I want to run a realistic, historically accurate, humans-only, no-magic, low fantasy setting

>call it fantasy
>has no magic

I know semantic retards will argue otherwise but magic is necessary for something to fall within the category of fantasy.

I played in a game pitched as "realistic hard sci-fi"
The game ended up being about using space wreckage to try to jury rig ships together since a brand new space ship was astronomical. Most of our game was about shenanigans as we tried to buy and sell things at various ports on the way to saturn.
He kept saying "Well advanced resources are hard to get in space and a crystal radio is easier to fix than a cell phone so that's why tech is so low outside the inner planets."
Then he started having everyone we meet sing folk music about space and eventually it came out that this was his main inspiration.
youtube.com/watch?v=vzVi_acjD-s

So in my experience, hard sci-fi games get more inventive with the setting at least rather than just ripping off warhammer or GoT.

The fantasy one simply because the actual middle ages were fucking boreing for most of the people alive at the time

Low magic, by miles. It's always some incompetent D&D-only sod who read about awesome hardcore gritty fantasy on the internet and is now super stoked to run a game where everyone has a stink score and walking down the street can give you tetanus.

That only comes into play if you try to run your hard scifi like you'd run soft scifi.

>friend wants to try a custom soft steampunk post-apocalyptic campaign
>he has lots of cool ideas
>I propose several game systems which support most if not all he wants
>"nah I'll use D&D because it's what I know"

Boy I can't wait for yet-another-D&D game with some awful broken house rules and untested shitty homebrew mechanics.

The """fantasy""" game. Hard sci-fi can, at least, still be cool because the modern world is already cool. The """fantasy""" game is just an exercise in how garbage it was to live back then.
_ ____ __ ___ ___ ___.

The former, actually. It would almost purely be political intrigue with a few handfuls of combat thrown in. At least with the sci-fi one you could be more creative.

In my experience the people who are exceptional faggots over the former tend to be the most autistic. Obviously both can be executed fine if you're not an idiot, but I assume we're not talking about rational people here.

The first one can be really bad unless you play with the right system.

That's pretty cool, user.

Any can be good or shitty depending on GM, but both are hard to pull off well.

I'd say low fantasy, since sci-fi fags tend to be just autistic enough to deal with scientific minutae, leaving actually fun stuff for players.

Get enough sci-fi fags together and you end up with something beautiful, but terrifying,
an infinite helix of autism, where character sheets are covered with formulas instead of stats and breakthroughs in science happen mid-combat.

...

The one that follows it up with
>And I' using my moded D&D guys it's gonna be great!

I like the first more.

>liking cute boys is a bad thing
what are you, fuckin gay?

>I want to run a campaign set in an MMORPG

Both sound cool. What are you on about, you commie?

No, you're thinking about modern times

>Everybody likes to shit on FTL travel and other "impossible" things,
The more obnoxious to play under is when the setting uses that excuse to introduce FTL or other magical technology without doing their homework on the consequences.

FTL means time travel, kid. Time travel. No-one serious says time travel is absolutely, one hundred percent impossible. Maybe we we'll find a way in the future to make it possible. But don't introduce FTL without introducing time travel and have the balls to say it is realistic science fiction. It's not. It's science fantasy at best.

Log Horizon TRPG

so, do i get it correctly
>fast = slow down time
>light speed = time is still
>faster = back in time

The sci-fifag's gonna be much worse. It's probably one of your underemployed losers who pride themselves on their connection to the STEM field and possibly is an autist. 'Realistic' sci-fi is about as obnoxious as clowny 'everything goes' cosmo-operas, it's just inventory porn and sperg logistics all over the place.

The 'historically accurate' thing has sliiiightly more chance to actually be about the interesting things in the period being simulated, and an attempt to immerse into the mindset of its people. But that's far from given, you'd probably get about the same kind of autist as above whose history knowledge ends at 'the Middle Ages consisted of plague, shit, rape, and senseless war'. Basically, it's his cheapo way to get his crapsack grimdark (reminder that the Middle Ages are grimdark only to us, faggots from 2018 with our faggot 2018 sensibilities) fetish fulfilled and have a possible 'excuse' that 'IT'S HISTORICALLY ACCURATE'.

