Why not more Sci-Fi?

[RN3G8 4E]

Hello everyone, this is my first post on The Forge!  I discovered this place just today and I'm pretty excited about this community.  I have a question:

I don't see many sci-fi RPGs out there and I'm wondering why.  Most games seem to be fantasy or try to include it. Warhammer seems to be fantasy with a sci-fi twist, but it still feels like knights and armies battling monsters.  Even Shadowrun and RIFTS incorporate fantasy & magic.  But maybe I haven't been exposed to as many RPGs as some of you on here.

So what gives?  I would think it would be more 50/50- sci-fi/fantasy.  Or 33/33/33- sci-fi/fantasy/both.  Any ideas? Rebuttals? Smacks to the head?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Jareth,

Welcome! We like new people 'round here.

In this very forum, the term "science fiction" has received its usual beating. Let's stay away from that one, everybody, and turn merely to the basic question at hand.

Startin' off, is the perception accurate? Is role-playing deficient in SF after all? To start to answer that ...

1) Perhaps SF is right on target in terms of its numbers and what we have is a bloat of fantasy and horror. I'm not sure how this could be assessed; let's just recognize that the issue may be a non-issue.

2) Whadda we got, anyway?

- SF in the Burroughs, Doc Smith, and Asimov sense is well-represented; Traveller's probably the granddaddy and hordes of imitators are out there.

- SF in the freaky loopy surrealistic sense is sort of represented; I'm not sure how many people would call Over the Edge SF, although Delta Green probably qualifies (and X-Files too, if you ask me anyway). UnderWorld and several others provides that fantasy-modern combo that bookstores, anyway, call SF.

- SF in the outright satiric or political sense is occasionally represented; Underground made an attempt in that direction.

- SF in the licensing sense is obviously well-represented, via Star Wars, Star Trek, Babylon 5, etc, etc.

Anyone want to fill in these categories more or otherwise round out the "Whadda we got" issue?

Those are my initial thoughts, anyway.

Best,
Ron

[szilard]

- SF in the Burroughs, Doc Smith, and Asimov sense is well-represented; Traveller's probably the granddaddy and hordes of imitators are out there.

I don't know. I suppose that there are a relatively decent number of such 'traditional' SF games. My initial reaction, though, was to think that this was the area that was most deficient, particularly compared to the popularity of the source.

Maybe it is just that it is comparatively much less popular than fantasy. If that's the case, though, then why is it?

- SF in the licensing sense is obviously well-represented, via Star Wars, Star Trek, Babylon 5, etc, etc.

True enough, though the vague genre of SF that might include such things (SF Epic?) is fairly limited in terms of numbers of games. I suppose that Fading Suns would fit in there.


Stuart

[Shreyas Sampat]

One more SF subdivision that Ron didn't point out: speculative extrapolations, like Brin's Glory Season, Asimov and imitators, Niven, Pournelle.  (I know that Ron put Asimov in another category too)

I think this category, Jareth, is where you see the void, and for good reason; the corresponding fantasy phyle is equally underpopulated.  I think this is because the speculative pattern isn't interesting to play; the developments of it tend to be more or less huge and inevitable, which pushes them into focus even if they are intended to be backdrop, and restricts the players' creativity.

In fantasy the problem is less in evidence, because there are ways to get around the phenomenon of extension - fantasy games, in my experience, tend more toward the Fabulist attitude that we've been discussing of late then SF games do.  With SF, either the extension is the point, which makes for better fiction than gameplay, or it takes attention away from what the players really care about.

Resultantly, the speculative genre, a sizable part of SF literature, has relatively less roleplaying representation than other subgenres; gamers instinctively know that it won't be as much fun.

As for the "SF Epic" genre, the epic is another problem entirely, one that's being addressed in the Continuing Story thread at the moment.

[sben]

A category that I think Ron missed, and that I didn't see in Shreyas's [sp?] response, might be whatever category includes the Culture stories that Iain M. Banks writes (e.g. Consider Phlebas, Excession, Player of Games).

At least, the setting style hasn't been explored much in RPGs, to my knowledge: The Culture is large and almost without challenges; it's in a sort of post-history phase. The setting is sort of used as a hook for political and/or social explorations, often by means of contrast with the (peaceful, near-utopian) Culture.

The setting should be gameable: The complications in the stories, since the Culture has no significant threats, seem to hinge on interpersonal (or intrapersonal!) relationships. But I've given it a few minutes of thought, and haven't figured out how to do it properly. Possibly because I'm distracted by the idea of Greater Systems Vehicles and similarly awe-inspiring AI battleships, which kind of become window-dressing at a certain point.

