Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Remathilis" data-source="post: 6198205" data-attributes="member: 7635">I once posed a question to some various players of RPGs: Why isn't there a Space D&amp;D? Not Spelljamer or DragonStar, where fantasy gets shot IN SPACE, but a legit generic mishmash of sci-fi tropes smashed together like how D&amp;D smashes fantasy and mythology together. The best answer I ever got was that sci-fi, at least as we see it, is fairly copyrighted. For example, I'd wager Vulcan is just as recognizable as Elf is to the mass population. If you created a sci-fi game with Vulcan as a race, you would probably have most people, not just Trekkers, know what the race is, looks, and does. But, Vulcan is copyrighted to Paramount and probably never will lapse into the Public Domain, so a generic Vulcan race in a generic sci-fi setting will never happen. The best you could do would be take some element of it (such as pointy ears or logical thought) and build a new race around it or file off the serial number and rename them (Logicans), which loses the &quot;I already know what that is&quot; moment you get when most players hear &quot;wizard&quot;, &quot;dwarf&quot; or &quot;barbarian&quot;. Imagine if sci-fi was invented 100 years before it was and we could have an RPG with Vulcans, Wookies, Daleks, T-800s, Replicants, and Cylons all in there by name.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Remathilis, post: 6198205, member: 7635"] I once posed a question to some various players of RPGs: Why isn't there a Space D&D? Not Spelljamer or DragonStar, where fantasy gets shot IN SPACE, but a legit generic mishmash of sci-fi tropes smashed together like how D&D smashes fantasy and mythology together. The best answer I ever got was that sci-fi, at least as we see it, is fairly copyrighted. For example, I'd wager Vulcan is just as recognizable as Elf is to the mass population. If you created a sci-fi game with Vulcan as a race, you would probably have most people, not just Trekkers, know what the race is, looks, and does. But, Vulcan is copyrighted to Paramount and probably never will lapse into the Public Domain, so a generic Vulcan race in a generic sci-fi setting will never happen. The best you could do would be take some element of it (such as pointy ears or logical thought) and build a new race around it or file off the serial number and rename them (Logicans), which loses the "I already know what that is" moment you get when most players hear "wizard", "dwarf" or "barbarian". Imagine if sci-fi was invented 100 years before it was and we could have an RPG with Vulcans, Wookies, Daleks, T-800s, Replicants, and Cylons all in there by name. [/QUOTE]

Verification