What changes in Space Adventures?

[Quertus]

Note that with Quertus's post about Geoff Shootsalot (or whatever he called the character)

Perhaps the spoof would have been more obvious had I named him Lucas George?

I'd argue that the issue is that the player created a one trick pony. If your character is the best shot in the Imperial Fleet and nothing else then you're screwed as soon as shooting things isn't an option.

He's also got "whiny farmboy" and "has found religion". That's "best shot in the fleet" and "has found religion" over what most people want out of their "zero to hero" characters!

And yet he still only had something to do in most scenes in the source material because of GM pity plot / taking Leadership / authorial fiat.

Take Jayne from Firefly. He's the muscle of the team, and definitely shines in that role, but he's not completely useless otherwise.

I'm not so sure Jayne would fare much better in arbitrary scenarios. In fact, other than max ranks in "one-liners" (Jayne was who I was picturing when i talked about "the chain of command" earlier), Jayne actually seemed pretty useless when he wasn't shooting things, even in the single author fiction of Firefly.

(Although, given that I could have been picturing Babylon 5, or numerous scenes from Star Trek, or even Alien, the chain of command obviously is important in the space genre.)

It's why I really like Fate's skill columns/pyramid. To be the best shot in the Imperial Fleet you're going to have to take several other skills to support that, and at least a couple of those will be high enough to reliably fall back on. With a narrow default skill list characters don't become omnispecialists, but there's few situations where they'll have literally no options. If Charlie Gunz had to take Average Crafts, Fair Rapport, and Good Athletics to get that Great Shoot then even when they can't use their broadside cannon (which they're even better at due to their stunts) they still have skills they can use (and again, you'll have some proficiency in half the default list).

And which those skills will you use on the diplomatic mission to Babylon 5?

The related problem I have with the pyramid is, Princess Leia finds that she's useless aboard a ship. Say she actually has "shoot stuff" at level 1. To get it to level 2, she needs to widen her base, and take "craft: underwater basket weaving" and "kissing" at level 1. Then, to get it to level 3, she has to take "it's a trap" (a popular option) at level 1, to support kissing a wookie to get kissing to level 2 to support having "shoot stuff" at level 3.

Now, try explaining to your non-gamer friends why it's necessary to kiss wookies in order to get better at shooting things, and you'll understand my beef with the pyramid.

Similarly, complex skill checks are not really all that different than rolling to hit, and players love doing that all the time.

Players for whom that is true are easy to please. Players who feel that playing the game means making meaningful decisions, and who feel that their choice of target / attack type / etc constitutes meaningful decisions, OTOH, might not be satisfied with just "rolling dice".

[NichG]

This thing about skills/character abilities is part of why I think its important for each player to have an independently autonomous 'token' in every situation. Even if you are terrible at combat, if you have a token in a fight you still need to think about 'how do I keep safe when I have no offenses/defenses? where should I stand? etc'. Those are impacted by character abilities, but they're not a question of character abilities - if you have no abilities, you still need to care about those things, think through them, make decisions, etc. In a large team/crew situation, it can be too easy to justify 'we should only let the specialists do each of the things'. If everyone has their own token and you're flying your own small craft and there's an massive solar flare incoming and you've got 9 minutes to get to shelter or be fried by the radiation, sure your buddy might be a better pilot but you're going to have to figure out if making it to the nearby abandoned mining station, hiding in the shadow of an asteroid, or jerry-rigging the power system to redirect life support to shields and hoping you can survive the hypothermia is a better option for you.

Or e.g. for character-level, even if you have a bad Diplomacy check, it still usually ends better if you speak for yourself on your dates than asking the party face to be Cyrano for you.

And in the end that helps expose the parts of the game that are about players making decisions, rather than about numbers on sheets making decisions.

Of course even if you have such a token, it can still be boring if you have absolutely nothing to do and no decisions to make.

[noob]

The related problem I have with the pyramid is, Princess Leia finds that she's useless aboard a ship. Say she actually has "shoot stuff" at level 1. To get it to level 2, she needs to widen her base, and take "craft: underwater basket weaving" and "kissing" at level 1. Then, to get it to level 3, she has to take "it's a trap" (a popular option) at level 1, to support kissing a wookie to get kissing to level 2 to support having "shoot stuff" at level 3.

Now, try explaining to your non-gamer friends why it's necessary to kiss wookies in order to get better at shooting things, and you'll understand my beef with the pyramid.

That looks like a very interesting concept: why not make a rpg where each time you start a new adventure you need to roll dice on a table to know the dependencies on the skill pyramids.
Like this time we rolled so that art of the blade required bread baker for reaching rank 2 but maybe next time it would require Noble speech (speaking in a way to look noble) or even Dancing.
So the pyramids would look random because they would actually be random.

[Anonymouswizard]

Perhaps the spoof would have been more obvious had I named him Lucas George?

