Why are SPACE RPGs so uncommon?

[rusty_shackleford]

A continuation of my SPACE threads

The total number of space sci-fi RPGs made this century is low. It used to be much more popular, in fact if you created a list of space sci-fi RPGs there's probably more notable ones made before 2000 than after. This is despite the popularity of Mass Effect.
What do you think the reason for this is?

[J1M]

Money people believing that half of gamers are women.

[Stack of Turtles]

A continuation of my SPACE threads

The total number of space sci-fi RPGs made this century is low. It used to be much more popular, in fact if you created a list of space sci-fi RPGs there's probably more notable ones made before 2000 than after. This is despite the popularity of Mass Effect.
What do you think the reason for this is?

I think it relates to the fact that we as a species found out that space is really boring and we don't want to go back. Exploring new planets and meeting alien races seems less believable than ever, both because we no longer expect alien races to exist, and because we hardly have the wealth to establish a space colony or a good reason to do so. You'll notice that modern sci-fi often tends to be space fantasy instead, where something happened differently in the past to make space exploration practical. Even Mass Effect is dangerously close to becoming that now - we have less than 50 years to colonize the moon to make the Mass Effect timeline work out. I think most people simply don't believe that will happen. Worse, far too many people think Earth will be destroyed and humans extinct from globowarmo by then.

[Tweed]

A continuation of my SPACE threads

The total number of space sci-fi RPGs made this century is low. It used to be much more popular, in fact if you created a list of space sci-fi RPGs there's probably more notable ones made before 2000 than after. This is despite the popularity of Mass Effect.
What do you think the reason for this is?

I think it relates to the fact that we as a species found out that space is really boring and we don't want to go back. Exploring new planets and meeting alien races seems less believable than ever, both because we no longer expect alien races to exist, and because we hardly have the wealth to establish a space colony or a good reason to do so. You'll notice that modern sci-fi often tends to be space fantasy instead, where something happened differently in the past to make space exploration practical. Even Mass Effect is dangerously close to becoming that now - we have less than 50 years to colonize the moon to make the Mass Effect timeline work out. I think most people simply don't believe that will happen. Worse, far too many people think Earth will be destroyed and humans extinct from globowarmo by then.

But there's always been less space RPGs on the whole than fantasy.

[Stack of Turtles]

A continuation of my SPACE threads

The total number of space sci-fi RPGs made this century is low. It used to be much more popular, in fact if you created a list of space sci-fi RPGs there's probably more notable ones made before 2000 than after. This is despite the popularity of Mass Effect.
What do you think the reason for this is?

I think it relates to the fact that we as a species found out that space is really boring and we don't want to go back. Exploring new planets and meeting alien races seems less believable than ever, both because we no longer expect alien races to exist, and because we hardly have the wealth to establish a space colony or a good reason to do so. You'll notice that modern sci-fi often tends to be space fantasy instead, where something happened differently in the past to make space exploration practical. Even Mass Effect is dangerously close to becoming that now - we have less than 50 years to colonize the moon to make the Mass Effect timeline work out. I think most people simply don't believe that will happen. Worse, far too many people think Earth will be destroyed and humans extinct from globowarmo by then.

But there's always been less space RPGs on the whole than fantasy.

Is there a reason there shouldn't be?

[rusty_shackleford]

Mass Effect did a decent job of making the galaxy seem much smaller than it is, something I think is probably a lot harder than it looks.

[Trickster]

A continuation of my SPACE threads

The total number of space sci-fi RPGs made this century is low. It used to be much more popular, in fact if you created a list of space sci-fi RPGs there's probably more notable ones made before 2000 than after. This is despite the popularity of Mass Effect.
What do you think the reason for this is?

Because an office clerk understands that if you add spaceships, aliens, and blasters to their life, little will change. It's a different matter when it comes to pseudo-medieval theme, with magic and an adventurous path, a dangerous, unexplored, mysterious yet at the same time familiar world.

[Tweed]

I think it relates to the fact that we as a species found out that space is really boring and we don't want to go back. Exploring new planets and meeting alien races seems less believable than ever, both because we no longer expect alien races to exist, and because we hardly have the wealth to establish a space colony or a good reason to do so. You'll notice that modern sci-fi often tends to be space fantasy instead, where something happened differently in the past to make space exploration practical. Even Mass Effect is dangerously close to becoming that now - we have less than 50 years to colonize the moon to make the Mass Effect timeline work out. I think most people simply don't believe that will happen. Worse, far too many people think Earth will be destroyed and humans extinct from globowarmo by then.

