NASA's Isekai D&D Adventure (That Exists for Some Reason) 

I have two hypotheses for how this kind of product could be produced: 1. One or more managers largely unfamiliar with D&D came up with a science communication idea, and dropped a series of ideas and restrictions onto one or more interns who _are_ familiar with D&D but struggled to make something within those constraints. 2. Someone had some really cool idea, but those ideas were turned into a playable adventure by someone who didn't really care about that idea and filled in the gaps with whatever came to mind first. There's a mix of potentially interesting ideas and thoughtlessly generic ones that makes me wish I could learn about its development.

I would like to state for the record that this adventure is not representative of the quality of rpgs run by NASA engineers.

I was baffled at first as to why the player characters end up in some random location when they’re first isakaied into the world, since they were brought there deliberately and you would think that the folks who brought them there would be able to have them just appear directly in front of them. Then I realized it was just so the game could include the stereotypical DnD tavern setting. Also, something that would have been cool to have would be if the players had to do actual science experiments irl to solve puzzles. I need to go talk to NASA…

When I heard NASA made rpg content, I thought they made a Sci-Fi rpg

The sad thing is that 'Hubble is missing, explore a strange always night world to find it' is a concept you could spin an entire campaign/adventure path out of. Like Hubble is pretty much just a MacGuffin but both the journey and the setting have potential. Like grab something like Fate or Burning Wheel which handle social conflicts, and then play up the fact that the ruling class is academics. Sure, you want to find the important and culturally significant artefact from your world, but they're too busy fighting over papers and funding. Play up that they're humans from Earth, and thus have to navigate an endless night with only limited supplies. Can the group even find an alternative light source before their batteries and generators run out. Why would a dragon even put the freaking telescope, probably in an L4 or L5 point and how on earth are you getting there? Do the PC's values conflict with those of the planet, are there ones who'd rather stay because they like the society? Will they bring a glorious revolution against a tyrannical overclass? ...hold on, I'm going to check what systems I own and actually write this damn adventure properly,

BRB, writing a short game where the main activity is "solve science mysteries."

A Magic School Bus type adventure could have been a lot of fun. Instead, they made telescope porn.

This teaches you science skills? Damn time to add it to my resume

Had a thought: It's possible that what was going on with the governments was less "let's all live under a Science Directorate" and more "okay, what's a sciencey twist we could do on the usual Benevolent Fantasy Despot?"

The Hubble Space Telescope is pretty neat, though.

I was dumbfounded by this concept... why not lunar or mars missions? Spacewalks?? It's like a Director of NASA marketing was convinced to use their brand to promote a home brew game by a staff member.... Weird.

I bet the design process included the sentence "remember, rhe players are jot NASA engineers, so dont make the puzzles too hard."

This sounds exactly like the type of project my classmates had for their freshman internship projects. You'd get $18.50/hr + room & board to do projects that specifically couldn't benefit the agency/organization in a practical way (because if it did then they'd need to onboard them as agency employees with all the benefits & guaranteed job extensions that implies). As a result since they're too inexperienced to do any really interesting engineering "hey look at what our interns did with 6 weeks in our lab," projects, they just have to do something that teaches them basic group project management skills, some tech writing skills, and making some kind of promotional feature/materials. So yeah, probably a team of 5-7 high school seniors or college freshmen made this in like 4-6 weeks *tops.*

This is why I've grown to love this channel. It confirms I'm not theo nlyo ne whose heard of Hot Chicks: The Role-Playing Game.

I'm just going to mention this, because there seems to be a gap in NASA's long term memory, BOTH D&D AND Shadowrun have scientific dragons. The latter's even ran for President. As for D&D's, they imported from MtG's Ravnica a legend by the name of Niv-Mizzet, whom has the alignment of Chaotic Good.

Creating an engaging game that is also educational is difficult. The skill of game design aside, teaching is a skill in and of itself. Just being knowledgeable about a subject doesn't inherently make you good at teaching that subject or presenting it in an engaging manner. This NASA D&D adventure serves as a great example of that.

I wonder how NASA could forget the little problem of growing food on a planet without a sun. Not even considering that you’d probably freeze to close to absolute zero in a few weeks. That said, how would it be possible to make this scenario better?

The "two doors trap" thing reminded me of this really stupid npcs i had in a game that had a "super secret hidden entrance" for his club. It was two doors, and one of the doors was fake. Again, this character was supposed to be an idiot.

There should be problems with fire, food, are because there's no photosynthesis without sunlight

I enjoy your videos.

Light should be a problem and nobody should have night vision. Except for those creatures that normally have night vision

Did they only let the people that played AD&D and earlier write this? Because I think railroading and info dumps were more popular in the early 80s.

So the thing that I'm not seeing acknowledged in the video or the comments is that I'm pretty sure the target audience for this is faculty sponsors of middle school DND clubs. If you take that into account, I think some of the assumptions about character motivations make more sense. .

Why didn't they like make a simple early tech level 9 space RPG, like you're an astronaut on an expedition where robots are being used to mine asteroids, and cosmic rays cause their AI safety to fail and become killer robots, then you have to either defeat all of them or escape, either just describing the adventure, or using a free thing like the GURPS lite ruleset since that still has enough for basic 0g combat and all. though committing to using the basic set at least would give rocket science stuff which could be very fun and passively teach, you'll fast learn about physics when knock back in space can risk death or at the least wasting some of your prescious oxygen to change course. don't focus on a device but on the discoveries, make players feel like scientists, like simply giving a +1 or 2 for good explanations of the science you'll use like understanding the computer when you hack it, the chemistry of corrosion to create a chemical spray for the robots or whatever makes the retention go from a fact to an exciting success at a point of danger. If you want to run an asteroids and robots sort of game like that keep points low so it's tense, like 75 to 100.

I suspect dystopian Rogue World. The whole reason there a rogue world is because of magic, somebody knocked this world into space through some some of that academic people

the eternal night part of the setting reminds me of Konrad Curze's homeworld from 40k which would be fucking cool if you did that but this is a much more neutered and boring dystopia

this sounds like this was the path players of nasa took and they thought someone might find it fun and made it a thing while not being a game dev.

This was difficult to watch from shear cursedness.

This could be integrated much better to spell Jammer. And could be a world that is visited. Edward make more sense than possession

Lol, it sounds like a Scientology pitch

7:00 based NASA?