Oh, I got the reference. It just wasn't funny enough for me to go back and check however it was spelt.

He's also got "whiny farmboy" and "has found religion". That's "best shot in the fleet" and "has found religion" over what most people want out of their "zero to hero" characters!

And yet he still only had something to do in most scenes in the source material because of GM pity plot / taking Leadership / authorial fiat.

Cool character traits, I wish more PCs would be religious. But they're separate to his skillset.

But focusing on Luke for a bit, his skill set isn't just his great shooting skill. He's also pretty athletic, s good pilot, and has basics technical and survival skills (although not to the point where they'd ever be the focus of a scene).

I'm not so sure Jayne would fare much better in arbitrary scenarios. In fact, other than max ranks in "one-liners" (Jayne was who I was picturing when i talked about "the chain of command" earlier), Jayne actually seemed pretty useless when he wasn't shooting things, even in the single author fiction of Firefly.

(Although, given that I could have been picturing Babylon 5, or numerous scenes from Star Trek, or even Alien, the chain of command obviously is important in the space genre.)

While he's not a great fit for those specific situations, the point was that he had a legitimately broad skill set, and it's applicable to the series/campaign premise.

And which those skills will you use on the diplomatic mission to Babylon 5?

Rapport, and possibly Crafts. And that's just one column, he could have Provoke in another one!

The related problem I have with the pyramid is, Princess Leia finds that she's useless aboard a ship. Say she actually has "shoot stuff" at level 1. To get it to level 2, she needs to widen her base, and take "craft: underwater basket weaving" and "kissing" at level 1. Then, to get it to level 3, she has to take "it's a trap" (a popular option) at level 1, to support kissing a wookie to get kissing to level 2 to support having "shoot stuff" at level 3.

Now, try explaining to your non-gamer friends why it's necessary to kiss wookies in order to get better at shooting things, and you'll understand my beef with the pyramid.

I mean, it's down to personal taste.

Also, for the record, it would be asking the lines of 'I know it's not realistic, but it's too encourage having broader skill sets. It makes the game better by allowing you to contribute more, instead of being left out because you brought a Space Marine Devestator to the Babylon 5 diplomatic mission.'

[Pauly]

I feel this is turning into moving goal posts.

Is the argument now that no campaign should have combat in space ever, unless everyone is playing a starfighter pilot?

No.

The issue is that if you have a campaign centered around [X] and if a player creates a character that cannot do [X] that creates issues. It’s a character creation problem, not a genre problem.

If you have a campaign about thieves in a thieve guild and a player turns up with a meathead fighter with minimized Dex, Int and Cha then that character will have a lot of downtime not contributing to the campaign.
If you have a campaign about exploring the wilderness and fighting wild beasts and a player creates a character that’s an inner city pickpocket then that character will have a lot of downtime not contributing to the campaign.
If you have a campaign which strongly features space combat and a player creates a character that doesn’t contribute to space combat then that character will have a lot of downtime not contributing to the campaign.

Not every sci-fi campaign needs to be centered on space combat. In some campaigns space combat never happens, others it never happens on screen and in others it is a rare event. In those type of campaign it is perfectly valid to have party members who contribute minimally if at all in space combat because it is not expected of them.

If you do have a campaign that heavily features space combat and a player creates a character that doesn’t contribute then the player shouldn’t complain that their character has nothing to do in space combat.
The side issue is whether the game system gives sufficient scope for every player to contribute. Clearly sone systems do it better than others. If a game system is chosen that is poor at providing players sufficient things to do in space combat, then the problem is choosing the wrong game system for that type of campaign.

[Mechalich]

If you do have a campaign that heavily features space combat and a player creates a character that doesn’t contribute then the player shouldn’t complain that their character has nothing to do in space combat.
The side issue is whether the game system gives sufficient scope for every player to contribute. Clearly sone systems do it better than others. If a game system is chosen that is poor at providing players sufficient things to do in space combat, then the problem is choosing the wrong game system for that type of campaign.

One reason the space combat issue comes up so often is that the skills to contribute in space combat tend to be highly specialized. This is true even in 'retro-future' setups where the combat is based on naval warfare from the past.

Naval warfare is a specialized field. 'Sailor' is one of the oldest skilled positions on Earth, and a seaman who knows how to fight is specialized even beyond that. Even as early as the Napoleanic Wars naval crew, and especially officers, were hyper-specialists who often trained their entire lives to become masters of their craft, and they were extremely exclusionary with regard to outside interference out of a long-established recognition that it tended to have catastrophic consequences. As a result the kind of generalist character who shows up as an 'adventurer' in most RPG contexts is almost never the sort of specialist who serves as warship crew.

