Play Starts at Character Creation

This was a summer of watching my Star Wars hopes come and fade. I got excited enough to start planning a campaign, but the energy never quite arrived. It felt like anti-energy: the Expanded Universe still feels like a better place than the one we have now, and the new material leans harder and harder on nostalgia bait. When you see that bait, it is always the lure and never the hook underneath.

Star Wars feels dead, uninspiring, and tired. I need to put it away for a while.

So I am back to my own science fiction. Back to the old standby: GURPS characters inside a Cepheus Engine universe. Starship rules and procedural generation from one system, character creation and resolution from the other. Clean-room, palette-cleaning, low-level science fiction—getting by, dodging pirates, trying to make payroll and survive.

My own stories will always be more compelling than telling my version of someone else’s franchise. They will be smaller, tightly focused on interpersonal conflict and a local struggle: surviving, making payroll, helping someone who cannot pay you back, or carving out a tiny difference in a galaxy too large to notice. The Jedi and the Rebellion feel vast and increasingly undefined; their original meaning was spent decades ago, and every new version has to dig the same bones up and rearrange them. Being chased by space pirates through an uncharted system and forced to hide on a world no one has named yet means far more to me than any of that.

That preference is not just taste. It recognizes what GURPS actually does well.

In many games that center on powers and skill selections, play begins after character creation. The sheet is a finished tool; the story starts once the numbers are locked. In GURPS, play starts during character creation. The choices you make, what disadvantages you accept, what relationships you define, what private codes and vulnerabilities you write onto the sheet, are already the first moves of the campaign. Those decisions do not wait for the first session. They begin generating consequences the moment they are written down.

Advantages, disadvantages, quirks, and the specific web of relationships a player builds are not flavor text. They are active forces. A Code of Honor, a Dependent, a Phobia, a Sense of Duty, an Enemy, a Reputation: these things do not sit quietly until the plot needs them. They create friction every session. They force choices. They turn “the party hides on an uncharted world” into “this particular group of people, with their particular debts and fears and private codes, tries to hide on an uncharted world.”

When the story stays small and local, those mechanical obligations have room to matter. The pirates are not a faceless faction; they are the concrete consequence of a Reputation or an Enemy someone took at creation. The decision to help a stranded colonist is not a side quest; it is a Sense of Duty check with real costs. Surviving the next payroll is not background color; it is the pressure that makes every disadvantage sharper.

GURPS is at its most alive when the fiction keeps asking the same question the players already answered when they built their characters: who are these people, and what does that cost them? The smaller the stage, the louder that question becomes.

The science-fiction frames that feed this engine best are the ones that keep the camera close and the outside world distant or unreliable:

Frontier and colony stories. A handful of people on a marginal world or remote station. Authority is weeks away. Resources are limited. Every personal flaw has space to become a crisis. The character sheet becomes the real map of the campaign.

Small-crew tramp freighters and working vessels. Not the mythic freighter with a destiny, just a ship that has to make payroll. Crew dynamics, debts, rivalries, and private codes of conduct generate more play than any sector-wide plot. Points spent on Contacts, Enemies, Dependents, and Social Stigma pay off constantly.

Low-myth procedural exploration. Generate the next system, drop the characters into it, and let their specific disadvantages and relationships decide what happens next. The interesting question is never “what ancient secret did we find?” It is “how does this particular group of damaged people react when the air recyclers start failing?”

Personal-scale cyberpunk or near-future grit. Cyberware as both power and vulnerability, identity erosion, street-level or corporate debts that map directly onto disadvantages. The system’s detailed treatment of social mechanics and personal cost makes the internal price of modification feel real.

In all of these, the rules and the fiction are arguing with each other through the medium of the character sheet. That argument is where GURPS is at its most entertaining.

I am not claiming these are the only stories worth telling in science fiction. I am only saying they are the ones that let GURPS do what it does best. When the stage stays small, the character sheet stays loud. The disadvantages keep working. The relationships keep costing something. The choices made in character creation keep mattering long after the first session.

That is the game I want to play right now. Not the recycled myth, not the corporate sequel, not the destiny that was already spent decades ago. Just a few people on a ship or a station or a marginal world, trying to get by, and carrying the full weight of who they decided to be.

Put the big stories away for a while if they have gone hollow. The smaller ones are still waiting, and GURPS was built for them.

Realism and High Tech Weapons

I have been playing a lot of Star Wars recently, and dealing with targets who get hit by "blasters." They take a little damage and keep moving. Ouch, my hit points have gone down.

It is a gamist sort of view of weapon damage, health, and wounding - the classic D&D "hit points" sort of calculation, where you can have 30 hit points and get stabbed repeatedly by a knife and still live.

And I look at the blaster again and wonder what that really is. An energy bolt that hot, and with that much energy behind it, should vaporize a huge chunk of flesh from the target. Okay, welcome to GURPS, where that can and does happen. GURPS is far more satisfying with high-tech combat and what these types of weapons do to a target.

Granted, many times it is "tag, you're dead" type combat, but that is how high-tech warfare goes. Look at the battlefields of today with drones dropping grenades, and those hitting point-blank and wiping out whoever they touch. GURPS does sort of boost the lethality of lasers and blasters.

A blaster pistol does 3d(5) burn damage in GURPS and is TL 11. A TL 8 tactical vest as a DR of 12/5 versus ballistic and all other attacks. Raise that to TL 11; it's multiplied by 3, giving DR 36/15 protection. That armor divisor of 5 still cuts that down to a DR of 3, not really taking too much off that 3d attack.

So even if Han Solo had a TL 11 tactical vest (he doesn't), he takes 3d-3 damage from that blaster pistol.

Let's add trauma plates for +69 hard DR. Now we are talking. This is essentially the same item as the Monocrys Tactical Vest from GURPS Ultra Tech (UT, p173), and let's use the blaster pistol against it. Total DR is 84 vs. other attacks; divided by 5, that's 17, so near-total protection against blaster pistols (shoot for the limbs or head).

Time to break out the blaster rifle for 6d(5) damage, and now, on average, we are shooting 4 points per hit through that vest. The blaster carbine, our stormtrooper weapon (UT, p123), does 5d(5) damage, so it is just stopped by the vest, and only gets through if it rolls high.

Unprotected limbs and heads are hamburger to these weapons, as are unarmored targets. If my Star Wars character gets hit by them in GURPS, they are likely near dead or dead if they are unarmored. In most of the other Star Wars RPGs, they get a serious sunburn, lose hit points, grunt, and pretend they are hurt.

In Star Wars, I am "holding my arm," ouch.

In GURPS, "what arm?"

Sure, Star Wars is "for fun" and "it isn't meant to be realistic," but if I am spending time playing a science fiction game, I would want a higher level of realism and simulation. If I use the "not meant to be real" argument, I might as well be playing fantasy.

