Why are sci-fi scenarios so thin on the ground?

[Jd Smith1]

Go to DriveThruRPG, and you can drown in the generic, system-specific, and setting-specific fantasy scenarios (except for War Hammer, which is re-releasing Death on the Reik again).

But sci-fi adventures are thin on the ground. Take away Star Wars, Star Trek, and Starfinder, and it's a wasteland.

Is no one running long-term campaigns in sci-fi anymore? There's quite a few new settings out there, but few adventures.

Why is this?

 

[John Dallman]

SF settings are so much more varied in their assumptions about societies and technology. One could readily design scenarios for Star Trek that were either trivial or impossible in Star Wars, and vice-versa. Adventures have to be written for a particular system and setting, which limits their sales as compared to fantasy.

Fantasy has become more popular, and that means more adventures are written for it, more people play it, and hey, look, it's even more popular!

 

[Neonchameleon]

One thing you can do when bored is take just about any film from before 1995 or so (and many after it) and work out what would happen if you just gave every single character in it a cheap smartphone. It's quite amazing how allowing every character to contact every other one at almost any time, or to call for an uber at any time. or to look up Wikipedia, or having a map and GPS changes things. Just take a film like Die Hard; John McClane pulls his phone out of his pocket and first phones the cops then starts live-tweeting things possibly with photographs. Or An Affair to Remember - where they miss their meeting on top of the Empire State Building, and then text each other to find out what happened or even keep in contact throughout. Or the Blair Witch Project where they have a GPS, Google Maps, and can text for help or even live-tweet the whole thing. I could go on.

That's just one tech piece we carry around in our pockets (and that as XKCD has pointed out has quietly cleaned up Bigfoot mysteries and the like). Meanwhile fantasy doesn't expect random high tech stuff in everyone's hands. Magic swords don't define interactions and not everyone can cast spells.

 

[Morrus]

It's weird that it's always been that in RPGs fantasy is much more popular than sci-fi, but in film sci-fi is much more popular than fantasy.

 

[Neonchameleon]

It's weird that it's always been that in RPGs fantasy is much more popular than sci-fi, but in film sci-fi is much more popular than fantasy.

Not that weird. In film SF requires you to simulate technology while fantasy requires you to simulate living beings. And a fake dragon is a lot harder to make look vaguely believable than a fake starship, especially when dragons (unlike horror movie monsters) don't stick to the shadows and aren't humanoid.

 

[Morrus]

Not that weird. In film SF requires you to simulate technology while fantasy requires you to simulate living beings. And a fake dragon is a lot harder to make look vaguely believable than a fake starship, especially when dragons (unlike horror movie monsters) don't stick to the shadows and aren't humanoid.

I don't think it's about the special effects. It's more about the audience.

 

[amethal]

The science fiction genre doesn't seem to have anything like as many people publishing adventures for other peoples' systems, like you get with D&D 3rd / Pathfinder and D&D 5. The closest thing to it seems to be with the Cepheus Engine (Traveller clone) where there are a number of companies publishing adventures - Michael Brown for instance has written lots of very short adventures for it.

Mongoose have some adventures of varying lengths for their version of Traveller, and Pelgrane have some adventures for Ashen Stars. For FATE there are some adventures for Bulldogs! and Mindjammer. The Expanse RPG is relatively new but might end up with a few more adventures in due course. The older adventures for Starmaster and previous versions of Traveller are still available on Drivethru. Fading Suns is also on drivethru but doesn't seem to have had many (any?) adventures written for it.

The more OSR end of the market, like Stars Without Number, does seem to assume people will come up with their own adventures (although the one published adventure I own for SWN, Hard Light, is very good).

 

[jasper]

Due to reading Scific Authors bitch on FB on Scific becoming Sci Fact while they are writing is one part of reason. Also it is harder to agree on a plot and easier to derail. Hmm Logical reason vs fiction reason?

 

[schneeland]

As @Neonchameleon points out, writing good scenarios with modern technology in mind can be significantly more challenging than writing fantasy adventures (until you get to the high-level spells with ruin everything ). So e.g. you have think about how to run an investigative plot when people can call anyone at any time, but also maybe check the equivalent of Facebook and LinkedIn.
Also - and maybe that's just me, but at least a handful of friends are also affected - my thresholds for suspension of disbelief are higher in fantasy settings. Once we start going into technological stuff, the engineer in me wants to know a lot of stuff about how this works. Occasionally poking a hobgoblin with a sharp stick, on the other hand, is something where I can also accept that it is a magically enchanted stick of supreme poking (+3 against hobgoblins).
And as we all know, D&D as the largest RPG (by far) is a fantasy game, so the market is also heavily leaning towards fantasy stuff.

That being said, there's a few nice 3rd party settings for Traveller out there. Unfortunately, not so many adventures (I think Mongoose Publishing has put out a number of things, but I haven't really checked out MgT 2e yet).

 

[Retreater]

My thoughts are that sci fi is much harder to run. Unless you're just running fantasy reskinned as sci fi, you've got vehicle travel, star ship combat, power armor, computers, scanners, big laser rifles, etc. Massive number inflation, super powerful characters that can negate most traditional challenges you can imagine. With the speed of travel, your localized world building is pointless.
For it to work like most traditional games, you have to take away the character's powers. In which case, is it even sci-fi?