Yeah. I know GURPS is the biggest and even though I don't use the system, I find their books useful due to all the non-game info they provide. It saves me a lot of time on doing research.
Yeah, this is one of the main flaws with that system. It's not universal like GURPS or AFMBE or NBA or whatever, it's "universal" like D&D. It was literally created to be D&D but for scifi, even down to the implicit setting assumptions of its flagship setting Star*Drive being baked into the core rules even though these weren't branded with the SD logo. d20 Future and its supplements sheds these assumptions for the most part, I guess, not that WotC gave it much love.
There's essentially three ways to go about it:
1. Have a large enough list of technology, items, species and creatures to supply any likely need.
2. Have a system for building the concrete elements of the above and let the GM decide the premises.
3. Do things in broad enough strokes that the fiction is informing how they interact, but the mechanics are generic enough there's limited ability to need to lock them down on that level.
All of these have issues depending on where you're coming from.
It's hard for me to blame them. D&D had a much stronger foundation built on Tolkien and various other authors listed in Appendix N, but scifi doesn't have any single genre-defining work like LotR that overshadows the entire genre. It has multiple famous subgenre-defining franchises like Star Wars, Star Trek, Alien, Dune, Foundation, Mass Effect, Starship Troopers, Warhammer 40,000, etc. It's impossible to create something that feels like generic scifi to the supermajority of scifi fans. Even if you tried making
a list of criteria found in "most" scifi, any particular setting you point to as a good example is probably not gonna neatly hit more than about half of your criteria. You would need to make multiple settings. What settings would you make? How would you decide what tropes get focus? How do you distinguish yourself from popular competitors like Traveller and Star Wars?
I'd argue D&D didn't really do that great a job of representing broad fantasy either. In particular, the magic and class systems forced the game into certain modes that excluded a lot of things. Fundamentally, they just didn't care, and neither did at least a majority of people who got into the game and stuck with it.
Even if you try anyway you're gonna run into the problem that there aren't any generic scifi races like there are generic fantasy races. D&D was able to ripoff Tolkien's races by invoking public domain folklore and fairy tales even though we all know they were ripping off Tolkien, but you can't do the same for the scifi genre because there aren't any widely recognized scifi aliens that are also public domain besides ufology cliches like grays, reptilians and nordic aliens. How many of these
public domains aliens do you recognize or would consider appropriate as basic player character races in a scifi game made now? Vulcans and Borgs are iconic but they're copyrighted by Paramount, so TSR had to cheat by combining them into an original species and naming it "mechalus".
But that's it; sand off the names and a few ultraspecific traits, and those are plenty good enough. I mean, honestly, "generic fantasy races" got that way because a lot of people did something similar to that, they just did some of it a long time ago.
Neato. Do you have a link to the specific product? The terms you provided don't have good SEO.
Google found the page easily enough.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/456433/sabre-rpg-3e-scifi-player-s-manual Wow, this came out in 2023? I'm surprised it's already canceled and forgotten. 15 alien species? Hmm... I'll have to read that.
Its less that it was forgotten than most people never heard about it in the first place. Its a one-man-band operation, and likely never got any large distribution.
I remember that! I bought it, but I don't remember it being a particularly good replacement for Alternity/d20 Future. It has a decent run down on customizing FTL for your setting, whereas d20 Future bizarrely had no rules for FTL engines at all despite the sample settings assuming casual FTL travel. It's a trade-off, I guess. Better in some ways, inferior in others.
The problem is you kind of need to define what makes a game a generic SF but not otherwise generic. I'll note you can't even define it by absence of magic if you're going to use Alternity as an example; the SFX rules, and even a separate book existed after all.
You left the space under "Paranormal..." blank?
That was actually where Monster of the Week was supposed to go, not with the urban fantasy. I could mention things like the third edition of Chill (which wasn't a bad game despite the authors turning out to be awful people) but a lot of other modern ones are adjuncts to generic systems (there's at least one for Savage Worlds for example).
Yeah, that's a common thing I noticed. The spy games I picked up are pretty organization-centric. If you want to play a different organization, then you have to buy a different game.
I can understand the reasoning behind this: different organizations are unlikely to play well together so you'd be writing content that is increasingly unlikely to get used by all the groups who buy your book, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Adding more options, even ones unlikely to be used in tandem, can still increase the appeal of your game to more groups.
But does it do so to an extent to justify the extra effort and page count? The both of those are limited resources.
Neato. I've noticed that there's a number of post apoc interstellar settings popping up. A galactic FTL explosion is a pretty common explanation. I first recall seeing this in the backstory for 40k, but since then I've seen it pop up in Stars Without Number and even Star Trek Discovery.