GURPS sci-fi combat tends to be balanced at the TL it is fought at, given equal weapons and decent armor. Why you would not be wearing decent armor in a science fiction setting is begging to be fried and microwaved by anyone with a personal arm, and it gets worse and worse as you go up tech levels.

And this is why we have cloning and cybernetics in GURPS.

GURPS forces you to look at weapons and energy beams in a realistic light. These are not "toy guns" that "knock someone over and make a puff of smoke" like they do in the movies, but serious weapons of war that, if they hit unprotected body parts, can blow them clear off. They are punching through walls like the MDC weapons of Rifts and setting structures ablaze; these are burn weapons after all. If a firefight happens in the streets of Tatooine, huge chunks are being taken out of walls, and there are likely several buildings and vehicles on fire in the general vicinity. Body parts litter the streets, along with burning corpses.

No, that is not the Star Wars that I remember.

But that is the Star Wars we get with GURPS, if you follow all the rules and don't apply a little creative license, applying that "movie reality layer" to the action. Where this all ends up is like what we got in the Asoka TV series, where a lightsaber can get pushed through someone, impaling them with a weapon that can cut through a steel bulkhead door, and they end up with a small burn on their tummy.

"But, it's hit points damage!"

GURPS, take me away from this insanity! Bring me back to a universe that makes sense, and where pulling out a blaster pistol (or any weapon, for that matter) was a lethal escalation of conflict. Even in GURPS fantasy, sliding out the 3-foot blade of a longsword meant a whole lot more than a non-lethal 1d8 metal stick of D&D 5E.

"But the guards had 20 hit points, it wasn't gonna kill them!"

It seems that, at times, the more superheroic and cinematic our games get, the less connected to reality they are, and the more the entire player base slips into madness. There are times I just want to wash my hands of it all and return to sanity, to games that treat conflict as a serious and weighty choice, and not whack-a-mole with foam-rubber swords.

There are times when I feel GURPS plays faster than D&D 5E, since combat is more lethal and ends sooner, and players are far less likely to engage in conflict because it is so deadly.

With GURPS, I like a harder science fiction campaign, like my GURPS Cepheus game. I sort of want to abandon the science-fantasy elements of Star Wars, especially the modern writing that makes me want to box up my Star Wars games and encase them in carbonite. I have to keep equating classic Star Wars with the OSR, compartmentalizing the modern movies and TV shows, and putting them in their own universe.

While Classic Star Wars is fun, my GURPS Cepheus game feels real to me. There is this "put on" factor with Star Wars that removes it from reality, and the fantasy elements take that grit and realism away, making it feel more like the Flash Gordon movie, campy, pulpy, and unrealistic. If I am in the mood for it, great, but there are times where I want the cold, hard vacuum of space to surround my character like a blanket of fear and dread, where landing on a new world is full of uncertainty and wonder, and walking around a remote settlement armed with a blaster on my character's hip feels like they are there for serious reasons, and if violence breaks out, that could be the end.

That feels real to me.

The rules, characters, skills, and dangers of the technology and universe make this a harsh, unforgiving, and deadly place.

When we are talking about what compels me to play, what makes it all feel real, and why I keep coming back, GURPS will deliver more of that feeling, easier and faster, and without sacrificing the cold, hard math of the future. Those high-tech weapons are all insanely deadly. You need to think seriously about protection and having the strength to haul it around on foot.

There will be times when you go without, and you won't have those high-tech toys to protect you because of local laws and restrictions. You will need to be able to fight with your fists or improvised weapons. You won't be in body armor. And you may encounter those with high-tech weapons while you are at a disadvantage. You will need to use the environment to your advantage and figure out a way to fight back.

I am immersed.

The danger is real.

I am right there, in that world, experiencing like I am in VR.

My character matters; all their hang-ups, weaknesses, strengths, and skills critically matter. This is all highly compelling and excites my brain, making me not want to play, but I need to play.

This is GURPS to me.

GURPS: Star Wars (Legends)

I ran Star Wars - Legends.

None of this new stuff was real to me, and it was all derivative, made-for-streaming "content." We played exclusively in the now-branded Legends era. In this place, new creators dip in to steal ideas for the nostalgia, while never respecting the stories or original writers of the time. In a way, it feels like D&D, where the new crop of creators can't be bothered with canon or continuity, letting any writer they hire off the street "do what they want" since they feel "it speaks to the new audience."

That is death for a franchise.

The new audience isn't interested in what you have to sell.

How they used to do this is get the older audience excited, and the new audience would latch on to see what the buzz was about, and from that point forward, new stories that could speak to a younger audience could be created. Simply "rewriting the whole thing" but "for a new audience" never works. Lucas knew you could never tell the same story twice, which is why none of the original movies were ever beat-for-beat recreations of each other.

Yet, here we are, with beat-for-beat recreations built by investor money to farm nostalgia.

We played Star Wars roleplaying during the 1990s, when it was fun; the novels and comics were the only source of "new" Star Wars, and writers were free to run with new ideas and shape the franchise's future. I hate to use the word "franchise" here, since it cheapens the creative effort by making it sound like a fast-food chain.

Which is where we are.

Star Wars is Arbys or Taco Bell.

What I remember is a good Star Wars, where the galaxy serves as a setting for sharing universal stories. These days, the setting feels more like a lead weight than a benefit. I can get better science fiction stories out of Cepheus Engine these days. The aliens here are more mysterious, the space empires more vile, the rebels more heroic, the battles more personal and real, and the whole universe doesn't feel like a "put on" or something fake crafted for audience engagement.

Star Wars is where D&D 5E is these days: a medium curated to deliver a certain, preset, on-rails, audience-pleasing "experience" that only delivers mindless action, flashy CGI powers, fake monsters and robot fights, and more flash than substance. Cepheus Engine feels real, like the player's starship could get blown up by space pirates, and the campaign ends then and there. With Star Wars, I am back in D&D 5E land, with heroes that can never die, and adventures that feel like they're on rails with the ending predetermined.

I am free to tell the stories I want to tell in my GURPS: Cepheus Engine game.

In Star Wars, I feel beholden to outside forces, to tell only stories that creators and a wider audience would approve of hearing. It is a strange feeling, like I couldn't tell a story where "the Empire rises," "they hunt down the Rebels," and "crush them all" in an "Evil Star Wars" campaign of a resurgent Empire. It isn't a story that would go over well with many. Still, as a literary vehicle and tragedy in the genre of Greek parables about how dreams can be corrupted and die, it is a solid moral tale of hope turning into despair and ruin, yet again.

Maybe the galaxy realizes "things were better under the Empire" and the influence of Hutts and space pirates in this new, open, and lawless frontier where the Rebels sit on the dying embers of the Death Star's destruction is not enough to sustain people's hopes and dreams, and that running a galactic government free of corruption and grift is a harder task than hopes and good feelings shall ever sustain. The glow of good feelings fades when it is time to run the tax machine, space police, and military, and to get a million planets to agree on policy, as the criminals rob everyone blind and make their own deals with worlds and consortia.