The thing is, most good and unique settings don't have to merchandise themselves as good and unique. It's emergent. Any good setting that is attractive and interactive will lead to player contribution also. It's at that point, when a player asks 'mummy, can X be in this setting?' that the DM has a natural opportunity to expand exposure in a way that's not infodumps.

Wait, if time goes back at FTL speed, can we get the tau calculations and compare them to velocity to determine if your personal frame of reference has you taking the same amount of time in transit as the rest of the universe sees?

I'm not a semantic retard, but what would you call an alternative reality historical setting where there are goblins, elves and dragons, but no magic?

The STEM autist one.

How do elves get their longevity? How did the cross or T-rex, bat, lion and a flamethrower come into being?

You sound like a little brainlet bitch lmao

OP said humans only.

I think what he wants is no spellcasters, not "no magic"
Absolutely no magic is boring as fuck, unwieldable but present, aware and capricious magic can be a cool thing

Option 1: It just happened, elves just evolved that way, same with dragons, they are descendants of flying sauropods, breathing fire is a natural adaptation.

Option 2: Biology in that world works differently from ours. It's a completely separate universe with its own laws, everything can be explained through those laws.

Option 3: No explanation, things are just the way they are. Inhabitants of the world either believe that God or gods created them like that or give some pseudo-scientific explanations like Aristotle did. There's no evidence that any divine powers actually exist, as far as you can tell, but you can't really be sure. And I explicitly admit that I won't tell you even if I have an explanation.

Option 4: God did it. Who is he? He's omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent. But how does he know this? Even if he looks at the timeline of that universe and sees it all in all possibilities, even if he sees countless universes and has power to do anything with them, he can't possibly be sure that there isn't something he doesn't know of can't perceive. Why does he exist? He says through his prophets that he has no beginning and no end, but he can't know if it's true, nobody knows.

You sound like a low tier troll loser that perhaps needs to TRY HARDER BITCH :D

>Option 2: Biology in that world works differently from ours. It's a completely separate universe with its own laws, everything can be explained through those laws.

Thats sci-fi, not fantasy.

>Option 3: No explanation, things are just the way they are. Inhabitants of the world either believe that God or gods created them like that or give some pseudo-scientific explanations like Aristotle did.

So magic.

>Option 4: God did it.

The biggest of magics.

>Which is more obnoxious to play under?
You.

Is it really science fiction if nobody in the setting has invented science as a practice yet?

Your logic fails you.

If "different laws of the universe" is not magic, but sci-fi, then how God is magic and not just a being that exists in a world with different laws? As you can notice, I said that it's possible that he just doesn't understand his own existence, but is deluded and thinks he knows everything.

Similarly, with the 3rd option, you conclude that it's magic, citing the conclusions that the inhabitants of the world came to, those obviously can be false. You don't mean to say that magic actually existed in our world because people used to believe in it? Then again, maybe one of the "magical"
explanations turns out to be true, but you can't know it.

Also, yeah, this user is right, nobody would really call it sci-fi.

Yes

The former. But both are bad.

>realistic
And then wait for him to bring out the trolls with regeneration that disregards matter conservation, dragons and giants that violate the square-cube law, human-sized creatures that fly with a wingspan of less than 9 meters, and so on.

>If "different laws of the universe" is not magic, but sci-fi, then how God is magic and not just a being that exists in a world with different laws?

Eh, you might be right about that, its all magical bullshit

>Similarly, with the 3rd option, you conclude that it's magic, citing the conclusions that the inhabitants of the world came to, those obviously can be false.

Then it's not fantasy.

>Then again, maybe one of the "magical"
explanations turns out to be true, but you can't know it.

Then it would be fantasy.