But there's always been less space RPGs on the whole than fantasy.

Is there a reason there shouldn't be?

I don't know, is there? You can do just about anything you want to in space, soft or hard sci-fi. People just don't seem to prefer it to generic fantasy ****** elf ****.

[WaterMage]

Urban fantasy, steam punk and teslapunk are also very hard to find...

[TheEmptyRoad]

A continuation of my SPACE threads

The total number of space sci-fi RPGs made this century is low. It used to be much more popular, in fact if you created a list of space sci-fi RPGs there's probably more notable ones made before 2000 than after. This is despite the popularity of Mass Effect.
What do you think the reason for this is?

I think it relates to the fact that we as a species found out that space is really boring and we don't want to go back. Exploring new planets and meeting alien races seems less believable than ever, both because we no longer expect alien races to exist, and because we hardly have the wealth to establish a space colony or a good reason to do so.

See, this I don't understand at all. The asteroid belt is full of natural resources we could use. Both here on Earth and in building space stuff. I think it's more that the political will is not there. Reaching out to a new frontier could be inspiring, and the Powers that Be((TM)) can't have that. They just want obedient serfs who consoom product.

Money people believing that half of gamers are women.

Willing to bet it has to do with this. Most women prefer fantasy to space and scifi, and focus-testing corps want to appeal to as broad an audience as possible.

[Breathe]

I enjoy sci-fi way more than fantasy, so I empathize. The amount of female devs probably has something to do with the lack of them, as most space rpgs I'm assuming were made by White male dev teams.

[Stack of Turtles]

See, this I don't understand at all. The asteroid belt is full of natural resources we could use. Both here on Earth and in building space stuff. I think it's more that the political will is not there. Reaching out to a new frontier could be inspiring, and the Powers that Be((TM)) can't have that. They just want obedient serfs who consoom product.

It's not economically feasible. Even mining landfills and recycling, which is vastly more expensive than having slaves dig ore out of the ground in Africa and sending it to China to be smelted (which is why we do that instead), is inordinately cheaper in energy terms than mining asteroids would be. The world produces over five million tons of steel alone every day. I want you to sit and seriously think about just the number of rocket launches and amount of fuel it would take to present a serious expansion on that number by mining asteroids. For asteroid mining to be feasible, we would have to be suffering enormous cost-push hyperinflation here on Earth to make the expenditure worth it, and it's frankly likely that, in such a situation, human civilization would have collapsed instead.

[rusty_shackleford]

Mining asteroids would involve slamming them into the moon and then using a space elevator to get the resources to earth, it's feasible

[Stack of Turtles]

Mining asteroids would involve slamming them into the moon and then using a space elevator to get the resources to earth, it's feasible

You can easily calculate the MINIMUM involved energies from basic physical laws, and I have. It's not feasible and would be enormously destructive.

[rusty_shackleford]

Mining asteroids would involve slamming them into the moon and then using a space elevator to get the resources to earth, it's feasible

You can easily calculate the MINIMUM involved energies from basic physical laws, and I have. It's not feasible and would be enormously destructive.

gravity go brrr

[Stack of Turtles]

Mining asteroids would involve slamming them into the moon and then using a space elevator to get the resources to earth, it's feasible

You can easily calculate the MINIMUM involved energies from basic physical laws, and I have. It's not feasible and would be enormously destructive.

gravity go brrr

Yes, that's where the "enormously destructive" part comes in, because we end up absorbing the kinetic energy.

[rusty_shackleford]

Some other quick opinions:

A lot of the travel is done in something that makes traditional combat hard, so you either need to avoid it or have two separate combat systems at minimum
There's no default setting to easily be inspired by
Space is really big, which makes hiring writers good at writing scifi probably a bad idea because good writers tend to understand space is really big but empty games generally aren't fun

[rusty_shackleford]

It's hard to justify seeing only a small slice of an entire planet unless you have a really good justification like mass effect.

[MrTwinkls]

A continuation of my SPACE threads

The total number of space sci-fi RPGs made this century is low. It used to be much more popular, in fact if you created a list of space sci-fi RPGs there's probably more notable ones made before 2000 than after. This is despite the popularity of Mass Effect.
What do you think the reason for this is?

It's not mainstream right now and so has low appeal for moneybags. Give it some time. Space craze will return some day and I'll be there to enjoy it once again.
My question is where the hell are all biopunk rpgs?

