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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JohnRTroy" data-source="post: 5561011" data-attributes="member: 2732">Science Fiction is a harder genre than Fantasy for several reasons.1)  Fantasy games tend to be unstructured with heroes playing adventurers.  That might be harder in certain S-F settings.  The team dynamics of say, Star Trek (organized military/government) is different than, say, Star Wars (organized or disorganized depending on your point of view), or something like Farscape.2)  Many Fantasy games are designed to be more or less "generic".  Sure, there can be specific settings, but they are based on mythology and inspiration from fiction and other games.  Two DMs can have vastly different campaign worlds and yet still use things like the monster manual.  We usually populate our worlds with faeries, monsters, dragons, etc.S-F is much more dependent on setting, and there are more demands for, if not "realism", an Internal consistency.  Thus, each game has to have a campaign setting.  You can do something like GURPS space, but it's really hard to just create a generic "monster manual".  And each S-F setting is widely different, having its own rules for things like technology, how the theoretical sciences works (FTL travel, Psychic powers, etc.)  Different genres appeal to different people.I think the only successful SF games have been those from licensed properties (Star Trek, Star Wars, etc.)--and I'll count StarFleet Battles since it's more or less a depreciative of Star Trek due to some licensing technicality--and Traveller.  And the latter was the first SF RPG and thus probably benefits from its long history--but even that gets strained due to the various game systems and what (IMO) is a campaign setting that shows its age in terms of S-F trends (lack of cybertech, nanotech, transhumanism).</blockquote>

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