FTL time travel is a meme. What actually happens is that information spreads at the speed of light, so if you travel faster than light you will reach your destination before information does, so from an observer's frame of reference you arrive at point B before you set off from point A. That's all there is to it, information lagging behind you.

I ask you to name it how it is, without "would be", becasue that's the information you have about the setting. Let's say you need to describe it to someone. You will never know the actual explanation (just like you actually can't know it for any setting, even the one you call sci-fi could turn out to be magical).

Unrealistic scifi is prone to be extremely timid and unambitious. There's all kind of cool stuff that you without new science that soft scifi never dares to do.

Sci-fi. I don't want to sit there and watch people argue about the plausibility of whatever pseudoscientific bullshit they want to do. I equally don't want to watch someone pull shit straight out of their ass and have everyone go along with it because they're not smart enough to debunk it.

The first one is just any other ttrpg without magic. I don't see how that's obnoxious.

both sound great, stay an uneducated brainlet.

Even without FTL, a genuine realistic setting would crush the most fancy of the scifi. Sof scifi understimates the scales, sizes, populations and energies that even a single solar system can hold. Only 40k comes close despite its nonsensical science.

>FTL time travel is a meme. What actually happens is that information spreads at the speed of light, so if you travel faster than light you will reach your destination before information does, so from an observer's frame of reference you arrive at point B before you set off from point A. That's all there is to it, information lagging behind you.
Which allows you to send information back in time, with all the problems and paradoxes that come with it.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyonic_antitelephone

are you?

40k is worse than most because the Imperium is supposedly a galaxy-spanning empire of a million worlds. It too completely neglects the enormous amount of resources that a single system has and instead focuses on the Imperium as a massive, sprawling thing when only a handful of systems are actually necessary to match the Imperium for numbers and production.

But if your empire isn't overly massive, how else are you going to lose strategic positions through poor infrastructure?

Neither, so long as the gm and players all want the same thing.

You are making the mistake of treating the Imperium as though it is efficient, user, when all of the material waxes at length about how wasteful it is of resources and manpower, or that it controls all the space in those systems.

>According to the current understanding of physics, no such faster-than-light transfer of information is actually possible. For instance, the hypothetical tachyon particles which give the device its name do not exist even theoretically in the standard model of particle physics, due to tachyon condensation, and there is no experimental evidence that suggests that they might exist.

So there's nothing to worry about, cool.

Given the Imperium's hilarious corruption and incompetence, they could easily lose stuff in the same star system that way.

Yes, but it gets the feeling of size and antiquity better than most. You see Star Wars and it doesnt feel like a thousand years galactic-spanning civilization. Having millions of ships and billions of troops and can lose a planet and feel like it is no near big news. A true galactic empire would be even more insane.

"Information spreads at the speed of light" is a meme. Time and causality spread at the speed of light, which also mean information spread at this speed. Because information is simply causality and time.

The issue with FTL isn't that you are going faster than bits of data sent in a laser. This is the braindead understanding of special relativity, the child's understanding of what it entails. The issue is that you are going faster than causality and time. You are going faster than what your own light cone "timeline" could be. You are going, in a very real sense, faster than time.

You don't seem to understand what you are talking about, to be honest. Learn some basic understanding of light cone, Lorentz transformation, and SR.

>so from an observer's frame of reference you arrive at point B before you set off from point A.
The information lagging behind you will create ghost illusions made of light, that's a given. FTL time travel has absolutely nothing to do with those kinds of light illusions.

well, yeah. But that goes for all of FTL
Basically it's
"Pick two:
Relativity
Causality
FTL"
since any FTL travel could be used as an TA

I don't see why everybody thinks time travels at the speed of light, did someone discover a measurable unit of time that travels just as fast as a photon while I was sleeping or something?

I feel like a no-ftl setting has more potential to be epic than one that has it. Think about it. People live for hundreds of thousands of years. Plans, plots and strategies think in terms of centuries, thousands or even millions of years. You can have plots spawned from a downright mythological ruler like the Yellow Emperor or the Scorpion King and have the guy be out there still alive.

