Man, I love sci-fi.

Xiru

One thing that always bugged me about my first real main character in Achaea is that I class-hopped like mad because I wanted to try everything out. It didn't really fit the RP as well in that world and while that didn't matter at the gamewide level, it always bugged me personally that I couldn't narrow it down and stick to one thing. (This was before multiclass. Multiclass would have saved me so much money early on...)

Here, I took my nanoseer and made him a scoundrel within a month of multiclass which sucked, but at least class-wise, it makes more sense. For a little bit there I felt like the one thing I wanted to do RP wise was stay the same class, but then I realized people make drastic career changes these days, so how much easier would that be in the far future? 

And then once I actually started playing again and started using the augmentation options to change Xiru's appearance, it really hit how much fun the mechanical advantages are here. It really suits my RP style, which can be quite fickle even as I'm trying to tone it down.

I'm curious as to whether or not anyone else has things they really appreciate about the sci-fi genre that just wouldn't fly or wouldn't fit as well in high-fantasy muds? 

Steve

Generally speaking, I find the sci-fi setting immensely useful for negotiating the strangeness that is having a player play a character through a game. Specifically, and most prominantly, I find the mindsim and the commsphere to be crucial to RP. I tried Achaea after playing Starmourn for a while, and every message that wasn't a mere SAY was jarring -- and, in my experience, nobody even tried to work around it. Perhaps that's an organizational phenomenon. Similarly, mindsim integration level (MIL) is brilliant. Nobody's talking about levels IC, really. Steve gets to talk about whatever his mindsim's got his MIL rated at (and that goes for captaincy and all other manner of things). This also plays out with things like FHELP files; check it out on the mindsim, and voila. No stretch of the imagination there.

Frankly, I just don't see why players enjoy RP in fantasy environments when so many of the game mechanics in a MUD work directly against fantasy world-building. Sure, everybody can have telepathy or something like that, but that's not my cup of tea (and the same goes for most high-fantasy trappings). To give you a sense of how I feel about it, I'm letting that Achaea character time out because the Starmourn setting suits my tastes far, far better. But hey -- that's my opinion, and to be clear, I expect other people don't mind the discrepancy I just pointed out, and certainly manage to have a great time. I also do not mean to be bashing on Achaea. It seems like a solid game, and I enjoyed my time with it, overall.

Related: I'm a big fan of sci-fi things like wetwiring explaining smooth mechanics. I see wetwiring as an example of brilliant lore-meets-game. While I'm comparing SM with Achaea, I'd like to point out how crazy it seems to have somebody sipping fifteen different drinks while using thirty different salves and still finding time to swing a sword.

OK, I'm done. In short: I love the sci-fi setting of Starmourn and think it's perfectly suitable to a roleplaying experience while still being a game.

Ikchor

To be fair, not all fantasy games are created equal. Choices like global player communication are decided beforehand and are probably one of those choices where you're weighing the fantasy theme you wish to go with against accessibility for your players. There's fantasy games out there where you cannot access the ability to tell/globally communicate unless you have access to a mystical item. This item is not handed to you at the start of the game, nor is it even bound to you should you happen to lose it.

That being said, yeah. I agree. There's much about sci-fi that fits the syntax a lot better. I like that I am not scratching my head about how my mindsim communicates with everything, I may not know intimately how it's doing it, but I can at least approximate a few things about it.

Even the fact that I don't need to wonder how I'm lugging around seven hundred corpses after a lengthy bashing session like it's nothing - granted holding all the junk from said bashing session is certainly something - yet I cannot pick up a fully assembled cannon, unless it is in kit form, which weighs exactly the same. Certain bits of "I should be able to do this" get sacrificed for a different kind of logic in fantasy settings in my experience.

For me this means I can lie awake at night wondering other things, like how fast are ships going at 3000su. What's an SU? Standard Unit? Ship Unit? Space Unit?

What are all these measurements, and can I reasonably translate them to something in our science? I would say "our universe" but Starmourn is set in the Milky Way galaxy, just in some undisclosed location away from Sol and several hundred years into our future. I can contemplate this and anything else that I suddenly find intriguing. I'm not looking for a hard science answer, by the way, I fully expect whatever hamfisted process I walk Starmourn's measurements and units through to result in numbers that just are not possible. This is a game, after all.

And yes, I could just handwave everything away with "nanites" but, if you can't tell by now, to me that's not fun.

Albion

SU is a starmourn unit

Xiru

Yeah, I could accept tells in Achaea because if my character could bound across the world or pilgrimage to another devotion user or tune into a grove, I could buy telepathy being available. I honestly had a harder time with being able to meet someone for the first time and know their name. Here, I just assume that unless someone's taken extreme measures to go off-grid (like masks, for example), my mindsim can do some sorta recognition. Boom! Sorted.

Junk is definitely a thing that gets a bit sketchy. I mean, there's shit Xiru wouldn't want to pick up off the ground that he ends up carrying around. I ignore that for the most part cause I like marks. Xiru likes to think at least he's earning an honest living.