How can mechanics capture the feel of a genre (like sci-fi)?

[zslane]

When I look at the Hero System mechanics, there are only a few that in and of themselves really help capture the feel of the superhero genre. Knockback and the non-lethality of Normal damage come immediately to mind. By putting those aside, you turn Champions into the basis for other genres. But the game mechanics can start to have a samey/generic feel to them, as you go from genre to genre, precisely because you're using a common core system for them all.

 

So how can RPG game mechanics capture the feel of, say, the science fiction genre? The most obvious way to deliver the feel of a genre is through the setting, and then through the flavor text attached to actions, abilities, and gear. But the former has nothing to do with mechanics, and the latter are just fancy labels that can be swapped out for others, which make them mechanics-independent as well.

 

I began to wonder about this because I saw Starfinder and began to ponder how it could feel distinctly like science fiction through its game mechanics, rather than through its campaign setting(s). I mean, I presume they are just the Pathfinder mechanics with the flavor text changed and less attention paid to "divine" abilities. But how does one not walk away from the game feeling like it is just a re-skinned fantasy RPG? Is it all up to the setting?

[archer]

I've always thought it was up to the setting rather than the mechanics.

 

You can make a phaser but it's still going to do what an energy blast or a RKA does regardless of what you decide to call it in the system you're playing.

[RDU Neil]

This is a very tough question that is keeping me awake when I should be sleeping.

 

So, I think you have to start with "what defines Science Fiction as a genre?" and then how do you best evoke that in game play? 

 

If you are thinking of mechanics as purely the kind in Hero, I think you'll struggle, as that style of mechanic was designed to be generic, and while Knockback is clearly something primarily evoked in superhero comics, it still applies in a lot of over-the-top action genres.

 

Now, if you go outside of such mechanics, you can look at things like classic D&D spells as a type of mechanic. It is a stylized way of organizing rules that evokes a specific genre feel... a wizard with her spellbook. Leomund's Tiny Hut is not just a name stuck on a mechanical effect, it is a unique set of effects combined in a unique way, including the structure of what level of spell it is, etc. It can't be  deconstructed and pieced together differently without just making stuff up, the game just doesn't allow that.

 

Now spells in D&D are a crappy way to do it IMO, but they do evoke the "magic" sense for fantasy in a specific way.

 

What could that look like in Science Fiction? Perhaps knowledge/skill trees that reflect abilities of science, engineering and technology? Perhaps character abilities that are defined in context of the world?  I think setting is SO important to science fictcion (the fact that it is, at core, an extrapolation of current social and technological trends to a possible future state) that the rules/mechanics have to evoke the setting in them.

[Cancer]

I think the question posed in the OP is best answered with: What do you want?

 

I am a hopeless simulationist when it comes to sci-fi gaming, and you can't simulate something unless you have a decent handle on what you're trying to simulate.  In my gameworld philosophy, the situation your players are gaming in has to follow logically from the initial assumptions made about your world and what operates in it.

 

Science fiction in particular encompasses such a blinding variety of different atmospheres, different "feels", that you have to have a clear picture as a GM of the style of universe and the style of RPG that you want before you try selecting mechanics.  Are you in a future still purely Earthbound?  Are you interplanetary in the Solar System?  Are you interstellar, and if so, are a couple dozen worlds in play, or the billions likely to exist in the Galaxy?  What speculative tech are you taking for granted: power sources, space drives, weapons systems?  How much of known physics are you going to handwave away, and how much of it will you take as unchallengeable, and how will you reconcile the contradictions that spring from those choices?

 

Now, if you have a specific published setting in mind, then lots of that is sort of chosen for you, and you can take whatever game mechanics set that tickles your limbic system.  

 

Me, I'd like to create a workable 3-D space combat system, emphasis on 3-D. But even then I have lots of question I have to consider from the outset.  What strategic situations will impose peculiar victory conditions on space warfare?  How big must spaceships be in order to be viable weapons platforms capable of achieving the strategic missions of a space conflict?  Do you want one big one, a hundred thousand little ones, or or something inbetween?  If multiple ships are indicated, how do those operate together?  Does a squadron in a cone formation have a tactical advantage over one in a hollow sphere or hemisphere?  Can a fleet ever plausibly threaten an inhabited planet at the same tech level? 

