SF Campaign Quiz

I stumbled across this when going through my old emails, and I thought it might interest some of you.  This was a survey I sent out for a group I was going to run a SF campaign for once a month online; they had agreed they wanted to play some kind of SF campaign, but they weren’t sure what.  Usually I’d start with an idea for the kind of campaign I felt like running, but since I was play-testing Zap! at the time, I was open to almost anything they wanted to try.

Tone

How serious do you want the tone of the campaign to be
  • Played for Laughs (Galaxy Quest)
  • Campy but played straight (Flash Gordon)
  • Straight, with leavening of humor (Star Trek Original Series)
  • Straight, with little or no humor (later season DS9)
  • Grim (Battlestar: Galactica remake)
  • Other:

Hardness of SF

How hard do you want the SF to be?
  • Sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic
  • Anything goes as long as you wave your hands sufficiently vigorously and invoke nano, quantum, or tachyons.
  • Stick to standard SF tropes like FTL travel and cloning, please.
  • At least make a stab at plausibility, don’t include anything known to be impossible without flagging it
  • Stick to actual speculative science
  • Everything has to be vetted by Scott (one of our two resident physicists)
  • Other:
Which of the following elements would you like to see? *
if there’s a conflict, these choices will override the previous answer in specific areas
  • Space ships
  • FTL Travel
  • Psionic powers
  • Alien life forms
  • PC alien races
  • Artificial intelligence
  • Teleportation/Matter transmission
  • Near Future
  • Alternate Present
  • Farther future, but Earth still known/relevant (3-400 years)
  • Far future, Earth history known but Earth lost
  • Earth? What’s that?
  • Terra-forming
  • Interstellar civilizations
  • Time travel
  • Extra-dimensional travel
  • Virtual worlds
  • Resurrection/Restore from Backup
  • Increased Longevity
  • Robot PCs
  • Interstellar War
  • “Uplifted” animals
  • Genetically engineered humans
  • Allegory and social commentary
  • Universal translators
  • Matter replicators
  • I’m good with any or none of the above
  • Other:

Campaign Structure

Episodic or Epic
  • Episodic: I want the stories to have discrete beginning, middle and end
  • Seasonal Arcs: I want the individual episodes to eventually add up to a larger arc, but that arc might be only one of several with these characters
  • Epic: I want one overarching story, with the bulk of what happens being driving that story forward
  • Non-dramatic: I want to explore and do stuff, and if I see any dramatic structure happening, I’ll zap it with my blast pistol.
  • Other:

Lethality

Should PCs die?
  • Never.
  • Only by player choice.
  • If they do something everybody agrees is lethally stupid
  • If they do something that the GM thinks is lethally stupid
  • If the dice say so
  • If the dice say so, but with player veto
  • Inevitably
  • Multiple times per session, thank goodness for backups
  • Multiple times per session, thank goodness characters are easy to create
  • Other:

Are the PCs special?

ordinary schmoes or heroes?
  • Some are born great, some achieve greatness, some have greatness thrust upon them. And then there’s the PCs
  • Ordinary folks thrown into extraordinary circumstances, trying to get by
  • Competent professionals, doing their jobs
  • Elite, the special squad within the ranks of the pros
  • We’re the A-Team, we get called in when the elite have failed
  • Legends, the ones that taught the A-Team everything they know
  • Mary Sue Squad
  • Other:

Scope

How far and wide do the PCs roam?
  • Based in a particular city-sized locale
  • Globe trotters
  • Interplanetary is an adventure
  • Interplanetary is a commute, Interstellar is an adventure
  • Interstellar commuters, Intergalactic adventurers
  • Time travelers
  • Dimension hoppers
  • Other: