The dystopian future

There are two main stream approaches to designing a futuristic dystopian game universe. There is the Matrix model and the Warhammer model. In the former, the antagonists are the machines. Mankinds own creations. This dystopian future is usually regarded as imminent, as in the Terminator films and usually set within the next era of technology. The latter is set further down the line with humanity having spread out into a galaxy filled with garish cartoon races all sporting an ardent desire for warfare and all more or less balanced against each other in the technological aspects of war. Warhammer is after all a table top wargame system.

Of these two, I find the aspect of rebellious machines to be far more effective and realistic. I don't like the fairy tale concept that humanity will meet a host of alien races, all hell bent on 1914 style warfare.

If I were to make a dystopian science fiction game therefore, I'd set it in the near future and keep it on Earth (and in low Earth orbit). I'd have intelligent machines as the antagonists and I'd have humanity as fighting for its survival in a world where the machines were battling each other. I conceived such a game a few years ago, where the players would be survivors of an ongoing third world war. The idea was the machines were still fighting long after the Earths human population had been reduced to ashes and a few isolated pockets of refugee warriors. I set the game here in Denmark, because Denmark was familiar and also because I can imagine Denmark being the sort of place which gets over looked in a global conflict (though naturally the city's had all long since been nuked).

The point of the game was strategy. The players had to fight against the local machine mind (once their own defence network) and defend their dwindling pocket of humanity (hidden out in the Danish countryside in an under ground settlment). The global conflict had reached a stalemate and the opposing sides were engaged in an entrenched conflict with neither side having any great advantage over the other. The nuclear war had long since been replaced with a more subtle conflict as stealth and deception became the most advantagous method of fighting.
Thus the human survivors found themselves in a world where the machines were dangerous, but not swarming over everything like locusts.

We gave up this game because we realised that the dynamics of modern weaponry were already too powerful for 28mm table top gaming. Once you get into the ranges involved then you can't really fit modern combat onto a table top, except maybe in an urban, Iraq style setting, but this sort of conflict doesn't fit with the sort of all out war that is envisioned in a dystopian conflict. Pitting a man in power armour against an AI in a 'spider tank' means you have to take several thing into account. The AI's reaction time for example. Machines and computers can react far faster than any human being. Two elements in heavy armour trading fire power at long range, over a series of a few seconds, can be entertaining, but it doesn't work well in 28mm.