Breaking the Heart of the Universe: Life and times of the Science
Fiction Heartbreaker


Ron Edward's concept of the 'Fantasy Heartbreaker' has really caught on, it's become the dominant epithet for describing a certain all too familiar type of RPG whose natural habitat seems to be the bargain bins of gaming shops. Since the late 70's I have been calling them, 'Another way to hit an orc over the head', as in: 'The World doesn't need another way to hit an orc over the head'. But Ron's phrase really is a lot catchier.
Often lying along side them in the Milk Crate of Doom are their brothers in the science fiction. There aren't as many of them, but there they are,dust-covered and marked down to hell, the Science Fiction Heartbreakers.
Like Fantasy Heartbreakers, SFHB's follow the same pattern established by their science fiction brethren:
1/ The are deriviative a very narrow category of science fiction concepts.
2/ They are derivative of a narrow base of gaming concepts.
3/ They are produced with great naivete' about the marketplace.
4/ They are produced as a labor of love by amatuers.

The Galaxy of Broken Dreams
I have a confession to make. It's easy to me to write about SF heartbreakers because SF rpgs have always broken my heart. First I like SF a lot better than fantasy and there are a LOT fewer gamers playing SF games, so I got relatively little chance to do much of it. But that isn't the only thing about them that has broken my heart.

A Word to the Agnostics
I have heard some question whether the phenomenon of the SFHB really exists, I am quite sure it does, as I have played, read, and bought quite a few of them. here are some excellent examples.
2070
Battlelords of the 23rd Century
COSMOS
FTL 2448
Imperium 52nd Millenium
Marauder 2170
Shatterzone
SLA Industries
Red Shift
High Colonies
Justifiers
Raven Star
Star Guild
Riech Star
Gatecrasher
Other Suns
Aurora
Future Shadows
Frontier Horizons
GateRunner
Challenge the Future
Albedo the RPG

The sky is not the limit
The primary reason I prefer SFRPG's is because I prefer SF literature to fantasy. Mostly because SF is a much more varied genre.Science fiction ranges from 'Man in the High Castle' to '2001 Space Oddessy' to 'Darwin's Radio' to (maybe) 'Perdido Street Station' and beyond.
Fantasy only has a couple of examples to work from (or better to say it only works from a couple of examples). Tolkien and to a lesser extent Robert E. Howard. American fantasy literature has settled down to endlessly replicating these writers. (mostly Tolkien). It has therefore become predictable and repetetive. And thus so have the games based on it.
One of the tragedies of the SFHBs is that theydo nothing to take advantage of this freedom. They are as repetetive as their fantasy brothers. Arguably they are even MORE so.

One Raygun to Rule them All
SFHB's invariably take their lead from Traveler, first published by Game Designers Workshop in 1977. Typically the SFHB is even less innovative in game mechanics than the FHB. While Traveler was quite innovative in it's time, being a sharp break from the pattern set by D&D the SFHB usually has even less to differentiate it from Traveler than the FHB does from D&D. Ron Edwards noticed that the FHB's often enshrine some core mechanical innovation at their heart, but you can look long and hard for such attempts in the SFHBs. It seems that once they heard of skill systems and chucked character classes they seem to think that the prospects for innovation in mechanics has ended,although a number of them have point build systems rather than random generation ( Although a few even had character class systems!). It's amusing to note how many of Traveler's almost 30 year old innovations are still being touted by FHB's down to this day as 'revolutionary'.

The Science Fiction Heartbreaker is almost invariably based in. the golden age, space operatic,SF universe. It's a far future setting with spaceshipsNrobotsNrayguns of various degrees of 'hardness' following the pattern established by E.E. Smith, Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov,Robert Heinlein and a host of lesser lights in the world of pulp fiction. It's a vision of the future that has already transcended mere obscolescence into actual quaintness. (Traveler computers for example, were starting to look old fashioned even in the late 70's....)
Coupled with this a system wedded to paradigms established by miniatures wargaming. Complete with highly gamist, crunchy combat, and elaborate weapons lists. Usually there is a complex spaceship design system, with attached minuiature wargame like space combat system. The SF heartbreaker will often have ONE well developed system for doing things other than combat. Its usually either mind numbingly boring (Traveler trade rules) or has nothing to do with what anybody else is doing (cyberpunk games netrunner rules).
Sometimes there is a 'magic system' based on the 'classic' psi abilities telepathy,clairvoyance,precognition, sometimes teleportation. Although SFHB's desperately need them, they rarely have psychic surgeons or faith healers.... Although some of them include rules for actual Bell, Book and Candle magic, apparently becuase you can't write an rpg without it (and I'm not talking about games where there is an actual setting reason for it, a la 'Spelljammer').

The Alien Perspective
Finally we come to aliens. Once again the SFHBs neatly sidestep creativity to provide three basic types:
1/ The BEMs-SFHBs use them for the same reason Heinlein used them in Starship Trooopers and D&D has orcs, you need SOMETHING to kill in massive amounts without feeling too guilty.
2/ The history textbook in space-These are the aliens that are Nazi's,Samurais, or some iconic earth culture but have 3 eyes, alternately they are human colonies with cultures that duplicate these icons for no apparent reason.
3/Aesop in Spaaaaace!- Cat people, Dog People, Gila monster people, Naked Mole rat people. And I'm not talking about 'Furry' games like 'Albedo' or 'Uplifted' earth speices, but independently evolved sentients just like Earth animals.

Loosing the Battle for the Future
Because they are based on miniatures wargames the best developed aspect of the SFHB is always it's combat system. Thus the primary form of conflic tends to be combat.

Many people have commented on the problem of combat in science fiction games. The weapons in SF games are often exceedingly deadly. With the concentration on combat as the almost only form of conflict this means you will tend to loose lots of characters. In many spaceship combat systems the entire campaign can be exterminated by a SINGLE die roll. 'Oops made a critical on the nonsensium matrix of the bafflegab drive, you all go up a in a flash of light, time to make new characters....'
Why SF rpgs aren't D&D in space
D&D was based on miniatures wargames too. But it did a better job of dealing with the problems this presented.
One solution to the problem of a combat based game is Segregation of Challenge. I've never seen any SF game, heartbreaker or not that developed anywhere near as effective a mechanism. If you don't go to the 10 level of the dungeon you won't run into the 10th level monsters, 1 HD goblins won't be packing Stormbringer. . In most SF games any joe can have a black hole bazooka or an an antimatter projector. Also in SF games 'magical' healing is generally much more restrained than in fantasy. D&D had the 'Heal' spell , and that that more than almost anything else in the game, made the overwhelming concentration on combat sustainable. That and hit point bloat. The simulationist in the SFRPG gamer found hpb 'unrealistic' but it's a practical gamist answer to a systemic problem with a highly gamist system.(many of the surrealistic, convoluted justifications for the weird aspects of the D&D system are the result of trying to 'justify' gamist solutions for a gamist system in simulationist terms.) The overall effect is that the survival rate in SF campaigns can be very low without plenty of fudging by the GM.

Sure there is plenty of military SF, but the major failing of the Sf heartbreakers is that that they never found any way to make anything but combat interesting or exciting. There are many other kinds of science fiction heroes,Doctors ,scientists, Diplomats , Merchants,even Galactic Pot Healers.

SFHBs look like you can have heroes like this. They usually have extensive skill systems with all kinds of non-combat skills. But with a wargame at it's heart, these are mostly just wasted paper. Your doctor, engineer, space archeologist etc, will be dragged from one firefight to another as, of course you can't have an rpg without all the characters in a PARTY can you?
And if the GM thinks to try to give them something to do, it will be a single skill roll done after a 2 hour battle, which the player is just as likely to whiff
This is the big thing heartbreaking about these games, they repeat the same mistakes,obsessively. And they make promises their systems can't keep.
.
Why a Medtech is not like a Cleric

Traveler has been so influential that it even defines the design of SF games in other subgenres. R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk, had Techs and Medtechs,and Fixers and Medias and Corporates, with no real guidelines for using them, (and inadequate rules for netrunning) but had an entire BOOK of combat rules (Friday Night Firefight), the second edition only improved the situation slightly, you had to buy an entire extra supplement to get anything out of your non-gunbunny. Again the promise, again the failure.
Cyberpunk was supposed to be a genre about the rule of information, but most people in cyberpunk rpg games make more use of their guns than their terminals, and indeed use the 'net' a good deal less than I do.....

The state of the market and the SF heartbreaker
The problem of the SFHB as a phenomenon in the rpg marketplace begins with the fact that SF is less popular Mr. Dancey's 'network effects' allow for a far smaller number of potentially successful SF rpgs. Therefore any dominant SF game will be even MORE dominant in it's genre than D&D is in fantasy (which is saying a LOT!). So there is even LESS reason to buy a Traveler look alike than a D&D look alike. Particularly since the actual differences between the SFHBs are usually much smaller . Real innovation in anything is difficult. but real innovation is the only thing that would give most SFRPGs a chance to survive much less triumph.

Want to avoid the pain of an SF heartbreaker?
Thinking of writing an SF game and want to avoid the Milk Crate of Doom? Avoid making the same mistakes AGAIN!

Focus on a clear single concept of what your characters are supposed
to be doing in this setting.

Make it a form of conflict with high stakes.

Make is something other than shooting things

Write your physical combat system LAST.

If you insist on making a combat based game, have systems to deal with the problems this creates as least as effective as those in D&D, but preferably don't just duplicate them....

By the way if you have an attached miniatures-based mass combat system or space combat system. you are probably writing a heartbreaker.

Figure out what the game is really about and design to that. The newest Albedo game (really an Erma Felna EDF game)'Platinum Catalyst' makes this error, it includes an (admittedly mechanically interesting) mass combat system. But 'Erma Felna EDF' ,although it takes place in military environment really isn't about firefights, any more than a Harlequin Nurse Romance set in a hospital is really about medicine. Its about Erma's relationships. Its Trollbabe in space, with furries.

There is plenty of room for innovation in SF games. Here are some ideas I've been wanting to write for a long time, I may have to do them myself:

L. Ron Hubbard's Old Doc Methusaleh, and Jame White's Sector General were about futuristic doctors and managed to create excitement and drama, indeed medicine is widely mined for this by popular entertaintment....

Dune, Megacorps or some similar environment with deadly byzantine politics, and physical combat is a duel after numerous session of elaborate, political manuvering, or death comes by poison or assasin's dagger.

A game of interstellar commerce that is narrativist, because simulationist ones always turn into accounting exercises, and gamist ones are just hand operated versions of a hundred 'build your space empire' computer games or they become a board game without the board..

Anyway that is my hat in the ring for what constitutes an SFHB, and my reccomendations for avoiding them....
There's a whole universe of gaming and game designs out there. Lets stop breaking my heart, PLEASE?
_________________

I'd just like to say that this is a very good start.

I would like to see a little close analysis of Traveler and how it worked and set the standard. You mention a lot of points; can you be specific about how these things got implemented?

I'd love to see some discussion of how these games do and do not "accurately" represent the sorts of novels and whatnot they have in mind. What about games explicity based on particular SF universes?

Anyone else have comments? Presumably the typos will be worked out before you "go to press"....

Well, there have been a few more main stream SF titles far more recent than Traveler, including TSR's own Alternity.
The others out there are based on a specific property, so I don't know if you'd want to count them among the games examined in this article. I've heard some of these points said for a few of them though, too. Last Unicorn's Star Trek was supposed to have a couple little gems, namely ship to ship combat and the "Technobabble" charts, but aside from some good press in InQuest Gamer magazine, I've seen little praise from others.
You also have instances of d20 "IN SPAAACE" games, where they slap on the setting over top of the d20 rules, getting (as you phrase ^_^) Bashing Orcs...IN SPAACE! Might have a little material you could mine from there as to more recent attempts?
d20 also seems to be the lisence of choice for lisences as well right now. Farscape and Stargate, two of the most recent, most popular shows have d20 games (I'm pretty sure they're both d20). Farscape itself I would say is actually D&D in space, as you have a party, going from world/dungeon to world/dungeon, an ongoing plot with recurring villians and all sorts of little sub stories.

Just a couple of others to look at ^_^

I always felt the problem was that SFHBs weren't space opera-y enough.

Part of this may be that for me SF was more inspired by visual mediums (movies, tv, comics), while fantasy was always inspired by books.

You mentioned the more wargame sorts of rules common in SFHBs. From a personal p.o.v., those systems have never successfully captured the feel of space opera, especially as based on movies or tv shows.

Put another way, and looking solely at space opera inspired stuff, isn't the real heartbreak that the games failed to capture the feel of the source material?

Robert

I am very unconvinced that the combat systems of these games are, explicitly, Gamist. The ones that you mention that I have played have highly detailed combat systems that, nonetheless, don't make astoundingly good Gamism. Detailed combat ≠ Gamism.

Also, I find it strange that you dwell on Cyberpunk, which is arguably one of the few not-highly-derivative SF games out there (different setting, sizably different system than most SF games.) Heck, it was even a (marginal) commercial success. I want to hear more about these other games you list.

yrs--
--Ben

The primary reason I prefer SFRPG's is because I prefer SF literature to fantasy. Mostly because SF is a much more varied genre.Science fiction ranges from 'Man in the High Castle' to '2001 Space Oddessy' to 'Darwin's Radio' to (maybe) 'Perdido Street Station' and beyond.

Anyway that is my hat in the ring for what constitutes an SFHB, and my reccomendations for avoiding them....

There's a whole universe of gaming and game designs out there.

Excellent start, Brian. I will be taking notes as I start real production on "Dead Space" next year. Do you have any examples of "SFRPGs done right"? Can you compare and contrast them to SFHBs?

Ron Edward's concept of the 'Fantasy Heartbreaker' has really caught on, it's become the dominant epithet for describing a certain all too familiar type of RPG whose natural habitat seems to be the bargain bins of gaming shops. Since the late 70's I have been calling them, 'Another way to hit an orc over the head', as in: 'The World doesn't need another way to hit an orc over the head'. But Ron's phrase really is a lot catchier.
Often lying along side them in the Milk Crate of Doom are their brothers in the science fiction. There aren't as many of them, but there they are,dust-covered and marked down to hell, the Science Fiction Heartbreakers.
Like Fantasy Heartbreakers, SFHB's follow the same pattern established by their science fiction brethren:
1/ The are deriviative a very narrow category of science fiction concepts.
2/ They are derivative of a narrow base of gaming concepts.
3/ They are produced with great naivete' about the marketplace.
4/ They are produced as a labor of love by amatuers.

Thanks Brian for the analysis! To let you know, I'm one of the original playtesters for FTL:2448 and did some design work trying to un-bore the trade rules for FTL:2448 second edition and I'm still not happy with the result.

One way I found in my FTL:2448 games to stay away from the Heartbreaker syndrome was to setup the campaign such that it took place on a single space station, though in this the station was Fomalhaut station, a massive, several miles long space station, and ran a detective game, but tried my best to include as much future tech as I could. And since I was introducing it, I could also introduce the flaws and ways around it as well. (No magical device to sweep through a room and gather all the DNA samples, you still had to find them and dab them up.)

But by setting a game where the players didn't own their own spaceship and didn't have a need to have one, the game actually became more interesting.

One problem I had in Traveller was that every world was reduced to a code and monoculture. But to do otherwise meant that I would have to either railroad my players to stay where I had created world descriptions, or make stuff up on the fly as we went along.

FTL:2448 was worse, as the designer, Rich Tucholka, was of the same opinion, but created this massive chart that you rolled dice on, such that it would take hours to properly create one world. At least Traveler kept that down to about fifteen minutes per world.

And there is the rub. To do a world real justice, you should spend hours on it, detailing out the races, the cities, etc. Otherwise it's a one line code string.

I've seemed to have wandered here, mainly because I have lots of opinions as well on SFHBs.

One thing I'd say is that SFRPGs come in two main variants: Soft Science, and Hard Science. The degree of softness or hardness depends on how much the Designer wants to make the games playable and understands what makes a game playable.

