other potential ATE, DF, MH OR Action series?

[lachimba]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

You'd want to deal with blending the conventions of Space Opera and Planetary Romance. You'd want templates, Adventuring Scholar/Scientist, Pilot Extraordinare, Psion, Space Swasher, ect. You'd want some Aliens, foes, allies, demi-gods, PCs, ect. You'd need some varrient tech levels. And you'd need Psi-options. You could get a few meaty titles.

IMHO Space Opera is too broad it needs to be a subset like DF is a subset of fantasy.

Breaking it down

Bug hunt... basically Aliens versus predator

Distinctive TL,
powers,
Templates,
Narrow genre
Seems like there are third parties out there with competitor products too.

You can imagine something similar for Mecha or a space pilot/ ship to ship combat game.

I also think theres something to be said for a Firefly type treatment where the pcs are on the frontier.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by acrosome

Did I miss something? Has After The End been released?

No, it hasn't. It has been on hold for a while, as described here.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by lachimba

IMHO Space Opera is too broad it needs to be a subset like DF is a subset of fantasy.

Breaking it down

Bug hunt... basically Aliens versus predator

Distinctive TL,
powers,
Templates,
Narrow genre
Seems like there are third parties out there with competitor products too.

You can imagine something similar for Mecha or a space pilot/ ship to ship combat game.

I also think theres something to be said for a Firefly type treatment where the pcs are on the frontier.

I'm working on a Captain-and-Crew "Explore a universe full of random aliens and rubber physics" as I write this. That's also similarly formulaic and pretty easy to write adventures for.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Rasputin

... since my idea of a WW2 adventure won't mesh with the next guy's, which won't mesh with someone else's. Am I catching spies in London, defending Stalingrad, escaping from Stalag 13, what? Just being in a platoon is really structured in terms of adventures for this idea; it will get tiresome fast.

Indeed, being in a platoon is pretty dull most of the time, but there's no reason it has to be run that way. The WWII campaign I'm playing in is one of the best RPGs I've played in 35 years. We've caught spies in London, defended Stalingrad, and would rather avoid needing to escape from Stalag 13, since that requires being captured.

Also, the lack of a place to go wild with few social constraints hurts as well.

I'll start a separate thread about that in Roleplaying in General, sine it isn't GURPS-specific.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

I'm working on a Captain-and-Crew "Explore a universe full of random aliens and rubber physics" as I write this. That's also similarly formulaic and pretty easy to write adventures for.

Let's see, you'd need some templates, Command Officers, Science Officers, Engineers, Med-Techs/Doctors, Psions, Xenologists/contact specialists, Weapons/Security, ect. You'd need some PC aliens, the cool cerebral ones, the tough warrior ones, the Empath/healer ones, the tricky swasher ones, ect. You'd need to define some TL for the ships and offer a few gameworlds.

[Astromancer]

A note on Captain and Crew stuff. Psionics will need care. I think the best way is to limit Earth Humans by requiring an Unusual Background if they want to have Psionics. However, Aliens should be limited to specific areas of psionics by species. This keeps everyone in the game.

[Humabout]

Originally Posted by lachimba

I also think theres something to be said for a Firefly type treatment where the pcs are on the frontier.

I've already run something similar to this with just Action! and some gizmos from Ultra-Tech. It barely required any tweaking.

[SCAR]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Let's see, you'd need some templates, Command Officers, Science Officers, Engineers, Med-Techs/Doctors, Psions, Xenologists/contact specialists, Weapons/Security, ect. You'd need some PC aliens, the cool cerebral ones, the tough warrior ones, the Empath/healer ones, the tricky swasher ones, ect. You'd need to define some TL for the ships and offer a few gameworlds.

Follow the link in his Sig for his webpage, then the GURPS Link and then the Space Opera Link.
You'll find Space Opera template (a la Action); as well as Military Templates, Lenses and Loadouts.
They're an excellent resource, they seem to cover the basics pretty well. They don't cover everything - but they never could (look at how many additional DF templates have been released in later volumes, Pyramid, and personal webpages!)

[SCAR]

This thread from a few years ago has some interesting and useful discussion, as well as input from Sean Punch and David Pulver.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Let's see, you'd need some templates, Command Officers, Science Officers, Engineers, Med-Techs/Doctors, Psions, Xenologists/contact specialists, Weapons/Security, ect. You'd need some PC aliens, the cool cerebral ones, the tough warrior ones, the Empath/healer ones, the tricky swasher ones, ect. You'd need to define some TL for the ships and offer a few gameworlds.

