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Message: <blockquote data-quote="VelvetViolet" data-source="post: 9701276" data-attributes="member: 6686357">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.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 href="https://spriggans-den.com/2022/07/18/the-default-space-opera-setting/" target="_blank">a list of criteria</a> 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?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 <a href="https://pdsh.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Alien_Species" target="_blank">public domains aliens</a> 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".Be that as it may, I've found it to be good enough. It's a pastiche of all the scifi tropes that the writers could fit in at the time, such as mutants, cyborgs, aliens, bug wars, roswell grays, everything including the kitchen sink. I find that this makes it feel pretty distinct from all the other settings I listed. I still carry a candle for it because it wasn't driven into the ground like all those franchises have been and I haven't found newer settings that make similar assumptions. If it wasn't canceled and had gotten support continuously into the present until the quality went down the drain, then yeah I probably would be equally tired of it now but we don't live in that timeline.While Alternity/SD is certainly idiosyncratic and the worldbuilding is quite frankly absurd, I found that its deliberate genericism makes it way more open-ended in terms of character options. Within its limitations, it can support a wide range of character concepts without the rules/setting fighting you like it would in all of the other settings I mentioned. It's hard to describe this without going into a long-winded tangent on the specific conceits.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. <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/456433/sabre-rpg-3e-scifi-player-s-manual" target="_blank">https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/456433/sabre-rpg-3e-scifi-player-s-manual</a> 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.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.You left the space under "Paranormal..." blank?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.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.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.Oh, another post apoc in space game?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 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). 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 (<a href="https://mythcreants.com/blog/five-common-masquerade-explanations-and-why-theyre-bad/" target="_blank">which is questionable by itself</a>) 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'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.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.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.Tides of Torment Numenera was his chance to break into the mainstream by using the medium of video games and piggybacking off the cult acclaim of Planescape Torment, but unfortunately it didn't work out.It's a pity. I've seen so many cool ideas that appear in one rpg supplement and then get forgotten, while stuff I consider in need of being pruned somehow gets kept around for decades. I'll have to check those out.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.I think a good example of this is the Magnus Archives. It originally started as an anthology short story series presented in a podcast, then was later adapted to a ttrpg. I bought the rpg but haven't listened to the original stories. From perusing the bestiary, I definitely get the feeling that these monsters work a lot better in the original stories rather than the game descriptions.Another, probably more pertinent, would be Star Wars. Much of the setting as fans recognize it now was actually invented by the West End rpg, to the point that Zahn used it as his reference while writing the famous Thrawn books.A lot of creators tried to turn their series bibles into ttrpgs without success, when they really should've tried prose fiction instead. That's what I've decided to do. I have a lot of ideas rattling around my head, but it's probably better to write them in prose rather than a ttrpg. It's much easier to convince someone to read a short story than to learn and play a ttrpg.I think it's a tragedy because ttrpgs were what exposed me to the variety of genres that exist in the first place, but such is life.</blockquote>

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