I've talked a few times on this blog (written? Whatever) about an attempt to build a re-skin of D&D's 5th Edition as a science fiction game, rather than a fantasy one.
As it turns out, the folks at Paizo had a very similar idea about five years ago, creating "Starfinder," a sci-fi re-working of their Pathfinder RPG system. Pathfinder was created as a reaction to D&D's 4th Edition, trying to build something that more closely resembled 3.5 Edition.
Fantasy and Science Fiction are closely intertwined genres. Not only is there a lot of crossover in fandoms between the two, but a lot of great examples of each genre have elements of the other. Star Wars is a fantasy series that takes place within a science fiction setting (and also adds elements of westerns, samurai films, and war films, of course). Many of Sci-Fi's classics, like Dune and Foundation (both of which have screen adaptations coming out) have somewhat fantastical elements. Dune in particular has the interstellar feudalism and also blurs the line between an actual mystical truth and a culture that turns highly advanced science and unusual phenomena into something kind of indistinguishable from magic. (Foundation, admittedly, is much more sober-minded, but then, in what way is Hari Seldon not basically just a future-seeing prophet?)
But, all that being said, when creating a game system for fantasy, there's a huge advantage: fantasy tends to echo iconic elements from one work to another. Elves, dwarves, dragons, and other elements make their way into practically every fantasy work. But when it comes to science fiction, you can't really do that. If I were to make some totally independent sci-fi story and populate it with Vulcans, Klingons, and Borg, I'd be liable to get sued for copyright infringement. You'll basically never see those species outside of Star Trek stories.
Sure, the concept of aliens is by no means specific to any one work, but pretty much each work is expected to come up with its own aliens. (Of course, the funny thing is that Vulcans, Romulans, Klingons, and Borg all have pretty direct analogues in the fantasy genre, with Elves, Dark Elves, Orcs, and the Undead acting as their respective counterparts.)
As such, a game like Starfinder is going to come with its own specificity and baggage. It's impossible to separate the specifics from the game.
Now, of course, D&D has its own specific creatures, like Tieflings, which don't really show up in other fantasy. But with the exception of Tieflings and sort of Dragonborn, you could easily have a fantasy story that involves all the other playable races in the Player's Handbook that no one would even suspect was directly taking from D&D.
I think you could also make the argument that science fiction is a broader genre than fantasy. I'm not sure I'd agree with that argument, but it might be a defensible position. Sci-fi can be anything from super-grounded, realistic stuff like The Martian to where it bleeds into other genres, which might include a lot of cosmic horror or science-fantasy like Star Wars.
Genre-wise, I think the cyberpunk subgenre has a few systems build around it. And Starfinder seems to work in that old-school, John Carter of Mars pulp sci-fi where it's basically just the adventure genre but on different planets instead of other continents.
What I'd love is to find a system that works well for many types of sci-fi. I'll concede that one might need to at least decide between terrestrial or space-based sci-fi, but having a system that could allow for stories that might fit in Star Wars, Star Trek, or Alien would be pretty fantastic.
One of the biggest challenges there, I think, is the treatment of the alien. In the Alien movies, any non-human life is basically a terrifying threat. Meanwhile, Star Trek treats the existence of aliens as mostly just other people, and treats them with a humanist empathy (at its best.)
The natural inclination when adapting something using a similar system to D&D is to go for the latter style. But does that rule out the possibility of the former?
I'm very curious to check out Starfinder, but I also kind of think I need to figure out what sort of stories I'd like to run using it.
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