What are the best genres of sci-fi for gaming besides space opera and cyberpunk?

>cyberpunk
>good

It can make for good adventures even if the genre tends to be played out.

Nah, zuberpkunk is overrated trash, and you know it. At least good space opera`s will never demand to be taken seriously. You stil got a galaxy of shitty ones (mass effect, for example).

Frirefly was shit, SHIT!!

Both cyberpunk and space opera are full of old tropes and clichés, both can be executed equally good or bad. Cyberpunk may be a bit more popular than a space opera nowadays, but it doesn't automatically makes it overrated.

I mean, they're just tools from GM's point of view. They do what they're meant to do. Why do you need to criticize saw for inability to effectively hammer a nail?

Ther is no good examples of cuber-punk, admit it.

Are we talking about cyberpunk examples of tabletop or examples of media in general?

Media in general.

He was obviously refering to Ghosts of Mars.

wtf I hate cyberpunk now

Space Horror

Alien and Aliens are some good examples.
Event Horizon too, if you want more mind-fuckery.
The first 2 thirds of Sunshine too, if you want to go with the "everything about the mission is going to shit" approach.

Well, examples are right on the surface: Blade Runner, Deus Ex, Ghost in the Shell. They're objectively considered to be one of the best works in their mediums, even if we don't look specifically for cyberpunk.
Why any of them can't be considered good?

>Firefly
>Not Cowboy Beep Boop

No user, you're taste a shit

...

>fireflop and animu fanboy
Wow, just kys.

Holy shit, sheeple, how can you live with suck shit taste? Also, where is sheeple favourite Matrix?

>such*

Can you provide some logical reasoning why anything listed is bad?

Hard scifi with cosmic horror tones.

Welcome to Veeky Forums, friend. How was the weather over in Reddit today?

>cyberpunk demands to be taken seriously

>unironically using sheeple as an insult

Social scifi.

Check out SHOCK.

>being a sheeple
youtube.com/watch?v=CltR7TPXhGw

>unironically

I miss when people on Veeky Forums understood the difference between jokes and BAITBAITBAITBAIT. Not even that poster, just moving my head from side to side forlornly to be quite frank.

so, never?

Never, 2013 when you arrived for the first time, same thing really.

I started using this website in 2007 though and people still can't detect sarcasm over the internet

they couldn't even before Veeky Forums existed

nothing changed

O-operapunk?

I'm picturing this bigass opera theatre with songs about metal being better than the flesh, lots of neon lights and prostetics.

How do you make technology based on operas, though?

Technology powered by raw emotions. All pilots sing huge operatic melodies. Gigantic speaker-guns. Great men clashing in the skies.

Actually if we are rolling with that I should point to Macross Delta, I guess. Where tecnomagic is songs.

>Mirage still best girl

So Macross 7: the Listen to My Songing?

I don't anime. Maybe, I guess?

...

I choose Delta because there is pretty explicit, songs are ancient alien artefacts that activate eldritch ruins and all that. I guess it did start with Frontier, though.

>also, mercats, because why the fuck not

first post best post

all you space horrors out there...

would you play a campaign where you're basically on Prometheus meets Pandorum, but there ARENT stupid trash zombies running around?

Like I want to capture that first comfy half of the movie, forgetting the bullshit somewhere in the third quarter and then wrapping it back around to a race to gain control of the vessel by the end.

What do you think?

Would probably have you go to sleep and then I would control your actions for you a short time, then when you wake up you have to follow the clues and figure out where you were... perhaps YOU'RE the killer? Maybe YOU'RE the one slowly sabodauging the ship's engines? Perhaps it's your best friend that's sleeping with your waifu??

This an more on my terrifying trip through my ship.

Sonic weapons are a thing irl you know.

Just think of those but with more Beethoven.

I've never seen horror in games work.

Survival horror

I feel that the less you've planned for horror game - the better. The main scaring factors are mystery and uncertainty, so it would be even better if you will not know the whole truth yourself
There are two great threadshots circulating on Veeky Forums: The Wall campaign and 2001-esque horror campaign on Mars. You can use them as a reference to get a general picture of what works in horror tabletop. Should I post them?

The question was about best, not literally worst

Planetes fuck yeah

It requires a good GM and a proper system. Otherwise, it's shit.

My friend ran a Eldritch Horrors game. He did horror VERY well. I was just too stupid to think I could kill a big bubbling monster with tons of fire (it would've worked too if I had just planned better)

Oh thanks for the suggestion, pal. I love 2001, but I haven't considered it being a modern sci fi setting. I was thinking more along the lines of post-future space flight. By which I mean, spaceflight that isn't FTL, but also doesn't take decades to get anywhere interesting. The fact that the whole story takes place on a sealed cannister floating in uncharted space is half the thrill. No one's coming to rescue you. You're on your own. But don't worry, your whole ship and "crew" are trained for this. You can survive out there, you just have to be smart and level headed. It's not about sprinting towards an objective -- it's more about slowly crawling down the bellows of the ship, learning where all the resources are, and then when shit hits the fan, we'll test how much you remember about the ship layout.

But much like 2001, I want it to have a 2/3 chill to 1/3 heart pounding horror. That's a delicate balance, but as I've stated, I've seen it work.

