What's so hard about Sci-Fi?

[Noje]

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]

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]

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]

For one thing, a player who's a physics or chemistry (hi, Trekkin!) can sometimes break the game right in two.

[Mr Beer]

"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]

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).
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]

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).
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]

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]

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, it´s not even the game system used itself that´s 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 can´t 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 they´re 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 can´t simply kick back and relax during the game.

[Anonymouswizard]

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.'

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]

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]

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

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]

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 don´t really matter. The difference between a laser and a railgun are a trifling matters.

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

[Khedrac]

Sorry, but these questions don´t 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]

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]

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]

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]

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 façade. 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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

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.

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]

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]

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]

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.'

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]

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]

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]

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.