at key moments so as to gradually shape human social and technological progress toward Transcendence, and away from self-destruction or the enslavement of technological inferiors by technological superiors.

The PCs in a game of Sufficiently Advanced are a team of Patent Office Inspectors, who wormhole about the universe under orders from the Ts, giving a helping hand to some inventors, discouraging or sabotaging others, and keeping bootlegged technology (especially weapons) out of the wrong hands. The Ts have limited bandwidth for temporal communication at this point in their development, so their future selves often send only the bare essentials of an assignment at first; that means even the Ts themselves may not know why they're sending your team halfway across the universe to watch out for "something important" occurring at an art exhibition two days, three hours, and forty-two minutes hence. (Like M-Force, the Transcendentals are not meant to have any hidden agenda; they never deliberately lie to their employees, and really do have the ultimate good of humanity in mind. On the other hand, even the up-front, sincere goal of the Ts could be questioned on specific points: the good of humanity in the long term doesn't always equate to the good of any particular humans here and now, including your team of Inspectors.)

Character Generation
Characters in Sufficiently Advanced are defined by Civilization, Core Values, Plot Scores, Capabilities, and Professions.

The universe of Sufficiently Advanced is home to fourteen major human and post-human Civilizations, ranging from the Old-Worlders (who have remained behind on the nearly-abandoned Earth and returned to a simple agrarian life) and the Cargo Cultists ("fallen" societies who treat their surviving technologies as magical or divine gifts) to the Replicants (who can take any risk because they always keep backups of their bodies and minds on file) and the Cognitive Union (a slave-state with no masters, where brain implants keep every citizen in line with the ideals of the Union's long-dead founders). Player-character Patent Inspectors can hail from any of the Civilizations, though in some cases they will have to be outcasts or escapees from their original societies. A character's native Civilization determines the allowable range of his technological Capabilities, gives him two of his Core Values, and grants a special Benefit unique to each Civilization.

Core Values are one of the neater bits of the system. Each Civilization in Sufficiently Advanced is defined by its Core Values, usually two in number. (Examples include Life, Freedom, Safety, Diversity, and Longevity.) A character has the Core Values of the Civilization he grew up in, plus two more of his own choice. Each is rated from 0 to 20 at the player's option, reflecting his strength of his adherence to each value. It is possible for a character to have low or even 0 values in his civilization's Core Values, indicating that he either never bought in to his society's beliefs or has actively rejected them. A character's Core Value scores are used to resist attempts to get him to act against those Core Values.

Plot Scores are the other neat bit of the system. Plot Points themselves are like your basic Yum Yums, Drama Points, etc. -- they are earned in play and spent to allow characters to pull off otherwise impossible feats. Plot Scores, though, are a unique addition to this basic idea. Each Plot Score represents a different kind of "plot power," and each character will have a different array of Plot Scores. When a Plot Point is spent, it must be spent "through" one of the Plot Scores, which determines the form and scope of the plot alteration. Each of the seven Plot Scores is rated 0-5. A character gains a variable number of points to divide among his Plot Scores during character generation. Characters with lower Capability scores gain more points for Plot Scores, and vice versa. That way, relatively low-tech characters still have ways of contributing to the game even though they can't lift tons, see into the infrared, or survive an atomic blast.

The "Potential" Plot Score doubles as the "experience" mechanic for Sufficiently Advanced. Potential represents a character's ability to alter the plot by suddenly being better than he was before -- revealing a previously unknown skill or technological upgrade, for example. Spending a Plot Point through Potential as usual simply allows a character to get out of one situation this way, but Potential itself can also be lowered permanently in order to permanently improve a character's Capabilities. Additional Potential is earned only when the GM feels it is appropriate, so this method works pretty much like the distribution and spending of XP in other games.

Capabilities are similar to the innate "attributes" of other game systems. However, few beings in the Sufficiently Advanced future are limited to the talents they were born (or otherwise created) with. Thus, rather than a category of natural ability, each Capability represents a category of technology that can be used to boost normal human capacities. Capability scores range from 1-10, with ratings 1-3 representing the unmodified human range and ratings 4-10 representing increasing degrees of technological amplification. The five Capabilities are Biotech (physical), Cognitech (mental), Metatech (social), Nanotech (perceptual), and Stringtech (combat). The player chooses his character's Capabilities freely, subject to any minimum or maximum tech levels available to his native Civilization. The catch is that higher Capabilities mean fewer points to divide among Plot Scores, as noted above.

