If you're in a modern / high tech setting, what are some ways to make you vulnerable when in the wilderness? Imagine that you can travel through doorways that lead to other worlds in a sort of Stargate SG1 meets Jurassic Park, with lots of potentially dangerous critters. If you come across a T-Rex and can whip out a tank or rocket launcher, it's no contest. So something has to even the fight. You can use story, but it would be better if the reason turned on something more universal.

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What if the properties of the gate limited the weight and sophistocation of the item you could bring through? So a minigun would work, but a rocket launcher wouldn't. You could even drag through a trebuchet, but not a harrier jump jet. Without yet worrying about why, you could even make the challenge of world proportional to what you could bring through. This might be silly, though. But if it is, how would you make the wilderness challenging without resorting to outside threats?

Some thoughts:

-Put something more powerful/advanced in the wilderness? Going with your Stargate example here, I'm thinking of things like creatures with amazing healings powers like the Unas (I'm thinking of a 'blended' one I suppose), or funky powers like the Nox. Technological reasons are less likely, but could occasionally crop up I suppose. Perhaps the creatures have other exceptional abilities, such as a talent for conjuring illusions or some such.

-Make the environment itself quite challenging. A rocket launcher probably isn't going to be particularly helpful when you have to cross a deep chasm. You could have things like chasms, cliff faces, quicksand, bodies of water, etc.

-EMP/strong magnetic fields/something takes out anything electronic you take with you? Perhaps something about the particular environment interferes with the targetting system of some of your more advanced equipment, or other problems of that nature?

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Original post by Wavinator If you're in a modern / high tech setting, what are some ways to make you vulnerable when in the wilderness? Imagine that you can travel through doorways that lead to other worlds in a sort of Stargate SG1 meets Jurassic Park, with lots of potentially dangerous critters. If you come across a T-Rex and can whip out a tank or rocket launcher, it's no contest. So something has to even the fight. You can use story, but it would be better if the reason turned on something more universal.

This makes me think of a Robert Heinlein story (Tunnel in the sky / Hole in the Sky) ? Where students had to fight it out Battle Royale-style. They could take whatever they wanted (as long as they could carry it).

This makes me think of having weight limits, ie. a rocket launcher may save you from a T-Rex, but how many shells could you carry. Whereas, you could have a knife, a rope, some turbo-boots, and some survival-kits instead. And there could be a reload time for the return portal, (or it could be somewhere else).

This way each new planet that you try to colonise will be a challenge.

How about the complexity of an object would be directly related to the chance that the object wouldn't 'survive' the transport and would end up being broken in some way.

Dino Crisis 1 & 2 come to mind, in those games they used Time Dilation as their "Stargate". An experiement went wrong and a whole military base was zapped back in time. So, they have limited supplies, limited food, and have to deal with nearly limitless dinosaurs, disease and pests. Another thing to keep in mind is that while the T-Rex is menacing, Raptors are perhalps worse. Generally thought to be pack hunters and rather intelligent, they could pick off people one at a time or pull off tactics to surprise and throw people off guard.

The weight limits are also a good idea, with a re-charge timer on the gate the players would be hard-pressed to conserve their ammunition and supplies for important things. Danger could potentially not be from large enemies, but with survival in general with limited supplies in a hostile environment.

My first thought is some overlord or super force that would annihilate you if you used any actions deemed "unsuitable" or unsporting.

I think one of the coolest answers to this and a few other problems is in the dune universe. Basically the only group of people who supply space travel are the guild, they have a complete monopoly on it. Because of this they dictate a bunch of rules that, if any "house" (group of people) break, they forfit their space travel rights.

Also space travel is very expensive and so isn't used that often.


For the "naked in the wilderness" scenario, one of the rules could be that weapons that you bring to the new world have to already exist there.


Another idea is that the gate technology can only transport living objects. People travelling to the new world would be completely naked and would have to start from scratch. An entire base of operations would need to be built to produce weapons and other equipment.

[Edited by - umbrae on July 7, 2005 11:53:50 PM]

In another Heinlein novel, "Glory Road", the hero bounces through a variety of universes. Basic physics is a little off from world to world, so some tech just doesn't function the way it does here.

Once, for instance, he's picking weapons, and goes right for a big old M1 rifle. He's told to leave it behind, because gunpowder won't work where they're going. Chemistry isn't quite the same on the other side of the portal, and so the gasses can't be made to expand fast enough to propel the bullet. Swords and bows are the peak of human weapons technology that can be transferred effectively. As a nuance of the same physical anomalies, large lizards have evolved with the ability to breath fire without harming themselves. Quirky.

Some lawyer in California just wrote a book about how fine the balance of physical laws has to be for our universe to behave as it does. If hydrogen behaved only slightly differently, the sun wouldn't be able to burn. If water was just a touch thinner, salt wouldn't dissolve properly, and vital chemistry would be impossible. A tiny shift in the balance of electromagnetic radiation would keep all our atoms bouncing endlessly, without slowing enough to form solid matter.

Tiny little tweaks like this can explain most anything.

The Microwave theory - the portal works with less dense materials, like say, flesh, but it would burn out for denser stuff, unless in small quantities. So any big weapon would probably not work, but maybe say a ceramic knife (or glock 9mm) would be allowed. Also, think bows with explosive tips (somehow that makes me wanna say yeeehaw!), but no machine guns. You could also say that the process would make explosives burst, thus stopping any sort of explosive based weapon to be transported.

Would be curious to see what kind of wood and ceramics based weapons people would come up with.

This is pretty simple to do by simply making the creatures evolve to resist certain tech. If you want players to have to melee creatures then make them impervious to rocket launchers and arms fire and give them special light sabre type weapons.

Having a door be the limiter is less exciting to me personally than making the monsters more formidable, but both work.

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Original post by Wavinator What if the properties of the gate limited the weight and sophistocation of the item you could bring through?

Mass and energy (since the two are the same in a more universal scope). The more stored energy or mass an object contains, the more energy the gate requires in order to move the object a certain distance. Closer the target, the easier it is to move massive objects (which also means that closer targets will be easier to control, which makes sense). Finally, there is always the: "Well, what if i hook up tons of power to the gate?" problem, but that can be solved by simply stating: there is a physical limitation to the amount of energy the gate can use/direct (which makes sense in an electronics sense). All of this could be part of the "physics" of the universe, hence it would just be natural that carying a Plasma cannon through the gate would cost a great deal unless you shipped it in smaller parts (and sent the charge packs with no charge, which means you would need to ship an energy source, such as a portable fusion reactor, which should only require water to run...but what about that desert planet? Water in a jungle would be hard to find as well (lots of it, but it's distributed all over the place, rivers and such don't just magically appear, plus water would need to be fairly pure for a fusion reaction to begin.)