Design Monologue 1: Creating a Game

What's the point of this game? To bring D&D-style roleplaying into a sci-fi world inspired by the best modern examples of the genre.

The critical success factors will be:

• Capturing the themes of the genre
• Making the game fun, playable, and replayable
• Creating an original and interesting world

The best chance for success lies with a methodical, top-down strategy, where every aspect of design focuses on satisfying the major goals. Once a framework is in place, the world should be built from the bottom up in meticulous detail.

To avoid inevitable instability in the system rules, the game and setting should be designed in the abstract, assuming only the most generic of RPG tropes, so there is room for the system to change and evolve. That is not to say the setting should be developed entirely without consideration to the rules; this is a game, not a movie, and needs to be set up like one.

What that means, specifically, is that the setting should provide ample opportunity for a group of otherwise independent characters to pursue a dangerous and rewarding career as adventurers, filled with action, excitement, and really wild things. The possibility of conflict must exist at all levels of play. There should be different types of conflict, too; it is far too easy in a modern or future setting to fall back on national conflict (i.e. war), which is limited in its appeal.

Obviously, we are influenced by a number of other science fiction worlds, from which we can learn many things. Those include:

• Star Trek: a little dated, but definitely captures the idea of episodic adventure, in at least one easily-reproducible way (give the PCs a ship, do lots of away missions, etc).
• Star Wars: not as easily portable; it's a mostly-colonized galaxy with tens of thousands of years (or more) of space travel history. Still, the classic action-adventure themes deserve at least a nod in tribute.
• Battlestar Galactica: the Homeworlders share a few things with the Colonial Fleet, namely the sense of desolation and apprehension of being such a small group of survivors surrounded only by cold, dead space. However, they lack the obvious enemy (Cylons), and their common experience is hundreds of years in the past. Still, from BSG we can take the themes of verisimilitude and harsh analysis of the human condition.
• Firefly: this will be a big influence. The Homeworlds have a culture (like BSG) of survival at any cost; hundreds of years of later, this has led, in many ways, to an overbearing state. The true action occurs on the fringe of civilization, among the independents who remember the reason they left Earth in the first place. Ultimately, the PCs adventures will probably more resemble Firefly than Star Trek.
• EVE Online: this is a big one, because it's a massive, complete game (not a movie or TV show) that offers many good, concrete examples. Taken as a whole, it satisfies the goals of this system, except for the obvious, unstated goal that it be a tabletop RPG system, not a computer game. It suggests a sense of scale that should exist to truly underscore the setting, as well as shows how a handful of factions in free space might form a playable setting. EVE cannot be ported wholecloth, however, because it makes no allowances for what will likely be the primary mode of play: a party of individuals performing actions other than piloting ships.

You got your fantasy in my sci-fi

For this to work, it's going to have to be well advised by the successful fantasy RPGs that have come before. The player base already knows how to play these games, so the system and the world should accommodate their existing knowledge as best as possible.

What is it, exactly, about fantasy RPGs that make them work?

• Cool options: different flavors of magic, different and exotic races
• Beautiful world: the best worlds are ones you'd want to live in
• Plenty of fights: there's always a monster around the corner for a quick, morally-justified, financially-rewarding battle
• Memorable characters: the NPCs, and the legendary PCs of previous games, make the world more real
• Universal mythology: everybody understands dragons, trolls, etc already.

How do we implement these ideas, or their legacy, in a sci-fi campaign setting?

Cool Options

Star Trek and Star Wars provide cool options, but too few. Nobody wants to play ugly aliens. There's nothing cool about a non-jedi in a world of jedi. There's really only one weapon to wield in Star Trek (phaser).

These are worlds created for the screen, not for the gaming table.

The ideal sci-fi setting would have a number of races, probably alien, all with rich histories, cultures, and, of course, unique game mechanics. Homeworlds has three humanoid races, plus cyborgs. It's not much, but it's a start.

Beautiful World

Must resist the temptation to make every world a dusty Wild West plain, or the foolish trope of making all worlds have only one biome.