Eventually, the planets will get sick of the constant theft, corruption, and grift, and they will cry for the Empire to return and for security to be restored across the galaxy. I honestly believe that Star Wars stories using the tired old WW2 metaphors should be banned; they have been done to death, and we are ready for new stories where things are not so simple. Forcing creators to think outside that "lazy narrative box" would be a good thing for the stories they tell there.

This is not to diminish the evil and power of the WW2 metaphors, but they are far too easy for creators to fall back on, the science fiction equivalent of an English teacher putting a red X on the phrase "many people say..." They are overused narratives, crutches that frame things in a tired, overdone, and overused framework. I want writers to move beyond the easy answer for evil and write things that generally disturb and terrify them within this storytelling setting.

In my GURPS: Cepheus game, I can do that. Refugees fleeing a war that a planetary governor turns back since accepting them would strain his planet's resources so hard that his entire government would collapse. In Star Wars? I don't think we ever had a story about refugees fleeing a war or a dying, domed city. Even though "war" is in the title, we never get anything beyond "space WW2 evil R bad."

In a storytelling sense, where meaningful stories can be told, Star Wars is dead.

But it wasn't in my 1990s game. We had amazing stories, just like that one, where the Empire sometimes played a neutral role or even came in to save the day, however reluctantly. They were looking for the same space pirates, too, when a sector fleet hyperspaced in and started blasting the space pirates the players were fighting. The players were the ones who tipped the Empire off, and then that situation played out. The Empire was "helping" in a sense, and the players fled the battle, the pirates too distracted to give chase.

And the Empire could win over territory in my game, and they did, as planets lost faith in the Rebels to hold together a galactic government. The agents of the Empire would walk in, diplomats, causing chaos behind the scenes, and then being the ones to help fix it all. The Rebels hated them, but the fight was real, and neither side was magically guaranteed victory just because "they R good."

Our Star Wars game in the 1990s was one of the best Star Wars games I ever ran, and my players were addicted to this universe since it felt real to them. Like a great OSR game, when it becomes a "dungeon simulation environment," and the world does not care if you live or die, your survival depends on your actions and a little luck, my Star Wars universe had that same OSR mentality.

You make your future and fortune here.

You are not guaranteed power and success, and your character can (and will) die, unlike D&D 5E's curated hero-path experience. Like modern fantasy gaming with too much focus on heroes and the heroic path, I want to forget these fake, MMO-like curations and return to a simulated world where nothing cares if my character lives or dies, and my success is my own to make.

This is the difference between a visual novel with one true path and a game like Minecraft, where you make your own stories from what you are given. I play one and forget, and the other I keep returning to so I can create more.

The universe doesn't care whether one side is seen as good and the other as evil. Those who put in the hard work will get the fruits of their labor. The universe is inherently neutral and a deadly, chaotic, and harsh environment for civilization to live in. Planets are not predetermined to see "rebels R good" and "empire R evil" - they will default to self-interest and survival in a universe burning in war and conflict. Nor will all Imperials act like mustache-twirling villains; some are in there to survive and protect their homes. Some have legitimate, genuine reasons to keep serving. Some areas of the Empire will be "less evil" and will almost seem like good guys, depending on leadership. They will constantly fight the "evil side" of the Empire and seek a middle path in conflict resolution.

It is heresy to even say that, since the ideologues are sharks in the water.

But I am a writer. And writers hold the truth as a core tenet and a reason to live.

If it is true, then it is true, and I am not changing my words to please others.

And there will be a wicked side of the Empire that seeks to corrupt its soul, Sith cults that seek to turn the war into a blood sacrifice. Same with the Rebels, the Hutts will promise resources and free access as long as they ignore their crimes and sins. Do you sell your soul for victory and let the innocent suffer, for the Hutts to sell slaves and drugs, and for corruption to run rampant? Or would you, knowing, lose the fight to a new planet coming to your side since you know it would stain your soul to make that deal?

Again, I can't tell these stories in Star Wars anymore.

I could use GURPS to run a gritty, morally gray Star Wars game, and that would be a great throwback to my 1990s experiences, delivered with punch and style. The holy grail of any generic RPG is to "play Star Wars" with it, and GURPS does it perfectly. Just because one side of the other wears the uniform does not mean they can be trusted; we need to know the person under the clothes first. Where their heart is will determine good or evil. The rebel commander who makes deals with the Hutts and the Imperial Administrator who refuses to let the Sith cults enter his sector and wishes to keep the preservation of civilization as their goal are both strong character archetypes.

And the conflicts these character types create are far better than the stories we get today.

They make me question the jingoistic side-isms that plague Star Wars these days and force people to think of others as people, not as cartoon characters.

I want the true, old-school simulator universe.

I want players to question motivations, not look at clothing.

I want the notion of good and evil to be in what lies in someone's heart. The players need to work a little harder to know what that is. For some of today's games and writers, that is too long a bridge to cross.

I do not want a world where we determine hearts by the labels we attach to either side.

The universe is not that easy a place.

Nor are its conflicts.

GURPS: MegaTraveller

MegaTraveller was the last time that the Traveller universe felt like it mattered to me.

Oh, I know this is going to rile a few, since GURPS: Traveller explicitly retconned and took a shot at the entire MegaTraveller setting, and in-canon, pseudo-erased it from history, and this erasure sort of outlived GURPS Traveller and the retcon became canon in the Traveller timeline. GURPS: Traveller took us back to the good days, past this mistake made in 1987, and back to the late 1970s of the little black books - plus GURPS.

GURPS: Traveller was the best of both games. I love GURPS: Traveller more than I do many versions of Traveller itself, except the original books.

And MegaTraveller never happened.

MegaTraveller marked the beginning of a fall from grace, leading to TNE and, eventually, GDW's bankruptcy. This is where the Traveller game began to lose its way, its identity crisis, and creators searching for what makes a science fiction setting compelling and interesting.

Battletech is popular!

People like Twilight: 2000!

Let's do that!

And what a mistake it was.

But I loved MegaTraveller. I got into this so deeply. This was the first time that Traveller felt real to me; it brought that "immersive universe" home that GURPS: Traveller would later recapture, and it took a black sharpie to a boring, static universe and killed trillions of people and nearly a thousand worlds.

My brother never saw the point in playing this, but I was enthralled by the setting and the active and post-war lore. This was exciting. It gave characters a reason to care. The stories were not "sleepy space trading" and "science missions," but they held real meaning and consequence.

The universe felt alive again.

And it left us with a mess where infinite adventures could happen, and the universe was reset, becoming yours again. We were no longer tied to endless canon, library entries, and that high barrier to entry for getting into this universe. Traveller today has the same problem that Runequest has: you need to know far too much to even get started. The amount of lore and canon you need to absorb makes the setting impossible for new or casual players.

