Like hard SFRPGs?

[Icosahedron]

Heh, I just love Gehenna. You don't mind if I 'borrow' it?

MTU is theoretically much bigger than the OTU, but I only game in a few subsectors near the rim - a Marches type region. The rest of it is a powerful nebulous entity 'over there'.

When I get players asking about 'mods', I sit them down and explain that if you roll snake-eyes for a breakdown each week, and you have 36 mods fitted...
And if a computer jack malfunctions you just use your fingers, but if your legs or eyes malfunction...
And breakdowns occur at the most inopportune times...

They usually get the message - most cyborgs are npcs.

 

[sabredog]

Heh, I just love Gehenna. You don't mind if I 'borrow' it?

MTU is theoretically much bigger than the OTU, but I only game in a few subsectors near the rim - a Marches type region. The rest of it is a powerful nebulous entity 'over there'.

When I get players asking about 'mods', I sit them down and explain that if you roll snake-eyes for a breakdown each week, and you have 36 mods fitted...
And if a computer jack malfunctions you just use your fingers, but if your legs or eyes malfunction...
And breakdowns occur at the most inopportune times...

They usually get the message - most cyborgs are npcs.

LOL...I do the same thing! That's why players start hating cyber-enhancements once they get off Gehenna and have try to find parts on some TL-9 world two subsectors away after getting wounded in a barfight. Most inconvenient to have your SmartGun eye knocked out of whack because some guy hit you with a beer bottle. Of course they don't know that its out of alignment until they next pick up their SmartGun-equipped gauss rifle and miss everything they shoot at with it while "ERROR" keeps blinking in their vision.

And yeah, while I've mapped a sector over the life span of my game, most play takes place along the Rim, which is the 3-4 (N to S...it's 1-1 1/2 wide) subsector strip outside Imperial space between the Terran Empire on one side, the evil Askorrian Empire on the other (that's my unmapped but for the edge of it "nebulous over there"), and is thus full of spies, smugglers, gentlemen adventurers, ne-er-do-wells, liars, and thieves.

Rich feeding grounds for players and thier patrons.

 

[Icosahedron]

Well, I don't want to derail the thread, but since nobody has talked about Hardness lately, we might as well chat...

My setting is a similar region of space on the Rim, between an Imperial region known as the Rimward Realms and an outlying region known as the New Territories, currently awaiting 'adoption' into the Empire. There are no other powerful empires out there, or at least none discovered so far, but there are considerable opportunities for the hooks you mention as several worlds compete to be declared subsector capitals, corporations engaged in nefarious activities beyond the border try to delay the adoption process, and all the while scouts are exploring new worlds on the frontiers.

Gehenna would fit in nicely as a hotbed of questionable trades run by a corrupt government busily laundering and stashing money in desparate preparation for the impending adoption clampdown.

 

[Jame]

I like medium-hard. Not necessarily Transhuman hard, or even Clarke-hard, but I want the options to make it that hard even if I end up ignoring them. (Just like I want options for making it science-light or fantastic, and also for low-tech rules).

 

[Magnus von Thornwood]

I have a quick point...

While I did vote for Diamond Hard Science, the poll did say in My SFRPG, I dig my Traveller just the way it is. My game is different because it's mine.

Now, I heard some Transhumanism bashing, but speaking as one of the old school, let tell ya kids, transhumanism is merely cyberpunk all grown up and wearing some thing a bit less monochrome than black and silver. Trust me on this.

Now to go back and read the rest of the posts...

 

[Karma]

I voted medium for the reason that too often hard science fiction can be rather lacking in the fiction department. It can devolve into more of an exposition of the author's knowledge or pet theory and suffers from the "God of the Gaps" phenomenon, which can show its age quickly.

That being said I really prefer gritty settings like Alien/Aliens and find things like the Colonial Marines Technical Manual to be great attempts at internal consistency, even after the fact. In Traveller I always liked the DGP books like the Starship Operators Manual or the TNE supplements World Tamer's Guide and Fire, Fusion & Steel. They seemed to provide a nice sense of grounding detail for the assumptions that other books glossed over and didn't seem contrived like the "particle of the week" on Star Trek.

 

[BlackBat242]

The new stuff might not hold a candle to the old stuff, but that doesn't mean you can't learn to love both.

Yes it does.

Why should I have to "learn to love" crap when there is massive amounts of gold out there... just because the crap is "new & relevant", and the youngsters refuse to make new gold purely because "its old & out of touch"?

 

[Trent]

A quick word of warning to people who like their SF hard: You may have read AC Clarke's excellent novel "Rendezvous with Rama" strange aeons ago.

Well, if you did please, Please, PLEASE do not get and read the (so called) sequel to it, Rama II.

To say it sucks would be a discredit to things that suck, some of which can be nice under certain circumstances. (Make your own Monica jokes if you must have one here...)

To say it stinks to high heaven and is a disgrace to the original would be a somewhat accurate, if too gentle description.

Whereas RwR was an excellent hard SF novel about intelligent, decent humans being confronted by and exploring a vast alien artifact, RII is a depressing, dreary, boring little excursion thru literary hell in which a boatload of very seriously defective people who come off like a bunch of reality show rejects act like the cast of "Survivor: Rama".

