>>44597370

I tell my players that they'll play what I want to run, and they can run a game themselves if they don't like it.

Now grab your blasters and magic wands.

>>44597389
You're a cunt of a person

>>44597389
Fucking THIS
If I'm gonna be foreverGM, I'm running the game my way. When you want to see your fantasy realm, you can GM.

>>44597370
Jousting/cavalric charges. I will just take them through combat as the lost Fleet series did it.

>>44597370
>very posthuman all around the players
>players are still human in this world of cosmic forces
>ai dragons in the electromagnetic waves
>ftl travel is still at the speed of light, functions by making a copy of the being, doesn't delete the original
>100% of the game takes place within one solar system which you map in detail
>have travel from one end to the other take a few months

Find the weird and make it weirder, then steal a plot line from a real opera

>>44597546
>>ftl travel is still at the speed of light
I'm drunk. This should say "interstellar travel"

>>44597389
This fuckin' guy has the right idea. DMing well is hard work with a lot of time sunk into prep. If I'm gonna do it at all I'm gonna do it well, but I'm damn well gonna do what I want.

If someone wants to play that shit they can toss together a system and run it themselves.

>ITT: A bunch of whiny fuccboi DMs don't know how to have fun -with- their players, rather than at their player's expenses

>>44597370
>hard sci fi
>but also a space opera
Tell them to make up their fucking minds

>>44597975
Are you saying Forever War wasn't a Space Opera? you can have both anon.

>>44598006
Sounds like we need to get into an argument about the definitions of 'hard sci-fi' and 'space opera'.

I'll start: your definitions are wrong.

>>44598006

Shit only barely qualifies as a space opera in that there are spaceships and a relationship, there aren't very many melodramatic circumstances, the characters are a smaller part of larger things and their individual actions have minimal ramifications. I'd be interested in how someone would group The Forever War in with space opera. Its usually military scifi. Antiwar military scifi at that.

>>44597974

>implying GMs have to collaborate with their players in telling good stories and making the game enjoyable for everyone

Do you have brain damage? That's not how GM'ing works. You play it my way, or you get the fuck out.

>>44597370
>Hard scifi
>handwaved shit
>FTL travel

uh
are you sure they know what hard scifi is?

>>44598535
science enthusiasts categorically reject limits that they have not been specifically told exist or are deeper than surface level understanding of the relevant fields.

Children always ask more questions than adults.

>>44598508
>being mean to your friends because you're oh a power trip
Nice

>>44598942
You act like we're not going to find more potent power sources

>>44597389
>I tell my players that they'll play what I want to run, and they can run a game themselves if they don't like it.

I agree with your sentiment.

On the other hand, I've wanted to run something transhumanist for a while. I'd probably be able to find a setting that fits their restrictions. Or at least one that they think meets their restrictions.

>>44597974
>>44599073
It's not as simple as "play it my way, or you get the fuck out", and I do expect GMs to work with players to pick a system and setting that they all agree upon.

However there are some games I will never run because I don't enjoy running them. Maybe I can't stand the setting/mechanics. Maybe it requires too much prep work for my liking.

If my players want me to play a system I don't want to run, then they will have to find another GM.

>>44597370
>Your players ask for a hard sci-fi space opera
sure could be fun
>They will allow hand waved energy sources to fuel the future of technology
thats best
>FTL can occur, but only through worm holes, which are obviously strategically defensible
oh plenty of big important fights awesome
>This is so that ship to ship combat will be able to take relativity into account
nope im not a bad enough dude.

>>44598535
your allowed to have a few things and still call it hard anon.
ftl and power are pretty standard in all but the hardest of sci fi.

>>44597370
First of all, I would cut out the FTL and the hand-waved energy sources. We don't need none of that shit.

Setting follows.

A war of ideologies is brewing up between the Jovian Satellite Systems and the Mars/Terra alliance. While mars and earth have higher populations and much more industries going for it, the JSS has the best fuel source- the hilariously plentiful hydrogen because it's orbiting a fucking gas planet. Saturn is a thing too, and is the Alliance's main hydrogen source, but you can never have enough hydrogen- so the JSS are sending scoopships there, too.

The primary reason for this war is actually from the first set of external intelligent life they've found- a species of serpentine silicate creatures, who were exiled from their homeland millions of years ago due to population pressure. They were then sent out to any possible garden worlds they could locate- one being earth.

However, the Alliance did not want a bunch of alien refugees on their own homeworld, in the end. Thus they sent a bunch of shitty drones to piece together shitty habitats for them to stay.

Only problem is that the aliens actually need electricity to survive- they naturally generate static charge in the right atmospheres, hence why they were looking for a garden ward, but can be fed electricity- and the habitats don't have enough power. They also don't have the right technology to farm gas giants for hydrogen. So they turn to piracy. Since their habitats are orbiting jupiter, they're mostly messing with the JSS, stealing their gas and solar panels.

The Jovians didn't like this, and blame the Alliance for it. The Alliance told the jovians to suck it up. The aliens eventually learned english and said that they wouldn't be forced to do this if they had other actual options, like a single Scoop Ship or something. The JSS and Alliance told them to shut up they're TALKING HERE.

This is where the players come in.

>>44600060
The players are a group of Ghosts (AKA, transhuman brains in jars who do nothing useful with their time except browse the internet) who decide to fix things... somehow. So they nab a bunch of asteroids with their drones, and get to work.

It would be point-buy. Design your body. How many points go here? How many points go there? If you spend two points, you get more bulk- which means more space, and thus higher maximum stats- but of course, more bulk means you're easier to hit, can't fit in smaller spaces, and you'll need to buy more armor if you want to be a combat beast.

Skills use a completely different set of points, for your intelligence and actual skills, rather than stats.

