What changes in Space Adventures?

[Corey]

Interestingly, I can't think of any light-freighter/PC party-size ships getting vaporized on screen.

The main example that quickly comes to mind of warships being vaporized on screen is

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIvLwQ5P-VM

(starting at the 1:30 mark)

But that certainly fits the template of the vaporizer being much more powerful than the vaporizee.

My sense is that those ships were envisioned as having crews of a few dozen or so.

[Yora]

Capital ship guns in FreeSpace 2 certainly could do it. Even the heaviest bombers get instantly destroyed if they happen to run into the path of a beam canon.
Though then, being a videogame, you just restart the level and continue.

[Anonymouswizard]

Just have the ship VWORP from place to place, it solves the problem with space combat and immigration (as long as you don't get too conspicuous).

[Yora]

I think the three main differences we identified are in communication, transportation, and guns.
Which admittedly are the obvious ones.

Are there cultural and social aspects that also become a major factor to consider?

Lawless frontier worlds are quite common in many sci-fi styles, and those are deliberately based on the image of the Wild West. Just like typical D&D country. But in contrast to that, big urban centers are very much like modern cities today. That makes them much more like modern settings than fantasy settings.
The main impact of this I see in police and weapons restrictions. While I've seen these things occasionally pondered for a minute or two in fantasy settings, fantasy generally seems to assume that characters can walk around in full battle gear all the time, and if they get into fights, there's nobody going to bother them about it. Unless it's a particularly broken down city, or one of the aforementioned lawless frontier planets, that approach seems rather implausible in a sci-fi setting to me. Carrying weapons could easily be illegal on developed fantasy worlds, as it is in almost every industrialized country today. And police is going to respond to every public shooting where people can see it. If the PCs can be identified, then there will likely be a manhunt for them for quite a while. Leaving the planet would probably be a good option in many cases, and getting departure clearance might be difficult on smaller worlds that only have a handful of ships coming and going each day. Of course, all of that changes if the shooting happens in non-public places and is with people who have even less interest in getting the attention of the police.
But overall, I think police would play a much larger roll than generic fantasy town guards.

I know that several sci-fi games have a mechanic for weapons requiring licenses. I think on more civilized planets, that could really be a very good element to make use of, to create more contrast with lawless worlds.

[BRC]

I think the three main differences we identified are in communication, transportation, and guns.
Which admittedly are the obvious ones.

Are there cultural and social aspects that also become a major factor to consider?

Lawless frontier worlds are quite common in many sci-fi styles, and those are deliberately based on the image of the Wild West. Just like typical D&D country. But in contrast to that, big urban centers are very much like modern cities today. That makes them much more like modern settings than fantasy settings.
The main impact of this I see in police and weapons restrictions. While I've seen these things occasionally pondered for a minute or two in fantasy settings, fantasy generally seems to assume that characters can walk around in full battle gear all the time, and if they get into fights, there's nobody going to bother them about it. Unless it's a particularly broken down city, or one of the aforementioned lawless frontier planets, that approach seems rather implausible in a sci-fi setting to me. Carrying weapons could easily be illegal on developed fantasy worlds, as it is in almost every industrialized country today. And police is going to respond to every public shooting where people can see it. If the PCs can be identified, then there will likely be a manhunt for them for quite a while. Leaving the planet would probably be a good option in many cases, and getting departure clearance might be difficult on smaller worlds that only have a handful of ships coming and going each day. Of course, all of that changes if the shooting happens in non-public places and is with people who have even less interest in getting the attention of the police.
But overall, I think police would play a much larger roll than generic fantasy town guards.

I know that several sci-fi games have a mechanic for weapons requiring licenses. I think on more civilized planets, that could really be a very good element to make use of, to create more contrast with lawless worlds.

Another thing to consider is the biodiversity of your setting, as regards sentient species.


