Science Fiction RPG Preferences and the Genre Umbrella

[Avoraciopoctules]

The Science Fiction label covers a lot of material. Any RPG aimed at all possible Sci-Fi stories would be enormously complicated and/or require a lot of MC work beforehand to tailor the rules modules into something aimed specifically at their game.

Most notable Sci-Fi RPGs I'm aware of try to tell specific kinds of stories. Think of Dark Heresy/Rogue Trader and Paranoia, for instance. Are there any kinds of SF stories you wish had a better RPG to emulate?

[Wesley Street]

I'm a big fan of space-based hard science-fiction, specifically of the CJ Cherryh-style of politics, trade, space station life, and combat. Traveller is the only game that I've found that touches on these. However the rules are so incredibly generic that there's a lot of MTP needed to get the right feel.

I'm also a big fan of 'starship stories' but what I've seen is Star Wars or Star Trek, neither of which I want to play as a game, or Rogue Trader, which I don't like as a setting.

I don't think I've found a TTRPG that does computer hacking 'right.' Tasks are either accomplished so incredibly quickly that there's no drama or the rules are so specific that they feel wrong (if you know how networked systems function) or weird, a la Shadowrun. Some sort of Netrunner-lite would be a good compromise.

[sabs]

I have 2 different kinds of sf games I like.

Near Future(ish) Cyberpunk, Shadowrun. The world is set in the next 100 years or so, and it's like today, only more fucked up with cool tech.

then Far Future.
For Far Future I'd want a game that covered:
FireFly, Traveler, space trading, space combat, future tech. Support Cyber/cyborg, AI.

Aliens are totally optional, but I would like some fun 'race' options.

[Aryxbez]

I'm not sure how compatible all my desires are, especially all at once. Though I've wondered if there's an RPG that could handle StarFox like battles, with also on foot segments, like Assault. In accordance to on foot, also Giant Mecha, so can have scenes where they might not be in their mech, and go do politics, have shoot outs, or whatever.

Lastly, I think might be a separate desire, RPG for ship vs. ship battles, kinda like in FTL:Faster Than Light, and have scenes where getting boarded, and more dynamically fighting off boarders, perhaps doing some boarding of your own. Each PC likely has role: Engineer, Medic, Soldier, Captain/Pilot or whatever more appropriate.

Though yes, and RPG that could handle those well could probably go quite a long way for me, especially with a variety of alien races, at least the general archtypes.

Unrelated note to video games, I think a mix of Mass Effect & FTL gameplay elements would totally be something I'd eagerly pay money for.

[Stubbazubba]

Yeah, I keep thinking of a home-brew SF setting that feels like a mix of Firefly and the latest Star Trek movie with just enough X-Men thrown in to keep it really interesting. I want the campaign to mostly be an investigation-themed episodic thing with exploration of alien worlds, cultures, and threats for profit. Starship battles would happen, but wouldn't be a focus of that campaign. Things like the asteroid belt scene from ESB, however, would need to work rather well.

[Voss]

The Science Fiction label covers a lot of material. Any RPG aimed at all possible Sci-Fi stories would be enormously complicated and/or require a lot of MC work beforehand to tailor the rules modules into something aimed specifically at their game.

Most notable Sci-Fi RPGs I'm aware of try to tell specific kinds of stories. Think of Dark Heresy/Rogue Trader and Paranoia, for instance. Are there any kinds of SF stories you wish had a better RPG to emulate?

Honestly? Just running around with ships and laser guns would be a pretty good start. Most sci-fi has this problem where they insert some level of pure bullshit into the setting (whether its Space Wizards, Completely Impractical Utopianism, or Its All Cowboys Up in Here), and most RPG systems almost always fall apart in some vital area (most often, rather bizarrely, ship combat).

The other problem, of course is most transplanted SF settings don't work well at the tabletop. Being a small part of a larger crew is just something that most gamers intrinsically fail at.

[ModelCitizen]

Yeah, I keep thinking of a home-brew SF setting that feels like a mix of Firefly and the latest Star Trek movie with just enough X-Men thrown in to keep it really interesting. I want the campaign to mostly be an investigation-themed episodic thing with exploration of alien worlds, cultures, and threats for profit. Starship battles would happen, but wouldn't be a focus of that campaign. Things like the asteroid belt scene from ESB, however, would need to work rather well.

Pretty much this. Space opera on a ship way the fuck away from civilization, with cool powers.

Putting the game on an exploratory vessel that occasionally goes to remote colonies saves the DM a lot of prep work figuring out how the technology works. There's probably no internet in space, for one, and you can have colonies where the tech is asymmetrically advanced because they only have what they brought with them.

