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I might extend my position to the U.S. in general, but I wasn't even attempting to make assumptions globally.

Simply put, it was when there was both a wide variety of games and it was relatively easy to still find people who were willing to try things other than D&D.

You have to remember the temporal context it took place in.

You do have to accept premise in that movie, or you're reading it as a different movie (i.e. that the robot police really are incorruptable and won't extend their perview beyond what's presented). There's a movie that can be questioning that premise, but TDTESS isn't it.

Well, that's just being mechanically cautious; there's nothing wrong with that. I just think there's no reason to intrinsically go through a lot of in-game backflips to access the Knife Fighter PrC.

All true enough, but when you're defining what you consider a Golden Age, problem areas are going to be part of why you do or don't consider it one. You gotta look at the topic at hand.

You'd be surprised. Concussion blasts trail off pretty fast. An old demo stunt was to put on a helmet, then set off a concussion charge sitting on top of it because most of the blast would just go upward. Antipersonnel shells are mostly just concussion, but they're a lot of concussion.

While not wrong, if you start getting picky about the horror/SF divide, a number of movies become a problem including Alien.

Nothing says an SF movie can't also have supernatural elements, even big ones. After all, we have the end of Brainstorm.

Eh. By the time the game was in full swing, there were two kinds of PrCs: Setting-dedicated class add-ons, and specialization-representation PrCs. The first needed to be managed, but the latter were either balanced or they weren't; if they were, you shouldn't have needed to do anything special...

"One Step Beyond" didn't do much overt SF though; most of its stuff was supernatural-adjacent at least. It might have been reruns of something like "Science Fiction Theatre" though, if that ever had a rerun set.

Like I said, they can try to make the already extent ecosystem happier, or they can spend a lot of time and effort trying to push their way into the lighter generic market, which is already pretty saturated. If they're going to bother at all, I know which one I'd think made more sense.

Yeah, the premise of that was, more or less, "Join our interstellar society and its incorruptable robotic police force, because otherwise you're going to become (effectively) a rogue nation that threatens interstellar peace and we won't tolerate that." Its kind of an open question what they...

Doesn't sound familiar, but there are a few movies of the era I only know of by reputation. It especially gets bad when I know there were some early SF TV shows that have pretty much disappeared completely (though I gather most of those are no great loss).

They can be viable enough to make a living at them and still create a problem for people trying to get people to try playing them. The only reason it often isn't insurmountable is that post pandemic the VTT playsphere has gotten so strong.

AT a certain point, a problem is a problem no matter why it occurs. I'd think you, of all people, would understand why in a hobby so dependent on network factors, having one game system be quite this dominant is a problem for everyone else.

At the very least it would require more end-user design work than probably makes any sense to expect. BESM did that with its skill costs, but it didn't attempt to do it with everything else.

Though they've at least moved away from the tendency early in the first edition to think the core magic system is an all purpose power tool (to be fair, it looked positively generic compared to things like the D&D magic system, but that's damning with faint praise, as the Witch World...

I think its more a case of visibility. Its hard for me to precisely explain what I mean here, but I can't help but think there were lot of other games that, even though they weren't really competing with D&D even then, were still playing at least vaguely the same playing field in visibility (at...

This is true with a lot of games, honestly; almost any game, generic or not, carries certain kinds of fundamental design assumptions that will color how settings designed for it work out. You can make it work with systems derived from each other most of the time, but past that its always kind...