How would a city look if it's citizens included 15 foot tall aliens with six arms, Humans, 2 foot tall blue frog people, hyperintelligent oozes who go around in robotic environment suits, and the occasional hivemind alien species that can't really carry on a conversation unless at least 3 individuals are in close proximity.


Can your different weird aliens eat the same food? Breath the same air? Might aliens from high-gravity worlds enjoy vacationing on lower-gravity planets where they have superstrength?
How does language work when different species might have wildly different vocal chords, or not even communicate using sound at all?

When I had my pulp sci-fi setting, I had a lot of fun coming up with weird aliens.

[Psyren]

A lot of settings get around weapons issues by just having the PCs join an organization of some kind that is authorized to have weapons, or be deputized/empowered in some way.

Spoiler

Show

For example, in Mass Effect you start out as a member of the Systems Alliance Military and later join the Spectres - in both cases, not only is Shepard allowed to walk around just about anywhere armed to the teeth, all his/her companions are too. Similarly, Starfinder usually has the PCs join the Starfinder Society or a similar organization that can walk around most places with at least a sidearm. And all of that ignores the idea of alternative "weapons" like psionics, biotics, Force-use, tech/hacking skills or outright space magic - some of these are harder to restrict, which makes restricting physical weapons performative at best.

This is not to say you can never take the PCs guns away in some circumstances (e.g. visiting a corporate HQ or a government official at their office) but those circumstances should usually be the exception rather than the rule unless your setting is much more tightly regulated than most space opera settings, which tend to go for more of a wild frontier vibe (pockets of order in a mostly lawless expanse.)

As for big differences between sci-fi/space and traditional fantasy, a big one for me is information gathering. For fantasy you usually have three sources to learn something - find someone who knows and learn from them, magical divinations, or journey to a physical repository like a library or temple or school for lengthy research. In a space setting you get a fourth option - the internet, or some version of that concept, which if you want to throw in a dash of cyberpunk you can add strata too like the Deep Web and Dark Web.

[Anonymouswizard]

But overall, I think police would play a much larger roll than generic fantasy town guards.

I know that several sci-fi games have a mechanic for weapons requiring licenses. I think on more civilized planets, that could really be a very good element to make use of, to create more contrast with lawless worlds.

On the first, I tend to find in games from about the Victorian era (or equivalent) onwards a reason why the PCs can't just call the police is useful. Generally either making them the police or making them be criminals or competitors (Scum and Villainy had three ship options which all give a reason why you don't want the authorities to be here).

On the second, it might have to do with the country I live in, but I don't see weapon regulations as inherent to any genre. I've had PCs get into fights with the town guard because they tried to walk around in mail carrying two handed swords (and I'll have similar rules in most fantasy games I play). Generally I use what weapons you can carry to establish how oppressive a settlement is: the default is being able to have your sidearm, freer societies tend to allow stronger weapons while oppressive ones might not let you carry a knife.

[Yora]

How does language work when different species might have wildly different vocal chords, or not even communicate using sound at all?

Though it's a general questions for all settings to consider, I want to show of my own work on the subject.

A trade language with a very simple grammar (like English ) and a single script, which has three different systems to pronounce the letters, which are designed to work with the anatomy of all the species (my setting only has twelve). While most people are only physically able to pronounce one of the three forms, they can still hear and understand the others. In principle, it's no different from reading the same text in all caps or all lower case, or learning to read text transcribed into the script of a different language, which billions of people do every day.
In case the voices of a species are partly outside the hearing range of another, regular personal comms can pick the voice up with their microphone and amplify them tona different frequency range. You'd still have to deal with very strong accents, but we actually do that all the time and stop noticing it after an hour or two.

[SimonMoon6]

How does language work when different species might have wildly different vocal chords, or not even communicate using sound at all?

