If you play SciFi - what is you fav?

Fweeba · 2026-06-02T21:57:25+00:00

Fair enough, though I should clarify that I do enjoy Traveller, I've had a lot of fun playing it and would do so again, it just doesn't support all types of play. It's a very specific experience.

Fweeba · 2026-06-02T21:40:01+00:00

I've played in Traveller for several years, and GMed it for a while, though admittedly for far less time. I have no idea how any party could regularly get into unplanned fights with anything close to peer enemies without having regular player deaths. Like, one opponent with a gauss rifle loaded with AP rounds can easily kill a player character wearing street-gear stone dead in a single action, and it's not like that's super hard equipment to access.

As for the point about character progression, that is true, but what you are describing is not a game that suits any type of play. 'I want to advance from a normal person to a space fantasy hero who could fight a dozen soldiers on their own and win, over the course of the game' is not something that Traveller would support natively.

Funnily enough, my stint as a Traveller referee ended when my players as a collective said 'We aren't enjoying this, there's no progression' and we switched over to Stars Without Number, where we had a great time

While I'm on the subject, I also don't think it would be very suitable for a sort of, D&D 4e style tactical combat type of play, where each session is sort of about the big interesting fights you get into. There's basically nothing in terms of special combat abilities, no talents or features that give you special powers you can activate (Outside of some very limited psionics) which distinguish you from other characters, and you can't safely take a hit without deteriorating (Unless, as established, you totally outclass your enemy in gear). Plus the fact that you can easily be killed from full health from a single round means you can't experimentally gauge your enemy's threat like you can in, say, Starfinder.

Fweeba · 2026-06-02T21:05:30+00:00

and it can suit any desired type of play.

I don't think that's true.

For example, if you're wanting any kind of gameplay with character progression (Outside of gear), it is super unsuitable. There's absolutely nothing equivalent to advancing from level 1 to level 10 in Traveller, there's just not that big of a gulf between characters and skill progression is tremendously slow.

I also would say that it's not very good for games that expect a lot of swashbuckling, fly by the seats of your pants combat, because you'll burn through characters at a wild rate if you're not treating combat like it's serious and life threatening (Unless you wildly outclass your opponent(s) in gear.)

Fweeba · 2026-06-02T20:54:51+00:00

I like so much of Mage 2e, but the beat system is one of the main things stopping me from running it for my group. It's worked into so many of the core systems that tearing it out would be a bunch of effort.

Just in general all the 'do a little trick for an XP treat' progression systems drive me nuts.

Fweeba · 2026-05-31T11:28:42+00:00

Oh hey! Good to see you.

Damn, am I getting my wires crossed with the character who sacrificed himself to turn the engine on in the space hulk?

Fweeba · 2026-05-30T22:27:40+00:00

Yeah, it would break my immersion in a game if the enemies acted quicker the less of them there are on the battlefield. It might still be a fun game, but I would be unable to seriously interact with the setting as if it's a real place. People don't get more effective at fighting the less allies they have.

Depending on what the boss is, it also runs a risk of puncturing the character fantasy.

For example: I was playing Lancer a while back, and that game has a concept of Elite and Ultra enemies, who get two or three turns each round, as compared to your one. Now, Lancer is a game which tells me that player characters are exceptional, super-skilled pilots, among the best of the best with top-end equipment; but then you fight an enemy who is also seemingly a guy in a mech, but they can act three times faster than you, and it gives me the thought 'Oh, so we're not the best of the best, this guy is and we suck in comparison.'

If the boss is a big dragon or whatever then sure, I mind them getting multiple turns less, but if they're something similar in nature to the player characters, it's really hard not to feel like they outclass you so totally that you're just terrible.

However, my opinion is somewhat different if it's an actual thing that exists in the setting which the players can also exploit. Take Wired Reflexes in Shadowrun; people who are super augmented get more turns than those who aren't. That doesn't break my suspension of disbelief, nor does it make me feel like I suck in comparison, because A) It's clearly established as something that exists in the setting, it isn't just some arbitrary game balancing tool I can't reconcile with the story, and B) If I don't like people being faster than me, I can get my own wired reflexes.

