Sci-fi: Trimmed beards.
Only for evil doppelgängers from parallel realities.
Sci-fi: Trimmed beards.
One thing that struck me early in my RPG career was that D&D had a monolithic sort of dominance in FRPG, but the first sci-fi RPG, Traveller, had no such presence. Prior to gaming, I was much more a sci-fi/horror fan than fantasy, I liked fantasy, too, Harryhausen movies, anyway, but more sci-fi.The "What was JRRT's contribution to D&D" threads prompted the above question: what is distinctive about fantasy RPGing?
Is it the tropes? Or is it the themes and situations?
The same question can be asked about sci fi RPGing.
On a tactical level, you can always file the serial numbers off. Star Wars is Hidden Castle and all that sort of thing.Recently I've been re-reading my Classic Traveller stuff and GMing some sessions of it. The first Traveller adventure published in White Dwarf was "The Sable Rose Affair". It's notionally a sci-fi adventure - the PCs fly in from another planet, there are flying cars, etc - but in the actual play it's barely distinguishable from the sort of adventure Gygax described in the closing pages of his AD&D PHB. The players receive a briefing from some NPCs - and with a map, and an outline of the expected targets, and the opportunity to choose their equipment, they have to infiltrate a club and extract some secret information. There are no wandering monsters, but there are "club alert buttons" which - if pressed - will bring the police in a certain number of rounds.
I was struck how closely the adventure resembles the sort of dungeon raid Gygax describes. It's basically stactical wargaming.
Does it become a sci-fi adventure just because of the tropes and trappings? Does a dungeon raid become fantasy just because there are orcs and rough walls rather than soldiers in a concrete bunker?
I remember one session, a long time ago now, where we all generated Space Opera PCs under the guidance of a prospective GM who had some familiarity with the setting. But we never actually played the game.Space Opera was an early sci-fi RPG that tried to kinda munge together classic sci-fi - from Verne & Wells to Heinlen & say, Alan Dean Foster, and to paste Star Wars as an after-thought - and it was just hopeless.
Eg? (There are some hints in the bits of your post I've cut out, but I'm interested to learn how you might crystallise them.)there are some sci-fi stories that you can't just port into fantasy - not without the fantasy becoming sci-fi...
Matches my experience, I poured over it, tried building characters, got nowhere. A friend tried to run it, got nowhere. A couple of years later I casually mention, at a GURPS game, mind, "Space Opera is un-playable," a genuinely exceptional RPer disagreed, offered to run, we never quite got through chargen.I remember one session, a long time ago now, where we all generated Space Opera PCs under the guidance of a prospective GM who had some familiarity with the setting. But we never actually played the game.
I'm having a hard time articulating it. Part if it is that details, why's and how's, really matter in such sci-fi stories, while in fantasy they can be arbitrary or even ignored...Eg? (There are some hints in the bits of your post I've cut out, but I'm interested to learn how you might crystallise them.)
As said upthread, everyone is people in all times and places. But people who are people not inherently evil monsters get to live, suffer and die in a different way to fantasy people and that effects how players interact with them. The "joke" about D&D adventurers being murder hobos is a more serious issue for sci-fi. The idea of a "traveller" already speaks to them being rootless adventurers moving through the universe - but if they just become murderers too with no moral compass or purpose then I'd think the game should be missing something. And as said above, the admin, law and bureaucracy skills that reflect living in a real and modern society suggest that some sense of society or local government should be there to contextualise events.
On a tactical level, you can always file the serial numbers off. Star Wars is Hidden Castle and all that sort of thing.
But, on a story level, a lot of stories - romance, hero's journey, adventure, etc - can be told in any genre, just change the trappings. Fantasy is often nothing more than that.
But, while you can just do that with science-fiction trappings, sci-fi has it's own sort of story that doesn't readily change genre with just a change of set dressing. So you can tell the same story as you might in a fantasy RPG in a sci-fi RPG, but there are some sci-fi stories that you can't just port into fantasy - not without the fantasy becoming sci-fi...
I'm not sure, but that may be the opposite of the point I'm groping for.... It's not really fair to say that med-fan (that's right, I'm coining it) has to conform to a set of standards, while sci-fi does not.
I think I understand. It's an interesting point. I have to reflect on how to feed it into my Traveller GMing.details, why's and how's, really matter in such sci-fi stories, while in fantasy they can be arbitrary or even ignored
That's an example of differences in trope details, but not much more. Whereas some of the posts on this thread are really helping me focus on how there is more than just those trope differences.the scale changes from medieval fantasy to science fiction. In the former, it's the wild areas between towns that are lawless. In the latter, it's the wild areas between star systems.