Most games that pass for SFRPGS are really SFnRPGs or "Science Fantasy RPG". They are soft as a baby duck's fuzz. About the only time science comes into play is in the science of ballistics. Orcs in Spaaace stuff.

The rest are semi-hard, as they don't want to make the game universe too strange and different. Any setting more than 50 years in the future if done hard as diamond, will not be recognizable by anyone.

Which is why in FTL:2448 we pulled back on tech, so that we could have something more playable and didn't require a masters thesis to understand. Even now, if given a chance to redo FTL:2448, I'd still pull back on the tech, just so the game isn't too cerebral, as well as not put in some bit a tech, a la Star Trek's Transporter, that will come back and bite us in the butt.

Basically, try to create a Modern era RPG as a Future era RPG. Provide a place where the players feel comfortable with the setting, and not view it as "Orcs in Spaaaace". And not as "Cargo run #22,345" which Traveller was prone to do. Don't make it easy to pick up cargo, don't make it easy to treat a world as a village inn. Make it something that will engage the players and their characters.

How?

You tell me, because I'm still trying to figure that one out.

Kedamono wrote: And there is the rub. To do a world real justice, you should spend hours on it, detailing out the races, the cities, etc. Otherwise it's a one line code string.

Mostly because SF is a much more varied genre.Science fiction ranges from 'Man in the High Castle' to '2001 Space Oddessy' to 'Darwin's Radio' to (maybe) 'Perdido Street Station' and beyond.

Fantasy only has a couple of examples to work from (or better to say it only works from a couple of examples). Tolkien and to a lesser extent Robert E. Howard. American fantasy literature has settled down to endlessly replicating these writers. (mostly Tolkien). It has therefore become predictable and repetetive. And thus so have the games based on it.

Ron's Heartbreaker essay wasn't focused on decrying 'another way to hit an orc over the head' but instead (mostly, IMO) focused on games that he (and this is my read) felt had actual gems of RPG-goodness in them but were self-limited by adhering to the D&D design or else had hit on 'innovations' that simply were not innovative.

Although I find the term 'Heartbreaker' a bit unfortunate, the essay is, IMO, looking at what is good about those games. It has muated, IMO, from the orignal meaning to simply become a way to describe a game as inferior.

This:

Sure there is plenty of military SF, but the major failing of the Sf heartbreakers is that that they never found any way to make anything but combat interesting or exciting. There are many other kinds of science fiction heroes,Doctors ,scientists, Diplomats , Merchants,even Galactic Pot Healers.

Marco wrote: This

b_bankhead wrote: Sure there is plenty of military SF, but the major failing of the Sf heartbreakers is that that they never found any way to make anything but combat interesting or exciting. There are many other kinds of science fiction heroes,Doctors ,scientists, Diplomats , Merchants,even Galactic Pot Healers.

Is pure opinion and doesn't square with either my analysis of those game's systems nor my experience playing them.

Albedo and SLA for the most part. I also played ... (IIRC) FGU's Space Opera (I believe that was the title) and Star Frontiers. Both of these, IMO, fit his description mechanically (weapon lists, star-ship systems, etc.)

For that matter, GURPS Space and Star Hero (both of which I played*) would also fit the bill. Each makes exactly the 'mistakes' that he lists where there is no 'what the characters are supposed to be doing' element and when the GM and players decide it surely could involve 'shooting things.'

Tracing some of the patterns in games back to Traveler (which I'll get to in a moment) is, IMO, an acceptable way to look at things--but there's a good deal of editorializing that I don't think is either analytical nor correct in context.

Traveler, if it's the first space game, can't honestly be a Heartbreaker under Ron's description but it gets its own commentary here:

Coupled with this a system wedded to paradigms established by miniatures wargaming. Complete with highly gamist, crunchy combat, and elaborate weapons lists. Usually there is a complex spaceship design system, with attached minuiature wargame like space combat system. The SF heartbreaker will often have ONE well developed system for doing things other than combat. Its usually either mind numbingly boring (Traveler trade rules) or has nothing to do with what anybody else is doing (cyberpunk games netrunner rules).

Hello,

Here's an idea which might help reconcile some of the points of debate in this thread.

Unlike the fantasy heartbreakers I wrote about, in which "what we do" is absolutely rock-solid (team up, confront things, level up, repeat), most of the science fiction role-playing games are a little squishy when it comes to general player-character "function."

In the D&D based games, "what do we do" is top-down, based more on player's approach to the strategic and tactical challenges. In the SF-ish games, "what we do" seems to be treated as an emergent property of whatever setting-based choices one makes about one's character, i.e., his or her species, job, homeworld, etc.

Therefore instead of providing very specific niches aimed at characters' roles during confrontations, the emphasis seems instead to be on wide-open diversity of skill sets and professional labels, which exists kind of uneasily next to very niche-y aliens. (A bit like second-edition D&D, in which proficiencies and character classes sort of rubbed shoulders for no good reason, only more so.)

The sense I get from reading these games and making up characters for them is often a peak, during character creation, followed by a "flatline" - OK, now I have my frog-guy with his Engineering profession and a few espionage-style skills thrown in. Pause. Now what? There's no sense of purpose that I get from making fantasy-heartbreaker characters, such as "OK, I have the cleric-y type guy, so let's get in a fight I so can heal folks."

On a related point, the fantasy heartbreaker games also seem to be much better constructed in terms of reward systems (usually just character improvement, as in most RPGs). The authors really seem to have cared greatly about smoothing character-improvement relative to play, and also about just what can be improved when. Whereas most of the games I think of as SF heartbreakers instead seem to be not-very-well-thought-out copies of GURPS in this regard - "Um, you get more character points, like the ones you bought your skills with, so, uh, you spend them."

So here's my thought - that the SF heartbreakers are characteristically weak on purpose of play, whereas the fantasy ones are (as I wrote in my essays) usually rather strong, in fact, better than any pre-3rd version of D&D. Therefore trying to characterize the SF-games in terms of purpose and themes is going to be awfully messy and vague.

I'm also thinking a little differently now about the foundations/sources. The literary or "structural" features of these games seems to be solidly based on Star Trek + Niven's Known Universe, as opposed to the original Traveller's wide-open, DIY approach. In fact, I'm beginning to think that the main model for play wasn't Traveller in its original form, but rather Star Frontiers and later editions of Traveller ... perhaps with the extensive adventure supplements for Star Wars as the foundation for "how to play."

Best,
Ron

P.S. Two titles to add for sure: Xro Dinn Chronicles and Manhunter

I think the point to purpose of play is very interesting indeed. But it jibes with an issue I would like to raise as well: as SFRPG's SF at all? Maybe most SFRPG's are damp squibs rather than heartbreakers, perhaps.

I'm quite struck by komradebob's point about SFRPG's feeling insufficiently space opera-ish. I think there is a vast gulf between science fiction proper and science fantasy, and the opera variety definitely falls into the latter. But as komradebob remarks this is mostly due to exposure to SF as a visual medium rather than a written one - I think real explorative SF is more likely to occur in print; certainly there have been very few representations on screen as far as I am aware.

I suspect that this problem lies at the root of most problems in SFRPG. Traveller proposes lots of technology, but the technology poses no important questions. It could be - and I might hazard going as far as saying it is - the Age of Mercantilism in space.

I think rather more SFRPG's have been designed based on duplicating precursors in visual media than have been built around concepts expressed in written media. And because most of the visual media have not been hard SF but have instead have been opera, the purpose of play may be rather confused. But What You Do in most of these is fly space-ships manually, shoot blasters at each other and swing over crevassess on a super-strength cable.

From this angle it may be that the 'heartbreaker' concept can be rehabilitated because it is still external expectations of what will work, what the audience wants, only vaguely understood, that drives much of the design as it appears in final draft, perhaps. IOW the orthodox reference point for SFRPG is not a prior D&D but instead Star Wars and Star Trek, and perhaps some cartoon shows.

Now the RPG sub-genre which suffered least from this effect was Cyberpunk, I feel. IMO there have been a couple of really solid Cyberpunk games that came very close to posing real questions about technology - the empathy/humanity ratings associated with implants. While these were pretty crude, they were at least heading in the right direction; these could have been the venues for some interesting play around such themes. And yet they didn't go there but instead got railed down new avenues of orc-smiting. In large part I blame the industry - pulling in many authors to mass produce supplements probably produced stock RPG tropes automatically.

My main candidate for an actual heartbreaker would be Blue Planet. There is excellent science; fantastic attention to meteorology and geology for an RPG, a stonrgly drawn setting with many implied questions... and yet the stock mode of play appears to be a caribean crime drama on the lines of Magnum PI, or wild west lawlessness on the open frontier. All the science in the setting is pretty much lost, and the opportunity offered by truly non-human PC's wasted.

I think the issue of whether or not a SF Heartbreaker is 'true' SF - whatever that may be - is a red herring. I mean, can you really call DnD 'true' fantasy? Where's the hard questioning of good vs evil? But that's besides the point.

While I don't mean to put words in Ron's mouth, he appears to have called Heartbreakers 'Heartbreakers' because the dream/innovation/etc. of the game was mired in assumptions and imitative design. What are the assumptions SF Heartbreakers make? What sort of system designs do they imitate? What areas of design do they try to improve?

The problem with creating something decidedly alien comes from the fact that we are human. Humanity is all we know. When we DO manage to create something un-human it is often ugly and wrong. It is instinct to take two things miles apart and squish them together to simulate something alien. Heinlein’s spiders with lasers, cat-people samurai, Star trek’s unending multitude of prosthetic head aliens....

At the center of any good sci-fi RPG ultimately are the players and the game master (if applicable). As a labor of love the creator of the SFHB can only put so much into the game. What we do with it is up to us. What is so wrong with incredibly lethal combat? If every time someone goes waving around a black laser pistol a whole bar gets cut in half, I HOPE that people figure out to stop waiving the dang things around. Case in point: Niven's Ring World the book has very little actual combat and what it has is very lethal. The people of Niven's far future science world have innate FEAR of what their technology can do and thus they avoid it if at all possible. Further more even though the book DOES have a race of sentient cat people they are very thoughtful and realize the futility of fighting a loosing war with mankind and the very alien race called the puppeteers. Larry Niven's book is a very good example of what a sci-fi rpg could be like. But if you were tasked to design a game around it sooner or later someone's going to need rules for what happens when you go shooting off your laser pistol, and at that point the fatality comes into play. Ultimately even if the combat system is a mere afterthought to the carefully designed social interaction system (and believe me you'll get criticized for that) combat will still arise and it will still be lethal. It's up to the people out there running the game to make it a heartbreaker or not. When someone shoots someone else do we blame the gun?

timfire wrote: While I don't mean to put words in Ron's mouth, he appears to have called Heartbreakers 'Heartbreakers' because the dream/innovation/etc. of the game was mired in assumptions and imitative design. What are the assumptions SF Heartbreakers make? What sort of system designs do they imitate? What areas of design do they try to improve?

Tim nailed it. Screw the whole issue of "whether SF" or "real SF." Screw it right in the ear.

The issue is not, whether SF Heartbreakers are or are not SF / science fiction / sci-fi / speculation fiction / etc. The issue is, given this set of role-playing design and publishing goals, which is manifest in the presence of the games that really do exist, what set of aesthetics seems to be foundational to their creation?

And indeed, is the aesthetics-set internally contradictory, as it is for the fantasy heartbreakers?

Best,
Ron

OK, so Tim proposes that we examine the aesthetical assumptions of SFRPGs, and why those assumptions make many of them Heartbreakers.

From the top of my head, here is my list of assumptions:


Everyone has to have a spaceship/starship.
SFRPGs have to be set in Future and in Spaaace.
Space combat is just like (pick one) air combat, sea combat, Star Wars, Star Trek.
Simple ballistic kinetic energy weapons, (AKA rifles, pistols, etc.) will be replaced by "ray guns" and hand-held laser weapons capable of killing with one short burst.
All worlds have a monoculture.
All worlds can be represented by a code and description of the spaceport.
Aliens are, well alien and we have nothing in common with them.
Aliens are just like us, but with a funny looking nose or ears.
Humans Über Alles.
Humans are the rodents of space.



There is probably more, but just this short list we can see how expectations are set for SFRPGs.

For example, the very first assumption: "Everyone has to have a spaceship/starship." is one most space based SFRPGs support. And I'd like ask, "Why?"

Why can't you have a space based SFRPG, where spaceships are very expensive, government owned, and that travel between worlds is a once in a lifetime event for the average citizen of this game universe? This way, when the PCs get a chance to travel to another world, it is a major event. However, for the most part, the game revolves around the people and places of the one world they start on.

Another favorite assumption made by SFRPGs is that all worlds have a monoculture. Hell, that's not even true for our own world, not for a long, long while, if ever.

Currently I'm part of the design team that's been tasked to produce the next version of Tri Tac Game's SFRPG Fringeworthy. (It was the first Alternate History RPG.) I'm working the world and racial descriptions for the game. One of which is Victorian Earth. And I'm doing my best not to do a pastiche of Space:1889, but a different POV, and try to deal realistically with the fact that this world is not a monoculture under British rule, but a spectrum and several spectrums in fact. Heck, even the British Isles are not a monoculture, let alone the British Empire. So from the very start of the description of this world, I'm trying to show that it is a multicultural and diverse society.

And this is the trap every, and I mean, every SFRPG I've ever read or played in has fallen for. Aliens are represented by a monoculture. You are a Klingon, so you behave thusly. You are a Zhodani, so you behave this way. You get the picture. That's about as useful as saying all Earthmen are just like Americans from the 1960s.

So if we are serious about ending the heartbreaker syndrome for SFRPGs we need to figure out all the traps that designer fall for when they design one.

This really is a situation where the literature cannot be touched by another medium. It was stunning to see Tolkiens Middle Earth in Jacksons movies, but so much of good sci-fi is internal that we cannot really see it.

The Dune series is one of my all time favorites. While the Jr. Herbert has done admirably with his prequels, Frank Herberts books are...wonderful.
A number of planets do suffer from the mono-culture syndrome- Calladan is a fishing world, Arrakis is a desert world (though there IS a reason for that!). But one of the fun things is...there are no aliens. SF, and not a traditional alien in sight. There are Humans, everywhere.
From the desert nomads the Fremen, who live quite differently than the citizens of the watery fishing world of Caladan, who are all together different than the Guild Navigators using Spice to ferry ships through space, the Bene Gesserit, women of power using Spice to shape their minds and bodies into the ultimate tools, the Mentats, human computers, even the Swordsmasters of Ginaz. All human, yet so alien to each other.
99% of the conflict, the REAL conflict, here is internal or political- the wranglings of the Nobility, the Bene Gesserit and the Guild, the internal turmoils as Paul and his children trancend humanity, knowing things people weren't meant to know. The fear that understanding brought, or the empowerment, and the madness. Some very alien concepts, all factions quite alien to one another, all represented so nicely within ourselves.

I've been thinking about this, and I keep coming back to Star Frontiers. It was not the first sci-fi RPG I played, as I played both Metamorphosis Alpha and Gamma World before it. GW I found disappointing because of its harshness--the problem already alluded to, that at any moment the next bunny rabbit could be a deadly killer that would take out the entire party in seconds. With MA, I think the referee had trouble figuring out a direction (it was her first game to run) and she abandoned it. She had wanted something more space-opera anyway.

I think that Star Frontiers was not a heartbreaker. We played it for a few years in roughly monthly sessions (we intermixed several different games) and most of that was in the Volturnus module series.