This means with regard to space combat either all your characters have to be naval crew who have additional skills they use to go on adventures - this is the model used by the X-wing series of Star Wars novels, where every character could be described as 'X-Wing Pilot +' and in game terms were basically all gestalt characters - or you can have adventurers who aren't naval crew. The latter model is probably more common, especially as adventurer characters are often 'marines' - combat capable personnel who are aboard a ship and will defend that ship but who don't fight the ship. Commander Shepard, from Mass Effect, is a marine, and your party is essentially the universes most eclectic marine platoon, and NPCs - notably Joker - fight the Normandy when it comes under attack.

Either approach is viable, however, the secondary approach provides more flexibility in terms of rotating the party roster since if characters aren't required to be able to fight a ship in some fashion at need then you can recruit people from primitive backwater planets or religious technophobes or bizarre aliens who don't think in base 10 or whatever. Generally I think this works better unless space combat is something that players deeply want to happen and find exciting, and having the ship's fighting crew separate from the PCs also offers the GM a stable of NPCs to work with for interaction and storytelling.

[Yora]

The issue is that if you have a campaign centered around [X] and if a player creates a character that cannot do [X] that creates issues. It’s a character creation problem, not a genre problem.

Oh, sure. But that makes space battles no different from gunfights. If you have a campaign setup in which many PCs can't shot guns in a space battle, then you have just as many PCs who can't shot guns in a gunfight.
Should RPGs therefore have no combat? Is it wrong for RPGs to have combat?

[SimonMoon6]

The issue is that if you have a campaign centered around [X] and if a player creates a character that cannot do [X] that creates issues. It’s a character creation problem, not a genre problem.

Or it's a campaign creation problem.

[Pauly]

Oh, sure. But that makes space battles no different from gunfights. If you have a campaign setup in which many PCs can't shot guns in a space battle, then you have just as many PCs who can't shot guns in a gunfight.
Should RPGs therefore have no combat? Is it wrong for RPGs to have combat?

No space combat doesn’t mean no combat. There are plenty of sci-fi properties where inter-ship combat either doesn’t occur or doesn’t occur on-screen. Mass Effect, HALO, Warhammer 40k, and Dune are examples of sci-fi properties where inter-ship combat happens off-screen from the character’s perspective. Dr Who, Alien/Aliens and Firefly are examples where the character’s ship does not engage in inter-ship combat even if inter-ship combat does occur within their universes.

Space combat is one element of sci-fi RPGs. It’s a feature many players want. How prominently it features in a given campaign will vary. The point I’m trying to make is that if space combat is going to be an integral part of the campaign the players should create characters that reflect that.

[Anonymouswizard]

No space combat doesn’t mean no combat. There are plenty of sci-fi properties where inter-ship combat either doesn’t occur or doesn’t occur on-screen. Mass Effect, HALO, Warhammer 40k, and Dune are examples of sci-fi properties where inter-ship combat happens off-screen from the character’s perspective. Dr Who, Alien/Aliens and Firefly are examples where the character’s ship does not engage in inter-ship combat even if inter-ship combat does occur within their universes.

Space combat is one element of sci-fi RPGs. It’s a feature many players want. How prominently it features in a given campaign will vary. The point I’m trying to make is that if space combat is going to be an integral part of the campaign the players should create characters that reflect that.

I'd put an asterisk against 40k (space combat is very important but if you're involved in it it's going to be the entire game batting some Space Marine campaigns) and Doctor Who (the TARDIS engages in space combat on Engines of War, but that's a Way Doctor story). But you are right on the broad idea: not even a space opera game strictly needs space combat rules. The Doctor Who RPG Bartlett include vehicle creation rules in its core book (but they are in the UNIT book).

[Yora]

I want to say I am amazed this thread has gotten to six pages. I didn't even expect one when I started it.

Even though we've been talking about whether there should be space combat since page 1.

[Anonymouswizard]

I want to say I am amazed this thread has gotten to six pages. I didn't even expect one when I started it.

Even though we've been talking about whether there should be space combat since page 1.

At least it's actually on topic, it's a pretty major chance in Space Adventure. But not a strictly necessary change.

[Pauly]

and Doctor Who (the TARDIS engages in space combat on Engines of War, but that's a Way Doctor story). But you are right on the broad idea: not even a space opera game strictly needs space combat rules. The Doctor Who RPG Bartlett include vehicle creation rules in its core book (but they are in the UNIT book).

For me Dr Who goes William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, John Pertwee, then some guy in a scarf and after that a bunch of randos. I hear they were planning on doing a remake a few years back but never followed up on it.
Daleks do not climb stairs and never will.

[noob]

For me Dr Who goes William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, John Pertwee, then some guy in a scarf and after that a bunch of randos. I hear they were planning on doing a remake a few years back but never followed up on it.
Daleks do not climb stairs and never will.

Yes instead they engage hovering mode then hover up very very slowly.

[Anonymouswizard]

For me Dr Who goes William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, John Pertwee, then some guy in a scarf and after that a bunch of randos. I hear they were planning on doing a remake a few years back but never followed up on it.
Daleks do not climb stairs and never will.