Even if the aliens can all use the same sounds to communicate, language is an incredibly complicated issue to deal with. There's a reason that Star Trek has the "universal translator" and Doctor Who has translation via telepathic circuits. Languages are weird. Even Earth languages can have very different concepts that don't translate from one language to another. I mean, take Japanese with its honorifics (-san, -chan, -sama, -sensei, etc) or its many different ways of saying "you" or "I" that have different connotations that will not translate at all into English. And that's an Earth language spoken by humans.

The use of languages in science fiction is something I always pay a keen attention to and I get really annoyed when it's not used well. For example, Stargate SG-1 started off with alien humans speaking a different language descended from Ancient Egyptian, so the guy who knew Ancient Egyptian could sort of translate a little bit. And then, after that, every alien spoke English. Even the ones in a distant galaxy who had no connection to Earth, not even ancient Earth in the years before English existed. It didn't matter who they were or where they lived, they spoke English and no other language. That annoys me to no end.

But one of the more interesting translation situations I've encountered was an audio only Doctor Who adventure in which the aliens were bugs who left trails of scent to communicate. Which meant that communications lingered and could be found by enemies.

[BRC]

On the first, I tend to find in games from about the Victorian era (or equivalent) onwards a reason why the PCs can't just call the police is useful. Generally either making them the police or making them be criminals or competitors (Scum and Villainy had three ship options which all give a reason why you don't want the authorities to be here).

On the second, it might have to do with the country I live in, but I don't see weapon regulations as inherent to any genre. I've had PCs get into fights with the town guard because they tried to walk around in mail carrying two handed swords (and I'll have similar rules in most fantasy games I play). Generally I use what weapons you can carry to establish how oppressive a settlement is: the default is being able to have your sidearm, freer societies tend to allow stronger weapons while oppressive ones might not let you carry a knife.

Eh, wouldn't necessarily agree with as a metric of free vs oppressive. I'll take a detour to avoid getting into politics


Weapon restrictions are probably based on two factors

1) Necessity: What does this society consider a valid reason to be carrying a weapon around? Lawless frontier planets might have aggressive fauna, or potential criminal attacks and consider it legitimate to carry just about anything short of a heavy artillery. Meanwhile, a space station that serves as the assembly for the space UN might consider anything more dangerous than a kitchen knife to be illegal, since the station is theoretically safe enough that nobody needs to defend themselves, and letting people go armed increases the risk to any visiting VIPs.
2) Ability. The local authorities will generally want to enforce their monopoly on violence, but they won't be able to. If everybody who lands needs to go through Starport Security where they can be thoroughly searched for weapons, the Authorities might ban most weapons. However, if you can land your ship out in the wilderness and walk into town, the locals might decide they have better things to do than trying to track down and stop every spacer who carries a laser pistol.

Generally, I'd say that if the local authorities 1) Don't consider a given weapon to be something anybody has a legitimate reason to carry, and 2) can reasonably enforce a weapon restriction, they're probably doing so, if only because they have a vested interest in not letting anybody have bigger guns than they do.

Unless the place in question has cultural values around letting it's citizens go armed.


One fun thing to do in these settings is play with how weapon restrictions might be enforced/implemented.

For example, if police scanners can detect energy weapons, you might have criminal gangs resorting to stuff like crossbows and crude gunpowder weapons which won't show up on the scanners. Dune justified space-age swordfights by having personal shields that would stop a bullet but not a knife (and would explode if shot with lasers).

There's also good old fashioned Corruption, where weapons might be illegal without a theoretically hard-to-get permit, but you can grease a few palms and get yourself licensed as a "Personal Security Consultant", or slap some interesting paint on your gun and call it a "Culturally significant art object"

[KineticDiplomat]

As an alternative way of looking at this:

The big difference is that you can actually set the expectations to whatever you want. Whereas so much of the generic fantasy expectations have been set by the high-fantasy-high magic-faux-renaissance-HP Battling-and-tolkien of D&D, you have freedom in space.