I've been thinking about something like this a lot lately and I've come up with three big design points, in order from least to most contentious:

• You need full working subsystems for the ship. Obviously get space combat right (preferably with emphasis on either a bunch of independent gunner stations or small fighter craft so multiple PCs can participate) but the big thing is the ship's sensors. PCs need to be able to use the ship to acquire information about the world, and that needs to not be pure MTP. (One more important note about ship combat: when the PCs want to nuke an enemy force from orbit or an enemy fighter wants to strafe a PC on the surface of a space station, you need to be able to handle that. Small vehicle weapons probably need to operate on the same damage scale as personal weapons, and big strategic-scale weapons need to be good at killing mooks but fantastically bad at killing named characters.)
• You need some metagame mechanic for big ship-level decisions. In genre the ship probably has a captain who makes the final decision whether to carpet-nuke the planet. You can't let a player play the captain, because they'll make terrible decisions that make the game unfun for other players, and you definitely can't let the DM play the captain because that's just a genre shift away from literal railroading. (Most of the games I've played in where the PCs lived on a ship have ended because of one of those two approaches.) The captain needs to make big decisions by majority vote of the players with the DM breaking ties, or something like that.
• You need an ensemble cast - one player, multiple characters. Obviously the game needs to support some kind of Science Officer character, but playing the science officer would suck because a lot of the game will consist of gunfights where there's nothing to be scienced at. Yeah, yeah, in something D&D-like we'd give the science officer a nanite fabricator and better weaponry so he can fight, and then we'd have the Signals Officer call in orbital strikes in combat time which he can only call in within his personal line of effect for some gimmicky reason, and the Captain would make inspiring speeches to give +2 to hit, and that's all fucking awful. Just thinking about writing it makes me tired. In genre there need to be characters who are only really good at one thing that doesn't matter most of the time, and there also needs to be a substantial portion of the crew that stays back on the ship when the ground team goes planetside. Accordingly, one player, multiple characters. Each player has one Ground Team character and one or two characters who specializations mostly matter on the ship. Corollary: the rules for generating individual characters need to be pretty simple. Corollary 2: The game can support and expect a lot of PC death if that's something that appeals to you.

[Red Lantern]

Yeah, I keep thinking of a home-brew SF setting that feels like a mix of Firefly and the latest Star Trek movie with just enough X-Men thrown in to keep it really interesting. I want the campaign to mostly be an investigation-themed episodic thing with exploration of alien worlds, cultures, and threats for profit. Starship battles would happen, but wouldn't be a focus of that campaign. Things like the asteroid belt scene from ESB, however, would need to work rather well.

Pretty much this. Space opera on a ship way the fuck away from civilization, with cool powers.

Putting the game on an exploratory vessel that occasionally goes to remote colonies saves the DM a lot of prep work figuring out how the technology works. There's probably no internet in space, for one, and you can have colonies where the tech is asymmetrically advanced because they only have what they brought with them.

I've been thinking about something like this a lot lately and I've come up with three big design points, in order from least to most contentious:

• You need full working subsystems for the ship. Obviously get space combat right (preferably with emphasis on either a bunch of independent gunner stations or small fighter craft so multiple PCs can participate) but the big thing is the ship's sensors. PCs need to be able to use the ship to acquire information about the world, and that needs to not be pure MTP. (One more important note about ship combat: when the PCs want to nuke an enemy force from orbit or an enemy fighter wants to strafe a PC on the surface of a space station, you need to be able to handle that. Small vehicle weapons probably need to operate on the same damage scale as personal weapons, and big strategic-scale weapons need to be good at killing mooks but fantastically bad at killing named characters.)
• You need some metagame mechanic for big ship-level decisions. In genre the ship probably has a captain who makes the final decision whether to carpet-nuke the planet. You can't let a player play the captain, because they'll make terrible decisions that make the game unfun for other players, and you definitely can't let the DM play the captain because that's just a genre shift away from literal railroading. (Most of the games I've played in where the PCs lived on a ship have ended because of one of those two approaches.) The captain needs to make big decisions by majority vote of the players with the DM breaking ties, or something like that.
• You need an ensemble cast - one player, multiple characters. Obviously the game needs to support some kind of Science Officer character, but playing the science officer would suck because a lot of the game will consist of gunfights where there's nothing to be scienced at. Yeah, yeah, in something D&D-like we'd give the science officer a nanite fabricator and better weaponry so he can fight, and then we'd have the Signals Officer call in orbital strikes in combat time which he can only call in within his personal line of effect for some gimmicky reason, and the Captain would make inspiring speeches to give +2 to hit, and that's all fucking awful. Just thinking about writing it makes me tired. In genre there need to be characters who are only really good at one thing that doesn't matter most of the time, and there also needs to be a substantial portion of the crew that stays back on the ship when the ground team goes planetside. Accordingly, one player, multiple characters. Each player has one Ground Team character and one or two characters who specializations mostly matter on the ship. Corollary: the rules for generating individual characters need to be pretty simple. Corollary 2: The game can support and expect a lot of PC death if that's something that appeals to you.

