D&D 5E Why not Alternity? (Or, will or how might WotC do SF?)

[Paul Farquhar]

Yeah, but a lot of planetary romance is about social interactions with new and weird cultures, politics, and the like.

Frank Herbert's Dune should qualify as a planetary romance, for example. As does Robert Silverberg's Majipoor series, Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld, and C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy. Most of which are dominated by social interaction, not combat.

So, the point about D&D not having the mechanical chops still holds.

It certainly can involve social interaction, or violence, but most characteristically, interaction with the world itself. Surviving alone in the desert of Arrakis is not social. It's all about learning how the alien environment works.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

but given people going towards less binary forces with more grey and less urge to just walk in and murder everything means sooner or later we will be needing such mechanics I may not know how to build them but they will sooner or later form.

You'd think so. And yet, here we are, nearly a half-century into D&D's dominance, and I think it's still so popular not despite the relative lack of mechanics for doing anything outside of combat, but because of that.

Not trying to get us into the pointless old debates about D&D's bugs, features, and bug-features, though. I'm just stubbornly trying to circle back to an earlier point, that there are tons and tons of games with very cool mechanics for social interactions and other non-combat stuff that might come into play in SF and any genre that isn't D&D (which is its own genre, related to but separate from high fantasy, in my opinion). Those systems don't require you to invent and graft on rules for not killing things. Some have even thought through all kinds of apparently thorny issues, like how to reconcile high-tech weapons with overall challenge levels, or this odd business that keeps coming up in this thread--the problem of ship-scale weapons vs. kaiju enemies, a gripe that's so firmly planted in D&D-centric FIGHT THE MONSTERS WITH WEAPONS THAT'S ALL THERE IS TO DO IN RPGS play-style I feel like I'm in an entirely different hobby. Those other games are just sitting there, waiting to be played.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Interestingly, a good example of a planetary romance is Dune, and in Dune, despite being serious SF, by the power of plot device, manages to make swords better than guns, and has space magic of a type.

My own system does the same, even in the future era (it supports play in the turn of the 20th century era, turn of the 21st, or turn of the 23rd), because magic is harder to put into a bullet than into a sword or clothing. Direct physical contact makes enchantment easier and more effective.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Yeah, but a lot of planetary romance is about social interactions with new and weird cultures, politics, and the like.

Frank Herbert's Dune should qualify as a planetary romance, for example. As does Robert Silverberg's Majipoor series, Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld, and C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy. Most of which are dominated by social interaction, not combat.

So, the point about D&D not having the mechanical chops still holds.

Enough planetary romance involves sword fights in alien environments that this rings a bit false, to me.

Also, you gotta keep in mind that for a lot of people, social interaction should only ever have a resolution mechanic and ways to tell who is good at what aspects of socialization, and pretty much nothing else.

D&D 5e isn’t so sustainingly popular because players don’t care about social interaction. I’ve seen very very few groups of new players who don’t care or just want to get past it to the “good stuff”, or whatever. 5e hits the right balance, for many people, of getting detailed where details will promote fun, and getting out of the way everywhere else.

So, the fact that a genre has a lot of social interaction is only a mark against 5e being able to do it if that is basically all it has going on, like Jane Austen novels. D&D would do Pride and Prejudice and Zombies just fine, though.

 

[Umbran]

It certainly can involve social interaction, or violence, but most characteristically, interaction with the world itself. Surviving alone in the desert of Arrakis is not social. It's all about learning how the alien environment works.

Except for the fact that they elide over most of his actual learning. They hand Paul a stilsuit, play him a a round of Aerosmith's "Walk This Way", teach him how to ride worms, and that's done. The rest is about becoming a messiah, which he has to work out on his own.

The point I am making is that planetary romance, as a genre, is not specifically combat-action focused. Some early examples, like the Barsoom books, might be, but the genre as a whole is a lot more than that, so that D&D, with its pittance of non-combat rules, isn't a great fit for the genre overall.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Except for the fact that they elide over most of his actual learning. They hand Paul a stilsuit, play him a a round of Aerosmith's "Walk This Way", teach him how to ride worms, and that's done. The rest is about becoming a messiah, which he has to work out on his own.

I don't know about you, but I'm talking about the novel.

The point I am making is that planetary romance, as a genre, is not specifically combat-action focused. Some early examples, like the Barsoom books, might be, but the genre as a whole is a lot more than that, so that D&D, with its pittance of non-combat rules, isn't a great fit for the genre overall.

And it's not specifically non-combat focused either.

Deathworld - Wikipedia

 

[Marc_C]

I do not want a space-fantasy cross over with D&D à la Starfinder.

I want a real science-fiction game. Ideally that uses d100% like Star Frontiers.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I do not want a space-fantasy cross over with D&D à la Starfinder.

I want a real science-fiction game. Ideally that uses d100% like Star Frontiers.

Er, Star Frontiers is as the softest, fantasy-est end of science fiction. It's much closer to Star Wars than 2001 a Space Odyssey. I think a lot of SF fans would balk at the idea that Star Frontiers was "real science fiction".

And what's so great about D100? It's easy to convert between D100 and D20.

 

[Reynard]

I truly don't understand the obsession with marrying science fiction to percentile systems. Why are 1% increments suddenly more appealing as soon as laser pistols are included?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

The point I am making is that planetary romance, as a genre, is not specifically combat-action focused. Some early examples, like the Barsoom books, might be, but the genre as a whole is a lot more than that, so that D&D, with its pittance of non-combat rules, isn't a great fit for the genre overall.

At the risk of beating a dead horse, this is only true for people who get a satisfying experience from prescriptive mechanization of social interaction, rather than from very loose mechanics.

And planetary romance has plenty of fighting. It’s often more single combat than D&D, but that isn’t exactly a big leap.