Real Daleks just level the building.

Honestly, most of the revival it's even worse than Colin Baker's TV run.

[Telok]

Real Daleks just level the building.

Honestly, most of the revival it's even worse than Colin Baker's TV run.

Harsh.

On topic: A lot of the answer to "what changes" depends a lot on system & adventure/setting design. You could run the original 'Expedition to the Barrier Peaks'* in space by simply saying an automated system re-launches the ship once the PCs enter. You can run do "wild west/spaghetti western" in Traveller by crashing on an appropriate planet after an EMP incident frags all your electronics and explodes all batteries & fuel cells. Any wh40k game can just be a series of basic dungeon crawls with guns if you pick the right sets of space hulks, hive world sewers, and abandoned ruins.

Compared to those a random 'pink mohawk' style ShadowRun mission on an orbital habitat can look like a super high-tech hard sci-fi space adventure.

* For those not old school: its an original AD&D module were the PCs explore a crashed & malfunctioning spaceship.

[Yora]

I would like to talk about setting up adventures and campaigns. And I don't really have any insights to share at this point, and don't underatand enough to articulate a specific question.

But when I had decided on the basic parameters for a setting for a Stars Without Number campaign and some general thematic ideas and thought about how to proceed with that, simply making it an open world sandbox in which the players are dropped in to explore as they want and get involved with whatever catches their interest doesn't seem very practical.
I mean you could do a campaign where you make things up as you go, but for it to be comprehensible to players, it would need to be kept very generic, just so that the unspoken preconceptions the players have are pretty much true. I don't see that as much of a problem with fantasy campaigns, but I think sci-fi setting are much more specific in their details. As I believe we discussed earlier. In a fantasy campaign, you encounter dwarves or orcs, or even just something that seems like it's basically an orc, and you say "cool, I know what this is and what to expect of if". With space aliens, you have much more expectation that this will be something you have not seen before, or at least something that is a fresh new take on something relatively similar. And of course the whole thing happens again with technology. In fantasy, the only important question is usually "gunpowder, yes or no?" In sci-fi, it could be anything before you see it established in play. Thankfully, this effect is much reduced in space opera compared to hard sci-fi, but it's still significant. And of course the whole issue that they can land on every spot on a planet they want, and don't have to proceed from one area to the next in a predictable path.

Because player's are much less well equipped to find their way through an unknown world with setting expectations, I think they will have to be able to understand what's going on through narrative patterns. Even if they don't fully understand what all the things around them are and what they do, understanding the kind of dramatic situation they are in should help a great deal with helping players to make plans and decisions that exercise agency. If the setting takes time to know, being able to go with the flow of events should help making the game fun to play.

This is a very long winded way to say that I think in a space opera, adventure type game, you need to have a story with familiar patterns. Thing is, I think writing a full script for what scenes the players will be going through is a terrible misuse of the RPG medium. Players don't get inspired to play a campaign because they want to experience the story the GM wrote. The wonderful promise of RPGs is that the players can influence a story with their actions.
I very strongly believe that a GM should prepare encounters, but not write scenes. An adventure that says "First the PCs will be doing this, then they will be doing that, and then they will go there to to that" is a failure.

What can a GM do to let players free roam when a conventional sandbox is impractical? Not a space travel campaign specific question, but one that I think becomes necessary when approaching such a campaign.

[NichG]

I would like to talk about setting up adventures and campaigns. And I don't really have any insights to share at this point, and don't underatand enough to articulate a specific question.

But when I had decided on the basic parameters for a setting for a Stars Without Number campaign and some general thematic ideas and thought about how to proceed with that, simply making it an open world sandbox in which the players are dropped in to explore as they want and get involved with whatever catches their interest doesn't seem very practical.
I mean you could do a campaign where you make things up as you go, but for it to be comprehensible to players, it would need to be kept very generic, just so that the unspoken preconceptions the players have are pretty much true. I don't see that as much of a problem with fantasy campaigns, but I think sci-fi setting are much more specific in their details. As I believe we discussed earlier. In a fantasy campaign, you encounter dwarves or orcs, or even just something that seems like it's basically an orc, and you say "cool, I know what this is and what to expect of if". With space aliens, you have much more expectation that this will be something you have not seen before, or at least something that is a fresh new take on something relatively similar. And of course the whole thing happens again with technology. In fantasy, the only important question is usually "gunpowder, yes or no?" In sci-fi, it could be anything before you see it established in play. Thankfully, this effect is much reduced in space opera compared to hard sci-fi, but it's still significant. And of course the whole issue that they can land on every spot on a planet they want, and don't have to proceed from one area to the next in a predictable path.

Because player's are much less well equipped to find their way through an unknown world with setting expectations, I think they will have to be able to understand what's going on through narrative patterns. Even if they don't fully understand what all the things around them are and what they do, understanding the kind of dramatic situation they are in should help a great deal with helping players to make plans and decisions that exercise agency. If the setting takes time to know, being able to go with the flow of events should help making the game fun to play.