If you're willing to learn the EABA system, "Fires of heaven" delivers everything you've just asked for, in spades.

[Fuchs]

I am partial to the Firefly/Cowboy Bepop/etc. theme. Small crew of a spaceship, doing odd jobs, traveling from place to place. Shadowrun covers the personal parts pretty well.

[PoliteNewb]

I am partial to the Firefly/Cowboy Bepop/etc. theme. Small crew of a spaceship, doing odd jobs, traveling from place to place. Shadowrun covers the personal parts pretty well.

This is what I want as well. I'm not interested in carpet-nuking planets or dealing with governments of millions of worlds. I like Star Wars, but only if the focus is on guys like Han Solo and Greedo.

[ModelCitizen]

If you're willing to learn the EABA system, "Fires of heaven" delivers everything you've just asked for, in spades.

Seriously? I'll check it out.

This is what I want as well. I'm not interested in carpet-nuking planets or dealing with governments of millions of worlds. I like Star Wars, but only if the focus is on guys like Han Solo and Greedo.

Honestly carpet-nuking planets is a bit IN THE GRIMDARK THERE IS ONLY WAR for my tastes too. I just needed a colorful example of the guy playing the captain ruining your day. Feel free to substitute something smaller in scope.

[shadzar]

Science fiction is too much of a shit concept. it basically means science lies, and well D&D fits in that because magic is a lie to science.

when i think science fiction, i think more Jules Verne than Lovecraft, though both fit it, just lovecraft, like D&D, fit within the fantasy sub-genre of science fiction.

that being said. i wouldnt mind Jules Verne type Sci-Fi RPGs.

[Hicks]

They have something like that. It's called Etherscope.

[Username17]

If you're willing to learn the EABA system, "Fires of heaven" delivers everything you've just asked for, in spades.

EABA has been out for nearly a decade and I have literally never heard a single person saying anything nice about the system. Now, doubtless part of that is because it's not available in print form and people can't lend copies to friends or build word of mouth that way. I know very well how painful it is to move an RPG when it's not available as a book.

But also part of it is that EABA's goals are pretentious and stupid. Let's be honest here: GURPS does not deliver on its claims of being able to deliver any conceivable kind of game. HERO does not deliver on that either. They both have things that they do passably well (GURPS for high-lethality "human scale" tactical combat, HERO for 4-color superheroics). But neither one can deliver a "universal" experience, because it is not possible for that to happen. Mechanics that enhance cartoonish cinematics by necessity detract from gritty realism, and vice versa.

The whole grim reality that you literally can't make a single game that scratches all itches was basically made at the end of the 80s. GURPS and HERO made a valiant attempt, and by 1990 it was pretty clear that the line of inquiry was not productive. By 1991, game design theory had moved the fuck on to exploring how to match games to genres better. To have someone even attempt to create an "end all, be all" in fucking two thousand three is a degree of out-of-touchness that is hard to even wrap one's mind around.

So EABA fell on pretty amazingly deaf ears, because the promises made by the author were obviously and laughably impossible. I have no idea what the system is actually like, because they lost me at "Hello".

-Username17

[Korwin]

If you're willing to learn the EABA system, "Fires of heaven" delivers everything you've just asked for, in spades.

You could have provided an link
This seems to be a sample of the basic rules:
http://www.btrc.net/images/stories/free ... sample.pdf

And this a sample of Fire of Heaven:
http://www.btrc.net/images/stories/free ... sample.pdf

Did I got that right and there are only electronic Versions out?
No dead trees?

Fake edit: Oh, Frank allready answered that, while I was writing.

[Red_Rob]

Science fiction is too much of a shit concept.

Well, I guess that is kind of a Science Fiction preference...

Obviously the game needs to support some kind of Science Officer character, but playing the science officer would suck because a lot of the game will consist of gunfights where there's nothing to be scienced at.

Not necessarily. Adventures don't have to involve a lot of combat unless you want them to. Star Trek gets plenty of mileage out of exploration of the unknown, diplomacy with unusual cultures and moral dilemmas. Combat doesn't have to dominate, it's not D&D.

[Cynic]

I have always wanted to play a Vorkosigan saga style game but the diplomancerism that the books show is pretty much not suitable for rpgs

[Red Lantern]

They have something like that. It's called Etherscope.

There is a steampunk setting for EABA called "Verne".

[ModelCitizen]

Not necessarily. Adventures don't have to involve a lot of combat unless you want them to. Star Trek gets plenty of mileage out of exploration of the unknown, diplomacy with unusual cultures and moral dilemmas. Combat doesn't have to dominate, it's not D&D.

