Why hasn't a go-to Scifi tabletop game arisen in the same manner that D&D is the go-to fantasy tabletop game?

>every edition came out at the same time

5e even admitted as much.

Because sci-fi has a ton of different somewhat exclusive generic world concepts that are hard to all integrate at once without also dealing with the philosophical implications of each. Star Wars gets closest, but it has too much IP protection to copy and too many central icons to deal with.

Because 40k is too expensive.

Because fantasy makes it easy for the characters to play together, and high technology encourages them to play apart.

Consider the fantasy archetypes: rogue, wizard, fighter, thief. They can all get together, delve a dungeon, and fight a dragon. They'll all be within earshot, they'll have a mix of melee combat and ranged attacks, and you never-ever-ever want to split the party.

Now, consider some scifi archetypes: hacker, pilot, soldier, jedi. The hacker does not want to leave the computer terminal. The pilot needs a spaceship to shine. The soldier has to do his thing on the ground, and the jedi gets kicked out because he didn't get the memo that it's a hard scifi setting.

Higher levels of technology make it harder to do the heroic party thing which is the essence of a good old tabletop sit down. When you have radios, you split the party more easily, forcing the GM to run multiple scenarios at once. When you have a mixture of hacking, space vehicles, ground vehicles, and ground wars, you have a massive skill split that forces your party to fight apart. When you have really good ranged combat, melee combat stops working unless you use stealth (which also splits the party) or bullshit (lightsabers).

Fellowship-style fantasy games are the staple of the genre because they allow four friends to sit down and have fun together. Their characters fight together, travel together, solve puzzles together, and emerge victorious together.

Modern and scifi settings don't catch as well because they make it easier to split apart, do different things, and generally run three different games that just happen to take place in the same narrative.

Because tabletop rpgs aren't that popular.

You gotta be popular before such popular things become defined.

As everyone else has said pulp fantasy is ingrained in everyone's head but there is no standard scifi setting, this means you would need a very flexible system and couldn't use a pre made setting.

Interesting ideas, but at their heart the thief/rogue and wizard don't really work as well in a group as they do alone. In the case of rogues, it's actually a challenge for DM's to not just have the rogue go off on their own.

And, radios actually help keep groups together and active in a scene, even when they're split up. I've actually run D&D games where I gave the players pseudo-radio type magic items, so that even when they split up, they still feel involved in whatever another player is doing because they can still communicate with them and otherwise influence the scene.

Well I forgot about the various star wars games, but those also have a shit ton of pure fantasy elements in them (But to be honest that's just how science fiction is. Things just vary on the level and nature of the fantasy elements)

There's actually a recent Star Trek RPG, it's interesting but I don't think it's great.

There's just too many incompatible variations of sci fi. All of fantasy is similar enough that a single system can work with minor modifications.

> All of fantasy is similar enough that a single system can work with minor modifications.

You really have to do major modifications. In effect, games like D&D need to be extremely modular in order to be versatile enough to be adaptable to so many different types of fantasy, be they high or low, Medieval or Gothic Horror, Modern Fantasy or Shonen Fighting Tournament.

I also generally disagree that one or the other has more incompatible variations. Most variations simply demand cutting out certain components, which both could do readily. In part, Star Wars's popularity is thanks to its versatility in this regard, because you can have stuff like Rogue Squadron which has next to no mention of the Force to stuff like the Force Awakens which is centered around Force deus ex machina.

>Why hasn't a go-to Scifi tabletop game arisen in the same manner that D&D is the go-to fantasy tabletop game?
You mean like how in every thread on Veeky Forums that asks for recommendations on a sci-fi system, the first five replies are always Traveller?

But Traveller doesn't have the normie name recognition as D&D

That's hardly what would qualify it as a go-to system.

I'd argue it's much more to do with D&D being the first actual RPG, than anything to do ith the genre in particular.

D&D is made, and lo it was a thing. When other fantasy RPGs show up there is already so much inertia behind D&D that the brand remains dominant even if the actual games have mutated drastically since those early days.

