To Space Opera or to Not Space Opera, That is the Question.
- Thread starter Murph
- Start date
Indiana Jones styles Traveller. Where travel is represented as a ship flying across the map with a line tracking its course, and when you land, it's a t-shirt world that, perhaps save for the fauna or denizens, is not outright trying to kill you. "Oh look, no air." "Oh look, alien virus that makes Ebola look like the common cold!"
T-shirt worlds, spaceships that hum, a trusty .45 Govt model on your hip and a backpack filled with comms that sporadically fail and sensors that just don't seem to detect anything properly. Whenever will we get those fixed?
T-shirt worlds, spaceships that hum, a trusty .45 Govt model on your hip and a backpack filled with comms that sporadically fail and sensors that just don't seem to detect anything properly. Whenever will we get those fixed?
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
I would describe that as SciFiPulp... I like it 
Daidoji Dave
SOC-11
Soft science/weird science makes it so much easier to come up with adventures and opponents. I can use enemies out of Voyage of the Space Beagle by AE van Vogt, I can stat up illustrations from 70s pulp sf novel covers, I can throw a weird psychic energy field in once, I can borrow weird odd world laws and customs from Dumarest (currently neglected in comparison to its original influence on Traveller) or from the Vorkosigan novels (post-date Traveller, but a gold mine for space opera ideas).
Then, I still end up running a fair number of dudes with guns adventures, with occasional mechanical and social challenges, but it expands my range.
But I'm also not really running epic or heroic scale adventures, so I don't apply the term Space Opera because it has those broader connotations.
Then, I still end up running a fair number of dudes with guns adventures, with occasional mechanical and social challenges, but it expands my range.
But I'm also not really running epic or heroic scale adventures, so I don't apply the term Space Opera because it has those broader connotations.
Tech as mcguffin/dues ex machine, not continuity albatross. Seems reasonable.
And not going big means you don’t have to do what every sci-fi blockbuster has to do, deliver big stakes save the world/galaxy every time, which is it’s own kind of thematic and story albatross.
Spinward Flow
SOC-14 1K
The WHOLE world/galaxy? Nah.
MY LITTLE CORNER of it that I care about right now? Oh hell yeah ...
That sounds great, and ... oh, you, uh, didn't mean that...
And there-in lies the beauty of 'space opera'.
When situations that happened several years ago, rear their ugly heads, and the player(s) have to wrack their brains just to contain the 'simple' fix they already know how to handle.
Communication lag can be a thing of beauty. Even the compulsive note takers are hard pressed to keep up with the ebb and flow that makes up the multi-parsec comm lag.
Even when the game is long between 'sessions', the universe never sleeps!
While I perfectly enjoy a grounded campaign (like a basic hardish-science Free Trader game) I run very, very, VERY broad Space Opera on the Babylon 5, Star Wars, Dreadstar, Stargate, or Dune level. Cloning, Time-Travel, Alien Gods - all play significant roles in my campaign.
D.
D.
Go clones!
"Ah! There’s your better half and worse half. Or at least your exactly the same halves. Thirds.
"Whatever. "
Spinward Flow
SOC-14 1K
"Why do people have such complicated lives?" 
rosswinn
SOC-11
I think what you are really discussing isn't Space Opera, it is Pulp Adventure. There are a lot of different types of Space Opera, but no matter how you slice it Tubb, Vance, Doc Smith, and Piper are very heavily influenced by the Pulp magazines of their youth.
I always aimed for a swashbuckling in space feel, rather than classic SO. Traveller was both to gritty for SO, and too soft for Hardish SF; essentially, it's hardish Space Opera, and of late, Alien, Star Trek, and Star Wars have systems I like better for medium to super soft Space Opera, and Star Wars is adjacent to Spelljammer, IMO, rather than to Trek or Alien.
SO can, as a genre, be very gritty, and yet, very soft on the tech base - see also Picard, certain episodes of The Orville, and Niven's whole corpus.
That the tech is doable isn't really the limitation/division between SO/SF in my view... it contributes... but the power of the heroes and villains makes a huge difference.
The Martian (book or movie) is Space Opera to me - even tho' all the tech is within reach - it's about the human triumphant, in a positive way, every bit as humanistic and chauvinistic as Star Trek. A proper SF approach would have (1) not had things blown over by the windstorm (the winds lack the force to tilt a rover, even at 150kph... only the hopper really stands much chance of being blown about ... ), required much more work to reform the soil to make potatoes grow, probably not have had a single uncooked unfrozen potato for him to plant, not had surplus food left at the base for him to eat while waiting for the plants to grow, not had as much spare material for him to bodge things together...
Proper sci-fi, he'd have been eating algae from the life support, and maybe some shrimp, both shipped live to specifically be a regenerative life support system... and spending a couple weeks just dealing with soil chemistry and his gut flora to get something that could support the needed microbial loads which plants are symbiotic with. Essentially, it's Space Opera because it has WAY too many coincidences in search of HUman Triumph. Realistic? THey return in 18 months, and he's dead, but at least he's got a nifty bit of perchlorate-tolerant microbiome started....
I concur (at least about Smith and Piper).
Lensmen is way the bleep and gone away from realistic. It's great adventure, every bit as much fantasy in space Star Wars... and Doc Smith was unapologetic about that. Meanwhile, Little Fuzzy is pretty gritty, but still a touch pulpy.
I want to run a game that's as pulpy as Lensman and Barsoom, but isn't either. Traveller, just doesn't encourage those notes of flavor for me, tho'.
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
I guess if the player could stop and sing an aria about their feelings.
Or duet about revelation and denial of parentage.
Or duet about revelation and denial of parentage.