Any advice on game systems? I was thinking of something with social and technical skills that allow for detective work on top of NPC interacting.

hard sci-fi that doesn't take itself super seriously. this series right here for example.

I'd play the SHIT out of a game where the team drops quiet and commando-fights against Saint' green-peace marines carefully rationing vitamin supplements when you can't find the right stuff, powered armor that feels powerful without being crazy overpowered. interesting shit like that...

Industrial sci-fi is a big one. You know, fairly advanced tech in terms of spacetravel and suchlike, but little in the way of "elegant" high-tech like true AI or teleportation. Essentially you don't have any neat universal machines that automatically take care of anything, it's more like a shitty 20th-century where there's always something in need of fixing. Except instead of the treadmill going on the fritz, now it's the grav system or the oxygen scrubber.

It often combines well with horror like mentioned, but you can also do a similar thing with a warfare, crime, or espionage focus. If you're looking for inspiration, The Expanse is a fairly decent series that hits the tone quite well.

I always found that something kitschy once and a while can always give a good laugh, and fun.

youtube.com/watch?v=EoM4tPQ_tgQ

In my experience horror works best if it's kept strictly to standalone one-shots rather than campaigns. It allows you to stay more focused on the central mystery, and you open up a broader range of responses from your characters. For example, in one of our games the entire party basically decided to just nope the fuck out of there, since the characters were way in over their head. The GM played along, and gave us a neat epilogue where he detailed how thanks to our failure, a whole lot of people died in the years down the line.

>John Ringo
Triggered.

why does the ringo trigger you?

that was a pretty good series.

I like any setting where baiting and shitposting is made illegal

Probably because my first/only exposure to him was through the Ghost/Kildar series. You know, the one with the actual pedophile rapist as the good-guy protagonist.

OP didn't ask for worst

I guess that means Australia becomes a prison colony. Again

My little user can't be this salty

Traveller?

go and read March Upcountry, that series had a protagonist with an actual developmental ARC(started shitty, got gud, had some real serious conflicts, etc. etc. it's a complete series.

>You know, the one with the actual pedophile rapist as the good-guy protagonist.
the good guys are Marines here, so only slightly better than that.
they're actually not that bad, their chaplain is a FANTASTIC character

the Bad Guys are literally Green Peace, and also alien fauna, and tribal barbarians.

try the second helping user, it sounds like the first plate-full you ate had gone bad.
Weber's influence on the series really evens things out.

HAIL SATAN

Nothin, huh?

cool cool

Space Westerns are neat. There's a lot of Golden Age Space Western out there. Doc Smith's Lensmen being a great example. (Elevator pitch was basically Texas Rangers In Space.)

I love hard scifi for reading, but it's honestly not super gripping for role-play. Everyone would need to have an equally robust technical and/or scientific background to really bring it out.

Star Wars is really good, yeah.

Cowboy Bebop isn't a Space Western, though. It's a Space Gangster series.

This is more a leitmotif than an actual genre. e.g. the setting's tech is old and well-tested. Again, Star Wars has this leitmotif, ignoring the prequels.

Personally the one I find least exploited is the beginning of the Age of Exploration-type scifi. Stuff's often hand-waveable, leaves a wide-open sandbox to play with, and you can smash as many tropes or pre-existing work into it as you like. Like mil scifi but with a focus on problem solving without violence.

>This is more a leitmotif than an actual genre. e.g. the setting's tech is old and well-tested. Again, Star Wars has this leitmotif, ignoring the prequels.
>Personally the one I find least exploited is the beginning of the Age of Exploration-type scifi. Stuff's often hand-waveable, leaves a wide-open sandbox to play with, and you can smash as many tropes or pre-existing work into it as you like. Like mil scifi but with a focus on problem solving without violence.
that's exactly what my Space Opera Western is like.

I say western because it is all about the unexplored frontier, and battling with the elements more often than bad guys with guns. But don't get me wrong, plenty of badguys too... you just have biggest shit to worry about, like the planet slowly crushing you to death if you don't have proper survival gear.

Right now I'm homebrewing off of Star Wars FFG rpg, but need to leap to something new as the space combat in that game is terrible.

>the space combat in that game is terrible.
Amusingly, I am in the middle of writing a game engine specifically because the space combat in FFG is so bad but friends want to play a starfighter campaign.

care to talk a little bit about with me? I'm heading into game design myself, as simply kitbashing rulebooks has only gotten me so far.

I can throw up my email if you rather talk one on one

would love to hear more regardless. Let me know.

I'll probably end up posting it to /swg/ when we've played with it a bit and ironed out the kinks.

yeah but what is it you're doing?

how are you changing it?

wtf I love ringo now

>how are you changing it?
I'm writing an entirely new game engine.

If the goal is excellent cinematic furballs, you basically have to build the game around that.

So the game is set up to allow that ground combat happens, but really designed to make starfighter combat interesting and resolvable in about an hour for an 8 v 8 engagement.

Hey user, how about you provide your own recommendations for quality cyberpunk instead?

I'm going to put my own hat in the ring. Neuromancer, and the two good vernor vinge books.

seconding march for ringo moderated by non-lunatic, also try Claws that Catch series for more of the moderated milporn with him and travis taylor cancelling each others lunacy.