And like Runequest, needing to know so much puts me to sleep, and it makes the Traveller setting feel massive and sleepy itself. There is far too much here to absorb to start playing, and the only way to start playing the game is to ignore 99% of what we have and start a micro-campaign.

But the setting is why we play. Right?

But MegaTraveller was a soft reset that let you remake the universe in your own way. You could take an entire sector, re-roll the world UDPs, and play there. It did not matter anymore. War changed everything. If you played with canon-plus, that was fine, but you could play in an entirely changed universe where every world was random-gen and still be playing in the same universe.

MegaTraveller brought the "shattered universe" model of Battletech to Traveller, but unlike Battletech, there were no cool mechs to stomp around in. The design and combat systems dramatically increased in complexity, so even if you wanted to fight in the starship battles, the system was harder than the original Little Black Book game and took a long time to figure out. The game created a wargame universe and dropped the ball on making it fun and compelling to fight in.

If I were to play in this setting today, I would use GURPS, the Mongoose 2nd Edition rules, or Cepheus.

But why play?

This is a failed experiment, a universally hated setting, and a huge mistake for the game and its lore. There is nothing "to do here" except fight and die for no good reason. This is Star Wars without any fun or cool elements. This is Battletech without mechs. This is punkless Cyberpunk. This is a lousy, brutal, meaningless, space war fought because stupid, callous royals, corporations, and powerbrokers could not get along and share power. There is very little good reason to fight for anything. The problems caused by war are the only thing driving "more war" at this point. This whole thing is a pointless, meaningless, self-sustaining mess I do not want to be involved with.

Huh.

That should sound familiar, and a bit scary.

If you have an appreciation for war stories, Twilight: 2000, and raw, unflinching survival stories, this is a great universe. There is a later sourcebook detailing the downfall of an entire spacefaring civilization, in which worlds with domed cities supporting billions of people are failing due to a breakdown of the universal economy, and people are fleeing for their lives and forced to live in primitive conditions on nearby worlds, often where they are not welcome. Cities on livable worlds are choked with people and refugees from war. Social strife and the breakdown of civilization and technology only get worse as time goes on, as banks fail, consumer goods run out, and food, fuel, and energy become scarce.  Prices for everything are sky-high. 

Technology itself is failing universe-wide.

Entire classes of people live on credit that is slowly running out.

Old starships are pressed into service, and they barely work, falling apart and breaking down before they ever reach their destinations. Dead space fleets full of wrecks are scavenged by pirates, salvage crews, scavengers, and the locals just to find spare parts to sell to survive.

Entire star systems are mined and under active occupation. Planets have been wiped out, their atmospheres destroyed, and cities leveled. Some live as feudal primitives on cut-off worlds. Others have turned to savagery and cannibalism. Planets suffer orbital bombardment and years-long sieges. Occupation forces and allied factional groups are everywhere, some with shifting allegiances. Mercenaries sell their services to both sides, and force people into press-gang units that fight with soldiers little more than slaves.

As communication breaks down, misinformation and lies run rampant. Rumor and underground information networks thrive. Entertainment becomes a black market. The throngs of the poor live in shacks built from scrap as the rich turn their skyscrapers into fortress cities. Armored cars take the VIPs from place to place, as riots on the street grow and local governments crack down with more brutal tactics. Computer and communication networks barely work, and the technology required to maintain them fails. Old-tech, like the radio and newspapers, becomes the way people hear about the news.

Environmental disasters are everywhere as the technology to address them fails, and some are deliberately started as sabotage. Fires burn massive parts of forests. Dams are blown up, and massive areas are flooded. Earthquake damage is never repaired. Pollution from massive war economies clogs smog and rivers with poison. Garbage piles up. Roads deteriorate, and bridges fail. Rail networks are held together by duct tape and prayers. Starports and combination junkyards and salvage yards, with some ships abandoned and being scrapped for spare parts, as they never took off and were left where they sat. Massive shanty towns surround starports, where people beg to be taken off-world, try to find jobs, and scavenge for food.

The frontlines are deadly, dangerous places. Rebel and terror groups sow discord and chaos just to weaken popular support. Local governments turn authoritarian to maintain order. The war economy drags on everyone, prices are insane, war profiteers attend rich parties with royals who couldn't care less, and the poor continue to sacrifice for a victory that seems farther and farther off every year.

The rich care less and less, as long as their war investments pay dividends. Resource shipments become legitimate targets of war, along with factories and starports. Random attacks hit civilian infrastructure at any time. The war seems to spread farther and farther from the front lines as time goes on.

Rarely do we ever get a science-fiction universe like this. Sure, Battletech is close, but you can ignore most of that from your mech cockpit. Here, you need to live in it and face the realities every day.

And the war machines profit, and the class of the rich become more and more detached from a universe they destroyed. Some would even say they are happy with the outcome.

Does that sound familiar?

Yeah, it is today.

Or it soon will be.

MegaTraveller was a game 40 years ahead of its time.

I've Played 5E Science Fiction

I saw the Traveller 5E Backerkit today, and I did not pull the trigger on that. It is a pricey set of books: $350 for the core books, and $1,000 for the all-in. The cost for these 5E crowdfunding projects is very high these days, and this won't ship until October of 2027. That is a long time to wait for books, nearly a year and a half.

And for $1,000, I can buy nearly every GURPS PoD book ever printed.

I played 5E science fiction: Esper Genesis and the Level Up Void Runners Codex. There is also Ultramodern5, a total conversion mod of 5E into cyberpunk and science fiction. The only thing 5E science fiction has going for it is monster compatibility, which I honestly never use. While the gee-whiz powers (psionic or techno-mage, typically) are cool, I never found 5E science fiction all that interesting. The last best version of "level-based science fiction systems" is Starfinder 1e, which was the last big set of 3.5E level-based science fiction gaming.

So, 5E science fiction has been done a few times, and what Traveller 5E brings to the table is the universe, the ships, and the entire Traveller feeling. I bought the original LBBs at the store. To me, Traveller will always be a game played with two six-sided dice.

All of these games play mostly the same, and you fall into a "space adventurer" motivation. You play to level, and you level to play. That MMO factor is the fun of the game, where you are buying abilities, gearing up, collecting powers, and buying that next feat or unlocking that next power. It is the exact same motivation as 5E; preplanned character power drives you.

All my level-based science fiction campaigns typically start off with a lot of energy but fall apart quickly. I get the first few levels, and the huge mountain to climb quickly discourages me, and I realize that levels are not why I play science fiction.

There is a mental break for me here; levels do not equal motivation in science fiction. In fact, they feel like more of a reason not to play, an unnecessary mountain to climb, an artificial game construct to hold you back rather than enable you. I feel I can't do things because I am not at a high enough level to, and I don't feel this in fantasy.

