In keeping with this sub-fora, I'll focus on the specific details of the media. In keeping with the nature of the forum as a whole, I'll discuss the gaming aspect.  This is a compare and contrast, and rather than essay up this bitch, I'm going to try and systematically break this down, starting with the big picture elements.

Overview:

Dark Matter:  In general has very good continuity from episode to episode, though elements of backtelling seep through the writing as the show progresses.  It is tediously predictable at times, and tends to suffer from 'tech at the speed of plot'. How fast is FTL? Fast enough to get you to the plot, even though when the plot is confined to the ship apparently it takes days. How powerful is Bubba? Strong enough to take out tall buildings with a single shot, not powerful enough to kill anyone we care about.   One searing problem in this head-to-head is that in only 37 episodes (to date), Dark Matter, despite having a coherent plot arc for its seasons and the show as a whole, still manages to cram in just about every 'cool idea' Science Fiction Show episode idea. They've got Groundhog Day Episode, they've just released a 'sci-fi characters in Modern Day' episode, they've got a 'mind game interrogation' episode, they've even got a 'alternate universe evil selves' episode!   That said, its ridiculously Gameable.  Disregarding slightly different assumptions about technology, its practically a Traveller game crossed with Shadowrun.  You've got Space Ninja-Samurai, nanite powered everything and corporate double dealings.

Killjoys:  It shocks me to say this, but in some ways Killjoys is much better written, or at least is much more creatively written.  I mean: the main character was/is ruthlessly Mary Sue, but starting near the end of the first season and carrying very well into the second season the other two 'main characters' became much more fleshed out, with their own plots and drama and... ah... Player-Character Special Auras.   In terms of science fiction and world building... much less consistency/coherency of the overarching plot? Not so much. The geo-politics are wonky as hell (which was backwritten at the end of Season 2 to lamp shade it, I guess...), everything resolves around a tiny handful of super-special people, more so than simply TV casting limitations imply, and so forth.  Unlike DM it is confined highly to a single star system with a limited number of worlds, but apparently an infinitely expandable number of macguffin locations.  It also offers a much cleaner gaming senario... the Killjoy/bounty-hunter set up, as presented in the show, is tailor made for gaming groups.


Plot:

Depending on your demands of fidelity to pre-written characters and episodes, this may have little influence on your gaming, but is necessary to understand the shows.

Dark Matter:  Space Mercs (with amnesia) get caught up trying to stop a highly destructive corporate war (and fail) while dealing with their complicated pasts, and doing corporate merc work and other shennanigans, from aboard their apparently run of the mill starship.   Also: Aliens from another dimension and the ethics of technology.  Dark Matter spends a lot of time revealing lost memories of the main crew, often triggering new plot twists.

Killjoys: Space Bounty Hunters led by a hot-chick/super-assassin on the run from her former master get caught up in a plot to enslave poor people by the absurdly rich... possibly in service to immortal alien parasite slime people. Its Complicated.  Killjoys spends a lot of time investigating various mysteries of the setting, amidst personal drama.


Analysis:  Dark Matter deals with the big picture stuff better, Killjoys handles the details of its 'big picture' more deftly, by far.  Killjoys is far more focused. From a gaming aspect, Killjoys represents a GM with a plan and players who buy into that plan, while Dark Matter is the GM playing in a metaplot setting, but without much buy-in from the group... they're just doing their thing while the metaplot unfolds around them.



Technology and Culture or Setting:

Dark Matter:  Dark Matter plays around in a couple hundred light years of human colonies, with only one alien race (extra-dimensional at that) set up as a big bad.  Big mega-corporations, lots of stuff 'in space' and aboard ship and a fairly good, if simplistic, grasp of its technology.  The implications of most technology aren't heavily studied, leaving only a few big ticket items to hang the traditional Sci-Fi exploration of humanity via toys hook on.  No locations or sense of geography really stick out, most places are 'episode of the week sparcely populated world or space station', you don't invest in and move on, so the ship itself becomes the primary focus of the show's 'landscape'  The setting itself feels very open, almost anarchistically lawless, with a Might Makes Right ethos, exemplified by the Mega-Corporations attitudes towards the people of the setting.  In some ways this is a sort of classic D&D frontier, only in space, where the ability to evade someone gives you the right to take their stuff and keep it.  