 

If you aren't a simulationist, then you are appealing much more purely to the flavor of the gaming session, and you choose to overlook perhaps gross inconsistencies in the backstory, backgound physics, background economics. Then you can have Space Westerns like Firefly, for example.  (And I admit: you can have a perfectly enjoyable game in such a setting.)  But more pointedly, you have to choose up front a game flavor you want, and then choose the mechanics that let that happen.

[Doc Democracy]

3 hours ago, Cancer said:

think the question posed in the OP is best answered with: What do you want?

 

In HERO, this is key, and perhaps the weakness of the system in the market.

 

To shine, HERO needs the GM to do a lot of work behind the scenes.

 

An example of this is the holy symbol effect.  If the GM ensures all undead creatures are bought with particular physical and psychological complications, then all anyone needs to do is buy the perk, Holy Symbol, to make things work the way people expect.  It does however mean the GM has to think of it, in advance, and build it into the setting. 

 

So, Zslane, what mechanics do you see in dedicated SF RPGs that evoke an SF feel?

 

Doc

[Greywind]

Mechanics in Scifi are usually called "engineers".

 

In fantasy they're broken down into different professions.

[zslane]

Imagine a grimdark space opera setting like W40k, where players are fighting against aggressor alien species and horrific creatures pouring in from other dimensions. Starship combat wouldn't be a game element since that steps outside the scope of what individual "heroes" would be involved with. All game activity would be either planet-bound or on massive vessels which are basically cities in space.

 

Or imagine the opposite: a Star Trek/Orville style utopian sci-fi campaign. Again, assume the campaign is all about landing parties/away teams and not fleet combat.

 

Of course, these are just two examples, but I suppose they serve as reasonable ones for this exercise. It seems to me that capturing the feel of sci-fi campaigns isn't going to be in the form of genre- or campaign-specific game mechanics, but almost exclusively in the form of descriptive text for everything from gear to abilities to setting-based stuff like the names of alien races and such. It's not like Call of Cthulhu which has a special Sanity mechanic, or Vampire: the Masquerade which has its distinctive Humanity and, as of V5, Hunger mechanics. What sort of special mechanics might uniquely capture the essence and feel of "grimdark space opera" or "utopian sci-fi"?

[Doc Democracy]

Hmm.  well, it is difficult for a mechanic to carry things but, you need to think of something that allows the game to capture the feel of the setting.

 

I think for 40K I might build characters as a squad.  You need to allow for individual units to die without losing the continuity of the campaign.  I think as an everyman ability, each character would have 128 duplicates.  As they say in the film "You cant kill a squadron", it should allow play to continue whether or not individual duplicates are killed off in particular encounters.  Each casualty is replaced as soon as central command can arrange reinforcements.

 

everything else I would leave to settings and story.

[zslane]

So what are people's favorite off-the-shelf science fiction RPGs other than Traveler or Star Hero?

 

And if you were going to create a home-brew sci-fi campaign with your own setting and all, would you use the Hero System or something else?

[Grailknight]

I think the key to a setting's feel is in establishing a good definition of what it is not.

 

So for a science fiction setting, I'd rule out any magic and probably most fantastic martial arts.

 

Then flavor all the powers as tech, genetics/cybernetics and psychic. Then I'd decide how effective I'd want the powers to be (default 1.5 or 2x  effect  to keep active points low) relative to a NPC  normal.

 

Set your guidelines and stick  with them until you have fleshed out the world. 

[RDU Neil]

On 8/7/2018 at 2:32 PM, zslane said:

So what are people's favorite off-the-shelf science fiction RPGs other than Traveler or Star Hero?

 

And if you were going to create a home-brew sci-fi campaign with your own setting and all, would you use the Hero System or something else?