I'm not saying combat has to be front and center, but I don't think anyone is going to be happy playing just the med bay operator who waits on the ship until someone gets shot or contracts psychic brain worms. At the same time I don't want to confine that guy to NPC status, because space opera serials don't focus just on the ground team and I don't think a space opera TTRPG should either.

In fantasy games we already have the problem where skill-based characters often don't synergize well with the rest of the party. In a tech-oriented genre it's a much bigger deal because the skills are more specialized and collectively need more screen time. Giving everyone multiple characters deals with that - if your guy's thing isn't relevant right now, play a different guy. It also lightens the DM's workload filling out the crew and puts the players more in control of the ship.

[sabs]

that game completely suffers from shadowrun's the difference in cost for amateur to elite in no way reflects the probability changes in the actual dice.

And it's a nK3 system, joy joy happy.
Why are you suggesting this horribly crappy gaming system?

[Lokathor]

There's a few models we could follow, and each model would be a different RPG:

[*]Stargate SG-1 / Atlantis: There's one or more "adventuring parties", and anyone who isn't them (including their commander) is probably an NPC that the PCs sometimes talk to.

[*]Star Trek / Babylon 5 / Battlestar: An ensemble cast, where different adventures focus on different characters, but where each player would probably have more than one PC under their control to make sure that everyone can play during all the adventures.

[*]Farscape: Each player controls one PC, and the ship and its pilot are very explicitly at the behest of the "crew", but there is no other crew besides the PCs. The PCs wander from place to place doing things kinda like it's a DnD campaign.

And there's probably more but I just woke up.

[shadzar]

[*]Farscape: Each player controls one PC, and the ship and its pilot are very explicitly at the behest of the "crew", but there is no other crew besides the PCs. The PCs wander from place to place doing things kinda like it's a DnD campaign.

or the LEXX where the ship is its own pilot, you are just living in it as the crew.

[Red Lantern]

If you're willing to learn the EABA system, "Fires of heaven" delivers everything you've just asked for, in spades.

EABA has been out for nearly a decade and I have literally never heard a single person saying anything nice about the system. Now, doubtless part of that is because it's not available in print form and people can't lend copies to friends or build word of mouth that way. I know very well how painful it is to move an RPG when it's not available as a book.

But also part of it is that EABA's goals are pretentious and stupid. Let's be honest here: GURPS does not deliver on its claims of being able to deliver any conceivable kind of game. HERO does not deliver on that either. They both have things that they do passably well (GURPS for high-lethality "human scale" tactical combat, HERO for 4-color superheroics). But neither one can deliver a "universal" experience, because it is not possible for that to happen. Mechanics that enhance cartoonish cinematics by necessity detract from gritty realism, and vice versa.

The whole grim reality that you literally can't make a single game that scratches all itches was basically made at the end of the 80s. GURPS and HERO made a valiant attempt, and by 1990 it was pretty clear that the line of inquiry was not productive. By 1991, game design theory had moved the fuck on to exploring how to match games to genres better. To have someone even attempt to create an "end all, be all" in fucking two thousand three is a degree of out-of-touchness that is hard to even wrap one's mind around.

So EABA fell on pretty amazingly deaf ears, because the promises made by the author were obviously and laughably impossible. I have no idea what the system is actually like, because they lost me at "Hello".

-Username17

So you're criticizing something you know nothing about then. You lost me when you admitted that. If you've never even seen the system you are, of course, free to say what you want about it just as anyone else is free to say your opinion is utterly worthless.

[Red Lantern]

[*]Farscape: Each player controls one PC, and the ship and its pilot are very explicitly at the behest of the "crew", but there is no other crew besides the PCs. The PCs wander from place to place doing things kinda like it's a DnD campaign.

or the LEXX where the ship is its own pilot, you are just living in it as the crew.

God I can't believe someone else knows about and remembers that show.

[Red Lantern]

If you're willing to learn the EABA system, "Fires of heaven" delivers everything you've just asked for, in spades.

You could have provided an link
This seems to be a sample of the basic rules:
http://www.btrc.net/images/stories/free ... sample.pdf

And this a sample of Fire of Heaven:
http://www.btrc.net/images/stories/free ... sample.pdf

Did I got that right and there are only electronic Versions out?
No dead trees?

Fake edit: Oh, Frank allready answered that, while I was writing.

I have Fires of Heaven in print.

Sometimes I link, sometimes not. Depends on mood. Also I kind of figure if people are interested,m they can search. If they're not interested enough to search, meh.

But here are links to reviews of FoH and it's ship system for you since you proved you're interested and worth the time:

http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/14/14733.phtml

http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/14/14969.phtml