The original Traveller and Star Frontiers games never had levels, nor did they ever need them. For me, fantasy games are where level-based systems, the almost video-game-like tiered progression, and the hero's story shine. I could make a similar argument that the GURPS-style "no level" fantasy is more compelling and better at supporting stories than the level systems of 5E and most OSR games.

What drives me in science fiction stories is the classic themes of exploration, commerce, war, discovery, mystery, and interpersonal character arcs. GURPS does all these the best, and removes the "level chase" from the equation, leaving me just with characters and story.

There was a GURPS review once where the writer said, "GURPS is a game where your scientist character feels just as powerful as the soldier with the machine gun." That is exactly what I want in a science fiction game! I don't want this "combat progression arc" to hang over my head, and make some characters better than others in combat, or having to bolt-on combat powers to science characters just to give them combat parity.

While yes, that machine gun soldier will be able to kill hordes of alien bugs, there will be moments in this adventure where the scientist's findings will be critical for the success of the mission. Perhaps the scientist will be able to identify the resonance of the colony reactor causing the bugs to attack and devise a solution to dampen it and make the bugs peaceful again. The team will need to reach the reactor via an ATV crawler to set up the dampers; the driver will deal with all sorts of hazards, and the engineer will need to be guarded as they install the system. The doctor will be tending to wounds. Everyone is ultimately critical to the mission's success.

Everyone is important, and no artificial combat balance is needed. No "magic science powers" need to be invented to achieve class parity; adding rules and complexity to a genre that does not need them.

I prefer a more cerebral, story-based game where power and levels are not the driving force behind why I play. I like putting the brakes on progression and enjoying the character build I create, and GURPS gives me the best character building in all of tabletop gaming. Plus, my GURPS character sheets are far shorter than 5E, which can run 12-20+ pages at level ten and higher. Even with special powers and 1,000 points, my character sheets in GURPS run 4-6 pages, and that is being generous with spell lists.

Oh, and we will need VTT or a character creation software written and supported for Traveler 5E, which is the Achilles heel of the system. Without software, forget creating characters; it's always an extra digital purchase and subscription. With GURPS, we have great character creation programs, both paid for and community-supported (please support the GCS creator!)

And GURPS gives me a far better selection of powers. I can use "space magic" or do full psionics. I can do bio-tech powers or space crystals that give superpowers. I can wield divine power systems granted by elder space gods. I have as many powers as GURPS can provide, and those power sources can be anything I can imagine. GURPS, like Champions, is, at its heart, a superhero game, and those are the best for magic and powers.

Nothing beats a point-buy superhero game. I can create any space monster or space power I want. I am not limited by the books, nor do I have to wait for expansions and new crowdfunding books.

And while most 5E games depend on powers for the flashy abilities, GURPS does a no-power science fiction game perfectly. While classic Traveller (and Space Opera) was psionics only, Star Frontiers had no powers. A lot of these 5E science fiction games "bake in" a power system that the game depends on, and it is intrinsic to character balance and gameplay. You are stuck with it if you play that version of 5E science fiction. With GURPS, I can easily have no power systems, one that supports the setting, or all of them.

Trying to mod a 5E game is painful, since you are telling players "don't pick these classes" and playing a game that feels like less than the full experience. Also, balance issues will come up if you use a 5E game that depends on magic for combat mechanics and balance, and you remove it to play hard science fiction.

I can also customize the power system to make it "depend on spice" or "channel the power of ancient aliens" or whatever I want in GURPS, so players will experience a unique and referee-curated mystery of how that power works and is sourced from, if the true secrets are even revealed at all. Once you spoil the secret, the power system loses its mystery, like linking The Force to space bacteria.

I like the concept of Traveller 5E as a "5E sandbox space game," and I wish them well. For 5E players, this is a much-needed break from D&D. I find the price to be very high, and the nearly 2-year wait to be excessive. But GURPS is my science fiction game of choice, and Traveller will always be that lightweight 2d6 system that we loved in the late 1970s.

And GURPS will be the best way to play it.

Or any science fiction game I can imagine.

Replication versus Storytelling

I suppose with science fiction, I am far more interested in storytelling than replication. I could go all-out with a Starfinder conversion, but what am I doing? My Star Frontiers conversion is closer to my heart, and Starfinder just feels like too huge an undertaking; it would be "just to have" rather than something I really want and need.

I would love to have a great Starfinder conversion, don't get me wrong.

Still, even Star Frontiers feels limiting to the stories I like to tell using science fiction. It is a great classic universe and sandbox, and simulating the universe would be a nostalgic throwback, but I have to ask myself, "Why am I playing science fiction?"

Many science fiction games can't even answer this question.

You will get this huge game, full of space monsters, starships, classes, gear, and starmaps, yet it will strangely feel empty, like there is nothing to do. The hook isn't strong, the obvious isn't as obvious, and there is no "why" answering the question of why you should live and adventure in this universe.

With some science fiction games, it is all about money, and that is a motivation, but not one that really drives me. Original Traveller and Space Opera fell into that category for us. Other games, especially Starfinder, are about levelling and "powering up" with better gear. Star Frontiers falls into the "pulp adventure" category, like Savage Worlds or Amazing Adventures, and those are the sort of self-driven motivations I like.

A great simulation can be a motivation for adventuring, too, especially a very well-done conversion with highly compelling GURPS templates. There is nothing like getting a great, blue-collar, GURPS template, like an astronaut, and taking that character through a crisis and a small adventure, especially in a universe where that sort of adventure would not normally "be a thing" like in Starfinder, where the game is mostly mixed combat and exploration, with light roleplay, and very sparse skill use (typically meant to overcome obstacles).

This is that "immersion factor" that GURPS can create.

Can you do a "chef adventure" in Starfinder? Sure, but I would bet 100cr that another group of space goblins is in there somewhere as a toss-in combat encounter, there is a map, and it breaks down into pawns moving around and trying to get to an end boss. In GURPS, you have the skills to do a really great chef adventure, with history, ingredient knowledge, cooking, and even social skills coming into play, along with various advantages and disadvantages.

GURPS throws the brakes on a typical "d20 experience" and forces you to slow down and enjoy the journey, and all the skill rolls, failed self-control rolls, and encounters along the way. With d20, it feels so streamlined and abstracted that I lose the smaller details, and I just want to clear the next room, search for treasure, and move on.

In GURPS, the small things matter more. Even my character, the advantages and disadvantages, my skills, and who I am with my history. My gear is part of my character build, and my loadout matters. Where gear is stored, and weight matters a great deal. A lot of games hand-wave off gear and encumbrance, and in GURPS, you aren't wearing armor you can't carry.