No, you don't start with templates. You start with challenges. Captain-and-Crew is about 5 things: Space, Science, Engineering, Action and Intrigue.

The first is, obviously, Captain-and-Crew adventures center on people in a space ship. You have your niches in the crew ("Captain, Science Officer, Pilot, Chief Engineer, etc") and most of what they do, most of their "Fun mechanics challenge" is defined nicely in GURPS Space. You really don't need much more work than that, other than to define what technologies are available (obviously, a lot of super-science. I ultimately settled on TL 11^).

The remaining four tend to blur together into "The stuff the PCs do on their mission," while the first is more "How do we get to our mission?" though, naturally, the adventure might end with a space-battle. Generally speaking, once the away-crew beams down to the planet, or shows up at the space station for the diplomatic talks, or stares down the enemy warship, then the rest of the stuff comes up. There's usually some science problem to explore WHILE there's some kind of social issue to explore, all of which is regularly punctuated by bouts of punching people in the face (despite the fact that they're wearing thick layers of durasteel armor that should be totally punch-in-the-face proof. I swear to god, I don't know how many times I've seen an alien shrug off a phaser blast to see him bowled over by a two-handed-federation-punch). Science is about figuring out the science problem, engineering is about solving it, intrigue is about dealing with the interpersonal problem, and action is about double-fist-punching aliens in the phase, or having blaster fights with the alien boarders.

Once you understand these challenges, you can then build the templates. I'm writing them out right now. Action is pretty well covered by numerous works, and intrigue mostly involves boiling down Social Engineering into simpler terms and adding in "How to deal with aliens". The science stuff is the only tricky bit, namely in that your science has to be rubbery enough that you can have the whacky antics you tend to see in the genre, but not so rubbery that players can't solve the mystery. In a TV show, the characters might say "Oh, the morphic field that's turning the captain into a frog was created by a tachyon pulse from that pulsar star we passed. If we return and hit it with a reverse polarity neutrino flow, we should be able to remove the morphic field," and a viewer will say "Oh, sure, whatever. Science-y stuff" but the science officer actually needs to come up with that solution in an RPG, ideally with more than just "Er, the captain is turning into a frog? I roll Science! to fix the problem." I haven't quite figured out how best to do that, but my best bet right now is Monster Hunters holds the key.

The thing that pops out pretty quickly is that characters end up with multiple roles. Namely, you have your ship-role, and your adventure-role. So the Science officer is also the guy who is reading your sensors on the ship, and your giant punch-people-in-the-face war-alien is also the guy who fires your x-ray laser cannons at the enemy, and so on.

From there, you need a way to rapidly create a variety of enemies and allies, in simple enough terms that it doesn't take months to build your universe (ideally, you should be able to do it on the fly. "Uh, in the next system you meet... a stony race of silicon beings who hunt other species for sport! They decloak their crystal ship behind you and move to attack!"). So, ideally, you have a series of moddable racial templates and cultural templates ("The silicon race template, with a magma-lens, and the proud-warrior-race with a hunter lens). You also need load-outs, because tech is key in any ultra-tech game, but you don't want the GM to take forever building it. Likewise, you need some ready-to-grab ships with enough variety that players get a tactical challenge. Your "world-building" should double as a "Monster manual development" and it needs to be fast. We just need single-note aliens with bumpy foreheads. If people want deeper treatments of their aliens, they use GURPS Space, not this Captain-and-Crew stuff (just like people who want Game of Thrones shouldn't be using GURPS Dungeon Fantasy)

I'm largely finished with my first draft of ships and the overall tech-layout and I'm tinkering with challenges right now. Like I said, Science/Engineering is the big stopping measure right now. Once I have it figured out, everything should move smoothly.

And I'm finished with school literally today (assuming all goes well), so I should have plenty of time to get this finished. When I do, I'll post it.

If anyone is interested in participating/looking over my stuff, let me know.

EDIT: And I should hasten to add there's a lot more Captain-And-Crew out there than Star Trek. I'm also using Farscape, MOO2, FTL and (to a lesser extent) Blake's 7 as inspiration. Oh, and Cosmic Encounters (which is a little less useful than I hoped, but I do love it so)