Take space battles.. Want space wizards re enacting the battle of Midway? Can do. Want ships of the line majestically pounding each other as shields flicker beneath titanic energies? Yep. Want a horrifying exchange of near autonomous weapons where after the humans commit to the plan, the attack and defense are mostly in the hands of computers for a furious bath of destruction? Sure. And anything in between. You are no more compelled to play "hard" science than you are to explain why somehow wizards live through crossbows to the face in some systems and wizards don't exist in others. The same applies for the ground...space wizards with laser swords, reskinned western gunfights, gunfights Ala the 20th century, fabulously complex interplays of networks and EM as low cost precision kill munitions stalk anything human...

And hey, you control the galactic history. Aliens, their status, humans, ancient ruins or a brave new frontier, empires or barely functioning pools of civilization between broad expanses of nothing. Jump gates, free FTL, no FTL at all and the entire adventure is on one ship traveling the stars. You control the technology, and what that means. You can tweak it all to the game you want...

So don't worry about what HAS to be different. Worry about what you want to be different.

[Quertus]

Does this impact play?

Depends on the system, and how realistic or limited certain components of play are.

Suppose your primary weapon is a rail gun, 0 arc of fire, forward fire only. Your secondary guns are… magical old-earth broadside cannons, port and starboard only, 30 degrees arc of fire "up" from "waterline" / horizontal (no arc in any other dimension). Your tertiary guns are… top and bottom mounted anti-fighter guns alla the millennium falcon, with 360 degree coverage… but only for the range of, say, 5-40 degrees above (or before) the "horizon" (and really short range - say, 5 units).

Your ship is located at [257,42,-170], with momentum vector of [+20,-12,-10], maximum forward thrust/acceleration of 20, thrusters to give ±1 thrust in any direction or 20 degree turning or 5 degree acceleration/deceleration of rotation momentum per turn. Your ship is currently facing +60 degrees "up", +30 degrees "right", and has a rotation momentum of 20 degrees clockwise.

Plot a course to shoot the satellites at [120,70,15], [220,0,0], and [56,180,92] before docking with the command ship at [300,-50,0]. Momentum when docking must be between 5 and 7. Bonus points for lining up a shot with the rail gun on the enemy space station at [500,-666,0].

And that's with stationary targets. There's a reason why the AI wins here.

[Satinavian]

I found that most of the time places with heavy weapon restrictions are also places where no one, not even PCs, expect to need weapons. Exceptions exist of course but they are rare. And unless you have a GM who wants to force fights with disarmed PCs, those expectations are not proven wrong.

The most important thing for me in a space adventure game would be to not make it "D&D in space".

[GeoffWatson]

Depends on the system, and how realistic or limited certain components of play are.

Suppose your primary weapon is a rail gun, 0 arc of fire, forward fire only. Your secondary guns are… magical old-earth broadside cannons, port and starboard only, 30 degrees arc of fire "up" from "waterline" / horizontal (no arc in any other dimension). Your tertiary guns are… top and bottom mounted anti-fighter guns alla the millennium falcon, with 360 degree coverage… but only for the range of, say, 5-40 degrees above (or before) the "horizon" (and really short range - say, 5 units).

Your ship is located at [257,42,-170], with momentum vector of [+20,-12,-10], maximum forward thrust/acceleration of 20, thrusters to give ±1 thrust in any direction or 20 degree turning or 5 degree acceleration/deceleration of rotation momentum per turn. Your ship is currently facing +60 degrees "up", +30 degrees "right", and has a rotation momentum of 20 degrees clockwise.

Plot a course to shoot the satellites at [120,70,15], [220,0,0], and [56,180,92] before docking with the command ship at [300,-50,0]. Momentum when docking must be between 5 and 7. Bonus points for lining up a shot with the rail gun on the enemy space station at [500,-666,0].

And that's with stationary targets. There's a reason why the AI wins here.

You'd summarize or abstract it out.
Do you require players running a sailing ship to tell you exactly which ropes and sails they are using?