Killjoys: A highly developed but tightly constrained setting, with key NPCs and locations appearing constantly. I could talk at length about the failures of world building-writing relationships here, but that's delving a little too deep and off topic.  The point is that unlike DM, in Killjoys the players know where they are and who they should talk to within a few sessions. There are also laws and formal rules that must be obliged, social status is important (unlike in DM) and specific ideas (migrant agricultural workers, specific illegal pharmacueticals, major plots by the powers that be) become the backdrop, and a comfortingly familiar one over time.  Specific slang becomes part of the culture of the game.  On the other hand, the technology is all over the map, and has almost no relationship to the human condition, or much to do with science. High-Tech can be synonimous with Magic at times... something magnified in Season Two, when a former macguffin Quantum Computer suddenly became a sentient hive-mind parasite ur-macguffin related to everything else.    Still, Killjoys does offer more high-tech toys than the shockingly pedestrian Dark Matter, such as guns that can double as rivet-guns and so forth.  

Analysis: Dark Matter at least attempts to hit the Sci-Fi classic by relating its tech to the human condition, while Killjoys keeps its sci-fi purely set dressing... its more tech fantasy. Beyond that you have a classic open sandbox setting vs a... I was going to say Frieburg City box set, but maybe Chicago By Night would be more well known.  Its a matter of taste, I suppose, though I personally like the Traveller Third Imperium here... big enough to be a pure Sandbox, but with enough development of the hex-map that you could seriously dial it into a more developed location specific if you wanted to?  Eh, that part sucked, but I meant it, so it stays.


Ethics, Morality and the Human Condition:

Dark Matter: In Dark Matter the single most dangerous technology is... a mode of transportation? Look, the writers are trying, but frankly I wonder if they are very smart, so lets leave the idiot-ball handling of the Blink Drive out of the equation, since mostly its pure Macguffin for dumb episodes done better by the original shows being ripped off (ok, so Farscape did the sci-fi characters in modern world better than the original Star Trek, so maybe not every original show...).  Lets talk about the Androids, which have consumed roughly 10% of the episodes to date. Now: We don't really see many androids in the setting (aside from The Android on the ship), but we do see how they are being used for a discussion (ok, so a Monologue) about Free Will and the nature of life.  Are Androids People? The show tells us that yes they are, but it is, in fact, addressing the issue. The fact that two of our characters are non-persons by the laws of the setting is highly relevant to the show.  Meanwhile we've got the whole Zairon plot on the side as well, discussing the duties of rulership, patriotism and so forth.  Its often handled sloppily and with some questionable moralizing, but it is a feature.  

Killjoys: Oddly, despite the much more detailed world building, Killjoys falls down here. The primary ethical question comes down to traditional class warfare and politics... despite the main character being (mary-sue) very much of the ruling class (but, you know, too cool to actually be snobby about it by playing the rich bitch...), but it falls down flat because the writers either can't grasp, or more likely, simply don't care that their economic and political setups are utterly non-sensical, to the point of being utterly goofy... which eventually had to be lampshaded by the upper classes having cut a deal with immortal sort-of-alien humans to prepare their star system for some sort of Harvest (for what reason? Because Evil!!!!) over the last several hundred years, so no. Nothing they did in the show had to make sense because it was all part of an evil immortal plan, a devil's bargin of stupid.  Regarding Starships: Killjoys doesn't really use its starship much as setting, mostly its a means for the characters to bounce from planet to planet (a trip of hours, or one screen-wipe), rather like D&D horses....

Analysis: Dark Matter is clearly the better Sci-Fi, simply because in a real sense Killjoys isn't sci-fi at all, twice over. Low Bar and all that.  From a gaming standpoint, however...   I would say that DM offers more choices in game play, as it does have politics, ethics, and androids, where Killjoys offers just politics and Space Magic-Tech, but Space Magic-Tech can be fun.



Characters:

Dark Matter: We have as an example, seen a Space Ninja turned Emperor, a Transhuman, an intuitive psychic warrior woman, a former monk bodyguard, a random street kid, an Android, a thug merc, an undercover cop, an undercover corporate weenie, a digital dead girl, and a junkie-doctor in our primary cast of characters.  As a general rule the characters appear to be remarkably competent, with no real explanation for why. Our Space Ninja is the BEST space ninja to ever Ninja, our thug merc is quietly competent... more competent in fact than most/all of his former compatriots, the kid is a technical genius for... reasons?  and of course, our transhuman is the only (er... caveat, but yeah) transhuman in the setting, so superhuman.   Its fairly safe to say that DM, as a game, would be pretty wide open for player characters, and nothing wrong with some PC-glow on them either.  