Plate mail isn't an AC entitlement; it is heavy! Some of these games ignore how heavy a suit of plate mail is, and you can walk around fully decked out in plate armor at a D&D STR of 10 and never suffer a movement or encumbrance penalty. The rules supersede reality and even common sense, and "because the numbers," we end up with a situation where character armor is maxed out because the rules would break if plate mail were casual clothing. Even a full suit of chain mail is heavy. I rarely have a GURPS fantasy character who can wear plate armor because the STR requirement to move is so high.

A lot of fantasy games "go silly" due to the math, and they drift off into unreality-land. Sure, a plate pauldron and chestplate count as "plate mail," and the rest of your fantasy outfit can be Hot Topic. "It's fantasy," they say, and there is a point where it is "too much fantasy," like how an abstract rules light game is "too simplistic" to the point where nothing means anything anymore. If everyone can wear suits of plate mail weighing 75 pounds and move around like they are in jogging shorts and a tank top, I check out.

Seeing a 5E player's face when I tell them their character in a suit of heavy plate has a move of 2 because they are heavily encumbered is priceless. Yeah, that armor you are wearing is as heavy as two of the boxes of Pathfinder books that I own. "But it's fantasy!" does not cut it anymore. Fantasy needs to be based in reality to even qualify as fantasy, or we fall into a kid's game of "nuh-uh" and "I am Godzilla, so it doesn't affect me."

I am honestly tired of the "it is fantasy" argument being used to ignore reality. Yes, fantasy is why we are here, even in science fiction, but fantasy is at its best when we have that contrast between the "grounded world" of reality, and then the fantasy of fantasy that makes everything seem so special and amazing. Using fantasy to say "reality does not exist here" makes everything meaningless and unrelatable. It devolves into "nuh-uh" -isms, and the argument comes up again and again, the next time to justify something more outrageous and often, game-breaking.

"I can wear plate mail with an average strength and move around normally!" No, sorry, you can't. Spend the points on a decent STR and give something else up, and you have "earned" that "fantasy." For many GURPS fantasy characters, just managing to wear DR 2 heavy leather is a major victory, and plate mail is an endgame goal.

I can carry around a heavy machine gun all the time!

Of course, they would let me into the bar with it!

This is a fantasy!

Again, our Car Wars experience was our wake-up call decades ago. No, they won't let you into the bar carrying heavy weapons or explosives, and if you think you can try because "this is fantasy," those running the place will likely unload on you. This is Car Wars. Life is cheap. Few care about your feelings. Please roll up a new character, and try to make them less stupid this time. Or they may have been smart, who knows? The world doesn't care, and I am not pulling punches.

In GURPS, your gear and loadout are half of your character build. Character power is not all contained in the rules and "oh my gosh" powers the book throws at you. Games that ignore the encumbrance rules are an instant red flag, and you will likely see the game bestow all sorts of kewl powerz on you to distract you.

This is also why some of these kewl powerz games are difficult to translate into GURPS, since they rely on a baseline of divorced reality that wildly differs from GURPS'.

The same applies in science fiction. A lot of games feel like they can treat armored battlesuits like casual jumpsuits, and I get it. Mass Effect does that (due to limitations in the character model and its simplification). Still, it breaks my immersion to have armored battlesuits as everyday clothing. I like those armored suits to feel special, to have to store them on a rack and put them on before a fight, and to be forced to fight without them when on shore leave or in social situations that go wrong. I feel the same way about heavy weapons, being forced to wear casual armor, and carrying screens in lower-threat situations.

Yes, you can ignore it all in GURPS and play "rules light," but I love the game's simulation aspects. They create new build options, gear loadouts, and being a character is more than a progression chart and powers. Part of my storytelling is gear and the character's equipment.

Many science fiction games get it wrong. Your high-level power armor becomes your everyday outfit. You haul around laser-heavy machine guns to bars, and have enough space explosives strapped to you that you could level a starport hangar. Despite an average STR, you can carry around an armory and a heavy weapon that weighs 50 pounds.

We had the same problem with Car Wars roleplay 40 years ago. The character is not the car, and the 3 DP "body armor" can't be worn everywhere. Pretty soon, you need to get out of the car, visit a bar in everyday clothing, and live your life without four wheels under you at all times.

Once we realized that, the world of Car Wars came alive. The world was a real place, and not just a map of quarter-inch squares, with a grid line every inch.

Immersion forces you to think about how your character equips themselves and how that affects their movement through the environment. It affects social reactions and can be forbidden in many places. You are forced to store your good gear, and you have to decide where in the game world to store it. You can't just throw expensive weapons and armor all in a cart and leave it parked on a street corner, and the "high-level game" in science fiction involves having your own ship, base, or secure vehicle to store gear in.

This is why medieval knights had bodyguards, squires, a trunk holding their plate mail, a few warhorses with horse armor, and an entourage. Just to support "full plate," they had a supply chain following them around, and the budget in gold to roll in big.

GURPS science fiction is really good and thinks about all this stuff, and it forces me to slow down and think about it, too. Other games? They fall into the rules-light trap and hand-wave away the complexity.

I don't want to simulate that.

GURPS: Star Frontiers, Update #6

Knight Hawks came out after the original Star Frontiers set came out, and we had already adopted starships from Traveller and Space Opera into our games. I wish this had come out at the same time, since we adopted the Star Wars-style "Millennium Falcon" trope into our games, turning starships into "space RVs" with anti-gravity, able to land on planets, and serving as flying hotels with antimatter engines.

Nothing kills science fiction faster than a magic space RV.

The ship lands next to space dungeons; there is no need for overland travel, landing at starports is a why bother, there is no need to carry shuttlecraft or orbital space planes, and the ship becomes "backup fire support" flying artillery for any ground mission. I have played decades of this, and having a destroyer hovering above the battlefield, turrets at the ready, really kills any challenge for the away team.

I wish our Star Frontiers campaign were a strict TL10^ game. Starships are these paper-thin, decks stacked like a loaf of bread, 1G acceleration, slow, weeks to get to a planet, dropship-carrying, atomic engines on sponsons, no artificial gravity, depressurize during space battles, flying cans with guns.

There are no magic "sensor beams," just radar and LADAR, and old-style radio direction finders. Telescopes and imaging equipment that detect brightness and radiated heat are used to detect objects at greater distances.

You should only have gravity when accelerating at 1G, a mid-point flip, and then deceleration at 1G provides gravity on the second half of the trip. There are no anti-gravity panels, and if you are in orbit, everyone is floating around. You need shuttles, dropships, starfighters with orbital capability, or space planes to get down to the planet. To get large cargo up, they fire it up on giant rockets that look like something from NASA or SpaceX. Starships are assembled in space and never land on a planet. Space stations handle interface duties and customs and provide 1G or gravity via giant rotating rings.

If you go on a mission, your ship needs to sit in orbit with a crew. You need a dropship and crew for that. If you land in a remote area, you need a flat space, and then you need to disembark an ATV or VTOL to get to where you want to go. If you will be there for a while, take camping supplies and survival equipment, including pressurized tents, solar panels, and life support units.

