The University of Chicago

Role-Playing

ExoTerra is a role-playing game world as well as a research community. Each player will create a unique character, members of the 1000-person crew of a space colony ship which left Earth in the 23rd century (2200s). You will get to make many of the key decisions about your character: your role on the ship, your areas of specialization, your secondary skills and hobbies, your country of origin, while other parts of the character will be determined by the details of the ExoTerra world designed by the orchestrators. You will play your character in conversation with other player characters in the online community as you design your part of the new world, and as the whole community explores and advances the ongoing story.

Sections of This Page:

Basics of ExoTerra Role-Playing

As your character, you will get to meet and talk with fellow crew-members, hear the discoveries that are made about the new solar system, discuss and advise on one another’s projects, participate in big crew-wide decisions, talk with Non-Player Characters (NPCs) meaning other people in the world played by orchestrators (who have unique information about the world and story), and work together to advance the ongoing plot. Since you can do as much, or as little, as you want, the role-playing very easy for first-time role-players, but players who enjoy developing a complex character and diving deep into the world will always find find that those efforts unlock more depth. It is entirely up to you whether you wish to keep your character fairly simple or develop something complex, and whether you want to create a character similar to a future version of yourself, with the same skills and specializations, or explore being someone very different.

The page below gives more details about how the character creation and role-play will work. You will get more detailed character creation and world documents as things begin, and orchestrators who are veteran game-runners will always be available to help.

When and Where Will the Role-Playing Take Place?

Short answer: online, and whenever you like. The Role-Playing component of ExoTerra will take place in the online community of the ExoTerra Discord Server (accessible by phone and computer) rather than in class (unless an instructor in an appropriate course, such as a theater course, decides to invite role-playing in the classroom.) Most of the role-play will happen in text-based discussion threads (designed to load easily even with poor internet connections). These will be open throughout the year, so you can pop in and play your character at any time, chatting with others and commenting on news and developments as often or as little as you wish. You can check the text chat at any time, and respond to things at your leisure, or make an appointment with friends to meet for a discussion at a pre-arranged time.

The server will have different text threads for different types of conversation: a ship-wide channel for major discussions, hallway threads for casual chat and silliness, topic-specific threads for discussing projects and plans, a council chamber for big debates, and you can also request and create private threads where you can chat with a specific group of friends. Discord also builds in voice and video chat options, so it is extremely easy to spontaneously suggest, “Hey want to continue this on voice?” and jump into a voice channel with a single click. Various public voice channels will represent different parts of the ship (the bridge, engineering, the mess hall), and there are also more private voice rooms. The system makes it easy to have very large conversations with a hundred players weighing in, and very small ones with just two or three people, all in one place. The Discord Server page explains the technical details, but it’s a very easy system, and we will offer training sessions and tutorials.

There will also be NPCs, played by orchestrators. These are not standard crew members but other beings you can interact with, such as leaders and experts back on Earth, the crew of other nearby colony ships, and the A.I. personalities in the different computers that run the ships. Talking to NPCs is a major way to learn more about the ExoTerra world, and discover new projects and possibilities. Sometimes NPCs will give you important information or documents if you ask, or persuade them to; other times they may present a puzzle you need to solve to access what you seek, for example decrypting a coded message, solving a riddle, or diagnosing the cause of a computer error. When players learn new information from NPCs, it is then your job to share that information with fellow crew-members and decide how to act upon it. Thus those who enjoy role-playing and puzzle-solving can enjoy spending time with NPCs unlocking mysteries, while those who don’t enjoy it can look forward to learning what their crew mates discover, and helping to brainstorm and implement new plans in response to revelations.

The Discord server will also have out-of-character channels, where you can talk as yourself with fellow players and with admins, about the game, projects, class, but also about different majors, other classes, campus news, world news, fun memes, planning other games or social activities, anything you like, and there will be special channels for first-years and for students who are graduating soon; you can request new custom out-of-character channels too if you want one, for example for your RSO, your dorm, or a dedicated topic.

How Much Role-Playing Do I Have to Do?

Have to do? None. If you would prefer simply working on developing your part of the new world and never interacting with the forums that’s your choice, or you can pop in to read about new discoveries and see new game documents without joining the discussion. You can also make your character basically simply be a version of yourself from a future time, so you don’t need to worry about how your character’s response to something would differ from your own. But if you would enjoy developing a complex character and exploring the role-play deeply, exploring another perspective and another world can be a wonderful way to grapple with ethics, politics, and to explore how theories and principles apply to a real community. After all, the planet is imaginary, but the people and the process of organizing yourselves, creating a government, learning how to cooperate, taking the lead at times, and making hard choices, those are all real, and can be a powerful way to develop skills and learn about yourself.

