WHAT is the DEAL with the lack of sci-fi gaming support?

[Slick]

Seems to me that the old-school movement has a massive focus on fantasy gaming, and a comparative lack of attention paid to similarly pedigreed games like Traveller/Metamorphosis Alpha/Gamma World. Not non-existent by any means, but it seems like the appeal to the majority of players is swords and sorcery, ancient tombs, demons, skeletons, treasure chests... Just looking at the content that ends up on tenfootpole, the sci-fi modules are so rare that Bryce has a separate tag just to find them.

Is it simply because D&D has the stranglehold on the TTRPG scene, or are there other reasons? Let us explore what makes modern/sci-fi games different from their fantasy counterparts.

I will begin the discussion with the hypothesis that advanced tech alleviates or eliminates some of the traditional dungeon-crawling hazards:
• A flashlight (especially a futuristic one) will outlast any lantern and certainly more torches than a PC could carry.
• The prevalence of guns reduces the frequency of gritty melee (is ranged combat inherently less exciting/interesting in a tabletop context?).
• Communication devices mean you're never really splitting the party.

I'm also open to the possibility that maybe I'm crazy/blind and there's a huge sci-fi OSR following that I've somehow missed. This thread does come to you courtesy of "Three-Pints-Deep" Slick so please enlighten me.

 

[DangerousPuhson]

Is it simply because D&D has the stranglehold on the TTRPG scene

That's my guess. Ask a random passerby if they've heard of Dungeons & Dragons, then ask if they've heard of Gamma World.

The business goes where the money is, and the money goes to what's popular.

 

[Yora]

Maybe science fiction worlds just don't provide as many interesting possibilities for games? The few games I can think of with futuristic tech are still fantasy with futuristic tech.

 

[Grützi]

From a rather general point of view (away from the OSR scene or even the whole hobby):
Fantasy is just the bigger thing right now (always was?)
The Lord of the Rings triology (and the Hobbit), Harry Potter, Narnia, Game of Thrones and some others have made Fantasy practically mainstream.
Nobody looks at you funny if you talk about dragons these days (sad isn't it ). The most you'll get is the question which fantasy franchise you are talking about. So anyone coming into the RPG scene will be drawn fiorst and foremost to fantasy because it's the thing most people "know" in some sense already. To say nothing about the people that want to play RPGs specifically because they want to play Game of Thrones or LotR.

In the whole hobby:
D&D is just the big guy of the business. It's the first TTRPG most people learn about, it's still used as a baseline of sorts for many people and it simply has the biggest fanbase. So you cannot not have contact with D&D and fantasy in gernal when loking at the hobby.
Another point surely is the historical development: Old Gary made a fantasy game so everyone that followed tried to make their own fantasy game.
There are of course many sciFi games and such stuff ... but for many people the whole RPG hobby is safely in the genre of fantasy.

In the OSR scene:
What Slick and Yora said.
I DM'ed Mothership (OSR-SCiFi-Horror) a few weeks back and the first thing my players did was try to build some sort of motion sensor to scan the whole ship for movement. They already had night vision helmets with internal radio. After that they tried to access the main computer to get maps and data on the ship. So there's that.
SciFi ... the availabilty of technology specifically alters the way a game is played in tremendous ways. Some of these alterations don't translate well into the OSR design mindset.

 

[PrinceofNothing]

I played a lot of SWN and I like SF a lot. The big fantasy boom came in...the 80s? before that it was a niché genre and science fiction and fantasy were often lumped together. I think Grognardia wrote about it at length, and it was far more acceptable to put a ray-gun in your fantasy novel then it is today.

I will begin the discussion with the hypothesis that advanced tech alleviates or eliminates some of the traditional dungeon-crawling hazards:
• A flashlight (especially a futuristic one) will outlast any lantern and certainly more torches than a PC could carry.
• The prevalence of guns reduces the frequency of gritty melee (is ranged combat inherently less exciting/interesting in a tabletop context?).
• Communication devices mean you're never really splitting the party.

