NOW LIVE! -- ZEITGEIST: Death of the Author for D&D 5E on Kickstarter! Murder. Conspiracy. Secrets. A remote manor. An adventure for D&D 5E.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(Psi)SeveredHead" data-source="post: 4609110" data-attributes="member: 1165">I prefer fantasy gaming.I usually prefer sci-fi settings, but most such settings aren't designed for gaming. It's rather difficult to twist something like Battlestar Galactica (most character are highly-competent military officers who act like a cross between marines and fighter pilots and are dependent on high technology) into something appropriate for gaming.Honestly, the only setting I've seen that wasn't designed for gaming but could be easily made into a sci-fi RPG is Firefly/Serenity. (Of course, someone did make an RPG for it, but you could turn any good ruleset into Firefly/Serenity). The very low technology (the main characters fly in an unarmed spaceship until the movie!) makes this a lot easier to pull off.Fantasy is just easier. I figure most of us probably know little about caring about a horse, but we all understand the concept of a horse. And armor. And swordfighting. Playing a knight-type hero is therefore quite easy.Now try this in sci-fi, where every little thing and every big thing is quite different. Even modern-day games (and movies!) run into problems with things like cell phones, so naturally sci-fi games run into this problem too.IME, it's extraordinarily difficult playing a skills-based character in a modern setting. Unless you know the skill in questio in real-life, any description (whether you're the player or GM) will come off as "boring" or "just a bunch of dice rolls). At least thinking about using a skill is pretty easy in a modern setting though. Also, it's rather difficult for GMs to make many skills useful in an RPG, to the point where a scientist-type player might keep asking the GM "is Craft (pharmaceutical) going to be useful at all in this adventure? Do I get to roll it more than twice?" Doing the same thing in a sci-fi setting is much harder since the same problems exist and no one really knows what the future will hold. Things that would be obvious to characters that live in the future will often simply not occur to players born in modern times.I think for these reasons, sci-fi will always do better in fiction rather than RPGs. There, the author can take as much time as they want to explain things. (Even then, sci-fi mystery novels tend to suck, as what are the chances the author will have explained future technology enough for readers to have any chance to solve the mystery for themselves?)Sci-fi games also tend to have scaling problems. I'll use Battlestar Galactica as an example. (Note that I'm not discussing the actual BS:G game, as I've never even seen the system.) Writing a set of rules for characters as people, and another for characters as space pilots just makes the game more complicated. And good luck if only some of the PCs are pilots.Even in modern games, a character who wants to be a good driver will continually impose a different subsystem (that would be driving rules) on the game. And of course, probably no one else will be any good at it, either. This is before taking into account some rules systems having terrible driving rules (d20 Modern made running people over way too good!).I once went through a bag d20 Future game where the GM allowed almost everything. We had aliens, mutants, people owning robots (those rules were busted, by the way), people owning mecha, people owning spaceships... guess how the mecha-operator felt when they realized spaceships were umpteen times better than mecha in every way that counted?</blockquote>

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