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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(Psi)SeveredHead" data-source="post: 4609718" data-attributes="member: 1165">But I think it would sell better if it were.There was another thread a week or so ago, about changing default assumptions about the game.One poster said he wanted to remove humans from a setting, but if he did so, he'd lose most of his players! I think more people are familiar with this German/Greek cross than with something based on other cultures.Was this in reply to the whole thread, or just BS:G?In any event, I think focusing on space ships is a real negative. It adds a different skillset with a completely different set of ... skills. (Wow, that was so eloquent.)Let's compare this to 4e DnD. In 4e, the game is designed around small team "infantry" combat. Everyone is good at this kind of combat, whether they're doing so with swords, sneakiness, mobility, or magic... and they're all theoretically as powerful.In a game with spaceship combat, now you're trying to ensure everyone is almost equally skilled with spaceship combat as well. In some settings (like Star*Drive) the system tries to parcel out different spaceship roles, but (unlike fighting in an "infantry squad" each role doesn't hold the balance of fun). The engineer isn't going to have as much fun as the gunner.I can relate to the squalor of an 11th century peasant village more easily than to an underhive or a holo chamber or what have you in the 25th century. I can relate better to messenger pigeons than to hyperspace communication relays.And as for phones... you can't really call for help timely in a fantasy setting, at least not at low level. The players have to solve the problem or find a way for the characters to survive for some time.In a modern game, players tend to treat their skills are more important than in a fantasy game. It's much harder to make these skills relevant to any adventure.It's often difficult to make a skill relevant when it didn't seem relevant at first, eg, the player who wants to use their Craft (mechanical) to make weapons. Not guns, but something like a rocket launcher that is "out of scale" with the rest of the party.It's a huge deal. A horse moves in a manner similar to a human character. You don't need a special set of rules to describe the movement of a horse. A shuttle craft or any other kind of space ship is a heck of a lot bigger, often uses acceleration and maneuver rules (the likes of which a human or horse never have to deal with) and tends to use a lot of special combat rules to boot.Some settings did this particularly poorly. Alternity/Star*Drive had rules for turning your ship 45 degrees (an easy skill check and it made you harder to hit... we're not talking dogfighting, as that was more complicated), and rules for hitting random parts of the ship (and aiming did little good). D20 Future did this a bit better; you didn't have to roll a skill just to move the ship, and was more similar to personal combat, but the weapons were horrendously imbalanced.Did the other characters have any spaceship relevant skilsl?Also, I don't find psionics to be a huge subsystem (from 3.x onward, it was very similar to magic), horse back riding has only a few added rules, feats are part of the base game itself and mass combat is a huge subsystem I avoid like the plague.I noticed you mentioned "system" repeatedly. Maybe there are systems that do this well, but I don't think they sell as well as systems that do things poorly (ironically).</blockquote>

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