It can still be utopian and aspirational without every character being those things. The same way you could have a show where you explore the concept of Justice by having a profoundly unjust main character. Or a show about Sin with a righteous main character. Sometimes you explore a theme by demonstration, sometimes by contrast.
Ohhhh, ok, we are talking about entirely different episodes. I thought you were misquoting "Erase that entire personal log" from In The Pale Moonlight. Yeah, the one where he gasses a planet is not the best.
I mean, like what you like. I think you can still have utopian fiction that explores when characters fall short of their utopian ideals, or the boundaries of a utopia, or the shortcomings of a particular form of utopianism. It helps us understand that it's not magic, it doesn't just happen, it's what could be, if real people all worked very hard against the systems and people preventing it.
And I'm not a space lawyer but I think technically Sisko doesn't do any war crimes in that episode, he's just accessory to 2 normie murders.
Hm. Well, don't feel obliged to hew to existing genre definitions.
Also, I'd still urge you to sit down and make a list of design goals, eg what you like about the experience of playing war games or ttrpgs, and then make rules to match, rather than starting with making the rules or choosing which ones to duplicate from existing games.
I think it's a false dichotomy. You want to decide what your design goals are, the kind of vibe you're trying to generate, and then create systems that support that vibe.
I think as a teenager I played a lot of Bards because being likeable and everyone doing what you say is kind of nice when you're an awkward disempowered kid, but nowadays I mix it up. Mostly just because playing the same character repeatedly would get kind of boring for me, and I want to explore different territory, even if it's on the level of "original the hedgehog donut steal"
21 people sharing 2 toilets?