I was a Teenage Gearhead.

Hi everyone. My is Doug, and I'm a Gearhead.

Hi Doug.

For those of you not familiar with the term in relation to role-playing games, a gearhead is some one who obsesses over designing all aspects of whatever fantastic realm the game take place in. In moderation, as with all things, gearheading can add depth to the game setting and to the enjoyment of the game. But fall into the Stygian depths of design sequences and scientific calculators, as I did, and you'll hit rock bottom.

Which, bearing a gearhead, means you've calculated the exact velocity of the fall and how much damage you'll take based on whether the rock is sedimentary or igneous.

As with so many things I blame my elder sibling. For it was that worthy who introduced me to role playing in 1977 with Traveller. As a 10-year old science-fiction addict, being able to play out the adventures was simply the best thing since the invention of the taco, as far as I was concerned. Soon after I begin playing, I had acquired my own copy of the rules and I started building my own clusters of inhabited star systems.

Now Traveller uses a one-line strong of characters to describe worlds. For example:

( Arteaga B-57399A-B In )

That's what I got out of one line. But soon, people began demanding more. In Traveller's case, information on the number of gas giants and asteroid belts in the system, as well as on the local star was added. But still people wanted more detail. We began getting rules on figuring the exact length of the day and year, and how warm it was on the surface. Every one of those single-digit descriptors were expanded into their own lines of data.

And nobody cared! I've never met a single gamer who made use of all the crap these systems dumped on us. Players in any SF RPG don't want to get a BBC nature documentary. They want things that are relevant to the game at hand. A few notes on local color will get you through.

Things were worse when it came to equipment in games. The oft-mocked AD&D supplement Unearthed Arcana had pages devoted to all the different types of polearms used back when long-pointy sticks were the thing on battlefields. It was worse on the SF side.

For a time, "toolkits" were all the rage in gaming. It boiled down to companies saying "rather than paying people to design the Complete Book of Toys, were giving you the tools to do the work yourself." On the surface, a good idea.

Until you get into a book like Fire, Fusion, & Steel (FFS). This was supposed to be, in both its editions, the toolkit to end all toolkits. And like any good slavering gearhead, I dove right in. Then bounced off the math. I'm not good at math. But Texas Instruments and spreadsheet writers had my back, and reached the waking-up-in-an-alley-wearing-someone-else's-shoes nadir of my gearheading.

There was a book being written by a couple of Traveller Mailing List's stalwarts. Imperial Squadrons was the name. I was tapped to design four ships for the early Imperial Navy. I dove right in. Friends, these were not going to be easy designs. The largest of these ships, the Coronation-class Dreadnaught, was a kilometer long and had a crew of thousands. And I designed it down to the last kiloliter of space. In a ship that massed more than all the US Navy's aircraft carriers combined, I stressed over a space not much bigger than a bathroom stall.

But dear God, those designs freaking sang! I knew every inch of those ships. They were, to my mind, the ultimate expression of what you could do with FFS! Then the book came out; and my designs were gone. Oh, they kept the write ups, but the glorious details? Reduced to a useless "combat card." I was actually devastated.

But that's where I realized that all this detailing is pointless! All players care about with their ships is how they perform and what's in them in the most general sense. Why bother with details that no one is ever going to use?

The last design work I did for an RPG book was the equipment chapter in GURPS Traveller: Ground Forces. Christopher Thrash did the design chapter, as i recall, I built the stuff. And for that, close was good enough. I was more about usable in a game than trying to be a defense contractor.

Now I've gone all the way in the other direction. My preferred gaming system this dates is FATE, which is as far from gearheading as you can get.

To be clear, I'm not saying devoting time and energy to building worlds is wasted. Just know when to stop and understand what is going to be important to the story you are building.

Besides, there's always time to go back and expand a little.