In fact it ought to be called "Survivor: Rama" just to warn people what horrors await them within it's tragic waste of tree lives.

RwR used admirable human characters as explorers of a logical, intelligently designed artificial alien world. Survivor: Rama uses that world as a neglected backdrop to stage the melodramatic, petty schemes of a bunch of people you'd mostly never want to be bothered by reading about.

All in all, if you haven't read any of the "sequels in name only" to RwR, avoid "Survivor: Rama" like you'd avoid most of the characters in it. (I.E. diligently.)

 

[Trent]

Jeez, don't tell me my valiant attempt to spare others the horror that is "Rama II" killed this thread....

 

[far-trader]

...sorry I was busy rereading Rama II.



No, not really. In fact I missed your warning until now. Years (decades) too late but for some strange reason I don't recall it being that bad. I'm not sure I really recall it at all so it was probably mediocre. I generally only recall (well) the extremes, the remarkably fine and the atrociously bad. One of those cursed gifts I suppose. Or just normal I suppose.

 

[rust]

Well, I like my science fiction roleplaying games quite hard, with as few soft
spots (contragrav, FTL ...) as possible.
However, plausibility is more important to me than scientific accuracy. If I
can believe the setting's science and technology and it does not include any
contradictions or nonsensical "science" that ruins my suspension of disbelief,
I can play and like it.
And while I am a fan of writers like Asimov and Clarke, there are also a num-
ber of "youngsters" who create quite good "semi-hard" SF, for example Da-
vid Brin or Jack McDevitt, so the genre is alive, and there is no need for me
to accept lower standards because "space opera" is more the fashion to-
day.

 

[lucasdigital]

Originally Posted by me
"The new stuff might not hold a candle to the old stuff, but that doesn't mean you can't learn to love both."

Yes it does.

Why should I have to "learn to love" crap when there is massive amounts of gold out there... just because the crap is "new & relevant", and the youngsters refuse to make new gold purely because "its old & out of touch"?

You are missing the point entirely. If you prefer using any of the 'gold' versions of Traveller, carry on using them and ignore the new version. You don't need to every buy or see the new edition. However, try and separate the facts from the emotions for 2 minutes. Those of us who grew up with little black books are (judging by sad posts made to this very forum) dying out. Where can a 14 year old SF fan find Traveller today? He isn't ever going to find the FFE website or know to look on ebay for old material. Unless his older brother or his dad sell him the idea of Traveller, it's just not out there for him to find. If your assertion is correct, that earlier versions of Traveller are gold compared the new crap, some new young players who pick up the Mongoose edition from a book store are going to gravitate to the CD archives, once they do - hay presto, Classic Traveller lives on.

 

[PathfinderAP]

A quick word of warning to people who like their SF hard: You may have read AC Clarke's excellent novel "Rendezvous with Rama" strange aeons ago.

Morgan Freeman's (yes that one) production company (Revelations Entertainment) may be making this in to a movie...

 

[lucasdigital]

Morgan Freeman's (yes that one) production company (Revelations Entertainment) may be making this in to a movie...

Yes indeed,
It's been trapped in development hell for about a decade. They did show some production art back when Revelation Entertainment first announced they had the option... http://www.revelationsent.com/movie_page.php?movieId=12

Apparently the technology to do Rama justice hasn't been available, chiefly, they wanted to be able to model the place in realtime, so that the actors could react to their virtual surrounds realistically. Well, just happens that James Cameron has just developed a system that allows this - we should be able to see it in Avatar at the end of the year.

 

[heart-carolina]

Medium Hard, Thank You!

I don't have the amount of time to devote to the game, that I had when I was younger (if I actually had the time, then). I love the little details that make the game so personable and real, but hard science requires a time investment that I just can't make anymore. However, I really appreciate the effort that so many of you put into Traveller.

 

[kafka47]

Hard as a diamond...with some handwaves that I must accept as part of the OTU. I also like to read very Hard SF but again there is something to be said about some of the New Space Opera movement which seems to be adopting more and more Hard conventions. So, I see a convergence happening between Space Opera & Hard SF...it is just a pity that our grand old game is not really doing the same...

 

[Omnivore]

Hard with an FTL exception

Many years later, after a misjump through time and the use of an emergency low berth... not thread resurrection honest!!

I have always leaned towards the hard scifi end of the spectrum, and despite being a CT fan since discovering it in '79, I've always slanted MTU's to the hard side. In the mid 80's I wrote an alternate starship construction ruleset based largely on Striker (unfortunately lost with time), dropping gravitics.

These days, being bored with way too much time on my hands, I've started to recreate that old ATU with a new twist. Sort of a merge between CT/HG, FF&S, and with a side of Gurps 3e Transhuman Space. I'm aiming for a Hard Times/One Small Step feel for the setting but want harder treatment of certain spacecraft techs.

If I live long enough, I'd like to put together a TCS Campaign/Pocket Empires game in the setting. If anyone is interested, let me know and I'll make the alternate ruleset available.