Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Imperialus" data-source="post: 1373378" data-attributes="member: 893">forgive me if this has been mentioned already but I also think that in a lot of Sci Fi settings it is exceptionally easy for a character to get lost in the background of the universe.  Say you were to play a Star Treck role playing game.  I can only really see two real options on how to run the game and both have some pretty big drawbacks.1) The players are all senor ranking officers on some starship.  They get to make all the command decisions, direct the ship in combat, and generally muck about as they please.  Big problem with this is the there will be no where near enough players in all but the most gigantic of groups to play even the most senor officers on a ship crewed by say 300 people.  I mean bare minimum you'll need a Captain, First Officer, Comms, Helm, Weapons Officer, Engineer, Doctor, Chief Petty Officer, Science, and Navigation, to name a few.  This forces the DM to play a huge array of regularly reccuring characters who must remain hugely consistant as the players will be dealing with them nearly every session.  The other problem is the fact that each of those jobs is so specialized it would be exceptionally difficult to write an adventure in which everyone can take part.  I mean it's all well and good to play an adventure that is a knock down drag em out fight with some alien menace but the poor SOB playing the science officer may as well be sitting with his finger up his nose for most of the session.2) The other possibility is to have the players all be members of a military unit, like say a squadron of Imperial Space Marines in Warhammer 40K.  This has the opposite problem in that each character may as well be a carbon copy of the others.  I mean when everyone is a grunt with a gun little can be done to allow the characters to develop specific personalities praticularly when they are fighting along side hundreds or thousands of other grunts with guns.  Sure grunt #1 might have some extra skill points tossed into demolitions and grunt #3 might have a few stealth skills but when you get right down to it there is no real position for a lot of characters that players might want to play.A few games have managed to do reasonably effecteive jobs of provideing futureistic settings, my personal favorite is probably Shadowrun but even in that game I felt the need to outright ban deckers as player characters.  I mean for 90% of the adventure they sat around and sharpened penciles while saying "Oh, a firefight?  I duck." and on the occasions they actually got a chance to use their decking skills everyone else may as well go out for pizza while the player and the DM spend 45 minutes playing a compleately different game.  My shadowrun teams would always have a decker onboard but he would be an NPC and I would run any possible decking beforehand.  On the occasions when he would jack in and do his computer vodoo I would simply say "you see joe blow go limp for 10 minutes while you cover his back.  Suddenly he reaches up pulls the plug from his head and says, OK guys, we're in."D&D has the exceptional advantage of nearly everyone being useful in almost all situations.  Sure a thief might not go toe to toe with an orc at first level, but he can probably drop him in 1 hit if he makes a sucessful backstab.  However a half decent DM can also write almost anyone out of a campaign as needed.  For example, you only have 3 players and they are playing a fighter, a cleric and a wizard?  Fine tone down the traps they are going to come across.  Have a fighter a thief and a wizard?  That works too just don't throw them up against too much undead and maby toss in a few extra healing potions.  Perhaps you would send group A into a dungon to kill a lich who relies on his undead servents to keep intruders out.  Group B may find itself breaking into the manor of a corrupt city offical with ties to the thieves guild, they would be forced to bypass the traps and human guards he has to find incriminateing evidance against him.  Even dungons that are almost indentical could be run by either group simply by changeing what they will encounter inside.  Take out that lich and make him an equivilant CR sorcerer instead give him orcs and ogres and bodyguards instead of vampire spawn and mummies.  Besides if things get too rough the fighter in group A could take a few levels of rouge or the wizard in group B could take a couple levels of cleric.</blockquote>

Verification