There's not a lot of 2011 left and I wanted to get an operating scifi game done this year, so I'd better get cracking … but I've been doing a lot of cogitation and mockupization while running silent, and I'm almost sure I'm onto something good.
To recap:
The goal is to make a scifi rpg that makes IO happy. None of the existing ones do. IO will only be happy if he has other people to play with, so it has to make some of them happy too. IO wants it to be a big mess that can handle many, but by no means all, kindsa scifi adventure. It is absolutely crucial that the weird, the eye-popping, the scifiness not be lost in a reasonable, well-structured game that's about flying around and shooting people. It needs to be able to really respond to influences like:
Star Trek, Star Wars, Ringworld, The Tar-Aiym Krang, Firefly, Deathworld, Space Viking, Witchworld, The Pern Series, Space Cadet, Between Planets, Starship Troopers, Citizen of the Galaxy, Anathem, Dune, Nova, Babel 17, Neverness, Red Mars, Hyperion, at the Mountains of Madness, Alien, etc. etc.
In the previous thread on A Copper Sea, I tried to make D&D stretch to accommodate this. I tried it out and found … less impediments than a lack of structure to hang things on. Steeling myself against my fear of skill games, I tried working with the RuneQuest / Call of Cthulhu / ElfQuest / Pendragon / (shudder) BRP skeleton and had more success. I came up with a slightly frightening but subtly useful skill scale and found it flexible and intuitive in play. To honor the source, I've changed the project's name to StarQuest.
The really onerous task I've been putting off is coming up with a default setting. This is much more important for a scifi game. Every one gets MAC (mediaeval armed combat) but the assumptions in a scifi game need to be explicit. To actually pin down rules for spacin' and fightin' and character creatin', I need to lay down some law. It's not that it seems like unpleasant work, it's just embarassing. Any real gamer geek could probably cough up a setting just as good/adequate/cheesy in a heartbeat, and most of us have. Outrageous violations of science fact and historical verisimilitude are at the core of this, and they are as arbitrary as the steps to a dance called the molerat. But they need to be done. So here's me dancing the molerat, with the sole idea of justifying a kitchen-sink setting that lends itself to gameable adventure: StarQuest Setting.
And here's a sketch of the RQ based rules, including skills: StarQuest Rules