Holodecks

Encounters or entire missions can take place within a holodeck that provides a simulated environment. The mainstream holodeck technology used is sufficiently advanced and immersive that all Planetfall mechanics and consequences work more-or-less identically to in the 'real world' within this simulated environment, with the only tweaks being minor ad-hoc adjustments needed to bridge the gap where necessary.

In general, Planetfall missions and encounters that take place within a holodeck will use immersive "Neurophysiological Interface" (NPI) technology, meaning that all normal game mechanics carry across into the virtual world with almost no modification. In particular:

• Characters work exactly the same, with full access to their skills and full memory of themselves.
• Where skills rely on additional equipment or items, such as weapons, scanners, drones, pets, etc, those are freely available in the holodeck and function identically.
• Startouched abilities dependent on a link with a Ship Heart will still have a connection to the real Ship Heart, however simulated Ship Hearts may also be encountered within a holodeck scenario.
• Characters gain XP as normal.
• Any post-encounter / post-mission / 'permanent' effects that a character receives will work as normal mechanically, but the specifics of how they work in the real world may differ from what occurred in the holodeck.
  • If your character takes a Severe Injury in the holodeck, they take a Severe Injury in real life. But the effects of that Severe Injury in the real world, while equally severe, may only bear superficial resemblance to what occurred in the holodeck.
  • If your character performs a Tinkering in the holodeck and later wants to make that permanent, but the Tinkered item does not have a 'real world' counterpart, you can still receive a mechanically equivalent effect that is related to the effect you learned to create, but might differ in substance.

While other holodecks systems that work differently to the 'regular Planetfall rules' conceivably exist in setting (e.g. video games where everyone has flying skills), for gameplay purposes we suggest avoiding anything that vastly changes the mechanics without very good reason. If you find yourself writing a mission that really requires this, consider whether it would make more sense running as its own LARP system rather than as Planetfall! If in doubt, speak to the Refs.

Holodeck encounters and missions can cover more or less anything you want, so long as a suitable amount of input data would exist in the setting from which the holodeck program could be made: recordings, scans, archive data etc.

• The data does not have to be complete, though the less complete it is, the weirder and wilder the extrapolation is likely to be. Depending on your scenario this may or may not be what you want!
• The data does not have to be truthful - you could feed it nothing but fanfiction and get a holodeck program that accurately reflected that fanfiction - but regardless of the input, remember that player character abilities still work as normal.

Note: The 'extrapolator software' that processes the input to form holodeck encounters is analogous to OC present-day neural network technology that can take example phrases and spin out entire stories or artworks based on them - only more advanced. Importantly, this is not true intelligence in any way - much like the OC neural networks that get marketed as 'AI', it's just fancy pattern matching and extrapolation, and nothing more.