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Noje
2016-05-25, 08:52 PM
I've noticed that there a lot of people on this forum asking for advice/help for playing sci-fi ttrpgs. why do you guys think that we have so much trouble with this genre? is it the fault of poorly designed games or is there something about sci-fi that is inherently difficult for us to grasp onto?

Slipperychicken
2016-05-25, 11:21 PM
When my group plays games that are near modernity in their technology and culture, we find that there's a lot more to consider. There's a lot of game-changing technology, and also we understand the social systems, societal attitudes, and cultural institutions in far more detail than we would those of generic dnd fantasy-land. Grasping the complexity of the modern world in addition to new factors (such as robot-arms, aliens, or space travel) can make it quite difficult to do things while properly taking everything into account.

Comet
2016-05-25, 11:46 PM
Fantasy has D&D. You can tell your group you're doing D&D in a sort of kind of Tolkien-esque world and everyone will be on board. Any changes that come after that are exceptions to the rule.

Sci-Fi runs a larger array of possibilities, none of which are as iconic or easily digestible. One guy might want Interstellar, one guy might want Star Wars and one guy might want John Carter and everyone will be disappointed if something else is provided since the common points do run pretty thin between those three and however many more sci-fi settings there are out there.

And, yeah, you're right in that there aren't enough good games to help us get over this. There's Traveller and Stars Without Number and a handful of good cyberpunk games and those are great at giving you a starting point and a consistent world, but even Traveller hasn't been universally accepted as the baseline for sci-fi tabletop playing as much as it would want to.

There are plenty of sci-fi games that give you simulations of raygun functionality and spaceship design and so on. Not as many that give you a gameable world in an easily digestible format and with mechanics that reinforce the themes of that world. A lot of sci-fi games, maybe sci-fi gamers, seem to be more interested in math, simulation and realism than mechanics that help you get into the world, which is why so many inquiries about sci-fi games get a response of "IDK, use GURPS" and leave you to figure out how to turn that into a story.

Arbane
2016-05-25, 11:51 PM
For one thing, a player who's a physics or chemistry (hi, Trekkin!) can sometimes break the game right in two.

Mr Beer
2016-05-25, 11:54 PM
"fantasy" has an instant "default" setting for TTRPGs, it's expected to be pseudo-Mediaeval, have magic spells and swords and a number of other tropes which are reasonably congruent to different players' own experiences of gaming.

"sci fi" is much broader in some ways e.g. Shadowrun; Star Wars; Traveller; Paranoia; Judge Dredd; 40K and Twilight 2000 have vastly different game worlds, expectations and technology.

Khedrac
2016-05-27, 02:18 AM
Another problem is that unless you push the technology level so high that it becomes indistinguishable from magic (Clarke's law) you run into the problem that futurists' predictions are normally useless.
This means that most games set in the near future (and some in the far future) have been made less believeable before they are published!

Take Traveller - the original serious SciFi rpg (I don't count GammaWorld as serious - it was much more of a humorous game).
In Traveller the most advanced starships had computers that weighed several tons and could run 7 programs at once (though the programs were major programs not simple apps).
Take Star Trek - they have very advanced computers, with full AI - but there generally only appears to be one computer per ship/station (which was actually the forward looking model for buisness back in parts of the 90s, we were all going thin client and big servers...)
Base something on the now with smartphones etc., and "the internet of things" will mess you up. It's coming (unfortunately) but not even the people working on it really know what is going to take off. Even if you get that right, will the web be twitter and facebook or what? The dominant platforms change over time, usually unexpectedly.

Society and technology moves forward very fast, but in odd directions. No-one knows what is coming next so games have to make predicitons and they always get them wrong.
This makes it much harder for the players and GM - they have to manage the suspension of disbelief thet is standard for fantasy but much less expected for SciFi, and what is worse they have to do it in areas they actually know lots about (and players who cannot switch off the real knowledge they have when it exceeds the DM's are a problem for the DM - I have been that player:smallfrown:).
Games based on popular settings help with the suspension of disbelief (as people know what technology is present) but are worse in many ways as different people knowledge and understanding of the setting varies. This is not a problem exclusive to SciFi, but does seem to happen more than with Fantasy.

Altair_the_Vexed
2016-05-27, 02:39 AM
Another problem is that unless you push the technology level so high that it becomes indistinguishable from magic (Clarke's law) you run into the problem that futurists' predictions are normally useless.
This means that most games set in the near future (and some in the far future) have been made less believeable before they are published!

Take Traveller - the original serious SciFi rpg (I don't count GammaWorld as serious - it was much more of a humorous game).
In Traveller the most advanced starships had computers that weighed several tons and could run 7 programs at once (though the programs were major programs not simple apps).
Take Star Trek - they have very advanced computers, with full AI - but there generally only appears to be one computer per ship/station (which was actually the forward looking model for buisness back in parts of the 90s, we were all going thin client and big servers...)
Base something on the now with smartphones etc., and "the internet of things" will mess you up. It's coming (unfortunately) but not even the people working on it really know what is going to take off. Even if you get that right, will the web be twitter and facebook or what? The dominant platforms change over time, usually unexpectedly.

Society and technology moves forward very fast, but in odd directions. No-one knows what is coming next so games have to make predicitons and they always get them wrong.
This makes it much harder for the players and GM - they have to manage the suspension of disbelief thet is standard for fantasy but much less expected for SciFi, and what is worse they have to do it in areas they actually know lots about (and players who cannot switch off the real knowledge they have when it exceeds the DM's are a problem for the DM - I have been that player:smallfrown:).
Games based on popular settings help with the suspension of disbelief (as people know what technology is present) but are worse in many ways as different people knowledge and understanding of the setting varies. This is not a problem exclusive to SciFi, but does seem to happen more than with Fantasy.

This is why I don't try to treat sci-fi as any kind of real prediction, but a reflection of the era in which it was published.

When I run my Cyberpunk games, the future we're playing in is the retro-future of the late 80s, for example. See also Rocket Age RPG, the movie Brazil (a 1940s future), and others.

As for actually scientists and engineers at the table breaking the game - start out by asking them not to? I'm quite happy to leave my technological education at the door when I play in the name of fun - just like it didn't bother me when Starkiller base started draining plasma out of a star somehow.

Knaight
2016-05-27, 03:21 AM
It's not particularly hard, it's just that D&D is the center of the hobby and because of that most everyone gets a background in a very particular type of fantasy. Anyone asking for advice within it (which is most advice threads) tends to ask for something very specific, whereas entire genres and other fantasy subgenres get pretty broad threads a lot of the time.

Florian
2016-05-27, 04:57 AM
I've noticed that there a lot of people on this forum asking for advice/help for playing sci-fi ttrpgs. why do you guys think that we have so much trouble with this genre? is it the fault of poorly designed games or is there something about sci-fi that is inherently difficult for us to grasp onto?

Most of the time, itīs not even the game system used itself thatīs the problem.

The closer we get to our actual real-life experience, the more we will expect the character we play handles similar to what we know, else we canīt make informed decisions and the easier any sense of immersion breaks.

The setting itself should then reflect our expectations and our shared vision of how future advances could affect the necessary knowledge, abilities and informed decisions.

And that simply often leads to the problem that some of the simple, basic and fun activities in RPG gaming either make no sense when transported into Sci-Fi, break immersion when you do or have to be replaced with new things that need a high and developed knowledge of all participants what theyīre all about so they can have act their characters "natural" to the setting. The last thing is pretty rewarding but often mentally exhausting as you just canīt simply kick back and relax during the game.

Anonymouswizard
2016-05-27, 06:17 AM
As for actually scientists and engineers at the table breaking the game - start out by asking them not to? I'm quite happy to leave my technological education at the door when I play in the name of fun - just like it didn't bother me when Starkiller base started draining plasma out of a star somehow.

The thing is, be nice about it and don't ban real world technology just because you don't understand it.

I once asked if my character could build a railgun in a '10 years in the future' setting. I had the physics, maths, and electrical engineering skills, as well as a load of electronic components and a 3D printer that could have built a casing, as well as access to two poles of equal length (picked up by the party in the first session, I had forgotten about them but still had the ability to make some).

'No, you can't have a railgun, it would be too powerful.' :smallmad:

So my character cannot build a weapon that uses magnetic fields to propel a projectile because it would be too powerful? At best I'd have made something comparable to the rifles and shotguns we were carting around, probably less powerful (I only wanted it to save on ammo anyway, I was bothering to track it). But because the GM's only experience of railguns was with Warhammer 40,000 they were immediately banned as being too powerful (despite the fact that them not being powerful enough is the main problem with man-portable versions, along with rail deformation). In fact, I played in another game where the GM disallowed railguns, but he went 'because men portable versions aren't currently powerful enough to be worth using over guns, and I'm using out current level of technology'.

Essentially, as an engineer one of the most fun bits of a science fiction setting for me is getting to play with the technology and mess around with it. It's come to a point where the best group I've ever played with has also been made up of scientists and engineers (to the point we really got into how the electric tram our characters were riding works), but even if not allowed to make new tech I will still ruthlessly exploit all technology I can get my hands on in ways the GM probably didn't expect (also known as why I should not be allowed to play robots, as I will take hacking skills and proceed to edit my software as is convenient, down to inserting new memories to get out of jail with only a mind wipe [no problem, I'll find my backup in a few days of working aboard the ship, yes my robot characters back up their minds in case of problems, you mean you meat brains can't do that*]).

P.S. Starkiller base's charging method was stupid, and I can see no reason how it would work. Also, as shown it's at an incredibly wasteful one star per shot, so you need to move the darn planet around the galaxy, which makes the whole thing inferior to just building a squadron of Death Stars (now that would have been a more interesting climax).

* Other things I plan to pull off at some point: copying my mind into another body for a quick ally, downloading my mind into a starship, using a central server and communications array to remote control bodies, a modular body where I can swap in locomotion systems and tools as needed, and so on and so forth.

Gastronomie
2016-05-27, 06:28 AM
After humans took to the air for the first time, it took only half a century for them to reach the Moon.

When the radio was invented, nobody even dreamed that someday, people will be gaining access to not only the sounds of places far away, but also moving images.

People, before the invention of the internet, would have never believed it to be possible for all the people around the world to be connected by this vast and ever-expanding network of data composed by only 0s and 1s.

We, as children or teenagers or adults, were all surprised when the Wii came out. Not without even pressing the buttons, it was possible to control the characters in a video game.

The smartphone was a staggering invention. Everyone has this bizzare magical telephone that also acts as a music player, photo album, watch, typewriter, camera, calculater, notebook, game console, map of the world, radio, television, and probably a dozen other stuff that I can't think up at the moment.

Did people in old sci-fi novels have Smartphones? None of them did. The real 21st century, weaved by thousands of top-level geniuses over the course of decades, most of the time exceeds the imagination of a sorta-witty novelist. And people know it. People have witnessed how technology is evolving ever so fast that it's impossible to predict what we're gonna be holding in our hands even ten or five years from now.

Which is why it's scary to write sci-fi stuff.

goto124
2016-05-27, 06:37 AM
'No, you can't have a railgun, it would be too powerful.' :smallmad:

So my character cannot build a weapon that uses magnetic fields to propel a projectile because it would be too powerful?

Let's say someone used RAW to build a technically legal but overpowered character who overshadows all the other party members. Is that acceptable behavior?

Besides, wouldn't that require homebrewing to even have mechanics for a railgun? Homebrewing takes effort and time to test and balance the mechanics. It's quite normal for a GM to refuse to come up with wonky railgun mechanics on the fly just because a player suddenly wanted a railgun.

It's like going into a game and asking if you can play a half-dragon, in a setting where humans and dragons have never entertained the idea of breeding together. It'll be great if a GM comes up with something right away, but is it wrong for the GM to say no to creating an entire race from scratch and trying to find some way to fit it into the pre-existing setting?

Florian
2016-05-27, 06:41 AM
Let's say someone used RAW to build a technically legal but overpowered character who overshadows all the other party members. Is that acceptable behavior?

Besides, wouldn't that require homebrewing to even have mechanics for a railgun? Homebrewing takes effort and time to test and balance the mechanics. It's quite normal for a GM to refuse to come up with wonky railgun mechanics on the fly just because a player suddenly wanted a railgun.


Sorry, but these questions donīt really matter. The difference between a laser and a railgun are a trifling matters.

More than that, itīs on how you try to solve an overall situation. Do you try the technical solution or not?

Khedrac
2016-05-27, 07:52 AM
Sorry, but these questions donīt really matter. The difference between a laser and a railgun are a trifling matters.
You know that, but does the DM? I would not have made that assumption and I consider myself relative well informed for a non-physicist/engineer.

And that is a classic example of why it can be hard to run a SciFi game - you are much more likely to run into players knowing more about the science than you do than you are iwth a fantasy game and appropriate history. What's more, in a fantasy game even if the players know more of historical reality the effect of magic can easily be used to ignore it.
What you are doing is like the D&D players who mix sulphur, charcoal and saltpetre to make gunpowder, except with them the DM can argue that their characters do not have the knowledge, something not an option with your character who obviously did.

Florian
2016-05-27, 08:12 AM
You know that, but does the DM? I would not have made that assumption and I consider myself relative well informed for a non-physicist/engineer.

And that is a classic example of why it can be hard to run a SciFi game - you are much more likely to run into players knowing more about the science than you do than you are iwth a fantasy game and appropriate history. What's more, in a fantasy game even if the players know more of historical reality the effect of magic can easily be used to ignore it.
What you are doing is like the D&D players who mix sulphur, charcoal and saltpetre to make gunpowder, except with them the DM can argue that their characters do not have the knowledge, something not an option with your character who obviously did.

Missing my point entirely. I usually call that the "Captain America vs. iron Man" dilemma.

When dealing with the unknown, you can either face it step by step, challenge by challenge (Cap)
Or try to pre-plan step, counter and counter-step in advance and see the technocratic solution as the entire challenge (Iron Man)

Instantly asking if something is potentially op or a hassle to design in a balanced way is sure sign that the technocratic step is involved. Once the thing is there and OP, it must always be OP, and so forth.

Thinker
2016-05-27, 08:34 AM
When my group plays games that are near modernity in their technology and culture, we find that there's a lot more to consider.
This was a big thing for my group when I first ran a modern campaign. Suspense became much more difficult. That locked door on the abandoned factory? One player used a drill from his contractor's van and they were in within a few moments. Half the group is on the other side of town following up another lead when one player finds something? She pulls out her cellphone and brings everyone together. Researching the mythical Hand of Palot? Search the internet. Need evidence to convince the priest to help you? Cell phone video. The monster isn't invulnerable to bullets and doesn't have projectile weapons/super-speed? Dead in a round (maybe 2 if its really tough) without the characters really being in danger.

Basically, to do modern or future, you need a different game from DnD. You can't do kick-in-the-door and raid a lost dungeon-style and maintain the suspense. Magic is less relevant than ever since it mostly can be replicated by technology so why not be good at a fight AND have most of the convenience?

DJ Yung Crunk
2016-05-27, 08:45 AM
If I had to wager a guess it's because swords n sorcery has more comfortable recurring tropes and sci fi doesn't. Having to keep up and maintain a setting in addition to your character might be a bit intimidating or boring.

Segev
2016-05-27, 08:50 AM
Take Star Trek - they have very advanced computers, with full AI - but there generally only appears to be one computer per ship/station (which was actually the forward looking model for buisness back in parts of the 90s, we were all going thin client and big servers...)

Actually, I could see how Star Trek's monolithic "ship's computer" might work as an interface faįade. It's a lot easier, if you're not working with a personal tool (like a PADD or an iPad), to think of the "thing out there" as one thing, especially if it can act like it is. What the Enterprise's Computer probably is is a network of many, many systems working on individual things, but which everybody calls "the computer" because it functions, from their perspective, as a single, highly multitasking entity.

"Computer, what time is the Captain's Ball?" is little different from "Hey Siri" or "Okay, Google, what time is the Captain's Ball?"

Even the fact that the Ship's Computer, if it became compromised, often had a cascade of failures rather than a monolithic one, particularly often moving physically around the ship and through specified systems, suggests that it's actually a network through which the virus or other computer-related problem is working, rather than a single, monolithic machine.


Honestly, the direction I expect to see things go will be that we'll have operating systems become detached from hardware, and able to "hop" from node to node, even running on multiple nodes and "crawling" along them, releasing some while picking up others. In this fashion, they physically follow their owner around geography, staying on nodes near to them for rapid response with probably some communication back to personal base stations. Your smartphone becomes just one node, and may even share computational time with neighbors' systems, as the "computer" that is "yours" is an emulation that overlays arbitrary hardware. This would allow localized responses from Siri and other systems which require far more processing power than your phone can provide, without need to "phone home" over broadband or cellular connections. Instead, the processing needed is borrowed from banks located nearby.

And that doesn't even touch on my ultimate dream, whereby we become our own OS and able to use hardware to augment our thought processes and control hardware as autonomically as we control our own bodies.

Slipperychicken
2016-05-27, 08:57 AM
This was a big thing for my group when I first ran a modern campaign. Suspense became much more difficult. That locked door on the abandoned factory? One player used a drill from his contractor's van and they were in within a few moments. Half the group is on the other side of town following up another lead when one player finds something? She pulls out her cellphone and brings everyone together. Researching the mythical Hand of Palot? Search the internet. Need evidence to convince the priest to help you? Cell phone video. The monster isn't invulnerable to bullets and doesn't have projectile weapons/super-speed? Dead in a round (maybe 2 if its really tough) without the characters really being in danger.