This is a very long winded way to say that I think in a space opera, adventure type game, you need to have a story with familiar patterns. Thing is, I think writing a full script for what scenes the players will be going through is a terrible misuse of the RPG medium. Players don't get inspired to play a campaign because they want to experience the story the GM wrote. The wonderful promise of RPGs is that the players can influence a story with their actions.
I very strongly believe that a GM should prepare encounters, but not write scenes. An adventure that says "First the PCs will be doing this, then they will be doing that, and then they will go there to to that" is a failure.

What can a GM do to let players free roam when a conventional sandbox is impractical? Not a space travel campaign specific question, but one that I think becomes necessary when approaching such a campaign.

There are a number of space roguelikes (FTL, Shortest Path To Earth, Everspace, ...) as well as space fiction that use a particular pattern - there's an overall urgency towards going 'forward' in some direction (a fleet is chasing you, you're depleting the exotic resources of the sector and there are fuel costs, you know the direction of home but it will take you 10 years, etc) which takes care of the question 'do we move on?' such that the answer is always basically 'yes', but there's always a perpendicular direction that you can (and indeed must) explore in order to find good/safe paths, get the resources you need, etc. It does rely on establishing the understanding that if you just rush straight towards your path, you won't have the resources to make it to your destination - so some degree of exploration perpendicular to your path is mandatory and isn't just a luxury.

In a campaign I might do it so that there's a sort of collective mothership which will spend two weeks or a month or whatever in each system/sector/whatever before engaging the high-cost warp and taking everyone to the next point, and the passengers are all independent ship operators or crews of smaller craft who are jointly relying on the mothership for large-scale transport. There could be a voting system for 'what is the next warp destination?' or just based on scouting and surveying that happens during that month (so the PCs can influence the next destination based on what they report), but staying still isn't a choice. And if the players want to leave the mothership and settle down, that in some sense means they've figured out enough about the setting to know what's going on and what they want.

[Telok]

What can a GM do to let players free roam when a conventional sandbox is impractical? Not a space travel campaign specific question, but one that I think becomes necessary when approaching such a campaign.

I just run a sandbox. The bugfest... (weird typo) The biggest difference, to me, is that the players do better the more they interact with the setting and non-combat parts of the game.

My main group has two semi-regulars who can coast along in d&d style stuff and tend to tune out during everything non-combat. Which works OK for d&d style dungeon crawl games with "level appropriate" fights. They played world of warcraft and watched the recent tolken book films, enough to have a half-decent grasp on "generic fantasy" tropes. But in sci-fi, supers, modern, horror, etc., type games they keep having problems. Since they never really engage the settings and zone out during "talky bits" stuff keeps popping up that they just don't understand.

Most d&d style generic fantasy doesn't really do much with consequences of the PCs action because there usually isn't any real law enforcement or authority figures, and the PCs can always just move to the next town/country to escape anything. (Again, most d&d style generic fantasy runs that way, especially if you use any published adventures. Not everybody's homemade campaigns.) What those players have problems with in every other genera & system seems to be the consequences of modern/future communication, media, law enforcement, and especially anything without an expectation of "balanced" or "level appropriate" combats.

Now, those guys did fine in things like Starfinder adventure paths which are just the usual generic fantasy adventure with some technobabble fluff on top and heavy into the "level appropriate" style (to the point that it extends into the equipment, vehicle, & space rules). But as soon they move beyond being the strongest people around and facing simple "beat everything to death" fights designed to fit some "x per day of y danger amount" they start failing against simple things like "10 million horde of clockwork horrors that can burrow through metal".

[Pauly]

I would like to talk about setting up adventures and campaigns. And I don't really have any insights to share at this point, and don't underatand enough to articulate a specific question.

[snip]

What can a GM do to let players free roam when a conventional sandbox is impractical? Not a space travel campaign specific question, but one that I think becomes necessary when approaching such a campaign.

I think what you say about a conventional sandbox is true. In a space opera the players just have too much agency and go to too many places for a GTA/Skyrim style sandbox to work.

Some suggestions.
1) A power forcing the players to move to a goal as discussed above.
2) Space is big but the places the players have energy enough to get to is small. The players have a choice of 3 to 5 places/missions next.
3) Space is small. The game setting takes place in one solar system. Many of the outer reaches are outposts with only 2 or 3 fully inhabited planets.
4) The players belong to a guild that they choose missions from. Bounty Hunter. Xeno Hunter (go to new and interesting places and kill the locals for trophies). Explorer (can be exploring new alien worlds or re-establishing trade routes in a fallen Empire). The rewards handed out by the guild are their source of compensation. This works best in a high cost of maintenance game world which forces the players to keep taking missions just to keep the lights on.
5) Privateers/Paramiltaries. There’s a war. The players are set loose on the enemy, but there is limited military oversight. There is no pay so the players rely on loot for their compensation.
6) Chase the Maguffin. The Maguffin can be moving by itself or be carried by others. The players have to be invested enough to keep chasing it.
7) Quest to find the Maguffin. The Maguffin is hidden and the party has to find clues as to where it is. You need some type of ticking timebomb to keep the players on the job.
8) Paranoia rules. Due to space plague/fears of war/fears of organized crime and piracy/general xenophobia getting into new planets takes a long time with players needing to prove their bona fides every time they enter a system. The time and money cost prevents players from skipping from world to world to world on a whim.

