The Plaintext version:

The Trials of the Human Diaspora

Humanity, despite the impossibility of Faster Than Light (FTL) travel, finally set out to make their way in that final frontier: outer space. We resorted to chemically-induced stasis for millennia-long flights to distant stars, but without FTL, people wake up and conduct their lives on such disparate timescales that community, in a broader sense, has become a far more casual than personal affair. One person’s memory of the same planet, its environments and its cultures, could be completely different from the person they’re talking to, who grew up 1 million years later.

Entire civilizations traveling the vast expanse of space will arrive on a planet only to find that they know nothing of its technology, language, or customs. The idea of meaningful technological progress for the collective human race has been shattered by an endless cycle of abandonment and rediscovery by relatively primitive peoples from millions of years ago.

This is a game about humans floundering in the galaxy.

There’s no FTL, there’s no teleportation, no aliens, and no magic solution to any of our problems that doesn’t come at a prohibitive cost, as per usual. It’s just us getting by, and the terrible, stupid things we do to ourselves when left to our own devices.

Overview: How the game plays

Future Problems is a creative engine for coming up with ridiculous worlds, societies, and characters. It has the basic shape of a TTRPG with a GM and players playing characters, but the characters are initially armed with a few paltry stats. As play progresses, players tell the table details about their home planet, the society they're from, and their place in it, all of which the player will try to pry relevant skills from in order to help them with their dice rolls.

Included at the end are an example scene showing the flow of play, as well as what a party's list might look like at the end of a game. I would only advise that you never show either to your players (hence why they're in the back), as the fun in this game is what deranged things come off the tops of the players' heads when they bend the foundations of their societies to try to get a leg up on an immediate problem, which is a very human thing to do.

THE RULES

Character Creation:

At the start of the game, players briefly describe their HUMAN characters, giving one fact a piece about their planet, their society, and themselves or their place in that society, and we write those down in a place everyone can see. I recommend opening a shared doc, getting a whiteboard, or starting a thread. The GM is going to be adding to this list. A lot.

When brought out of cryosleep, characters have a severe case of brain fog and body cramps which both gradually clear up during play. Each stat starts at 1, and players have 3 points to spend on increasing them (maybe related to their starting facts).

STATS:

BODY - Physical stuff like punching, balancing, seeing, hearing.

MIND - Being smart, knowledgeable, wise, using technology.

FACE - Interacting with people and getting what you want out of those interactions.

The stats might seem vague, but characters’ rolls are going to be informed by the society they grew up in as play progresses, so a person who “grew up in low gravity” might get an extra die on a body roll to traverse the outside of a space station, but then have to roll on 6s* to open the hatch because of their weak noodle arms.

*I’ll get to that in a minute.

Play:

Players need a number of successes on each roll, typically 1, 2, or 3 depending on the difficulty of the task. A success is a 5+ on a d6, and you roll a number of d6s depending on your stat.

Before rolling, you can give another fact about your society that might be relevant. If a fact is helpful to your roll, you may add a die to your roll, and add a die to future rolls that are relevant. You can’t write down more facts until everyone has as many facts written down as you.

If you’ve already given details that put you at a clear disadvantage for the roll, the GM might rule that successes occur on a 6 instead of a 5+.

If at any point two facts seem contradictory, “that sounds like a future problem” and the player who gave them must give a strict downside about their character caused by the conflicting nature of their home.

When Does it End?

The game ends when some goal is reached, every player has 3 “future problems”, and/or everyone dies:

When a character fails a roll, the GM may have them take a wound and specify the type of wound: physical, mental, or superficial (corresponding to body, mind, and face). While they have a wound, a character has -1 dice rolls for that stat for each wound they have. When a character rolls with zero dice, if they would take a wound on a failed roll, they are out (usually dead, but it’s your story).

Because each character’s pool of dice is continually growing, if they can creatively sell the details of their character, it’ll be pretty hard to die. Conversely, an uninterest(ed/ing) schlub will be out quickly. I’d recommend giving characters a fair amount of leeway.

What Next?

This game is meant to be played in one-shots, any more development of a character beyond a single session becomes unmanageable. What you do end up with, however, is a list of great settings and ideas for worlds where you could play another game. Maybe you like one of the players’ ideas and use that as the basis for another adventure, maybe they get to be the GM for the next game, whatever floats your boat.

Examples of Play:

Here’s what a list for the party might look like at the end of a session, followed by how a scene might play out in Future Problems:

Character List:

(the negative numbers represent wounds)