What do you like or don't like in sci-fi rpg

[Morte]

1) If you play sci-fi rpg, what do you especially like in your sci-fi adventures?,

Problem solving. Moral dilemmas. Inventing a personality and playing it through thick and thin. Discovering (and creating) the setting through play. Fear of dying. The absence of mystical claptrap.

but also what you don't like and would like to see changed.

I would like to to have one game available off the shelf that's got:

- no magic (psionics, force) or pseudo-magic (fog witches)
- no demonstrably real deities
- a small interstellar setting (10 to 100 worlds)
- plenty of usable setting and adventure material for busy GMs
- a wide variety of tensions and dynamics at all scales in the setting
- non-military focus
- a society in which it's not bizarre for private individuals be adventurers

I can't think of any game on sale which supports this. One can hack exisitng games closer to it.

2) If you much prefer Heroic-fantasy games, and don't want to play in a sci-fi rpg, what you especially don't like in a sci-fi universe?

N/A

3) Whether you play or don't play in sci-fi rpg, what would be a very cool feature to absolutely have in a sci-fi campaign?

A solution to the death problem. I want grit, deadliness, and fear of dying. I also want heroics to be feasible at key moments.[1] And, tangentially, I want players whose PCs die to get back into the game quickly.

Another thing that would be nice is a story-driven game, with player control. E.g. instead of rolling hits and damage, you roll to see who gets to describe the combat.

--
[1] The best solution I've seen to date is the narrativist "Spiritual Attribute" mechanic in The Riddle of Steel, which is ultra-deadly but gives you hefty metagame bonuses when trying things your character cares about, and advances your character for succeeding. The way to powergame TRoS is to roleplay. You do need to create parties with something in common, and to run adventures they actually care about, so it's not for lazy gamers. It's not an SF game, but one could graft that metagame mechanic onto a deadly and interesting combat system like Friday Night Firefight from Cyberpunk. None of this is D20, sorry.

 

[Turanil]

Traveller 20 seems the closer to the kind of sci-fi game you like. (And I got a look at your story hour too...)

Anyway, what's the difference between magic and science fiction technology in a rpg? I think where a mage just gestures a little to have a spell cast; technology just requires some appropriate equipment. As such nearly the same effects could be achieved: powerful magical effect require high level spells, while powerful technological effects require a bigger equipment. So when it comes to resurrecting someone, you can do it as in the "Fifth Element" movie; that is, a high tech machine recreates a whole human being from a sample of ADN. Now, how far are players prone to accept such kind of things as technology instead of magic? However, it looks to me less implausible such kind of machine rather than space-jump. At least in theory the former doesn't violate the known laws of physics. Space-jump is a great sci-fi idea, but also a complete nonsense (and even if going through a black hole could bring you into another part of the universe, you don't choose where you emerge, and you emerge in the form of energy particles only).

 

[Morte]

Anyway, what's the difference between magic and science fiction technology in a rpg?

{my italics}

in a rpg the difference is that one plays like fantasy and the other plays like science fiction.

The Centauri Knights game (which I bought yesterday) is set on a world with clouds of abandoned microscopic robots. Anyone with suitable equipment and skills (a crystal recovered from an alien tomb and implanted in to their head) can control these robots and make them form obscuring clouds, or walls, or chairs, or weapons. They can also control the nanotech dust the buildings are made of to walk through walls, or have their mecha walk through walls and hit the cops from behind.

This is all rationalised in terms of microtech, nanotech, implants, and data networking. But in actual play it's accomplished with the BESM/Tri-Stat magic system, using the same rules and chargen options, by characters known as "Fog Witches". So it's described as technology, but it walks like magic and it quacks like magic. For practical gaming purposes it's magic -- you get scry/buff/teleport equivalent tactics, you have the whole "protect the caster" thing, and so on.