[Vahnavoi]

In a game that's actually focused on sailing, putting such detail into sailing would be just fine - just like detailed three-dimensional navigation would be fine for a game that's actually focused on space navigation.

The best reason to not do the latter by hand is simply because computers do it better. The best reason to not do the former on paper is because if you're that interested in sailing, it'd pay off to actually go sailing.

[noob]

In a game that's actually focused on sailing, putting such detail into sailing would be just fine - just like detailed three-dimensional navigation would be fine for a game that's actually focused on space navigation.

The best reason to not do the latter by hand is simply because computers do it better. The best reason to not do the former on paper is because if you're that interested in sailing, it'd pay off to actually go sailing.

While sailing there is empty times where you are not actively working on sailing so you could play a game about sailing while sailing.

[Vahnavoi]

Yes. Characters in a roleplaying game can also start playing a roleplaying game. It's simply a question of whether the game allows recursion.

[noob]

Yes. Characters in a roleplaying game can also start playing a roleplaying game. It's simply a question of whether the game allows recursion.

No it was not about rpg recursion.
I was talking about real life people that have empty time while sailing.
They do have the physical possibility to play a game about sailing during such empty time because in real life you can not skip empty times.

[GeoffWatson]

It really depends on how spaceships work in your game.

Realism would probably be boring (really long travel times, carefully planning all trips, etc), so you'll have to make up some bull**** futuristic technology. With whatever properties you want it to have.
You'd also have to decide how communication works, how space weapons work, etc.

[Yora]

The big difference is that you can actually set the expectations to whatever you want. Whereas so much of the generic fantasy expectations have been set by the high-fantasy-high magic-faux-renaissance-HP Battling-and-tolkien of D&D, you have freedom in space.

As someone with an interested in non-generic, non-D&D-clone fantasy worldbuilding, this is actually a really nice feature. In a space setting, players are much more open to consider that they don't already know everything there is about the setting and will listen to descriptions and ask questions.
If you announce that you are starting a fantasy campaign in which there are no dwarfs, there will almost certainly one or two people who say they really want to play in your campaign, but they want you to change it so they can play a dwarf. That just doesn't happen in custom space settings in my experience.

[Quertus]

You'd summarize or abstract it out.
Do you require players running a sailing ship to tell you exactly which ropes and sails they are using?

The point is… well, there's several.

Abstracting out piloting to maneuver / get to a location vs to set up a shot for guns with limited firing arcs (and holding steady for the shoot vs maneuvering / dodging) is one thing, and *might* be reasonable to abstract.

But "here's your limited arc of fire", abstracting out how many of which guns you can bring to bare? Unless your abstraction never returns rail gun and millennium falcon guns simultaneously (unless you're shooting the broadside of a Borg cube from point blank), virtually always returns the "top" anti-Fighter gun whenever the broadside cannons are applicable, etc, there's going to be some cognitive dissonance between… well, not so much between the "fluff" and the "crunch", so much as between one set of crunch and another set of crunch.

But the *main* point is, it had to "come up" in order for it to be something that gets abstracted out in the first place.

And, if you're using a realistic thrust system (something like I detailed with all those numbers), the amount of *planning* necessary to set up a shot isn't exactly trivial. Easier for a single gun than all those numbers make it sound, granted, but still quite complex when trying to consider multiple arcs of fire simultaneously, or when planning future shots in addition to evaluating the current situation. Which is another reason (on top of the other obvious reasons regarding human limitations already stated) why, IRL, I side with "the AI wins space battles".

[Satinavian]

And, if you're using a realistic thrust system (something like I detailed with all those numbers), the amount of *planning* necessary to set up a shot isn't exactly trivial. Easier for a single gun than all those numbers make it sound, granted, but still quite complex when trying to consider multiple arcs of fire simultaneously, or when planning future shots in addition to evaluating the current situation. Which is another reason (on top of the other obvious reasons regarding human limitations already stated) why, IRL, I side with "the AI wins space battles".