Basically, to do modern or future, you need a different game from DnD. You can't do kick-in-the-door and raid a lost dungeon-style and maintain the suspense. Magic is less relevant than ever since it mostly can be replicated by technology so why not be good at a fight AND have most of the convenience?

The main thing is, those aren't modern problems. You threw caveman-level issues at them, and expected those to stump people who have access to the solutions their civilization has already created. If you want obstacles to confound the modern man, you need modern obstacles. Put an alarm and sophisticated sensors on a door, with a station full of security nearby, or even a bunch of robots or auto-turrets. Make the info they need not public (a lot of info in archaeology departments hasn't been digitized yet -interns might be scheduled to type it into a computer in 2018, if ever). Make the monster fast, stealthy, smart, and hard enough to not put itself in the line of fire and be instantly slain by bullets. In whatever game you're talking about, if you want your monster to actually take a beating, you have to set it up that way. Give it enough hitpoints to take X rounds of being shot at, make it fast enough to go as many times as it has to, and give it enough damage to actually matter.

There's a reason why dnd has kept to ancient technology. It deals with ancient problems, many of which humanity has solved a long time ago.

CharonsHelper
2016-05-27, 08:57 AM
I believe that it's primarily because we don't have the same sort of communal tropes in sci-fi as we do in fantasy.

When you play a TTRPG, you generally don't want to do a lot of research before the first session. For fantasy that's fine. You know that you use magic, or swing a sword, or are the dagger from the shadows etc. You can know the gist without any extra work.

Sci-fi lacks the same sort of tropes outside of specific IPs which are still well within copyright. That's why licensed Star Wars games have probably had the best commercial success. The sort of players who want to play a Star Wars TTRPG already know the gist of what's going on.

For fantasy, the IPs are inherently general because they're all pretty much based on ancient mythology & lore. While you might be able to protect your specific take on it (like how no one else but D&D can use mindflayers or beholders outside of parody) but you can't stop someone else from doing a slight variation on the same thing.

I think that the best way for a non-licensed sci-fi game to get commercial success is to try to use as many different sci-fi tropes as possible & file the serial #s off, all while putting their own spin on it.


Secondary reason is probably the additional complexity of vehicles. You can't NOT have vehicle rules in a sci-fi game, but I've never seen any vehicle rules which mesh with infantry which both feel right for an RPG and aren't too complex for a sub-system. (war-games can get away with having rather abstract movement)

Thinker
2016-05-27, 09:16 AM
The main thing is, those aren't modern problems. You threw caveman-level issues at them, and expected those to stump people who have access to the solutions their civilization has already created. If you want obstacles to confound the modern man, you need modern obstacles. Put an alarm and sophisticated sensors on a door, with a station full of security nearby, or even a bunch of robots or auto-turrets. Make the info they need not public (a lot of info in archaeology departments hasn't been digitized yet -interns might be scheduled to type it into a computer in 2018, if ever). Make the monster fast, stealthy, smart, and hard enough to not put itself in the line of fire and be instantly slain by bullets. In whatever game you're talking about, if you want your monster to actually take a beating, you have to set it up that way. Give it enough hitpoints to take X rounds of being shot at, make it fast enough to go as many times as it has to, and give it enough damage to actually matter.

There's a reason why dnd has kept to ancient technology. It deals with ancient problems, many of which humanity has solved a long time ago.

When every door has a security system attached to it, it becomes repetitive. When every monster is smart, fast, stealthy, and super durable enough to withstand weapons that can take out buildings, it becomes repetitive. Those were early lessons that were learned, not all at once. I changed my assumptions about the players. Basically, buildings were no longer safeguards or challenges - if they wanted to get into a run-down or abandoned building, it became a footnote, rather than a minor challenge. If I wanted some sort of physical challenge, I moved it into a safe or hid it or put a rent-a-cop in the area. If I wanted to hide information, I made it so that they had to get in touch with an expert to interpret or expand on information they found online. I moved away from monsters almost altogether, opting for other humans instead. I made the law more important for the players - it's a lot more difficult to operate as an outlaw in modern times. It was a bit of a learning curve though compared to what I was used to when running games involving ancient times.

Satinavian
2016-05-27, 09:45 AM
I have not experienced those kind of differences.
Maybe because i live in central Europe and it is as difficult to achieve versimilitude with a pseudomedieval fantasy setting as it is with a SciFi setting with average gamers here.


And in both cases it works only with a specified setting. "Generic fantasy" and "generic scifi" simply don't exist. For believable interactions with the world, believable characters and believable decisions/consequences one has to be far more specific.

Anonymouswizard
2016-05-27, 09:53 AM
Let's say someone used RAW to build a technically legal but overpowered character who overshadows all the other party members. Is that acceptable behavior?

No, but Bob deciding he wanted to refluff his glaive as a War Scythe would be exceptable behaviour.


Besides, wouldn't that require homebrewing to even have mechanics for a railgun? Homebrewing takes effort and time to test and balance the mechanics. It's quite normal for a GM to refuse to come up with wonky railgun mechanics on the fly just because a player suddenly wanted a railgun.

Or take the existing stats for a single shot/semiautomatic rifle, rule it sounds slightly different and that the rails need changing every 2d6 shots. Maybe drop the range and damage while you're at it.

And I had actually expressed my interest in building a railgun about 4 sessions before the session where I got all the materials. I don't expect you to come up with the rules on the fly, you can have another session or two while I 'continue building the thing' to work it all out.


It's like going into a game and asking if you can play a half-dragon, in a setting where humans and dragons have never entertained the idea of breeding together. It'll be great if a GM comes up with something right away, but is it wrong for the GM to say no to creating an entire race from scratch and trying to find some way to fit it into the pre-existing setting?

It's like the setting includes bows, and you want to build a crossbow (which the theoretical game has no rules for). You could force the GM to come up with the rules right away, or you could allow them some time to think them over and come up with a balanced set of rules. Heck you can even work with them to sort the stats out.


Basically, to do modern or future, you need a different game from DnD. You can't do kick-in-the-door and raid a lost dungeon-style and maintain the suspense. Magic is less relevant than ever since it mostly can be replicated by technology so why not be good at a fight AND have most of the convenience?

Of course you can't do a D&D style game for a modern or future setting. It's hard to do so with WW1 era technology, or arguably Victorian levels of tech. This is why most games I've played with technology equal to 1900 or later have been far more investigative, getting inside a warehouse has been more of a side note than an actual obstacle (which is likely the security guards or the fact we don't know where the McGuffin is). Except that your players will google stuff for information, my friend is writing an RPG that includes a Search skill (looking around the room), an Investigation skill (talking to people to find stuff out), and an Internet Search skill (dubbed the google roll). Build your adventures around it being set in the modern world, one of my groups has a real problem when we can't just phone each other's characters.

In addition, magic can be incredibly useful, just not in the same way. Look at Unknown Armies, the magic in it is incredibly useful to a party, but mainly as a supplement to technology rather than an alternative for it. Videomancy, Urbanomancy, Cliomancy (which one of my friends says she'll kill any in the same party as her), the only school that's likely to outright replace technology for the user is Mechanomancy, and in that case you're effectively just using alternative technology (my friend played one who used an old brick-style mobile phone so he could be contacted, and shunned modern technology. He preferred to use his carrier pigeon drone).

So yeah, you can't do D&D-style adventures in a modern or future setting, but this isn't bad. Modern adventures should be more along the lines of The Dresden Files while future adventures can be more like Star Trek, Blade Runner, whatever you want.

EDIT: I don't tend to see the 'guns kill things too quickly' problem either, as due to most games I play being set in Britain we either use weapons that can be more easily justified or the game's been specifically balanced for us to use guns (our characters generally do not want to explain why we have pistols to the police, we only use them when licenced). And generally things dying too fast isn't a problem, as we generally use systems where we can only tank a hit or two.

raygun goth
2016-05-27, 10:12 AM
After humans took to the air for the first time, it took only half a century for them to reach the Moon.

Which is awesome.


When the radio was invented, nobody even dreamed that someday, people will be gaining access to not only the sounds of places far away, but also moving images.

Mechanical scanning televisions with definitions higher than what we had in the early 2000s were invented in the 1850s. They were considered useless toys by corporations and fell out of favor by the 1920s, mostly because playback technology was moving at a faster pace than recording technology. We still have them now, they're just so degenerate they're like the TV equivalent of the appendix (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tauqy199yv0).


People, before the invention of the internet, would have never believed it to be possible for all the people around the world to be connected by this vast and ever-expanding network of data composed by only 0s and 1s.

The foundations of hypertext were in the 1930s. In 1945, scientist Vannevar Bush described a machine that could utilize hypertext to communicate with other machines, as well as functioning almost identically to what we now call wikipedia.


We, as children or teenagers or adults, were all surprised when the Wii came out. Not without even pressing the buttons, it was possible to control the characters in a video game.

The same technology that the wiimote uses has been implemented in motion-sensitive devices before, most notably in wheelchairs and in laptops to protect them from damage. Video games are the one thing that science fiction is terrible at predicting - the best, most accurate video game prediction I've ever seen other than the AR games in Ender's Game was in Back to the Future part II, as an example.


The smartphone was a staggering invention. Everyone has this bizzare magical telephone that also acts as a music player, photo album, watch, typewriter, camera, calculater, notebook, game console, map of the world, radio, television, and probably a dozen other stuff that I can't think up at the moment.

Did people in old sci-fi novels have Smartphones? None of them did.

Pocket videophones have been a staple of science fiction since the 1930s - they dropped out of favor in later decades, but Bradbury brought them back for Farenheit 451 in the form of "postcard-sized" television/phone/radios.


The real 21st century, weaved by thousands of top-level geniuses over the course of decades, most of the time exceeds the imagination of a sorta-witty novelist. And people know it. People have witnessed how technology is evolving ever so fast that it's impossible to predict what we're gonna be holding in our hands even ten or five years from now.

Which is why it's scary to write sci-fi stuff.

The "sorta-witty" sci-fi novelist is likely a scientist themselves. I know of very few SF writers that don't have engineering or science degrees. In addition to that, science fiction like Star Trek gives our own engineers and scientists things to shoot for. Half the telecommunications advances we've made in the last half a century can be directly tied to Star Trek (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_William_Shatner_Changed_the_World).

One of the coolest stories I read growing up was in an old pulp - I forget the one, and I can't find it again, it really cheeses me off - but the main plot was about a future in which everyone had a desk machine that let them watch movies, talk to each other, listen to the radio, and read any novel or encyclopedia or text at any time, and someone invented an attachment to it that left them burn vinyl discs. The main conflict was that music companies were trying to prevent the machine's users from sharing songs through the machine and distributing records to each other for free. It was from the 1930s.

CharonsHelper
2016-05-27, 10:17 AM
I'm not sure why being able to take a few bullets is a bigger deal than being able to take a few chops with a battleax. In either case they're either survivable to a silly degree or you use abstract hitpoints.

Though if it is, you can always default to bringing multiple lesser foes than a single big one. (Most systems work better when you do that anyway, including most fantasy systems.)

But if the players have access to rocket launchers etc. - I do think that sci-fi/modern games benefit from a solid scaling damage system.

Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll
2016-05-27, 11:02 AM
Treat a rocket launcher like you would a +5 vorpal great sword; getting it should be an adventure in and of itself, using it to defeat an enemy should be the climax and reward of that adventure.

neonagash
2016-05-27, 12:07 PM
The thing is, be nice about it and don't ban real world technology just because you don't understand it.

I once asked if my character could build a railgun in a '10 years in the future' setting. I had the physics, maths, and electrical engineering skills, as well as a load of electronic components and a 3D printer that could have built a casing, as well as access to two poles of equal length (picked up by the party in the first session, I had forgotten about them but still had the ability to make some).

'No, you can't have a railgun, it would be too powerful.' :smallmad:

So my character cannot build a weapon that uses magnetic fields to propel a projectile because it would be too powerful? At best I'd have made something comparable to the rifles and shotguns we were carting around, probably less powerful (I only wanted it to save on ammo anyway, I was bothering to track it). But because the GM's only experience of railguns was with Warhammer 40,000 they were immediately banned as being too powerful (despite the fact that them not being powerful enough is the main problem with man-portable versions, along with rail deformation). In fact, I played in another game where the GM disallowed railguns, but he went 'because men portable versions aren't currently powerful enough to be worth using over guns, and I'm using out current level of technology'.

Essentially, as an engineer one of the most fun bits of a science fiction setting for me is getting to play with the technology and mess around with it. It's come to a point where the best group I've ever played with has also been made up of scientists and engineers (to the point we really got into how the electric tram our characters were riding works), but even if not allowed to make new tech I will still ruthlessly exploit all technology I can get my hands on in ways the GM probably didn't expect (also known as why I should not be allowed to play robots, as I will take hacking skills and proceed to edit my software as is convenient, down to inserting new memories to get out of jail with only a mind wipe [no problem, I'll find my backup in a few days of working aboard the ship, yes my robot characters back up their minds in case of problems, you mean you meat brains can't do that*]).

P.S. Starkiller base's charging method was stupid, and I can see no reason how it would work. Also, as shown it's at an incredibly wasteful one star per shot, so you need to move the darn planet around the galaxy, which makes the whole thing inferior to just building a squadron of Death Stars (now that would have been a more interesting climax).

* Other things I plan to pull off at some point: copying my mind into another body for a quick ally, downloading my mind into a starship, using a central server and communications array to remote control bodies, a modular body where I can swap in locomotion systems and tools as needed, and so on and so forth.

I dont know, when i GM a crunchy sci-fi system i dont really allow major tinkering either. It can be a real pain in the butt for the GM to have bring the game to a screeching halt for a technical discussion and then try to figure out game rules for how something actually works.

On the other hand i usually use the 2nd edition storyteller system with just straight human rules. So everything is loose enough there that I can make up technical details in a minute after a quick chat and move on. So I'll allow a lot more creative stuff there.

Anonymouswizard
2016-05-27, 12:39 PM
I dont know, when i GM a crunchy sci-fi system i dont really allow major tinkering either. It can be a real pain in the butt for the GM to have bring the game to a screeching halt for a technical discussion and then try to figure out game rules for how something actually works.

I agree that in a fiddly and crunchy system it can be difficult. I have a friend who loves to run GURPS and he will discuss the rules for player-made inventions with the players, but only between sessions. I'm not saying that a technical discussion should bring the game to a halt, heck in my science-heavy group we like to just discuss it for a bit and move on, but a lot of our player revolves around tinkering or exploiting technology, more along the lines of 'can I do this to this' on the fly over 'can I design and build [complex bit of non-statted kit]', or if I want to build a railgun it'll be something to do between sessions, but if I just want to know if I can edit my droid's memories with a good enough hacking roll I'll literally ask that.


On the other hand i usually use the 2nd edition storyteller system with just straight human rules. So everything is loose enough there that I can make up technical details in a minute after a quick chat and move on. So I'll allow a lot more creative stuff there.

Yeah, the 2nd edition Storyteller system is great, and I plan to use it for pure mortals at some point (also: get CofD core rulebook). I ironically wouldn't use it for a technical heavy game for the precise opposite reason, I'd want to have separate skills for writing and using software, and the ability to have minor rules differences for different items, but I'd inform the players that it might slow down at points to just work out the results of people's actions.

Thinker
2016-05-27, 12:48 PM
Treat a rocket launcher like you would a +5 vorpal great sword; getting it should be an adventure in and of itself, using it to defeat an enemy should be the climax and reward of that adventure.

Why? If the group already has access to other restricted/illegal firearms, why should a mass produced rocket launcher be all that much more difficult to acquire? It might bring a lot more heat to actually use, but actually getting a rocket launcher shouldn't be all that difficult.

Knaight
2016-05-27, 04:00 PM
Why? If the group already has access to other restricted/illegal firearms, why should a mass produced rocket launcher be all that much more difficult to acquire? It might bring a lot more heat to actually use, but actually getting a rocket launcher shouldn't be all that difficult.

While I don't think that being equivalent to a +5 vorpal sword is at all sensible, I would expect the rocket launcher to be more difficult to acquire in any number of settings. It's large, ammunition is comparatively huge, they're expensive, and there are any number of reasons that they are much harder to get ahold of than other illegal weapons - starting with how they are less useful for most criminals who would want firearms. You can't conceal them, you can't get them ready to fire all that quickly, they're bulky enough that just carrying them around regularly doesn't work, etc. There are others where you could just buy them, or make them easily, or whatever else. There are yet others where you could get ahold of them fairly easily, but there's not really much point in it because they have been completely replaced.

Trekkin
2016-05-27, 05:12 PM
For one thing, a player who's a physics or chemistry (hi, Trekkin!) can sometimes break the game right in two.

Basically you just have to ban nitrogen.

But really, people like me are but a symptom of a larger problem with the telling of science-fictional stories in an RPG medium. I can most concisely express it thus:

The entire point of science is to find and resolve plot holes.

In the real world, these plot holes are inconsistencies between the models of reality we build and the sum total of the observations we gather about the systems they represent. In a game, though, we have the creator of the universe and executor of its physical laws is sitting across the table from us, and empiricism invites us to vivisect the dream they've invited us to share.