[Psyren]

Players for whom that is true are easy to please. Players who feel that playing the game means making meaningful decisions, and who feel that their choice of target / attack type / etc constitutes meaningful decisions, OTOH, might not be satisfied with just "rolling dice".

But that's my point - making "meaningful decisions" part of the encounter is the GM's job. If there aren't any, that's the GM's fault, not the players'. And "choice of target / attack type / etc" doesn't require guns either.

[Quertus]

But that's my point - making "meaningful decisions" part of the encounter is the GM's job. If there aren't any, that's the GM's fault, not the players'. And "choice of target / attack type / etc" doesn't require guns either.

Say you're running an engineer.

One mission, you're set to repair anything that gets damaged, but the pilot makes all his "dodge" rolls, and so you've got nothing to do.

The next mission, the hyperdrive gets hit with a "will explode in 10 minutes" crit. You've got rolls to make, but no meaningful decisions.

Then, after that mission, there's an important question of whether to fix shields or weapons first, but the captain made that decision.

I'm just not seeing most roles actually getting to make meaningful decisions, outside the worst kind of contrived scenarios.

I don't see that as much of a problem with fantasy campaigns, but I think sci-fi setting are much more specific in their details. As I believe we discussed earlier. In a fantasy campaign, you encounter dwarves or orcs, or even just something that seems like it's basically an orc, and you say "cool, I know what this is and what to expect of if". With space aliens, you have much more expectation that this will be something you have not seen before, or at least something that is a fresh new take on something relatively similar. And of course the whole thing happens again with technology. In fantasy, the only important question is usually "gunpowder, yes or no?" In sci-fi, it could be anything before you see it established in play. Thankfully, this effect is much reduced in space opera compared to hard sci-fi, but it's still significant. And of course the whole issue that they can land on every spot on a planet they want, and don't have to proceed from one area to the next in a predictable path.

Because player's are much less well equipped to find their way through an unknown world with setting expectations, I think they will have to be able to understand what's going on through narrative patterns.

…what?

I very much disagree that Fantasy has inherently comprehensible, predictable beings, especially compared to Space Opera.

Even looking through 9 Star Wars movies, you've got… what… one race that maybe resists Force manipulation, maybe 2 races that can fly, and a bunch of brutes?

Compare that to one D&D movie (ugh) that I thankfully haven't seen in… has it been decades?… where I can still remember 2 flying races, 1 fire breathing race, and who knows what their "Beholder" could do?

Or, for a better D&D movie (that I've also seen this decade), "The Gamers: Dorkness Rising" had… various "no biology" undead, "can only be trapped in its own element", charm / mind control, wish granting, fire spewing (I think - that's how the demon attacked, right?), and basic luminance, at least.

Or… "urban fantasy"(?) Harry Potter (+ Fantastic Beasts makes 9 movies now, right? That matches Star Wars.). You've got… golly… I'm sure I'll miss lots… 5+ fliers, a telepathic shapeshifter, a fire breather, a soul / XP / "happy thoughts" sucker, unknown amounts of indestructible (seriously, I can just picture young Voldy in the Tri-Wizard tournament shooting "Avada" at everything), water breathers, "invisible to those who haven't suffered loss", "swarms around the heads of those who are confused", "bigger on the inside" storage, teleportation, invisibility, various aptitude with magic, poison x3+, death gaze, healing tears, self resurrection… and even I can remember more, but I'll stop there, because that's more than enough.

So… I'm not seeing where the basic premise holds true, that Fantasy is inherently less fantastical and more predictable than Space.

I also don't see how "here's the map of Faerun - where do you go?" is any less daunting than, "here's the space map - where do you go?"

There's just… Hmmm… less pre-built for you in the void of space?

[BRC]

Say you're running an engineer.

One mission, you're set to repair anything that gets damaged, but the pilot makes all his "dodge" rolls, and so you've got nothing to do.

The next mission, the hyperdrive gets hit with a "will explode in 10 minutes" crit. You've got rolls to make, but no meaningful decisions.

Then, after that mission, there's an important question of whether to fix shields or weapons first, but the captain made that decision.

I'm just not seeing most roles actually getting to make meaningful decisions, outside the worst kind of contrived scenarios.

The way to cheat around this is to include some sort of meta-resource, which can turn the act of "Roll to succeed" into meaningful decisions (At least from the player perspective).

