Sci-Fi: I'd love to run some exploratory sci-fi, but I simply haven't the brains or the education to run "hard" sci-fi, whether for home games (too many engineers and high school teachers!) or online (too many engineers!).
Nor could I manage a Star Trek game, because it could too readily devolve into a contest of technobabble, or the perfectly reasonable abuse of precedent. (All sorts of shenanigans are possible in a universe riven by temporal anomalies, casual time travel, god-like and capricious entities, matter replicators, transporters, etc., to the point where all too many "problems" are only as a result of a failure of imagination.) Oh, I could throw out IDEAS for scenarios, ad nauseum, but I haven't the confidence in any particular discipline to be a hard-nosed GM who can definitively say, "No, sorry, that's NOT how it works."
(And, IMHO, if you're going to run serious hard sci-fi, rather than heroic pulp, you need a GM who can confidently say "no," because true challenges should withstand a simple barrage of technobabble and sloppy pop science, whereas in pulp sci-fi there's more of an expectation of the "rule of cool.")
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Nor could I manage a Star Trek game, because it could too readily devolve into a contest of technobabble, or the perfectly reasonable abuse of precedent. (All sorts of shenanigans are possible in a universe riven by temporal anomalies, casual time travel, god-like and capricious entities, matter replicators, transporters, etc., to the point where all too many "problems" are only as a result of a failure of imagination.) Oh, I could throw out IDEAS for scenarios, ad nauseum, but I haven't the confidence in any particular discipline to be a hard-nosed GM who can definitively say, "No, sorry, that's NOT how it works."
(And, IMHO, if you're going to run serious hard sci-fi, rather than heroic pulp, you need a GM who can confidently say "no," because true challenges should withstand a simple barrage of technobabble and sloppy pop science, whereas in pulp sci-fi there's more of an expectation of the "rule of cool.")
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