It is also possible to engage deeply but with limited time; if you are someone who loves complex character and deep role-playing but you have a busy year ahead and fear you may not have much time for role-play, you can still design a complex character and enjoy a powerful narrative without committing to spending time on puzzles or talking to NPCs, since everyone will get to see the new game documents and discoveries, even if you don’t have much time to spend in the forums.

What Are the Player Character Options?

A few things are fixed about all characters, since they are all the crew of the ship so went through similar training. You will receive more detailed game world documents as autumn approaches, but in brief, the ExoTerra mission is one of a wave of missions organized by the United Nations which left Earth to colonize other planets starting in the late 2100s. The crew chosen to settle the new planet are all young adults (college-aged), so you will all have many working years to give to building the new world.

You all spent many years together training for the mission since childhood, and have many memories of the boarding-school-like training period, along with a few older (often vague) memories of early childhood. Because you were raised in the training program, you and your fellow ExoTerra crew members lived rather aloof from the broader world of Earth politics, so while you will get a general background packet telling you about the state of Earth when you left, there will be much still to discover about your home world as well as about your new world. And the Earth you left is not the one that you must deal with: in this world, humanity does not have faster-than-light travel, but does have cold sleep technology, so the journey to this new star system has taken a full century. You spent most of it asleep, waking only for the shifts when it was your turn to monitor the ship systems.  Thus each crew member spent roughly four years of conscious time on the ship, working with a small crew of close friends to monitor the ship during your shift (you can pick your group), and sleeping the rest of the time, but Earth has undergone a century of change in that time, and may be very different from the world you left. The game begins when the crew awakens from cold sleep.

As you design your character you will get to make many decisions such as appearance, personality, hobbies and skills, weaknesses if you would enjoy exploring some, and what subjects your character studies. It makes sense for you to have at least one specialty which corresponds to the committee you will work on, i.e. you should have some knowledge of animal biology if you are on the committee to choose which animals to release into the forests from your bank of frozen animal eggs, but your character could also have an additional specialty in law, or music, as you like. In addition to studying specialized subjects like public policy or oceanography, all the crew members have also trained for some more direct type of labor that will be needed on the new world: mining, farming, childcare, robot maintenance, nursing, construction, transport driving, manufacturing, so that everyone will do both intellectual labor and less glamorous tasks, rather than replicating old class disparities. And every player will choose which of the crew positions you filled on the ship during your four year shift (engineer, cold sleep overseer, astronomical data analyst, etc.). If you have friends doing ExoTerra, you can request as a group to form one of the small crews together, each taking a different crew position, or you can let us hook you up with new people based on a survey we will send about your interests, a good way to make new friends.

In addition to deciding your personality and specializations in your training, you will also fill out a casting survey which will ask you how interested you are in in engaging with via a wide variety of themes (war, family, medical ethics, deep space exploration, migration, rivalry, intense friendship, loss, disability, economic justice, artificial intelligence, etc.). We will also ask a few other questions about what aspects of the game most excite you, and what kinds of activities you most enjoy in a game. We will use this casting survey to then assign the key part of your character you won’t create yourself: your memories of early childhood, and the backstory they connect you to. Each child who chose to join the crew of ExoTerra had a reason to leave home and family behind at a young age and commit to leaving Earth behind, and like all children you had only partial control over your choices at such an early age. Your backstory will give you something deeper to shape your character, and give you a personal connection to the story. For those who say on the survey that you would enjoy it, the developments and revelations may expose surprises about your past, while those who prefer something more stable will still receive a backstory that adds richness to your character as you enjoy supporting friends through what they learn about their pasts, and joining everyone in reacting to new discoveries about both your new home, and the old.

Will There be a Code of Conduct?

Yes, safe role-playing always requires some basic rules about civility, healthy ways to engage with more intense subject matters, ways to be sensitive about hot-button issues, and best practices for handling conflict. The code of conduct will be discussed in the character materials you receive closer to the start of the event, and there will be moderators to help and guide things along. There will also always be orchestrators available to give advice, listen to questions, and help, whether with tiny things such as trouble finding the right text channel, major things such as tension with one of your collaborators, strategic things like advice on how to gather support for a plan or proposal, and creative things such as a new idea for a project or game activity.

Further Questions?

We will keep expanding this page, so please contact us if there’s something you’d like to know that isn’t covered, or see our page about the Discord Server, which answers many logistical basics.