Yes. That has been common knowledge among scientist since we solved the Maxwell Equationsw. The speed of light has little to do with light. The universe doesn't conspire to keep that limit. The universe could care less about light. Everything without mass is always travelling at that speed and photons just happen to have no mass.

youtube.com/watch?v=msVuCEs8Ydo

FTL only means time travel if you're a fucking retard. Accelerating towards the speed of light slows down time relative to your position, so a guy experience a year while everyone experiences ten. That's not time travel, that's time dilation.

And right now, the most plausible current method of FTL travel theorized, the Alcubierre Drive which relies on spacial expansions and shrinking to essentially cheat the cosmic speed limit wouldn't even involve as much time dilation because you're not accelerating towards light speed.

No one who ever seriously considered moving faster than light from the standpoint of physics assumed you could actually move backwards in time with it.

That said, conversations like this are why hard scifi is the more obnoxious setting. They rely on physics that most players don't understand, and there's always the one player who flips his fucking shit over something is incongruous as being able to reach past the asteroid belt in anything short of 7 months. Even though douchebags can be convinced to not spend hours arguing minutae over swinging a sword.

Honestly thats what i like unironically about the Combine from Half-Life. Its made pretty clear that the Combine view Earth with the same importance that the US views a 1-stoplight town in Kansas. It is notable for the resistance only, and later MAYBE having teleportation, which is a BIG if.

user, everything moving faster than light can be used as an Tachyonic Antitelephone

Seems pretty 'only human player characters' to me. When that guy says elves goblins and dragons, he's talking about elves, goblins and dragons. Not the dnd shit that stole their names. Elves are the mystical laughter in the woods at night, the reason why people hang iron horseshoes over their door, so that they might not steal in the house and spirit away a child from the crib, leaving a monster in it's place. Goblins sit in a similar position. Crafty little devils, bound to get you lost, alone in the wild.

> People live for hundreds of thousands of years.
Okay, so literally every atom of matter in known space, including all the people, is now owned by one of a handful of functionally immortal god-kings who have had hundreds of thousands of years to slowly amass more wealth and power until nothing is outside of their control. So you're either a god-king or you may as well be dead, because you have zero agency thanks to AI assisted surveillance perpetually monitoring you anywhere you and the god-king that owns you also owns everyone you'll ever meet and everything you ever encounter. It's a cool setting if you're one of the god-kings. It's shit for any other possible story.

youtube.com/watch?v=bJMYoj4hHqU

I have yet to see a setting that prides itself on being "Realistic, scientifically plausible, hard SciFi" that does the pure batshit insanity of a world 100, 200 or one thousand fucking years in the future any justice. The world of the future would be so twisted and incomprehensible to us that the culture shock of peasant from 1518 that got ported to 2018 would be a fucking joke.

The first is for historians.
The second is for aerospace engineers.
The rest of us are blissfully ignorant and can still enjoy the inaccurate stuff as long as it's fun.
I especially like it when it feels vaguely plausible.

...

Just like peasants in medieval fantasy. But with plots lasting for thousands of years,the most common form of death is murder followed by accident. Revenge is best served cold and you are got more time to plot on your hands than human civilization has existed so far.

>The second is for aerospace engineers.
Wannabe 4chins aerospace engineers, because anyone working in that field knows enough to know that he doesn't know enough about all the other fields that would advance dramatically to make a setting with such a claim.
In my experience, if somebody is actually knowledgeable in something to a signficant degree, they'll give a shitton of leeway while worldbuilding.

> Just like peasants in medieval fantasy.
No. Medieval fantasy doesn't feature the kind of technology necessary for that kind of total control. You can still have interesting stories about people other than the nobility because the nobility don't control every single thing. They can't, the technology to do that simply didn't exist back then. But in a sci-fi setting it does, and so you get a setting where the only interesting stories are ones that center on the god-kings themselves. Everyone else is a piece of property with no agency and no ability to meaningfully impact the story.