Consider your standard fantasy setting; if we give the players a wand of fireballs, there's an implicit understanding that the fireball is the quantum unit of its functionality. It does one set thing in one set way with no justification needed beyond "magic works like this". But now we want to be science fictional, so we cross out "wand of fireballs" and write in "plasma gun", and all is well and good -- until the players find or build an electromagnet. Yes, you can simply ask them not to, but eventually they'll want to bolt it to the back of a satellite or repurpose the power cell or otherwise hit the story upside the head with their cleverness again. This is mitigated somewhat in medieval stories, but anything with the technological trappings of science fiction is an endless source of player options and no clear way to delineate a priori what you're prepared to accommodate. FTL is time travel, reactionless drive is relativistic weapons, fast space travel is a weapon of mass destruction...magic's just so much better at keeping the PCs pointed at the story.

At the same time as it's inviting your players to run roughshod, science also constrains the stories you can tell. Everything from the speed of light to the laws of thermodynamics to the conservation of momentum implies a set of events you can't plausibly have happen, and it's not always immediately obvious why. It's like telling a story in an established canon, except the canon's in a state of continual retcon.

Of course, you can avoid this all by just forgetting science, at which point it isn't science fiction anymore. It's space opera or science fantasy or something, all of which are vastly more amenable to improvisation by laypersons. As an added bonus, everyone trying to use Clarke's Third Law to cram magic into a beeping chrome shell can have their way, technobabble doesn't have to mean anything, and you can throw in recognizeable things like single-person starfighters and rubber-forehead aliens.

So, in sum, science and technology make interactive storytelling harder and medieval magic makes it easier, so why make things harder than they have to be by insisting on conforming to a massive rule system most people don't have the time or inclination to learn?

Anonymouswizard
2016-05-27, 06:45 PM
I think we have to accept that the RPG community sees science fiction gaming in two ways.

The soft science gamers want technology as magic, where it's all in discrete (or not so) chunks and is used by PCs as if pressing a button.

The hard science gamers want technology as technology, where it's made up of a load of things all put together to do something and you can mess around with that and change how an item works or combine things to do something else.

Bare in mind there's a similar split over magic as well, I'm firmly in the 'science as magic and engineering' camp for most settings and hate the Sorcerer as a D&D class, whereas there are other people who are all 'the scientific magic cannot be magical and full of wonder' (have you ever talked to an academic about their specialty?).

Yes, those of us slanted towards science in some way have a tendency to exploit science fiction settings (for a given value of exploit). There are ways around that, but you should be up front about it if you don't want us to do our worst (as a side note we tend to be half decent optimisers, in one group I've played with the only ones of us who can optimise are engineers).

Be warned that if an engineer gets into the engineering mindset they will look at a problem, see the materials they have on hand, and try to devise a solution to a problem. On a good day we can mock up a device to help the party right there on a table, and my go-to ambitious in-game sci-fi project is working out how to launch a projectile at >0.01c (ideally >0.1c, but I refuse to work out the power required for that). Oh, and we'll try to upgrade important computers with EMP shielding, because why wouldn't you?

That's not to say we can't play a Jedi with no understanding of technology, it's just that for some of us that isn't the fun bit.

Cluedrew
2016-05-27, 06:46 PM
Basically you just have to ban nitrogen.Ah, happy memories. Also some terrifying faith-in-humanity-shaking memories, but let us focus on the happy memories.

My actually contribution comes from this quote:
"Science is the study of the improbable, fantasy is the study of the impossible." -Isaac Asimov

And the problem is that if you have a the set of possible things, there is a lot less you can do with that than the set of possible & impossible things. (Because any number of possible things and one impossible thing is still impossible.) So essentially you are reducing the size of your story/game tool box if you move to sci-fi. The broader category of "futuristic" is a little bit easier to deal with, but often caries with it the problems the other characters have mentioned.

CharonsHelper
2016-05-27, 07:34 PM
It's large, ammunition is comparatively huge, they're expensive,

While I agree that setting can make it difficult to get a hold of a rocket launcher, they aren't really all that expensive. The launcher (ignoring potential black-market costs) only runs a couple hundred bucks. You can actually get them in the US - totally legal. It's the explosive rockets which are illegal. The rockets are $100 or so each. (again ignoring black-market issues)

So - a launcher with a couple of rockets is about the same price as a nice pistol.

Freelance GM
2016-05-28, 07:15 PM
I've noticed that there a lot of people on this forum asking for advice/help for playing sci-fi ttrpgs. why do you guys think that we have so much trouble with this genre? is it the fault of poorly designed games or is there something about sci-fi that is inherently difficult for us to grasp onto?


I think we have to accept that the RPG community sees science fiction gaming in two ways.

The soft science gamers want technology as magic, where it's all in discrete (or not so) chunks and is used by PCs as if pressing a button.

The hard science gamers want technology as technology, where it's made up of a load of things all put together to do something and you can mess around with that and change how an item works or combine things to do something else.


This.

There's a very real problem when you write rules for SF. How long do the batteries in the player's smartphone last? Does it matter how long they last? Mechanically, what can they do with a smartphone? Designers have to be incredibly cautious to avoid going down this rabbit hole. It can easily make the game excessively complex. Yet, if you cut out all of the realism in favor of simplicity, then what's left to make it sci-fi?

Science fantasy games can invoke Clarke's Third Law and run, which is why you see more of them. You don't see a lot of good RPGs for Halo/Mass Effect's kind of sci-fi because no one can get the right balance between simulationist verisimilitude and gamist philosophies of elegant design.

Actually, Halo has a perfect example: think of Halo 2/Halo ODST. A Slipspace rupture above New Mombasa basically wrecks the entire city. Almost every starship bigger than a dropship has a Slipspace drive in Halo. Why wouldn't a group of PC's grab one, fly as close as they can to the enemy's base in their ship, and then Slipspace jump out? How do you write rules for that? How do you make that balanced, when any players with a starship can do it, regardless of their level?

I could probably write a thesis paper on this. Ultimately, sci-fi is less about the characters, and more about the toys. And if you're going to be making a game where character advancement is based on equipment, instead of ability, then suddenly money becomes XP, and that's a very dangerous thing in a game world where credit cards and identity theft exist.

BayardSPSR
2016-05-28, 08:46 PM
I think there are three parts to it.


I believe that it's primarily because we don't have the same sort of communal tropes in sci-fi as we do in fantasy.

This is one of them: the default assumptions for D&D-like fantasy are deeply and firmly set; you can assemble a game that has more or less magic, less of a retail-oriented economy, more or less or different technological assumptions, and so on, but everyone knows what fantasy "is" and is likely to default to it in the absence of reminders to the contrary. Science fiction has monolithic behemoth like the D&D franchise. This, I believe, is a good thing,

The second issue is related. Science fiction relies to a much greater extent on people's views of the world today, the role of technology, what they expect the future to like like, and so on. This is more pronounced the closer the setting is to the present (where it becomes more difficult to state the setting as a given, divorced from the real world). In a, say, 2030-2050 setting present day perceptions of political, social, and economic reality becomes important - and more so if the place is "here," to the point that the more verisimilitude you perceive, the less it's likely other people will. It's much easier for people to come to the same conclusions about a fictional war between fictional countries in a technologically and magically distant setting, for example, than it is for one where one of the countries has the same name and shape of their own; the latter engages far more with their own perceptions of history, present politics, the efficiency of bureaucracy and technology, the inherent moral standing of militaries, justice, and so on. This would be fine and interesting, if not for the fact that one of the people at the table is stating their own perceptions of the above as the reality that everyone else has to engage with.

I haven't done this, but I imagine you might have similar issues if the "country" the players are in is a Star Trek-style "UN in Space."

The third part is technological. Many people approach tabletop RPGs as tactical puzzles to solve, where the problem is the "encounter" and the tools you have are the things on your character sheet. With science fiction, some players seem to think of the tools as "anything they could conceivably put together with their own scientific knowledge, with human error and technical glitches removed." I haven't run into this much (except in fantasy, oddly), so I'll leave the details to the people who have already supplied them.

Knaight
2016-05-28, 09:13 PM
The soft science gamers want technology as magic, where it's all in discrete (or not so) chunks and is used by PCs as if pressing a button.

The hard science gamers want technology as technology, where it's made up of a load of things all put together to do something and you can mess around with that and change how an item works or combine things to do something else.

I wouldn't put this as a difference between gamers. The people who just want to play the same genre over and over again are pretty much entirely encompassed within D&D and WoD, mostly because the people who would do this for something else are in a position where they are more likely to just leave entirely. As such, you end up with the same people who are good with a soft science space opera which is probably better classed as fantasy (e.g. Star Wars, Star Trek), and also good with more hard science that does depict technology as technology.

Segev
2016-05-28, 09:44 PM
One of the things that often is so accepted that it's missed in these discussions is that fantasy, magic, and even psychic powers have a major distinction, narratively, from technological gizmos: one is personal and non-transferable; the other is something anybody can learn to USE without needing "character class" levels of devotion to studying it.

A mage, psychic, martial artist, or even high-fantasy swordsman (with effectively-supernatural skills and capabilities) is a combination of personal talent and learned ability that builds, maintains, and channels enormous personal puissance. They do things that others without their training cannot do, and do so dramatically and with immediate consequences. Their power, too, is difficult to impossible to take away by simply removing their gizmos. And is unavailable to those who might confiscate their tools.

This could be replicated by complicated, personalized "locks" on technology, or by tech being actually very inconvenient to use with the tech-master having to do a lot of complicated things from memory or by training-to-the-point-of-instinct, but very little tech is actually developed for that. It would be one way to let a "technologist" class work: they build prototypes that give them the personal power, but they have interfaces that only the technologist who built it understands. But ultimately a sci-fi setting operates generally on the principle that tools are usable by anybody with moderate training, at most. And sci-fi skills that are more unique and brilliant take a long time and resources to do anything with...which then produces something to be used dramatically by anybody who knows how to push the right button. (Invention really isn't exciting to write about or watch; it's what you do with the invention afterwards that is the exciting part of the story, and the inventor isn't essential to that part, because the trained warrior can use the exotic new weapon more effectively.)

So the reason sci-fi can be so difficult is that it's far more difficult to make clearly-defined roles, and the genre-defining characteristic is something that tends to make people more same-y. At least, on the easy-to-define cool-tricks level. Further, it doesn't work with the most stereotypical of story types, which means that it takes more understanding of what the narratives are that can be tapped. It almost REQUIRES a more social, political game, in some ways. Not always, but it's tricky to write "sci-fi" without it.

Max_Killjoy
2016-05-28, 09:46 PM
Another problem is that unless you push the technology level so high that it becomes indistinguishable from magic (Clarke's law) you run into the problem that futurists' predictions are normally useless.
This means that most games set in the near future (and some in the far future) have been made less believeable before they are published!

Take Traveller - the original serious SciFi rpg (I don't count GammaWorld as serious - it was much more of a humorous game).
In Traveller the most advanced starships had computers that weighed several tons and could run 7 programs at once (though the programs were major programs not simple apps).
Take Star Trek - they have very advanced computers, with full AI - but there generally only appears to be one computer per ship/station (which was actually the forward looking model for buisness back in parts of the 90s, we were all going thin client and big servers...)
Base something on the now with smartphones etc., and "the internet of things" will mess you up. It's coming (unfortunately) but not even the people working on it really know what is going to take off. Even if you get that right, will the web be twitter and facebook or what? The dominant platforms change over time, usually unexpectedly.

Society and technology moves forward very fast, but in odd directions. No-one knows what is coming next so games have to make predicitons and they always get them wrong.
This makes it much harder for the players and GM - they have to manage the suspension of disbelief thet is standard for fantasy but much less expected for SciFi, and what is worse they have to do it in areas they actually know lots about (and players who cannot switch off the real knowledge they have when it exceeds the DM's are a problem for the DM - I have been that player:smallfrown:).
Games based on popular settings help with the suspension of disbelief (as people know what technology is present) but are worse in many ways as different people knowledge and understanding of the setting varies. This is not a problem exclusive to SciFi, but does seem to happen more than with Fantasy.


As a side-note on the internet of things... (https://www.google.com/search?q=why+the+internet+of+things+is+stupid)

At any rate -- not only are the possibilities for science fiction far more wide open and harder to cover (not really, but looking at the extant fiction and game settings, compare the "area" covered by 90% of fantasy to the area covered by 90% of science fiction), there's also the issue of scope and scale. When your setting spans not multiple cites or continents, but potentially an entire galaxy and potentially a billion years, it's harder to get the details right and much easier to fall down on scope and scale. Science fiction also tends to draw more scrutiny of the details than fantasy... you can get away with less, unless you're just doing "space fantasy" and flat out say that the plausibility DOES NOT matter.





Basically you just have to ban nitrogen.

But really, people like me are but a symptom of a larger problem with the telling of science-fictional stories in an RPG medium. I can most concisely express it thus:

The entire point of science is to find and resolve plot holes.

In the real world, these plot holes are inconsistencies between the models of reality we build and the sum total of the observations we gather about the systems they represent. In a game, though, we have the creator of the universe and executor of its physical laws is sitting across the table from us, and empiricism invites us to vivisect the dream they've invited us to share.

Consider your standard fantasy setting; if we give the players a wand of fireballs, there's an implicit understanding that the fireball is the quantum unit of its functionality. It does one set thing in one set way with no justification needed beyond "magic works like this". But now we want to be science fictional, so we cross out "wand of fireballs" and write in "plasma gun", and all is well and good -- until the players find or build an electromagnet. Yes, you can simply ask them not to, but eventually they'll want to bolt it to the back of a satellite or repurpose the power cell or otherwise hit the story upside the head with their cleverness again. This is mitigated somewhat in medieval stories, but anything with the technological trappings of science fiction is an endless source of player options and no clear way to delineate a priori what you're prepared to accommodate. FTL is time travel, reactionless drive is relativistic weapons, fast space travel is a weapon of mass destruction...magic's just so much better at keeping the PCs pointed at the story.

At the same time as it's inviting your players to run roughshod, science also constrains the stories you can tell. Everything from the speed of light to the laws of thermodynamics to the conservation of momentum implies a set of events you can't plausibly have happen, and it's not always immediately obvious why. It's like telling a story in an established canon, except the canon's in a state of continual retcon.

Of course, you can avoid this all by just forgetting science, at which point it isn't science fiction anymore. It's space opera or science fantasy or something, all of which are vastly more amenable to improvisation by laypersons. As an added bonus, everyone trying to use Clarke's Third Law to cram magic into a beeping chrome shell can have their way, technobabble doesn't have to mean anything, and you can throw in recognizeable things like single-person starfighters and rubber-forehead aliens.

So, in sum, science and technology make interactive storytelling harder and medieval magic makes it easier, so why make things harder than they have to be by insisting on conforming to a massive rule system most people don't have the time or inclination to learn?


Well said.

Segev
2016-05-28, 09:56 PM
On the up side, if your grandmother wants to buy a toaster and not use it as a smart toaster, she probably won't take the time to give it the password to her wi-fi. And if some malicious war-driver wants to hack her wi-fi, he's thus on the same footing with or without the "smart toaster."

So I think the "internet of things" scares are overblown.

There are risks. But those are already there.

Kelb_Panthera
2016-05-28, 10:19 PM
Honestly, the direction I expect to see things go will be that we'll have operating systems become detached from hardware, and able to "hop" from node to node, even running on multiple nodes and "crawling" along them, releasing some while picking up others. In this fashion, they physically follow their owner around geography, staying on nodes near to them for rapid response with probably some communication back to personal base stations. Your smartphone becomes just one node, and may even share computational time with neighbors' systems, as the "computer" that is "yours" is an emulation that overlays arbitrary hardware. This would allow localized responses from Siri and other systems which require far more processing power than your phone can provide, without need to "phone home" over broadband or cellular connections. Instead, the processing needed is borrowed from banks located nearby.

Isn't that basically how chromebooks and a lot of online gaming works anyway?

Segev
2016-05-28, 10:33 PM
Isn't that basically how chromebooks and a lot of online gaming works anyway?

I can't comment on chromebooks, but that's not quite how gaming works. Gaming distributes a lot of its processing, but there are generally still central servers, and all of it operates on existing operating systems and requires specific installation. What I'm envisioning is literally something no more single-processor intense than a GPU, with GPU-numbers of those simple processors, and the only OS they're running is something that enables them to be available to house these moving emulation engines that gobble up GPU cores and emulate processors on them, one for every process they're running, then release them when they aren't using them anymore (or when they move on to others to stay physically near their user).

Satinavian
2016-05-29, 12:13 AM
Processing power is not the important limit. Data transmission rates are. And that would get far far worse by changing physical devices on the fly.

Then there are other problems. Will there be banks to borrow from nearby ? Will the software run without problems on all those different devices ? How about security, if all stationary devices share computational power with random visitors ? Will the software work properly while it transfers ?

I don't say it can't be done. But i have a hard time understanding why one should even try to do that and what improvements are supposed to comne from it.

Segev
2016-05-29, 12:53 AM
Processing power is not the important limit. Data transmission rates are. And that would get far far worse by changing physical devices on the fly.

Then there are other problems. Will there be banks to borrow from nearby ? Will the software run without problems on all those different devices ? How about security, if all stationary devices share computational power with random visitors ? Will the software work properly while it transfers ?

I don't say it can't be done. But i have a hard time understanding why one should even try to do that and what improvements are supposed to comne from it.

