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Stephenls <stephenls@shaw.ca> wrote in message news:<2rtp4dF1enokrU1@uni-berlin.de>...
> Certic wrote:
>
> > Who's been doing it? Arguably only the Traveller line... the rest
> > tends to fall into the grimly depressing cyberpunky genre.
I personally hate the 'Depressing dystopia" cyberpunk genre- but
Transhuman Space is weird but not depressing, Jovian Chronicles is
gritty but not dystopic, and Ex Machina has a variety of scenarios,
ranging from guardedly optomistic to oppressive. And of course
Centaurii knights is flat-out optomistic.
> Generally speaking, historical games and hard SF games that try to be
> "future historical" (which is to say, basically realistic in their
> presentation of how things work; PCs defined by skill lists and
> backgrounds)) sell real badly. Steve Jackson Games, the primary
> producer of such books, has basically said as much, and are planning on
> producing far fewer of them in the future.
Part of the problem I've seen with "future historical" games is that
they tend to be written by military buffs, so those histories tend
to be lists of war after war, with the occasional technological
invention to open a new area to have wars in. And that gets rather
tedius, in the same way that reading a list of European wars can be.
Then again, having an Anthropological background, I find the broader
sweep of how societies change to be more interesting than seeing
which aristocratic bastard is fighting which. SO YMMV.
> Games that try to emulate reality don't really appeal, it seems.
> Players want the cool powers. This is not a criticism of that sort of
> gaming style -- /I/ like the cool powers.
RPG players have ALWAYS wanted the cool powers. Even Traveller- the
cool powers were just defined in terms of FGMPs, Battle Dress, and
writs of nobility. I remember players just having their Battledress
and grav-belt equipped mercenaries drifting over a world with
Victorian era technology, merrily vbaporizing anyone that opposed
them, and threatening to nuke the local starport if it bothered
them.
The main thing is, Traveller has fallen behind on the tech curve, so
the col powers of Traveller just don't seem so cool anymore.
> I've talked about this before. Games that define PCs as attributes and
> skills, but which don't allow for special powers or anything, tend to
> end up with a bunch of PCs who are generally homogeneous. It's only by
> adding special abilities that the PCs are differentiated enough for
> players to find them really interesting. That's why Hunter had edges.
The tendancy for newer games to compress skill lists has increased
that problem- back in the days of Space Opera, the Orbital Pilot had
a bunch of finicky skills that the Powered Armor Trooper couldn't
match, and vice versa.
It's worth noting that the "special abilites" don't need to be
pwers per say- merely anything that makes characters distinctive,
and interestng to play. It could be Appearance and social
modifiers, cultural and racial attributes, anthing that says "Hey,
this person has more to him than 85A99B Pilot 3 Laser 2 Admin 2"
> (Call of Cthulhu is the exception, but it's benefited from great writing
> and a die-hard fanbase, and even it's currently being mismanaged into
> oblivion.)
I think CoC has benefited by not being character-centric. It's the
monsters and the mysteries that are important. Of course it also
has that reactionary xenophobic element going for it as well. They
have that niche secured.
> The new WoD uses Merits to get around this. Maybe a hard SF setting
> could do the same.
Merits seems perfect for an AF setting, yes.
- Eric Tolle