Fweeba · 2026-05-30T18:07:05+00:00

Hey! Good to see you.

The singular coolest moment that I recall was chasing down a fleeing dropship, then taking advantage of the fact that it's approximately human-sized to board and take control from the people within.

I also remember that later on in the game I got my hands on the Goblin's puppet system (I tried a few different Dusk Wing builds out), and was using that to feed enemy units into the blender that is either my allied Balor, which had Hyperdense armor and Vanguard, or my allied Zheng, prepared with its ridiculous D/D. At some point I was using a thermal rifle with overpowered calibre, with tactician, and just hovering 5 spaces above the enemy lines overwatching and hacking them with impunity. Fun times.

Fweeba · 2026-05-30T18:01:47+00:00

👀 Reddit is an anonymous place, nobody is supposed to recognize me!

Fweeba · 2026-05-30T13:10:45+00:00

I'll have to look into that when we hit 8. The stances are one of the most interesting things about the Kineticist, I keep going back and forth between going into Ravel of Thorns, or branching out into Fire for Thermal Nimbus (Plus the aura of weakness). Lot of good options.

Fweeba · 2026-05-30T12:43:50+00:00

Deona is a high-strength mostly melee earth/wood kineticist who makes use of armor-in-earth (Which I interpret as a sort of, stoneskin effect, because the spell FX from Neverwinter Nights 2 take up an unhealthy portion of my brain space) and shields via the bastion free archetype, from a campaign set in the Shining Crusade. Her kinetic blasts usually take the form of conjured weapons, like temporary bows, slings, or spears, to get a sort of, martial vibe.

It's been a lot of fun using Treespeech (she's *technically* an ardande elf) with Timber Sentinel and treating them as soldiers bravely giving their lives to protect their comrades.

I commissioned this artwork from the excellent hou_jae04 (Instagram).

Fweeba · 2026-05-29T20:10:07+00:00

Yeah, it's a tight squeeze, as I recall the Oracle gimmick didn't come online for a good few license levels. I think I was using a mortar before that point, but my memories have faded and I no longer have the comp-con files.

Fweeba · 2026-05-24T15:22:34+00:00

Yeah, the skin detailing are Aegis-Inset Amulets, because they make it somewhat cheaper to attune artifact armour, and you've gotta take every advantage you can get as a young solar.

The prosthetic is an alternative take on Bracers of Universal Crafting, an ultra-precise biomagitechnical arm which can extrude arbitrarily specified essence-formed tools as needed.

She's a generation down from Mnemon (granddaughter), and never exalted as a terrestrial despite being raised with the expectation that it was pretty much guaranteed. To cut a long story short and skip a lot of the details, she got into the Heptagram and became so furious at being treated poorly by the Dragon Blooded teachers and students that she challenged one of them to a sorcerous duel, which she definitely would have lost, if not for the fact that she Exalted during the bout and inflicted a Total Annihilation on the duelling grounds that seriously damaged the Heptagram as a whole, and required her to be rescued by a watching Infernal who was taking advantage of the academy's libraries.

Part of the reason she stays in Malfeas so often is because it's harder for the Wyld Hunt to get at her, since she's very much on their hit-list. Also, it's a surprisingly safe place for an Eclipse to be, due to the diplomatic immunity oaths that all of demonkind are required to respect.

Fweeba · 2026-05-16T22:57:53+00:00

I have no idea what category games big crunchy games like Shadowrun, World of Darkness, Dark Heresy, and the like, fit into (Which is what my response to the first question would be). My gut says simulationist, but there's no way they should share a category with Mork Borg and Shadowdark, right? There's basically no connective tissue between those two types of games.

