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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Quixote" data-source="post: 5454308" data-attributes="member: 694">(Feh.  No Alternity prefix.)  This is an open-ended question for all you clever refs out there.The last several long-term campaigns I've run have all been high fantasy.  It remains my favorite genre, but we all need some variety after a while (especially those of us who chronically DM and hardly ever get the chance to play, but that's a topic for another post).  I feel like I'm starting to get burned out on Tolkienesque fantasy worlds, and I have no desire at all to dip into Conanesque low fantasy or any flavor of superheroes.  As far as popular RPG conceits go, that leaves some brand of sci-fi.Space opera would have to be my choice, because it shares something fundamental with high fantasy: it's got clear-cut good-aligned heroes, evil-aligned villains, and just enough gray area in between for lovable rogues and scoundrels.  Darker styles of low fantasy or hard sci-fi tend towards <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlackAndGrayMorality" target="_blank">black and gray morality</a> and <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrapsackWorld" target="_blank">crapsack worlds</a>, both of which I find obnoxious in the extreme.  I want to run a campaign that feels more like Star Wars.  (What can I say, I'm one of those nerd heretics who just didn't care for Firefly very much.)For the moment, I have a setting in mind, something that I'm slowly home-brewing and adding detail to.  I have all the major factions, organizations, and alien races ready to go.  But I'll also likely lay out these two conventions or table-rules before I sit down with my players to begin the campaign.1) In space opera, the protagonists are good guys.  The player characters can be what D&D usually thinks of as good or neutral, but if anyone turns evil, they get NPC'd.  I think this is a reasonable rule for most any campaign where the DM doesn't want to deal with evil PCs, but especially for certain genres that just demand it.2) In keeping with genre convention (I'm thinking of both Star Wars and Star Trek here), the majority of the protagonists should be human.  Aliens, robots, and other special snowflakes are the exception, not the norm.  To model this, players must start the game with human characters.  If a player character dies, the player may then opt to roll up an unusual character, drawn from among all alien races (&al.) that the party has so far encountered in-game.All of this is fine and dandy, but I'm having a bit of trouble now deciding precisely how I want to begin this campaign.  If the players roll up a typical set of characters, and I'm sure they will, I'm liable to see a spread of variously good- and neutral-aligned mercenary soldiers and pilots, rogues and scoundrels, techies and psionicists.  (Have you noticed how, when playing Alternity, the diplomat is by far the least-played class?)  What, in the opinion of all you GMs out there with sci-fi experience, is the best way to draw a rabble of player characters into a heroic space opera?  Drop them in the middle of a firefight between good guys and bad guys, and hope they side with the good guys?  Mysterious stranger in a bar who wants to hire them for an interstellar treasure-hunt?  Start them on a planet under the thumb of an oppressive empire, and hope that they start sticking it to the man?  Archaeological dig on a remote planet releases an ancient, alien darkness?Help me, EN-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope!  (...sorry, that was lame, I apologize.) <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/blush.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":blush:" title="Blush    :blush:" data-shortname=":blush:" /></blockquote>

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