I totally agree with you that there are traditional dungeon crawling hazards that are eliminated, but SF can add new dungeon-crawling hazards!
• The Cold Vaccuum of Space is hostile to men, meaning that you must keep careful track of your air supply or suffocate in the cold and the dark
• Thick bulkheads, interference or a dampening field by the long extinct First Empire means your communications equipment is not so reliable as it seems
• Different weapons, devices and the technology of the 25th century mean you can tackle problems in ways men have hithereto only dreamed
• The derelict hulks of the First Empire are inhabited by any number of hideous perils; Renegade AIs, Lethal Radiation, Berserk Chirurgical Droids, Malevolent energy creatures, Solari Pirates, Cryonically Frozen F'aarsi Death Commando Sleeper Cells, Malfunctioning Artifical Gravity, Animus Phages, Nanomachines, Femtomachines, the mysterious Traveller and more!!!

I've always thought of SF as having immense potential in any game but I think its lack of popularity in the TTRPG scene is the lack of a common frame of reference. DnD represents a sort of distilled average of dozens of different fantasy-sf novels, mixed with a heavy dose of Lord of the Rings and classical mythology. Many of its elements like dragons, wizards or orcs are recognizable and so its easy to join. In science fiction it seems more balkanized to me, and there doesn't really exist any sort of generic science fiction game. Even Traveller and Gamma World are far removed from the more popular and well known SF of today like Star Trek, Star Wars or some sort of Marvel Sci Fi.

 

[squeen]

I love Science Fiction. I watch it, read it, computer-game it, and even love when its elements show up in fantasy D&D. (Heck, I've even worked in the aerospace industry all my adult life)

...and yet I was never tempted to play it.

I'm not sure if I can explain why.

Here's a thought though: When Gygax and Arneson were playing war-games in and around Lake Geneva, it was when individual characters started "crawling through dungeons" that things really caught fire. There may be something special about the restrictiveness of that setting that works. Blah, blah, blah, Mythic Underworld, etc., but also the limitations of possible actions.

Dunno. Just my $0.02.

Good topic Slick!

 

[Melan]

There just doesn't seem to be easy and good "blueprints" (for lack of a better term) to build standardisable SF scenarios around. Traveller and SWN have robust world generation stuff, but a SF game may be hard to distill into the equivalent of a dungeon crawl without turning it into a tactical combat excercise. D&D has its frameworks, and you know how to use them, and SF games generally don't.

Star Wars is kind of an exception here; for some reason, people instinctively get SW, and there are lots of adventures for it out there (the D6 version, which is the only good one). Perhaps a Trek game would make it easy to generate random planetary sorties, but there doesn't seem to be a viable Trek game at all (not that I was looking). There were allegedly some fairly good SF modules in the 1980s for the now forgotten Space Opera game.

But the basic problem with SF adventures to me seems to be the inability to put it into a box in a good way.

 

[DangerousPuhson]

I gave it a shot myself last year - made a setting inside a generational ship that had exploded above the Earth (which is now a ball of nuclear fire). Everyone aboard had their memories wiped from the cryonic process, and so had to relearn and rebuild societies (everything is worded in pidgen languages, essentially bastardized English). The aft of the ship had split away from the forward decks, creating a sort of "unexplored wilderness" flooded with radiation, mutants, insane robots, etc. Eventually I abandoned it after realizing it was a little to similar to Metamorphosis Alpha (which I had never heard of at the time) - thankfully I hadn't invested too much into it at the time.

You can see it all here, on my now-abandoned blog: https://cult30creations.blogspot.com/

Yes, one post was published today - I went in and put up one of the drafts that was sitting unpublished.

 

[Yora]

Star Wars is set in space, but it's story structure is entirely fantasy. It's fantasy in space and people intuitively get that.