I personally don't like having that sort of thing as a core, bread and butter ability in SF games. Or other sorts of magic like psionics or "the force". I'm not claiming to be "right" somehow. I just don't like it -- you asked what we do/don't like, so I answered.

 

[cybermonkey]

Problem solving. Moral dilemmas. Inventing a personality and playing it through thick and thin. Discovering (and creating) the setting through play. Fear of dying. The absence of mystical claptrap.

I would like to to have one game available off the shelf that's got:

- no magic (psionics, force) or pseudo-magic (fog witches)
- no demonstrably real deities
- a small interstellar setting (10 to 100 worlds)
- plenty of usable setting and adventure material for busy GMs
- a wide variety of tensions and dynamics at all scales in the setting
- non-military focus
- a society in which it's not bizarre for private individuals be adventurers

Check out http://www.zaon.com/rpg/. I followed these guys for a while, but their arguments... oh well. Their forums have some interesting ideas.

 

[jasper]

Turanil sounds like you want a traveller campaign. Try t20 travellers and get the gateway domain source book. Good things on the frontier various races would don't always get along. Various megacorps who may not get along with you. No raise dead technology in most of space

 

[Umbran]

So it's described as technology, but it walks like magic and it quacks like magic. For practical gaming purposes it's magic...

Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

 

[noretoc]

Just gotta ask, how many would be interested in role-playing the firefly universe?

 

[Morte]

Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I wondered when that was coming.

 

[Chroma]

Just gotta ask, how many would be interested in role-playing the firefly universe?

I would! *laugh* I've also been watching HBO's "Deadwood" and thinking about how to translate it into a Firefly-esque scenario... Westerns will never be the same for me... and I like it! *laugh*

 

[Morte]

Just gotta ask, how many would be interested in role-playing the firefly universe?

GM background for a Traveller game I'm about to start play in:

The setting of the game is just prior to what is known in the Third Imperium (classic CT) as year zero, when Grand Duke Cleon of the Sylean federation is said to have founded the 3I. This is the period immediately following the sol called 'Long night' which was the 400 year 'dark ages' after the second Imperium (AKA the Rule of Man) collapsed.

The entire Imperium was fractured. Pocket empires sprang up, each with their own Emperors and princes, fleets and armies. Some planets fell into barbarism, others dropped multiple tech levels. Pirates and raiders harried what ships that tried to maintain the tenuous lines of communications.

One of these pocket empires grew and prospered and became what was know as the Sylean Federation (after the leading planet, Sylea). The Federation sought to bring neighboring worlds under it's influences, one way or another. Finally, a group of independent worlds, who didn't want to be under the centralized authority of the burgeoning Federation formed the Interstellar confederation to raise an army and navy to resist the naked ambition of the Feds.

Unfortunately, the confederation was just that, and made up of independent minded planets that didn't even want to surrender their independence to a single commander. While they fought, and argued amongst themselves, the monolithic Federation defeated their forces. It could have gone the other way. The Interstellar confederation was actually larger, but it lacked the single vision and purpose of the Feds.

No the last vestiges of the confed are falling apart. Federation ships ply the space between old independent worlds, enforcing Fed law while the Sylean Army and bureaucracy slowly digest the old ConFed planets.

Your captain, a former something in the Confederation military (brown coats) has obtained a ship and moved far away from heart of federation power, but not so far that you'll be in totally 'wild' territory.

The place he is chosen is called the fringe (mostly because I haven't thought of a better name). A line of rough, low tech, frontier world far from Sylea and the central worlds, but not so far that Pirates and freebooters roam free. Here, the Feds are stretched thin, so that they don't take notice of someone who doesn't cause too much trouble, and where people don't ask too many questions. Where a person's business is their own and someone willing to take a few chances can make enough money to get by, keep a ship running and pay his crew a little something.

As he put it, any similarity to Firefly is strictly deliberate.

I don't know if Joss Whedon ever played or read Traveller, but Firefly could be a synthesis of thousands of tramp freighter games played over the last 25 years.