Except it can't. Alcubierre style FTL precludes sending information, which tachyonic antitelephones require. All that FTL drive can do is arrive at a location in a quicker timeframe, relative to the location, then a ship not equipped with such an FTL drive.

How can you use Alcubierre Drive as a Tachyonic Antitelephone then?

the -punk genre wants a word with you

Without FTL, this kind of control is impossible. There's huge time lags between the stars. It could centuries or even thousands of years before you even heard half the galaxy has risen up against you.

you see that example in the wiki page? Just have them send the messages with Alcubierre drive equipped pods

The -punk genre is practically dead because we invented way more effective and efficient means of total control than anyone dared to fear in the 80s.

There doesn't need to be FTL, the god-kings can just keep everyone near them. If a ship heads off to another star system, it will only be because so god-king decided to go check things out and took a bunch of his slaves with him. No one else will be able to muster the resources needed to build such a ship because all available resources will be owned by the god-kings, including the very people who want to leave. And they wouldn't be able to organize such a trip because they wouldn't be able to communicate with one another without the god-king that owns them finding out about it.

So players are Star Lords?

If there's no FTL, what the fuck do you need to colonize other systems for anyway? Robots can presumably procure any resources you might want from other systems and ship them off on their own on top of being way more efficiently.
There's no point to colonizing other planets when you can probably build habitats in space way easier and more cost efficient. Space to live is a thing we aren't hurting for once we can build space habitats.

What about when a God-King kills another and leaves a power vacuum for a new God King to take its place?

This sounds like any game that involves antediluvian immortals like vampires. Freedom is an illusion.

dead or not, it showcases stories about rebeling about a system. And people outside the main, controlled society still exist today. And they will in the future.

Inheritance laws presumably transfer ownership of the dead god-king's property to another, related god-king.

>And people outside the main, controlled society still exist today. And they will in the future.
How relevant are most of them, truly? Even some l33t underground deepweb hacker lives somewhere civilized most likely and thus leaving at track inside the system. Sure, it's not easy to connect his illegal activities to his day life, but still. The people that truly live off the grid are completely irrelevant for the most part. Sure, Motumbo the Cow Herder or Artyom the Siberian logger and moonshine brewer live off the grid, but they cannot have any impact either.
Now take those examples and amplify them thousandfold. A thousand years from now, humans will probably be barely recognizable as humans. Not necessarily in form, but in function. Gene engineering and therapy, cyberware and have medication will be part of normal everyday life, simply for their benifits. If you are already swallowing a drug cocktail every day (or rather, inject them) to be happier, sleep better and be more efficient at everything you do, adding some more into the mix to supress adverse immune reactions to implants. Why wouldn't you if those implants give you so many benifits? Hell, it's unlikely you were ever asked in the first place, why the fuck WOULDN'T you implant a newborn with this shit if you could? It's highly questionable if people will even be able to go off the grid at all with all the shit stuffed in their bodies.

all of that doesnt even remotely imply that stories cannot be written about people living off the grid. whats more, it opens up some opportunities for them to explore the grid, or explain exactly how they manage to survive without the grid

As long as you are fine playing literal retards in a world of monstrously superior beings. Because the humans will be stronger, faster, significantly smarter, better connected, with better reflexes, the wealth of human knowledge at their fingertips with better search and learning routines and quite possible with backup bodies at their disposal.
The off-gridders would be gibbons rebelling against their zookeeper. Obnoxious but ultimately completely harmless.

Why is it relevant that we're going faster than causality?

How are those off grid people going to live off the grid when all the available oxygen is owned by someone who has more military strength than all of modern day Earth combined?

So, the typical mythological stuff of mortals vs the will of the gods and fate.

Mini fusion reactors to make oxygen from stray hydrogen, duh.

Look, they already released the plans open source, just use your 5th generation jailbroken 3D printer to make it.