Space Opera Box set Ideas

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by tbone

Maybe a middle ground: "A Handful of Select Occupations/Activities Covered in Reasonable Detail..." ?

"Starship crew" is a pretty defined subset of occupations, differing mostly in campaign activity, motivation, and patron (which all go hand-in-hand together once you decide on the primary campaign activity). A starship crew can work for the scout service, the patrol, the navy, be free traders, or be space pirates. Most of the skills are going to the same no matter the campaign activity, with some slight differences in skill subsets - patrol needs some policing skills, navy needs some leadership/tactics/strategy skills, free traders need some mercantile skills, scouts need some science & survival skills, and pirates need a little of everything.

The big differences come in what kinds of adventures the troupe will go on, not in their basic character archetypes or skills they'll have. You still wind up with the same basic archetypes of a pilot, an engineer, a bodyguard/security officer, a doctor, and a captain, maybe with a scientist or merchant rounding things out and various amounts of doubling-up to fit the campaign needs.

[tbone]

Originally Posted by ericbsmith

The big differences come in what kinds of adventures the troupe will go on, not in their basic character archetypes or skills they'll have. You still wind up with the same basic archetypes of a pilot, an engineer, a bodyguard/security officer, a doctor, and a captain, maybe with a scientist or merchant rounding things out and various amounts of doubling-up to fit the campaign needs.

All sounds fine; it's that "what kinds of adventures the troupe will go on" that my question centers on: Should a space opera-themed box set offer one kind of adventure (per DFRPG's "raid dungeons"), or many kinds?

Just musing aloud on that.

=
To clarify a term, in case I'm being confusing: I'm calling character archetypes ("pilot", "engineer", "captain", etc., or "bard", "cleric", "druid", etc.) "professions", as DFRPG does. By "occupation", I'm trying to refer to "that thing that all the PCs do together" – raid dungeons in DFRPG or DF, hunt monsters in Monster Hunters, and so on.

I'll welcome a better word for that; it's too easy to confuse with "profession". Maybe "campaign focus" is better. (Though "occupation" isn't all bad, as I'm talking about the thing that occupies the PCs.)

So I remain idly pondering: Would a space opera-themed box best offer players one fixed occupation, like DFRPG does? Or offer all kinds of occupations (and thus all kinds of campaigns)?

(One item worth noting: The After the End series is the same sort of setting in a (virtual) box as DF and Monster Hunters. But I don't see AtE presenting a single occupation like those others. Or at least not one as clear. Unless I'm missing it ("survive and gain stuff"?), the series seems to leave occupation more open-ended. Perhaps a boxed set could follow that lead?)

[robkelk]

Originally Posted by Refplace

As an exercise lets see if we can come to a reasonable consensus on a possible Space Opera setting for a possible boxed set like the DFRPG.
...

Is there some reason we shouldn't use the existing space opera setting, GURPS Tales of the Solar Patrol? Why re-invent the wheel?

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by tbone

I'll welcome a better word for that; it's too easy to confuse with "profession". Maybe "campaign focus" is better. (Though "occupation" isn't all bad, as I'm talking about the thing that occupies the PCs.)

Campaign Activity, or Core Activity. The lack of a Core Activity (or as I was calling it at the time "core conflict") is one of the things I railed against in the What GURPS Needs... Now thread a couple weeks back.

Originally Posted by tbone

So I remain idly pondering: Would a space opera-themed box best offer players one fixed occupation, like DFRPG does? Or offer all kinds of occupations (and thus all kinds of campaigns)?

I see no reason why you can't offer several, especially when the the basic character archetypes can support several. Dungeon Fantasy was trying to tap into a specific... genre?... so purposely limited its scope by removing anything that looked or sounded like "talking to the NPCs." I don't see a similar limited campaign scope in Sci-Fi as I do in trope dungeon fantasy. OTOH, you don't want to cast the net too broad - "Spaceship Crew" supports quite a few campaign activities fairly well, but it does rule out several others. "Combat Unit" is another common core activity in sci-fi, and that basic core easily supports Bug Hunting, Mercenary, and Marine Ground Pounders but wouldn't work very well to try work into a Scouting or Free Trader game.

The main thing is to try to offer some well worked examples of things to do, the types of places you can go, and what you'll do when you get there.

Originally Posted by tbone

(One item worth noting: The After the End series is the same sort of setting in a (virtual) box as DF and Monster Hunters. But I don't see AtE presenting a single occupation like those others. Or at least not one as clear. Unless I'm missing it ("survive and gain stuff"?), the series seems to leave occupation more open-ended. Perhaps a boxed set could follow that lead?)

GURPS Action doesn't direct exactly what kind of core activity you'll be doing either. With Action you could do anything from A-Team to Mission Impossible to Oceans 11 to James Bond. The series is more about setting the backdrop of Hollywood Cinematic Action than it is about deciding what types of missions should be pursued. So I think there's room to leave the core activities a bit open so long as you can provide a solid backdrop and flesh out a few specific campaign activities.

Future supplements can always focus on different activities - you could follow up a "Space Patrol" box set with a Star Traders and a Ground Pounders expansion, or even offer them as box sets of its own, which would share all the same technological and setting backdrop but using a different group dynamic and set of activities. Planned right you could even sell separate stand-alone boxes (with a shared core rulebook) and expansion boxes (which would lack the rulebook but be a few dollars cheaper).

