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.