As I said, I expect there will still be some "home stations" and the like where larger amounts of data are kept. Security is unquestionably one of the larger concerns. It may turn out to be more practical to have personal computer nodes you carry around with only minimal interaction with the surroundings. The real "thing" that I anticipate happening remains the use of weaker processors in parallel to run emulations of other processors powerful enough to run given programs, designed primarily to enable one emulated processor per process. I am well aware of the difficulties of simulating a more powerful serial processor with multiple less powerful ones in parallel; it is in part a matter of very, very carefully designing such a system to take every bit of advantage possible of parallelization. For instance, one of the biggest serial log-jams is jump processing - when a piece of code has to calculate the result of a user input to determine where to "go" next in the code. There already are strategies for taking the most-likely path (particularly if it's a jump-or-just-keep-going type, where the processor can keep going while it waits for the jump to be processed), but with sufficient parallelization, one could literally take every possible jump at once. The locations are known; it's only a matter of figuring out which is the right one.

Things like division - a serial process - can also be turned into parallel ones of greater efficiency by inverting them. Division is a much, much longer process, in computational cycles, than multiplication. Inverting it by having parallel processors guess quotients and multiply-to-check will take much less time, if the right guess is made soon enough. With sufficient parallel units, this can be achieved. The trivial (but massively hardware-intensive) case would be trying literally every possible quotient. A more feasible algorithm would partition the space. We already use such techniques for guess-check-and-try on finding primes, since we lack good and tractable algorithms for straight-forwardly calculating them with a guarantee of not missing any on the way. (We have algorithms that will find previously-unknown primes, but they're of particular subclasses, and none can guarantee there aren't more between the ones it finds that it fails to find. None save exhaustive search guess-and-check.)

In any event, the main advantage would be much larger available computational power if one can spread out to nearby hardware. Those who are not seeking to abuse the system would use it as needed, then relinquish it. Before anybody accuses me of being naive, I am not saying that there won't be "bad apples" who run malicious software, or who wouldn't try to seize as much processing power as they could and not relinquish it, or any number of other things. Security would be crucial.

Though I would assume that isolation would also be employed, at least to a limited extent: the bank, for example, probably wouldn't run its secure programs on the public wi-fi network now; it also wouldn't share its processors with the public "crawlers."

Of course, this is all really hypothetical, thought-experiment stuff. While I have interest for a number of reasons in the basic one-processor-per-process massively-parallel processor-emulation design, I know of nobody actually doing it, so it may never form.

Florian
2016-05-29, 02:42 AM
I think there are three parts to it.



This is one of them: the default assumptions for D&D-like fantasy are deeply and firmly set; you can assemble a game that has more or less magic, less of a retail-oriented economy, more or less or different technological assumptions, and so on, but everyone knows what fantasy "is" and is likely to default to it in the absence of reminders to the contrary. Science fiction has monolithic behemoth like the D&D franchise. This, I believe, is a good thing,

The second issue is related. Science fiction relies to a much greater extent on people's views of the world today, the role of technology, what they expect the future to like like, and so on. This is more pronounced the closer the setting is to the present (where it becomes more difficult to state the setting as a given, divorced from the real world). In a, say, 2030-2050 setting present day perceptions of political, social, and economic reality becomes important - and more so if the place is "here," to the point that the more verisimilitude you perceive, the less it's likely other people will. It's much easier for people to come to the same conclusions about a fictional war between fictional countries in a technologically and magically distant setting, for example, than it is for one where one of the countries has the same name and shape of their own; the latter engages far more with their own perceptions of history, present politics, the efficiency of bureaucracy and technology, the inherent moral standing of militaries, justice, and so on. This would be fine and interesting, if not for the fact that one of the people at the table is stating their own perceptions of the above as the reality that everyone else has to engage with.

I haven't done this, but I imagine you might have similar issues if the "country" the players are in is a Star Trek-style "UN in Space."

The third part is technological. Many people approach tabletop RPGs as tactical puzzles to solve, where the problem is the "encounter" and the tools you have are the things on your character sheet. With science fiction, some players seem to think of the tools as "anything they could conceivably put together with their own scientific knowledge, with human error and technical glitches removed." I haven't run into this much (except in fantasy, oddly), so I'll leave the details to the people who have already supplied them.

The "default assumptions für D&D-like" are not so firmly set as you might want to believe. A lot of cultural bias and expectations flow into that. In a lot of countries, D&D is far away from being the top RPG selected when it comes to fantasy role-playing.

Science Fiction is based on extrapolation the actual state coupled with knowledge of what will come. The "Hardware" itself is pretty much uninteresting, actually, its rather a question about the Human Condition that will be interesting and is what is getting explored.

Amongst other things, the "Hardware" forms the setting, informs you about what the new "laws of nature" are now and what the environment will look like that the actual game will happen in.

That will then shape the rest of what is needed.

For example, if we say there is a global technology that instantly copies a persons personality and memories into a clone when he dies, the question of what damage a "gun" deals or to handle the above mentioned weaponized slipdrive becomes irrelevant because death is irrelevant.

Anonymouswizard
2016-05-29, 05:13 AM
I wouldn't put this as a difference between gamers. The people who just want to play the same genre over and over again are pretty much entirely encompassed within D&D and WoD, mostly because the people who would do this for something else are in a position where they are more likely to just leave entirely. As such, you end up with the same people who are good with a soft science space opera which is probably better classed as fantasy (e.g. Star Wars, Star Trek), and also good with more hard science that does depict technology as technology.

Yes, I didn't say there wasn't overlap. But I personally hate playing in a Star Wars style setting entirely because of the fact that technology might as well be a black box except for a few 'improvements'.

Now, I love playing in Science Fiction settings, and I can deal with a Science Fantasy Setting. What I cannot deal with is one masquerading as the other. I also expect to be able to break open various pieces of technology and build a new device out of the components, assuming I know what the components are and my character has the skills (if I understand that the GM does not want me engineering I will not play an engineer, the problem is when they don't make that clear and then allow me to).

PersonMan
2016-05-29, 05:42 AM
I also expect to be able to break open various pieces of technology and build a new device out of the components, assuming I know what the components are and my character has the skills (if I understand that the GM does not want me engineering I will not play an engineer, the problem is when they don't make that clear and then allow me to).

I can see an issue here being a rift in what you and the GM see as 'engineering'.

If the GM thinks 'engineering' means you fix things and can maybe cobble together a mostly-worse version of already-existing tech using pieces of other things, then they're likely to be completely surprised when you start dismantling things to make an entirely new niche tool to solve a problem.

Max_Killjoy
2016-05-29, 06:33 AM
Processing power is not the important limit. Data transmission rates are. And that would get far far worse by changing physical devices on the fly.

Then there are other problems. Will there be banks to borrow from nearby ? Will the software run without problems on all those different devices ? How about security, if all stationary devices share computational power with random visitors ? Will the software work properly while it transfers ?

I don't say it can't be done. But i have a hard time understanding why one should even try to do that and what improvements are supposed to comne from it.


There are a multitude of reasons -- personally, I'll never let the internet of things into my home, and I'll stick with purely local storage and computing power that I physically control.

Anonymouswizard
2016-05-29, 06:52 AM
I can see an issue here being a rift in what you and the GM see as 'engineering'.

If the GM thinks 'engineering' means you fix things and can maybe cobble together a mostly-worse version of already-existing tech using pieces of other things, then they're likely to be completely surprised when you start dismantling things to make an entirely new niche tool to solve a problem.

The bolded part is the core bit of engineering. Engineers aren't people who fix things (that's a technician), engineers are people who solve problems. Why wouldn't an engineer take stuff apart to build a tool if it can solve a problems? (assuming you can put the stuff back together again)

Now, an engineer can also fix things and cobble together a mostly-worse version of already existing tech, but we can also throw together a slightly different version, which can change the game drastically. We probably can't do it on the fly, engineering is a fairly slow way to solve problems, but when working from existing bits and pieces a day to come up with a usable prototype isn't unreasonable (whether or not it works as intended is another matter, the more time you spend the better it performs).

In short:
-The guy who fixes your gun is a technician, if you want me to stick to that tell me (and I'll play a doctor or something)
-The guy who fixes your gun and invents a grappling hook pistol to climb quickly is an engineer.

goto124
2016-05-29, 07:01 AM
*sighs*
*scratches out 'engineer', writes 'technician' in its place*

Which systems have rules for engineers? Do they also have rules for amount of time spent improving and developing the item, as well as failures ("You fire your grappling hook pistol at the tower above you. The hook flies up about *rolls* 1 meter before dropping back down.")?

Anonymouswizard
2016-05-29, 07:24 AM
*sighs*
*scratches out 'engineer', writes 'technician' in its place*

Which systems have rules for engineers? Do they also have rules for amount of time spent improving and developing the item, as well as failures ("You fire your grappling hook pistol at the tower above you. The hook flies up about *rolls* 1 meter before dropping back down.")?

GURPS has pretty good invention rules, including prototyping. No others that I know of, but then again I've only had one GM willing to run with actual engineers, and in his games it comes down to either the inventing rules (if you're making something new) or skill checks to see if it works correctly (if not he'll give a result like 'your grappling hook pistol only shoots 1 meter).

Note that it's pretty much fine to use 'engineer' and 'technician' interchangeably if the group is fine with it, but I know from personal experience that a lot of engineers, especially us younger ones, get annoyed at technicians using the term.

PersonMan
2016-05-29, 08:58 AM
In short:
-The guy who fixes your gun is a technician, if you want me to stick to that tell me (and I'll play a doctor or something)
-The guy who fixes your gun and invents a grappling hook pistol to climb quickly is an engineer.

The problem being that the theoretical GM in question doesn't know that their definition of 'engineer' is actually a technician.

I'm not the one who doesn't know what an engineer is, I'm just the one saying 'I think the GM may be surprised (and knee-jerk block things) because he doesn't know what an engineer character will actually be doing'.

Segev
2016-05-29, 11:33 AM
For example, if we say there is a global technology that instantly copies a persons personality and memories into a clone when he dies, the question of what damage a "gun" deals or to handle the above mentioned weaponized slipdrive becomes irrelevant because death is irrelevant.

Untrue. Unless you can transfer consciousness instantly, on demand, and have the new body RIGHT THERE right when you want it, the damage dealt by weapons remains relevant to determine when your current body in your current location stops functioning. Sure, death is a revolving door, but if you are knocked out of the scene, that's meta-game annoying and can be in-game disastrous, depending on what you were trying to accomplish or prevent in that place at that time.

JoeJ
2016-05-29, 08:15 PM
The bolded part is the core bit of engineering. Engineers aren't people who fix things (that's a technician), engineers are people who solve problems. Why wouldn't an engineer take stuff apart to build a tool if it can solve a problems? (assuming you can put the stuff back together again)

An "engineer" is also a person who operates and/or maintains an engine. That's why we have railroad engineers, flight engineers, and ship's engineers. This definition of engineer is very commonly used in science fiction that focuses on space travel.

It sounds like the character you're interesting in playing is more of a MacGuyver than an actual engineer. At least, unless you enjoy gaming out months or years of development, sourcing of parts and materials, prototyping, and testing before you have a finished product.

goto124
2016-05-29, 11:12 PM
Untrue. Unless you can transfer consciousness instantly, on demand, and have the new body RIGHT THERE right when you want it, the damage dealt by weapons remains relevant to determine when your current body in your current location stops functioning. Sure, death is a revolving door, but if you are knocked out of the scene, that's meta-game annoying and can be in-game disastrous, depending on what you were trying to accomplish or prevent in that place at that time.

Borderlands does the thing described. It's essentially a spawn point.

Segev
2016-05-29, 11:18 PM
Borderlands does the thing described. It's essentially a spawn point.

Yep. And note how your hit points and the damage you take to them DO matter in that game.

BayardSPSR
2016-05-29, 11:20 PM
The "default assumptions für D&D-like" are not so firmly set as you might want to believe. A lot of cultural bias and expectations flow into that. In a lot of countries, D&D is far away from being the top RPG selected when it comes to fantasy role-playing.

Fair enough; I should be more conscious of international variation (though I think the international variation is useful to demonstrate how monolithic certain countries' RPG scenes tend to be). I'm curious: what's popular in Germany?


Science Fiction is based on extrapolation the actual state coupled with knowledge of what will come. The "Hardware" itself is pretty much uninteresting, actually, its rather a question about the Human Condition that will be interesting and is what is getting explored.

Yes, exactly! This is roughly the point I was trying to make, in far fewer words. I believe that the focus on the human condition (relative to some local fantasy monoliths) is what can make SciFi challenging (to those accustomed to those local fantasy monoliths).

nightwyrm
2016-05-29, 11:22 PM
The problem with engineering/inventing of any sort in a sci-fi game is that it can be extremely hard for a GM to adjudicate whether something is possible. If I was a GM, should I allow you to engineer my TV into a Starfighter? How about into a cold fusion reactor? A primitive computer? A communication device? A toaster? I don't know where I should set the limit of what's possible coz I don't have the technical knowledge. You can abstract it with dice rolls and penalties but I'm not even sure I have the knowledge to set the difficulty level for many things.

With fantasy-esque games, the GM can hand-wave a lot of things due to magic or well-established tropes. With sci-fi or modern games, there's a much higher expectation that things could be examined and explained.

Trekkin
2016-05-30, 12:54 AM
There's also a reason, completely aside from technology, why science fictional tropes don't gel with RPGs very well: Fantasy RPGs are about fights between monsters. SF is about conflicts between or within people.

We joke a lot about murderhobos, but even the most righteous fantasy hero is judge, jury, and executioner to a cavalcade of visibly, viscerally inhuman monsters. Fantasy is a genre where the guy who can mow down an army of professionally trained soldiers single-handed is rightfully considered underpowered next to the guy who has a rootkit for the laws of physics, both of whom operate in a world bent backwards to permit four or five people to profitably save the world by killing whatever entity is threatening it.

Science fiction doesn't work that way; there is no one person driving a megacorporation or an evil star empire. There's just people doing a job, and that breaks with the long-standing fantasy tradition of killing problems. I actually ran into this myself, once; I accidentally added an extra guard to a facility my Shadowrun group was to rob. Being cautious by nature, their decker wanted to look up why, so I improvised an email in their server from the extra guard asking if they could work the graveyard shift that night so they could make their daughter's piano recital without losing hours. The group was...not enthusiastic about continuing a run that would get her fired if not wounded or killed.

That's a specific example to be sure (and bad improv on my part), but I think SF's fondness for social speculation makes it difficult to tell stories amenable to the kinds of dramatic, drastic, often violent solutions that RPGs make exciting. SF is about people. People who collectively do evil by individually doing their jobs, or people who have become extraordinary as a result of the technological achievements of their society, but ultimately SF concerns itself with what happens to humanity, and what humanity means, given technogical/social/political situation X. Its dragons sit on executive boards rather than in caves. (Literally, in Shadowrun's case.)

I think it is possible to tell a good, engaging, thoughtful collaborative science fiction story about that, but it won't involve rolling a d20 to see how many cyber-orcs you decapitate -- and a lot of the meta-mechanics underlying RPGs to date have pointed in that direction. I would even go so far as to say that part of the escapist appeal of RPGs is that they posit a world in which decapitating orcs saves the day, but that is at best a techno-thriller.

You could argue that Eclipse Phase gets close, but even it is riddled with magic and aliens to boot, contrived to create a scenario in which the PCs are, in the normal implementation, guns to point at extinction-level threats, and existential crisis is a mechanical penalty. There is almost certainly another way, and it will almost certainly not look like D&D.

Knaight
2016-05-30, 01:01 AM
There's also a reason, completely aside from technology, why science fictional tropes don't gel with RPGs very well: Fantasy RPGs are about fights between monsters. SF is about conflicts between or within people.

That doesn't mean that it doesn't work with RPGs - and there's a case to be made that a lot of fantasy RPGs are also about conflicts between people. This does prevent certain D&D tropes from working all that well, but that's about it. RPGs as a whole can handle conflicts between people just fine.

Trekkin
2016-05-30, 01:36 AM
That doesn't mean that it doesn't work with RPGs - and there's a case to be made that a lot of fantasy RPGs are also about conflicts between people. This does prevent certain D&D tropes from working all that well, but that's about it. RPGs as a whole can handle conflicts between people just fine.

Certainly they can and some do; I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm saying that most RPGs currently on the market don't try to do people-vs-people nearly as hard as they try to do monster-vs-monster, (and I partly blame the primacy of D&D for that, particularly in making diplomacy a skill roll and combat a whole subsystem), and it's harder to fit SF into that mold than, say, horror, which might help account for why SF is harder to do, per the OP.

Knaight
2016-05-30, 01:43 AM
Certainly they can and some do; I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm saying that most RPGs currently on the market don't try to do people-vs-people nearly as hard as they try to do monster-vs-monster, (and I partly blame the primacy of D&D for that, particularly in making diplomacy a skill roll and combat a whole subsystem), and it's harder to fit SF into that mold than, say, horror, which might help account for why SF is harder to do, per the OP.

We appear to be familiar with very different parts of the market. Outside of D&D, people vs. people seems to be the standard. Sure, there might be the occasional monster in it somewhere (e.g L5R), but human conflict is the centerpiece. Even in D&D, in actual play that's what I've generally seen.

Trekkin
2016-05-30, 02:07 AM
We appear to be familiar with very different parts of the market. Outside of D&D, people vs. people seems to be the standard. Sure, there might be the occasional monster in it somewhere (e.g L5R), but human conflict is the centerpiece. Even in D&D, in actual play that's what I've generally seen.

