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I'm kinda reminded of the Dropbox comment. While I essentially agree, I don't think those conversions are trivial for anyone except an experienced GM, with an experienced group, who all consume the same sort of sci-fi media. "Extremely good computers", in isolation, isn't enough information to extrapolate a coherent setting. They're extremely good, fine, but are they, say, all airgapped from one another like in early Shadowrun? The consequences of this small decision affect everything from the players designing their hacker characters to the GM designing the layout of the corp they'll be hacking. Can you run a game without considering this at all? Probably -- just don't play hackers!! But the GM having the answers to questions like this, or better still, the players reading about what computers are like in a corebook before the first session of play, is ultimately easier for everyone and more immersive. Further, a system used to play a game strongly affects the game's feel. Take the Star Trek license, there's been plenty of attempts[0]: FASA, LUG, even GURPS and d20 modern supplements. None really make for a playable game, because they're mere reskins of games fundamentally designed to tell different stories than those one usually thinks of when one hears "Star Trek" [1]. Those systems are more simulationist and gameist, particularly GURPS and d20, and express more DNA from RPGing's Great Ancestor of tactical wargaming than is appropriate for Star Trek. Star Trek needs a narrativist system. The most recent attempt, Star Trek Adventures, has a ruleset that's a mere armature upon which narrative beats are hung. But what rules exist power a sort of bennie-economy [2] that allows the GM to menace the players with the mechanical equivalent of threatening musical stings, and allows the players to pull technobabble/white-knuckle-skill solutions from nowhere to defeat those otherwise-insurmountable GM-imposed obstacles. It just feels more like Star Trek in ways that have nothing to do with the GM or the players individually. I'm not suggesting that this, uh, fairly aspirational [3] project is necessarily going to have that desirable trait, but rolling one's own system means there's at least a chance. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Trek_games#Role-p... [1] Fine, "90s Star Trek" [2] https://savageeberrontales.com/savage-worlds-and-bennies/ [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30956393 |