Next game?

[tyrtix]

Some days ago, i've seen a post in A:EftP in wich someone liked the idea of a spiderweb-style sci-fi game, and i liked it so much, mostly because i've had that idea in mind from eons

Someone complained about graphical items, but i believe that these things could be done easily, as what i've done in 10 minutes today, here is the result:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=...e=3&theater

 

Hope to see Jeff like so much the idea of a sci-fi game that would do one, one day or another!

[Avadon]

@tyrtix

 

Frankly fantasy and science fantasy are similar in so many ways that I don't really see the point. Wizardry versus "the Force", "magic missiles" versus blasters etc. In fact, you could see some of that in Might and Magic, Wizardry and Ultima.

 

Now if you are talking about science fiction, then it would be a very different matter. Who is up to crafting a science fiction RPG?

[Lilith]

Jeff had originally planned Geneforge as a pure sci-fi RPG, but apparently he felt it'd be easier to write and sell better if he threw in a little fantasy.

[Avadon]

Are any prototype or concept art of sci-fi Geneforge available on the internet? I am curious about what it would look like.

[tyrtix]

In fact, i like so much the concept story behind Geneforge, and it's far more easy to make a game on a fantasy basis, but i speak about a pure sci-fi game, and i believe that it's possible only in an indie game to have some success...mainly because the story and the spirit of that kind of game impact only on a minor part of public, instead of something like, say, skyrim, and honestly many of the last fantasy rpg are only a mix of the same story and elements (such as dragons, or swords that you can handle only with a 6 feet long arm...).

I hope in a sci-fi game, but i think it would be difficult to find an attractive story about that, and even more, a game system for implement that game.

Last words: do you like the wall that i've done? hihih

[Tracer Bullet]

I dunno...hi-tech is so hard to balance. It's one of the reasons why sci-fi Geneforge went out the window.

 

If you want to see this in action, you can read The Eternity Artifact. It's patently obvious throughout the book just how much Modesitt had to stretch himself to make space combat seem like a fair proposition.

 

Despite precedent, I'd still love to see a successful sci-fi RPG. If you have any more ideas on this topic, please share them (I hope I can speak for the community in this ).

[adc.]

Quote:

Someone complained about graphical items...

Damn kids these days, all they blabber about is the graphics. Graphics here, graphics there. Never appreciates retro-like RPGs with awesome stories. Wait, what in the world would they expect from indie game developers? I'm still a kid too (13 years old), but I've played Avernum 3 without graphical complaints (wasn't a lie). If Jeff turned this games into novels/books, it could be a hit. But mind the choices and fun stuffs, it would be gone...
------------
Sci-fi? Haven't seen Jeff go sci-fi

[tyrtix]

Lol, don't say share my ideas... you can easily be in an Arkham asylum after...

 

First, excuse me if i write something wrong, but i'm italian.

 

I am an rpg player, one of those D&D fans from the age of the second edition, and i've played many, many p&p games, and there are not so much successful translations of sci-fi in the rpg world, both in pen & paper and in the videogames, but sometimes you have jewels like fallout, or bioshock, or even homeworld (even if some of them are not rpg games, still they have beautiful stories.

 

I believe that a good way to port in a sci-fi story in rpg games, is to understand that you can substitute magery (wich is base for fantasy worlds) with skills: a cleric become a doctor, daemons become aliens, a fireball is a grenade, and so on. But the characters could basically be the same, and even the story could follow the same thread, so there is no need to a character that have to pilot a starship, but you can instead have the story develope partly on a planet, or on the moon, on a space station and in a spaceship (do you remember the space station from duke nukem?)

 

It's even possible to put in some traits or characteristics like psionic powers, and these are basically the same of magery, and adjusting some details you can make a viable combat system even if in this kind of world ranged combat are the most to be found.

