Science Fiction Gaming

Why? Why play sci-fi?

Fantasy gaming has built-in motivation, especially old-school or modern gaming. In modern gaming, everyone typically comes in with "their ten-page backstory," and you have built-in motivations to complete those arcs. In old-school gaming, XP = GP, dominion play, leveling, and getting treasure.

Exploration exists in both genres, uncovering those sweet blank hex-maps and filling in what is out there. Fantasy gaming has an edge over science fiction in terms of exploring culture, family, and local politics. In science fiction gaming, you get more of a modern bent and experience, like trying to find local culture in a mall.

Especially if the science fiction culture is anywhere close to modern, you begin to pull in cyberpunk elements, local law enforcement, governments, military, and all sorts of "big picture" factions. Fantasy tends to be easier since most everything is close to home, based in family and ethnic groups, and local relations. The rare exception is "Wild West science fiction," which leans more into the local style of relations and interpersonal interactions than the more modern takes.

Fantasy tends to be more popular because its focus is tighter and its conflicts are more personal.

There are times when science fiction feels too big to wrap my head around, unless it is the day-by-day of exploration and survival. On a low level, things work. Try to pull in too many sweeping space wars and galactic conflicts, and the characters feel very small, and the nature of a space war feels too large to even comprehend, let alone change the course of. Even Star Wars works better as a low-level, interpersonal, survival, and smuggler-based game.

Cyberpunk works better as street-level drama. So do Wild West stories. This is also why we see a lot of science fiction stick to these stereotypes and archetypes.

Also, ship combat matters. The Star Wars, Cepheus, and Stars Without Number ship combat systems work well in the abstract and don't require calculus or a physics degree to figure out. So many science fiction games fall flat on ship combat that it is a real problem with the genre. Some games omit ship combat entirely.

The setting matters. A great, classic, compelling setting works well for me, but I can also get into hex-crawls in space and the feeling of discovering something new. A Forbidden Lands-style start also works well, where the galaxy is recovering from a massive event that disrupts communication and travel for a few hundred years, records are lost or out of date, and everything out there changes. At this point, a hex-crawl makes sense, and your campaign universe can slowly expand.

Star Wars? Expanded Universe only. Otherwise, the New Republic and Leia's leadership were all for nothing, since nothing ever changed. Leia was running around tarmacs as a grandmother, still fighting the Empire. The whole idea is stupid, and it robbed her of the chance to ever be recognized as a transformative leader, mother, Jedi, and figure. The sequels trashed the original universe and continue to rip off the EU, which only proves that we had it better before Disney, and that today's creatives can never get out from under the shadow of better writers and creators.

Traveller feels too huge for me. It is the best universe in gaming, but it is far too big for me. I know, pick a small spot and start there, but the universe feels stuck in one point in time, unchanging, and written in stone. The universe has undergone various iterations as it tried to change, but it is sort of set in stone at this point and is unable to change. It is a starting point for campaigns and ideas, and a great one, but I like to roll my own or start smaller with less.

Fantasy is easier since it is so generic, and sci-fi tends to be a harder sell. Very few want to get on board with a campaign, since the genre is either tightly tied to an IP and played with the official game, or it is so vague what your motivations are that people can't connect. What are we doing? What is the point?

Another problem is that science fiction, as a genre, borrows so much from the Western that playing the Western is the easier game to pitch and put together. Why are we playing a space western when we could play the for-real western, ride horses, wear cool hats, and talk like cowboys? The cowboy movie may be dead as a film genre, but it is still a far better gaming genre than most science fiction IPs.

Part of why Western beats science fiction is that too much science fiction is a "do anything" genre with no rules of physics, and creators feel free to break those rules. Any of the rebooted Star Trek movies are great examples, as are the Star Wars sequels, which used hyperspace as a magic teleportation system. You might as well invent a "hyperspace belt" and get around that way. When you start pulling the rug out from under players with "anything magic," they often quit.

With the Western, we have rules, partner. Even the "Weird West" genre has rules and expectations.

Sci-fi is a tough genre to sell to players.

You almost have to avoid the rules and sell the campaign concept first.

Are Modern Games Doomed?

https://www.archivesofnethys.com/agreement.html

Some terrible news for open gaming today, as Paizo ends its partnership with the Archives of Nethys, the free online rules resource for everything Pathfinder and Starfinder.

At this point, if you invest in digital, ot support games that live behind paywalls, you need to ask yourself some hard questions. Many games are guilty too, such as 5E versions, where the SRD is free, but what you actually need to play (subclasses and character options) are locked behind book or PDF purchases.

