Space Adventure RPGs

[dragoner]

From another angle there are like 25 fantasy video games with the D&D gameloop to every sci-fi video game.

I'll take your word for it, though it reinforces the point.

 

[pogre]

I agree that one of the things holding Sci-Fi RPGs back a bit is the same thing that holds high level D&D back - it's wide open and tougher for some folks to run. There is a sense of endless possibilities than can be hard not to run as "Mother May I."

Mostly though it is because D&D is so darn popular - it's just easier to find a an enthusiastic D&D group.

I finished up a Traveller campaign earlier this spring and enjoyed it very much. However, by the end, the players were ready to return to D&D or WFRP. So, it is not just on the GM-side, in my experience, players tend to gravitate back to fantasy too.

Which, leads me back to Morrus's astute observation - D&D was first.

 

[kronovan]

While SciFi games may not be so popular around IRL tabletops these days (at least in my city they aren't), they're being played quite often online on virtual tabletops. The roll20, Fantasy Grounds and Foundry VTTs all have a number of SciFi RPGs available, which get played a lot.
I'll ditto recommendations for Traveller and the Cepheus Engine, which is based upon the Mongoose Traveller 1e rules.

 

[aramis erak]

Dunno about being played (though I see plenty of Twitch and YouTube APs for the game) but I've noted a lot of people are buying Star Trek Adventures but not necessarily talking about it on Enworld or other forums as much compared to the big WOTC and Paizon games.

There's discussion about it... but not much to be said. I'm running it currently, it's not my favorite flavor of trek, but it's one of the easier to teach and use over VOIP. Plus, it has a good discord roller bot. And it's got a really good corpus of adventures...

 

[John Desmarais]

Though I think part of it is just commonality; that a lot of people have a sort of generic sense of fantasy, where their sense of SF tends to be more specific.

This. There are a set of common fantasy tropes, cliches, and labels that tend to be present in most popular fantasy (games) that create an immediate sense of familiarity - and easy hooks for the audience to grab. SF, for the most part (outside of a handful of major media franchises), lacks this.

Something a basic as races breaks down in translation. When you say “Elf” or “Dwarf” most gamers (and non-gamers) tend to visualize a similar concept. When the game says you can play as a “Pnume” or a “Dirdir”, you visualize nothing unless you’ve read the same books I did.

 

[Yora]

I'm not sure. At least in the last 10-20 years, there's been an extremely common "shiny military videogame sci-fi" style that looks really interchangeable to me as someone who isn't diving particularly deep into the individual settings.
It goes back to Babylon 5, FreeSpace, and then Halo and Mass Effect, and more recently Stellaris and Star Citizen. I also think Neo Star Trek has the same look from images I've seen.

Of course there's variation, and there's sci-fi works that are completely different from that. But that also holds for fantasy. Not all fantasy is D&D fantasy.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That's more a general visual look than anything that isn't skin-deep though; just as a simple set of examples, B5, Trek and Mass Effect might have a not-dissimilar visual palette (likely because at least the last was influenced by the first two), but in terms of setting conceits, specifics and tech assumptions they aren't particularly close at all.

 

[payn]

That's more a general visual look than anything that isn't skin-deep though; just as a simple set of examples, B5, Trek and Mass Effect might have a not-dissimilar visual palette (likely because at least the last was influenced by the first two), but in terms of setting conceits, specifics and tech assumptions they aren't particularly close at all.

A lot of Mass Effect's look was just recycled Star Wars stuff by Bio-Ware. You are right tho, they are not alike in concept.

 

[Thomas Shey]

A lot of Mass Effect's look was just recycled Star Wars stuff by Bio-Ware. You are right tho, they are not alike in concept.

Yeah. Of the things compared to, ME is probably closest to B5 in terms actual setting look-and-feel, but just to give an example that doesn't match up well, the implications of B5 psionics (and how the overall culture treated it) is considerably different than ME biotics.

 

[Dioltach]

I think one deterrent in "science fiction" is the "science" part, or at least the fear of it. People are put off by the thought of having to make allowance for the laws of physics. "Fantasy", on the other hand, implies a freedom to make up the rules yourself.

The irony is that the science is handwaved, and the fantasy formulated, to a point where they meet in the middle.