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<blockquote data-quote="Morte" data-source="post: 1489004" data-attributes="member: 9413">{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 &quot;Fog Witches&quot;. 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 &quot;protect the caster&quot; 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 &quot;the force&quot;. I'm not claiming to be &quot;right&quot; somehow. I just don't like it -- you asked what we do/don't like, so I answered.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Morte, post: 1489004, member: 9413"] {my italics} [i]in a rpg[/i] 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. [/QUOTE]

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