And how does that matter for the game ? There probably is an AI or computer assist for that and the problem is just solved. There is no reason for the players to try figuring something out per hand what not even their characters actually need to do.


I mean i have had a coupble of space battles considering firing arc but only in 2D and it was fun enough. There are several systems that do this per default. But going actually to 3D at the table and consider firing arcs, acceleration and momentum and rotation around various axes is way to complicated for a game for very little benefit.

[KorvinStarmast]

The problem I find with spaceship combat is that the PC's can't really lose any encounter in the sense of getting their ship destroyed, because that's pretty much a TPK.

TPK isn't necessarily a bad thing. Roll up new characters.
In space, no one can hear you scream.
This puts "keep the ship repaired/running" as the central task for any crew.

That can be something difficult to train out of D&D veterans as well, the idea that you only lose when you're combat ineffective and every fight is to the death. But in many cases, its easier to run away in space than it is in a dungeon, so retreating from a fight you are going to lose means keeping your ship intact. The trick is convincing players that this is viable.

Good point. Run away is better than being stuck in a vacuum where you just die. Wrecks at sea? People can live for days and even weeks clinging to floatsam... (in warm waters anyway)

You could always use the Lensman model: ships blue up because anything that's powerful enough to take their screens down will just vaporise the ship into incredibly energetic plasma.

When outgunned, run.

This is why repair and maintenance is a good thing.

The trick is how to make that into interesting table top game play.

In the combat minigame hell yes. If one side (GM) or the other (players) grok 3d and the other doesn’t space combat becomes space murder.

And if one side has read and comprehended Boyd, double down on that.

[Psyren]

Weapon restrictions are probably based on two factors

1) Necessity: What does this society consider a valid reason to be carrying a weapon around? Lawless frontier planets might have aggressive fauna, or potential criminal attacks and consider it legitimate to carry just about anything short of a heavy artillery. Meanwhile, a space station that serves as the assembly for the space UN might consider anything more dangerous than a kitchen knife to be illegal, since the station is theoretically safe enough that nobody needs to defend themselves, and letting people go armed increases the risk to any visiting VIPs.
2) Ability. The local authorities will generally want to enforce their monopoly on violence, but they won't be able to. If everybody who lands needs to go through Starport Security where they can be thoroughly searched for weapons, the Authorities might ban most weapons. However, if you can land your ship out in the wilderness and walk into town, the locals might decide they have better things to do than trying to track down and stop every spacer who carries a laser pistol.

Just chiming in once again with the possibility of non-weapon weapons too. If your setting has supernatural abilities (e.g. Force Users, biotics, psionics etc) or preternatural alien biology (e.g. bioelectricity, acid spit, even simple super-strength) then convincing those people without such abilities to go unarmed is going to be that much more difficult even in common or neutral spaces.

It really depends on how spaceships work in your game.

Realism would probably be boring (really long travel times, carefully planning all trips, etc), so you'll have to make up some bull**** futuristic technology. With whatever properties you want it to have.
You'd also have to decide how communication works, how space weapons work, etc.

You can even have the same explanation for both or all three.

In Mass Effect for example, the same technology for long-range FTL (the Mass Relays) also facilitates communication, because the same physics that allows them to slingshot ships at FTL speeds lets them do the same to communications via the comm buoys. Then they came out with QEC communicators and you get essentially teleportation (for messages), albeit point to point.

Starfinder's Drift dimension works similarly, facilitating both travel and messages.

In those cases though, you need to explain how you can throw ships across the galaxy in seconds but not use that technology to somehow develop an infinite-mass arbitrarily high yield ordnance or suicide bomber.

[Batcathat]

In those cases though, you need to explain how you can throw ships across the galaxy in seconds but not use that technology to somehow develop an infinite-mass arbitrarily high yield ordnance or suicide bomber.