We might also be operating under different definitions of monsterhood. I'm counting bandits and guards and other such humans; provided the bulk of their rules and stats concern their capacity for violence, they're monsters. This definition handily includes PCs.

Maybe I'm familiar with a skewed subset, but I'm used to RPGs where physical combat gets a lot more rules than negotiation. Monsters can have human DNA and still be pointy blocks of HP/wounds/vitality with which it is assumed that the PCs will fight, often to the death -- and if by that standard RPGs don't have many monsters, I will be pleasantly surprised.

Florian
2016-05-30, 03:03 AM
Fair enough; I should be more conscious of international variation (though I think the international variation is useful to demonstrate how monolithic certain countries' RPG scenes tend to be). I'm curious: what's popular in Germany?

Here, the 800 pound gorilla is "Das Schwarze Auge" (DSA).
That game is centered on an extremely well fleshed-out setting that has now more than 20 years of ongoing (meta-)plots and is kept running in sync with real time on a 3to1 basis and is preplanned for some years to come.
Nearly each and everyone of the available modules or campaigns fully ties into the time-line and the overall happenings in the setting. Even in neutral material, youīll find markings next to NPCs, events or places that announce that something is free to alter or is preplanned to show up in some future product.
The two major RPG Cons are also quite some happenings for DSA players, as the developers use them to kick off some of the new plots or major events.

So playing this game is pretty much a nation-wide communal affair and leads to some big changes in how the community is and what topics are talked about.
For example, the setting and fluff are sacrosanct. No-one would come up and say "Hey, I like the mechanics of that, letīs drop the fluff and build something else on it". The question is not how to build an elf, but rather how the play an elf. DSA players have an easy time finding or switching groups because they nearly all share the same play-style and common background knowledge to instantly fit in.
Even people who quit the game some 10 years ago still keep an ongoing interest in what is going on with "their" world.

The downside is heavy railroading, plot armor and a lot of handwaving.

Thereīs some three attributes that we see as linked to the game (The last one will be well known to D&D players):
"Hotzenplotzigkeit": Yes, there will be bandits in the forest, yes, one of them will have a silly name, yes, thereīs a troll under the bridge, yes, we will find a wyvern in the forest, yes the princess will be a lesbian... and so on.
"Hartwurstigkeit": Have you packed your rucksack? Though about the spare pair of socks? Whetstone? Kettle? Healing potion ingredients? remember little hero, youīre of you fight the demon lord, canīt die of a bad case of cold feet en route.
"Hartholzharnisch": No, we do not why in this edition, a blank of wood is better armor than a full plate when going by RAW, and no, two planks are not better than one.

The whole thing is as monolithic as D&D is over in the U.S., if not even a bit stronger so.

Florian
2016-05-30, 04:25 AM
We appear to be familiar with very different parts of the market. Outside of D&D, people vs. people seems to be the standard. Sure, there might be the occasional monster in it somewhere (e.g L5R), but human conflict is the centerpiece. Even in D&D, in actual play that's what I've generally seen.

Itīs more the way to think in conflict, challenges, encounters and direct personal action that is meant here. Those things are exemplified by murderhoboism.

"Dealing with the Human Condition" changes the focus to dealing with dilemmas. In L5R, this will focus on the inherent contradictions of Bushido and how you deal with it, how much damage you can deal with your katana.

Anonymouswizard
2016-05-30, 05:36 AM
There's also a reason, completely aside from technology, why science fictional tropes don't gel with RPGs very well: Fantasy RPGs are about fights between monsters. SF is about conflicts between or within people.

To be fair, I've played in a few fantasy RPGs that are people versus people, although they tended to be in a modern setting. I do have plans to run a relatively combat light (but conflict heavy) fantasy game revolving around conflicts between people.


Science fiction doesn't work that way; there is no one person driving a megacorporation or an evil star empire.

To be fair, sometimes there is. I blame Star Wars, but I've fairly often seen the 'Empire hold together by one person at the top' (while I'm one of a handful of people I know who will run science fiction with a megacorporation as the big bad), or the 'evil aliens we can kill with no problem, blow up the mothership' (I've heard of a friend who did it well, but there wasn't a mothership exactly and the conflict was much more prolonged than most).


There's just people doing a job, and that breaks with the long-standing fantasy tradition of killing problems. I actually ran into this myself, once; I accidentally added an extra guard to a facility my Shadowrun group was to rob. Being cautious by nature, their decker wanted to look up why, so I improvised an email in their server from the extra guard asking if they could work the graveyard shift that night so they could make their daughter's piano recital without losing hours. The group was...not enthusiastic about continuing a run that would get her fired if not wounded or killed.

I wish my Shadowrun group had every actually thought anywhere near that. It was normally 'go in guns blazing and hope the McGuffin doesn't get destroyed'. They quickly stopped being offered good missions and got stuck with the bad ones where destroying stuff was okay or the goal, as well as the guys to throw at anything you didn't want to waste smart gunbunnies on.


That's a specific example to be sure (and bad improv on my part), but I think SF's fondness for social speculation makes it difficult to tell stories amenable to the kinds of dramatic, drastic, often violent solutions that RPGs make exciting. SF is about people. People who collectively do evil by individually doing their jobs, or people who have become extraordinary as a result of the technological achievements of their society, but ultimately SF concerns itself with what happens to humanity, and what humanity means, given technogical/social/political situation X. Its dragons sit on executive boards rather than in caves. (Literally, in Shadowrun's case.)

The thing is, this is what makes science fiction gaming so great. Although it is focused slightly more on the criminal aspect in published RPGs, science fiction allows you to better explore morality and excellence than fantasy does. My favourite Supers RPG right now is Venture City, because you have the ability to play the struggles of the people at the top (where you're officially a hero but work as your megacorporation demands) and the struggles of those at the bottom (who have a lot more freedom but are unsanctioned), and it feels much more like science fiction than Mutants and Masterminds (which gives me a more fantasy 'you are good because you are a Hero' feel).


I think it is possible to tell a good, engaging, thoughtful collaborative science fiction story about that, but it won't involve rolling a d20 to see how many cyber-orcs you decapitate -- and a lot of the meta-mechanics underlying RPGs to date have pointed in that direction. I would even go so far as to say that part of the escapist appeal of RPGs is that they posit a world in which decapitating orcs saves the day, but that is at best a techno-thriller.

You could argue that Eclipse Phase gets close, but even it is riddled with magic and aliens to boot, contrived to create a scenario in which the PCs are, in the normal implementation, guns to point at extinction-level threats, and existential crisis is a mechanical penalty. There is almost certainly another way, and it will almost certainly not look like D&D.

Look at Fate if you haven't already, the contest and conflict rules are designed to work for punching people in the face, having a heated debate, turning the court against your rival, defeating the bank's security hacker, psychically probing your target... The rules are generic to the point where subsystems don't specify if they are for physical, mental, or social actions, and work well for each of them. Research is just as fun as a foot chase.

Lorsa
2016-05-30, 07:45 AM
Hard Sci-Fi is a lot harder than soft Sci-Fi.

Word play aside, as humans, we have a much easier time to project backwards than forwards. Somehow it is easier to imagine what life would be without certain technology, than what it would be with new (and unknown) tech. History is a field of study, it can provide some actual knowledge of the past, and hermeneutics can help us understand.

The assumption for a fantasy game is that magic both break the laws of nature, and that nobody really understands those laws anyway. A typical fantasy campaign takes places in a pre-scientific era, so even if we can still say that there ARE natural laws, the GM or player hardly needs to know them in detail. Just assume everyday phenomena functions like everyday phenomena, and that nobody in the world really questions it and you are fine. People don't care why fire burns, only that it does and that you can put it out with water (or magic).

The assumption for a sci-fi game is that it takes place after the scientific "revolution". This means that people are both more aware of natural laws, and regularly seeks to question them. Thus a GM often have to struggle with questions like "how does the space flight work?" or "what exactly is this 'plasma' thing in my plasma rifle and how is it made?", just to mention a few. Most GMs lack the knowledge to answer these questions in a consistent way that doesn't quickly break down verisimilitude. Asking your players NOT to care about these things would be asking them to play characters in a futuristic setting with ancient, and out-dated cognitive processes.

In essence, a sci-fi setting is much harder to portray in a consistent manner that the players will feel is realistic.

It usually works quite well for me, because I am both smarter than my average player, and have infinitely more knowledge about physics. Even so, I have trouble maintaining most sci-fi settings on the basis of my own questions, and struggle with consistency in science and verisimilitude even though my players might not.

neonchameleon
2016-05-30, 07:52 AM
NPC count and communications.

A D&D dungeon is an artificially limited environment where the factors are the PCs, their hirelings, and the monsters. Maybe a couple of dozen hirelings, and a couple of dozen monsters active at any one time. And those in limited manners. Base camp is a village with again maybe two dozen defined people.

In a non-Trek/Traveller/Firefly Style SF setting (or even early 21st century Earth) we carry mobile phones or Star Trek communicators; we can access dozens of NPCs that each PC knows at any given time. No GM can keep up with that - especially with wide scale schemes and flashmobs.

Trek/Traveller/Firefly is here defined as "The PCs have a spaceship with a small crew (and possibly redshirts) and are the main people on that ship, And travel from place to place barely knowing anyone in the new environment they will find themselves in in the new episode.

Max_Killjoy
2016-05-30, 10:03 AM
There's also a reason, completely aside from technology, why science fictional tropes don't gel with RPGs very well: Fantasy RPGs are about fights between monsters. SF is about conflicts between or within people.

We joke a lot about murderhobos, but even the most righteous fantasy hero is judge, jury, and executioner to a cavalcade of visibly, viscerally inhuman monsters. Fantasy is a genre where the guy who can mow down an army of professionally trained soldiers single-handed is rightfully considered underpowered next to the guy who has a rootkit for the laws of physics, both of whom operate in a world bent backwards to permit four or five people to profitably save the world by killing whatever entity is threatening it.

Science fiction doesn't work that way; there is no one person driving a megacorporation or an evil star empire. There's just people doing a job, and that breaks with the long-standing fantasy tradition of killing problems. I actually ran into this myself, once; I accidentally added an extra guard to a facility my Shadowrun group was to rob. Being cautious by nature, their decker wanted to look up why, so I improvised an email in their server from the extra guard asking if they could work the graveyard shift that night so they could make their daughter's piano recital without losing hours. The group was...not enthusiastic about continuing a run that would get her fired if not wounded or killed.

That's a specific example to be sure (and bad improv on my part), but I think SF's fondness for social speculation makes it difficult to tell stories amenable to the kinds of dramatic, drastic, often violent solutions that RPGs make exciting. SF is about people. People who collectively do evil by individually doing their jobs, or people who have become extraordinary as a result of the technological achievements of their society, but ultimately SF concerns itself with what happens to humanity, and what humanity means, given technogical/social/political situation X. Its dragons sit on executive boards rather than in caves. (Literally, in Shadowrun's case.)

I think it is possible to tell a good, engaging, thoughtful collaborative science fiction story about that, but it won't involve rolling a d20 to see how many cyber-orcs you decapitate -- and a lot of the meta-mechanics underlying RPGs to date have pointed in that direction. I would even go so far as to say that part of the escapist appeal of RPGs is that they posit a world in which decapitating orcs saves the day, but that is at best a techno-thriller.

You could argue that Eclipse Phase gets close, but even it is riddled with magic and aliens to boot, contrived to create a scenario in which the PCs are, in the normal implementation, guns to point at extinction-level threats, and existential crisis is a mechanical penalty. There is almost certainly another way, and it will almost certainly not look like D&D.


Eclipse Phase also gets into the rather wonky and technomagic world of posthumanism, which blows scale and scope (and often plain old rationality) out of the water like throwing demo charges in a barrel of fish.


Science fiction can include stories in which "kill one or more things" is a viable solution, or at least what needs to be done to live long enough to find a solution, or to get to where the solution is. Wars and assassinations and direct physical threats still exist in the far-away and the far-future. Fantasy can include situations where killing just makes things worse.

Florian
2016-05-30, 10:09 AM
Eclipse Phase also gets into the rather wonky and technomagic world of posthumanism, which blows scale and scope (and often plain old rationality) out of the water like throwing demo charges in a barrel of fish. .

Iīm a dreadnaught-class warship, youīre right now a regular humanoid android. Yes, possibilities like that is why the plain old quest/mission often simply donīt work in SF and you have to relearn what role-playing means in this context.

Knaight
2016-05-30, 06:25 PM
To be fair, sometimes there is. I blame Star Wars, but I've fairly often seen the 'Empire hold together by one person at the top' (while I'm one of a handful of people I know who will run science fiction with a megacorporation as the big bad), or the 'evil aliens we can kill with no problem, blow up the mothership' (I've heard of a friend who did it well, but there wasn't a mothership exactly and the conflict was much more prolonged than most).

True. Plus, it's often not that much less believable than in fantasy. The empire held together by one person at the top is a fantasy trope first that gets applied to sci-fi occasionally, and even in fantasy contexts it rarely makes sense. I mean, look at how much trouble some of the modern retelling of the Arthurian myth have to go to to get it to happen - you've got the absence of heirs, the incredibly fragile peace held together by personal loyalty, the Saxons eternally at the border at barely being fended off, the list goes on. The big, stable evil empire shouldn't have that problem, even if it does go into a dynastic crisis for a while.

The megacorporation meanwhile is a sci-fi trope, particularly prevalent in cyberpunk. I tend to avoid the whole singular big bad concept in sci-fi, but I have made exceptions for mega-corporations before, with the biggest example being the Galactic Fruit game I ran - in which the PCs were all civilians on a backwater jungle planet that wasn't particularly unified, was very poor, and was very low tech, which let Galactic Fruit come in and exploit the heck out of people. There was armed resistance at points, along with military atrocities committed by Galactic Fruit, but at no point would killing the CEO or similar have done anything to help.

neonagash
2016-05-31, 12:27 AM
The bolded part is the core bit of engineering. Engineers aren't people who fix things (that's a technician), engineers are people who solve problems. Why wouldn't an engineer take stuff apart to build a tool if it can solve a problems? (assuming you can put the stuff back together again)

Now, an engineer can also fix things and cobble together a mostly-worse version of already existing tech, but we can also throw together a slightly different version, which can change the game drastically. We probably can't do it on the fly, engineering is a fairly slow way to solve problems, but when working from existing bits and pieces a day to come up with a usable prototype isn't unreasonable (whether or not it works as intended is another matter, the more time you spend the better it performs).

In short:
-The guy who fixes your gun is a technician, if you want me to stick to that tell me (and I'll play a doctor or something)
-The guy who fixes your gun and invents a grappling hook pistol to climb quickly is an engineer.

Here's the problem I've seen. Some players think that a few ranks in engineering skills should make them a combination of Tesla and the guys who make all of bonds fancy toys with McGuivers timeframe.

That's fine I suppose. But it seems when you remind them inventions take time and money, so roll the dice, cough up all your cash plus debt and 20 years from now you might succeed, and you might not, but the money's gone either way....and those players tend to get all huffy.

Its easier if you explain engineering doesn't make you fantasy Tesla. It makes you at best Scotty, and sometimes the engines just can't take anymore.

JoeJ
2016-05-31, 12:57 AM
Here's the problem I've seen. Some players think that a few ranks in engineering skills should make them a combination of Tesla and the guys who make all of bonds fancy toys with McGuivers timeframe.

That's fine I suppose. But it seems when you remind them inventions take time and money, so roll the dice, cough up all your cash plus debt and 20 years from now you might succeed, and you might not, but the money's gone either way....and those players tend to get all huffy.

Its easier if you explain engineering doesn't make you fantasy Tesla. It makes you at best Scotty, and sometimes the engines just can't take anymore.

This is why character concepts need to be discussed with the GM so that you are both on the same page. If you just say "engineer," the GM might think you want to play Chief Tyrol, when you're actually imagining Tony Stark.

Max_Killjoy
2016-05-31, 08:05 AM
Here's the problem I've seen. Some players think that a few ranks in engineering skills should make them a combination of Tesla and the guys who make all of bonds fancy toys with McGuivers timeframe.

That's fine I suppose. But it seems when you remind them inventions take time and money, so roll the dice, cough up all your cash plus debt and 20 years from now you might succeed, and you might not, but the money's gone either way....and those players tend to get all huffy.

Its easier if you explain engineering doesn't make you fantasy Tesla. It makes you at best Scotty, and sometimes the engines just can't take anymore.

I've run into those guys.

I've also run into "stop trying to change the setting's tech" guy who doesn't want anything to change, no modifications to published weapons, no new gear, no progression of science that takes place on-screen, etc.

CharonsHelper
2016-05-31, 08:08 AM
Here's the problem I've seen. Some players think that a few ranks in engineering skills should make them a combination of Tesla and the guys who make all of bonds fancy toys with McGuivers timeframe.

That's fine I suppose. But it seems when you remind them inventions take time and money, so roll the dice, cough up all your cash plus debt and 20 years from now you might succeed, and you might not, but the money's gone either way....and those players tend to get all huffy.

Its easier if you explain engineering doesn't make you fantasy Tesla. It makes you at best Scotty, and sometimes the engines just can't take anymore.

Yes - I'm actually working on a sci-fi RPG where I made sure to have that skill be 'mechanic' instead of 'engineer' for just that reason.