Yes, fix the hyperdrive, but do you burn the meta resource to succeed, or do you just try it again next round and save your resource for later.

[NichG]

…what?

I very much disagree that Fantasy has inherently comprehensible, predictable beings, especially compared to Space Opera.

Maybe going outside of space opera its a bit more balanced. From various harder sci-fi novels I can recall things like: blobs which are living neural networks which can subdivide and merge their minds freely and exchange mathematical theorems via chemical communication, eyestalks that move along vast living ice carpets which harvest charged particles from the surface of an airless moon to feed the eyestalk, intelligent low-temperature insect-plants which concentrate radioactive materials and poop them out to construct a fission bomb underneath their own colony to spread spores from planet to planet, lifeforms engineered to live in the superfluid medium of a neutron star which use magnetic vortex cores like building materials, etc. Star Trek and Dr Who had their share of humans in rubber suits, as well as the weirder stuff like interdimensional warp fungus, living nebulae, planets which borrowed sentience from the thoughts of visitors (if I'm remembering that really weird Casino Royale episode), parasites that lived inside the transporter beam, living shadows, memetic contagions, etc.

[Pauly]

Say you're running an engineer.

One mission, you're set to repair anything that gets damaged, but the pilot makes all his "dodge" rolls, and so you've got nothing to do.

The next mission, the hyperdrive gets hit with a "will explode in 10 minutes" crit. You've got rolls to make, but no meaningful decisions.

Then, after that mission, there's an important question of whether to fix shields or weapons first, but the captain made that decision.

I'm just not seeing most roles actually getting to make meaningful decisions, outside the worst kind of contrived scenarios.

?

For the combat role of the engineer it depends on what the system allows the engineer to do.
For example
Energy allocation. Shields, guns, engined, life support, med bay, transporters, comms, ECM all require power. You don’t have enough energy to piwer all of them at 100%. The captain may say he wants full power to guns then the engineers has to juggle where that energy comes from.
Repairs. Damage control (i.e. fighting fires, sealing holes basically stopping the bleeding) or jury rigging a critical system? In damage control which damage do you prioritize.
Boarding actions: Sealing doors, blowing airlocks, turning off life support, venting waste gases into enemy occupied rooms.
Engine management. Do you use boost for extra power at a cost of fuel, being easier to target risk of engine damage? Do you run cool for stealthiness or fuel conservation at the cost of having less energy this turn?
Out of these possible actions the engineer may be only able to do 1 or 2 actions.

There are systems that allow for this type player decision making. Some have it explicitly written into the rules. Others are a more generalized the DM responding to a player’s description of their action.

However if the system is a D&D type make a skill role system as you described in your example then there aren’t many choices for the engineer to make.

Engineers have plenty to do. Whether the system recognizes that and gives the engineer (or whatever role you choose) player sufficient meaningful choices is a different question.

[Psyren]

Say you're running an engineer.

Okay.

Spoiler: Scenarios

Show

One mission, you're set to repair anything that gets damaged, but the pilot makes all his "dodge" rolls, and so you've got nothing to do.

He only made all of those "dodge" rolls because you diverted power to the engines, which you chose to do instead of leaving it in the guns for additional damage because you knew in this particular fight/phase that not getting hit was more important. Or, because you overclocked the sensors at the science officer's urging, the pilot knew where to dodge to in order to put {insert phenomenon here} between you and the enemy's fire.

The next mission, the hyperdrive gets hit with a "will explode in 10 minutes" crit. You've got rolls to make, but no meaningful decisions.

Sure you do. Stopping it from exploding is the obvious one, but maybe using that critical drive core to turn your ship into the only bomb that can take out the Big Bad's dreadnought while everyone hits the escape pods is the better approach. Or maybe if you can immobilize that enemy ship, jettisoning the hyperdrive entirely (instead of trying to fix it) and escaping at sublight speeds could actually be easier. Or maybe your skills can turn that 10 minutes into 20 so rescue has time to arrive.

Then, after that mission, there's an important question of whether to fix shields or weapons first, but the captain made that decision.

A good captain would get the engineer's opinion on a question like that. Moreover, whichever one got fixed first, if you had to hurry and take off before fixing the other, the engineer would be pretty key at that point.

I'm just not seeing most roles actually getting to make meaningful decisions, outside the worst kind of contrived scenarios.

If any kind of encounter design is "contrived" to you, then nothing in any game will be interesting, no.

[Telok]

I very much disagree that Fantasy has inherently comprehensible, predictable beings, especially compared to Space Opera.

The thing I think is that "fantasy" overall & in general is more generic than sci-fi. I think that the venn diagram of "gamers" has lots of overlap with "fantasy" and much much less with any of "space", "science", and "sci-fi'.