They have a single ship, a generic installation meant for ghosts exclusively- useful for nothing but a very advanced tightbeam system, basic maneuvering systems, and absolutely no weapons. One useful thing they do have is a multitude of repair/construction drones, meaning they can break things down and put together new parts, bodies, even ships if they have the time and raw resources.

Time is their main enemy- while they can set themselves on a course for Jovian Orbit, it'll take months for them to get there- and if they're spending all this time doing things that take high amounts of power, they're out of hydrogen, their life support systems shut down, and they DIE.

So, like the 'Skinks', they're on a tight leash to electricity. The rest of the installation Ghosts up and bailed when their sugardaddy corp just went under. Thus, no more fuel, no more supplies, no more resources, except for what the ghosts can scrounge up themselves. The players, for whatever reason, had nowhere else to go. So they're out for adventure. Or to save the system. Or to construct their own, better installation. Or they're going to make skink sexdoll bodies and go have interspecies relations. It'd be up to them. I'm just the GM.

>>44599901
>This is so that ship to ship combat will be able to take relativity into account
>nope im not a bad enough dude

Oh, but you are if you consider the limitations of hard sci-fi. Sure, they have energy sources that can accelerate until they run out of reaction mass. But they are rather limited in how fast they can accelerate by the limits of what the crew can endure. They aren't going to be going above 1g except for short periods.

At 1g getting up to the speeds where relativity matters will take too long for it to be viable. The distance required to build that much speed means that the only relativistic objects will have to have started accelerating in the next system over.

Plus hard sci-fi combat will be boring. There is no stealth. Combat will take place at ranges where randomly firing thrusters will make each ship impossible to hit with lasers. So that leaves guided missiles as the only offensive weapon worth using.

If those missiles hit, you're screwed. Dodging them isn't an option because they don't have a crew, so they can survive more acceleration than your crew can. Leaving only two options: Fucking with their guidance or shooting them down. Both systems would be computer controlled.

So expect long battles (hours between firing missiles and them hitting) where the crew doesn't have much to do. Their options are:
- Who to fire missiles at and when.
- Turn on/off defences against enemy missiles.
- Turn on/off random thrusting.
- Find something to do while waiting for the battle to end.

>>44600313
>At 1g getting up to the speeds where relativity matters will take too long for it to be viable.

Lets do some math:
1g = 9.8 m/s^2
The speed of light = c = 299 792 458 m / s
Most of the time you can ignore relativistic effect when talking about velocities under 10% of c and just use newtonian calculations. So how long would it take a ship accelerating at 1g to reach 0.1c ?
299 792 45.8 / 9.8 = 3059107 seconds.

Or 35 days to reach the point where university papers care about the difference between newtonian and relativistic calculations. Players won't care anywhere near as much.

How long would a ship travel in that time ?
Fuck doing this by hand, I'll just use a calculator I found online: http://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/physics/displacement_v_a_t.php

That gave 45854864623500 m
Which Google calculates as 307 AU.

Wikipedia puts Pluto at 49AU at its furthest point from the sun.

Oh and this is all assuming the ship can maintain constant acceleration for that length of time. The soft sci-fi power supply will probably hold out, but will the ship carry enough reaction mass ?

>>44600676
>The soft sci-fi power supply will probably hold out, but will the ship carry enough reaction mass ?
>Implying it won't just use an EM drive
:^)

>>44600698
Ah, that.

NASA still wants to do more tests before they decide if it is a reactionless drive or not. Mainly because it doesn't produce much thrust, which makes isolating the thrust it produces and measuring it difficult.

If that does prove to be a reactionless drive, that lack of thrust means I doubt anyone will be able to build a spaceship that can do 1g from it and have enough mass to support a crew.

>>44597370

For the setting/space travel/smalls arms, I'd shamelessly rip off the Vorkosigian Saga: wormholes and five-space math! Oh, plus stunners, nerve disruptors, data discs, space armour, suit camera feeds, uterine replicators (fuck having babies with your body), sketchy cryostasis, genetically engineered hermaphrodites* (for people who like variety downstairs), clones, and evil rich people putting their consciousness into said clones.

Oh, and Space Russia having to tone down their militancy and other tics. Glorious 80s Sci-fi that has the 17th or 18th book coming out this year.

* Herms can make babies too, with those uterine replicators.

As to ship-to-ship combat, my serious option would be to crib off the Lost Fleet's combat and then design ships that don't have an obvious top, bottom, front or back. Then get Physic-al and crunch some science-numbers.

IMO, though, too much "realism" or seriousness could kill an endeavour like that, so my unrealistic combat would be a fusion of Honor Harrington (Hornblower in space, complete with old-style naval combat, ships of the wall replacing those of the line) and the High Crusade (English Crusaders get a spaceship and pretend to be a super-advanced race slumming it; launch their dudes over to enemy ships in essentially missiles to engage in glorious melee in vacuum). Oh, and maybe some ramming, because ships are penis extensions.

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On top of what everyone else has said, I'd also recommend pilfering through Orion's Arm, basically a shared worldbuilding project about a hard sci-fi space opera. There's a lot of weird and unique ideas to go through that would be worth it, even if only for their alien designs.

>>44600939
Orion's Arm is a lot less hard sci-fi, and more 'so far in the future that hard looks like soft'.

I mean, just look at the nanotechnology seeds that turn you into a living planetgod. Or quantum locking 'magic wands' that are literally magic.

It's good inspiration, but also terrible.

>>44597975
Bodacious Space Pirates was opera as fuck and quite hard.

>>44601011
If you're looking for a space Opera it's the hardest you can really get.

>>44600060
>>44600230
I would DEFINITELY play this.