It's been said that these games are always focused on combat. This one was not. Our biosocial specialists did many things, all the time. The psychosocial skills enabled us to work out much about the alien cultures we encountered, much as if we had a team anthropologist; they also gave us some interesting skills to use in dealing with our enemies. The medics of course took care of us, treating not only our injuries but our exposures to various environmental hazards. Our environmentalists not only kept us alive in the hostile environs, getting us potable drinking water and edible food and decent shelter, they also built supplies for us, including ropes, protective clothing, and other useful tools when we were cut off from supplies. Part of the time was given to their explorations of the world, identifications of new species and mapping of the world's resources. In the technology specializations, we had computer experts hack into systems to get us tremendously valuable information about our enemies, technicians operate vehicles and repair equipment to keep us moving, and roboticists shut down enemy robots and reprogram them to work for us. We also had military specialists. When we got in a fight, they were a little better than the others and carried their own weight--but everyone could fight, and always did when it came to it. The one military skill that stood out was demolitions, as our demolitions expert both disarmed a bomb that could have killed us all, and used the TD19 explosive from it to take out enemy fortifications. So the game really did use all our skills, to the point that a lot of characters cross-trained to make sure we had enough people skilled in every area.

Aliens are tough for any game. The original Star Frontiers had three player character alien types. The Vrusk could be criticized for being a monolithic stereotypical alien--giant insectoid creatures whose social structure was very like a complex corporation, with everyone focused on the profit of the whole. However, they were alien--humans couldn't really be like that. The Yazirians could be targets of the opposite criticism: being mammalian humanoids, they weren't all that different from humans, save for a few cultural nuances. At the same time, this allowed for a greatly diverse race. Every yazirian was said to have a life enemy, but in modern times someone's life enemy could be cancer or poverty as easily as a military enemy. The dralasites were in some ways the most alien. They were amoeba-like in form, but that's not a completely accurate description. They changed gender over their life cycle, reproduced by airborne spores causing budding, and had no family relationships whatsoever. You could play them, if you thought about it, but they had very little that was like humanity about them.

Sure the alien races encountered elsewhere were considerably more stereotypical; but given the difficultly of creating alien races in the first place, and of communicating the concept sufficiently that they can be presented as alien secondly, it's a bit much to expect a game to produce consistently original aliens for what are essentially minor parts in play.

Combat wasn't always deadly, nor was it particularly safe. We lost a character to an unexectedly potent attack once, and we always tried to fight smart because of the hazards.

We never owned a space ship, and had little hope of doing so; we traveled as passengers on hired liners and other ships, mostly.

I'm curious that the original post did not mention this game. The impression given was that the writer had tried many science fiction games and found none that were satisfying. I'm curious as to whether there was a heartbreaker aspect to Star Frontiers that I overlooked, or whether it was ignored when it came out, possibly because it was a TSR game. The core set was not complete; the detailed space ship rules were a second installment which worked pretty well and made the technology skills far more important, as these were prerequisites to most space ship operation skills--in turn making the spaceship game more of an upper level play concept, as you had to have reached top skill levels in some of your technology skills to get even basic scores in pilot, astrogation, or engineering. There was a shortcut to getting to the spaceship level of play, if you wanted (I tried it in a separate game), by being a cadet training for space fleet. I didn't do much with that, but it seemed to work. The late supplement Zebulon's Guide to the Galaxy Volume I was interesting in some of its expansion ideas, but much of it relied on the anticipated Volume II, which WotC reliably informs me was never published.

--M. J. Young

Hello,

How many times do I have to say it ... Star Frontiers by definition cannot be a heartbreaker, and neither can Gamma World, Metamorphosis Alpha, Traveller, or Skyrealms of Jorune. Heartbreakers are published in a later historical period - again, by definition. We are discussing these earlier games in order to understand the aesthetic parameters that were treated as rock-solid by later authors. M.J., does that make more sense?

Kedamono, that's a great list. I also think that the assumptions about aliens can be specified even tighter: they include the short, agile, and smartmouthed race; the big, lumpy, but perhaps quite bright race; the Kzinti/Klingon race with all the combat adds which always goes off about honor; and the ethereal psychic race.

Thomas, you're missing the point - in SF role-playing games, the humans are often very diverse, and in fact, Dune is often a major starting-point for the authors. The point Kedamono and others are making is that the aliens are not diverse, but rather serve the role they serve in much literary and cinema SF - to dramatize a particular human issue. This may or may not be a bad thing or a good thing - which again, is not the point. What matters in this thread is whether science fiction role-playing games take this idea as a starting point for their design parameters, which I think they do.

One of my frustrations with discussing science fiction (or various stories which are labeled whatever they're labeled, SF, etc), is that fandom crops up sooner or later. Someone feels the need to rave about how great such-and-such author is, and someone else feels the need to enter into a debate about some nuance of such-and-such author's work, and then someone starts talking about how cool or uncool whatever film adaptation of such-and-such author's work is ... So, to be blunt and clear, everyone, please leave your SF-convention hats at home when posting here.

Best,
Ron

One problem with the Heartbreaker mode as well is that while there was really not published fantasy that fit the D&D model to any deep extent there certainly is a lot of SF that fits the space/laser-gun/funny-headed alien model.

In terms of 'narrative elements' IME, Traveler does kind of mimic the actual fiction. Not exactly, of course, but the standard Traveler universe isn't a very far cry from Star Trek, Star Wars, or Ring World.

[Yes, in specifics there are vast differences but in generalities you could play the crew of a starship on a 5-year mission in Traveler, or fly a spacecraft past Imperial Blockade ships, or investigate a massive alien construct]

The fact that major generic system's space books fall into this model is pretty indicative that there's a different underlying set of assumptions. Fantasy Hero and GURPS Fantasy did NOT re-create the D&D model with any serious fidelity, IMO (elves and dwarves aside, there was no real 'cleric-role,' lots of world-stuff in Yirth, etc.)

But the fact is, these games, the ones I'm even passingly familiar with (and I would exclude cyberpunk games from the list) that portray a space-opera world do so not because of fidelity to the source game as the Fantasy Heartbreaker shows but actually to the source fiction to one degree or another. Traveler's shotgun-weilding space-traders are, if anything, somewhat removed from the standard space-opera fiction.

That makes them a fundamentally different animal from the Fantasy Heartbreaker. One can look at design limitations one precieves but, IMO, the later space games weren't really all that much like Traveler systemically. Certainly we didn't see a lot of games where you could lose a character during chargen.

I think the charge of Heartbreaker (and in the essay, I think it's clearly a 'charge') is being leveled, improperly. Much of the accusation applies directly to the fiction being emulated and little applies to the mechanics which one might presume are derravitive (James Bond also includes a vehicle system, a combat system, and some general assumptions about what badguys would be like within certain stereotypes--that doesn't make it a Science Fiction Heartbreaker and the traditional model of game with a character generation system and a combat system isn't enough to hang a Heartbreaker lable on either, IMO).

-Marco

Hello,

Marco, I do see your point that the source fiction plays a greater role in the design of SF role-playing games than it does in fantasy role-playing games. However, I don't think that point negates the heartbreaker designation. There does exist a body of role-playing games, published from the late 1980s to the present, which conform to a fairly strict set of aesthetic and rules standards concerning "science fiction," and which are commercial disasters. The relationship to sources just works a little differently, that's all - not only a standard set of source games, but also a standard set of SF motifs from the larger pop culture. I think the two sources are sufficiently tightly linked not to offer any sort of conceptual difficulty.

Did you see my post at the end of the first page? It was directed to some of your earlier points, among others.

Best,
Ron

Hi Ron,

I did see it, yes--and the conclusion that SF HB's were weak on purpose of play is, I think, insightful (being in the space-FBI in Star Frontiers did make the game more purposeful, IMO). But then, if the game has a different relation to the fiction, I think there are two points that need to be examined.

Firstly, why are we still using the Heartbreaker designation? What is it that breaks the heart about these games? In the original essay it seemed that it was the elements of design (and, mostly, not setting per-se) that were really and truly good--but were, in your analysis, shackled due to either not being incorrectly presented innovative or due to not overcoming the baggage of the basic non-literary D&D mythology.

Originally it was not simply that some designer poured his heart into a game that was not a comercial succes. Does Encounter Critical* count? I would think not, since I don't believe that it would contain the innate value that the Fantasy Heartbreakers did--but it certainly fits the mold of traditional design (from the 70's), lots of weapons and combat, and I don't think it could really be counted as a commercial success (although the authors were probably pleased with its run).

If we've moved from analysis of the evolutionary tree of game-design to genre critique (look at all those books and movies with mono-culture planets, simplistic aliens, and laser-gun centric resolutions) or a question of commerical success then I think it's becoming a different and, IMO, less insightful form of commentary.

Specifically it is becoming what the term Heartbreaker is commonly used as--rather than how you, to my understanding, first meant it: a term used to designate a game in a given genre as lackluster or inferior.

Seecondly, Star Hero was not, AFAIK, a commercial success--and it gave no guidance to the players about what they were supposed to do. Structure wise it had skills, a combat system, and a spaceship system.

How do we distinguish it from any other Heartbreaker (considering that it contained the char-gen rules in the book, making it different from GURPS Space in that regard).

If it is a Heartbreaker then it gets the status purely on it's application to genere in a broad manner. The term is more about setting than mechanics--and I think that simply calling the games 'space-opera' might be more meaningful.

-Marco
* Encounter Critical: does it count?
http://www.pen-paper.net/modules.php?op=modload&name=Downloads&file=index&req=viewdownload&cid=7

Ron Edwards wrote: How many times do I have to say it ... Star Frontiers by definition cannot be a heartbreaker, and neither can Gamma World, Metamorphosis Alpha, Traveller, or Skyrealms of Jorune. Heartbreakers are published in a later historical period - again, by definition. We are discussing these earlier games in order to understand the aesthetic parameters that were treated as rock-solid by later authors. M.J., does that make more sense?

The original fantasy heartbreaker article was interesting because it showed examples of these heartbreakers that had great ideas for a few simple things then fell back on what they knew (d&d) for everything else. For me at least something like that will be necessary for sci-fi. Where are these games that fall back on how it was done in x? I havent seen any really but that may just be me.

That's another problem for sci-fi rpg's there is no monolith like d&d to fall back to. Traveller was pretty big as was Gamma World, Star Frontiers, and a few others but none of them were big in the way D&D was big in the fantasy market. In fact I would think that where the designers looked to for how it was done before was often outside sci-fi rpg's, back to d&d or something else they'd played before.

One thing I think Ron touched on when he spoke of lack of purpose for most Sci-fi games is the inherent sim basis of most of these games. They were very focused on detailing the setting and how the universe worked for the most part without bringing up what to do within the universe. You could choose from dozens of types of weapons, professions, or races, but had little guidance on how to develop a story within said universe.

Ron Edwards wrote: Star Frontiers by definition cannot be a heartbreaker, and neither can Gamma World, Metamorphosis Alpha, Traveller, or Skyrealms of Jorune. Heartbreakers are published in a later historical period - again, by definition. We are discussing these earlier games in order to understand the aesthetic parameters that were treated as rock-solid by later authors. M.J., does that make more sense?

Brian (?) wrote: It's easy to me to write about SF heartbreakers because SF rpgs have always broken my heart.

First off, lets put some perspective back into the Heartbreaker moniker. It is not a perjorative term. It is a term that aptly captures the essential point of the entire concept.

A Heartbreaker is a game that we the consumer wanted so very much to love. The cover was engaging, the blurb on the back promised excitement and adventure, the art was evocative, and man...wouldn't it be great to have a really good space game to play...look at that dude...I wanna play him.

And then we get it home...and read it. We can see the author's devotion. The game isn't some slapped together PoS...if it was we never would have fallen for it in the first place. There's some REALLY cool stuff in there...stuff we REALLY REALLY want to like. But ultimately...the game taken as a whole is just warmed over "x". And that's where the Heartbreak part comes in. Like a crush that turns out to not really be "all that" after the first couple of dates (if it takes that long), the game that we were so excited about and held such promise winds up being disappointing.

THAT's what being a Heartbreaker is all about. I don't care "Fantasy" from "Science Fiction" from "Zombie Cowboys". The adjective in front of it is material only in so far as it points out which "x" (or Xs) the game is derivative of.

Calling something a Heartbreaker isn't another way of saying "it sucked". "It sucked" is easy enough to say, we don't need a jargon word for that. Calling it a Heartbreaker represents the actual feeling of sadness a lover of RPGs feels when they find a game that tries so hard, but ultimately doesn't work.


The only question is then...what didn't work? Where did the game fail?

IS there actually a common theme, a common failure, among these games that disappoint that can be described as characteristic of games of this category. OR is the disappointment so based on individual preference that the game is only a "heart breaker" to you. In other words: are these various disappointing titles repeating the same mistakes?

That's where the characteristic lack of familiarity with other games out there comes in. If these designers had familiarized themselves with more than just the core game lines then they might have noticed that they were making the same mistakes as others who went before. They might have realized how common place their "revolutionary" idea actually was.


Whether Sci Fi Heartbreakers exist or not then comes down to whether we can identify consistant, commonly repeated elements across the majority of potential candidates that (in my non exhaustive list):
1) simply duplicate with little substantive value added what the "ancestor" game(s) already did.
2) make extreme effort to "fix" a "problem" that is only a problem for the hardest core niche of gamers (Entire games have been published for the sole purpose of fixing D&D HPs or the Class system). The rest of the game falling back to #1
3) Often includes 1 highly original innovative subsystem that was the designer's primary motivation for the game...the rest of the game falling back to #1.


For a Sci Fi Heartbreaker, what are we looking at?

What are some common features that we see over and over again.

1) Be anything character creation. Very rarely do we see a Sci Fi game where you are limited in your options. Even though most sci-fi stories are very limited in scope (some occuring entirely on a single ship, or to a single family, or about a single conflict)...game designers have this irrational need to let you create the Junior Assistant Bantha Stall Mucker character. If its possible to conceive of a person like that existing in some far corner of the universe, then (the reasoning goes) you should be able to create them as a character. That "should" is to me one of the most telling features of impending Heartbreak. No one can give a satisfactory answer to "why should you" that amounts to anything more than "because".



2) Missing the point of the literature. This is where Sci Fi and Fantasy Heartbreakers have a lot in common. Both are highly derivative of the source literature but both completely miss the point of the literature in their eagerness to emulate the trappings.

Good Sci-Fi literature are morality plays. They take an issue and they use the flexibility of fiction to address it. Most of the best sci-fi stories are highly focused. You don't get details about the rest of the universe in Starship Troopers or Forever War. You don't read about how the common folk live in Dune. Planets and aliens are one dimensional ("the desert world" the "water world", etc.) because they serve a specific function in the story and do not need to be developed beyond that function. Its when hack authors miss the purpose of those functions and just start creating Desert Worlds and Water Worlds because "that's all those other authors did", that you wind up with mass produced Sci-Fi Drek that's every bit as prevalent as the mass produced Fantasy Drek. RPG designers then do the same thing and Voila...yet another ho hum sci-fi setting.

People miss the point that every planet the Enterprise visited was just a stage for the "issue of the week" to be played out on. It wasn't meant to be a complete world, a complete culture, or a fully diverse people. So simply copying the format into a game without copying over the purpose (of presenting an issue to wrestle with that the world is just a back drop for) is, for me, a key "Heart Breaker ahead" sign post.

Even the Venerable Traveler was guilty of this. At least, I don't remember any "random issuer generator" alongside the atmospheric content generator.


3) The one cool idea. Go down the list of of some of the games that have been mentioned here. Chances are you'll be able to identify what the one cool idea was that motivated the designer to write the game in the first place. Some times its a Fix. Other times its an original idea. Maybe its a really neat alien. Or a piece of technology of the "what would the world be like if "X" existed" nature. The "Cool idea" will often resemble other "Cool Ideas". Frex, in Dune people fight with knives because shields render firearms ineffective. That's a cool idea. Once a gamer gets an idea like that into their heads, they often feel the need to design an entire game around it. How many games can you identify that had a cool idea like that and then the rest of the game was just thrown together around it?

And THEN...and here's where the Heart Break comes in...instead of JUST making the game about that cool idea and the select types of characters involved with it...we revert back to "be-anything character creation" and the Cool Idea just gets lost in a world populated with Bantha Stall Muckers.

Valamir wrote: First off, lets put some perspective back into the Heartbreaker moniker. It is not a perjorative term. It is a term that aptly captures the essential point of the entire concept.

1) Be anything character creation. Very rarely do we see a Sci Fi game where you are limited in your options. Even though most sci-fi stories are very limited in scope (some occuring entirely on a single ship, or to a single family, or about a single conflict)...game designers have this irrational need to let you create the Junior Assistant Bantha Stall Mucker character. If its possible to conceive of a person like that existing in some far corner of the universe, then (the reasoning goes) you should be able to create them as a character. That "should" is to me one of the most telling features of impending Heartbreak. No one can give a satisfactory answer to "why should you" that amounts to anything more than "because".

2) Missing the point of the literature. This is where Sci Fi and Fantasy Heartbreakers have a lot in common. Both are highly derivative of the source literature but both completely miss the point of the literature in their eagerness to emulate the trappings.

Good Sci-Fi literature are morality plays. They take an issue and they use the flexibility of fiction to address it. Most of the best sci-fi stories are highly focused. You don't get details about the rest of the universe in Starship Troopers or Forever War. You don't read about how the common folk live in Dune. Planets and aliens are one dimensional ("the desert world" the "water world", etc.) because they serve a specific function in the story and do not need to be developed beyond that function. Its when hack authors miss the purpose of those functions and just start creating Desert Worlds and Water Worlds because "that's all those other authors did", that you wind up with mass produced Sci-Fi Drek that's every bit as prevalent as the mass produced Fantasy Drek. RPG designers then do the same thing and Voila...yet another ho hum sci-fi setting.

3) The one cool idea. Go down the list of of some of the games that have been mentioned here. Chances are you'll be able to identify what the one cool idea was that motivated the designer to write the game in the first place. Some times its a Fix. Other times its an original idea. Maybe its a really neat alien. Or a piece of technology of the "what would the world be like if "X" existed" nature. The "Cool idea" will often resemble other "Cool Ideas". Frex, in Dune people fight with knives because shields render firearms ineffective. That's a cool idea. Once a gamer gets an idea like that into their heads, they often feel the need to design an entire game around it. How many games can you identify that had a cool idea like that and then the rest of the game was just thrown together around it?

Valamir wrote: Missing the point of the literature. This is where Sci Fi and Fantasy Heartbreakers have a lot in common. Both are highly derivative of the source literature but both completely miss the point of the literature in their eagerness to emulate the trappings.

Good Sci-Fi literature are morality plays. They take an issue and they use the flexibility of fiction to address it.

Kedamono wrote:
Why can't you have a space based SFRPG, where spaceships are very expensive, government owned, and that travel between worlds is a once in a lifetime event for the average citizen of this game universe? This way, when the PCs get a chance to travel to another world, it is a major event. However, for the most part, the game revolves around the people and places of the one world they start on.

Another favorite assumption made by SFRPGs is that all worlds have a monoculture. Hell, that's not even true for our own world, not for a long, long while, if ever.

Well, ideas are cheap... so here are mine.

I actually started a scifi game where there are starships and such, but the players are on one planet. They are P.I.s and they often work for offworld insurance companies checking claims on a tapped out mineral planet. Pretty mundane stuff. The emphasis is on retro 20th century fashion (flappers and spats mixed with disco, to the future, it is all the same of the wacky creativity of the 20th) and a pulpy noir feel. I also use a lot of my copywriting background as pointed satire of current advertising trends. But that idea isn't really original (Bladerunner's coke ads come to mind). I'm starting out small. Just twin cities at the moment, no attempt to do anything with the planet except general info and terms for the players.

The other idea I always wanted to PLAY, but never wanted to run (hence, it ain't happenin') is that the conflict is with a biosphere of a planet. The players and allies are colonists, dropped off. The planet is wily (psychic planets have popped a couple of times in my readings) and voracious... tame the place (or at least your corner) or perish. So sociology and biology and engineering are just as important as knowing which end of a blaster to point at the target.

So, in one idea, the tension is mostly social. Who you know, who'd ya piss off and who rubbed who out... pretty much any Dashell Hammet story. The other idea, the tension is mostly man vs. nature. Just an alien nature, so the GM can whip out lots of surprises.

Sure. Combat can happen in both settings, but it doesn't have to dominate. Not relying on combat for tension/drama/conflict in the colony scenario would take a lot of work, that I admit. More science that I can bring to bear for sure. But I believe it could be done.

What breaks my heart... or at least my head... is the technobabble lists of gear in Gurps or Hero or Traveller. I used to think such shopping lists were cool. Now, I just find them distracting to the actual story/plot/characters. I just don't care. They don't generate story. My players hate equi9pment management. Sure, cybernetics and genesplicing can CREATE cool characters... but rarely does a Tivo PulseMod Scanner Alpha do much for me. Trinity had such a small amount of gear that I actually found myself being more interested.

I'm not sure how to make technology more accesible to story. Each little leap of techno extrapolation can have huge social (environmental/business etc etc) implications. At some point, ya gotta draw the line and say "the game starts here and this stuff is in play". I think fantasy is a lot easier to control the info because while a scimitar and a broadsword ARE different, they are still sharp things to swing and hurt people. A magnetic railgun has implications, but an anti-matter gun has even greater ones.

If you can make the tech cool and interesting and accesible ( huge, tall order here), then I think there is a better chance of avoiding heartbreak status. Of course, what *I* find cool & interesting, the next gamer might find yawn-worthy.

Marco wrote:
From day one, I've said that the term Heartbreaker would (and is) used in the common language as a way to give a game you don't feel is up-to-snuff a good condescending pat on the head and send it on its way. That wasn't the original meaning--but that's how it's used here and how it's being defended.

If the game is very focused in one part (the intended action) and not in another (char-gen), then, yes, that can be a problem in design--but that isn't the same thing as 'make anyone you want' for a 'play in a far-future universe' game which I think a lot of these are.

If a game is NOT strictly limited in it's context (you play a member of the Robinson family who is lost in space, forex) then the open char-gen shouldn't be a sign of a Heartbreaer at all. If it is, this makes Star Hero a Heartbreaker. And GURPS Space. Hell, it makes Transhuman Space a heartbreaker because you can be anyone in that universe.

Expecting some direction to come from the players and GM's isn't unreasonable (although I concede that most games--especially earlier ones--could do better in laying out how to organize games). Most games from the 70's and 80's did a mediocre job of hand-holding in this respect, IMO.

MJ Young wrote: I think this is dangerously close to saying that a sci-fi game that doesn't support narrativist play is a heartbreaker. I'm doubtful. After all, it suggests that it is not Star Trek if the focus of the players is on the gadgets and technology, even if every scrap of that aspect is ripped from the show. I don't buy it.

Valamir wrote:
You can see condescending if you like. I don't.

The original essay was very clear that despite the effort and the buried gem to be found that ultimately these games were failures. They were failures because, despite the gem, there was a laundry list of things they did wrong.

Not, "things they did that I don't personally like". But "things they did wrong and you should learn from that and not repeat those mistakes".


That isn't perjorative. That's applying professional criticism.

I don't buy it. Once again the question of "why" is answered with nothing more than "because". Under what set of circumstances is "Make anyone you want" a good value added design goal? How does that help capture the feel or flavor of science fiction. What was the designers purpose for going that route rather than a more tightly limited one.

Where SF Heartbreakers "miss the point" is when they copy the Klingons without understanding that the only reason the Klingons worked was because of what they represented. Take them out of that context and they don't work. And you just have yet another Sci-fi game with aliens with funny clothes.

Valamir wrote: I don't buy it. Once again the question of "why" is answered with nothing more than "because". Under what set of circumstances is "Make anyone you want" a good value added design goal? How does that help capture the feel or flavor of science fiction. What was the designers purpose for going that route rather than a more tightly limited one.

If the designer can't list off a half dozen bullet points for why its a superior option for this setting for this game...and the best he can do is come up with an answer that amounts to "because someone might wanna play a Bantha Stall Mucker"...then this is a design flaw. Not a feature. Its a choice made with no real reason behind it other than the assumption that "that's how its supposed to be". And THAT speaks to the very core of why the game is a Heart Breaker.

"Be any Character you want" is a design flaw...period. Unless, and only unless, the designer has a damn good reason for why that option is superior to a more limited option. And "Maybe someone might want to play 'X'" is not a damn good reason. "Maybes" are damn poor reasons to base critical design decisions on.

Marco,

Much as I can understand your point, and where you are coming from, I think you are wrong. And I think you are wrong because we are talking about Science Fiction as a genre, as opposed to fantasy as a genre.

As a genre, Science Fiction is not about spaceships, technology, aliens, or the future. Science fiction, much moreso than fantasy, is about dealing with modern humans and modern or timeless issues. The "futuristic setting" that comes with them is a stage, rather than the point.

In any science fiction literature you care to talk about, the technology and the year are nothing more than Color...they are Plot Device.

Science fiction is not and never has been about realistic portrayals of actual humanity in the future. Big spaceships, laser pistols, cryogenic suspension, teleporters, etc. are all props. One thing doesn't change in all those stories: they're about very modern people who just happen to live in a future era, who are wrestling with either notably modern or timeless moral/ethical issues.

You could rewrite those stories into the modern age, and the people would not change, only the backdrop. THAT is the point of science fiction: "What would we be like if we had this stuff?" not "What would it be like if we had this stuff?"

This is why the question: "Why can't I play Harry Mudd?" is a red herring -- science fiction literature has never been about "what it would be like to live in the future." Yet SF RPGs are. Being able to play Harry Mudd misses the point of the whole of the genre!

Science fiction isn't about the science, or the technology, or space, or the future, or "being there." It never has been. It's always been about us, right now, today. This is the element that defines science fiction as a genre, and has since its inception.

Science Fiction is defined by being a morality play: whether any of us like that or not, or whether we become incensed that Science Fiction isn't about Exploration at all.

Perhaps this is what Brian refers to as "breaking his heart" -- SF RPGs fail to be about what Science Fiction itself is about at its central axis? Instead, they attempt to be "really being in the future"?

Marco wrote: The answer is that the game designer may not know better than the GM and players how the group wishes to approach the fiction. If I give you Known Space, how am I to know what position you wish to take in it?

You can say that's not a good idea for a game but, frankly, that's your opinion. Speaking as someone who always wanted to play Harry Mudd in Star Trek, I find my opinion disagrees.

I think this is dangerously close to saying that a sci-fi game that doesn't support narrativist play is a heartbreaker. I'm doubtful. After all, it suggests that it is not Star Trek if the focus of the players is on the gadgets and technology, even if every scrap of that aspect is ripped from the show. I don't buy it.
--M. J. Young

Raven,
I have a great deal of appreciation for what you (and Ralph) are saying--so much so that I'm really reluctant to argue it any more. I'm not unaware of methods of translating fiction to RPG-formats in ways other than a straight-up virtuality.

On the other hand, I wouldn't write an essay talking about these story-games that break my heart because they don't get cause-and-effect right and clearly don't understand immersive play.*

So I am going to keep going.

1. As a critique of games the essay is co-opting the Heartbreaker term and methodlogy in order to argue against a certain translation of fiction-to-game. The idea of taking a fictional universe and faithfully reproducing the cause-and-effect world is, IMO, a very, very legitimate way to render that fiction accessbile across the GNS and GDS spectrum.

He is not doing the same thing that Ron did in the Fantasy essay although it wears the same clothes--and I find the repeated charges (again, Traveler's trade is deadly dull--huh?) to be exactly what I didn't like about the term's use in general conversation.

NOTE: The essay doesn't evidence any appeciation of the games the same way that Ron's did of the fantasy games he chose.

2. A game that lets me 'live in the future' (as a method of translating a fictional reality into a RPG) is a very effective tool in the with which to explore human-experience issues (or to keep some sort of 'point' as per GNS-Sim, I would expect too). Consider:

(a) Taking away my ability to play Harry Mudd, just because the game designer thinks it's missing the point is a lot like an author complaining that RPG'ers in his world are bound to miss the point by playing in it.

(b) Being Harry Mudd is full of wonderful premise: faced with self-righteous but enlightened federation goons, being a rebel has deep potential, IMO. Taking that away because you don't t think it's the point is just limiting to me--I'll keep looking until I find a system that works for me. My story isn't invalid just because it's different from Star Trek's main stories

But my Harry Mudd story gains its power and accessibility from being in the Star Trek world. So I have an authentic use for those elements even though I'm not using them the way the Star Trek-Play-A-Federation-Officer game wants me to.

(c) Looking at this:

greyorm wrote:
You could rewrite those stories into the modern age, and the people would not change, only the backdrop. THAT is the point of science fiction: "What would we be like if we had this stuff?" not "What would it be like if we had this stuff?"

Science fiction isn't about the science, or the technology, or space, or the future, or "being there." It never has been. It's always been about us, right now, today. This is the element that defines science fiction as a genre, and has since its inception.

Perhaps this is what Brian refers to as "breaking his heart" -- SF RPGs fail to be about what Science Fiction itself is about at its central axis? Instead, they attempt to be "really being in the future"?

NN wrote:
Id say that Simulationist and Gamist play is much much trickier in a sci-fi setting than a fantasy one.

Kedamono wrote: Problem was that Harry Mudd was not playable in the original Star Trek RPG because the role of civilians, especially traders and merchants let alone con men, was never defined. FASA, God bless them, did their very best to flesh out the universe and try to make it work. Especially the TNG Trek. But unless you bought every book and supplement, you couldn't play Harry Mudd out of the box, so to speak.

And what did the GM do? He narrowed the focused and forced the players to create characters of a certain type.

greyorm wrote: I think you are wrong because we are talking about Science Fiction as a genre, as opposed to fantasy as a genre.

As a genre, Science Fiction is not about spaceships, technology, aliens, or the future. Science fiction, much moreso than fantasy, is about dealing with modern humans and modern or timeless issues. The "futuristic setting" that comes with them is a stage, rather than the point.
...
Science Fiction is defined by being a morality play: whether any of us like that or not, or whether we become incensed that Science Fiction isn't about Exploration at all.

Marco wrote: I want to play in 'Star Trek.' Not your Star Trek (which maybe is limited to smarmy command-deck officers who beam the ship's doctor down into unsecured zones with frightening regularity)--and not 'Roddenbery's' either. As has been pointed out, once I start making it my own I'm not really in his Star Trek anymore--I can't play there: he created a TV show, not an RPG.

But as an RPG designer you have the option to get down with me enough to understand that 'because I want to' really is a good enough reason that I should.

Marco,

I think you are strenuously arguing against a point I didn't even express my opinion on: Brian's essay in particular and whether it is correct, incorrect, good, bad, ugly, right, wrong, or whatever. I'm talking about something else entirely, so Point 1 on your list is just noise to me and I don't know why you are again detailing it (in response to me).

Marco wrote: (a) Taking away my ability to play Harry Mudd, just because the game designer thinks it's missing the point is a lot like an author complaining that RPG'ers in his world are bound to miss the point by playing in it.

(b) Being Harry Mudd is full of wonderful premise: faced with self-righteous but enlightened federation goons, being a rebel has deep potential, IMO.

This is true only to an extent. If we are exploring issues of emotion and intuition over logic, having tools like Data and Spock or Asimov's robots creates characters that would change in a modern setting.

I don't want to argue against this--but I do want to note that a great deal of SF gets its 'kick'

Perhaps, but "really being in the future" is, IME, a legitimate way to get to the human-interest stuff that SF 'is about.' The virtualist-approach that those games give you is, IMO, every bit as valid as one that comes pre-packaged with a premise mechanic.

Kedamono wrote:
Yes, you, I, anyone in this discussion, could take the rules and do with them what they will. I'm an old "blue-booker" D&D rpger, been playing since, hmm, 1978. We're all on the upper edge of the bell curve for gaming experience. Trouble is if you write a game for the upper edge, you're not going to sell very many, and hardly any supplements either.

Let's be crassly commercial here. Unless you are writing a RPG as a labor of love, you want to sell the game and make money. So you want to aim at the middle of the bell curve and aim at those people who aren't top-notch GMs, who don't have 20 years worth of roleplaying experience behind them as both a GM and as a Player.

Modern Era, Future Era RPGs need to have narrow focus, lest you end up playing "Paychecks and Pocketbooks". While playing an average joe is OK, we all want to play the heroic character, and to be properly heroic, you need something to be heroic against.

Think about this, how engaging would a Modern Era RPG be if it only modeled reality, and did not provide anything for the characters to do other than their jobs. It would be boring, wouldn't it?

But that is what a lot of SFRPGs are: A Modern Era RPG without the heroics, set in the Future. So instead of doing your 9 to 5, eat dinner, watch the tube while drinking a beer, you do your 10 to 4, replicate dinner, watch the holotank and suck down a bheer bulb.

A good SFRPG needs a theme, a set of conflicts, something to strive against or for. It need not be one theme or set of conflicts, that's fine as long as you as the game designer make sure they don't contradict each other. Besides, that's what supplement are for. :-)

Marco wrote: I think an SFRPG starts with a great deal more potential for characters to lead dramatic lives.

greyorm wrote: Marco,

I think you are strenuously arguing against a point I didn't even express my opinion on: Brian's essay in particular and whether it is correct, incorrect, good, bad, ugly, right, wrong, or whatever. I'm talking about something else entirely, so Point 1 on your list is just noise to me and I don't know why you are again detailing it (in response to me).

Ok, so go play a non-Sorcerer in Sorcerer. See my point? The GAME is wrong FOR YOU...the game for restricting you is not WRONG for restricting you, however.

I agree! But...it has nothing to do with Star Trek, per se. So while the story isn't invalid as a story, it isn't a Star Trek story, either. It might share elements of the setting, but you are playing a completely different game.

That is, you can't "explore Star Trek" by playing Harry Mudd. You especially can't do it when you play Harry Mudd and everyone else plays Federation Officers, because you are playing two very different games at the same table, even if the dice mechanics you are using are the same. Free-for-all wide-open creation is a problem in this respect.

This is true only to an extent. If we are exploring issues of emotion and intuition over logic, having tools like Data and Spock or Asimov's robots creates characters that would change in a modern setting.

Yes, but they ARE tools -- disguised as characters, you bet. What's their purpose? It isn't "to be an android". It is to highlight and comment upon the human condition -- and this is where SF games seem to utterly fail.

All the adherence in the world to real physics, all the cool gadgets available, is not going to produce this aspect of Science Fiction out of thin air. Thinking it will, just because you COULD do something like that sounds eerily similar to me to the mistaken belief that if you sit down and just play your characters, somehow it will all eventually be a story.

In my opinion, this is where the problem is with SF heartbreaker games: the "well, you can do/be ANYTHING" syndrome (often "because it is realistic, and SF is about realism, right?"). This IS the Harry Mudd problem from above. Sure, you CAN play Harry Mudd against the Federation, rife with premise and et al. But the chances that anything coherent is really going to develop out of the more-than-probable mess most groups are going to make of the free-for-all is slim.

Yes. Color = Kick. We're in complete agreement here. However, technology is only meant to showcase the human aspect of the story, and as such, secondary. This is what SF games seem to miss: they try to be SF by being about the "General Products hull". This is what I believe "breaks the heart" about such SF games, because they are nothing like their source genre in a very noticable way in this fashion.

I disagree here, simply because I feel the nature of SF as literature and the nature of Fantasy as literature differ so broadly in this respect. This is simply not about Narrativism vs. Simulationism. It IS about "genre versimilitude", which is required by both Narrativist and Simulationist modes (and to a lesser extent, about "playability").

Hello,

Everyone, play nice, please. Wandering as this thread might be, I'm gaining an immense amount of perspective and (I hope) insight from it.

Best,
Ron

daMoose_Neo wrote:
So, why exactly does Sci-Fi have more potential?

I’m sorry, but I really think there’s a lot of misreading going on here.

Brian laid out a few points succinctly and clearly:

• SFHBs take their lead from Traveller (and a few other early games)
• SFHBs tend to have very crunchy combat systems, derived ultimately from miniatures
• SFHBs take very little advantage of the vast range and complexity of the literary and other SciFi genre
• SFHBs are very rarely innovative in mechanics, though they sometimes tout themselves so
• SFHBs generally lean on a narrow type of space opera genre which has in other media not actually survived very well—the Traveller computers look quaint, for example
• SFHBs commonly put a lot of time into creating aliens which are basically cheesy knockoffs of (a) the bug-eyed monster, (b) the human culture stereotype, or (c) the earth animal turned sentient species
• SFHBs emphasize combat as the sole form of important conflict

Then Brian goes on and makes some suggestions for getting out of this narrow pattern.

As far as I can tell, Brian buys these games religiously in the hope that maybe this time things will be different. They never turn out to be, so they break his heart.

These things are heartbreakers a la Ron’s essay because

• They constantly recapitulate the structures of one small group of early games (Traveller, Star Frontiers, etc.)
• They keep touting themselves as doing something new, when they don’t
• They are deeply naive about what buyers will actually want
• They are clearly worked out in a lot of depth because the designers love them

So what’s hard about this?

What I have not read, in four pages of discussion, is someone saying, “No, these games do not do this.” I have not heard someone say that there aren’t a huge number of games that fit this description. I have not heard someone claim that this description is not basically Traveller and Star Frontiers over again.

What I have heard is:

• No, Star Frontiers was different. – Not the point, as it’s one of the founding games.
• No, what I like about SciFi is different. – Totally irrelevant.
• No, I define SciFi differently. – Totally irrelevant.
• No, you’re just trashing SciFi games. – On the contrary, Brian has I think made a pitch for why he continues to buy the things and how he just keeps hoping that one day they’ll break out of their self-imposed shell.

I realize this is going to be taken as a flame or something, but I don’t mean it so. I think we’ve wandered rather far afield.

One thing Brian does not discuss, and I am not at all sure he should have, is games that explicitly depend upon a specific work of sci-fi — Dune, Star Trek, etc. I’m not sure such games could be heartbreakers by his definition or Ron’s. It’s an interesting question, and worth discussion, but I think completely irrelevant here.

clehrich wrote: Brian laid out a few points succinctly and clearly:

• SFHBs take their lead from Traveller (and a few other early games)
• SFHBs tend to have very crunchy combat systems, derived ultimately from miniatures
• SFHBs take very little advantage of the vast range and complexity of the literary and other SciFi genre
• SFHBs are very rarely innovative in mechanics, though they sometimes tout themselves so
• SFHBs generally lean on a narrow type of space opera genre which has in other media not actually survived very well—the Traveller computers look quaint, for example
• SFHBs commonly put a lot of time into creating aliens which are basically cheesy knockoffs of (a) the bug-eyed monster, (b) the human culture stereotype, or (c) the earth animal turned sentient species
• SFHBs emphasize combat as the sole form of important conflict


Then Brian goes on and makes some suggestions for getting out of this narrow pattern.

As far as I can tell, Brian buys these games religiously in the hope that maybe this time things will be different. They never turn out to be, so they break his heart.

These things are heartbreakers a la Ron’s essay because

• They constantly recapitulate the structures of one small group of early games (Traveller, Star Frontiers, etc.)
• They keep touting themselves as doing something new, when they don’t
• They are deeply naive about what buyers will actually want
• They are clearly worked out in a lot of depth because the designers love them

clehrich wrote: These things are heartbreakers a la Ron’s essay because

• They constantly recapitulate the structures of one small group of early games (Traveller, Star Frontiers, etc.)
• They keep touting themselves as doing something new, when they don’t
• They are deeply naive about what buyers will actually want
• They are clearly worked out in a lot of depth because the designers love them

So what’s hard about this?

What I have not read, in four pages of discussion, is someone saying, “No, these games do not do this.” I have not heard someone say that there aren’t a huge number of games that fit this description. I have not heard someone claim that this description is not basically Traveller and Star Frontiers over again.

greyorm wrote:

Marco wrote: Perhaps, but "really being in the future" is, IME, a legitimate way to get to the human-interest stuff that SF 'is about.' The virtualist-approach that those games give you is, IMO, every bit as valid as one that comes pre-packaged with a premise mechanic.

I disagree here, simply because I feel the nature of SF as literature and the nature of Fantasy as literature differ so broadly in this respect. This is simply not about Narrativism vs. Simulationism. It IS about "genre versimilitude", which is required by both Narrativist and Simulationist modes (and to a lesser extent, about "playability").

>>>>>>>Please ignore ill-advised rambling<<<<<<<

John Kim wrote: As far as I can tell, no one is bothering to actually discuss the games in question. I'm not familiar with most of the games on the list, so I can't say with certainly that Brian is wrong. However, I can and did say that for the two I was familiar with (Shatterzone and Aurora), he was completely wrong about.

Chris,
What you see as misreading, I think is just disagreement. Let's take a look at this:

Of your seven main points:
1 is that the games derive from Traveler.
3 are that the games are space-opera.
3 is that they are crunchy combat-focused.


For 1 (Traveler), concerning these games, let's ask:
.- Must you play ex-military in them?
.- Is the core mechanic for most of those games a 2d6 roll-low?
.- Do many of those games use Hexidecimal for stats?
.- Can you die during char-gen in many of those derived games?
.- Do most of those games have the same ballisitcs weapons focus that Traveler did?

I don't know the answers but if there's a bunch of 'yeses' then I think we have a solid point. If the answer is 'no' then what early SF games do these derrive from? The essay doesn't say.

For the next 3 (Space opera) let's ask:
.- Does space opera tend towards mono-culture aliens?
.- Does space opera tend towards laser-guns and space ships?
.- Does technology in space opera tend to look 'quaint' today?
.- Is space opera a narrow segment of fiction like, say, Private Investigator fiction?

If the answer is 'yes' (and it is, I'm pretty sure) then we have departed *strongly* from the Heartbreaker theme. This is where Star Trek comes into the picture.

If three of the points in your list can be applied to Star Trek and Star Wars then the essay is, IMO, really making negative commentary on the fictional genre and not on the execution of the games that translate it.

For the final 3 (combat) let's ask:
.- Did Traveler, which is clearly lumped right in there, make anything other than combat fun?

The answer is "its opinion" (and my answer is 'yes'). The idea that combat-system = combat-focus is in no way proven. The idea that given no direct guidance from the game as to who the players will be the focus will be shooting games is just one person's experience.

In Star Wars, you play a rebel soldier: that's a lot of shooting things.
In Star Trek, even given the role of a bridge crew member, there was still, IMO, a good deal of shooting things.
In Star Frontiers, where you play a space-agent, there is a lot of shooting things.

In roleplaying in general there is a lot of exciting combats.

What's 'so hard about this' is that I don't think the analysis (either in the original essay or as you laid out with your bullet points) has a lot of merrit.

It gigs games on adherence to source material one minute, traditional RPG design the next. If space-opera writers can't give us complex aliens (and Raven argues that those characters are just tools for exploring the human condition) why would our hearts be broken by RPG's that faithfully reproduce that.

-Marco

clehrich wrote:
Ultimately, Aurora is the same damn thing as everything else: a straight-up "now we get in our spaceships or go down on the planet" sort of thing. The novelty of Aurora lies exclusively, so far as I can tell, in the alien designs (setting aside mechanics which I can't discuss because I'm really bad on the history of mechanics). And are these really new?

Hmmm.

No one has mentioned Metabarons. Where the theme is Heroes rise up out of the galactic ennui that grips society (with lots of exciting space opera fights). But while it does have that theme, the rule book does concentrate on a lot of combat stuff. In fact, the theme is not well laid out... it takes reading the comics in the Metabarons universe (which there are several titles) to get a handle on it. Its a Heartbreaker w/o the comics. With the comics is much less a Heartbreaker, because there are several examples on how to run situations that aren't combat oriented (Jon DiFool, Moebius's creation, runs from most combats)

I dunno. For me, I think that might be the problem with scifi rpging. Scifi is much easier to absorb in literary (or tv/movie form) than it is in role playing. Maybe because I've swung a sword, ridden a horse, farmed crops... I have a visceral understanding of those things. I don't have a visceral understanding of zero gee, xeno contact or zipping ftl.


Of course, I have imagination. I can imagine zero gee, aliens and ftl just fine. But my point is that a lot of the elements in scifi rulebooks, the equipment, the long history of HOW HUMANITY GOT TO THIS POINT, the societal deviations from our own, is just NOT EASILY ABSORBED. So game designers focus on what is easily absorbed, combat generated conflict.

In fantasy, a lot of that stuff can be glossed over, because I have a gamer's understanding of feudal society (after all, that is looking backwards), equipment lists aren't difficult (shovel, axe, sword... pretty basic stuff, and I've used all of them personally). But Super-multi use scanners have to be defined in game mechanics so we know how to use them in play. In a novel or tv or movie, the spaceship scanner works just so. Firefly's (Serenity) scanners work at a different level than the Enterprises. There are no mechanics, it was simply the creator's decisions that made it so.

That doesn't work for gaming. It needs to be defined, so it can be used in play. Often for purposes that push its design specs. "Can I calibrate the scanner to search only for bio-organic robots?"

What breaks my heart about almost all scifi games is that I want the depth of exploration of that universe without ridiculous amounts of detail for details sake. Traveller really started the ball. Spaceship construction is horribly complex... yes, spaceships probably would be horribly complex to construct... but this is a game. I want the gist of what is to be a spacefaring society more than I want the gist of spaceship engineering.

When you add all the booklets, I remember Traveller as being this immense, complicated mess of a unverse. Cool in a lot of ways, but also a bit sterile and emotionless.

Which brings me back to Metabarons. Because of the comic source as background, it is anything but emotionless... operatic and wacky weird french stuff... but not emotionless.

I have not come across a scifi product that has described its geist succinctly except maybe Trinity. And I have never successfully run a science fiction campaign, although I've tried several times. It comes down to this. I think scifi is simply harder to do. There is more to define, more to think about and no one has done it to my knowledge with organization and brevity combined with the necessary detail. I DO believe it can be done. Especially now, with 25 years of role playing behind us to draw upon.

There's a lot going on in here. I'll try to add some points which I think are relevant:

1. In the very second line of the "Fantasy Heartbreakers" essay, we get:

So combine this with the facts that many would-be hopeful role-playing games are fantasy, or "fantasy" anyway

And by this it is meant, I believe, that these games are not really trying to emulate the fantasy genre. They're trying to emulate Dungeons and Dragons. They are a simulation of a simulation, to get a bit Baudrillardian.

As others have mentioned, there doesn't seem to be an archetypical SF game with such an overwhelming presence in the genre, the way D&D is to its. And even if there is, no one seems interested in finding it. Everyone is too busy pointing out that in 1983, Foo Games published a dozen copies of Barsoomian Babes, which was swell.

This may or may not be a reflection on the impact Tolkein has had on the literary fantasy genre. If the vast majority of written fantasy consists of footnotes to Tolkein, perhaps it should not be surprising that there are many FRPGs which are little more than footnotes to Gygax.

2. The emphasis on character creation, world creation, equipment creation, etc etc in Traveller and others leads me to think that a lot of the people who 'played' these games never quite managed to make it to the table at all. There's no small amount of this on the FRPG side of the fence, of course, but I think it's been especially embraced with SF games. There is so much setting and mechanics that not having any players is hardly a drawback at all.

3. While we're sticking games into Heartbreaker genre categories, there's one gorilla I think everyone has missed: Call of Cthulhu, and the horror RPG genre. Could be worth some consideration.

4. Perhaps this is the true genius of the d20 licensing concept. Instead of writing games which are sorta kinda like D&D, but with a difference, people can now publish games which are exactly D&D, but with some differences.



Cheers,
Roger

Hmm, perhaps ill-advisedly I'm going to throw in some more cents. The first thing I want to tackle is "what SF is" and whether it is relevant.

I strongly disagree with the notion that SF is just human stories in which the technology is merely colour. That is not so IMO; Marco is quite right to say that they lend grandeur and kick and inspiration to the setting. They are important parts of the setting. IMO, it is precisely the choice to make such elements unimportant or off-stage that makes SFRPG so poor.

Some support for my poisition:

"Science Fiction is that class of prose narrative treating of a situation that could not arise in the world we know, but which is hypothesized on the basis of some innovation in science or technology, or pseudo-technology, whether human or extra-terrestrial in origin. "
Kingsly Amis, New Maps Of Hell (London, 1960)

"Modern science fiction is the only form of literature that consistently considers the nature of the changes that face us, the possible consequences, and the possible solutions... That branch of literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance upon human beings. "
Isaac Asimov (1952)

"The touchstone for scientific fiction, then, is that it describes an imaginary invention or discovery in the natural sciences. The most serious pieces of this fiction arise from speculation about what may happen if science makes an extraordinary discovery. The romance is an attempt to anticipate this discovery and its impact upon society, and to foresee how mankind may adjust to the new condition. "
James O. Bailey, Pilgrims Through Space and Time (New York, 1947)

"SF is a controlled way to think and dream about the future. An integration of the mood and attitude of science (the objective universe) with the fears and hopes that spring from the unconscious. Anything that turns you and your social context, the social you, inside out. Nightmares and visions, always outlined by the barely possible"
Gregory Benford

"Science fiction is really sociological studies of the future, things that the writer believes are going to happen by putting two and two together."
Ray Bradbury


I was very surprised to see Ron say that we should not enagage in a discussion of what SF is; IMO that lies at the heart of the problem. In a manner directly analogous to Ron's discussion of the differences between the fantasy genre as it appears today and the sword and sorcery genre proper, we have to distinguish IMO between science fiction and science fantasy in order to cut through the confusion.

Games and novels which start from assumption that Greyorm cites, that the dilemmas faces the protagonists are common dilemmas that could take place in any setting, and to which the science part of the fiction is largely irrelevant, is IMO 100% wrong. If the science is not real, and the science does not have impact, then it is science fantasy and operates by the rules for fantasy, not SF. The science in SF is not colour, it is Setting and Situation. Of course there must be human conflict, consequences, all the structure of Story that are independant of setting for this to work as an actuial entertainment - but without some sort of scientific exploration being carried out at the same time, without some technical IMPACT on those humans that is present because of the science component, it is simply not SF. Not at all.

I think the situation with derivative works for SF is not quite the same as it is for Fantasy. As Ron pointed ou in his criticism of the genre, quite a lot of modern fantasy is derivative of works that accord with gaming presumptions about fantasy, rather than those that accorded with its sword and sorcery precursor, to the point that novellisations of fantasy game worlds are quite common. I don't think this same situation applies to SF - there are two derivative sources, the first being pop-SF as per Trek, and the second being precursor RPG's in general, not SF RPG's specifically. So I dno;t hink the same relationship between prior RPG and current RPG will apply to SF as it does to fantasy. That is, I think many of them are still doing D&D in space in terms of their RPG derived influences, with the concomitant concentration on combat mechanics at the expense of the SF-derived Big Idea. IMO heartbreaker does legitimately describe some SF RPG's, but not a large quantity, because most have not even had any clear Big Idea in the first place.

Blue Planet qualifies exactly IMO - it was a game I wanted to love. But it has no mode of play that makes use of its uniqueness, and the mode of play it offers by default is almost straight Cyberpunk.

As for the term itself, Marco if you have a real problem with this publish a standard rant and be done. Alternatively, if you feel the term is "commonly" used incorrectly, then use it correctly yourself and correct those who do not. I point out its hardly in common circulation, being Forge coinage.

Anyway, think the attmept to reconcile heartbreakerness with exactly the same terms as apply in fantasy are doomed to confusion. Firtly, quite a lot of the material being discussed is actually fantasy anyway, and secondly because the origin of influences are rather different. I do not think there is a grand daddy of a space game that all others emulate that way there is in Fantasy - but I do think that much the same error occurs with reference to and from much TV SF.

The last couple posts really brought something out to me. The problem with sci-fi role playing isnt that people are looking back to how it was done before and using that despite it's inappropriateness. The problem is that they are designing for every option and in sci-fi the options are virtually limitless.

This works great for the person who has the time, inclination, and ability to fashion a great game out of the tool kit that has been provided if not you get my first run in with Skyrealms of Jorune, railroaded plots or nonsensical encounters from a random table.

Gareth,

1. I think your 'cents' are well worth the price.

Leaving aside my agreement that science is a key attribute of SF, I think you have made an excellent point that the mechanical source for most 70's and 80's games wasn't Traveler so much as D&D (and other precursor games--not, as you say, specifically SFRPGs).

I don't know the mechanics for most of those games but I do know that although Traveler was a strong diversion from D&D in terms of basic mechanics, in concept it was very traditional. I suspect that many of the games on the list owe more to other RPG's than Traveler.

2. This:

contracycle wrote:
As for the term itself, Marco if you have a real problem with this publish a standard rant and be done. Alternatively, if you feel the term is "commonly" used incorrectly, then use it correctly yourself and correct those who do not. I point out its hardly in common circulation, being Forge coinage.

Thanks Contra, for going much quicker to the heart of the matter that I was trying to say. I think the quotes you supplied are excellent and back up what I was feeling about scifi roleplaying games.

Also. I agree, there is no standard for scifi, so Heartbreaking might be a slippery term in this instance. Or has you put it; 'not in large quanity'. Traveller doesn't equate to D&D in terms of impact on its genre, IMO.

Marco wrote: I do know that a game that doesn't give me combat options (mainly ship-to-ship but personal as well, there is some in the book), the ability to make some aliens that are more or less human but may have their quirks, and the ability to play 'anyone' (there are nobles, street kids, military commanders, rebels, etc.) will lock me out of that universe.

Agreed that Focus vs Freedom is an issue with SF games.

Science FICTION, like the literature, deserves a more focused game and system. I look at Contra's quotes and see that true scifi, from the POV of some of its most illustrious authors, uses the technology to address something specific about us and where we are going. The technology in Fiction isn't backdrop or color, its almost an additional character on stage. Consider the Outer Limits TV series on the Sci-Fi channel. I'm more familiar with the newer series myself, though I've seen some of the older ones. Using the given coolness of the week, it asks something of us. Without that, the show couldn't ask the question.

Given we could transverse huge distances in space by cloning ourselves into data, would we have the heart to kill the now obsolete template? Thats one episode- teleporter technology that "faxed" people through the stars with the limitation it generated a second person. To "Balance the Equation", the original template must be destroyed to keep from having multiple people living the same life. In the show, one fax goes wrong and supposidly doesn't send. Come to find out it DID send, and there were now two of the person who was sent and the operator was forced to kill the person still at the station to "balance the equation".
Thus, the technology was at the front of the show, but so were the moral implications- is it okay to kill a clone, and in what situations is it okay to kill another human for a "greater good"?

Science FANTASY, is your D&D in space. You could just as easily shift Star Wars to a D&D styled campaign. Death Star? Floating castle. Lightsabres? Mystic swords. The Force? Magic. X-Wings? Fighter Dragons or other devices. That Outer Limits episode? It'd be harder to do so. After all, if we're relying on Magic, then why not develop a spell that doesn't clone a person to teleport them? D&D has a plain Teleport spell, use that!
Fantasy is the ability to live out in the world or universe of your choice. Folks who wish this should also realize there will be considerable differences. Being a Bantha Stall cleaner means the real odds of you meeting a Jedi are slim to none. Sure, the GM can throw in a contrived excuse or extremly lucky situation, but otherwise why would a Jedi want anything to do with a Bantha Stall mucker?

So, I'd argue that any game calling itself Science FICTION that lets you live as a Bantha Stall mucker and goes into great detail is on such is FANTASY, not Fiction. Anyone who buys it on the FICTION premise, for whatever little diamond in the rough they see ("Ohh! Technical charts for devices! This'll help me create the stuff I need for that session idea I had for X thought!") only to find it helps you develop anti-grav wagons for hauling bigger and bigger loads of Bantha doo-doo and is, in reality a FANTASY, has a right to be Heartbroken and call it a heartbreaker. If it says "Live as a Bantha Keeper!" however, then you have no reason to believe it'll allow you address, in system and in detail, situations where the issues are the moral, ethical, and higher questions regarding the cloning of a 2000 year old specimen who may or may not have been a diety.

clehrich wrote: All that said, I'd say Aurora is a heartbreaker. It broke mine, anyway.

Ultimately, Aurora is the same damn thing as everything else: a straight-up "now we get in our spaceships or go down on the planet" sort of thing. The novelty of Aurora lies exclusively, so far as I can tell, in the alien designs (setting aside mechanics which I can't discuss because I'm really bad on the history of mechanics). And are these really new?

Well, to be sure, the biology of these alien beings is well thought-out. But look at their cultures. What's really new here? Aurora really made a serious stab at not creating monocultures, but when push comes to shove that's exactly what happened.

John Kim wrote: OK, I believe you here, and yet I don't see how it changes the point. What I said is that it doesn't match Bryans' characterization. The aliens might be ultimately monocultural, but none of them are one of bug-eyed-monster / disguised-human-culture / bipedal-Earth-animal. So, objectively, that point is flat-out wrong. Also, it is not particularly Traveller-derived in mechanics or setting. About the most you can say is that it has a mildly crunchy combat system, but at least in mechanics it doesn't seem miniatures-derived to me.

Now, I agree with you, that Aurora seems pretty directionless as far as adventures. It doesn't provide guidance for interesting situations, which is a significant failure on its part. Thus, I'm not surprised that in play for some it devolved down to a dull "beam down", "welcome to my world" routine. Aside from the aliens and the failure dice mechanic, there is no real innovation -- though I think those two are worthy of note.

daMoose_Neo wrote:
Science FICTION, like the literature, deserves a more focused game and system. I look at Contra's quotes and see that true scifi, from the POV of some of its most illustrious authors, uses the technology to address something specific about us and where we are going.

clehrich wrote:
1. Alien (or other) monocultures
2. "Beam down and deal with a situation in a box"
3. "Welcome to my world"

Might these be typical qualities of the heartbreaker? It's been a long time since I read Traveller; does any of this fit that model? If not, where does it come from -- just from Star Trek and the like? Does this have a game model that's being reiterated?

Marco wrote: But that's not really what's being argued here. What's being argued is the presence of the space-opera elements makes the game a Heartbreaker (a lot of those titles had quite a bit of shootin' too, IIRC).

contracycle wrote:
Jovian Chronicles, anyone? Near future setting, no aliens wrinkly-headed or otherwise. Good development of early human space expansion, pretty ships, good science. However again the strong military theme is virtually overriding and yet play is not meaningfully structured to make use of this basis; furthermore, the single campaign game/sample of play provided is set very much in the intelligence world, occurs on one location, and makes very little use of ships except for a stock combat. Especially as this is one of the few settings with significant travel times and no magic propulsion systems, the absence of a game mode specifically dealing with shipboard life is quite striking.

contracycle wrote:
I really do not think this is helping. There is not one thing being argued here - there are people discussing their views. If you object to a view, then please point to whose view you are objecting rather than just saying "here". The issue of whether or not the hHB classification is strictly appropriate is not a big deal IMO.

Response to comments on Breaking the Heart of the Universe

I have found that threads on the Forge, like some exotic cheese, take time to mature. I have found it instructive to sit back a while and watch what develops. Often is can be best to respond to developing themes rather than firing back like an action hero at each and every individual comment. This is especially true with a thread as long as this one.

One theme I should deal with straightaway is the matter of science fiction games based on specific worlds such as Dune, Farscape etc.

It may be instructive to reveiw the description of a heartbreaker.

1/ The are deriviative a very narrow category of science fiction concepts.
2/ They are derivative of a narrow base of gaming concepts.
3/ They are produced with great naivete' about the marketplace.
4/ They are produced as a labor of love by amatuers.

The overwhelming majority of the 'specific worlds' fall into the category of major licensed properties. The amount of Lawyers, Guns and Money necessary to land the license to do (say) the Star Wars rpg places the maker in a realm completely outside criterion 4. Also since they are attempting to attach themselves to a property of proven value, they certainly don't fall under criterion 3. What is a major licensed property? Any movie you might see in your local multiplex, any TV show you might see on network or major cable, any bestselling book. Any character owned by a major comic publisher. (The Albedo license certainly isn't in this category)

As to the matter of Star Frontiers, this game can never be a heartbreaker. Come on people how can any game produced by the then General Motors of the rpg 'industry' meet criterion 4?


Now lets deal with something I think has produced some misunderstanding about my essay. Sometimes I mix comments on games that are manifest non-heartbreakers with those that are.

In my opinion just because a game is a non-sheartbreaker doesn't mean it can't make many of the same mistakes in either design or marketing that heartbreaker typically makes. Star Frontiers is an excellent example.
In my area Star Frontiers came and went as a phenomenon in a couple of years at best. Reason? The game came out during the era of 'Traveler ascendant' . People looked at SF (as did I) and saw Traveler lite, and couldnt see a single reason to stop playing Traveler to play it. (anybody who wants to play Traveler lite can just play Traveler with fewer rules) Star Frontiers made the first three heartbreaker mistakes without being a heartbreaker at all.

Now I I do not mean to suggest that I have actually owned all the heartbreakers in the list. I owned about a third of them at various times, have actually had a chance to at least look through about 2/3 of them (including the semi-legendary 'Reich Star'), just played a game or two in a couple more. I've read so much rpg stuff I'm likeI can spot a heartbreaker from its back cover blurbs and table of contents.

Now one area in which your comments certainly have changed my mind is the area of SFRPG combat, I was wrong it, isn't gamist, it's simulationist to the core. What they are trying to simulate aren't science fiction stories but science fiction wargames.I realize now that I have been fooled, what I mistook to be gamism was really simulationism in pursuit of a wargame experience!
In SF wargames resistance to black hole bazookas is based on cm. of unbreakium. In SF stories it's based on what Prime Time Adventures calls 'Screen Prescence'.... THAT"S why its so hard to kill Captain Kirk with a phaser.

I should also comment on the matter of 'real' science in SF rpgs. I firmly believe that the 'hardness' of an sfrpg is almost soley a matter of color and group creative agenda. After all the ability of a game to sustain a particular level of 'hardness' is ultimatley bounded by the level of scienfic knowledge the group posseses. Therefore it isn't something that can really be instantiated in the rpg design. Its amazing what people are willing to accept as 'hard'. For example Traveler lived for years on it's image as the 'hardest' sfrpg even though Travelertech had a laundry list of things that went against science-as-we-know-it .
In literary SF, so long as the implications are well worked out,there is a gentlemen's agreement not to press to hard as to exactly what is under the hood of many inventions and discoveries. 'Hard' SF is in fact a specialized enough subgenre to need a name of it's own, and even a surpising number of supposedly 'hard' sf writers call upon the gentlemens agreement a lot. Larry Niven is supposed to be among the 'nut and bolts' crowd, but really, how do those magic teleportation booths of his work, and what are those puppeteer ships REALLY made of.?

'Marco' seems very concerned that I'm misusing the heartbreaker label to mearly diss the genre. I don't know what to say except I don't have much affection for the dominant approach rpgs have taken to SF. If that makes my use of the term doubtful then I guess I'll have to live with that. Perhaps he'll see more affection in part 2.

Finally I agree with the consensus that a weak 'how to play' is the downfall of too many SF games. In fact a major factor of what I regard as a successful design is a well considered HtP. More on this later.

Thanx for all the thought and responses to my original essay. You will certainly affect the final article version as well as the upcoming parts. Part 2 is as yet untitled and will deal with what I regard as successful SF designs.

Although I think this is the point Ralph is making, Greyorm expressed it well when he wrote: As a genre, Science Fiction is not about spaceships, technology, aliens, or the future. Science fiction, much moreso than fantasy, is about dealing with modern humans and modern or timeless issues. The "futuristic setting" that comes with them is a stage, rather than the point.

clehrich wrote: Then surely what needs to happen in the discussion is to refine Bryan's points? Not that we've heard from him in a while, but...

1. Alien (or other) monocultures
2. "Beam down and deal with a situation in a box"
3. "Welcome to my world"

Might these be typical qualities of the heartbreaker? It's been a long time since I read Traveller; does any of this fit that model? If not, where does it come from -- just from Star Trek and the like? Does this have a game model that's being reiterated?

contracycle wrote: My main candidate for an actual heartbreaker would be Blue Planet. There is excellent science; fantastic attention to meteorology and geology for an RPG, a stonrgly drawn setting with many implied questions... and yet the stock mode of play appears to be a caribean crime drama on the lines of Magnum PI, or wild west lawlessness on the open frontier. All the science in the setting is pretty much lost, and the opportunity offered by truly non-human PC's wasted.

contracycle wrote: 2300AD was an offshoot of traveller set in an earlier era, just after the developement of interstellar travel. It was a much more bounded, purposeful game than Traveller IMO. It had genuinely interesting aliens, 4 or 5 or so, and apart from the totally weird ones, neither of the two near-human aliens, the Kafer and the Sung, were described as monocultures. Now the Kafer were truly wierd in that their adrenaline response boosted intelligence and not physical power, which meant they were only really sapient in times of stress. This is great, truly alien psychology. Unfortunately the game had a split personality over function - a sizable chunk was oriented around military shipping, and another almost by implication, around the planet on which the war with the Kafer is being conducted. It was not clear how the Kafer were to be used, nor was the military game much fleshed out in any procedural sense. What ther game was About was unclear, and it probably would have been better off to focus fully on the war in the manner of Heavy Gear.

M. J. Young wrote: That's a stupid argument (I apologize, but it is), because frankly good fantasy is about the issues, not the setting, and the same can be said for good westerns, good spy stories, and any other sort of literature.

Hi Ian,

I have some doubts about the primacy of logos in SF. It seems to me that the core of both detective and much hard sf is the ethics of information - with subsets of ethics of truth and ethics of technology - not the logic of argument or the coheranceof a puzzle.

Look at The Big Sleep. Though I've never found the flaws myself, I've heard that there are logical holes in the plot. But that doesn't matter, because it's focus is the consequences of secrets, not setting a challenge to the reader. I think we'll find this true of any successful detective novel.

Likewise Ringworld or Jurrasic Park. Their cores are the ethical question: what do we do with huge secret projects that will influence the survival of the human race?

I begin to suspect that ethos is one of the required criteria for calling a piece of fiction good. Take any great book and ask: what happens if I take away the ethical dimension? I think you'll see that the book loses it's greatness. On the other hand, even in detective and SF, both logos and pathos can be forgiven to some degree or another. However, this doesn't mean that they aren't held to higher standards in SF or detective novels.

b_bankhead wrote:

It may be instructive to reveiw the description of a heartbreaker.

1/ The are deriviative a very narrow category of science fiction concepts.
2/ They are derivative of a narrow base of gaming concepts.
3/ They are produced with great naivete' about the marketplace.
4/ They are produced as a labor of love by amatuers.

'Marco' seems very concerned that I'm misusing the heartbreaker label to mearly diss the genre. I don't know what to say except I don't have much affection for the dominant approach rpgs have taken to SF. If that makes my use of the term doubtful then I guess I'll have to live with that. Perhaps he'll see more affection in part 2.

I think it's worth re-emphasizing that fantasy literature doesn't have the kind of dual nature that science fiction has; I've never seen a discussion of fantasy split down the middle over whether the genre is defined by "world building" or "conceptual exploration," but this is very common (in my experience) when sci-fi buffs start talking shop.

From what I can see the interaction between RPGs and sci-fi is overwhelmingly located on the world-building side of the equation; has anyone seen a game attempt "The Martian Chronicles," or J.G. Ballard, or "Brave New World," or "Clockwork Orange," or "Childhood's End," or Philip K. Dick, or Asimov's "Robot" stories? In contrast, "fantasy" RPGs have been able to draw from authors across the spectrum from Tolkein to Howard to Lieber to Vance to Beowulf to Homer to Mallory and so on.

If anything, I'd say an overwhelming number of SFRPGs are "heartbreakers" in the sense that they appear to unthinkingly repeat the fundamental assumption that Dune/Ringworld/Star Wars/Starship Troopers are the only way to "do" science fiction. In other words, the "world-building" model of sci-fi literature is to SF heartbreakers as the D&D model of fantasy gaming is to fantasy heartbreakers.

Marco wrote:

b_bankhead wrote:

It may be instructive to reveiw the description of a heartbreaker.

1/ The are deriviative a very narrow category of science fiction concepts.
2/ They are derivative of a narrow base of gaming concepts.
3/ They are produced with great naivete' about the marketplace.
4/ They are produced as a labor of love by amatuers.

I don't think 'instructive' is the right word here. This is a revised defintion based, I think in large measure, on the discussion that followed. It is not using the term the way Ron did, nor is it, by quite some measure, using the term in the way your original essay did.

b_bankhead wrote: If you examine the essay you will find it to be a direct cut and paste from the original.

b_bankhead wrote:

Wrong. If you examine the essay you will find it to be a direct cut and paste from the original.

Traveller is far from being a Sci-Fi Heartbreaker. There is a considerable fan community that has followed it through all of its iterations. We have home-brewed software for generating spaceships, javascript trade analysis programs, and several boardgames for analyzing combat.

The heartbreak in sci seems to consist of several well-intentioned attempts to bring simulations of alternative realities into game play. Traveller has a wonderful series of games designed to simulate individual character adventures, tactical action on starships, tactical and strategic warfare on planets, tactical and strategic space warfare, etc.

But in roleplay you end up solving intrigues like weird space drug dealers or spies.

How do you bring the simulation of scientific speculation or possible futures into game play.

That is the heartbreak of all sci-fi gaming. The mechanics of Traveller or GURPS are systematic and balanced. There is no heartbreak or half-asserey here. But the essence of sci-fi, the "what if?" is missing.

epweissengruber wrote: Traveller is far from being a Sci-Fi Heartbreaker. There is a considerable fan community that has followed it through all of its iterations. We have home-brewed software for generating spaceships, javascript trade analysis programs, and several boardgames for analyzing combat.
...
The mechanics of Traveller or GURPS are systematic and balanced. There is no heartbreak or half-asserey here.

This struck me ( from daMoose_Neo):

too many systems duplicate D&D...but in space.

the absense of the "what if?",

daMoose_Neo wrote: So, from a design and a mechanics standpoint, these are replicating High Fantasy, just calling it different. And when you hit the nail on the head though about the absense of the "what if?", you have a heartbreaker. A game, well designed, that you really really want to like, that just doesn't live up to its promise dispite good intentions, some real gems, and a lot of hard work.

Something to note about the "science" aspects of the games:

Some discussions on RPG.net have led me to conclude that what is consdiered Hard Sci-Fi has changed over the years. The barrier (and have been convinced there is merrit in this argument even if it is not universally true) is much higher today--we see the horizion of 'the future' pushed much closer and far less speculative technology in 'Hard SF' today (no artificial gravity).

For games produced in the 70's and 80's, drawing from a body of fiction that matured in the 50's-70's, games like Traveler would be considred fairly hard science (and, IMO, was--I contrasted Star Frontiers which seemed, IIRC, far less concerened about the nature of planetary systems of the dynamics of interstellar travel).

Finding fault with Traveler's quaint computers, for example, is using hindsight in a particularly unfair manner. Almost no one foresaw the computer revolution until it hit and that includes most SF authors as well as most major corporations.

Today Known Space can be considered Space Opera--that wasn't the case when it was written (IIRC it was MIT students who discovered, triumphantly, that the ringworld would be unstable due to orbital mechanics prompting the discovery of re-positioning systems in the next book).

I think that using, for example, the fact that these games depict what today looks like Science Fantasy or Space Opera as a categorizing factor in the Heartbreaker definition is like condemning secret agent games (Top Secret, James Bond, MS&PI, etc.) for not doing Horror and Romance genres as well--or, perhaps, for not presenting quite enough post cold-war cynicism for the modern reader.

-Marco

I think a lot of discussion is still going on debating the merit of some of the big games of sci-fi rather than the actual heartbreakers. That's all fine but not really on topic. Traveller, Star Frontiers, Trek, Star Wars, cant be heartbreakers in exactly the way that D&D, Runequest, an Rolemaster are not fantasy heartbreakers. They all have their own problems and we can discuss the problems with Traveller or D&D but that should really be done in a different thread.

So back on topic, An interesting phenomenon that I've noticed is how with the sci-fi heartbreakers the elements that draw from previous games tend to be setting material (monoculture aliens, everyone has their own ship,etc) much more that it was with fantasy which tended to be modelling techniques (hit points, levels, etc.) I think this relates back to what was expressed earlier, the source material (literature, tv shows, movies) has more emphasis than other gaming sources.

And its not my intent to diss Traveler ^_^ Just about all games serve a purpose and even the worst offenders on Ron's original heartbreaker list have a small but existing fan base.

I'm saying there ought to be a distinction made as to whether a game is Science Fiction or Science Fantasy and define the Heartbreaker qualities from there.
Traveler may be up on technology and explaing how and why things work and tackle some challengeing, realistic designs, but gadgets doth not sci-fi make. I've gone through quite a bit of trouble to explain Mages in my game "Final Twilight", jumping into some rudementary genetics, heredity, and such. On one hand, it could fall along the lines of X-Men, genetic mutants, on another its quite similar to traditional sorcery. Tis still fantasy, however. Just because I explained it away with genetics and technical terms doesn't make it any closer to Science Fiction.
Just basically- No amount of technical detail can be used to explain S.Fantasy as S.Fiction.

So, I'd propose a new question/qualification at the top of the list for Science Heartbreakers:
1) A game, otherwise better suited to S.Fantasy, which presents itself as Science Fiction while in-sysetm avoiding the "What if?" of S.Fiction (or something worded better).

We can appreciate S.Fantasy as S.Fantasy. Star Wars is an awesome movie and awesome stories. I have a shelf full of the novels. Call the Star Wars RPG an "awesome adventure!" and you're right. Even call Traveler as a realistic romp through space and you'd be right (for its time). Try to put it on par with Dicks or Asimov? Nope. If, for whatever reason, someone picked SWRPG up expecting it to hit on issues of humanity, individuality, good of one vs. good of all, socioty vs the individual, etc etc they'd most certainly be heartbroken (not that anyone would unless they lived in a cave and someone just lied through their teeth to this poor purchaser).

Re: Marco's observation
Either I noted the fact, or someone else did elsewhere, that yesterday's science fiction is today's reality. Thats why tech can't be used as a defining factor in determining HB legitimacy. HOW does the game go about approaching subjects? If the focus is on the tech, planetary patterns, etc I'd say it falls more under the realm of the Fantasy yet, because it avoids actually dealing with anything. If it, via system, encouraged tackling issues central to humanity and technology while exchanging jokes with Robby the Robot in artificial gravity, even that is closer to the types of things Dick or Asimov would attempt (though their attempt would be a LOT better, lol)

Bob hit something above with his Campaign notation- Dick and Asimov wrote mostly short stories. These were characters you were introduced to quickly, got to know quickly, and who found themselves in quite unusual, challenging and frightening situations, forcing them and the reader to ask questions. At the end of some of these, the main characters die. Three sessions and you could do a fine job of tackling some form of these short stories. Its a FANTASY concept, again, to try to spend years wandering the depths of space. Classic Trek I'd call an amalgamation of the two concepts- I don't recall seeing any kind of continuing storyline through classic Trek as we did in its later counterpart Deep Space 9, Voyager or even Farscape. It dealt with questions in its "situation in a box" much as an SF Author would tackle a question or concept with a one-use main character. Being a television series, however, Roddenberry couldn't kill off central crew members left and right just because they served his purpose for the one thing. So, it worked out the series complications on a "campaign" style basis, its 5 year mission to explore strange new worlds. Need someone to die, make a stupid decision or have something incredible happen to, call up one of the Red-shirt extras!
(which leads me to another suggestion for this S.Fiction exclusive list...consider pitching the "Situation in a box"? If Sci-fi short stories are the source material, its a common thing for them to handle things as such, doling out only as much information as NEEDED, often creating the "situation in a box")

daMoose_Neo wrote: So, I'd propose a new question/qualification at the top of the list for Science Heartbreakers:
1) A game, otherwise better suited to S.Fantasy, which presents itself as Science Fiction while in-sysetm avoiding the "What if?" of S.Fiction (or something worded better).

We can appreciate S.Fantasy as S.Fantasy. Star Wars is an awesome movie and awesome stories. I have a shelf full of the novels. Call the Star Wars RPG an "awesome adventure!" and you're right. Even call Traveler as a realistic romp through space and you'd be right (for its time). Try to put it on par with Dicks or Asimov? Nope. If, for whatever reason, someone picked SWRPG up expecting it to hit on issues of humanity, individuality, good of one vs. good of all, socioty vs the individual, etc etc they'd most certainly be heartbroken (not that anyone would unless they lived in a cave and someone just lied through their teeth to this poor purchaser).

Caldis wrote: I think a lot of discussion is still going on debating the merit of some of the big games of sci-fi rather than the actual heartbreakers. That's all fine but not really on topic. Traveller, Star Frontiers, Trek, Star Wars, cant be heartbreakers in exactly the way that D&D, Runequest, an Rolemaster are not fantasy heartbreakers. They all have their own problems and we can discuss the problems with Traveller or D&D but that should really be done in a different thread.

So back on topic, An interesting phenomenon that I've noticed is how with the sci-fi heartbreakers the elements that draw from previous games tend to be setting material (monoculture aliens, everyone has their own ship,etc) much more that it was with fantasy which tended to be modelling techniques (hit points, levels, etc.) I think this relates back to what was expressed earlier, the source material (literature, tv shows, movies) has more emphasis than other gaming sources.

John- No, not really. If you picked up, say, Alternity, expecting to run Asimov, you'd be disappointed. If you picked it up to run Lucas, well then bravo, you have a lethal, action packed system.
What #1 is proposing is to weed out some of these games. As adventure systems, they probably stand fine on their own and if they are HB's they suffer from mostly the same heartbreaker elements that a fantasy does. I'm saying Science Fiction, because of its difference from High Fantasy or traditional Adventure of any genre, might need an additional qualifier. As we're going down this list, Traveller keeps coming up, defenders pointing to its attention to detail and attempt to realistically portray the technology and the systems, and the trade route/system comes up as well. Those challenging that cite a rather boring system, a "diamond in the rough" syndrome with what works and what doesn't and antiquanted tech. These are fairly general, vauge, and IMO fantasy based arguements, used in analysis of High Fantasy and even Modern Fantasy around here. They don't even come close to nailing anything to do with sci-fi, except for portions dealing with technology, which is a really poor basis, again using Traveller as an example. Odds are my old PC has more processing power than some of the example Traveller tech.
So, if they're being attacked and defended on the same basis as a fantasy heartbreaker, share many of the same elements as fantasy, but are being attacked for NOT being "Science Fiction", I'd say something is wrong. If you're going to critique something, judge an apple as an apple, not a peach. Thus, #1 would try to weed out the actual Fantasy games and judge "science fiction" as science fiction, not fantasy as sci-fi.

Robert a.k.a. komradebob wrote: One of the things that seems to be duplicated in many games (of all genres) is a design that assumes that extended campaign play with repeat characters ( whether or not they advance in skills/levels) should be the norm. Is this one of the barriers to "what if?" that some folks see as being essential in some way to science fiction? For that matter, has campaign play as a conceptual model worked its way into the conciousness of fiction writers as well?

