Jan 27, 2018, 3:23 PM

I know what people demand. That they want extremely exhaustive answers on how everything works so they can tell their own compelling stories in the setting. I know that if you say, 'Well that's a transporter' that people are going to ask 800 questions on what a transporter is, and exhaustively ask at length why you can or can't use it to create new life or rebuild anything else at the molecular level or a million other things. I get that every engineer character is going to feel they need to know all those.

What I'm saying is it's wrong for a game creator to try to answer them. That it's a mistake to do so.

I think that you should only go very slightly past the knowledge that any general character would have access to. Just a little bit. A few paragraphs at most. You absolutely will never, ever get started if you try to exhaustively define every aspect of the setting. Let me put it another way:

Sure, you'll have phasers or blasters or laser cannons or whatever in the setting. You really don't need to define them past a sentence or two that amounts to 'pew pew'. That's it. If you make other races, and have diplomat characters, you can't write 300 or 400 pages on the hundreds of years of history between the different aliens, and their cultures. There is never going to be a point where you are 'done' there. If you are drawn into rabbit holes away from the baselines, it will never get done, and no one will ever be able to RP in the setting.

Yes, of course I know people have way different demands for sci fi and fantasy. I'm saying it's a mistake for a game designer to try to -meet- those demands initially. It is impossible to do so. And imo the reason why almost no sci fi original theme games exist is because the designers, excited about their settings, want to try to do so. Don't. Say as much as you need, and nothing more.