Science-hard players in RPG

hello Veeky Forums, has anyone here encountered a person or is one of them himself, who, in table-top games really into science to the point that not only every character they create has to be scientist/engineer with 140 IQ but also in every possible world: XXI century? Scientist, Medieval-like world? Medieval scientist or scientist from the future, Full on magical world where even standard fighter has variety of spells in his arsenal? Cranked up scientist.

It's not that I have something against those characters, BUT if someone just goes for "science fuck yeah" no matter the setting, it beckons the question "why"

If anything science beckons the question why, the answer is usually somewhere between "why not" and "because we can".

I guess you're right, but it doesn't brings me any closer to greater understanding of such people

Yeah, In a WW2 supers game, had a player who wanted to play a multi-millionaire scientist / engineer who had invented the tracking system for battleship cannons.

He then made himself a super-scientist who had invented a walking mecha.

So, Rich smart guy with giant robot. Good archetype? Classic isn't it?

Except it wasn't enough for him.
He had to mass produce his giant robots for the US military to use.

This is actually against the rules of Wild Talents, Super Science effects stop working out of the sight of their creators.

>He had to mass produce his giant robots for the US military to use
True, I didn't notice this before but mass production seems to be their next step after having created something

Science is the best way to obtain knowledge about the world.
Knowledge has, almost without exception, led to power on a societal scale.
"I invent gunpowder" guy is almost always trying to von Neumann his way to the top of your campaign world. He's just SLIGHTLY more clever about it than Killfuck Soulshitter: the guy who tries to treat every campaign world like the setting of Doom.

Sound like THAT guy if the player isn't a humorous people person.

>who, in table-top games really into science to the point that not only every character they create has to be scientist/engineer with 140 IQ but also in every possible world
Sounds like a guy with a very myopic take on RPGs.

>mass production seems to be their next step after having created something
True to an extent, but don't get 'mass production' confused with 'factory production' and don't get 'factory production' confused with 'automated production'. Just because a person can build it doesn't mean you can reasonably expect to turn around and get a modern factory line to be able to increase production 100 fold. There's a looooot of work to be done to get it to that point.

My issue's more with the 140 IQ players that refuse to acknowledge that they don't just have "layman's knowledge" and assume that all of their characters would be able to figure out the composition of gunpowder and thermite and how to efficiently produce it in large quantities in a fucking bronze age setting.

To be fair, that's just modern people being arrogant.

What seems like basic knowledge to us was a mystery to people back then.

Like people believed that a wife could cheat on her husband and cuck a dude if she had feelings for another guy while pregnant, like the baby would be 'fathered' by the guy she had feelings for and look like him instead.

Yeah, but it's a case of guys like that refusing to acknowledge that it's common knowledge.

The most recent situation:
>So you have been sent on a clandestine mission by the consulate to empower a minor barbarian tribe that is sympathetic to our cause, so it can come to dominate the neighboring tribes and rule the region as a puppet of the consulate. How do you proceed?
Easy, let's make cannons for them. They'll crush the other tribes with superior firepower.
>But you can't, only the greatest minds of the empire can produce flammable powders and even then, they're just curiosities and they don't know how to weaponize them.
That's bullshit. It's literally just sulfur, saltpeter and charcoal mixed in the right quantities. Anyone could put it together.
>Your character probably isn't even aware that any sort of black powder exists.
Oh, fine. So, my character comes up with the idea of a tube that launches projectiles really far and tries to think of a way of making projectiles move that fast. He comes up with explosive powder and puts together the reagents to make it work. It's pure logic. Anyone that isn't brain-dead could make a cannon in their garden shed with the right reagents.
>Your character doesn't even have any crafting or any knowledge skills though, you're playing a seasoned centurion, not any sort of scientist or researcher.
God, you're not even listening to me. Anyone could make this stuff, who cares about the right skills? Whatever, if you're going to railroad us I'm just going to text my GF until I'm allowed to do something.

kick him out

I have a couple people who are like that. I've found that it's mostly people who are kind of smart, but not as smart as they think they are

There is always the fucktard that brings his own knowledge to builds things that don't exist on the setting. I remember a player bringing blueprints and all to make auto cranking multi shot crossbows on a low fantasy medieval setting.

People also believed circa the early modern period that women had to orgasm during sex in order for a child to be conceived.

I wonder where we went wrong.

Even most people today wouldn't know how gunpower is made, and even if they did, wouldn't be able to explain why it works. Sure, you might've seen that episode of Star Treck where captain Kirk uses suphur, saltpeter and charcoal to make gunpowder to shoot that guy in a stupid lizard costume, but that's very different to understanding why Kirk could do that, which would be crucial to actually inventing gunpowder from scratch. Hell, I can't tell why exactly that specific combination produces gunpowder since chemistry is not my area of expertise (I know saltpeter is there because it's a nitrogen compound, and nitrogen compounds make good basis for explosives since nitrogen bonds contain a lot of energy that is released explosively if you break them; trinitrotoluene and nitroglyserine are explosives for the same reason).

