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Message: <blockquote data-quote="schnee" data-source="post: 7104489" data-attributes="member: 16728">Speaking as someone who absolutely loved Shadowrun, Traveller, and Gamma World back in the day, I think the pervasiveness of information technology has ruined sci-fi.Like the jokes about <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH2B9F-GPm0" target="_blank">cell phones and movie plots</a> - having wifi, RFID, cameras, smart phones, GPS, motion tracking, and smart enough algorithms at everyone's disposal has made all the fun sci-fi story telling of the past kind of retro.Sneaking around? Breaking and entering? All the 'juicy' targets that are fun to use as adversaries are now impenetrable. To do them with any verisimilitude means spending so much time investigating and hacking and doing confidence games that the 'break in, have combat, get the MacGuffin, get away' model is kind of broken. It's why nobody ever really played Deckers in Shadowrun, because it became a completely different game that involved a boring set of skills.It also means there is so much *complexity* in that style of game now. It's not about avoiding a camera, distracting a guard, and cracking a lock - it's about foiling an interconnected system of hundreds of cameras all with facial recognition, doors keyed to specific RFID badges and biometrics. Imagine what happens in 20 years? 200? Who wants to make rules for that, let alone do all the adjudication?Let's face it, most of our RPGs were just a game that let us act out our favorite movies and books from when we were kids. The Buck Rogers / Star Wars swashbuckling model is dead. What sort of hand-waving and 'world building' would you have to do to make the actual Death Star as easy to sneak around in as it was in the 80's? It's really odd to read Shadowrun and realize it's one of those 'Popular Mechanics' issues from the 1930's that got the future hilariously wrong.Fantasy is a lot simpler, and you can hand-wave away things that aren't realistic.</blockquote>

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