Killjoys: We have Space Bounty Hunters. One of whom is a former courtesan-assassin trained by a semi-alien immortal because she happens to be a dead ringer for his turned crazy-evil immortal semi-alien daughter, a former soldier/human guinea pig, and some random dude who is just really good with technology.  They appear to be hypercompetent, but contrasting DM, all their opponents appear to be just as hypercompetent, making them weirdly sort of average.  Its like Feng Shui, in that you've got mooks, then you've got PCs and NPC-threats who are pretty much on par and cinematically badass.  You also have much less room for wonky character ideas, but not much... and if you bring in the supporting cast you've got the fallen rich-girl doctor/junkie or the fabulous bartender with a secret past as a warlord... and the masochist priest rebel leader.

Analysis: Again, a lot of this comes down to playstyle and taste.  A detailed setting like Killjoys may have more constraints on character design, but offers richer choices within those constraints, while Dark Matter seems to go for the goulash style of 'toss it in the pot and lets see how it tastes'.  You might get a tasty character, but it won't be a five star gourmet product...

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Gameability:

Dark Matter:  An oft overlooked rule of writing is that constraints tend to produce better writing. Dark Matter, like so much TV, seems to lack the concept of constraints, be they technological or geographical (for an example of the opposite, see the very well designed setting of Game of Thrones, where Danyreas can't just show up one week at the wall to flirt/fight with Jon Snow (they are doing that, right? I'm not watching, I know, I know!!!) one week, then be back in former slave-town to deal with local politics the next.  No one is claiming GoT is badly written.  This is a great weakness of the show from a gameablity standpoint, though in hands like mine (seat of the pants GMing) it can work.  Most of the setting is broad-brush, and requires regular exposition dumps to set up the tension of the episode/adventure, which can lead to a lack of tension as it may feel as if player actions don't meaningfully affect the setting. Its all very loosey-goosey.

Killjoys: Despite being tonally opposite in world building, Killjoys suffers the same problem from a different angle. While giving a fairly fixed setting, the constant ass-pull writing, ret-conning and general sudden changes to the setting for the purposes of 'reveals' actually shows how shallow the writing is, and how little the writers feel constrained by what they've previously written.  On the other hand, from a game standpoint, this matters much less as the GM can restrict himself to what is known about the setting and can avoid making adventures that are asspull retcons for his own game.    We KNOW it takes many hours of travel to get from world to world (twelve+ if I recall, up to a few days), and months/years to travel between star systems, we KNOW the major locations and enough of the unknown locations to fake them reasonably well. One planet is rich and refined, with lots and lots of water, one planet is primarily agrarian and middle class, one planet is a blasted unhealthy wasteland, dotted with cramped savage poor people cities, and one planet is 'evil central', a supposedly blighted toxic barren wasteland where all the evil plots occur in secret.

Analysis: Killjoys is simply better here, as DM actually requires some revamping/ignoring the show in order to be a playable setting.  Not much, mind you, but...


Final Take:

I got next to nothin' but here is what I got...

While I think a lot of it comes down to playstyle and taste, I think DM is better from a gaming standpoint, though it might be faster to jump into a Killjoys based game.  DM can be tightened up, and has fairly great consistency within its very vague galaxy. You can stack a corner of Dark Matter with the Killjoys setting with only minor tweaking, but it would be much harder to expand Killjoys into Dark Matter.  That, and I think its easier to find players who won't care about your space geography than it is to find players who want to get stuck in on a detailed setting with important NPCs doing Important Things.   DM doesn't require uncovering secrets, though that was/is a feature of the show, while Killjoys is constantly focused on its asspull version of plans-within-plans-wheels-within-wheels plotting.

Are these both TV shows?

No, I was comparing a comic book with an LSD vision in my own head.






Yes.

Quote from: Spike;985053No, I was comparing a comic book with an LSD vision in my own head.






Yes.

I've seen your posts about Dune so it could have gone either way.

Well, I do occasionally question my own existance... I mean, Descartes was a drunk... so its possible that neither of these shows objectively exists and you are just talking to yourself right now.

I couldn't make it past the first season of Dark Matter. I don't know if things changed much later on, but that show was definitely not for me.

Killjoys is fun. I wish there was more information on the setting, but the basic premise works just fine for a game and there's plenty of room for a good GM to expand and make that universe his own. I'd probably ignore how things have developed and run a game set in a different RAC entirely with my own worlds. This season has been interesting but it's not the direction I'd take a campaign. It has brought in more info on toys like the body modifications, though, so that's a plus.