Other genres don't have that issue, where a single brand is the icon not just of the genre but of RPGs as a whole. I'm sure that if Rockets and Robots had been first out the door with a selection of settings that combined Dune, Foundation, Flash Gordon, Star Trek and countless 50s B-movies it would have the same niche D&D does in our timeline. And fantasy would have a more varied selection of games in the top spots that each cater to specific IPs or sub-genres.

The only thing comparable I can think of is WoD's stranglehold on Urban Horror/Fantasy but even that is a pale shadow to D&D.

Why the fuck has no one mentioned Stars Without Number?

SWN is the ultimate go-to SciFi TTRPG, that can be changed easily to fit any scifi setting.

Sure, its simple.

It has its own weird setting.
But it litterally says in the book "This is made to be a base sandbox system for any scifi setting, feel free to use this system for any scifi setting you want, and heres good ways to do it."

Because it isn't popular enough to qualify as a go-to game

Because a go-to game is not a good idea. The mechanics are not "sci-fi", the mechanics are a tone, a theme, and a set of constraints that are used to describe typical characters.

WHAT your character stats are and how the system resolves things will inform a huge amount of how the game feels to play, and the system will to some degree influence what kind of characters are created.

D&D is the go-to because it has, over time, created its own niche in a huge way. D&D is a thing of its own, and there is no avoiding that.

Nothing has done that for non-fantasy gaming, and as such, there is no one go-to for fantasy.

Incompatible differences is very different in terms of a game system. All of those fantasy genres are, in terms of actual game functions, similar enough that you can use the same system and either ban some things (low fantasy), change some things, or add some fluff although modern fantasy can be a problem but that's easily rectified by either using a system designed for scifi or altering stuff a bit (like adding in some basic gun rules, which can now often be found in the DMG). Scifi games are an issue because the rules you would use for mecha games differ from those that would be used in starship games or a bunch of other types. The core focus of fantasy is always the people which means the system just needs to run smoothly when you play as a group of people but scifi has the people as being important but mechanically other things are often most important.

Because no one has been able to find a copy of the GURPS core rules in almost twenty years, rendering the goto scifi tabletop game impossible to actually play.

sjgames.com/gurps/books/Basic/

wow.lobo.cx/rpg/4th Edition/GURPS 4th Edition - Basic Set - Campaigns.pdf

Nobody can find it, eh?

Why not try Starfinder? It just came out from Paizo and it's really good.

Ban envoy and solarian though, they're underpowered classes.

>Because a go-to game is not a good idea.

I don't know. Having a uniform base for discussion is kind of its own asset, and why people like things like standardized formats and common languages. Very likely, if D&D actually came out with good Scifi support, we'd see plenty of people choosing it over more specialized systems.

The might be what Pathfinder is sort of hoping to do with Starfinder (though it's not likely to succeed), and what Loraine Williams tried to do by forcing the TSR writers to make Spelljammer. It's funny though, because they purposely tried to make Spelljammer bad in order to screw Lorraine over, but funnily enough just throwing all sorts of ridiculous ideas together actually made for a fun setting.

If it's anything like Pathfinder I'm not really interested. I'd like to do some sort of Spelljammer style game, but not enough to play what is essentially 3.5 again and saying to ban classes (I'm assuming they're classes anyway) right off the bat doesn't build confidence

sorry, user. you've given me a broken link and a site that hasn't been updated in over a decade.

The hunt continues!

Works for me, google gurps core rules, it should be on the first page. Be patient and make sure you can load PDFs from links.

>The Matri but with X
I laughed

>>But muh Asimov novels...
>Fuck off, nobody ever read them. So, we have Star Trek.
Pleb.

What says. Scifi isn't as static as fantasy is (well, became), and is divided into complicated subgenres and styles.

I mean, to an extent fantasy is as well. But the core of DND (Conan+Ffhard, Tolkien is flavour but has not that much narrative structural impact) is pretty much estabilished.

