Last week I asked the question about how other people ran their sci-fi games and I got a great response from the community. I have had a good think about a lot of things in my game and I came up with a few different ways that I will be running my games in the future. I am not going to go into any detail about that being that my players read this blog so I will leave it as a surprise for them.
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One thing that came out of this conversation though was the attitude of flying fighter ships. Many people are of the attitude that this is a very deadly thing to do with a ship normally taken down in one hit and thus it is difficult to do in an RPG setting. I was having this discussion with one of my old Traveller players and I mentioned that perhaps I should make a game that has the players role-playing many characters to start with and hone in on the ones that survive.
Well then my friend said “Hey, make them clones like in Paranoia!” and made a Paranoia based joke. But that stirred something in me. Take away the humor, what if it were clones? I can totally see this occurring in a dystopian future. Wars are fought with machines and clones. A bunch of the best fighter pilots were cloned and they have their personalities and skills embedded in a clone body. As long as the deaths are not too frequent the bodies can be replaced and the new consciousness updated after each battle enabling the clones to have up to date and relevant information to rejoin the game.
This is kind of the opposite of what I was talking a couple of months ago about mortality in games and making death matter but I am excited about the idea. What do you all think of a campaign that ran along these lines? Let me know in the comments and keep rolling!