[J1M]

See, this I don't understand at all. The asteroid belt is full of natural resources we could use. Both here on Earth and in building space stuff. I think it's more that the political will is not there. Reaching out to a new frontier could be inspiring, and the Powers that Be((TM)) can't have that. They just want obedient serfs who consoom product.

It's not economically feasible. Even mining landfills and recycling, which is vastly more expensive than having slaves dig ore out of the ground in Africa and sending it to China to be smelted (which is why we do that instead), is inordinately cheaper in energy terms than mining asteroids would be. The world produces over five million tons of steel alone every day. I want you to sit and seriously think about just the number of rocket launches and amount of fuel it would take to present a serious expansion on that number by mining asteroids. For asteroid mining to be feasible, we would have to be suffering enormous cost-push hyperinflation here on Earth to make the expenditure worth it, and it's frankly likely that, in such a situation, human civilization would have collapsed instead.

Being capped to your starting ore resource is lame.

[Vergil]

Tim Cain talks about this I think. Basically fantasy is just a lot easier to start from a baseline. Both as a creator you already have a lot of basic worldbuilding/tropes that you can then adjust or add on to as you see fit. For space/sci-fi stuff there's just a lot more minutiae you have to figure out. People already know what orcs, trolls, goblins, elves etc are from the general cultural zeitgeist. Even if you call them "Orsimer" people can look at them and get a general idea. Even if you're going to be subverting those tropes you know what the average person is gonna think the moment they see them.

However something like a "Turian" from Mass Effect requires it's own loredump so you get what their deal is. A toddler probably knows what a dwarf is but a "Kaleeshi" is a bit dubious. You have to find a way to get people immediately interested but also comfortable in your world without having to overload them with a bunch of wikipedia codex articles about **** they have no reason to be invested in enough to bother reading yet. It's not so bad when you're watching a movie but if you're playing a game where you have to roleplay or even pick a race it can be a bit daunting to see a bunch of random goobers you have no context for.

There's also the issue of it just being such a larger scope to try and tackle where even just the means of transportation requires some sort of explanation. In a fantasy world you don't need to explain the intricacies of why boats work we've had those in real life forever. You do have to at least come up with a decent hand wave for interplanetary travel though.

Really it's just so much easier to have a world with elves throwing fireballs and orcs smashing things with hammers and then tweak things to your liking instead of creating your own entire galaxy.

[Vergil]

It's hard to justify seeing only a small slice of an entire planet unless you have a really good justification like mass effect.

I think it's actually pretty easy to justify it's just that some games like Starfield focus on stuff like exploration over everything and that's just not going to work for this kind of game. I can buy that most planets only have a limited number of points of interest I'm going to want to bother with.

[Tweed]

Tim Cain talks about this I think. Basically fantasy is just a lot easier to start from a baseline. Both as a creator you already have a lot of basic worldbuilding/tropes that you can then adjust or add on to as you see fit. For space/sci-fi stuff there's just a lot more minutiae you have to figure out. People already know what orcs, trolls, goblins, elves etc are from the general cultural zeitgeist. Even if you call them "Orsimer" people can look at them and get a general idea. Even if you're going to be subverting those tropes you know what the average person is gonna think the moment they see them.

However something like a "Turian" from Mass Effect requires it's own loredump so you get what their deal is. A toddler probably knows what a dwarf is but a "Kaleeshi" is a bit dubious. You have to find a way to get people immediately interested but also comfortable in your world without having to overload them with a bunch of wikipedia codex articles about **** they have no reason to be invested in enough to bother reading yet. It's not so bad when you're watching a movie but if you're playing a game where you have to roleplay or even pick a race it can be a bit daunting to see a bunch of random goobers you have no context for.

There's also the issue of it just being such a larger scope to try and tackle where even just the means of transportation requires some sort of explanation. In a fantasy world you don't need to explain the intricacies of why boats work we've had those in real life forever. You do have to at least come up with a decent hand wave for interplanetary travel though.

Really it's just so much easier to have a world with elves throwing fireballs and orcs smashing things with hammers and then tweak things to your liking instead of creating your own entire galaxy.

I was gonna say something like this, but then I didn't.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

If the game spans multiple planets which have different nations on them, then you have a production setback in that you will probably not be able to reuse the same assets across planets. Ie, you will not be able to reuse Belogbog building assets on Xianzhou. This means that production can take longer as you have to spend more time creating enough assets for each different planet/culture, and it is hard to reuse them to expedite future production unless you specifically write planets that are colony worlds of Belobog or something. Or everyone in the universe just uses the same boring generic sci fi buildings. With a more traditional fantasy RPG setup where it is just one world, you can more justifiably reuse assets across the map.