You need to take a ton of stuff with you for extended stays.

If your ship in orbit detects an unknown contact, and you know space pirates are in the area, they will go into action without you. You may be left stranded in your camp for a while, with your radio and heat-producing gear off, so nobody can detect you, staying silent to avoid detection. You may not know when your ship will return, if ever, since you both go radio silent. If you get on the radio, a pirate missile may come flying in from orbit at that signal.

And you won't be able to detect, see, or know what is up there in orbit, unless you get fortunate with your electro-binoculars and see it from the ground. You may have radio direction finders of your own that can help you detect objects in orbit.

The pirates may have dropped a satellite up there for some reason: to detect orbital ships, ground emissions, or radio traffic, or to relay communications. If you found that early, you could have blown it up or sent someone over to hack it and tap in, being wary of it being trapped with anti-tamper devices or explosives.

Big ships, like battleships, are a big deal and require a fleet. Most of the "grunt work" in the galaxy is done with smaller ships tooling about and solving problems. Fleets are expensive and for homeworlds, while colony worlds will have a handful of smaller ships for defense, if any. Space combat is closer to The Hunt for Red October than Star Wars.

Hard TL10^ is the way.

You get too high-tech, and it is the magic space RV landing on the planet. Even Traveller has this problem with its adventure ships. Go further, and you are teleporting to the surface. Very little from the GURPS skill list is needed, and there is no preparation or procedure. My TL10^ away-team has a small group of experts, including a doctor, a communications person, an engineer, security personnel, scientists, contact people, command, and others.

Past TL11, it is "the PCs get out of the ship," and one of them could be a bartender and another an entertainer. While that is great for light-hearted science fiction, more like Guardians of the Galaxy, it is not what Star Frontiers tried to do, or what I wish we had done.

For Star Frontiers, that genuine feeling is the TL10^ game, with lasers as the ultimate weapon and the entire universe closer to that 1980s ideal and vision of the future. This isn't smooth, ultra-sexy, future-tech, but that gritty, NASA-style, Interstellar, The Martian, Cold War naval battles, survival-in-space sort of game that GURPS does so well.

GURPS: Space Opera, Part II

There is a problem with generic science fiction. Why bother?

Space Opera goes a long way towards solving this problem, especially if you grab the Star Sector Atlases and use the structure in the core rulebook to establish factions and organizations. All of a sudden, we have a complete universe out here to explore, on the size of a complete setting like Traveller and its Imperium, and due to this game being so rare and niche, practically nobody knows what this universe is about.

Galactic Starship Dune Star Federation Troopers Battlestar Trek Wars: Gordon Rogers is my best explanation of this universe. Every pre-1980 primary science-fiction setting put into a blender, just like D&D did with fantasy.

Drop players in here, and let them figure it all out.

Trust me, after their initial revulsion and complaining that this is not Star Wars or Star Trek, they will begin to like it here. Because this is really Star Wars and Star Trek, with the licensed IP removed, and the whole thing feels like a classic science fiction novel from the 1960s and '70s.

This is solid, playable, generic science fiction!

If you want one of the factions to walk around and act like the Galactic Empire, do it! Just don't play the music, and have their troopers be just as brutal and be better shots. If you want Starforce to be like the United Planetary Federation, just do it! The ships are a little different, more heavy metal, but that does not mean you can't riff on classic Trek.

Oh, and spoiler alert, when you are in battle, everyone will be in a spacesuit and strapped in tight, so take that, stupid TV shows and movies. Decompression is real, and having an armored spacesuit protects you against internal explosions and fragmentation. If you start the game in the middle of a starship battle, start all the players in spacesuits in a depressurized ship. Set the tone from the start.

Seriously, that is such a cool thing to imagine the bridge filled with a crew in armored spacesuits, armed in case they need to abandon ship, and the entire bridge depressurized to a vacuum to avoid explosive decompression. Escape pods will be close to all crew stations. Seats may also be armored to give an extra level of protection. There is a hard-science fiction element to this universe, but it remains at the highest levels of theoretical technology.

Space Opera is a mix of World War II naval battles, hardcore engineering, speculative science, and instant death at any moment. This is not hard science fiction, science fantasy, or any other genre we know. This is the OG version of science fiction found in Starship Troopers and Federation. Yes, you may be dealing with a hyper-intelligent species of alien pod-creatures on some undiscovered world. Still, you are backed up with a battlecruiser armed with one-meter megabolt battleship guns in a triple turret, sitting in orbit. If these aliens give your away team heat, an option always exists to pull out and start orbital bombardment.

Space Opera is Battleship Gray Science Fiction (BGSF).

This genre stands on its own, smelling like a fresh coat of paint and the metallic tinge of air recyclers. The genre is pure STEM, with a heavy metal injection of military power. Science is essential when the captain wonders what they are dealing with, and engineering builds the solution. Navigation and math-plot courses are getting the ship to its destination before a vessel faster than the one the players are in, just because the navigator knows how to use gravity wells to fling the cruiser quicker and on a better course, without wasting time or acceleration.

Right now, they are wondering how we got here before them, despite their faster ship. Communications officer, open a hailing frequency. Navigator, you may raise your middle digit on my command.

This genre is strong enough to carry the entire game, just as good as Star Wars, Star Trek, or Licensed IP. Seriously, I ran BGSF for decades in the Star Frontiers Universe using the Space Opera game, and it was a great time. We ran generals and admirals who planned planetary invasions and got involved in conflicts and adventures. The genre stands on its own without corporate IP. Just look at Helldivers. Star Wars and Star Trek like to pretend they are in the same genre, but they are not, and they have gone too soft, into science fantasy.

Parts of this universe are wonderfully backwards and silly. Other parts of this universe will remind you that you are dealing with anti-matter-powered systems, and things can go horribly wrong. You will laugh, but never cry, since by that time your atoms will be scattered all across deep space.

The ship design and combat system work as-is if you convert GURPS skills to Space Opera (GURPS Skill Level - 10, max 10; so an 18-minus in GURPS is a skill level of 8 in SPO). So there is zero work needed to design starships and have combats with GURPS characters inside them, using converted skill levels. You do not need to mess with GURPS ship combat and design; the system in Space Opera is a bit of WW2 wargamy goodness, but it is functional and works well.

And we have starships! Seriously, there are some amazing ship designs in here, and it is worth learning the starship combat system to see these heavy-metal behemoths slug it out with massive nova-gun battery fire and the follies of dozens of nuclear torpedoes. If the players sit in their starship and whine that they don't care about the universe, have the Space Soviets of the Galactic People's Republic show up in a fleet cruiser and obliterate them all. You will learn to care, comrade!

Those Soviets never really do go away, do they? All of a sudden, we are stuck with the Cold War forever. Yes, this is silly, but hey, we are talking 1970s science fiction here, with spandex jumpsuits and early 80s hair. There are hives of billions of bug aliens here, too, and there are times the only way to stop them is to blow up the planet. Sorry, we need to blow up a world to save the rest of them. Next time, please check the cargo pods with customs before they infest the world.

