Re: Pyramid #3/79: Space Atlas
 

I do not know what scifi issues have sold well and what have not, but a some of the scifi issues you have been too "fluffy" for me. That was specially true for the early issues. (Scifi tricorder toy... ugh)

I do not claim to be a typical gamer, as I am in the small segment of people who actually liked 3rd ed Vehicles (and in fact it was eventually the reason I started playing GURPS), so for more generic gamers things may be different. But I would think that a lot of the people who enjoy running/playing scifi games are more on the details side of the spectrum as compared to something like dungeon fantasy or action though I may be outside the norm even for such.

The best "scifi" issues you have had for me are the tech and toys,spaceships,military scifi ones. (several useful things in each)

The aliens, space exploration,second transhuman space and space atlas are kind of medium(one very useful article, some other maybe useful)

The useless ones are space colony alpha, space opera and the first transhuman space issue where I did not see anything useful for me.

I do not know what else you consider scifi so cannot comment on them.

Re: Pyramid #3/79: Space Atlas
 

I suspect the problem with sci-fi is that it's much more diverse than fantasy (it doesn't have to be, of course, but "Elves, dwarves and humans go fight orcs and skeletons and dragons in a dungeon" is ridiculously popular). But ask people what they want out of their sci-fi, and one guy wants space-knights and force swords, and another guy wants phasers and tricorders (I liked the space opera scanner!) and yet another guy wants gloomy soldiers fighting scary bugs, and yet another guy wants Neil deGrass Tyson narrating his diamond-hard exploration of space physics with the occassional (physically accurate!) gun battle, sprinkled with Atomic Rocketship-style introspection on space economics (and that's all just space! We're not even touching on Gattaca, Blade Runner, Neuromancer, Robocop, etc). All great games, much harder to serve than "Look, here's more monsters for your elves, dwarves and humans to kill."

Re: Pyramid #3/79: Space Atlas
 

Personally, I can say I generally flock to anything that looks like scifi, but I generally am less excited about "fluff" pieces overall. With scifi, I find fluff pieces particularly susceptible to "I'm not running that so why would I want it" syndrome.

Crunchy articles get most of my attention, since crunch generally translates across genres and subgenres. I may not need a scifi organization dedicated to the psychic hunting of transhuman cybernetic space werebats, but I probably wouldn't mind some more rules concerning cybernetics, transhumanism, or psychic powers and technology (provided they don't already exist, of course!). The latter I can adapt to my own games or settings.

While it might be hit and miss (for apparent reasons), I could see more targeted scifi issues the likes of Cyberpunk, Golden Age Scifi (Atomic Rockets and Ray Guns), Hard Science Fiction, Military Scifi, Near Future Scifi, Planetary Romance, Space Opera, Transhumanism, etc. I know some of these have been covered already, and I'm not entirely certain which ones would sell best. But I think this might provide more utility to consumers, since I can pick up the Gothic Space Opera issue if that's what I was running. But again, I'd want more crunch that I can potentially port over to other genres, frex, if I am running a pulpy gothic space opera, I might enjoy an article in Planetary Romance about making swords and blasters coexist peacefully so my players can run over-the-top military types who can be reasonably effective charging a tank with a saber or with a laser gun.

Subgenre specialization aside, gear indices are nice, but more useful are articles that tackle potential loadouts with gear expantions incorporated. UT's downfall, imo, is the hodgepodginess of it all. It takes a ton of GM work to sort out what's available and tons more to sort out how they interact and would see service. Articles to that end would probably be quite useful - something akin to the article on modern military loadouts (I can't remember the title or issue; will replace when found).

Lastly, I love articles that let me build things myself. I might like a treatise on artillery-scale ultratech weapons, but I would REALLY like to have rules for making my own ultratech artillery! I like seeing creative Spaceships builds, but I LOVE getting my fingers on things like Alternate Spaceships and new systems. Basically, I prefer rules and tools to fluff. As a GM, I don't mind doing the legwork myself. I'm probably in the minority in that respect.

Re: Pyramid #3/79: Space Atlas
 

One other thing that might be interesting to help focus "scifi" into something more useful for GMs might be breaking down issues by TL - Cutting Edge already seems to be experimenting with that. I could see this as helping collect a group of gear that might interact and giving a rule structure for handling it all together.

Re: Pyramid #3/79: Space Atlas
 

At the danger of me too-ing this.... me too.
I love organizational details and rules "crunch".

Re: Pyramid #3/79: Space Atlas
 

I don't have any problems with this issue, though I didn't see anything that jumped out as being particularly useful for me; if I were to ever do a hard-science UT campaign featuring in-system space travel heavily I'd probably use the travel article, but none of the others say 'use me' all that much - and I like UT. I just don't find settings all that useful, personally - especially settings that are all fluff with no crunch.

A setting coupled with a GURPS Action equivalent tailor-made for the setting and genre? That's something I could get behind. Just fluff coupled with maybe four 'monster'/alien stat-blocks? Not so much.

