What is distinctive about fantasy RPGing? Or sci fi?

[Dannyalcatraz]

Sci-fi: Trimmed beards.

Only for evil doppelgängers from parallel realities.

 

[Anselyn]

As an extension or tangent to my previous comment on gods and religion. The consequence of that - in Sci-Fi that I like and Traveller as I've played it - is that there are no moral absolutes and no monsters. In game terms, no alignments, no detect alignment and no creatures or races that it's permissible to kill just because they exist.

in your Traveller, the Imperium may be a benevolent umbrella of stability rewarding the talented with ennoblement or may be a corrupt oppressive aristocracy but the generalities need not apply the the local nobles in the local situation given recent events. [That's the Sci-Fi scale and Traveller communication times coming in too.]

As said upthread, everyone is people in all times and places. But people who are people not inherently evil monsters get to live, suffer and die in a different way to fantasy people and that effects how players interact with them. The "joke" about D&D adventurers being murder hobos is a more serious issue for sci-fi. The idea of a "traveller" already speaks to them being rootless adventurers moving through the universe - but if they just become murderers too with no moral compass or purpose then I'd think the game should be missing something. And as said above, the admin, law and bureaucracy skills that reflect living in a real and modern society suggest that some sense of society or local government should be there to contextualise events.

Obviously, there are example and exceptions to test this rule. Star Wars is more black/white morality (AFAIK not knowing the extended universe) but seen as more Space Opera than Sci-fi and Starship Troopers gives you a bug hunt against implacable alien killer foes (but see Ender's Game - my son tells me).

[Sorry - rambling now. Nothing intended as a ciriticism of other valid ways to play and run Sci fi games]

 

[Tony Vargas]

The "What was JRRT's contribution to D&D" threads prompted the above question: what is distinctive about fantasy RPGing?

Is it the tropes? Or is it the themes and situations?

The same question can be asked about sci fi RPGing.

One thing that struck me early in my RPG career was that D&D had a monolithic sort of dominance in FRPG, but the first sci-fi RPG, Traveller, had no such presence. Prior to gaming, I was much more a sci-fi/horror fan than fantasy, I liked fantasy, too, Harryhausen movies, anyway, but more sci-fi.

When I looked through more sci-fi RPGs, I started to form an opinion about why. Sci-fi and fantasy are both fantastic, they both ask you to suspend disbelief and go on to answer a 'what if' question. In fantasy that question is always some variation on 'what if the magic of legend were real?' In sci-fi, it can be anything.

So a generic fantasy game is going to have swords and armor and spells and monsters, probably including dragons and the like. People often figure, well, sci-fi is going to have ray-guns and space ships and bug-eyed monsters, right? Well, no, not so much. A science fiction setting might posit something that leads to rayguns and space ships, or it might lead to cybernetics and archologies, or mutant powers and monsters.

Another shading of difference is that, in fantasy, the fantastic has always been there in the setting. In sci-fi, that might be the case, or it might be a new development everyone's grappling with. In fantasy, too, the central conceit is often a backdrop, and the story is simple adventure, romance, heroes' journey, or whatever. In sci-fi, the central 'what if' question can be the primary focus.

So a fantasy game can be pretty generic, and even if it's magic - like D&D's - works like virtually nothing in the genre, it's still just magic (the hows & whys of magic aren't always that important to a fantasy story) and off you go, slaying the dragon and getting the treasure, anyway.

You create a sci-fi game, and you have to pick some fairly specific things. Is space travel super-fast and safe & easy and communication even faster, like Star Trek, or is it slow & dangerous and the only way to carry messages from one world to another, like in classic space operas? Or is it the latter, but there's a new development, like the ansible, poised to change everything? Are aliens humanoid? Are they integrated? Are they only rumors? All monsters?

Then there's societies. Fantasy cribs heavily from history, kingdoms, empires, maybe city-states, a fantasy setting could easily juxtapose several of those, and, again, they don't often dominate the story - there's a war, is it so important if it's empire vs kingdom or city-state-vs-bararians?
In science-fiction, the answer to that central question could re-shape society. You could have a society where privacy is unthinkable, or one where isolation is the norm, you could have a harsh dystopian dictatorship holding the galaxy in its clutches or a freewheeling mercantilism beyond the limits of any one system. That'll all be locked into the way science & technology work in the setting, and whatever species exist, &c - and changing one of those variables could change everything.

On fantasy game, even one that does them all pretty badly, like D&D, can cater to fans who want Howard or Tolkien or Moorcock, Middle Earth or Narnia or Hyborea. It can pretty much cater to all of them in one messed up setting, like FR. It can juxtapose elements of them with minimal consequences.

One sci-fi RPG can't do that. It could try, but it would end up with a long check-list for the GM. How does FTL work in your setting? Are there aliens? Central casting or CGI? etc, etc. One generic sci-fi setting can't have Star Trek and Star Wars and Blade Runner and Dune and Lensman tropes happily co-existing. Not even close.

(Space Opera was an early sci-fi RPG that tried to kinda munge together classic sci-fi - from Verne & Wells to Heinlen & say, Alan Dean Foster, and to paste Star Wars as an after-thought - and it was just hopeless.)