 

Back in the late '80s and early '90s it was mostly Cyber-punk for our SF games, bleeding into Mad-Max'ish stuff on the "wasteland frontiers" of the same games. Originally tried Aftermath and Twilight 2000, but essentially everything was Hero. Cyber-Hero (4th Ed) really was thematically fun, but rules wise, very clunky in terms of cybernetics and net running. In almost all games, we left net running to NPCs and played the mercs, and kept cybernetics as simple builds with specific power limitations. "Real cybernetics" involved the fact that body done was 'breaking' them and didn't heal, had to be fixed. EMP grenades and such were a threat... you had high-end cybernetics if you had 'power defense' vs. EMP, etc. Been a while (nearly 30 years, jeez) so I don't remember all the details.

 

Later, we did a Star Hero type of campaign, but I never owned 4th ED Star Hero... as you could just make Hero characters with sfx of the guns/equipment/ships/setting being sci-fi. This was pre-Firefly, but we had a crew of a hauler/smuggler that dealt with station politics, pirates, competing merchants, etc. That was short lived, but a ton of fun. Space combat was lethal and to-be-avoided. No shields, no dog-fights in space, 'cause that doesn't work. Firing distances were often hundreds of kilometers, unleash missiles and run... etc. My biggest influence on SF is probably CJ Cherryh as an author and her Merchanter/Alliance universe. Capturing that feel was possible, but more in terms of setting limitations... no easy warp drives, no sub-space communication, deep space travel is long and isolated, intersystem space travel around space stations and key gravity wells/planets is where the action is, etc.

 

I'm so strongly influenced by Hero that it would be very hard for me to do characters in anything else, but I would happily steal ship combat/vehicle combat rules from another system.  Hell, back in '83 or so, we had Hero characters but they ended up on a  Federation type ship and we used a bastardized Starfleet Battles set of rules for ship combat... Hero rules for character stuff.

 

That makes me think, that vehicle/ship rules are something Hero has NEVER done well... so perhaps that is a defining element of an SF game... rules if not mechanics.

[zslane]

Yeah, I always wanted to try a really simple space combat wargame like the old Starfire to run fleet combat as part of an RPG campaign, but never had a chance to try it.

[Cancer]

5 hours ago, zslane said:

 

And if you were going to create a home-brew sci-fi campaign with your own setting and all, would you use the Hero System or something else?

Last time I tried, yes, I used Hero System.  That was 15 years ago.  Haven't had a hankering for it since, other than a weird situation where we used the Rocket Age setting/background but ran it using FATE.  I consider that more pulp than sci-fi, despite the interplanetary action.

[Doc Democracy]

I really enjoyed running a one-off FFG Star Wars (Edge of Empire flavoured). It ran pretty well, I coped with the strange dice but LOVED the destiny mechanic (which delivers cinematic/heroic action rather than a SF feel). I think I will import that to the next Champions game I run.

 

Doc

[Vondy]

1 hour ago, Doc Democracy said:

I really enjoyed running a one-off FFG Star Wars (Edge of Empire flavoured). It ran pretty well, I coped with the strange dice but LOVED the destiny mechanic (which delivers cinematic/heroic action rather than a SF feel). I think I will import that to the next Champions game I run.

 

Doc

 

I love both the dice and destiny token mechanics from this game.

 

The talent-tree driven system of character development? Not so much.

 

[IndianaJoe3]

On 8/5/2018 at 12:18 PM, zslane said:

Imagine a grimdark space opera setting like W40k, where players are fighting against aggressor alien species and horrific creatures pouring in from other dimensions. Starship combat wouldn't be a game element since that steps outside the scope of what individual "heroes" would be involved with. All game activity would be either planet-bound or on massive vessels which are basically cities in space.

...

Of course, these are just two examples, but I suppose they serve as reasonable ones for this exercise. It seems to me that capturing the feel of sci-fi campaigns isn't going to be in the form of genre- or campaign-specific game mechanics, but almost exclusively in the form of descriptive text for everything from gear to abilities to setting-based stuff like the names of alien races and such. It's not like Call of Cthulhu which has a special Sanity mechanic, or Vampire: the Masquerade which has its distinctive Humanity and, as of V5, Hunger mechanics. What sort of special mechanics might uniquely capture the essence and feel of "grimdark space opera" or "utopian sci-fi"?