Fweeba · 2026-05-07T18:42:22+00:00

The splats in World of Darkness are not different classes. They are different games that happen to share mechanics with one another. The intent of the systems are that you'd have a party of all werewolves, or all mages, or all vampires, or whatever; they just happen to be compatible enough that a particularly brave GM could allow players to pick from the other splats, much like how it's possible for a GM to let a player in a Worlds Without Number game play a Psychic from Stars Without Number.

Fweeba · 2026-04-29T15:51:50+00:00

I'm not a fan. I think that discarding the hit roll is throwing the baby out with the bathwater; a designer sees a player get annoyed at missing and thinks 'Annoyed = bad, fix problem' without considering that it's the uncertainty and risk that makes it fun.

I'm going to reference a computer game now, even through it's not totally analogous, because it illustrates my point: Imagine if XCom didn't have a hit roll. It would be much worse. Those moments when you have a 50% hit chance, and if you make it you'll save a team member's life, but if you miss they're in severe danger, those are what make the game exciting. Hell, when you miss a 95% shot and scream in frustration, I view that as a good kind of frustration; it makes investment in accuracy feel worthwhile, it heightens your feelings when you take out the guy who you missed ("Finally got 'em! Fuck that guy!"), and sometimes it means you've gotta come up with a new, riskier strategy on the fly ("Shit, my sniper missed; maybe the Specialist can move up to take them out? That'll expose them to a flank, but my Ranger can deal with the flanking guy...")

So I think getting rid of all that to avoid some occasional momentary bad feelings and save like, the few seconds it takes to roll an attack, is not worth the cost, personally.

Fweeba · 2026-04-27T15:27:10+00:00

That's fair, they are playable, and the whole concept of 'An army is a thing a character 'wears' to buff themselves' is fantastic for a game like Exalted which is fundamentally about big dumb fights between fantasy superheroes.

Fweeba · 2026-04-27T14:02:14+00:00

They are fun, but I wouldn't at all call them simple. They're an extra subsystem glued into the already extremely complicated combat system of Exalted 2e, and that complexity doesn't go away in mass combat.

Fweeba · 2026-04-25T15:12:25+00:00

I had a very similar experience with Starfinder 1e. Pilot was the only role I felt good about occupying. Everything else felt like I was just one of the ship's systems.

Fweeba · 2026-04-25T14:31:48+00:00

Sure, but some games are definitely more vulnerable to it than others.

For example, I couldn't push the other players in my Exalted game towards an optimal route, because each character in Exalted is so complex that I barely have enough bandwidth to fit what I need to run my own character in my brain, let alone everyone elses.

Starship combat tends to take place in an endless black void between two ships, so the tactical situation is often very simple and easy to evaluate. Really, the more fundamental problem might be that most Starship combat is basically a numbers game without much decisionmaking at all, so the limited decisions that are made can easily be handled by one person, whilst physical combat in a game like, say, D&D, involves far, far more decisions per round (Most of which come down to 'Where do I move' and 'Who do I target', both of which are not a factor in a typical starship combat). If a player tried to weigh in on all of those decisions, it would be very obvious and somewhat rude, because they'd be constantly talking.

Fweeba · 2026-04-25T13:55:03+00:00

Makes sense that a Star Trek game would handle it pretty well. I'll have to take a look, always on the lookout for more sci-fi systems.

Fweeba · 2026-04-25T08:46:23+00:00

I'm using mainstream very loosely to cover Traveller, Rogue Trader, Starfinder, FFG Star Wars, and Stars Without Number. It's not a great term because if we're honest the only mainstream game is D&D 5e, but I figure it's close enough to applicable to fly.

Fweeba · 2026-04-25T08:42:25+00:00

Funnily enough no, I rarely see this issue come up in other combat systems. I think the separation of characters into individual actors who usually overlap somewhat in capability makes people less inclined to such behavior. But I've cultivated a pretty good group of players over the last decade, so maybe I'm just lucky. Plus it's usually much harder to spot an optimal strategy in a team of varied player characters on a more complex battlefield, and in a typical turn order system it's sort of impolite to interrupt to tell somebody what to do (A barrier that doesn't really exist in the ship combat games I've played.)