Recently I've been re-reading my Classic Traveller stuff and GMing some sessions of it. The first Traveller adventure published in White Dwarf was "The Sable Rose Affair". It's notionally a sci-fi adventure - the PCs fly in from another planet, there are flying cars, etc - but in the actual play it's barely distinguishable from the sort of adventure Gygax described in the closing pages of his AD&D PHB. The players receive a briefing from some NPCs - and with a map, and an outline of the expected targets, and the opportunity to choose their equipment, they have to infiltrate a club and extract some secret information. There are no wandering monsters, but there are "club alert buttons" which - if pressed - will bring the police in a certain number of rounds.

I was struck how closely the adventure resembles the sort of dungeon raid Gygax describes. It's basically stactical wargaming.

Does it become a sci-fi adventure just because of the tropes and trappings? Does a dungeon raid become fantasy just because there are orcs and rough walls rather than soldiers in a concrete bunker?

On a tactical level, you can always file the serial numbers off. Star Wars is Hidden Castle and all that sort of thing.

But, on a story level, a lot of stories - romance, hero's journey, adventure, etc - can be told in any genre, just change the trappings. Fantasy is often nothing more than that.

But, while you can just do that with science-fiction trappings, sci-fi has it's own sort of story that doesn't readily change genre with just a change of set dressing. So you can tell the same story as you might in a fantasy RPG in a sci-fi RPG, but there are some sci-fi stories that you can't just port into fantasy - not without the fantasy becoming sci-fi...

 

[pemerton]

Space Opera was an early sci-fi RPG that tried to kinda munge together classic sci-fi - from Verne & Wells to Heinlen & say, Alan Dean Foster, and to paste Star Wars as an after-thought - and it was just hopeless.

I remember one session, a long time ago now, where we all generated Space Opera PCs under the guidance of a prospective GM who had some familiarity with the setting. But we never actually played the game.

there are some sci-fi stories that you can't just port into fantasy - not without the fantasy becoming sci-fi...

Eg? (There are some hints in the bits of your post I've cut out, but I'm interested to learn how you might crystallise them.)

 

[Tony Vargas]

I remember one session, a long time ago now, where we all generated Space Opera PCs under the guidance of a prospective GM who had some familiarity with the setting. But we never actually played the game.

Matches my experience, I poured over it, tried building characters, got nowhere. A friend tried to run it, got nowhere. A couple of years later I casually mention, at a GURPS game, mind, "Space Opera is un-playable," a genuinely exceptional RPer disagreed, offered to run, we never quite got through chargen.

Eg? (There are some hints in the bits of your post I've cut out, but I'm interested to learn how you might crystallise them.)

I'm having a hard time articulating it. Part if it is that details, why's and how's, really matter in such sci-fi stories, while in fantasy they can be arbitrary or even ignored...
Not that the throwaway detail isn't a thing in sci-fi, either.

 

[GMMichael]

As said upthread, everyone is people in all times and places. But people who are people not inherently evil monsters get to live, suffer and die in a different way to fantasy people and that effects how players interact with them. The "joke" about D&D adventurers being murder hobos is a more serious issue for sci-fi. The idea of a "traveller" already speaks to them being rootless adventurers moving through the universe - but if they just become murderers too with no moral compass or purpose then I'd think the game should be missing something. And as said above, the admin, law and bureaucracy skills that reflect living in a real and modern society suggest that some sense of society or local government should be there to contextualise events.

Oh don't worry. The game is missing something when D&D players become murder-hobos too. Mostly balance, as in, there would be no functioning society if it were actually possible for a group of people to go around getting away with murder like D&D characters do.

Interestingly, the scale changes from medieval fantasy to science fiction. In the former, it's the wild areas between towns that are lawless. In the latter, it's the wild areas between star systems.

On a tactical level, you can always file the serial numbers off. Star Wars is Hidden Castle and all that sort of thing.

But, on a story level, a lot of stories - romance, hero's journey, adventure, etc - can be told in any genre, just change the trappings. Fantasy is often nothing more than that.

Here's the TL;DR. But it does go off the rails:

But, while you can just do that with science-fiction trappings, sci-fi has it's own sort of story that doesn't readily change genre with just a change of set dressing. So you can tell the same story as you might in a fantasy RPG in a sci-fi RPG, but there are some sci-fi stories that you can't just port into fantasy - not without the fantasy becoming sci-fi...

Medieval fantasy and science fiction are two -extremely- broad categories. It's not really fair to say that med-fan (that's right, I'm coining it) has to conform to a set of standards, while sci-fi does not.

 

[Tony Vargas]

. It's not really fair to say that med-fan (that's right, I'm coining it) has to conform to a set of standards, while sci-fi does not.

I'm not sure, but that may be the opposite of the point I'm groping for...

 

[pemerton]

details, why's and how's, really matter in such sci-fi stories, while in fantasy they can be arbitrary or even ignored

I think I understand. It's an interesting point. I have to reflect on how to feed it into my Traveller GMing.

 

[pemerton]

the scale changes from medieval fantasy to science fiction. In the former, it's the wild areas between towns that are lawless. In the latter, it's the wild areas between star systems.

That's an example of differences in trope details, but not much more. Whereas some of the posts on this thread are really helping me focus on how there is more than just those trope differences.

 

[Parmandur]

I don't know if it relates to overall genre tropes per se, but 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.

Another relevant skiffy reference I would suggest would be the film and television work of Irwin Allen (Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, Time Tunnel, Poseiden Adventure, Towering Inferno, the 1960 Lost World, Land of the Giants, etc, etc, etc): bands of adventurous, competent folk of various skills on expeditions into strange unknown territories, or thrust into ludicrous situations. A Traveller party feels to me like the cast of such a movie or TV show.