In addition, humans didn't design any of the tech anyway. I'm able to deal with quite a few of the sci-fi RPG issues by having it be less than a century in the future, but humans have been recruited to be the muscle for the dominant alien species. (who suck at fighting - weak, horrible reflexes, bad at thinking on their feet etc.) It makes it so that I don't really have to explain why tech works the way it does since it's presented from a human perspective, and humans don't really have a clue. (Though it's not future fantasy either. No different from how MOST humans are now. I don't know more than the gist of how my cellphone works; I certainly couldn't fix it, much less re-engineer & improve it.)

CharonsHelper
2016-05-31, 08:14 AM
Here, the 800 pound gorilla is "Das Schwarze Auge" (DSA).

...

The whole thing is as monolithic as D&D is over in the U.S., if not even a bit stronger so.

Interesting. Seems almost like the whole thing is set up like Pathfinder Society, but with the main storyline being more of the focal point.

It does seem like it'd be all but impossible to have the PCs be the heroes of the world instead of just minor characters.

Trekkin
2016-05-31, 10:13 AM
Here's the problem I've seen. Some players think that a few ranks in engineering skills should make them a combination of Tesla and the guys who make all of bonds fancy toys with McGuivers timeframe.

That's fine I suppose. But it seems when you remind them inventions take time and money, so roll the dice, cough up all your cash plus debt and 20 years from now you might succeed, and you might not, but the money's gone either way....and those players tend to get all huffy.

Its easier if you explain engineering doesn't make you fantasy Tesla. It makes you at best Scotty, and sometimes the engines just can't take anymore.

True for near-future settings, but the most egregious examples of engineers being frankly magical I've seen come from settings where they have the processing power and small-scale fabrication capacity on hand to help them be so. Anything with "nanotechnology" (in the magical robots sense, not the synthetic chemistry sense) is halfway there anyway.

It also doesn't help that most of these settings are written with somewhat arbitrary technological constraints, and after a while the argument "it doesn't exist, therefore it won't work" wears thin and anything more nuanced is a lot of hassle for everyone.

Florian
2016-05-31, 11:16 AM
Interesting. Seems almost like the whole thing is set up like Pathfinder Society, but with the main storyline being more of the focal point.

It does seem like it'd be all but impossible to have the PCs be the heroes of the world instead of just minor characters.

That depends on what you see as "heroes" and "minor characters". Samwise or Aragorn?
The stance here is that Aragorn is not a hero, as he already has anything, Samwise is. The small, common people that make their contribution so that people like Aragorn can lead the final push. Those are heroes and that we play.

Satinavian
2016-05-31, 11:28 AM
Interesting. Seems almost like the whole thing is set up like Pathfinder Society, but with the main storyline being more of the focal point.

It does seem like it'd be all but impossible to have the PCs be the heroes of the world instead of just minor characters.
Not really. There is no official organized play as such. But there is the setting and metaplot carried through both background books and modules (most mayor events have modules), there is some kind of ingame-newspaper, there is support various play-by-male-circle where players bring some life into lower regional nobility that can't be covered by official publications, sometimes there are official Larp-Events that are meant to portray certain developments (and reveal them to the public).

But most groups stick to setting books and modules.

Atm there is a kickstarter running for an English release under the name "The Dark Eye".

Compared to D&D it is far less combat centric (the designers were not wargamers) has far more focus on politics and interactions and while in the beginning it was full of stupid jokes inspired by T&T it is nowadays far more concerned with versimilitude and semi-realistic portrayal of of both its fantasy counterpart culturs and its unique cultures. Supernatural elements (magic, divine stuff) is not rarer but notably weaker than in D&D.


But we have lot of other RPGs too. Which ones were popular changed over time a lot. WoD, Shadowrun, Midgard, Cthuluh, D&D/Pathfinder, Ars Magica, Gurps, Traveller, Fate... I can't really say what is second or third place. The systems/settings that had always problems here were those concerned with western or steampunk. It's just not our cultural heritage or a particular popular time period. People don't relate to it well. Postapocalyptic and SciFi don't have a problem but are not as popular as fantasy.



True for near-future settings, but the most egregious examples of engineers being frankly magical I've seen come from settings where they have the processing power and small-scale fabrication capacity on hand to help them be so. Anything with "nanotechnology" (in the magical robots sense, not the synthetic chemistry sense) is halfway there anyway.

It also doesn't help that most of these settings are written with somewhat arbitrary technological constraints, and after a while the argument "it doesn't exist, therefore it won't work" wears thin and anything more nuanced is a lot of hassle for everyone.
With technology that advanced you don't really need an engineer any more. The computer probably could it do better anyway.

So, yes. If you are playing an engineer in a hard scifi game with me as GM, you probably would get "it doesn't exist, therefore it won't work" a lot. Developing new good stuff takes years and a big team of engineers and lots of materials and other budget intensive ressources not one and is not guaranteed to work. Things a single engineer can do in a short time with limited supplies are things that are either already existing or no one really wants to make. That could be stuff that is so specific that no big market exists. It can be awesome in its niche. But otherwise you would probably get a "no".

CharonsHelper
2016-05-31, 12:12 PM
Not really. There is no official organized play as such. But there is the setting and metaplot carried through both background books and modules (most mayor events have modules), there is some kind of ingame-newspaper, there is support various play-by-male-circle where players bring some life into lower regional nobility that can't be covered by official publications, sometimes there are official Larp-Events that are meant to portray certain developments (and reveal them to the public).

Yeah - I didn't mean in the organized play sense that it was like Pathfinder Society. (I explained what I meant poorly.) I just meant that there are central characters which show up in everyone's campaigns who have more to do with framing how the main storyline progresses than the PCs do.

Trekkin
2016-05-31, 03:29 PM
With technology that advanced you don't really need an engineer any more. The computer probably could it do better anyway.

So, yes. If you are playing an engineer in a hard scifi game with me as GM, you probably would get "it doesn't exist, therefore it won't work" a lot. Developing new good stuff takes years and a big team of engineers and lots of materials and other budget intensive ressources not one and is not guaranteed to work. Things a single engineer can do in a short time with limited supplies are things that are either already existing or no one really wants to make. That could be stuff that is so specific that no big market exists. It can be awesome in its niche. But otherwise you would probably get a "no".

GM your games the way you want, certainly, but I'd argue that any computer that can meaningfully respond to "do this better" can probably be a playable character -- and ones that can't can still make engineering very fast without making it redundant.

Computers are peerless at mapping one set of numbers to another, which is great when you have a defined search space and fitness function -- so long as you can reduce your problem to finding an argmax, there's a way for a computer to find it for you. More importantly, their utility in this role is a function of their processing power; faster computers can do this better, by either expanding or more exhaustively searching the space in the same amount of time.

That said, they give you what you ask for, without regard for what solutions may lie beyond their search space or what external factors impact the optimality of a given result -- and in many cases, the user doesn't know what they want with enough exactness to tell them, at least without some knowledge of what the computer thinks is possible. There's a cycle that develops: the computer tells you how close you can get to what you want and you go back and refine what you want until you reach something you're both happy with. That's where you need an engineer to informedly leverage computational naivete and be the sanity check on that cycle -- and the role of "sapient moderator of blazingly fast idiot calculators" can still plausibly interact with a lot of engineering tropes and be enjoyable to play. Naturally you can posit computers smart enough to define their own fitness functions ex nihilo. They'd be fun to play, too.

You could also thread the needle and posit machines that are smart enough to make invention boring and dumb enough to be boring themselves, but I'm not sure you have to -- and why go out of your way to make things boring?

As to your second point, I agree completely. PCs are also often in extraordinary situations (otherwise why play them?) with equivalently unusual needs & abilities, and I've found that they frequently want things nobody could already profit by making -- which is enough wiggle room to let them have fun inventing things while maintaining suspension of disbelief.

Besides, player inventions are a wonderful opportunity. Here is a player asking you to please let them carry around a complicated bit of technology that was rushed through a design process completely devoid of safety testing and built with minimal quality control. How often do you get such a golden opportunity to make your players' lives entertainingly difficult?

Satinavian
2016-06-01, 01:35 AM
GM your games the way you want, certainly, but I'd argue that any computer that can meaningfully respond to "do this better" can probably be a playable character -- and ones that can't can still make engineering very fast without making it redundant.

Computers are peerless at mapping one set of numbers to another, which is great when you have a defined search space and fitness function -- so long as you can reduce your problem to finding an argmax, there's a way for a computer to find it for you. More importantly, their utility in this role is a function of their processing power; faster computers can do this better, by either expanding or more exhaustively searching the space in the same amount of time. If you actually have working naomachines that can build basically everything than most of the construction decisions are done by computers anyway. And is way beyond what humans could do. I actually did write code for large scale molecular dynamic simulations and have a pretty good idea how processing power, scaling and looking for an optimal solution/process work. The only thing left to do for a human is to clarify what the result should be capable of and the computer finds the best way to achieve that. Yes, to describe the result some engineering knowledge is needed. But as soon as you can describe what you want, you don't get better results for being a better engineer because you don't actually make all of those engineering decisions anymore. Also by a time when this method is widespread we will have done a lot of pretty good interface work which makes it even easier to translate your wishes to something the computer can use as search parameter or fit function. Even a layperson could use such a device and produce useful things. An engineer would use how to optimize and where the interface might assume things he doesn't actually want and how to counter. But there is no real place for a genius engineer anymore who can do stuff other people can't. You may still have some place for genius designers who envision the usefulness of devices never thought of before. But making a better version of something existing will simply fail as you use pretty much the same optimization goals and fit functions as everyone else. Improvements of existing technology will only happen if

a) science marches on and you get literally more tools your optimization computer can play with
b) a breakthrougth in math resulting in a better numerical accuracy
c) a bug fix
d) an algorithm gets to a singular, never bevor discovered better solution. That is posibble because most agorithms never explore all of the solution space and some even have random elements in the search algorithm. More computing power is helpful here, but not necessary


As to your second point, I agree completely. PCs are also often in extraordinary situations (otherwise why play them?) with equivalently unusual needs & abilities, and I've found that they frequently want things nobody could already profit by making -- which is enough wiggle room to let them have fun inventing things while maintaining suspension of disbelief. Yes. I use that very often and that is basically the most important niche of engineering characters in my games. That and discovering/understanding/operating new unknown devices and repairing stuff. And it is actually a pretty fun role.

Also i don't really like the idea of practical universal machines that can produce everything (possibly even ignoring raw materials like Star Trek replicators). There should be drawbacks, limits and special tools for special tasks. Universality always comes at a price, be it size, cost, speed, material efficiency or whatever.

Mutazoia
2016-06-01, 02:07 AM
I've noticed that there a lot of people on this forum asking for advice/help for playing sci-fi ttrpgs. why do you guys think that we have so much trouble with this genre? is it the fault of poorly designed games or is there something about sci-fi that is inherently difficult for us to grasp onto?

I would say that the biggest problem, is often that sci-fi can encompass so much more than fantasy. For instance, you can file the serial numbers off of The Lord of the Rings, and you will still have a sword-and-sorcery adventure no matter which way you look at it. There's always going to be some one swinging a sword, and some one chucking magic around. There will be big, scary monsters and even bigger scary villains trying to take over/destroy/remake the world in his own image/etc. Throw everything up against a medieval feudal backdrop and you're good to go.

Sci-Fi, on the other hand had a few more layers to sift through. Do you want Hard Science, or Space Opera? Is it the near future with flying cars and man-kind has yet to colonize the rest of the solar system, or is it the far future with governments spanning hundreds of star systems? Is there alien life, intelligent or otherwise, or are humans the only life forms in existence? Is interstellar travel widely available, or is it restricted to a chosen few who charge exorbitant prices to ferry people around the galaxy?

Anonymouswizard
2016-06-01, 04:04 AM
I would say that the biggest problem, is often that sci-fi can encompass so much more than fantasy. For instance, you can file the serial numbers off of The Lord of the Rings, and you will still have a sword-and-sorcery adventure no matter which way you look at it. There's always going to be some one swinging a sword, and some one chucking magic around. There will be big, scary monsters and even bigger scary villains trying to take over/destroy/remake the world in his own image/etc. Throw everything up against a medieval feudal backdrop and you're good to go.

Sci-Fi, on the other hand had a few more layers to sift through. Do you want Hard Science, or Space Opera? Is it the near future with flying cars and man-kind has yet to colonize the rest of the solar system, or is it the far future with governments spanning hundreds of star systems? Is there alien life, intelligent or otherwise, or are humans the only life forms in existence? Is interstellar travel widely available, or is it restricted to a chosen few who charge exorbitant prices to ferry people around the galaxy?

Except fantasy also mean:
-Urban Fantasy, where the tech level is high enough that modern style firearms are available.
-Wuxia, where martial arts are king.
-Swords and Sorcery, where magic is bad and evil and our heroic barbarians stab it in the face.
-Science Fantasy, where lasers and magic coexist (different to soft Sci-Fi, I'd argue that Star Wars is around the dividing line).
-Various other types that don't fit the above (e.g. Mistborn).

I would in fact argue that Fantasy is more varied than Science Fiction is, it's just that due to D&D we have a collective set of assumptions when it comes to fantasy gaming.

Mutazoia
2016-06-01, 10:34 PM
Except fantasy also mean:
-Urban Fantasy, where the tech level is high enough that modern style firearms are available.

Still fantasy, until the tech level matches or surpasses our own, then it's Fanta-sci



-Wuxia, where martial arts are king.

Martial Art's themed fantasy, is still fantasy. Just swap "fighter" for "Ronin" or "rogue" for "ninja". Still fantasy.


-Swords and Sorcery, where magic is bad and evil and our heroic barbarians stab it in the face.

Conan. Still basic, low magic, generic fantasy


-Science Fantasy, where lasers and magic coexist (different to soft Sci-Fi, I'd argue that Star Wars is around the dividing line).

Sci-Fi.


-Various other types that don't fit the above (e.g. Mistborn).

I would in fact argue that Fantasy is more varied than Science Fiction is, it's just that due to D&D we have a collective set of assumptions when it comes to fantasy gaming.

Fantasy has always been generic, even before D&D. Swords, magic and monsters, all else is just window dressing

Trekkin
2016-06-01, 11:27 PM
Yep, those are all fantasy. Just like hard sci-fi, space opera, cyberpunk, and so forth are all science fiction; they're both broad genres of fiction and RPGs, and I'm not sure either one is necessarily broader than the other. Then, too, they can easily become each other.

Take Star Wars: it's laughably unscientific, from the psionic monks with laser swords to the FTL, but more to the point it doesn't need or want to be scientific. It wants to tell a redemption story about a black-clad psychic cyborg and his whiny psychic kids while selling as many toys as possible, and it does this very well. If you were to scrub it of everything even vaguely futuristic and have Han Solo and Chewbacca sailing a wooden-hulled Millennium Falcon to Alderaan Island with two sorcerers hidden in their hold, the only thing you would lose is the ability to sell light-up toy blasters.

And yet we don't want to do that, because window dressing matters.

neonagash
2016-06-01, 11:31 PM
*sighs*
*scratches out 'engineer', writes 'technician' in its place*

Which systems have rules for engineers? Do they also have rules for amount of time spent improving and developing the item, as well as failures ("You fire your grappling hook pistol at the tower above you. The hook flies up about *rolls* 1 meter before dropping back down.")?

There was one that came out in the D20 heyday called spycraft that had a system for that.

If I remember right it also had the best martial arts and vehicle rules I remember for d20

neonagash
2016-06-01, 11:46 PM
True for near-future settings, but the most egregious examples of engineers being frankly magical I've seen come from settings where they have the processing power and small-scale fabrication capacity on hand to help them be so. Anything with "nanotechnology" (in the magical robots sense, not the synthetic chemistry sense) is halfway there anyway.

It also doesn't help that most of these settings are written with somewhat arbitrary technological constraints, and after a while the argument "it doesn't exist, therefore it won't work" wears thin and anything more nuanced is a lot of hassle for everyone.

True. That's part of why I like to run scifi as either a Warhammerish

"only the priesthood of Mars can tinker with this on penalty of death by heresy" to

"space apple built this, it only works with space apple brand products and it's designed to break if anyone but a certified space apple guru opens it, and no you are not enough of a hipster douchebag to be a space apple guru".

Anonymouswizard
2016-06-02, 04:02 AM
Still fantasy, until the tech level matches or surpasses our own, then it's Fanta-sci

Right, okay. I'm sure the fact that it generally takes place in the modern day and has to work around that has no influence on the subgenre at all. Nope, The Dresden Files is just Lord of the Rings with the serial numbers filed off. Rivers of London does not feature the Metropolitan Police, because that would mean it's not the simple fantasy you like to claim all fantasy is.


Martial Art's themed fantasy, is still fantasy. Just swap "fighter" for "Ronin" or "rogue" for "ninja". Still fantasy.

Okay, let's start with this:
'In Ancient China a Ronin and a Ninja were wandering around the Jianghu looking for rights to wrong.'

Umm... it doesn't quite fit.

Wuxia is fairly different to western fantasy. There are no monsters around, unless you count corrupt humans (I don't). Magic and Martial Arts are much less separated, but still not the same thing. Heck, it's likely that nobody's actually going to use magic, just martial arts. Heck, it's probable the villain doesn't even want to take over the world? I mean, he can try to become the Emperor, but there's no real thing that makes that the basic story. But sure, tell me that Legend of the Condor Heroes is just like Lord of the Rings.

Oh, and for the record, Wuxia is Chinese fantasy, so the sentence should have been:
'In Ancient China a couple of Xia were wandering around the Jianghu looking for rights to wrong and people to test their skills against.'


