Roleplaying Sci-fi

[Captain Hornblower]

Thought I’d jump in here since I’ve been playing role-playing games for over 20 years now.

Started with the OLD D&D, yes the original 5”x8” booklets (still have some of those, most sold on ebay though). Converted over to AD&D and had a blast. Then the first Arduin (vol 1) Book came out and we (my high school buddies and I) were immediate converts. Sometime after that, I created my first fantasy world and let my friends have fun, and they did. Well eventually high school ended and we went our separate ways. Some I still have stayed in contact with and we still fondly remember the “good ole times” of tying a rope around the magic user and making him walk ahead of us as a sort of sentient trap detector.

Sometime after this I became a RPG collector and bought just about every single friggin game made. I absolutely disliked the wide variety of different game systems, longing for the day when the industry would finally come to their senses and standardize everything (Thank the gods for D20!). While I am not particularly a fan of D20 (I prefer D100) at least its an industry standard and it allows those in the industry to focus on quality and not creating and play-testing a new friggin system every 6 months.

I was in college in the late eighties when I started running a Star Trek RPG (TOS). This was for a group of fellow physics and astronomy majors in the same department. We had a good time on friday nights when we had the whole thermodynamics lab to ourselves. Things were going good when I decided to do a Star Trek/Star Wars crossover. I started by buying the WEG books, all of them, and researching the possibilities of a crossover. Unfortunately WEG had an absolutely horrid game system (I HATE d6 systems). The Star Trek system was based purely on percentile (D100) and was skill based not class based. After review of the WEG books and deciding they were of no real use to me, I got the movies and books and started to visually research the capabilities of the Star Wars tech verses Star Trek tech and after a few calcs was quickly able to determine the vastly superior technology of Star Wars over Star Trek and felt that a crossover was not such a good idea after all. It was at this point that I became fascinated with the overall technological capabilities of the Star Wars galaxy. Though I still remained a fan of Star Trek.

Today, 10+ years out of college, I still play, though family responsibilities have decreased the amount of time I spend at it. I have a new group of friends who get to enjoy the same fantasy world I created more than 15 years. While not pure 3rd edition (I have kept what I like and thrown out what I don’t like from 3 different game systems) the goal is to see that people have fun when they come over to your house few hours. I haven’t failed to please yet; at least I don’t THINK I have.

Finally, I am not so much the fan of Star Trek anymore because of the idiocies of B&B, no pun intended. Just wanted to set the record straight.

[Akm72]

You're entitled to your opinion of course, but I find it incredible that anyone could prefer the old Star Trek RPG to the WEG Star Wars system. The WEG system is a superb system, that gives the games master a great deal of flexibility in game playing styles. Like you, I once looked at doing a cross-over, though in my case I was looking at running a Star Trek game using the WEG system, and realised how incompatable the two systems are. It's a long time since I've looked at it, but from memory the Trek RPG went into far too much detail, slowing down character creation and making for a rather dry role-playing experience. Though I admit I probably didn't play it as extensivly as you.
That said I spent a couple of years playing the Aliens RPG using the Phoenix Command combat system, and you don't get any more detailed and dry than that

[Captain Hornblower]

You are right, I am entitled to my opinion and the Star Wars game was a very popular game in the RPG market. I just happened to hate D6 systems, not just WEG D6 system, but also everyone’s, (lousy probability curves). Also, when Star Wars had first hit the market I had played a lot of games with very simplistic systems. In fact, my core gaming group, some 10 individuals didn’t care for the WEG system. They all liked Star Wars, just hated WEG version of it. As to Star Trek, it was tedious creating a character; I’ll be the first to admit that. However, after character creation was finished, it was no harder to run than most other RPGs. It has also been a long time since I looked at the WEG Star Wars game (they sit boxed up somewhere nearly as new as the day I bought them) but in the first edition rules it was possible to get your defense up so high at character creation that you couldn’t be hit by a blaster when one stormtrooper or 10,000 stormtropers were shooting at you. I believe they eventually changed that rule by letting the GM add 1d6 to the stormtroopers role for every additional stormtrooper past the first. Though it’s been awhile since I read that. My point is, by the time Star Wars hit the market, my friends and I had become more sophisticated as gamers and wanted to add the extra level of realism and detail to our sessions. And as far as the Phoenix Command (PC) system goes, there’s such a thing as TOO much realism. We tried the PC system out one Saturday. We each rolled a character, outfitted him/her then tried to kill one another. Five minutes of game time combat (using modern day firearms) took us over 2 hours, real time to finish. I hear that they simplified it greatly. However, we were not interested in giving PC another try after that exercise in bookkeeping.

[Akm72]

I don't recall ever having any problems with Stormtroopers when playing SW-PRG, though it's a while since I played it, and I never felt obliged to use the standard stats given by WEG for anything.

As to Phoenix Command, I never found that any individual combat lasted as long as five minutes, more than 4-10 seconds would've been quite unusual Though I never bothered using the turn based system for precise tactical movement, but only to resolve a few seconds of actual shooting. We found it worked really well, except when using Shotguns, Miniguns and Frag Grenades at close range when, if you followed the rules precisely, you could find yourself having to calculate dozens (or even hundreds) of hits in a single 2-second phase. I tended to cheat in those circumstances, as after a certain point the number of damage points became rather academic anyway! Though my players did like know precisely which bit of their characters had been burnt/blown-up or torn-off for some reason.