Saltpeter, charcoal, and sulphur is kind of a random combination of materials, especially to a person who isn't aware of chemistry (ie. pretty much everybody in a quasi-medieval setting), so you're unlikely to just figure it through logic. If your character is an alchemist, they might discover it through trial and error, which is how gunpowder was actually discovered: alchemists did experiments with all kinds of materials, and at some point somebody noticed that saltpeter reacts explosively in certain conditions. From there on it was a matter of using trial and error to find a combination of materials that resulted in an explosive powder that would be safe to handle but could be easily set off.

Yep, I'v got one of those.

She's a biologist, but it seems she desperately wants to be an engineer. She always played that class in TF2 as well even though she complained it wasn't fun.

She always has to go for like the combination Alchemist/Doctor characters in old-world RPGs, and straight up scientists in modern ones.

Her characters goals are always some dream invention or cure or something, which is great the first time but it's always an excuse to try and use real-world knowledge in-game.

Whenever we try a new system I always try and guess what class she's gonna choose.

Like these characters wouldn't be so bad in a vacuum but it's just fucking boring at this point. Nobody enjoys it.

The worst part is that there's aaaaaaaaaaalways snarky IC comments about brains over brawn. A running joke (that she doesn't feel included in and has complained about) is how, when faced with a closed door, she'll try to concoct an acid to eat through the lock (very clever the first time). The barbarian walked up and just kicked the thing down, it wasn't anything special.

Anyway shit like this just kept happening to the point where, when she was working furiously to cure an ill child, the barbarian asked if he could attempt to "just kick the disease out of him".

Anyway, that's my venting done for the day.

Sometimes people just like an archetype. I love the spiritually wise but potentially world naive warrior mage. Like Avatar Ang or Obi Wan Kenobi (doesn't have to be world naive).

Some people just want to be a badass wizard character.

>Anyone could put it together.

See, when someone in my group said this to me, I just stopped and let him do it, and let him him have his shitty medival guns.

Followed by, after they first get used and he realizes how shit his one-shot handguns are, them getting ambushed by gun-toting alchemists with far better guns, and even a cannon, which they threaten to use unless he hands over all his guns, prototypes, any blueprints he might have, etc, because they came up with guns first and are deadset on keeping the monopoly on them.

Cue said player throwing a shitfit that someone else had guns, to which I point to his "It's common sense! Anyone can do it!" comments, adding that if inventing gunpowder/guns is as braindead easy as he says, what makes him think he was the first one to do it?

They also bombed his lab when they (rightly) suspected he was hiding gunpowder and guns there because he couldn't Bluff to save his life.

>They also bombed his lab when they (rightly) suspected he was hiding gunpowder and guns there
My kek-boner is so hard right now

Maybe starting an arms race against a cabal of mad alchemists isn't a great move when all you've got is homemade flintlocks.

What's that guy's eplanation for gunpowder not being invented earlier in the real world?

probably people in ancient times were not as smart as him :^)

But it's common sense.
Anybody can do it!

As someone who knows fuck all about mathematics but respects it immensely, I have plenty of characters who fit that bill.

This is true.

Not in every setting, but I'm playing as a super-scientist in a fantasy setting right now. Its amazing. I fight SCPs and don't afraid of anything.

>Knowledge has, almost without exception, led to power on a societal scale.
>He had to mass produce his giant robots for the US military to use.
>She's a biologist, but it seems she desperately wants to be an engineer
>As someone who knows fuck all about mathematics but respects it immensely
That could be reasons, lack of understanding but seeing science as something so powerful it trumps any other choices. I start to see the pattern in those stories, which could be the right answer to my question

If you could tell us about your characters that would be great, maybe it will show me even more to those type of chars than this thread did already

why is that man firing meowths out of a crossbow

To be fair, as a biologist I find myself trapped in settings that barely add some biopunk into things and even if they do it its subjected much more to medical than actual biology.

Like is hard to see organic buildings, living weapons or a "monster creator". I mean, if I want to create my big swarm of social spiders that carry jumping worms that literally chew their way out of their victims very fast I have to resort to DM discussing(with all the problems that it implies)

Meanwhile, the people that want to create their grenades carrying carbon nanoeaters find their rules around the manual or suplements.

And all sci-fi games have hacking and related stuff(but very few actually do it right or near right)

So at times you feel the need to be autistic, but still there is no excuse.

Thankfully, GURPS is there to do anything you want, 40k has the adeptus biologicas(that is almost never heard of but still helps as a baseline) and tyranids and EP short of contemplates the idea but is still very far and unfocused from actual biopunk.