A little incoherent. Perhaps someone who's read more Banks and thought more about the setting's gameability could comment.

[Edited to remove superfluous close-tag.]

[Daredevil]

There's a few threads that have been done here in the past which interested parties should probably have a look at.

I'm going to have a brief look at the specific concern of Iain M. Banks' Culture as a setting for role-playing as I'm both a fan and have considered using it just such a way. I think this is interesting as a more general look at using similar settings for role-playing, as the utopian Culture represents a rarely taken path in gaming.

Oh and for what it's worth, I tend to think of Iain M. Banks stuff as space opera.

At first look, the nearly all-powerful and dilettante Culture seems to lack conflict, but that really isn't true except in the most basic "romp around dungeons and collect treasure" understanding of it. The books certainly don't lack conflict. Human relationships. Human-AI relationships. Culture's relationships to external powers. Those are the primary things we see and not really all different from the usual stuff.

The setting provides the roleplayer with one natural role to be taken as player characters. Contact (and the more shadowy department of Special Circumstances) is Culture's diplomatic core and intelligence service all rolled up into one. They send their agents to foreign nations to do all sorts of missions for a variety of different reasons: to maintain the Culture, to educate the other cultures or to just meddle for the hell of it. Certainly there's excellent plots for gaming to be found there. Culture's agents tend to be arrogant and often think they have license to do anything when in touch with other cultures. This provides a basis conflict. Even though Culture technology is beyond impressive, there's only so much that technology can accomplish and only so much that Contact is willing to blatantly reveal to outsiders. This provides appropiate kinks. Anyway, Contact is a very good hook (and serves as a good example of what type of stuff is still interesting in an utopia).

I think one of the core premises of the Culture is the fact that while it is a human society, it is entirely maintained and ruled by artificial intelligences, which though meddlesome and quirky, are rather (but not entirely) benevolent. Humans have created an utopia for themselves by using machines to achieve it. Indeed, it is doubtful if humans themselves could even maintain it without succumbing to their darker natures. Now, they're left to live in utopia, trying to find meaning in their lives. There is considerable fodder for a Narrativist Premise in that.

Anyway, those are my quick thoughts on the subject.

[Stuart DJ Purdie]

A few thoughts on the matter.

Firstly, SF in the Gibson style has been (over?) done, with the plethora of cyberpunkesque games.  I may be stating the obvious, but no-one else had :)

Is V:tM an SF game?  I would say a resounding maybe.  It's not space opera, but neithers most SF.  It does start with a basic premise that could be considered SF.  Whether what it works into is or not, is a tough call (probably ending up more horror than SF).  To me, as written it's straddling the wire so much, it depends on the groups playstyle.  Now repeat that exercise for M:tA.  I'd say Mage would count as SF. I only mentioned those two, because they're well known, and possibly not immediatly considered SF.

I can't help but shake a niggling thought that Jareth may have ment 'Futuristic' rather than SF.  I submit that there are indeed, aparently few then might be expected futuristic set games.  Further, I suggest that this might be due to the nature of a futureistic game itself.  Namely that there is limited common grasp of any particular futuristic setting.  This leaves a lot of work to do to supply the needed detail which, in a contempory set game, is intuative.  There are significant accepted ideas surrounding a faux-medeival setting (c.f. D&D) to reduce the setting work down to a more managable level.

A consequence of this thesis is to suggest that futuristic set games come with significant setting material - to the point where a Simulationist mode of play would be the expected mode of play, engaging in Exploration of Setting.  The work required to make a futuristic setting tractable would be more or less the same required to support such a mode of play.  An exception would be if the basic precepts and general information surrounding the setting could be considered common knowledge.  This could be invoked either as a T.V. show spinoff (Or, other liscensed content), or where is is very close to a 'well understood' setting (Technically futuristic, but behaves as, say, fantasy setting.  Clicking sands in S&Sword, for example).

In summary, Futuristic games would tend to self select down to fewer modes of play, thus naturaly reducing the bredth (and thereby number) of games available.  

Course, I could be barking up the wrong tree - but I can't at the moment think of a counter example.

If futuristic was not the oridginal intent, then I'd try to dig myself out of a hole by positing that the most visable SF games are indeed those set in Futuristic worlds.

(Aside: Does anyone else feel that the word fantasy has been corrupted into 'faux-medevil with elfs and magic' ?  Or is that just me?)

[clehrich]

I'd agree with Stuart on the issue of futuristic game settings.  I mean, when you get right down to it, there aren't all that many historical-setting games out there either, and most of them more or less deliberately fantasy-ize or alternate-history-ize the periods.  I think the reason is the same: you have to present a hell of a lot of background material, which is (1) difficult and (2) unattractive to a lot of players.  