 

Now I'm trying to imagine a WH40K-style game where, "Heresy" is a stat much like, "Sanity" in CoC.

[zslane]

What would a Heresy stat do in the game?

[Zeropoint]

As your Heresy stat goes up, you get bonuses to interacting with xenos, technology skills, and generally everything involving creativity and unorthodox solutions, but you get penalties to interacting with any of the Imperial orders. Maybe you become more visible/accessible to Warp beings? I'm not really up on 40K fluff.

 

If you switch from calling the stat "Heresy" to "Orthodoxy", then the CoC "Sanity" model works really well. Learning things reduces your Orthodoxy stat. Your Orthodoxy stat is what you roll against to avoid losing Orthodoxy. Exposure to evidence that the world doesn't work the way that the official Imperium doctrine says it does calls for an Orthodoxy roll. When you talk to Inquisitors you have to make an Orthodoxy roll to avoid inadvertently saying something heretical, etc.

[Vondy]

On 8/7/2018 at 11:32 AM, zslane said:

So what are people's favorite off-the-shelf science fiction RPGs other than Traveler or Star Hero?

 

And if you were going to create a home-brew sci-fi campaign with your own setting and all, would you use the Hero System or something else?

 

The Jovian Chronicles by Dream Pod 9. I prefer the first edition core book. It was initially inspired by Mekton, but if you remove the giant mecha you end up with a fairly hard science fiction setting with a surprisingly diverse number of campaigns you can run. Most of the games I've run using it have been without mecha. The SolaPol book gives you a "space cops" option, for instance. And the civilian vehicle guides could open the door to travelers, merchants, miners, etc. It also includes rules for "reality distortion levels" running from gritty to cinematic. It runs on the Silhouette system, which was later released separately as "SilCore." Its the same system that ran Core Command, Heavy Gear, and Tribe 8. It handles vehicles and tech extremly well, which is critical for science fiction. JC was intended to be "near future" so you might have to tweak the timeline a bit, but the big brushstrokes are easy enough to work with. I usually don't like anime / manga style art, but Ghislain Barbe really made the setting come alive.  

 

 

 

 

[zslane]

I really like the visual aesthetics of anime science fiction, and I love mecha, so Jovian Chronicles definitely sounds interesting. Its name definitely rings a bell.

[Duke Bushido]

Late to the game, as usual, 

 

but I wanted to make a couple of comments, if I may.

 

First, I totally understand what you're feeling.  Totally get it.  Went though it many, many times before being introduced to Champions, actually.  As I've noted all throughout my spotty history here, I am not really a comic book guy. I don't hold them in low regard; it's simply that I wasn't a comic book kid, either, and so there was no formative exposure.

 

Further, I _detest_ fantasy as a genre ( paradoxically, I _love_ the Fantasy HERO books and material.  Go figure), and detest D&D above all else.  I like modern age stuff (though at this point I suppose MSPE and Danger International are no longer "modern day."  It's hard to find kids today who understand that tiny hopeless fear in the back of your mind from having grown and lived through the Cold War anyway.  Same thing seems to be happening to Cyberpunk as a genre).

 

But I digress, and this was supposed to be a couple of comments to help me forget for a minute that I have just finished my second work day with a 102 degree fever.  Essentially, I'm staving off sleep at least until sunset, because I don't plan to get up at all tomorrow unless it's for my funeral.  If any of you should find my body before my funeral, put it back in the shower and make sure the water is hot enough to make soup.  Then maybe I can stop shivering.  

 

Gah-- again.  Sorry.

 

When I was first introduced to RPGs-- I can't remember which was first.  It was D&D (first edition, then a smattering of second) or Traveller, that much I do recall.  I also recall that I preferred Traveller far, far more because it was sci-fi, my favoritiest (it's probably a word; my eyes are too runny to check) genre of all.

 

I also remember that when the guy who owned Traveller moved, I was stuck with D&D to get my fix. Sort of like needing your heroin, even though you know it's laced with bleach and freon.  

