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Message: <blockquote data-quote="buzz" data-source="post: 1402082" data-attributes="member: 6777">Sweet Jeebus! Remind me never to game with you guys. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Anyway...Back in the day, SFRPGs weren't so unpopular. I mean, some of the first RPGs in general were sci-fi/SF games: Metamorphosis Alpha, Traveller, Gamma World, Space Opera, Universe, Starships & Spacemen, Space Patrol... Heck, they used to have their own *magazine*: The Space Gamer. The various incarnations of Star Wars and Trek have generally been pretty popular, and Shadowrun and Cyberpunk2020 were dang popular in the '90s, and Alternity still has a pretty hard-core following.Frankly, though people have made some good points in this thread, I think it really comes down to a combination of faddism and "killer apps".Fantasy, in various incarnations, seems to be in ascendance right now. Between the LOTR films, Harry Potter, and Buffy/Angel, fantasy is simply "on the brain" of the geek populace. And let's not forget that, among the gaming populace, the biggest fad in recent years has been 3e/d20, which is primarily focused on fantasy/D&D support. Fandom, in general, just doesn't seem inetersted in SF right now. Along with supers (which has seen an amazing resurgence... and what are Buffy/Angel but a confluence of fantasy and supers), fantasy is simply the shiznit right now.(Look at how disappointed, IMHO, people and/or media companies have been with SF of late, too. The SW prequels were lame, the Matrix sequels were lame, Enteprise is probably going to get cancelled, Firefly was cancelled, audiences seemed indifferent to films like AI and Minority Report, and so on. Heck, besides SW, when was the last time you saw a major movie with spaceships in it?)Alongside that, SFRPGs simply haven't had a "killer app" in recent memory. Reactions to both SWd20 and Decipher's Trek seem kind of mixed. Transhuman Space is really cool, but it's also pretty obscure, subject-wise. Blue Planet is even more obscure, as well as being pretty dead as a product line. And cyberpunk as a genre is pretty much passe, as it were.Ergo, it's just not SF's "time" right now. Ergo, gamers aren't trying to emulate it (which is what gamers tend to do).Whether SFRPGs are harder to run or not, I dunno. All I know is, I'm eagerly awaiting d20 Future, and I'd join a Star HERO game at the drop of a hat. And if someone were to release an updated Known Space RPG (not just Chaosium's old Ringworld RPG), I'd buy the first copy.</blockquote>

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