If it's not too much trouble, I would like to request suggestions for a sci-fi tabletop for 3-5 players. The game would most likely be run over a Discord voice chat, a fact that I'm sure limits my options. The premise shoots for the kind of apocalyptic-futurism/survival horror seen in Prey (2017); putting the player characters in the role of the maintenance crew of a generation ship, intrigue and horror being major themes.
@internetcoward replied:
The players would have to deal with dwindling supplies in their efforts to keep the ship intact and running amid the various threats present. Ideally, combat would be simple but robust enough to represent many varied circumstances and resource management would be a major factor in gameplay. As for the social side of things, either something with little to no rules or something that gives it the same mechanical weight as combat would be preferable. Thank you for your time!
If you really want to play up the “generation ship” angle -- and if the ship you’re picturing is large enough -- you might give Legacy 2nd Edition a spin.
In a nutshell, it’s a generational game of political intrigue where each player takes on the role of an entire faction -- or Family, in the game’s parlance -- and switches back and forth between high-level political play and zoomed-in crisis play. When the latter arises, each player stats up a member of their Family to be their player character for that generation; when the crisis has passed, the game zooms back out and the timeline advances to the next generation.
Out of the box it’s more about post-apocalyptic settings, but the publisher released a supplement a couple of years back focused specifically on generation ship settings; it can be had either standalone, or as part of a bundle that also includes setting hacks for running Legacy as a bio-punk god game and Castlevania style dungeon crawler, if either of those grab you.