I'm fairly heavily involved in an SF game design (Aurora, at AuroraGames.com), and we're spending inordinate amounts of time writing up background information.  Frankly, it's more interesting to us than it's likely to be to most potential players.  Is anyone really going to read my 200-odd page masterpiece on Uhrmina civilizations?  I doubt it.  

Similarly, when I ran a game set in Tang dynasty China, nobody really wanted to slog through a lot of background information --- too much like school, I suppose.  Stock fantasy is, well, stock.  The same goes for SF: if it's Star Trek or Star Wars or something, everyone's comfortable.  If it's new, you have to learn a lot, and the curve is steep.

[Balbinus]

This is anecdotal, so take it for what it's worth.

In my own group I have had three problems running sf games.

The first is personal.  My taste runs to hard sf.  My knowledge of the genre is fairly good, that of my players fairly weak.  To fill them in on the technological options available to their characters when faced with a problem takes ages and necessitates gm interruption to constantly explain how things work.  Because it's hard sf, how things work now is not necessarily a good guide.  The real future is likely to be technologically complex, characters in hard sf novels take their surrounding technology for granted, characters in rpgs can't because the players aren't familiar with it.  Blue Planet is a good example here, the players must read up on what technology is available in the setting (remotes and bioimplants being particularly important) or their characters' actions will make no sense in their context.

Second, sf is not generic.  This point is made above so I will simply say that if I say to my group I'm running a fairly standard fantasy game they know what to expect.  If I say I'm running a fairly standard sf game they won't have a clue what I mean.  SF does not have quite the same consistency of tropes that generic fantasy does.  Thus, the players must read setting material, something they may not be keen to do.

Thirdly, it's harder to run.  If I run a fantasy game and the party are travelling between towns and I have an encounter planned, I know the potential scope of what may happen.  They may fight, trade, negotiate, whatever.  But ultimately I know what their options are - they are physically present with the skills and assets they have on them.  In sf this is not true.  They encounter someone and they have all the resources of a technological culture.  A magnitude of resources beyond that of even a King in most fantasy settings.  This is much worse in hard sf of course, a Star Wars game is basically fantasy in space but a Transhuman Space game gives characters a range of resources which is dizzying to contemplate.

Finally, a metapoint.  If I wish to publish an rpg then with sf I face a harder task.  The lack of common tropes means that my game will likely not appeal to even a majority sf fans, just a niche within that fandom.  A game which appeals to Anne McAffrey fans will not appeal to Greg Egan fans.  A game which appeals to Robert Jordan fans will, however, probably also appeal to Raymond E Feist fans.

[Cadriel]

This actually reminds me of the game I'm planning presently.  Of course, it qualifies as science fiction, and it's one of the things I've wanted to run in an RPG for a long time.  While it's technically cyberpunk, I'm going to be using Over the Edge's system because its freeform character trait system is perfect for this sort of character generation.  But the material inspiration for the game is the genre of cyberpunk anime, with the strongest examples coming to mind as Ghost in the Shell and Battle Angel.  They're interesting, because as much as they have insanely good action sequences (and T&A in the case of Ghost in the Shell), they're also unafraid to ask the big questions about human existence and relationships.  That's why I want to run this as a Narrativist game, taking on those questions (the central one:  "What does it mean to be human?") as a focus for the entire game to revolve around.

That said:  if I were to publish this game (with a new system et al), the amount of setting material that would be needed would make it look like a Simulationist:  Setting game instead of a Narrativist game.  Meanwhile, most of the cyberpunk games out there are heavily Gamist or Simulationist (Shadowrun and Cyberpunk being the big ones).  They represent the heavy-chrome and big-guns aspect, but not the questions that I really love (except as abstract, delimiting game mechanics like in Shadowrun).

I think the real problem with SF RPGs is the narrow bands of interest that each one serves; modern occult games, superhero games, and fantasy games all have a good, solid starting ground, and can easily attract all kinds of fans.  Not so with any particular stripe of science fiction.  I think part of it lies in the fact that science fiction, good science fiction, is so idea-driven that it kinda falters in making good Sim: Exploration of Situation or Setting games; I'd posit that, once you get past the trappings, SF is actually very well suited for Narrativist Premises.

I don't know if that's entirely accurate, but I do think something of merit is in that thought.

-Wayne

[John Kim]

So what gives?  I would think it would be more 50/50- sci-fi/fantasy.  Or 33/33/33- sci-fi/fantasy/both.  Any ideas? Rebuttals? Smacks to the head?