GURPS Traveller did this by having expansions for each type of campaign activity - First In (Scouts), Far Trader, Ground Forces, Star Mercs, and Bounty Hunters each provided specific campaign activities. Traveller further expanded by providing setting books (Sword Worlds, Behind the Claw, Rim of Fire), character option books (Alien Races 1-4, Humanti, Nobles), and crunch books (Spaceships, Modular Cutter, Starports).

All of this is also completely ignoring one of the other major Sci-Fi genres - the PCs as Key Players in Galactic History. Babylon 5, Star Wars, Star Trek (particularly DS9), Battlestar Galactica, Dune, and many other Sci-Fi feature the trope of the main character or characters being pivotal players in the stage of galactic history. The main characters are not just the hero of their own story, they are everybody's hero in the story (or, in a few cases, everybody's villain). That's a genre that's hard to set up, especially if you are going to try to avoid setting up the galactic history (campaign "world") in which the story will live and breathe.

[A Ladder]

Originally Posted by lvalero

I would pay for a developed Space-Opera Box based on the works of Psi-Wars of Mailanka. I am not a big fan of Star-Trek, Traveller, Transhuman or Hard Sci-Fi worlds but Star Wars/Psi Wars/W40K and simmilar worlds are very appealling to me.

The space is big, so a "space gameworld" could support all the genres but an approach like "this box is a neutral space gameworld and you can make any game you want just by creating it by yourself" is not a buy-driver for me.

In resume.

+1 vote to produce the Mailanka's Psi-Wars! :)

Wow we have the same taste in Sci-Fi. My thoughts exactly.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by robkelk

Is there some reason we shouldn't use the existing space opera setting, GURPS Tales of the Solar Patrol? Why re-invent the wheel?

It's overly narrow. A very specific emulation of an early-to-middle period in the source genre. Also one that isn't all that popular in its' original source material. I've read almost all of it but my reading tastes are broader and more old-fashioned than is common these days.

Solar Patrol is also so relatively small as a setting that it's maybe half-way to being fully developed.

If you've got to have one default setting my best guess would be a Star Wars emulation that would support multiple styles of play. tbone already suggested the other biggie though Star Trek is a little broader than just Space Exploration.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by robkelk

Is there some reason we shouldn't use the existing space opera setting, GURPS Tales of the Solar Patrol? Why re-invent the wheel?

Tales of the Solar Patrol seems to assume a solar system like that of classic science fiction from Edgar Rice Burroughs through E.E. Smith to the early/middle Robert Heinlein: One where at least Mars and Venus had oxygen in their atmospheres and liquid water, and where elsewhere in the system there were places where human beings could set up based. That solar system is now scientifically obsolete and has been known to be for half a century; Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and Zelazny's "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" were the last major works set in it.

There are still people who like that setting; in fact I'm one of them—I enjoyed Stirling's Venus and Mars novels, and I just ended a campaign set on a Lowellian Mars of the late Victorian era. But that's a minority taste, found in people who still read old science fiction. It's not a mass audience taste any more. The most recent mass audience film that was set on Mars had a Mars that was almost airless and waterless and was generally compatible with findings from recent space probes. And that solar system isn't a setting for "outer space adventures," not unless you assume such massive terraforming that your setting has to be many centuries in the future.

Nearly all recent visual media sf that runs to "adventure" has been set in interstellar milieux: Either in a galaxy not many centuries from now, after the discovery of FTL has opened up other solar systems, or in "a galaxy far, far away," or perhaps in a present-day galaxy where races slightly more advanced than ours travel between the stars. In any case it involves FTL and other solar systems that can be imagined to have earthlike planets, usually one each. Audiences are familiar with superluminal travel, often via hyperspace, and will tend to expect it. And it gives you more room to improvise, and more sense of "frontier."

So I would recommend a setting with FTL—and with the convenient assumption that FTL does not turn into time travel; you don't want to turn this into a "change the past" war setting, or keep dropping your PCs into new histories. Keep it simple.

[jason taylor]

One idea I had that would make a great book, but probably not as good an RPG is "Tales of the Wayside Inns" where a whole bunch of different people from various hangouts in a Starport can be telling tales over the datanet. This has the potential for thousands of people from different walks of life and unlimited opportunities for fanfiction.

[Stormcrow]

I'm going to throw out what I think would be best as a setting for a standalone space—not necessarily space opera—set. It would be "Wagon Train to the stars" with a Star Wars veneer and scope and without taking place on a government-owned ship. Player characters would generally have to be against the bad guys, otherwise you lose the Wagon Train focus, but they're still independent operators or, at most, detached agents of certain organizations.

If dungeon fantasy is about wandering through dungeons, fighting monsters, and taking their stuff, then this space setting is about wandering through the galaxy, fighting bad guys, and making a profit. Profits aren't necessarily just money; they can also be fame, resources, and training. If you rescue a beautiful space princess from an evil planetary lord, you become a hero to her people and can invest your accolades back into improving your character. If you manage to deliver precious cargo through an area infested with pirates, you get paid and gain a good reputation with the authorities of that area. If you save a colony from a space monster, you earn special commercial rights with them.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by tbone

To clarify a term, in case I'm being confusing: I'm calling character archetypes ("pilot", "engineer", "captain", etc., or "bard", "cleric", "druid", etc.) "professions", as DFRPG does. By "occupation", I'm trying to refer to "that thing that all the PCs do together" – raid dungeons in DFRPG or DF, hunt monsters in Monster Hunters, and so on.

I'll welcome a better word for that; it's too easy to confuse with "profession". Maybe "campaign focus" is better. (Though "occupation" isn't all bad, as I'm talking about the thing that occupies the PCs.)

When I'm talking with my players, I say "mission statement."