When the major VTTs shut down and all those digital books are lost, nobody will get anything back. If D&D Beyond ever folds or is sold to a group that shuts it down, all of that is gone.

I also get why Paizo would go this way. Who would ever buy digital copies of Pathfinder 2 rulebooks with Nethys out there providing the more popular and free alternative? Major VTTs don't see any money from supporting Paizo games, nor will most people buy VTT books for something they can get for free, better supported elsewhere.

At this point, why wouldn't I only support games like Basic Fantasy or OSRIC? Kevin Crawford put a few of his core rule sets under a public domain CC license. The excellent 2E clone game For Gold & Glory, you can distribute the PDF for free as long as you aren't selling access to it; you can share it freely and post it on a website. Basic Fantasy's PDF is free, and the books are printed at cost.

We have far better alternatives.

When does modern gaming get to be too much?

If this were the world of open-source software, Pathfinder would be forked and cloned, and the free version would start development. It took far less for OpenOffice to be forked into LibreOffice. This is how the real world works.

But this isn't how the silly world of gaming works.

One group would attack the other for "hurting the game," and nothing that people swear they believe in, open and free gaming for everyone, would ever get done. People who complain that capitalism is ruining gaming will not support games owned and run by the community, and will go out of their way to attack those communities as they keep playing games printed by Wall Street. They won't consider free and open alternatives.

I will miss the old Nethys site.

It is the end of an era.

Deathbringer TTRPG by Professor DM

Backed.

https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/roll-for-combat/deathbringer-ttrpg-by-professor-dm

Why?

Because the hobby needs it.

Mail Room: Into the Majestic Fantasy Realms: The Northern Marches

Highest recommendation.

Let's just get that out of the way. This is an OSR-style living sandbox campaign with enough room for your ideas, plus a book full of hexes described with history, story, and current events. We get city maps. We get locals. The art is flat-out beautiful.

This is the setting the Forgotten Realms should have been. Not an author's setting where your characters are allowed to play alongside a cast of unkillable GMNPCs, but your setting where the characters are the important characters in the novels and stories.

The book uses BX-style hit-die rating for monsters, but this is usable by and large with any fantasy ruleset.

This is sort of the Holy Grail of old-school style settings, clearly on the same level as the amazing Harnworld. While Harnworld leans more into historical accuracy while folding in fantasy concepts, this starts with fantasy concepts and works to give them historical accuracy and a weighty feeling. Harnworld, at times, feels like magic, dragons, monsters, and fantasy elements are optional and not central to the "alt-history" realistic setting. The Northern Marches feels like fantasy was already there and helped shape the world, yet the setting doesn't "go modern" and remains grounded in the medieval fantasy baseline.

An insanely great book, replacing a shelf-full of fantasy settings for me.

This one feels like home to me.

D&D's Problem is Combat

D&D was never a combat-focused game. Combat was a failure condition, and something to be avoided, short-circuited, or a sleep spell or fireball spell ending the encounter before it even began. It did not matter how you got the gold; all of it was experience. Lie, cheat, steal, or a thief grabs it, and everyone profits.

Wizards D&D is 90% combat. Combat is the only thing. This is why every class and subclass option exists. Modern D&D is all about violence, killing, and the selfish notion of "the character" and "what I get" over the story or heroism.

Every edition since D&D 3E has been this way, and very few see it this way. You get mixed up in your notions of nostalgia and feel like "I can play D&D 3 to 5E any way I want," but that isn't true. Your character is rigged to kill and do massive damage, and that is mostly all you do.

Most problems are solved with violence. This is all the classes can do. Every problem is solved with the hammer. Most stories are a series of combat encounters. Player skill does not matter.

This is also why D&D 5E feels so hollow for many of us old-school players.

We often have to bring in our own assumptions about "how the game used to be played" and play it that way, living the lie. The biggest problem 5E has is combat.

Mail Room: Dungeon Dwelling Creatures (DCC)

 

From DCC, MCC, Star Crawl, and XCrawl, Goodman Games has the best "games for your imagination" in the industry right now. Today, we continue that run with Dungeon Dwelling Creatures, a DCC-genre game where you play the monsters. I got the crowdfunding PDF release for this today, and I like this game.