Aren't setting-heavy issues generally low-sellers already, not just when coupled with UT?

Things I'd like to see in an Ultra-Tech-based Pyramid article:

• Revised UT weapons and armor, either to fit better with HT equivalents or to fit better with 'DF in SPAAAAAAACE' campaigns.
• Expanded/alternate UT computer use and hacking rules
• Expanded/alternate cybernetics or bioengineering rules
• Expanded/alternate rules for lockpicking/trap disarming/etc in an Ultra-Tech setting
• Custom design UT tech rules, like robots, AIs, guns, power armor, vehicles, etc
• Expanded/alternate gadgeteering rules
• Monster bestiaries for mutated or alien enemies
• Generic Ultra-Tech henchmen formatted like a monster bestiary entry

For each of these things, they don't need to be completely generic - detailing stuff like this with a single setting's assumptions in mind is fine so long as those setting assumptions are mentioned.

This list is largely 'stuff I would have found useful in setting up Edgerunners'; as-is, I actually wrote the first five of the entries in that list for that campaign (and my players wrote some of the rest), so it's stuff that, to me, would have been great (and in some cases was great, as I used as inspiration a good bit of stuff from some of the other Pyramid UT articles such as Cyberspace Cowboys and The Thinking Machine or whatever their names were). It's also all heavily crunch.

One thing that could be interesting is an 'assumed setting' found in multiple Pyramid articles EDIT: in multiple issues. Each article might be useful on its own, but when combined with others specifically designed to be in the same setting together it could become Voltron or Captain Planet or Devestator or any of the other 'By Our Powers Combined' trope-holders.

Re: Pyramid #3/79: Space Atlas
 

On the astrophysical side, I'd buy a reworked planetary system constructor kit - one that allows editing multiple individual planets in the solar system even after being generated randomly, and preferably one where the Excel format is merely the output or storage format, and isn't involved in formula-checking and random-creation procedures. But I do realise that this is not what Pyramid articles are like, the recent Halfway to Anywhere notwithstanding.

Re: Pyramid #3/79: Space Atlas
 

"If I were to write another planet write-up with bizarre society, like my piece Nahal in the 27 March '08 issue of Pyramid 2, would that be well received?

How about an essay on the physics of tides and tidal braking? Or an essay on surface conditions on spin:orbit resonant worlds?"

Very much yes please to all of them.

Re: Pyramid #3/79: Space Atlas
 

For me, the lattermost would be extremely useful. The second to last would be merely interseting but probably have no bearing on any game I'd run (and I'm a hard scifi kind of guy), and the first I'd have no interest in. Expanding away from rules and just generally useful info pertinent to scifi gaming (a category I totally forgot to include in my list of stuff above! good catch!), I'd love to see topics like extrasolar planet weather, the aforementioned surface conditions of tidally locked worlds, effects of orbiting a binary star (on stuff like day length, climate, weather patterns, etc.), estimating the strength of radiation belts around planets (even though this may boil down to pure GM arbitration based on what we know of our own solar system), at what orbital radii various minerals are likely to occur, or anything else that helps me create and describe an alien world as more than "Earth but with a reddish sky". The implications of all of those things are what drive interesting colonies and cultures to me. What if orbiting a binary can result in more than 4 seasons? What if the alternating tug of multiple stars causes the planet to tumble unpredictably, so that the day length changes randomly and constantly? What if the orbit itself is jerked all around so that seasonal changes are not regular? What if the primary star is brightest in the reds and infrareds and emits little blue, violet, or UV radiation - how does that affect plant growth? These would all not only help me destribe worlds in more better and more interesting detail, but it would also spark a lot of "what if" questions that are the bread and butter of ANY scifi genre. In my experience, the possibilities presented by the real world far exceed even the best and most creative authors in their ability to astound and captivate the imagination.

Re: Pyramid #3/79: Space Atlas
 

I am probably a bit unusual but my three most used pyramid issues have been the Aliens, Space exploration and Space Colony Alpha issues mostly because of some of the 'background' articles.

Things like 'Making Something Alien' and 'How to Build Tomorrow' have changed the way I think about parts of my settings and the way I use existing elements of the rules. More of this sort of thing would be useful, I can certainly see scope for similar exercises looking at tailoring star ships to particular campaign needs and would definitely second the suggestion on planetary environments.

Also while I would second the call for less fluff, or at least more targeted fluff I would be slightly concerned if this was just setting fluff plus mook/ beastie/ ship stats shoehorned in at the end. I think that the cure to this would be to have an implied setting in these articles, actually I think that you would need two* to offer better coverage of a wider range of options. In addition to this I would also keep things topic based 'looting your lifepod's locker' in the space exploration issue is probably still my favourite crunch article (despite being somewhat narrow) probably because it combines a specific topic with a variety of variations.

*Probably one higher TL, high superscience setting and a smaller scale harder, but not hard, science setting. Hard science single system stuff is already covered by Transhuman Space.