Sportsball

So, it occurred to me that in my comments on sports here I missed one very large elephant in the room that makes competitive sports… difficult.

Namely, the number of species, and then the number of clades of those species, and that’s before we start getting into individual-level modifications, which leads to truly astonishing levels of ability divergence in various areas, many of them qualifying as “special abilities”.

To some degree, as we do, you can try and level that with rules, but that’s limited in the first place unless you go for a blanket “only baselines, or at least only alphas, of one single species, can play” – which very much limits the number of players and amount of interest you’ll get – you’re dealing with an entire culture of people whose natural inclination is to exploit the hell out of loopholes in anything that seems “unfairly restrictive”.

And it’s not as if this “ain’t no rule” attitude wasn’t giving referees plenty of headaches long before there were any other species around. “Yes, the rulebook says that the ball must be in a player’s possession when it enters the scoring zone, but there Ain’t No Rule that says another player can’t PK-throw the possessing player into said zone, right?”

(Minor plot point from the Contact Novel That Shall Never Be Written: the first football team to come up with the notion of hiring a kaeth fullback. After the ensuing (mostly metaphorical) carnage, it didn’t take the NFL long to come up with the “must weigh under 400 lbs.” rule.)

As such, those attempts at competitive sports leagues which do exist tend to have rulebooks the approximate size of the unabridged Encylopaedia Britannica, and add about a chapter to their length every game as people find new, obscure abilities or new, not-yet-forbidden synergies of abilities to exploit.

Or they go the free-for-all route, but that’s less “competitive sport” and more “exhibition grand meleé, specializing in deviousness”.

 

The Two Laws of Writing Firm SF

…is today’s meta-post. These are the rules I live by, or at least the rules I write by.

One: If it violates the laws of physics or other natural laws in the setting, you can’t have it. On the other hand, you’re entitled to buy all the awesomeness you can squeeze inside them1.

Two: Any sufficiently advanced science and technology is functionally indistinguishable from space magic. It just has to work harder, and so do you.


1. Spartan-analogs riding armored bears inside boarding torpedoes in space included, obviously.

Trope-a-Day: Screw The Rules, I’m Doing What’s Right!

Screw The Rules, I’m Doing What’s Right!: Subverted inasmuch as, except for the most important of the rules, there is almost always a rule telling you explicitly that while you are expected to follow the rules, the rules are not there to substitute for thought, and they most certainly are not there to provide an excuse for being a damn fool.  Therefore, if you need to break the rules, this rule means that you’re actually following them by doing so. (The Order of Cirria is a medal which exists specifically to be given to people who achieve victory by doing this in a military context, even.)

This applies even to the criminal law – while for matters such as self-defense it’s explicitly covered, the general rule is that you can at least plead “justification”, as well as “necessity”, for just about any charge, and try to make your case in terms of the law’s fundamental principles and/or spirit.  It’s still not easy, but it has been known to work – rather more than it has in most Terran jurisdictions.