Yeah, I feel like a lot of settings just avoid talking about that possibility or giving it some vague hand-wave. In the campaign I'm currently in, I'm secretly hoping for an enemy big enough to warrant trying that. We have some spare ships and from what the GM has said about how the FTL works, it should be possible. I suspect there's about a 75 percent chance he'll just come up with some reason in the moment why it won't work but until then I'll keep dreaming.

I'm not sure if someone's mentioned this already (I kinda skimmed parts of the thread), but on the topic of FLT communications I'd consider skipping it altogether. Being able to "outrun" information can be handy for adventurers (and their enemies) and having to use couriers to transport information opens up some possibly quests.

[BRC]

Just chiming in once again with the possibility of non-weapon weapons too. If your setting has supernatural abilities (e.g. Force Users, biotics, psionics etc) or preternatural alien biology (e.g. bioelectricity, acid spit, even simple super-strength) then convincing those people without such abilities to go unarmed is going to be that much more difficult even in common or neutral spaces.

Eh I mean, think about Humans.

There isn't much your average unarmed human can do against 2 average unarmed humans who decide they want to do violence to them.

In a society with no weapons, any given person is in potential mortal danger from any two people who decide they want to kill or otherwise harm them. And yet, plenty of people go around unarmed, and plenty of societies on modern earth don't allow people to carry weapons.

If you replace "Two people who want to mug you" with "A single superstrong alien that wants to mug you", it can come out about the same.

On the other hand, you could have a mixed-species society where the Aliens are no more dangerous than individual humans, and yet the humans insist on being able to go armed because they fear (With or without reason) attacks from the Aliens.


A lot of it depends on who is making the rules and for whom.

Imagine a society with Humans and Groxlar. Your average Groxlar is stronger than your average human, with sharp claws. Unarmed, a Groxlar will almost always beat a human, but a human with a gun will almost always beat an unarmed Groxlar.

The society could say "We allow weapons, because Groxlar are basically armed all the time anyway, and it wouldn't be fair to our human citizens to leave them defenseless".

It could say "We ban weapons, because, sure, a Groxlar could kill a Human, but so could two humans. There are three times as many Humans as Groxlar here, and three humans could kill a Groxlar unarmed. Giving everybody guns doesn't really make anybody safer"

It could say "We ban weapons because we don't expect people to be able to defend themselves anyway. If you're attacked, you're supposed to go get help from the proper authorities, who WILL be armed."

It could say "We ban weapons because we want to make sure that our police officers outgun anybody they might run into, and we care more about that than about making sure human citizens can protect themselves against hostile Groxlar"

It could also say "We allow certain weak weapons, which put a Human and a Groxlar on roughly even footing, but ban anything more powerful".

It could even say "We allow weapons because we believe everybody should be capable of defending themselves with deadly force, Regardless of the presence of Groxlar"

This sort of thing is a good way to show what a society cares about.

For example, imagine a sci-fi setting where Energy Shields completely blocked most projectile weapons, but couldn't stop energy weapons.

If you had a society where VIPs, Police, and the wealthy could all afford personal Energy Shields, and that society only banned Energy Weapons, that would tell you a good deal about the priorities of the people who made the laws (They don't care about projectile weapons, since their cops can outgun anybody shooting bullets, and all the people they care about protecting have energy shields).

Edit: I suppose what I'm saying is that if you want to have a society that allows people to carry weapons, having potentially dangerous aliens as citizens is a fine excuse, especially if the aliens in question are dangerous enough "Unarmed" to put them about on-par with millitary-grade weapons, but that doesn't have to be the case.

Public demand for weapons is going to be based on perceived threat more than anything. If people think that there are roving gangs of muggers everywhere, they're going to want weapons, even if each individual mugger is no more dangerous than they are.

Similarly, if people feel safe, they might be okay with a complete weapons ban, even if some of their neighbors are sentient firebreathing bears who all know kung-fu.

