One of the biggest things I've struggled with as a Starfinder GM is relatability: It's easy to tell your players they've gone into a tavern and have everyone know what you mean. They've all been in buildings before, and can just mentally go "oh that, but made of wood". Much harder to find common experiences they've all had that you can bounce off to really sell the sense of scale in a Dwarven mining colony mounted to the underside of a moon's 2km thick ice crust, where they use 300ft long magically enchanted stone submarines to Subnautica their way to the rare metals at the moon's core.
Oh one other comment: One thing that *does* transfer over really well is modelling large-scale spaceships as if they were villages. If it is size Huge or larger, then it will need an infirmary (i.e. the local temple), an armory (i.e. the local blacksmith), a bridge (the castle), a mess hall (the tavern). Treat the hangar bay as dock, and the cargo bay as a warehousing district, and you're basically running a flying city. On a completely related note, I tend to ignore hit points for ships that are huge and above: If they're cities, then they need to get sieged like cities. No reactor cores going critical here, you're going to need to deal with those 1200 corpses you just created! (Yes, I bump up crew counts too: Multiply the listed crew in the CRB by 3, one full set for each 8 hour shift, and then stipulate that this is just combat-related personnel and add extra for medics/cooks/cleaners/HR/admin/etc).
Very interesting topic! 4:44 I agree, that's really important. One might think that roleplaying and immersing in sci-fi might be easier with the everyday stuff because of our real world modern reality, but in fact sometimes (depending on the flavour) it can be trickier than fantasy, as you alluded to.
A.I. is taking over? Someone call the YangGang! Lol 😂 great video guys. Why are all these systems so serious? What about a Hitchhiker’s Guide campaign? Or maybe Disk World?
No, the opposed tends to be true The consequences of a technology in a sci fi setting should be though threw and usually is. Magic in fantasy settings get a free pass. A sci fi setting needs a lot more internal consistency and you can't do that if you're always pulling stuff out of your butt.
Sci Fi can mean a lot... general fantasy into sci Fi: Starfinder or spelljammer. More specific there is cyberpunk or shadow run. There is also franchise specific with star wars, star trek, fallout... And so on