Conan. Still basic, low magic, generic fantasy

Yes, but it's not basic, high magic, generic fantasy. Which is a key difference, as the presence of Gandalf leads itself to a vastly different story.


Sci-Fi.

No. That is quite frankly insulting. It isn't a simple case of 'fantasy has swords and science fiction has lasers'. Let me give you a synopsis to a story.

'Two inventors create a time machine. They go back to the year 1200, meet a knight, mingle with the king and some peasants, and eventually go back home and decide to patent the design.'

That is quite clearly science fiction. Not a single laser in it, in fact it probably has plenty of swords, but it's still science fiction. Therefore if I take a future princess, have the evil wizard capture her and put her in a space station, and have the old wizard train a farm boy as they go to rescue her on a shifty rogue's spaceship and you get.... the first Star Wars film, but also an example of fantasy.


Fantasy has always been generic, even before D&D. Swords, magic and monsters, all else is just window dressing

You can have fantasy with no swords (Rivers of London, the first book in the Rivers of London series).

You can have fantasy with no magic (no examples immediately spring to mind, but I'm sure the forum could provide some).

You can have Fantasy with no monsters (Elantris by Brandon Sanderson as the first example that springs to mind).


Yep, those are all fantasy. Just like hard sci-fi, space opera, cyberpunk, and so forth are all science fiction; they're both broad genres of fiction and RPGs, and I'm not sure either one is necessarily broader than the other. Then, too, they can easily become each other.

Take Star Wars: it's laughably unscientific, from the psionic monks with laser swords to the FTL, but more to the point it doesn't need or want to be scientific. It wants to tell a redemption story about a black-clad psychic cyborg and his whiny psychic kids while selling as many toys as possible, and it does this very well. If you were to scrub it of everything even vaguely futuristic and have Han Solo and Chewbacca sailing a wooden-hulled Millennium Falcon to Alderaan Island with two sorcerers hidden in their hold, the only thing you would lose is the ability to sell light-up toy blasters.

And yet we don't want to do that, because window dressing matters.

You're right. For what it's worth, I consider all the Star Wars films fantasy, but I also consider A New Hope to be science fiction (I'm not sure about Empire to Awakens, but Episodes one to three aren't in my view). It has subtle magic, but really, apart from one scene which would have worked without it the magic isn't really there, it's more an old religion and seems to work really subtly, to the point where the 'tech' has more of an impact on the story and it comes across as a very soft space opera.

Knaight
2016-06-02, 05:15 AM
Fantasy has always been generic, even before D&D. Swords, magic and monsters, all else is just window dressing

There are plenty of cases that are lacking in all three of these, and a veritable overabundance that is lacking in two. There's definitely a highly repetitive strain of more generic fantasy, but things like the New Weird subgenre are pretty distinct from anything at all similar to D&D.

Mutazoia
2016-06-02, 10:51 AM
There are plenty of cases that are lacking in all three of these, and a veritable overabundance that is lacking in two. There's definitely a highly repetitive strain of more generic fantasy, but things like the New Weird subgenre are pretty distinct from anything at all similar to D&D.

Yes, there will always be wierd sub-genere of everything. Evoking sub-genere's in a fantasy vs sci-fi debate is like evoking the platypus when some one states that mammals birth their young live.

If you read Anne McCaffrey's Pern novels, you find people flying around on psychic dragons. If you skipped the preface in the beginning, you would have to read 6 or 7 books before you found out that you were reading science fiction, not fantasy.


My original point was that Sci-Fi has far more details to narrow down than Fantasy does, when deciding on a ...if you pardon the pun... universe to play in.

Sure we could drag this "what classifies as Fantasy and what classifies as Science Fiction" until we've run out of space on 3 different threads and still not come to a solid consensus. But when it comes to gaming, you have more technology based decisions to make before starting a sci-fi game, where as Fantasy is usually (in a very general way) simply "High magic, low magic, or no magic".

If you want a play weird hybrid, or a platypus knock yourself out.

Wuxia isn't fantasy. It's martial arts....a period/genere game. Would you call the movie "Enter the Dragon" fantasy? nope. Just like Boot Hill wasn't a fantasy or sci-fi game...it was a western. The Indiana Jones RPG wasn't fantasy or sci-fi, it was....well it was a feeble attempt to cash in on Indiana Jones is what it was.

Segev
2016-06-02, 01:47 PM
Part of why fantasy is "easy" is that we accept that magic can be limited to frankly illogical packages. If your wizard can cast "fireball," but can't cast "summon grilled cheese sandwich," nobody bats an eye. If you've got a blowtorch with a flamethrower and a welding setting, however, if you claim you can't make a grilled cheese sandwich with it, people will start digging up internet references to high-rise construction workers doing exactly that.

The more your magic becomes a well-defined underlying system with the rules for using it being tools to apply for more specific effects, the closer you are to a system that can be used equally well with sci-fi. Because the thing about technology is that we don't expect it to be restricted to the inventors, outside of superhero and super-spy stories. They're invented, then anybody can use them. Maybe with training, but the training to fly a fighter jet is not the same as the training to build one or to invent its systems.

It'd be like wizards inventing spells, but handing them off to fighters to fight with.

Max_Killjoy
2016-06-02, 02:02 PM
Part of why fantasy is "easy" is that we accept that magic can be limited to frankly illogical packages. If your wizard can cast "fireball," but can't cast "summon grilled cheese sandwich," nobody bats an eye. If you've got a blowtorch with a flamethrower and a welding setting, however, if you claim you can't make a grilled cheese sandwich with it, people will start digging up internet references to high-rise construction workers doing exactly that.

The more your magic becomes a well-defined underlying system with the rules for using it being tools to apply for more specific effects, the closer you are to a system that can be used equally well with sci-fi. Because the thing about technology is that we don't expect it to be restricted to the inventors, outside of superhero and super-spy stories. They're invented, then anybody can use them. Maybe with training, but the training to fly a fighter jet is not the same as the training to build one or to invent its systems.

It'd be like wizards inventing spells, but handing them off to fighters to fight with.


Whereas I expect people to use actual functioning magic the same way they'd use any other tool or skill.

Segev
2016-06-02, 03:11 PM
Whereas I expect people to use actual functioning magic the same way they'd use any other tool or skill.

Absolutely. But most fantasy game systems don't provide the kind of tool-level functionality that technology does. They provide end-effects. Creative players can and do engineer unique solutions to interesting problems with them, but the nature of it tends to be such that it doesn't invite quite the same level of that as sci-fi tech tends to. The more your sci-fi tech resembles encapsulated abilities specific to a character, the "easier" the sci-fi gets to model in game mechanics.

What makes sci-fi hard to game with tends to be that it operates on a lower level of expected access to the tools. We tend to expect to be able to do with technology what a programmer does with C++. Whereas the expectations set in fantasy tend to be that you have an app for that, but that developing that app is not something you'll likely do in-game (unless there's an app for developing those apps, e.g. 3.5e's magic item creation system).

2D8HP
2016-06-02, 03:20 PM
Part of why fantasy is "easy" is that we accept that magic can be limited to frankly illogical packages. If your wizard can cast "fireball," but can't cast "summon grilled cheese sandwich," nobody bats an eye. If you've got a blowtorch with a flamethrower and a welding setting, however, if you claim you can't make a grilled cheese sandwich with it, people will start digging up internet references to high-rise construction workers doing exactly that.It wasn't a high rise, but I did see a Steamfitter at a low rise construction site use a cutting torch to heat a can of soup that he held with s welding clamp, and yes he burned his tongue.

The more your magic becomes a well-defined underlying system with the rules for using it being tools to apply for more specific effects, the closer you are to a system that can be used equally well with sci-fi. Because the thing about technology is that we don't expect it to be restricted to the inventors,
-snip-
It'd be like wizards inventing spells, but handing them off to fighters to fight with.I have longed wondered why dungeons are littered by all those magic swords for fighter to find, when presumably they were made by "ancient wizards" who wouldn't use them. Maybe they were made by 1e Elves?

CharonsHelper
2016-06-02, 03:21 PM
What makes sci-fi hard to game with tends to be that it operates on a lower level of expected access to the tools. We tend to expect to be able to do with technology what a programmer does with C++. Whereas the expectations set in fantasy tend to be that you have an app for that, but that developing that app is not something you'll likely do in-game (unless there's an app for developing those apps, e.g. 3.5e's magic item creation system).

I think that's a player issue, not a system one.

Why in the world should characters who specialize in investigation and/or combat be able to come up with entirely new technology on the fly? This actually seems much less likely than in a fantasy game.

A high level wizard is probably among, at most, a few dozen level 15+ wizards in the world. It sort of makes sense that he'd be able to take magic in a new direction. (Though I agree that it'd probably be a bad idea to allow too much freedom there.)

A character in a sci-fi character who is in charge of the starship's engine is one of thousands of such throughout the galaxy. Not to mention the thousands of researchers/engineers who do nothing but try to figure out NEW tech. Why in the world does it make sense for them to be able to come up with the next big thing in a few weeks of downtime between missions? The GM should just tell him no, in the same way as if a D&D wizard wanted to invent a new & obviously OP spell.

I do agree that there are issues which make sci-fi RPGs difficult, I just don't think that this should be counted among them.

Segev
2016-06-02, 03:58 PM
I think that's a player issue, not a system one.

Why in the world should characters who specialize in investigation and/or combat be able to come up with entirely new technology on the fly? This actually seems much less likely than in a fantasy game.

A high level wizard is probably among, at most, a few dozen level 15+ wizards in the world. It sort of makes sense that he'd be able to take magic in a new direction. (Though I agree that it'd probably be a bad idea to allow too much freedom there.)

A character in a sci-fi character who is in charge of the starship's engine is one of thousands of such throughout the galaxy. Not to mention the thousands of researchers/engineers who do nothing but try to figure out NEW tech. Why in the world does it make sense for them to be able to come up with the next big thing in a few weeks of downtime between missions? The GM should just tell him no, in the same way as if a D&D wizard wanted to invent a new & obviously OP spell.

I do agree that there are issues which make sci-fi RPGs difficult, I just don't think that this should be counted among them.
I'm clearly not getting what I mean to say across, and for that I apologize.

It's... I guess it's the Artificer problem. The class has difficulty because it splits its focus. Honestly, the best person to use a lot of what he builds isn't him...unless his class gives him bonuses to work with his own stuff. Playing Q in a spy game just doesn't have the appeal of playing James Bond. And yet people have some expectation that Q is a valid archetype for sci-fi games.

Knaight
2016-06-02, 04:26 PM
Why in the world should characters who specialize in investigation and/or combat be able to come up with entirely new technology on the fly? This actually seems much less likely than in a fantasy game.

That post wasn't about technology, it was about application - and while I disagree regarding fantasy RPGs (discrete spells usable for very little is a D&D specific trope, and while it does crop up elsewhere so do various spell-less effect systems), the point about being able to use tools for a variety of things is entirely true.

It also doesn't seem like something likely to come up that much, but then I am the engineer(ing student) of the group, so this might just be a case where I happen to be lucky with the players I have.


It's... I guess it's the Artificer problem. The class has difficulty because it splits its focus. Honestly, the best person to use a lot of what he builds isn't him...unless his class gives him bonuses to work with his own stuff. Playing Q in a spy game just doesn't have the appeal of playing James Bond. And yet people have some expectation that Q is a valid archetype for sci-fi games.
Q is fine in a sci-fi game. Looking at really soft sci-fi, take the various engineers in Star Trek. The best example is probably Kevyn Andreyson from Schlock Mercenary, but that's niche enough to not necessarily be familiar. Yes, they generally pass their work off to other people, but that's not an issue for a lot of games. The artificer problem is only there if you have some sort of weird assumptions about tech restrictions to try and make video game style classes work.

Anonymouswizard
2016-06-02, 04:50 PM
I'm clearly not getting what I mean to say across, and for that I apologize.

It's... I guess it's the Artificer problem. The class has difficulty because it splits its focus. Honestly, the best person to use a lot of what he builds isn't him...unless his class gives him bonuses to work with his own stuff. Playing Q in a spy game just doesn't have the appeal of playing James Bond. And yet people have some expectation that Q is a valid archetype for sci-fi games.

Well of course I have problems playing Q, the darn GM keeps insisting that I go out into the field instead of designing new tech :smalltongue:

In reality a PC engineer should be combining X and Y to do Z in the field, rather than trying to build new gizmos (which is a downtime activity). The key trick is to work out where the logical limit for gizmos is, in a modern setting an engineer probably has a portable toolkit, is a lock picking device or a recon drone really too big for a downtime project?

Knaight
2016-06-02, 05:22 PM
Well of course I have problems playing Q, the darn GM keeps insisting that I go out into the field instead of designing new tech :smalltongue:

In reality a PC engineer should be combining X and Y to do Z in the field, rather than trying to build new gizmos (which is a downtime activity). The key trick is to work out where the logical limit for gizmos is, in a modern setting an engineer probably has a portable toolkit, is a lock picking device or a recon drone really too big for a downtime project?

This depends on the game though. Not every game even has a lot of traveling, and if you've got a game that takes place in a small area where characters have homes and such, and it goes over a long time then they probably are building new things. Similarly, if you've got a bunch of people traveling on foot, the equipment available is going to be somewhat less than if you've got some gigantic starship or something. There's enough different types of games that generalizing what a PC engineer should be doing really doesn't work.

Anonymouswizard
2016-06-02, 05:29 PM
This depends on the game though. Not every game even has a lot of traveling, and if you've got a game that takes place in a small area where characters have homes and such, and it goes over a long time then they probably are building new things. Similarly, if you've got a bunch of people traveling on foot, the equipment available is going to be somewhat less than if you've got some gigantic starship or something. There's enough different types of games that generalizing what a PC engineer should be doing really doesn't work.

Sorry, the question wasn't meant to be rethorical, it was supposed to be something you ask when the PC wants to build one, I only slant to answering yes because I'm used to games taking place in a small area where every PC has a home.

CharonsHelper
2016-06-02, 06:05 PM
Q is fine in a sci-fi game. Looking at really soft sci-fi, take the various engineers in Star Trek. The best example is probably Kevyn Andreyson from Schlock Mercenary, but that's niche enough to not necessarily be familiar. Yes, they generally pass their work off to other people, but that's not an issue for a lot of games. The artificer problem is only there if you have some sort of weird assumptions about tech restrictions to try and make video game style classes work.

He really isn't. Even Q (who basically gives Bond Deus Ex Machina ways of dealing with the exact life-threatening situations he'll be in later) has an entire team of researchers and spends months along with millions of pounds to create his Deus Ex-ing gadgets. And he's not exactly suited to fieldwork. He's not trained for it. Making a PC class for Q in a secret-agent game would be a bad idea. Keep him as an NPC.

And when do the Star Trek engineers ever invent anything totally new? They just temporarily get that 10% more out of the engine or whatnot.

Knaight
2016-06-02, 06:17 PM
He really isn't. Even Q (who basically gives Bond Deus Ex Machina ways of dealing with the exact life-threatening situations he'll be in later) has an entire team of researchers and spends months along with millions of pounds to create his Deus Ex-ing gadgets. And he's not exactly suited to fieldwork. He's not trained for it. Making a PC class for Q in a secret-agent game would be a bad idea. Keep him as an NPC.

There's a lot of assumptions here as to the specifics of the game, none of which are necessarily true. The big one:

PCs aren't in positions of authority with lots of people under them.
PCs don't have lots of money.
The PCs are doing fieldwork.
The game uses classes.


None of these are necessarily true for any given game. I'm not arguing that Q is applicable for every sci-fi game, only that there are sci-fi games in which Q is a perfectly reasonable PC. Q will never be an adventurer, but not every game is about adventurers.


And when do the Star Trek engineers ever invent anything totally new? They just temporarily get that 10% more out of the engine or whatnot.
There was Chief O'Brian's self replicating minefield. There were the new technologies to counter various weapons, cloaking systems, etc. There's the pharmaceutical engineering that Julian Bashir gets up to all the time. The list goes on.

Segev
2016-06-02, 07:23 PM
There's a lot of assumptions here as to the specifics of the game, none of which are necessarily true. The big one:

PCs aren't in positions of authority with lots of people under them.
PCs don't have lots of money.
The PCs are doing fieldwork.
The game uses classes.


None of these are necessarily true for any given game. I'm not arguing that Q is applicable for every sci-fi game, only that there are sci-fi games in which Q is a perfectly reasonable PC. Q will never be an adventurer, but not every game is about adventurers.It is, however, relevant to the question as to why sci-fi games are hard. Fantasy games have many answers to the questions of, "how do I do this, mechanically?" Sci-fi games cannot use the same answers. And they have different problems. In short, sci-fi games are "hard" because we haven't had as much experience designing mechanics for their unique problems.


There was Chief O'Brian's self replicating minefield. There were the new technologies to counter various weapons, cloaking systems, etc. There's the pharmaceutical engineering that Julian Bashir gets up to all the time. The list goes on.Indeed. However, trying to quantify those into a game system really would require a specialized subsystem (or multiple subsystems) for developing things. Since this is not "combat," the subsystem technology is not really that solid yet in RPGs. (Our combat subsystems tend to be pretty robust, as they've been the primary focus of many years of RPG development.)

CharonsHelper
2016-06-02, 08:16 PM
There was Chief O'Brian's self replicating minefield. There were the new technologies to counter various weapons, cloaking systems, etc. There's the pharmaceutical engineering that Julian Bashir gets up to all the time. The list goes on.