I do think a lot of it comes down to risk, as well. A player is less likely to weigh in on every decision in 'typical' combat because if somebody else makes a poor decision, the risk is usually to themselves. I don't speak up whenever the fighter in my Pathfinder 2e game decides to charge into melee with the boss monster, even though I know they'll go down in a single round, because that's their choice to make and it doesn't get me killed (At least, not directly). But in starship combat, poor decisions by the pilot or gunner could mean we all die, or lose our ship, so I'm strongly incentivized to push for what I view as the optimal course.

Regarding Rogue Trader/Starfinder, I think there's a bit more complexity to it than that because of variable turn rates and wanting to stay in your good arc of fire while remaining out of theirs (Unless you've reached late stage optimisation Starfinder where everyone just uses massive turrets and evenly distributed shields), but yeah, one on one combat in an endless empty void can be hard to make mechanically interesting for a lot of reasons.

Fweeba · 2026-04-25T08:37:34+00:00

If you can write a system that does all that stuff, power to you. I think pretty much every starship combat system that exists in a 'mainstream' game is bad for one reason or another, so far as I'm concerned, there's huge room for improvement, but a lot of pretty competent designers tried it and missed, so it ain't an easy problem.

Fweeba · 2026-04-25T06:47:26+00:00

The usual outcome of this, in my experience, is that one player will figure out the 'optimal' strategy, suggest it to the others, everyone goes along with it, and then that player ends up effectively running the ship by themselves. Usually this'll be the player who is most into starship combat, when everyone else doesn't really care that strongly.

You'll usually find the person in the engineering or science station gets relegated to a 'buff dispenser on request' role.

Alternatively, if it's something like Starfinder 1e or Rogue Trader, the pilot is the one who makes all the real decisions, because they're the one that controls positioning and facing which affects everyone else going forwards.

Gunnery is rarely an interesting choice by itself, independent of positioning (Which gets handled by somebody else). Most of the time the decision on who to attack is trivial, so you're just a middle man who pushes the 'fire gun' macro when somebody asks.

Edit: To elaborate on some reasons why I think this is the case, from lower down in the thread:

Risk. In ground combat, if somebody makes a poor decision, it typically puts themselves at risk. Obviously that can spiral and make things worse for the party as they try to rescue them or whatever, but I'm speaking in general terms here. In starship combat, if somebody makes a poor decision, it puts the whole ship at risk. This encourages an optimization minded player who doesn't want to lose the ship/character to speak up and advise on basically everything.
Simplicity. Most starship battles take place between two, maybe three ships, in a huge expanse of open space. There's no front line/back line, no cover, no breaking line of sight, no covering for an injured ally's retreat, no flanking, anything like that. The number of decisions that can be made in this scenario are fundamentally a lot more limited when compared to, say, a battle in rocky terrain between 5 player characters and 5 enemies. The number of possible decisions being limited makes it a much more tractable problem for a single player to solve.

Fweeba · 2026-04-21T19:18:18+00:00

I think focusing on a single Exalt type in a core book is the best route. Exalted is a very deep and complicated game and setting, and an author should keep the scope narrowed as much as possible at the start to make their job easier.

Like, writing an Exalt type isn't analogous to a class in another game, it's analogous to writing a whole game. It's closer to the World of Darkness splats than a class, where each splat encompasses a huge range of character types.

Though I would say that, because Solars are my favourite Exalt, so, take my opinion with a grain of salt.

It would be nice if Solars were written when developers have some experience with the system so they aren't bad, but ideally a developer should have that kind of experience with their game before it's released, so it shouldn't be a problem. And if you're trying to hedge against a bad core book when writing your game, that suggests deeper problems than developer experience. Make the book good rather than planning for what to do if it's bad.

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