[Anonymouswizard]

Yeah, I feel like a lot of settings just avoid talking about that possibility or giving it some vague hand-wave. In the campaign I'm currently in, I'm secretly hoping for an enemy big enough to warrant trying that. We have some spare ships and from what the GM has said about how the FTL works, it should be possible. I suspect there's about a 75 percent chance he'll just come up with some reason in the moment why it won't work but until then I'll keep dreaming.

I'm not sure if someone's mentioned this already (I kinda skimmed parts of the thread), but on the topic of FLT communications I'd consider skipping it altogether. Being able to "outrun" information can be handy for adventurers (and their enemies) and having to use couriers to transport information opens up some possibly quests.

I did once write a piece of flash fiction where an experimental FTL drive was only good as a weapon (due to releasing lots of very hard radiation on deceleration). But yeah, most of the time is better to just ignore it. Have ships not travel through normal space when FTL and decelerate without side effects or use a wormhole network.

Although to be fair that universe also makes heavy use of zero point energy and dimensional travel. You see ZPE doesn't actually give a whole lot of energy, but nothing says you can't nick any from the universe next door...

On the topic of FTL Comms, I also like to do away with them. But in all honesty unless the PCs are very high profile or their enemies know exactly which system they're jumping to most of it gets lost in the deluge of data. If you want to make sure somebody in another system gets the message or don't want to use the public network you've still got a great reason to hire couriers, as does anybody who wants to move massive volumes of data (and now I'm picturing a rocket full of SSD arrays). There's also the question of FTL bandwidth and range, it might just be more practical to load anything nonurgent onto ships and fly them to other systems.

[Yora]

Weapon power cell detectors are one of my excuses to have swords.

[Pauly]

There are also a couple of sci-fi sub genres that are worth exploring.

1) Steam Punk. Space 1889 really has this genre covered and I can’t recommend the setting highly enough. The system is a little clunky, but you can port the setting over to your system of choice without too much trouble. You don’t get interstellar travel but you do get in solar system travel and Jules Verne/H G Wells style moonmen, martians and venusians.
This plays very similar to regular sci-fi, but with genuine old timey technology.

2) Multiverse. The party is sent to alternate timelines of Earth for [reasons]. The party then has to negotiate an alternate history world to obtain the maguffin. The world and technology are basically the same, but you can have very different systems of government and societies. You’d probably want to have a power restriction or something that prevents the players jumping too far to keep it grounded.

3) Time travel. The party are time cops or revisionists. Time cops are trying to keep history from changing, revisionists are trying to make the world better, according to their ideals, by changing history. You can make the time stream relatively stable i.e. future tech doesn’t work before it was invented, forcing the players to use historical tech or relatively flexible allowing future tech to work before it was invented and the players becoming the basis for gods, myths, magic and so on.

[Quertus]

And how does that matter for the game ? There probably is an AI or computer assist for that and the problem is just solved. There is no reason for the players to try figuring something out per hand what not even their characters actually need to do.


I mean i have had a coupble of space battles considering firing arc but only in 2D and it was fun enough. There are several systems that do this per default. But going actually to 3D at the table and consider firing arcs, acceleration and momentum and rotation around various axes is way to complicated for a game for very little benefit.

You're looking at it backwards: the physics (in most universes) *are* that complicated, the question is whether the game is going to *simplify* it for playability benefit, and to what degree you'll suffer fidelity loss.

And the AI? Unless your rules are good, The rules cannot calculate how many turns you need to spend lining up your shot while the target is moving and maneuvering.

Yes, I've played 2d war games with firing arcs, and it was fun. But the leak of fidelity to 3d space combat hurt… immersion? Or just some players' enjoyment?

And my stealth point is, know your players. Know how much "but why can't we go *over* the obstacle" level of dissonance between 2d and 3d representations will bother them. Know how much they'll care whether the fixed rail gun on the space slug gets to fire as often as the 360° federation phasers, the tracking missiles, and the agile fighter's laser machine guns.