The Year Long Mars Mission
In reply to Malakhon (msg # 13):
This is GREAT advice! I wanted to say something similar, but you said it better. So now I don 't have to try. :)
I ran a hard sci-fi game that was an RPG and "RTS" ala starcraft or total annhilation style. Where players would have missions that would be played out like any most TTRPGs, then after each, during "downtime" I'd give "rewards" which were assets and tools, technology, and most imporantly time values. Building their home was important to the players, but they could have had a mars base like the white house, if they wanted, but that would have been it. Instead other things, like weapons, communication, and travel, omg travel was their biggest sink of that downtime. So in that way, the "boring" was instead a separate game "Type" where they'd spend their resources, be it assets, or time, or research to just fill that in more macro. I wouldn't award more XP for them spending it "wisely" but if a player did, and they did, was extra creative on the process, I'd discount that communal project, in time, or what have you, to show it made the game not just better, but much better. Then again, we'd get into another more typical time frame. My players would travel, and that was important because their next investment was their base, so being able to explore was only the big priority, without the idea of "rescue" their base was their "comfort zone" and the better the travel they developed, the farther they could explore and still make it b ack to their base.
John Conway (game of life) had being inspiration for their robots. Which was the "sci-fi" part, where "dumb" machines could make "smart" machines. John Conway, the mathematician whom thought the "Monster" was the most beautiful, "invented" the game of life to show how simple machines are more than capable to make complex machines. This is how it was hard, but still sci-fi. Lasers existed, but not like Star Wars. Joe Rogan makes an excellent point, which is rare, in that you SEE laser beams in Star Wars. You can't even see, less hear bullet with the eye, so this group only built radial lasers, in that they were one or two shots, and then needed to cool down, had an arc of maybe 100 degrees each, but that could fire just barely more accurately through time space than just...unguided light. So they had some time space control like a slow moving terrestrial projectile and the correlis affect, the group; could "aim" by compensating for the light bending by certain bodies. To be fair though, that part was slightly more soft sci-fi as there were aliens near the black hole.