The players will be back next time to this insane place, a little wiser and wanting to explore more. Play it serious, torture them with the crazy things, turn the factions up to eleven, and make the universe come alive.

I would keep this universe hard, brutal, and deadly. Don't let people laugh it off or take it unseriously. Have the GPR or Blarads show up, beat the entire party up, leave them for dead on a planet with no gear, and laugh as they fly away in their shuttlecraft. The evil factions here are not to be messed with, and they will enjoy taking out their punishment on anyone who crosses their path.

Otherwise, what? I am bored and playing Traveller. Not to slight that game and its universe, but we have had many times where the universe felt too cosmopolitan, safe, and advanced, and it all fell flat for us. While there were small fights here and there, wars did not reach across subsectors. Where Traveller can feel too much like 2025, Space Opera is firmly set in a universe that resembles the Cold War, with a couple of Vietnam Wars going on around the galaxy. Starfleets can and do get into scraps here, especially in border space.

These space armies still use flame weapons, disruptors, gauss weapons, and tactical nukes. Go figure. Star Wars is soft romance fantasy compared to this. Ewok, meet flamethrower. If that fails, we gas the whole forest with chemical weapons and send the warbots in, firing cannister rounds out of gauss cannons.

I wish all of you were back in the 1980s playing Space Opera with us. Very few know the unhinged side of this universe and how slap-in-the-face brutal it can be. It makes Warhammer 40K look like My Little Pony.

Oh, and one of the ship damage results is the solid waste sewage system backing up into hydroponics again. Or a box of bandages in the med-bay malfunctioning and losing their stickiness when the ship is hit by enemy fire. Or all the interior sliding doors need to be cranked open manually. Or the ship's humidifiers breaking and turning the vessel into a sauna, increasing the breakdown rate of every piece of electronics on board. Fire detection systems can go out, and you will never know that the lower decks are currently engulfed in a hellish inferno until smoke starts blowing from the vents and killing people in those compartments. If the anti-matter converter fails with a high enough shutdown level, there is a flat 25% chance the ship turns into a small sun. 

Some of these ship breakdown effects are hilarious in a way only the classic Paranoia game can inflict on players, and your players will be begging the engineer for relief. Or survival. Or it may be too late by then. And no other classic science fiction game makes ship breakdowns this deadly, so you will take maintenance and repair seriously.

Here is a secret. All the ships resemble World War 2 vessels; they explode in gigantic atomic explosions, mount weapons far too powerful for anyone's own good, and hate everyone inside them. Even the smallest starfighters pack a punch that can do severe damage to a city skyline.

Seriously, though, these ships feel like real starships, not just fake CGI or oversimplified parts of the game the designers don't want to think too hard about. Every one of these ship breakdowns needs attention, and continuing to fly with them is a considerable risk that ups the ante and heightens the tension. They can also ground the ship until they are repaired.

And the computers are wonderfully a 1970s vision of computing, with a TL 7 mini-computer (hand computer) having 1 DPU of CPU and 2 DPU of storage, with a DPU being about a megabyte of storage. When you scale up from computers to mainframes, the TL 6-7 multi-computer weighs 500kg and has 100 MB of memory and 500 MB of storage. These are so primitive that they are endearing in a way.

This is not really a society that has the Internet, and computers are more utilitarian and functional. Computers do not control society here; you walk up with a clear plastic "holo card" and put it into a wall slot, and a holographic movie plays.

You can actually talk to the higher-level computers with sentience! Otherwise, the conversation goes like this: "Computer, how many moons orbit Alpha Ceti Five?" And the mainframe answers you like someone talking out of a can, repeating the question with the answer, "The answer is, seven moons orbit Alpha Ceti Five." Think of any computer out of Star Trek: The Original Series or 1970s science-fiction movies, and you have what it is like in Space Opera. As a referee, drive your players up the wall with canned, vague, and too literal answers from these computers.

And you have to pay double and allocate 5 MB of memory (instead of 3) for a galley program to get served chicken cordon bleu. Seriously, the computers in this game are as bad as the starships, and they secretly all hate you, too.

Modern game designers assume that every piece of computer technology has to be "just like today," and they put themselves in a box. I still miss the original Shadowrun universe, where nothing was wireless, and you had to physically "jack in" to access points in dangerous locations. Wi-fi and VPNs ruined the entire setting.

If you port in the classic weapons, you can use GURPS Ultra Tech for the base stats. Still, there are some good parts to take into consideration with the classic Space Opera weapons, like the fact that almost all the energy weapons are capable of fully automatic fire. Even the blaster pistol. So Han Solo will be sitting across from Greedo, and instead of just shooting him one, he will be drilling a burst of ten blaster shots into the poor green latex sap. Tell Jabba to suck on my blaster Mauser with a switch. It is insane, unhinged, but incredible. Make sure to carry around a personal force screen.

Otherwise, stick with GURPS personal weapons and gear if you want to keep your life simple.

Plots? Steal them from other science fiction. If you have a Starforce ship, make a remote outpost lose contact, and send them to investigate. Since we have no transporters, we need to take a shuttle down with a contingent of marines, and then we get to do science in the abandoned outpost. Make the sentient computer get paranoid, and you need your social scientist to talk the computer out of it to find out the truth. Have the Space Marines go on foot to investigate a series of strange signals around the outpost. Let the engineer discover a secret sublevel beneath the outpost, full of labs conducting strange experiments. Let one of the PCs have a possible psionic awakening and hear voices telling them to run.

Come on.

Science fiction is not hard. It is full of secrets and mysteries, and nothing is as it seems.

Also, we are rocking the new Wacom MovinkPad 11 today for my doodle art. If you are into drawing and sketching, this pad is excellent. I did not go all out and get the most expensive one; I just got the smaller one, since all I wanted was a quick tablet to practice on with a Wacom-quality matte screen and a paper-like feel. Just something to practice a little each day, and knock out silly, fun doodle art is all I wanted. If you are looking to get into art, this is the ideal pick-up-and-draw Android practice device that lets you get some pen time in, save your work, and tear off a new sheet of digital paper for another silly idea.

Highly recommended and a great Christmas gift for a budding artist. Don't use AI! Have the satisfaction of drawing it yourself! Practice each day! Learn fundamental skills and grow as a person. Years down the line, you will thank me, and no one else will be able to draw a straight line without using ChatGPT.

But GURPS: Space Opera is a fun universe with a complete set of star sector maps, starships, fun gear, and compatible space combat systems that work efficiently with GURPS. Most of the books are "stuff to play with" either in organizations, equipment, weapons, starships, star maps, or other information. Outside of Traveller, this is one of the most complete science fiction universes in gaming we have, and one that has been forgotten.