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:
Tales of the Rambling Bumblers 