The monsters are quirky and strange, sort of mirroring DCC-style classes, but using the system in interesting and unique ways. Instead of luck, we get Vile, which is your Luck-like "power of evil." All the monsters have an icky factor, and none of them are cute or adorable. A huge problem with "play a monster" games is that they get too cutesy and chibi, and that opens the door to hurt feelings and problem players. A cute fairy dragon with butterfly wings would be inappropriate for this game, where a spider that sucks people's brains out would fit right in.

I would love to see expansion monsters for this game. What we have is great, quirky, and cool.

This reminds me of the Monsters Monsters! game from Flying Buffalo, the spiritual successor to the classic Tunnels & Trolls game. You play the monsters. Civilization is crushing you. You are the minions and mooks that live in a dungeon (and even the DCC modules) as the bad guys. The good guys show up and crush your dreams, loot the place, laugh, and head back to town.

A few times.

Maybe they burn everything out in a 10-minute adventure day, and you are watching them pull the typical party nonsense by coming back daily. Maybe you follow them back to town and give them a lesson in how the monsters who put up with this nonsense teach them a lesson.

This is close to being a new, major game in the DCC line, and it feels like a surprise release. The bestiary is excellent and covers many more of the classics than the main DCC book. This feels like "the other side" of the DCC experience, and it puts players in an unfamiliar but cool situation.

You are the monsters.

Deal with those pesky heroes.

A very surprising release, and I can't wait to get my hardcover.

Mail Room: HackMaster

If a game sticks along long enough, it eventually becomes a parody of itself. In HackMaster's case, the parody turned into a real game. In 5E's case, you have a game that supposedly is as simple as BX, but it quickly grows beyond the complexity of HackMaster, and people quit at around level 8.

This is a game in the same "hobby self-referential vein" as games such as Dungeon Crawl Classics or even Munchkin, which embrace the hobby's absurdity and conventions. Yet it can flip right around and become a completely serious, non-humorous vehicle for storytelling. Think Robin Williams and comedy. There are moments when even the funniest comedian can flip right around and make us feel pain and cry.

D&D 5.5E, by comparison, is so self-important and full of itself that it borders on the unhealthy. As a lifestyle game, it refuses to have fun or admit to the absurdity of the hobby and its sometimes strange assumptions. It presents the fake as real, the pre-chewed superhero progression tracks of heroes that far outstrip monster power and are railroaded to level 20 on adventures carefully balanced to let the players win.

D&D 5.5E has no admission of the absurdity of "killing everything in the hole in the ground" as the way to solve problems in this world. There are no tense negotiations with kings and emperors in a throne room; any change in the world is effected through a boss fight on a battle mat. Combat, death, and killing with "my kewl powers" is the only way to create change.

I mean, if I wanted realism, I would be playing GURPS in Harnworld.

D&D 5.5E is, in comparison, one of those terrible superho games out of the 1980s where players use their powers to kill everything and everyone in the room until they get their way. Might makes right, and having power justifies using it.

Hackmaster is a lot like DCC. If you get the joke, it is hilarious. We embrace the absurd, the pedantic, the arcane crunch of rules, and the hypocrisy of the strange and unusual. In DCC, the rules are simple, and the world is unhinged and strange. In Hackmaster, the world is more normal, but the characters and their strange, odd, and incomprehensible rules are the unusual ones.

HackMaster is like one of those Flash games that presents a "walking simulator" where your analog sticks control each leg, and you are hilariously trying to make the stick figure walk to the other side of the room without dying. In HackMaster, just getting through character creation is the game, and figuring out how all this works in a typical medieval sandbox setting is the point of the joke.

Only, it is not a joke anymore.

In this case, the parody began to be taken seriously, and the game turned into a game, about as complicated as Rolemaster, that presents a method of playing fantasy adventures with. Could you get this with Rolemaster? Not really, being in on the joke is a big part of the fun here.

The absurd becomes the lingua franca. The joke becomes enshrined as the culture. The hypocrisy is the rules of the game. It is Monty Pythonesque, accepting the silly walk is the norm, and being shocked when anyone walks by normally.

Hackmaster is still a modern classic, fading a bit in relevance and popularity, an in-game for the in-crowd, but if you love DCC and other self-referential games where the absurd is enshrined and celebrated, a worthy read and inspiration for old-school chaos and inspiration.

We haven't heard much news, and the game feels like it is sitting in the doldrums. I am hoping this is just a low moment and that the game doesn't go away. The silly parts of our hobby and our addiction to the specific, minute details that make our "fantasy simulators" work need to be celebrated and embraced.

Even as a source of inspiration for old-school gaming, HackMaster is still worthy.