 

[Grützi]

Accessibility of Fantasy and Sci-Fi:
I think Prince is right, that Fantasy offers a broader intro into the hobby trough it's themes, tropes and whatnot ... a common frame of reference he called it.
Another point against Sci-Fi is the seeming demand of it's players to be at least somewhat scienctifically literate. Somewhow most people seem to think, that to understand sci-Fi you have to understand science in some way (It helps of course to have safe footing in the realm of science ... but it's not strictly neccessary)

Blueprints and "boxed in feeling":
In most cases Fantasy is "smaller" in the realms of mobility and possible choices where to go.
In a hexcrawl you can plan ahead rather well ... If your party has access to a spaceship suddenly the whole universe is open to them. I fell many DM's are paralysed by the many possible choices ... what to prepare? It's probably the same for partys ... Where to go? What to do there?

The exception of Star Wars:
Classifing Star Wars as Sci-Fi is risky on it's own. While it certainly has Sci-Fi elements ... the common consensus seems to be that it's essentialy an epic, destiny driven fantasy tale set in a rather nonsensical sci-fi influenced verse.
The main reason why star wars "works", as Melan put it, for me seems to be the strict inclusion of a "good" and a "bad" side.
Star wars has no gray zones (or rather very few) ... you've got the clearly labeled Bad guys and opposed to them the heroes.
There are some scoundrels in between ... but they all turn out to have hearts of gold or have always been rotten to the core.
Like the aligment system in some DnD version, this helps players to instantly get a grip on the core tennets of the setting.
Like a german comedian once said: "Knowing who the bad guy is gives structure to your day."

As a small tangent:
One thing i always liked about Sci-Fi gaming is the "promise of understanding".
In fantasy you've got gods, unfathomable dragons and elder powers, magic itself and whatnot ... and nobody really expects to understand any of it.
In some cases magic itself is used as a explanation: "Don't try to understand it ... it's magic."
While that is fine an certainly creates a sense of wonder and mystery .... I always loved, that one of the inherent promises of Science Fiction is that the reader/player may have a chance to understand the stuff thats going on. The aliens or phenomena are inscrutable ... but thats only because you don't have enough knowledge now. And knowledge can be gained if you work hard enough.

 

[PrinceofNothing]

I'd posit the reason people get Star Wars, beyond its use of the archetypical hero's journey is that its setting too is replete with recognizable imagery and concepts. The bounty hunters, gunslingers, smugglers and seedy shanty towns of the old west is crossbred with mystic warrior monks of the east. The tech is WW2 with lasers, the Empire is a space-faring vision of a Nazi Germany that never was and of course there's space princesses, wizard emperors, secret passages, traps, daring escapes and dastardly betrayals. Star Wars is perhaps a bit like DnD in that its a mishmash of different bits of pop culture, mythology and history, blended together in a vision of a future a long time ago.

Contrast this with most science fiction, which tends to posit something new, a distortion or extrapolation of something that exists now, and sometimes something that we can barely imagine. There is ultimately nothing radical or innovative about Star Wars, but thats why its so familiar and easy to grasp.

I'm with Grützi that theoretically you need a little bit of scientific literacy to enjoy science fiction so the barrier of entry might be a bit higher but thats probably more perception then reality and I don't think its the main factor.

 

[Pseudoephedrine]

WRT the OSR and science fiction, I think SWN came out early enough (2010) that it basically intimidated or absorbed a lot of the amateur creators into its fan community. It was easier to build off the SWN framework than to reinvent the wheel, and this led to a fairly vibrant SWN community of fan publication instead of a collection of different SF games competing with one another.

Every science fiction OSR game I've seen since (e.g. White Star, Hulks and Horrors, etc.) has been compared to it, and most are found wanting, especially when it comes to giving you tools to spur your imagination during world-building. It's only in the past couple of years that Cepheus (2017) and Mothership (2018) have emerged and become popular, with Cepheus appealing to people who wanted SWN's worldbuilding tools to resemble Traveller's more closely (as well as just straight up Traveller grogs), and Mothership focusing on doing Cthulhu in Space / Aliens during a period of peak-Cthulhu.

 

[Two orcs]

It's hard to share a sense of wonder with sci-fi. I've played several sci-fi adventures as tabletop RPGs but what my friends think is interesting I find trite, and what I'm fascinated with my friends find incomprehensible and dull. Murdering wizards and stealing their magic has broad appeal and is something everyone dreams of doing in real life.