That being said, it's kinda bizzarre that there isn't SOME scifi genre get-go. I mean, at least on paper, a Dune-like rpg should have its niche. It's not something cerebral like Star Trek, it's not hard scifi, it's not Heinlein military shit (bad players can't deal with discipline in game).
I guess it's because DND is pretty much problem solving and very "basic" adventure (not judging, just sayin). Enter a dungeon, kick people's asses, get riches. Also, the characters are more or less equivalent to each other in importance. To an extent Cyberpunk tried it (have a hopefully good reason to go against the Man, don't get your ass kicked too much, continue the fight) but it didn't work so well.

>yes, I know Fading Suns is a multicultural Dune, for example, but still

Actually, you know what is really fucking weird? The absence of a real get-to horror game. Chtulhu would like to but it really doesn't do any of the things it wants to do (being horror, being a detective game, and most of all, being remotely similar to HPL's works).
I mean, horror is subjective as fuck, but still. We have a get-go Mad Max game, jesus.

The horror genre in generally isn't really suited to having actual mechanics for player characters.

The first book came out in what, 1996? We've certainly been through enough editions for it to wick its way through at this point.

Why not? You mean because they die (not at the end of the movie, anyway, leaving players out of the game)?

I don't think it's really a given. In The Shining, they die at the very end. In a surprisngly high number of the movies, deaths are pretty low (the Exorcist).It's not always Scream

(worth mentioning that The Final Girl is Scream: the RPG. Interesting zero-prep little game)

>There's just too many incompatible variations of sci fi. All of fantasy is similar enough that a single system can work with minor modifications.

That's bullshit. Hell, even GOT -as mainstream as it is- is radically different from DND, to take a literary example.

The fact is that gamers like to play DND and so a whole lot of games are similar to it, but The Warren, Nobilis or Pendragon aren't DND while being fantasy as much as DND is.

No, I mean that characters that can effectively accomplish tasks doesn't really work well for horror in general. I think horror works best with a sort of "you can only take 10, but you'll need an edge to make it succeed" as the default assumption on interactions and checks. Having things like a character that specializes in a task is contrary to the sense of helplessness that horror should have. Characters dying and players on standby didn't really cross my mind.

Hrm. You have a point. But that's not really necessary to an RPG, isn't it?

I mean, fucking Cthulhu -which I loathe, but still- is about fighting the inevitable.

>no one system or setting can accommodate that
Let me introduce you to our lord and savior.

I'm not saying the PCs shouldn't be able to win. I just think the odds should be against their favor, and the horror tone would be kind of compromised if you got too technical.

In my mind the ideal horror RPG would basically just be the GM's notes, various mood setting things like dim lighting and music, and napkins with scribbles on them for character sheets

>GURPS
>good with anything to do with space

Heh

Well, no RPG has the name brand recognition of D&D. It's the first RPG, the most popular, and the most iconic in the public mind. That short-lived D&D fad back around '82 was colossal, you have no idea.

But Traveller started off doing pretty well. It's lost a lot of ground over the decades, but back in the early 80s it was quite possibly the second most popular RPG.

It was poorly handled though, with bad edition releases going further and further up the crunch scale, with the fluff steadily becoming everything the fans didn't want and then some, until nobody played the later editions and you wound up with mostly incestuous groups of old dudes still playing the '81 release decades later.
Things got somewhat better with Mongoose's version, but they seem determined to fuck it up too, with those greedy licensing changes in 2e driving third party support away.

Traveller's had it rough.

Westeros is mentioned in the DMG.

>Fuck off, nobody ever read them.
Which is why I lift stuff from them wholesale. It's the tits.

I dunno, it's within the top 20, I'd say that's good enough.

Damn, meant to reply to

Funny thing is, all the negative press about D&D enshrined it as THE roleplaying game.

bumps

Being in the top 20 doesn't really make you a go-to game, especially when there's several other sci-fi games above it.

In general, the numbers for games outside of the top 10 have such low numbers and fluctuate so much that you could quite readily say that the games in the 11-30 range might as well all be tied for 11th place.

Still, it's important to note that roll20 stats aren't a totality, and only provide a slice of the RPG picture and largely only the Anglosphere.

Also, now that I look at it, Traveller is actually #31 on that chart.