While "like medeval plus magic and dragons" is variable, there's more consistency in assumptions just because there's more media thats medeval/faux-medieval. The "sci-fi" concept tends to get stuffed with space fantasy (Star Wars, Dune), space opera (Star Trek, Honor-verse), cyberpunk-ish (Blade Runner), computer fake-out (Matrix, Tron), and a bunch of other stuff.

This sort of double applies to many gamers who haven't really played much beyond D&D+knockoffs. Just the difference in setting & assumptions between a "reaction drives & hibernation" setting (Alien, Avatar) and the Star Foo "hyperspace cut-scene & hop a bus to the next planet" creates massive gameplay differences that may be cometely alien to people used to straight dungeon crawls. I've had players absolutely stunned by the audacity of a suspected smuggler to call the cops when they started murderizing his ship's crew at space-dock. In D&D-land the PCs normally so massively overshadow normal guards and communication/response time is so long that they expect to get away with that sort of stuff. Just the act of a non-violent criminal using a phone and getting a response within five minutes was incomprehensible until it happened to them.

[Satinavian]

I'm just not seeing most roles actually getting to make meaningful decisions, outside the worst kind of contrived scenarios.

If you really want a space game, design ship posts in a way that they all have meaningful decisions to make. It is not actually difficult but it does mean to do more than D&D style skills and "wing it when it comes up".

You could make the captain direct the general flow of the battle, a gunner choosing targets an weapon modes, a sensor guy deciding which enemy stats to reveal or give target bonuses to the gunner but not both, a pilot plotting the actual course and choose from various flight maneuvers, some guy distributing energy between subsystems, someone doing damage control in the ship, directing repairs, prioritizing and making decisions of shutting down damaged stuff or keeping ot running at the risk of it blowing up. Before damage occurs, this person could also run countermeasurs and decide which ones to turn on. Maybe you also have small fighter crafts with their own pilots. The only ones on standby by default are marines and medical personal.

[Quertus]

Hmmm… rather than directly address people's comments, let me hit this from another direction.

A D&D party doesn't need to be cookie cutter - most any party can have fun trying to find inventive ways to handle problems.

But - and maybe it's my inexperience - I don't see valid characters likely having fun on arbitrary space missions. And certainly "random valid characters" struggle to run a ship by themselves.

Suppose we make a system. And the players make Han, chewy, Luke, sis, and R2. On the falcon.

Or Picard, #2, data, Diana, and visor man on the enterprise.

Or Mal, Jayne, Zoe, Simon, and… Kaylee on Serenity.

And they each encounter…

Babylon 4.

General Roth'h'ar Sarris.

Reavers.

A rescue mission inside an asteroid field.

Far Point station.

Earth, circa… WW2.

The battle over Endor.

Earth, during "close encounters of the third kind".

The Andromeda.

I look at this, and see Jayne twiddling his thumbs while spouting awesome lines whenever they're not a fight (you know, just like he did in the series), Simon being completely useless (same)… and, well, just… most of the characters not having a good time on most of the missions. I think most of the Enterprise crew could have fun on most of those missions, actually, but modifying the missions enough that everyone has fun on every mission seems like it'd be not just too contrived for my taste, but for most people's taste, as well.

I mean, I'd love to see the serenity crew encounter Hugh, but they're really not spec'd for engaging that scenario meaningfully.

Do my concerns make sense? Or am I over-thinking it?

My *actual* most experience in space (that I remember so far (darn senility)) was with a primitive screwhead telepath, who (Illithid Savant style) quickly learned to see the world as they did (-1 crew), and began running the transporters (and comms) (-2 crew). I was Control, and it fit the character perfectly. Useless in most fights (until he started getting creative with the transporter), but good at coordinating and logistics.

I'd enjoy playing him in most of those scenarios, but… I'm not sure anyone else would.

Or maybe I'm just being silly. Maybe the focus on balance on the Playground has blinded me to the truth, that in space, as anywhere else, the key is to have a character that you enjoy, regardless of how big their role is.

[Satinavian]

A D&D party doesn't need to be cookie cutter - most any party can have fun trying to find inventive ways to handle problems.

D&D tried to go back to being a tactical wargame and making every character a combattant (which screwed over the fighter) to solve the problem. If i would actually pose that varied fantasy problem to a D&D group, i would get the very same problems as many D&D characters can't do that many things, if fighting is not relevant.

But more importantly, "science fiction" or "space adventure" is way too broad to automatically make fitting characters. I mean, if you say "Star Trek campaign inspired by TNG", you will likely get an assortment of characters that fit well enough. Did that twice already, worked.

Or maybe I'm just being silly. Maybe the focus on balance on the Playground has blinded me to the truth, that in space, as anywhere else, the key is to have a character that you enjoy, regardless of how big their role is.

There is also that. I mean, you regularly express how much you dislike Shadowrun's way of doing things, having minigames not engaging everyone. But there are more than enough players who actually like Shadowrun and playing this way, so maybe the problem is not actually that huge.