If the game involves controlling a spaceship in addition to controlling a character on the ground, then that might be doubling the amount of time and effort required to keep both modes polished.

[Vergil]

I was gonna say something like this, but then I didn't.

I almost didn't bother but I needed to vomit a world salad long post to distract from the darkness

[MrTwinkls]

Tim Cain talks about this I think. Basically fantasy is just a lot easier to start from a baseline. Both as a creator you already have a lot of basic worldbuilding/tropes that you can then adjust or add on to as you see fit. For space/sci-fi stuff there's just a lot more minutiae you have to figure out. People already know what orcs, trolls, goblins, elves etc are from the general cultural zeitgeist. Even if you call them "Orsimer" people can look at them and get a general idea. Even if you're going to be subverting those tropes you know what the average person is gonna think the moment they see them.

However something like a "Turian" from Mass Effect requires it's own loredump so you get what their deal is. A toddler probably knows what a dwarf is but a "Kaleeshi" is a bit dubious. You have to find a way to get people immediately interested but also comfortable in your world without having to overload them with a bunch of wikipedia codex articles about **** they have no reason to be invested in enough to bother reading yet. It's not so bad when you're watching a movie but if you're playing a game where you have to roleplay or even pick a race it can be a bit daunting to see a bunch of random goobers you have no context for.

There's also the issue of it just being such a larger scope to try and tackle where even just the means of transportation requires some sort of explanation. In a fantasy world you don't need to explain the intricacies of why boats work we've had those in real life forever. You do have to at least come up with a decent hand wave for interplanetary travel though.

Really it's just so much easier to have a world with elves throwing fireballs and orcs smashing things with hammers and then tweak things to your liking instead of creating your own entire galaxy.

Good fantasy requires excessive lore dump too especially if it has magic. Otherwise you'll get Harry Potter or Japanese isekai level of worldbuilding which is boring and crumbles completely after some simple questions.
In sci-fi you can skimp on lorebuilding but cannot ignore science aspect otherwise it's not sci-fi.
In fantasy you can skimp on conventional realism but must compensate with lorebuilding to flash out how the world works.
In both cases there must be some universal rules for world to operate by to not break suspension of disbelief.
E.g. your elves throwing fireballs - it's such a simple fantasyish idea but brings with it a ton of questions about the world that must be accounted for in writing. Why fireball? How they conjure it? How did they improved it through the years? How do they build their cities with constant fire hazard? How does it affect their culture and religion? What is the temperature of it's flame? For how long can they hold it? How do they throw it? What military tactics they use? Can they cast it underwater or without air? Can they cast it without arms or inside someone's head? Can they cast plasma torch and make steel products? What countermeasures against fireball magic were implemented by other races? And so on.

[Stack of Turtles]

See, this I don't understand at all. The asteroid belt is full of natural resources we could use. Both here on Earth and in building space stuff. I think it's more that the political will is not there. Reaching out to a new frontier could be inspiring, and the Powers that Be((TM)) can't have that. They just want obedient serfs who consoom product.

It's not economically feasible. Even mining landfills and recycling, which is vastly more expensive than having slaves dig ore out of the ground in Africa and sending it to China to be smelted (which is why we do that instead), is inordinately cheaper in energy terms than mining asteroids would be. The world produces over five million tons of steel alone every day. I want you to sit and seriously think about just the number of rocket launches and amount of fuel it would take to present a serious expansion on that number by mining asteroids. For asteroid mining to be feasible, we would have to be suffering enormous cost-push hyperinflation here on Earth to make the expenditure worth it, and it's frankly likely that, in such a situation, human civilization would have collapsed instead.

Being capped to your starting ore resource is lame.

That's exactly the problem: Once we figured out we were stuck like that, now it's boring to talk about space.

[gastovski]

Because space is fake and void therefore boring. Either go with star wars or dont go at all.

[KOS-MOS]

Agree with Vergil.

I also think writing fantasy is a lot easier and more forgiving than sci-fi, mainly because of the amount of knowledge needed to make a sci-fi world feel believable. In fantasy, you can always fall back on 'well, it’s magic' to explain things. But in sci-fi, things need to feel at least somewhat grounded in science. Sure there is 'space magic' sometimes, but it’s still way less forgiving than your typical fantasy magic.

I’d also add that, obviously, women and ******* suck at science.

[rusty_shackleford]

Any opinions as to how popular the genre(setting) is with strategy games?