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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nobby-W" data-source="post: 8086948" data-attributes="member: 7017291">I guess one could say It depends on what you want to do with such a game.  Some random thoughts for tropes -SandboxesIf you want a sandbox game, a galaxy-spanning empire with complete freedom of movement is going to be a logistical nightmare to run.  Traveller solves this problem by giving starships a relatively short range, which lets you set up a workable sandbox in just one or two subsectors.  A few dozen worlds is enough to get you started.Galaxy spanning empiresIf you want to do a massive Star Wars style empire then you have the problem of generating content for it.  There are various toolkits that you can use to roll stuff up on the fly.  If you take this approach, you will get the sort of things that just randomly rolling stuff up will produce - it will lack cohesion.  Ergo, you might be better off with a more plot-driven, railroady style of play in order to make this work.  That means that this trope is in tension with the sandbox to some extent. Poul Anderson had an interesting trope in his Polesotechnic league stories.  The polity had some 4 million inhabited worlds, far more than one being could understand in a lifetime, let alone meaningfully govern.  Ergo, you may have many smaller quasi-independent regions or polities.Star GatesIf this is the only means of interstellar travel then you can moderate travel by requiring the use of star gates.  This might facilitate galactic-scale sandboxes as your party doesn't have complete freedom of movement - effectively you get a point crawl.  For a plot-driven game the freedom of movement question is less of an issue; if you want something more sandboxy then you might consider a star gate network.  Back fill in whatever ancient culture you feel like to have built the network, or maybe it's a patchwork of local efforts.  Blowing up people's star gates is considered poor form.  See The Algebraist.Magic, The Force, PsionicsPsi powers or similar tropes won't cause significant balance issues if they are equivalent in power to something that can be replicated through other means.  For example, if a psionic attack is as powerful as a weapon, then an equivalent effect can be achieved by having a character armed with a weapon.  If the effect is more like a high level D&D wizard, then you might have balance issues.  You can have whatever social attitudes to it that you want, from the psionics suppressions of Traveller at one end, to the Jedi from Star Wars at the other extreme.Post-ScarcitySomething like The Culture could be done with a narrative-focused system, I suspect, although I've never tried it.  It makes interesting reading; whether it's a terribly good trope for a RPG is another question.  I think it's so heavyweight that you would really end up building a game around it, rather than incorporating it into a general purpose sci-fi setting.MechaGiant robots are another heavyweight trope.  Generally, mecha fans want to play games revolving around the life and times of mecha pilots and their adventures, rather than playing an ex pilot having a midlife crisis in space.  You can have them in the background or not, but I think that bolting mecha onto the side of some other setting isn't going to achieve much.  It won't be enough for the mecha fanboys and nobody else will care.TranshumanismThis is another fairly heavyweight trope.  It's quite a domiant feature of Eclipse Phase, and was a major theme in Schlock Mercenary - the latter part of which put a lot of effort into exploring the implications of a society coming to grips with the technology.  It's one of those things that's rife for mcguffinite abuse, so worth thinking carefully about the implications of it on your setting.  Does your universe really need this?Ancient mystical ordersJedi, Bene Geserit, Time Lords, even The Foundation.  Could one play a reverend mother or Jedi knight in your game without it becoming the centre of the game and reducing the rest of the party to hangers on?  Are they just NPC factions in the background?Gun PornWhat does your gun porn look like - Blasters and high tech, tacti-cool projectile weapons, warhammer (same but with more rivets).  How gearheaded do you want to be?Big ships or small ships?I'm a small ships guy really - the Millenium Falcon, Serenity or Rocinante are far more interesting ships for a party than a mile-long dreadnought.  Your party can run a small ship without having a gaggle of NPCs in tow, and you can do deck plans and suchlike for it much more easily.  Mile-long star destroyers make good cinema but aren't all that useful in a RPG.  Try to think of an actual use for one that couldn't be achieved by any warship too big for your party to pick a fight with.Artficial intelligenceThere have been a few different approaches to it, ranging from the ubiquitous A.I. characters in Schlock Mercenary or Star Wars through a more uneasy relationship through to outright bans on AI like Dune.  What role do you want it to play in your setting?AliensYou can take the rubber suit approach like Star Wars and have a galaxy teeming with largely interchangeable sophonts.  After some shakedown, I took an approach of requiring an alien species to have some playable mcguffin and be practical to run as a PC.  Without those it's confined to NPC use only and doesn't really pull its weight.<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">If you take the warrior race trope, is this perhaps a warrior society.  How well are they adapting to an industrialised, affluent, middle class society?  Is their traditional short sword still worn as a fashion accessory?  What do they do when a friendly, but ignorant human makes a terrible faux pas?</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Space orks, vargr or other chaotic, factional races.  What's their role in society, how badly screwed up is their homeworld that they prefer to travel offworld for years and work as a mercenary?</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Tentacle creatures - alien aliens.  What's alien about their personality?</li> </ul>. . .  and so forth.</blockquote>

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