Totes flashing back to my childhood right now...
The noble PC in my game has a yacht - and a mortgage to go with it, requiring over 200,000 credits repayment per month. There's no way to make that sort of money just ferrying passengers on your yacht!one of the elements particularly going in Classic Traveller, per Miller, is that "legitimate" activity, such as trade and passengers, are by design insufficient to pay the bills: the game economy is designed to corner players into desperate gambits just to stay afloat, to "do crime" as Captain Malcolm Reynolds might say.
Hence... shennanigans and ADVENTURE!The noble PC in my game has a yacht - and a mortgage to go with it, requiring over 200,000 credits repayment per month. There's no way to make that sort of money just ferrying passengers on your yacht!
Well, currently they're caught up in some sort of biological weapons smuggling/manufacture conspiracy. Having been paid to smuggle high-tech medical equipment on to a low-ish tech world, under the impression it was going to be taken to an even lower-tech world where the virus exists in the wild, they've disccovered that (i) the virus is already on the world they're on, and (ii) the medical equipment seems to be staying onworld, but is being taken out of the domed city to some isolated place. We finished our last session as they were approaching that isolated place in their ATV, which is filled to the brim with weapons and grenades (hidden in secret compartments, so as not to come to the attention of the authorities) but is running low on food and water (after the travel took longer than they had planned for).Hence... shennanigans and ADVENTURE!
It's something I gave a lot of thought to, a long time ago. So it's been kinda settled in my own mind, but re-examining it is muddy.I think I understand. It's an interesting point. I have to reflect on how to feed it into my Traveller GMing.
I think that, for the reasons you lay out, the most popular sci-fi RPGs have always been tied in to an existing IP (namely, Star Wars in multiple iterations). A "generic" sci-fi is a tall order.It's something I gave a lot of thought to, a long time ago. So it's been kinda settled in my own mind, but re-examining it is muddy.
In no particular order and to no precise purpose or point:
In fantasy, it seems OK to have a fantasy world with fantasy political units, and just give them all novel proper nouns, and call it a day - leaving everything else approximately like some pre-gunpowder period/place in history. In science fiction, it's fine to posit another world, but if there are humans, they've been transplanted there by some precursor race, or descended from colonists or something, there can be plenty of earth flora & fauna (likewise transplanted), but probably some native-to-the-planet stuff, too. Otherwise, the people will be at least Star Trek forhead-ridges, or ERB-color-not-found-in-humans 'alien.'
You could plop a random character from The Sword & the Sorcerer (or any even worse 80s fantasy flick) into LotR or Hyborea or Nehwon, and, apart from ignorance of the local proper nouns, he'll barely stand out. You plop a Green Man of Mars onto Dune or Pern or Darkover or Trantor and he will really stand out.
Plop a Jedi Knight onto Dune, and, even though Star Wars is in some ways decidedly derivative of Dune, he'll stand out - and laser-sword vs personal shield is not going to end well. In fantasy, magic might work very differently from one setting or even one mage to another, but exactly how it works is often pretty vague, and the consequences of how it works often limited to what quest the hero must undertake to break a curse or something. It matters to the hero, not so much to the society.
In science fiction, technologies and societies shape eachcother. On Dune, booting up a computer is a capital crime and personal shields and laser weapons put MAD on the table in almost any conflict. On Trantor people carry computers in their pockets, and don't carry weapons because it's a safe well-policed capital. On Tatooine, everyone has a blaster and droids openly walk the streets - the Butlerians of Dune would never allow such abominations.
I remember a TV show a few years ago (OK, I just checked, 10 years ago) that used a similar resolution to transition from cops to sci-fi.Did the whole campaign suddenly become science fiction in retrospect? Did the big reveal turn the game into science fiction, despite the protagonists being completely unprepared for the revelations?