Then he wrote: What exactly does extended campaign play emulate, other than the norms of D&D?

Nate 'daMoose Neo' Peterson wrote: We can appreciate S.Fantasy as S.Fantasy. Star Wars is an awesome movie and awesome stories. I have a shelf full of the novels. Call the Star Wars RPG an "awesome adventure!" and you're right. Even call Traveler as a realistic romp through space and you'd be right (for its time). Try to put it on par with Dicks or Asimov? Nope. If, for whatever reason, someone picked SWRPG up expecting it to hit on issues of humanity, individuality, good of one vs. good of all, socioty vs the individual, etc etc they'd most certainly be heartbroken (not that anyone would unless they lived in a cave and someone just lied through their teeth to this poor purchaser).

daMoose_Neo wrote: Those challenging that cite a rather boring system, a "diamond in the rough" syndrome with what works and what doesn't and antiquanted tech. These are fairly general, vauge, and IMO fantasy based arguements, used in analysis of High Fantasy and even Modern Fantasy around here.

They don't even come close to nailing anything to do with sci-fi, except for portions dealing with technology, which is a really poor basis, again using Traveller as an example. Odds are my old PC has more processing power than some of the example Traveller tech.

So, if they're being attacked and defended on the same basis as a fantasy heartbreaker, share many of the same elements as fantasy, but are being attacked for NOT being "Science Fiction", I'd say something is wrong. If you're going to critique something, judge an apple as an apple, not a peach. Thus, #1 would try to weed out the actual Fantasy games and judge "science fiction" as science fiction, not fantasy as sci-fi.

Maybe I'm trying too hard to read something in here that isn't here. Looking at the originator of this thread, the first post is trying to say there is a difference unique enough to Science Fiction games to warrent a different approach than there is to Fantasy games in terms of analysis.
And, IMO, all I'm seeing (alibet interptiting maybe) is a rehash of Ron's original essay, except tackling a specific setting: space (or the "future" in general).
So, what makes science fiction unique from traditional fantasy to warrent such an examination? If all we're discussing is setting (Hard SF vs. Theatrical SF vs. X), are we saying each setting can have a catagory of its own heartbreakers? There has to be SOMETHING that sets it apart, and that, again IMO, is the literature or source material.
Fantasy's are epic, sweeping or especially dramatic stories. The model of traditional sci-fi authors are the short stories that come off more as parables. So, what happens when we have a game that takes the sweeping effects of Fantasy with the backdrop found in Science Fiction? Science Fantasy, or "space opera" (thankee Marco ^_^)

Would I be heartbroken if someone told me Battle Tech was Science Fiction? Not especially, I don't honestly care. I'm looking at the terms in context of this essay. Theres nothing wrong, in my experiance, with Traveller, Battle Tech, Star Wars or any of the aforementioned. What I'm considering is the position of the essay to find something more than setting to give "Science Fiction Heartbreaker" its own standing as opposed to another way to call it a "Fantasy Heartbreaker".

So, if all we're discussing is setting, attention to detail, technical accuracy and inventiveness, (which appears to be a chunk of the discussion) we can drop the whole need for a SFHB concept and apply the same standards as Ron's Fantasy HB. Unless theres something different SF Games need that Fantasy doesn't. In which case, that difference should be #1 at the top of the list of qualifications.

I've been looking at this and wondering. Traveller is held-up to be the Ur-game for SFRPGs and that it was different from FRPGs. Hmm, well in a way, it was. It was very different. (This is from memory, as I can't find my Traveller books)

Instead of choosing a class, you chose a career path, one that could be fatal and kill your character before you get to play him. As a result, you could end up with a character who starts out in his thirties or forties. They would also end up as high ranking NCOs or Officers in the Navy or a Merchant Marine or Scout with his own ship.

Increasing a skill was hard, and characters really didn't change much between adventures. Out of the box combat was very abstract for gun combat.

As for the much vaunted "setting" for Traveller, everyone forgets that the Imperium was added on later. The original edition of Traveller had no setting other than this quasi-Asimovian Human-Only Universe.

It was as bare bones as you could get. Just as bare bones as original D&D was.

So in light of this, just about every SFRPG subsequent has a setting, extensive background, as well as having characters that changed from adventure to adventure.

So the POV that SFHBs are based on Traveller is more along the line of "SFHBs ignore how Traveller worked."

Marco wrote: Well, Calids, while it's easy to say that Traveler can't be a heartbreaker--the bulk of my complaint with the analysis applied here is that whatever attributes (outside of their publishers) are applied to 'heartbreakers' the same are applied to the 'original games.'

If SFHB's are making the same decisions that SF-NON-HB's are--and those decisions are based on the modeled fiction then what separates the HB from the non-HB.

So it seems that your label of "heartbreaker" is based on ignorance and/or one-true-wayism on the part of the purchaser. i.e. This hypothetical cave-dwelling purchaser apparently has his heart set that any game which has rayguns or spaceships should try to emulate the specific qualities of literary science fiction in the style of Dick and Asimov. Thus games like Half-Life, Starfarers of Catan, and Traveller are all heartbreakers to him.

I think that using, for example, the fact that these games depict what today looks like Science Fantasy or Space Opera as a categorizing factor in the Heartbreaker definition is like condemning secret agent games (Top Secret, James Bond, MS&PI, etc.) for not doing Horror and Romance genres as well--or, perhaps, for not presenting quite enough post cold-war cynicism for the modern reader.

The fact that you want narrativist games and these are not those do not make these heartbreakers. There has to be another basis for that.

I suspect its easier to reconcile the different demands of G, N and S in a 'fantasy' game than in a 'sci-fi' game.

M. J. Young wrote:
Science fiction is about setting. It is used as a setting to tell stories. They can be love stories like <a href="http://www.mjyoung.net/time/happy.html">Happy Accidents, mysteries like Minority Report, light-heared adventures like Flight of the Navigator, comic adventures like Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, comedies like Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure or The Ice Pirates, thrillers like Alien. It's not required that it deal with issues to be science fiction. It is required that it involve some extrapolation of future technology or science as part of the setting. I've read some Larry Niven, and although I haven't read much and I did enjoy what I read, I never encountered anything that seemed like it had great literary value in this sense. It seemed to be about gadgets and how they might impact our future lives, but as a backdrop for telling stories that might otherwise have happened without the gadgets, just a bit differently.

I keep seeing this recurring idea that science fiction is only the stuff that has literary merit, and I have yet to see anyone on this thread demonstrate that this is not what is meant. A science fiction game does not have to produce such stories to be a good science fiction game. The fact that you want narrativist games and these are not those do not make these heartbreakers. There has to be another basis for that.

contracycle wrote: If you are telling a story to whch the technology is irrelevant, then it is not SF - it is just using a futurisitc setting.

If you are telling a story to whch the technology is irrelevant, then it is not SF - it is just using a futurisitc setting.

I think there are a few different issues at work here:

1. A lot of the Science Fiction that has really *impacted* me has used science or ideas from science in its construction to greatly engage and excite me intellectually. This is, IMO, the benefit of having actual science in SF.

RPG Application: Traveler has a certain science-based approach to starship travel and technology (the use of guns, for example, since they haven't become less deadly with the advent of lasers). This, to me, gave me some intellectually exciting elements to the game and drew me to it.

This improved the game for me and it would've been weaker, IMO, with out it.

2. What I connected with on a dramatic level (human-experience, pathos, etc.) was usually not directly connected to the science per-se.

RPG Application: The presence of what I think would be Narrativist style Premise was extant, when it was extant, in situation. In fiction, IMO, this is largely character-centric and while science may play a role (a robot wishes to become human) the fundamental element is the human-experience connection we have with events that transpire.

3. It is certainly possible to play "Star Knights of the Round Asteroid" wherein horses are exchanged for fighters and swords for blasters and King Arthur for 'High Counsel Arthur'--and the author makes zero attempt to use science (1) as an element.

I have some sympathy for saying this isn't 'Science Fiction'--but like the Hacker-Cracker argument (some people get really upset when you refer to computer intrusion black hats as Hackers) I think the war has already been lost. In terms of clear communication, a book with space-fighters will be recognized as Sience Fiction by most people. You can call it Science Fantasy if you want (people are usually okay with that too) but most bookstores don't have a Science Fantasy section.

In terms of clear communication, the look and feel of a setting makes it science fiction moreso than the quality of its ideas (and can you call Star Wars futuristic when it is explicitly set long, long ago?)

RPG Application: The blanket term of Science Fiction, outside of specific, contraversial interpertations of the term, is broad enough to cover anything with spaceships and aliens and rayguns. Demanding that the game should call itself, say, Science Fantasy in order to satisfy, for instance, Asimov is, IMO, a bit Quixotic.

4. Most stories fall between the hard-science absolute reality of whatever we are going to consider "Science Fiction" and the clearly transformed King-Author myth set in space.

Alien, for instance has similarities to Scream--but when Ash turns out to be an android, how does that translate? There is no exact analogue. People on a ship at sea being hunted by a tiger would still not be an exact duplicate--some of the elements (androids, cold sleep, alien spaceships) are simply impossible to duplicate without an advanced level of technology.

RPG Application: Transhuman Space is, IMO, pretty clearly "about the technology" but Star Frontiers which, IMO, is not, still allows some of those SF elements which may not inspire us as per (1) but, as per (4) allow stories that are still pretty clearly reasonable Science Fiction.

NOTE: I think that being overly picky about what role science plays is missing the forest for the trees. Many of the powerful books (or movies or games) that are reasonably in the SF genre do have a few excellent scientific ideas and some really good human-experience stuff may very much be stronger on one than the other. I found Asimov's Foundation striking for it's innovations in political and social science, not technology.

The telepaths of the Second Foundation were closer to mysticism: but the grandeur of a failing pan-galactic empire was, IMO, pretty awe-worthy and relied on a futuristic background to exist (even though the science to create the empire was not in the foreground of the stories).

-Marco

So, if Multiverser can do Science Fiction and Fantasy without batting an eye, GURPs can pretty much do the same, and a host of Space games developed for d20 (D&D), where are the game mechanic differences between what fantasy and science fiction need if not the framework of sci-fi literature instead of fantasy epic?

Snowden wrote:

On the face of it, this definition would appear to exclude a lot of things that are commonly accepted as "science fiction" (Star Wars and Trek, Dune, Martian Chronicles, Childhood's End, a good chunk of Heinlein, the Alien franchise, Niven, and every non-"cyberpunk" SFPRG I can think of including Traveller), because they either don't feature technology as a prominent element, or use it only as color to amplify and embellish a story that could have been told without it.

Yes.

I'm admittedly among the hard care mentioned here in the Wikipedia's article on types of science fiction (section Other types below):

Hard science fiction

Main article: Hard science fiction

Hard science fiction, or hard SF, is a subgenre of science fiction characterised by the copious use of science and technology, and a focus thereupon. Hard SF stories focus on the natural sciences and technological developments. Some authors scrupulously eschew such implausibilities as faster-than-light travel, while others accept such plot devices but nonetheless show a concern with a seemingly (though often times not) realistic depiction of the worlds that such a technology might make accessible. Character development is sometimes secondary to explorations of astronomical or physical phenomena, but other times authors make the human condition forefront in the story. However a common theme of hard SF has the resolution of the plot often hinging upon a technological point. Writers attempt to have their stories consistent with known science at the time of publication.

Soft science fiction

Main article: Soft science fiction

Soft science fiction is the subgenre where plots and themes tend to focus on philosophy, psychology, politics and sociology while de-emphasizing the details of technological hardware and physical laws. It is so-called 'soft' science fiction, because these subjects are grouped together as the soft sciences or humanities. For instance, in Dune, Frank Herbert uses the plot device of a universe which has rejected conscious machines and has reverted to a feudal society. Consequently Herbert uses the Dune saga to comment about the human condition and make direct parallels to current socio-political realities. Soft science fiction may explore the reactions of societies or individuals to problems posed by natural phenomena or technological developments, but the technology will be a means to an end, not an end itself...


Other types

There are, of course, many borderline cases of works using outer-space settings and futuristic-looking technology as little more than window-dressing for tales of adventure, romance, and other typical dramatic themes; examples include Star Wars (which is considered by some diehards to be not science fiction but fantasy) and many Hollywood space operas, such as Star Trek. Some fans of hard science fiction would regard such films as fantasy, whereas the general public would probably place them squarely in the science fiction category. It has been suggested as a method of resolving this confusion that SF come to stand for speculative fiction and thus encompass fantasy and horror fiction as well as science fiction genres. During the 1980s another new type emerged: Cyberpunk. Cyberpunk was probably first written and conceived by William Gibson through his work Neuromancer.

I'm probably reading this definition as more strict than it was intended to be...could you clarify what you mean by "technology" and "irrelevant"?

No you are reading it correctly. Take the Aliens franchise - the first movie is nearly SF, but is not because in fact the monster is just a monster designed to be monstrous, and there is no explanation of its origins. It's as impossible a creature as a dragon. On the other hand, the Legacy of Heorot (Niven/Barnes/Pournelle) while also being mostly a monster-hunt story is real SF because of the discussion of the native ecosystem necessary for the humans to figure out and thus kill the monster(s). The presence of that ecosystem, the process of its investigation, and the capabilities of the monster constitute the extrapoloation of the known possible necessary for hard SF.

I also noticed this paragraph from the Wikipedia article:

Fiction which is concerned with science has been repeatedly diluted and dumbed down for the mass audience of radio and television. Ironically, this dumbing down process has been so effective that the television version of sci-fi has come to be used as a format for dumbing down other scripts which would have been tossed out as "too cerebral". This happened with the satirical dystopian novel It Can't Happen Here which was transformed into the science fiction series V in order to dilute it down to a level the TV company considered appropriate for a television audience.

This illustrates the central point of my argument. I would agree that I am among the hard core who do not regard SW or Trek as having anything to do with science fiction at all. And I recognise that for the bulk of the public, whose exposure is to TV and film sci-fi, sci-fi means anything that is vaguely futuristic. Thus I argue, this fault-line in perceptions is echoed in RPG too: those of us interested in actual, hard SF are frustrated by most RPG going the route of pop TV, which has nothing in common with the hard stuff at all.

Hence the sense that there is something like an SF heartbreaker; games that want to be SF in the way the hardcore junkies want it to be but doesn't rise to that point. Where I think this differs from the fantasy heartbreaker is that the crippling historical influence is not prior RPG but prior pop sci-fi.

Marco wrote: NOTE: I think that being overly picky about what role science plays is missing the forest for the trees.

contracycle wrote: If those stories could have happened without those particular gadgets, in a setting other than that specifically bounded by the technology of the setting, then it is not SF. As I have quoted, SF is specifically about the impact of technology on the human experience. If you are telling a story to whch the technology is irrelevant, then it is not SF - it is just using a futurisitc setting.

He wrote: Why do we need an article specifically for Science Fiction Heartbreakers?

He then wrote: A fair concencus points to D&D as the granddaddy of SF RPGs, but Traveller has a fair bit there. How much influance has each had? If the former, is there enough Traveller influance to include it as a major influance?

He next wrote: What is it that you feel a SF RPG needs and why a Fantasy system cannot deliver those things for you?

Finally, he wrote: On a mechanical level, what makes these game different from their Fantasy bretheren?

M. J. Young wrote: The argument is that the same pattern of copying from copies that afflicts Fantasy games also afflicts Science Fiction games.

daMoose_Neo wrote: Both groups fall prey to using one established source or another and not deviating far. Fantasy falls back on Tolkien's beautiful, immortal Elves while Sci-Fi has a higher tendeny to fall back on either insects (maybe because of the old Bug Eyed Monster flicks? heh) or "made for TV aliens", creatures that are humans except...for that antenna. Or that pointy ear. Or that colored blood.

Well its been bun and thought provoking but I think this thread has evolved to the point that it has several subthreads going beyond the original it's time to spawn new threads for them.

Hello,

Damn good call. Time to stop this one and spawn new ones.

Best,
Ron