Re: [GZG] First Sci-Fi Game

On Friday 24 April 2009 21:07:44 Tom B wrote:
> In the long run, hard sci games will be boring. No FTL = years of time
in
> transit = not a lot of dramatic tension just character aging.

Not necessarily. SF != star travel. Transhuman space is limited to just
the solar system, and looks like quite an interesting setting (I have
all
the books, but I've never played it).

Cyberpunk style can also be done as Hard SF, and that doesn't even
require getting into orbit.

On the other hand, something like the Revelation Space setting by
Alistair Reynolds has star travel, but no FTL. The light hugger
crews spend their time in sleep, and relatively short periods of
time pass for them due to time dilation. Running a campaign where
a trip to the next star system requires working out how society
has changed over 100 years is left as an exercise for the reader.

In such a campaign, you concentrate on what happens at destinations,
and ignore the travel periods. No reason it couldn't be done in a
way similar to Ars Magica, with downtime used for politics, study
and research.

On the gripping hand, traversable wormholes could fall into the
no-FTL category (for a loose enough definition of no-FTL), and
would allow a large empire spanning time and space.

-- 
Be seeing you,			       http://www.glendale.org.uk
Sam.			    Mail/IM (Jabber): sam@glendale.org.uk 

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