The problem with having too heavily civilized settings is the same one as in fantasy; it constrains the type of stories you can tell. At the other end if there's no civilization, that creates problems too. In some respects, a society that's getting back on their feet after been knocked down is the best of both worlds.
Ooh! I know of that, as well as similar games like Transhuman Space. I read Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, Down And Out In the Magic Kingdom and a few other books in the transhuman nightmare world genre. It is very freaky and unsettling, even when the author isn't trying to gross me out with descriptions of body horror.
There are definitely horror elements in EP. There's a lot of opportunity given the technologies and history going on thee. And there's some stuff that might be unsettling for people that's not intended as horror in a setting where people treat their bodies about the way we do our cars in interchangeablility.
Oh, another post apoc in space game?
Well, if you go back far enough, any setting is a post-apocalypse setting.
In this case the big issue is that PCs are making a go of it in a universe that doesn't hate them but also doesn't consider them particularly important.
I'll add those to my reading list, but I have to admit that I never developed an interest in interstellar post apoc or transhuman nightmare worlds. I do enjoy watching Monkey Wrench on youtube, but I have yet to develop an interest in playing games like that.
I don't think I'd call either EP or FE nightmare worlds, though both have some horrific elements. Some individual parts aren't too happy making, but they're more so in the way any place that has bad places are--in this case in kind of cyberpunk ways, but they have the advantage there are places that
aren't like that.
I bought that! I've never been able to wrap my head around PbtA, but I thought it was interesting when the book made 1:1 comparisons between its classes and various characters in tv shows. Some of it confused me as some of the classes felt redundant to one another or covered wildly different power levels (e.g. it has a different class for Willow in the earlier seasons of Buffy and then another class for her dark witch arc, both of which are available at character creation).
The thing you have to understand about PbtA is that power doesn't mean what it means in a more representative game. It just means what sort of influence you have on your character's development and in what contexts. That's why some of the playbooks seem redundant; they aren't so much based on what they can
do as what they're
about.
I have some issues regarding what I want, and what my players would be comfortable with regarding MotW, but power imbalance isn't really a part of it.
I picked up the supplement that included settings, but I don't remember being wowed. The shadowy quasi-governmental and morally ambiguous at best MIB setting was specifically one of those settings that I'm not interested in because it's oversaturated. Maybe not in ttrpgs, but MIBs are oversaturated in prose fiction. I find the worldbuilding highly questionable because it combines both the trope of keeping magic arbitrarily secret from the public (
which is questionable by itself)
and the trope of the secret shadowy organization being maybe evil too and definitely morally questionable. I already burnt myself out on that by reading those early 2010s creepypastas where a shadowy MIB organization performs horrific experiments on people by exposing them to dangerous magical objects, creatures and less definable phenomena for unexplained reasons that resemble Nazi science. I'm not a fan. It's fine as an option, I guess, but the
only option? Sorry, no thanks.
I'm not qualified to comment; I was mostly pointing out the core game which is (other than assuming relatively modern period) setting-free and frankly can easily just be run with the PCs deciding to go hunting monsters themselves or one of the ones that implies money being a sponsor.
I'll need to check that out.
I don't know why, but I never developed an interest in Shadowrun or similar settings that combine urban fantasy and cyberpunk. My first introduction to the idea was actually in d20 Cyberscape where the writers mentioned on one page that you could play a cyberpunk version of Urban Arcana where the various D&D races install cybergear (with image of a drow with robotic spider legs). I thought it sounded neat when I read it, but I just never developed an interest. No idea why.
Since you didn't mention them, I assumed lack of interest.
I actually had no idea that this mixing of genres even had more than one setting beyond Shadowrun. I'll have to check that out.
Even back in the day, there was TORG and the like and Vault and Sinless were recent attempts to revisit a more cyberpunk/fantasy combo, but if you want more broad multigenre, they aren't.
I love all the weird fantasy that Monte Cook makes, but I have to agree that he makes it so weird that it becomes inaccessible.
I didn't consider it inaccessible; I just don't happen to like Cypher.
Overall, I keep getting the impression that rpgs are ironically not the best place for writers to be creative and they should be writing prose fiction or making video games instead. Trying to get gamers to try a new rpg is like herding cats because of the high investment cost of learning rules and settings, whereas it's probably way easier to get someone to read a short story you wrote.
Well, until recently you had the problem that if you did anything really quirky, there had to be a group somewhere that wanted, well, quirky and original. Not an individual in it: the group. Even now its harder to recruit that than something mainstream. Of books, video games and RPGs, the latter is the one most group-dependent.