 

So we started doing things.  We started trying to re-cast the world around the rules.  I'm pretty sure everyone has tried this at one point.  For what it's worth, it never did work with TSR's D&D; from what I've seen, it didn't even work with the *ahem* "generic" d20 system from a few years ago (is that still around?).  I gave up.  How do you have a blaster pistol that never misses, only fires three shots a day, then you forget how to load it until some time after breakfast tomorrow?  But it does get stronger every time you "level up (something else I detest)."

 

Gave up on that, and TSR eventually released "Gamma World," proving, on a budget and with professional artwork, that D&D can't be sci-fi.  Found Star Frontiers, and-- well, we played that for a while.  It still felt like space magic.

 

Then my GM found Champions 1e.  We loved it.  Well, it wasn't any odd D&D variant, and you didn't roll random stats, so Yay!  Okay, I played it.  I liked it, but I didn't _love_ it.  Because, as noted, I'm not a comic book guy.  I wasn't ever really excited about superheroes.  I knew what they were, knew they existed, and had even read a handful of comics at friend's houses over the years.  I had nothing against superheroes, I just never wanted to be one.

 

So for about six months, we played superheroes, and I was so, so very much happier with the far-more-logical system that made the game work.

 

 

Then one of the players made a character who used a gun.   Not some comic book thing with ray gun circles poobiloobling out of it, but a gun-gun.  Well, mostly.  Non-lethals (he was doing an homage to (that's the much nicer way the French say "rip-off of") Doc Savage (who I also liked, for the sciency bits ) and was building the "super firer" gun that Doc absolutely disdained, but had to fire at least once a novella.

 

And then it just clicked.  Guns.  Armor.  Clinging....   gear!!  Clinging gear!  Forcefield belts!  Life Support via a mylar-esque suit with a bubble over your face!

 

I wheedled and cajoled, and Jim let me borrow his rule book during the week while I read it over and over and over, building a little something each time.  And boom-- Sci-fi with Champions (later HERO).  Wasn't long before one guy in the group was running a Fantasy campaign, I was running a Sci-fi, and Jim was still running Supers.  

 

With the exact same rules.

 

The immediate upside was "no other rules to learn."  But after a while, you did notice a certain "sameness."  The same problem that plagued the entire house of TSR.  

 

But it was different because it didn't detract from the game in any way.  We were just using the same method to tell different stories.  Had we been unable to tell convincing, right-feeling stories (like trying to run sci-fi with D&D 1e), it would have been different.

 

Eventually we realized that the actual core rules of the game had nothing to do with the flavor of the game, because unlike everything that had gone before it, nothing was _actually_ built in to the system that  forced a certain flavor.

 

I suppose this is my fevered brain hoping to remind you that the core mechanics are _not_ the game.  They are the rules for resolving issues in the game.  Unless they actually detract from the feel of the game (I'm lookin' at you, D&D and all your bastard d20 System "generic" off-spring).

 

There's nothing in HERO, at it's core, that forces detraction from any genre.  These days, there is a _crap load_ of stuff you will never, ever use, but you are not required to, either.  Pick and chose until you are left only with rules that _do not detract_ from what you want.  At that point, the rules are _done_.  (For example, in spite of having had them published, we have never used Vehicle rules, simply because, thanks to our early forays away from superheroes, we needed them sooner than the rules provided them.  Oddly enough, the rules already offered them:  A character, at base, is 2 meters by 1 meter by half-meter, roughly.  So is a motorcycle.  Add powers and skills and penalties and bonuses until you have built the vehicle you want, and you did it with the rules you already had.  Didn't need anything special or outside those core rules.   We _still_ do it that way, if only because it makes the most sense to us: this system is already universal; why do we need to add "except for this bit here; that takes special rules?"

 

 

Comment 2 (which I seriously pray is much, much more concise):

 

It is not up to the mechanics to enforce feel or flavor.  It is up to the mechanics to do two things: provide a meter to which the story will be told and a means of resolving challenges, and to absolutely not get in the way.  That's it.  Once the system gets in the way, the spell is broken, and the curtain falls, and the entire "story" is two kids pulling ropes and a fat guy with a lap full of noisemakers.