 

I strongly believe that the game system in A:EftP is one of the best, and surely the more mature system used by Jeff in those years, and i believe that it could easily be adapted to a sci-fi genre. The only thing that i believe could be adjusted in this kind of ruleset, is to lower damage from monsters and PC's, and to put in some more health in both, so the combat is less oriented to a 2-round kills of a monster (i actually have killed some bosses in one round, given the right combat situations...), or a 1-round total player killing.

[Kreador]

In the PnP world, there were several SF RPGs back in the day. Traveller is the big one that comes to mind, and they did a cRPG from it as I recall. I know some people don't like that your character can actually die during the process of rolling it up, though. ;-) There was also a Star Trek RPG.

 

If you're just changing the facade ("Dammit, Jim, I'm a Doctor, not a Cleric!"), it hardly matters. A true SF RPG would want to follow some logical expansions of science, like possibly an alien-world exploration or something.

[Student of Trinity]

I played Traveller briefly, and wasn't impressed. The combat system was brutal but indecisive; it was very hard to kill or totally incapacitate an enemy, so you could be totally sure they were no longer a threat, but it was very easy to receive a crippling wound that would make your character essentially useless for the rest of the game.

 

A more basic problem was that the only sense in which your character could advance in power was to acquire better high-tech equipment. This is in itself a limitation on the genre, because starship owners can more easily lose their starships than archmages can lose their 18 levels, and so the power/security fantasy is less fulfilled. With Traveller, though, there was a worse problem with advancing by collecting cool sci-fi gear. There wasn't actually such a wide range of cool sci-fi gear to be had.

 

It pretty much topped out at laser rifles. In order to have laser rifles as the distant aspirational goal, therefore, you had to start them game with ... knives. So your super-cool sci-fi adventure campaigns started with several weeks of medieval combat. Yay.

 

You could ultimately aspire to command large battleships or something, if you had a generous referee. But that means getting your hands on a really enormous piece of metal, with a crew of hundreds or thousands, and that's all just a lot more cumbersome than being a lone warlock with a brainful of devastating magic.

 

No doubt Traveller could be improved on, but I still just don't think hard sci-fi is good for RPGs. I think your best bet would be a fantasy game with sci-fi flavor — psychic powers, and sufficiently-advanced alien artifacts, and such. But even that would still be hard. It's easy to whip-up a passible quasi-medieval background world, but technologically advanced societies have to be quite complicated to be credible, and that's a lot of work for mere flavor.

[Alorael at Large]

As far as a Spiderweb sci-fi game goes, it's possible, but not in the immediate future. Jeff's schedule is filled with more Avernum series updates and more Avadon sequels for a few years at least. There's also still the same problem that he originally had with Geneforge: he might be uncertain about how a sci-fi RPG would sell. Of course, the intervening years have seen the blockbuster KotOR and Mass Effect games bring sci-fi RPGs into the mainstream, but he might still be worried.

 

There are no early sci-fi Geneforges floating around. I don't think any ever existed; from the sound of it, Jeff scrapped the sci-fi idea in the early planning stages, before there was anything playable or any graphics.

 

And the last decade has been kind to RPGs as well. The industry as a whole may be struggling, but there has been an explosion of games that branched out boldly from the genre's D&D roots. There are GURPS variants in the near or far future and there's d20 Future, for relatively mainstream engines, but look a bit farther and you can find FATE-based Diaspora for hard sci-fi, Eclipse Phase for transhumanism taken far past its cyberpunk near edge, Burning Empires and Burning Sands: Jihad for two flavors of political warfare space opera, Shock for even more non-traditional story-driven gameplay, and a bevy of IP-based games of varying quality.

 

—Alorael, who even notes that those games don't, for the most part, use telepathy or psionics or biotics or any of the other popular magic substitutes. You can have a solid sci-fi game that stands on its science.

[Harehunter]

I would give Bret Bixler credit for his scenarios that cross the line between fantasy and sci-fi in his Riddle of the Spheres series played on the Blades of Exile engine.