Professions are like Jobs in QAGS; each one is a package of skills and areas of knowledge handily described in a single word or phrase. Examples should be easy to imagine. Professions are rated 1-10, like Capabilities, and are bought by "spending" years of one's age. Characters with high Cognitech Capabilities learn faster, so they can master more Professions in the same number of years.

Task Resolution
Sufficiently Advanced started out as a diceless system and "grew" a dice mechanic in the course of its development. Some artifacts of this change are still apparent in the quickstart rules. Most obviously, a character's various scores must be translated into die ratings via a table before they can actually be used. Possibly, a future version of the rules will rate a character's scores in dice to begin with. (For the curious, the die-equivalents are set up to have a maximum result equal to twice the numeric score. Thus, a score of 1 translates to a die rating of d2, a 2 to d4, a 3 to d6, and so on. After d12, multiple dice are used; a score of 7 translates to a rating of (d10+d4), and so forth.)

Once a player has the dice ratings of his various scores, the task resolution system is pretty standard: roll the highest applicable score (Capability, Profession, or sometimes Core Value) and compare it to a difficulty number. If engaged in a direct contest with another being, both roll and the higher result wins.

The concept of "reserve" modifies this basic system slightly. The game assumes that characters do not normally exert themselves at full potential. To represent the additional effort that can go into a task, each Capability and Profession has a pool of reserve points equal to its score. A player may spend one reserve point from the appropriate pool to roll twice and take the best result. Additional reserve points may be spent to add directly to the final result, on a 1 for 1 basis, though the final result cannot be more than doubled by that means. Reserve is generally regained with a night's sleep, though characters with superhuman Capabilities sometimes have to go to additional lengths to "recharge."

For extended conflicts, such as combat, a more involved system is used. Such struggles are played out in "exchanges" or rounds, which each consist of three steps -- Finesse, Power, and Resilience. (Those basically translate to "to-hit, damage, and soak.") A table shows which Capabilities to use for each step. In physical combat, for example, Nanotech (representing perception and coordination) is generally used for the opposed Finesse roll. In a fistfight, Biotech would be used for both the Power and Resilience steps, while in a combat involving implanted gravity beams and force fields, Stringtech would be used for both instead.

Sufficiently Advanced Technology
Following the rules, a short section describes the most important technologies of the fourth millennium. Far more are promised in the full rules. The best part of this section is not the individual technologies, but the overall use of Clarke's Law for flavor. The technology of Sufficiently Advanced really is indistinguishable from magic in several ways. Small AI brains in most tools take the place of familiars and demons. Since the most powerful of these AIs were actually spawned by the Aia as their eyes and ears in the slow-moving human world, even the idea of bargaining with something that holds greater loyalty to another master and may not have your best interests at heart holds true. Furthermore, in a world where people can have planet-destroying weapons implanted in their bodies, no one wants such things going off accidentally, so complex activation triggers are built into each piece of technology. These usually take the form of nonsense words and unnatural gestures, which would naturally be mistaken for spellcasting by the ignorant. Those of sufficiently high Cognitech can use mental triggers instead, which in turn gives rise to tales of psychic powers on primitive worlds. Even something as simple as a direct neural connection to the infosphere gives one all the divinatory powers of a legendary oracle or prophet.

My Overall Opinion
I love the ideas of transhumanism and transhuman/posthuman SF, so Sufficiently Advanced pushes a large number of my happy buttons. Compared to the closest contender, the GURPS-based Transhuman Space, I believe it's actually the superior game, even at this stage of its development. The mechanics are set up to focus directly on the issues of that kind of setting, especially with Core Values and the tech-based Capability scores. A more generic system like GURPS struggles to keep up with the possibilities of posthumanity, while here those possibilities are built right in. I also think Sufficiently Advanced is a more easily digestible game than Transhuman Space. The higher-tech setting, the pseudo-magical tech, and the cinematic flair added by Plot Scores will appeal to a lot more players than the relatively hard SF of THS, and the "Patent Inspectors" premise gives immediate direction to a campaign while still giving the PCs a reason to be involved in a wide variety of situations throughout the setting. Some people may be leery of it for the same reasons they are leery of Continuum (which I suspect had some influence on Sufficiently Advanced) -- the notion of helping work toward a particular future under the direction of inhuman aliens rubs some folk the wrong way. Even though the Transcendentals are written as the good guys (and there's no companion game that portrays them as bad, unlike Continuum/Narcissist), I suspect there are some who will find their motives suspect or their goal of a transcendent humanity not altogether sympathetic.