Well, here's a smack.  First of all, I don't think that sci-fi is terribly poorly represented -- there are tons of sci-fi RPGs out there.   2002 alone brought us "Aurora", "The Colonies", "Danger Quest", "Deadlands: The Lost Colony", "Digital Burn", "Farscape", "Haven: City of Violence", "Judge Dredd", "octaNe", "Spaceship Zero", "Starchildren", Decipher's "Star Trek" RPG, "Terra Primate", and "Traveller20".   That seems like a lot to me.  

cf. my big RPG list at http://www.darkshire.org/~jhkim/rpg/encyclopedia/index.html for more information on these.  

My question is: why should it be 50/50 scifi/fantasy???  That isn't how movies, novels, television, or other media are broken up.

[Uncle Dark]

Hi.

I think Wayne and Eric may be on to something here.  Let me come at it the other way 'round...

Look at the SF games that have been published.  Stack up the "generic" games vs. the "setting" games.

Come to think of it, I don't know of any generic SF games.  Granted, I've never read GURPS Space...  Traveller (in the original edition) is close, as the books go out of their way to say that the Impirium is not the only possible setting.

Star Frontiers was TSR's attempt at a basic SF game, but it was more of a mix of Star Wars and Star Trek elements than a generic game.

Star Hero (the Hero System supplement for SF gaming) is probably the best attempt I have personally seen for a generic SF game.

I'm not sure whether I should count Theatrix.  It is a very generic game, with no setting whatsoever, though it could be used to run SF.  For that matter, so could Elegant Role Playing, The Pool, or even Sorcerer.

On the other hand, looking at setting specifc games I have: Paranoia, Dr. Who (two versions), SLA Industries, GURPS Traveller, GURPS Autoduel, Gamma World (first and second editions)...

It seems that settings sell.  Hell, Star Wars and Star Trek have kept games in print over the years despite having experienced every problem a liscensed product can suffer.

So is the "setting sells" effect peculiar to SF games, or has the "D&Desque" setting become so prevalent in fantasy that we (like fish in water or Los Angelinos in smog) don't see it?

Lon

[JSDiamond]

Stuart was knocking on the door with his post and Uncle Dark made a comment that sparked something to me, -so I'll reply to both while minding the thread's original query, "What happened to sci-fi rpgs?"

Blame: Marketing and Everyday Reality.

Marketing:
The sci-fi RPG is a two edged sword, depending upon the setting.  If it's based upon countless television episodes, movies, books, etc., then everyone is blessed because everything is 'a given', things *just are* because of the aforementioned product that tells you so.  E.g., we already know what the Enterprise bridge looks like, just like we all can easily imagine the sound and fury of a lightsabre.

System shmystem.  We KNOW already how things are.  We role-play according to the model we've been watching for years.  A Klingon wouldn't do *that*!  Don't play out of type!  

It's LARPing while sitting down.  Nine times out of ten it's tantemount to digging up Gene Roddenberry and charging 50-cents to look at his corpse.  It's lazy design.    

Then there is Everyday Reality:
First, most sci-fi rpgs feature not-so-fantastical technology when compared to what we already have. Remember those wonderful yellow-spined DAW sci-fi novels?  The wonderful stuff they came up with was weird and 'alien' and we could only imagine it with help from the author.  Have we run out of ideas?  I don't think so.  Maybe a thread could address quality in sci-fi (or any other genre) as well.        

Second, a party of adventurers doesn't camp out near town, they have to rent a hotel room.  They have actual bills and living expenses.  But probably the biggest hurdle (as pointed out by Stuart), with all of that technology WHY OH WHY does Planet-X2, or Emperor Zargon need a bunch of characters to save it?  

Oh YOU wrote a sci-fi rpg that you want to publish?  Well, you will have to train players to 'envision it the way you do' through your core rulebook.
That's all.  No bazillion-dollar movies, no action figures, no syndicated television series spanning decades, no novels, no lunch boxes or cross-over CCGs.  No pop culture.  Just your book.    

IMO a sci-fi RPG needs to be F*CKING GREAT to succeed [success being = to be played with verve] without the support of that other stuff.

Still, I'm not giving in.

[RN3G8 4E]

Thanks for all the great replies everyone!  I think I've been persuaded that Sci-fi RPGs are more plentiful than I previously thought.

However, this newb needs a definition- what is a sci-fi epic game?

[Uncle Dark]

Epic SF?  Think Dune.  Think Asimov's Foundation series.  Think Star Wars.
Think Babylon 5.

Vast landscapes, big conflicts, with the fate of empires hanging in the balance.