Fair enough. I never liked Deep Space Nine, so I had no knowledge. I'm basically just a Next Gen Trekkie.

Satinavian
2016-06-03, 03:43 AM
It is, however, relevant to the question as to why sci-fi games are hard. Fantasy games have many answers to the questions of, "how do I do this, mechanically?" Sci-fi games cannot use the same answers. And they have different problems. In short, sci-fi games are "hard" because we haven't had as much experience designing mechanics for their unique problems.
I have played a lot of Q-like characters.
Usually with bases
Often with money
Occasionally with underlings

The mayority of them in fantasy games. I really don't see your point. I even like playing artificers when i for some strange reason go back to D&D. I really don't see your point Building tools in your downtime for your group that are individualized to personal strengths, weaknesses and interests is a lot of fun and makes up dor not being that useful in the field, where you can lean back and see all your wonderful creations saving the day.

Florian
2016-06-03, 03:54 AM
Indeed. However, trying to quantify those into a game system really would require a specialized subsystem (or multiple subsystems) for developing things. Since this is not "combat," the subsystem technology is not really that solid yet in RPGs. (Our combat subsystems tend to be pretty robust, as they've been the primary focus of many years of RPG development.)

Nah. It would rather need using something like Fate Core that never deals with specifics and letīs you color any use of aspects and stress tracks as you like.

Thatīs a step away from the usual obstacle <> solution problem.

Segev
2016-06-03, 10:31 AM
Fair enough, though FATE is a much more rules-lite system, to my understanding, and is definitely much more in the "guided storytelling" than "game" side of the RPG spectrum. This isn't a problem, but it is indicative of the kind of game people are looking at.

Since the question was, what is so hard about Sci-Fi, I suppose the next question is: is sci-fi any harder than fantasy for FATE?

Leave out whether you like FATE or not; this is meant to simply examine whether the reason sci-fi is harder is based on the system.

CharonsHelper
2016-06-03, 10:49 AM
Fair enough, though FATE is a much more rules-lite system, to my understanding, and is definitely much more in the "guided storytelling" than "game" side of the RPG spectrum. This isn't a problem, but it is indicative of the kind of game people are looking at.

Since the question was, what is so hard about Sci-Fi, I suppose the next question is: is sci-fi any harder than fantasy for FATE?

Leave out whether you like FATE or not; this is meant to simply examine whether the reason sci-fi is harder is based on the system.

I would say that a sufficiently abstract system removes THAT part of what makes a sci-fi RPG difficult. (tech issues)

However, it still has to deal with the lack of consistent tropes outside of IPs.

Check here (it's a good & rather quick read) - http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/five-elements.htm

Abstract sci-fi would have every bit as much trouble with the first of those 5 - "Cliché".

Depending upon the kind of sci-fi, many sci-fi worlds would have issues supplying the last two as well - "Anarchy" (many sci-fi worlds have too much order/organizations for many types of adventures to take place) & "Enigma" (some hard sci-fi worlds are too well defined for RPGs). The latter two are why I would never attempt to set an RPG in an Asimov style sci-fi world.

Anonymouswizard
2016-06-03, 10:52 AM
Fair enough, though FATE is a much more rules-lite system, to my understanding, and is definitely much more in the "guided storytelling" than "game" side of the RPG spectrum. This isn't a problem, but it is indicative of the kind of game people are looking at.

It depends, Fate Accelerated is rules-lite, and one of the things I don't like about it. Fate Core is actually as rules-heavy as D&D 5e, and encompasses a lot more with those rules. However, it avoids getting into specifics with the rules, is a conflict a heated debate, or a battle for your life? It can slide along the scale from 'guided storytelling' to 'game', but in my view sits best somewhere in the middle.


Since the question was, what is so hard about Sci-Fi, I suppose the next question is: is sci-fi any harder than fantasy for FATE?

Leave out whether you like FATE or not; this is meant to simply examine whether the reason sci-fi is harder is based on the system.

Going straight to 'characters go places and do stuff' with setting trappings, no it isn't.

Adding in magic for fantasy and technology for science fiction it comes out as about the same, you have to decide how to treat them. Is it just that if you have a skill you have the tools or magic needed to do it (and not having your equipment would be a situation Aspect), or do you want specific rules? At that point, the baseline for magic is easier, but technology isn't so much harder as 'how do you want to represent it'. The best way I've seen to handle technology is if it does something particularly well it gets an aspect (e.g. 'ten feet long and pointy'), it saves you having to write up rules for each specific piece and counters nicely with not having the equipment being an Aspect (and ties into the Fate Point economy). Plus if something does something even better you can make it a stunt or three ('Jet Black's Amazing Jet Pack'). The difference between magic and technology is that magic is more likely to make you need new rules, while technology works best with creative use of the existing rules, neither is harder than the other.

Satinavian
2016-06-03, 11:05 AM
Since the question was, what is so hard about Sci-Fi, I suppose the next question is: is sci-fi any harder than fantasy for FATE?

Leave out whether you like FATE or not; this is meant to simply examine whether the reason sci-fi is harder is based on the system.I would say, it doesn't matter too much in FATE because the system is so abstract and rules light.

But you get similar answers with more traditional rules heaver systems. Take e. g. Shadowrun which tries to do both SciFi and Fantasy. It doesn't really seem to have a harder time with one or the other. They share even similar problem (astral space/matrix). And the amount of gear customization, tinkering and weird PC-build vehicles is enorm.




However, it still has to deal with the lack of consistent tropes outside of IPs.Yes, there is no generic SciFi. But what is the problem with using established IPs ? Why not have your Star Trek/Star Wars/Dune/Mechwarrior/Knights of Sidonia-RPG ?

And it is the same with fantasy. The generic D&D world is actually quite specific and by far the most fantasy settings don't match it at all. But there are so many existing IPs you could use...



Or you do the hard work of worldbuilding. That is harder in SiFi because you can't introduce fantasy counterpart cultures and be taken seriously.

Florian
2016-06-03, 11:30 AM
Fair enough, though FATE is a much more rules-lite system, to my understanding, and is definitely much more in the "guided storytelling" than "game" side of the RPG spectrum. This isn't a problem, but it is indicative of the kind of game people are looking at.

Since the question was, what is so hard about Sci-Fi, I suppose the next question is: is sci-fi any harder than fantasy for FATE?

Leave out whether you like FATE or not; this is meant to simply examine whether the reason sci-fi is harder is based on the system.

FATE Core actually is pretty rules heavy, but not in the same way d20 or Gurps are. The constraints here are the overall scene and story, not the individual action. The final result can be pretty similar, though.

So some things are easier to handle, or things are still open.

Fate is a consensus-based system. The group should be on the same level of understanding the tropes involved and should understand when to call in a veto.

For example, some two week ago, I gamed with the owner of a popular SF bookshop, his wife and his partner, whoīs a freelance translator of SF books. Weīve all read the same source material (in this case: David Brin), discussed it and had a blast playing it. We had no need to tie things down to certain skills or DCs, as we were using a mix of Fate Core and Diaspora an where on the same level.

Segev
2016-06-03, 11:42 AM
Given the discussion here, then, I would suggest that the reason sci-fi seems harder than fantasy to the OP is that the OP is used to systems purpose-built for fantasy settings, and that they do not adapt particularly well to sci-fi without a lot of work (making it harder than running fantasy).

CharonsHelper
2016-06-03, 12:24 PM
Yes, there is no generic SciFi. But what is the problem with using established IPs ? Why not have your Star Trek/Star Wars/Dune/Mechwarrior/Knights of Sidonia-RPG ?

If you're actually creating the system for general consumption rather than homebrew, it's because you don't want to get sued!



Or you do the hard work of worldbuilding. That is harder in SiFi because you can't introduce fantasy counterpart cultures and be taken seriously.

Star Trek pretty much does. Though it also uses a few theoretical philosophies, and it's far from the most realistic of world-building.

Segev
2016-06-03, 12:33 PM
One of the biggest problems with sci-fi is that we just don't seem to do very well at creating worlds full of aliens as diverse as humanity. We wind up with planets of hats. This is easier to swallow when it's a race-of-hat, because the race often substitutes for culture, too, and very commonly humans have only a subset of cultures, turning the others over to other races.

In sci-fi... every planet is, in reality, no more than one city, in terms of culture and how much the players are likely to see. And that makes it manageable, but also makes it weird when you stop to think about it.

CharonsHelper
2016-06-03, 01:30 PM
One of the biggest problems with sci-fi is that we just don't seem to do very well at creating worlds full of aliens as diverse as humanity. We wind up with planets of hats. This is easier to swallow when it's a race-of-hat, because the race often substitutes for culture, too, and very commonly humans have only a subset of cultures, turning the others over to other races.

In sci-fi... every planet is, in reality, no more than one city, in terms of culture and how much the players are likely to see. And that makes it manageable, but also makes it weird when you stop to think about it.

I think part of that might be the RPG's world-building biting off more than it can chew.

Just give a few generalities about how the species thinks and move on. If an adventure calls for more details, the GM can do what they want. (or the module writer)

Admittedly, this probably works better in the sort of sci-fi where aliens have a lot of 'otherness' rather than sci-fi where species are reflections of humanity.

Storytelling pros and cons to each. The former allows more strangeness/discovery, and it gives the GM more leeway for how they act ("Why did they do that? You don't know. Aliens!) while the latter allows you to tell human stories which dabble in sensitive things while being removed enough to avoid raising anyone's ire and able take social/philosophical things to extremes. (Star Trek dabbles very heavily in the latter. At least Next Gen did.)

Max_Killjoy
2016-06-03, 02:36 PM
When developing the various alien species that will feature in a setting, it's far better to NOT think of them as exaggerated various aspects of humans, or as "people of hats".

Segev
2016-06-03, 04:38 PM
When developing the various alien species that will feature in a setting, it's far better to NOT think of them as exaggerated various aspects of humans, or as "people of hats".
That actually depends on the kind of sci-fi you're writing, and what kind of story you're telling, which will impact what kind of aliens you'll want in the setting.

Also, being aware of the tendency helps to avoid it.

Florian
2016-06-03, 04:44 PM
Keeping stuff in the background also help.

Realistically speaking, how many aliens do you meet per session? Probably very few. Having them drop certain background infos (Lore) ainīt that hard. "Well, I will never understand you Humans. We had our last Great War some 50 years ago and have achieved inner unity since then. Oh, what that was about, wel..."

goto124
2016-06-03, 10:30 PM
You meet only a few aliens per session? What do you do in a sci-fi game? Also, it still adds up to a lot of aliens after a couple of sessions, every alien has a lot to them, and there're setting elements to deal with even if the PCs aren't meeting the aliens themselves. Such as all the alien's technology.

I remember a piece of advice to have only 4 factions ongoing in a campaign, and really develop these 4 factions. That could work.

Why do people play sci-fi while refusing to play science fantasy? What makes sci-fi different or 'better' than science fantasy?

CharonsHelper
2016-06-03, 11:17 PM
Such as all the alien's technology.

That was likely one of the main reasons for the Mass Effect premise where everyone had pretty much the same tech because it was really all just copied from old prothean tech. It allowed them to avoid this issue entirely.

I would suggest that any sci-fi RPG design include something similar to at least keep tech down to (at absolute most) 2-3 tech styles. Unrelated kinds would likely be better. For example: one species (perhaps even an alliance of species) creates all of the best of the top tier hardware (everyone else making knock-offs which are virtually/actually the same) and another species specializing in biological tech. MAYBE a third for cybernetics.

But that's the absolute limit. Anything more just becomes filler.

CharonsHelper
2016-06-03, 11:18 PM
Why do people play sci-fi while refusing to play science fantasy? What makes sci-fi different or 'better' than science fantasy?

What makes you say that? The only very commercially successful sci-fi RPGs I can think of are Star Wars, and that's pretty blatantly future fantasy.

Segev
2016-06-04, 12:01 AM
What makes you say that? The only very commercially successful sci-fi RPGs I can think of are Star Wars, and that's pretty blatantly future fantasy.

Even though it happened long, long ago. :smallwink:

Florian
2016-06-04, 12:11 AM
You meet only a few aliens per session? What do you do in a sci-fi game? Also, it still adds up to a lot of aliens after a couple of sessions, every alien has a lot to them, and there're setting elements to deal with even if the PCs aren't meeting the aliens themselves. Such as all the alien's technology.

I remember a piece of advice to have only 4 factions ongoing in a campaign, and really develop these 4 factions. That could work.

Why do people play sci-fi while refusing to play science fantasy? What makes sci-fi different or 'better' than science fantasy?

Why do you like A Game of Throne but refuse to watch the Smurfes? Itīs both fantasy, right? You see where thisīll lead...

Besides that, itīs harder to make aliens "more alien" than it is with using tropes in fantasy.
Take Traveller as example: Iīm playing that for decades now and Iīm still doubting my ability to really bring the strangeness of Zhodani across and I often struggle to no let Darrians slip into the "space elves" role because of pointy ears.

goto124
2016-06-04, 02:25 AM
Why do you like A Game of Throne but refuse to watch the Smurfes? Itīs both fantasy, right? You see where thisīll lead...

Someone who has watched both GoT and Smurfs can describe the many differences between them, but since I have watched neither and don't even know how magic is used in either, there's not much I can say beyond "GoT is grittier than the Smurfs".

I was hoping for someone to list the differences between sci-fi and science fantasy.

Florian
2016-06-04, 02:36 AM
Someone who has watched both GoT and Smurfs can describe the many differences between them, but since I have watched neither and don't even know how magic is used in either, there's not much I can say beyond "GoT is grittier than the Smurfs".

I was hoping for someone to list the differences between sci-fi and science fantasy.

Well, ok:

In Science Fantasy, the technology is actual window dressing and eye candy. You could run Star Wars, Jupiter Ascending or any other Science Fantasy film/story unchanged in practically each time period, from stone age over victorian times to cold war and the story stays intact, the technology in the background doesnīt affect it at all.

With Science Fiction, especially Hard, Cyberpunk or Transhumanism, the technology is both the cause of the story as well as the hard boundary that canīt be beaten, no matter what, as it is extrapolated from our reality. It both empowers and sets limits to our control over it. Thatīs the thing thatīs got to be explored.

Satinavian
2016-06-04, 03:27 AM
If you're actually creating the system for general consumption rather than homebrew, it's because you don't want to get sued!And here i thought we are talking about "Why is it harder to run a SciFi campaign with my players" instead of "Why is it harder to build a commerrcial SciFi-RPG instead of a commercial Fantasy RPG". In the first case there is nothing to get sued over.

As for commercial products. Well, most of the big franchises do acutually have licensed RPG versions anyway. So that is how you use established settings. Get a license to do it.

If you don't want or it is too expensive, just make your setting for your RPG instead of trying to cover all SciFi ever. SciFi is so diverse that covering everything will lead to a universal RPG anyway,, not to a SciFi-RPG.


Star Trek pretty much does. Though it also uses a few theoretical philosophies, and it's far from the most realistic of world-building.They rarey do take more than some inspirations instead of blatant inserts. Which results not in fantasy counterpart culture but only in planet of hats. Still not good. But both SciFi and Fantasy have a lot of lazy writing for foreign cultures/races/species/regions. It is hard to argue which one is worse but i don't see any big difference here either.

Trekkin
2016-06-04, 04:08 AM
I was hoping for someone to list the differences between sci-fi and science fantasy.

I think of it this way: the core of storytelling is hiding the seams between narrative causality and actual causality somewhere the plot won't run into them.

Fantasy uses magic for this purpose. Bad fantasy uses magic as plot hole spackle, which is how you get curses that "turn people evil" and similarly shameless cop-outs. If you think too hard about it, at its core, magic is narrative causality: things happen because the story says they should.

Science fantasy is what happens when someone wants the narrative freedom of magic and the trappings of technology for "flavor". This generally leads to someone trying to work out whether the whiz-bang marvels that drive the plot could actually exist, which leads to Internet conversations in which Clarke's three laws are desperately bandied about in the hopes of warding off actual physics. Same cop-out, different look.

Science fiction, on the other hand, actually tries to quarantine its nonsense. Hard sci-fi tries to have as little as possible, but even softer versions try to make clear that while, say, the core of the faster-than-light drive is blatantly aphysical, it has the following defined properties that interact like so with the rest of the universe (which works according to physics as we understand it.) From that basis, the story proceeds to explore what would happen if the universe worked that way, often on a social level.

Have a quote from Jules Verne: “[H.G. Wells'] books were sent to me, and I have read them. It is very curious, and, I will add, very English. But I do not see the possibility of comparison between his work and mine. We do not proceed in the same manner. It occurs to me that his stories do not repose on very scientific bases. No, there is no rapport between his work and mine. I make use of physics. He invents. I go to the moon in a cannon-ball, discharged from a cannon. There is no invention. He goes to Mars in an airship, which he constructs of a metal which does away with the law of gravitation. Įa c’est trčs joli, but show me this metal. Let him produce it.”

Of course, Verne got the number of moons of Earth wrong and his cannon wouldn't have worked*, but the point is we can actually point to why it wouldn't work because he went to the trouble of doing the math. Wells, by contrast, just says "cavorite floats" and there we stop; by itself that might be pillow-soft science fiction, but the rest of the story lands it squarely in science fantasy.

*although, to his credit, he was as physical as the science of his day let him be.