 

HERO doesn't do that: it doesn't get in the way, because there is always another way to do it.  Find the one that flows and stays out of the way.

 

The feel of the game should be up to the players: the GM can create as simple or as grand a universe as he wants, and can share it at any level of detail he choses.  The players respond in kind.  You want it to feel like science fiction?  Chose one:

 

Okay, you find an area full of chest-high walls and take cover.  There's lots of shooting, but not directly at you, at least not yet.  It looks like your ship is okay because it's still hidden.

 

Or

 

So keeping low and slow, darting when their attention seems focused elsewhere, you've made it within a hundred yards of the skirmish.  The entire hilltop is scarred with pits and sprays of raw earth from a shelling that seems to have been just a day or two ago, from the sick, musky scent of the mud.  Several buildings, or maybe one large compound, once stood here, and scattered around for two hundred yards square are chunks and sections of plasteel wall, ranging from big enough to hide behind to too small to cast a shadow.  You've made it to a wide, low section of wall, the top line of which is black and globular as if it were seared by a tank-mounted plasma beam.  If you stay crouched, you should remain hidden.  The wall is wide enough that the both of you could stretch out and sleep, if you wanted, but the nails-on-glass crackling and burnt ozone smell of beam weapons just a hundred yards away is enough to keep your hair on end, even if the build up of charged electrons around the battle wasn't already doing it. 

 

A small group of five men is marching along the tree line on the far side, and you can't help but wonder if your ship's concealment screen is still functional, of if a stray shot or two might have damaged it.  They don't _seem_ to be a headed directly toward it, but their carefully-picked advancement path is going to carry them awfully close.

 

 

Okay, _not_ my best stuff.  Not even my mediocre stuff, but in my defense: fever, remember?  

 

 

All that to say this:

 

I know what you're going through.  I've been there.  It took some time to realized that the feel of the game-- that was _my_ job.  That was _your_ job.  That was the job of everyone at your table.  The only two things the mechanics have to do with your story is to let you tell it in a fair, equally-accessible-to-all manner, and to not be in the way of the story itself.

 

I'm going back into the shower now.

 

Good night.

[zslane]

I remember when SJG tried to foist a GURPS version of Vampire: the Masquerade upon unsuspecting consumers. It was a great example of how a generic system like GURPS was ill-suited to capturing and conveying elements unique to a very rich, very different campaign setting (different than the vanilla junk typically found in their source books). Rather than the setting shaping the mechanics, the setting was forced to fit the generic mechanics, and it was a disaster.

 

The design dichotomy between generic systems and setting-specific systems is very real and shouldn't be dismissed. I love the Hero System, but I am also aware of its intrinsic limitations as a generic system. I understand that it sometimes becomes necessary to augment it with new mechanics in order to properly capture and convey a campaign setting to its fullest. I'm not so sure that everyone who uses (or designs for) a generic (or "house") system gets it. That's why you get a game like Starfinder which, despite protestations by its designers, does indeed feel like "Pathfinder in space", rather than like a unique science fiction universe that just happens to have some familiar D20 mechanics helping to drive game play.

[Duke Bushido]

So there's probably no hope for Ponyfinder, either, then? 

 

[Murrkon5]

I am forced to respectfully disagree.  I often find setting-specific designs to be rather condescending and limiting.  

 

Essentially, a well-crafted generic system is a blank canvas and a fresh paint supply.  The unfettered power of my and my players' imaginations can be let loose.  

 

Setting-specific designs are one of these adult colouring books with crayons.  The drawing of a spaceship might be very nice, and I do get to choose my crayons, but it is some other mind's idea of what a spaceship should be.  It's all born out of the tangled weed of D&D, where some players delight in getting pre-packaged, pre-made "Fighters" where others prefer to design their own ideas.  My fighter might end up looking virtually identical to the pre-made fighter, but I made it!

[zslane]

22 minutes ago, Murrkon5 said:

Essentially, a well-crafted generic system is a blank canvas and a fresh paint supply.

 

Indeed. So how would you utilize a generic system to capture the feel of a science-fiction campaign setting with the game mechanics themselves?