This difference ultimately led to the schism, because neither side could really understand or appreciate the other's goals. Marvin doesn't really care about the fiction, back-story, or personality, he wants a balanced game where the rules preclude any loop-holes that allow a player to win by "Gaming the system". He, and his supporters, don't care if the result is flavorless because the competition is what they are after. The 3rd Ed role-players don't care about loop-holes for the most part because they won't use them unless it fits the personality of their race, and then its all good. For the role-players the flavorless, bland system of 4th was repellent.
I guess what gets me is that a business owner/game producer should be smart enough to understand these divisions and be trying to find the best way to fill the gap between the two groups of players. After all, if he's in it to make money, he should be wanting to have the largest number of customers possible, not simply creating the his personal House rules and slapping the Starfire label on it.
Well, I think that Marvin did not fully appreciate the difference in views until after 4th came out. Marvin had gotten quite a few complaints from people about strategic starfire concerning "explorer's luck", which usually let a person win almost regardless of how good of a player they were. Because these complaints fit in with his own view of the game, I believe he came to think that everyone, or most everyone, felt the same.
There's always going to be some luck. Crap, just look at some of those artifacts in the Galactic Oddities chart in Ultra! Talk about adding luck to the game.
Unless you change Starfire from Warp Points (where you have no clue at all what's on the other side of the WP until you go look) to a hyperspace game (where you'd have a minimal idea what sort of system you might chose to go explore, before you jumped into hyperspace), there will always be a level of luck in system generation. It's the nature of the beast.
Wanna reduce luck? Get rid of NPRs.
Wanna reduce luck? Make all star systems exactly the same.
At some point, you just have to accept that in the Starfire paradigm, luck in exploring is, as they say in golf, the rub of the green.
I challenge anyone to pick up a rule book for 4th ed, ultra or whatever, read it and be able to play a game without asking the starfire list a million questions. The tech research system is very difficult to figure out, and I speak as a man who has played board games for over twenty-five years.
I haven't really tried to fathom the R&D rules yet, but there are other rules sections that I've found to be overly complex.
And to be honest, this pisses me off.
I don't mean to rag on ML, but I can't help myself. Here he goes, competely gutting some of the best parts of the tactical system, wiping out missiles, etc. all in the name of simplicity, etc. and yet then at the same time, he produces some ridiculously complex rules abortions that would only be "simple" for a computer. ARGH!!!
Marvin and I (and others) had many discussions about missiles. Marvin felt that the problem with missiles is that in the strategic game they are inherently unbalanced against beams in that they are superior in almost every way. For instance, a HT 1 missile launcher can launch a standard missile with anti-matter warheads and other nifty add-ons without modification, upgrading, or refit, just as a HT 5 capital missile launcher can fire capital missiles with HT 11 or 12 add-ons without refit. If a player wants to use a beam-only strategy, though, he is forced to constantly refit his ships to upgrade to the latest beam weaponry. A HT 1 laser cannot fire a HT 7 HET laser beam. This puts a beam-only player at a disadvantage from the beginning, and Marvin's goal was to make multiple strategies viable.
My problem (among many) is that missiles SHOULD be superior to beam weapons. Throughout the history of weaponry superiority fell to the weapons with the greatest range. And what has always been one of the most important features of new technological development in weapons? The seeking to increase range over your enemy's weapons. Superior Range almost always equals victory.
People whining about how missiles are too superior to missiles sound like battleship admirals complaining about naval aricraft and aircraft carriers, and trying to fudge the wargames to make them look inferior. (Sort of like as DW presented it a parallel situation in one of his HH books.)
Also, it's exactly proper that older missile launchers should be able to fire newer weapons. Old guns are perfectly capable of firing newer ammunition, as long as the ammo's fitted to the old gun's calibre. I'm not a gun person, but there's no reason I know of that you can't take an old 1910-something Colt 45 pistol and put the latest teflon coated bullets in it and use it as it. This crap about requiring a new missile launcher for every missile upgrade is a bunch of bullpucky.
My objection to his solution was that by watering down missiles he made things so that no one cared what weapons system they were using. If everything is balanced, what is the point?
Exactly. If every weapon is the same, what *IS* the point?
Part of the reason that you do tech research is so you can get the bigger, badder, longer ranged gun than your enemy so you can open a big can of whup-ass on his fleet.
Also, and this was the big one for me, how much can you change everything before it isn't Starfire any more? I felt that he had crossed that line. Marvin disagreed, and felt that the changes were needed to produce a balanced strategic game that could only be won by skill and experience, rather than by dumb luck.
A. "how much can you change everything before it isn't Starfire any more?" I've had the same thoughts as well. While 3e is a much larger and involved product than the old 1e baggie game, you can clearly see 3e roots in 1e. This is not true of 4e. 4e might as well stick a different name on the cover, cuz it's only barely recognizable as Starfire any longer.
B. If he cares so much about skill, why doesn't he just take die rolls out of the game too?
Frankly, Kurt, the more you describe Marvin to me, the more he sounds like a ... person at TFG that Dave had to deal with who was , in our opinions at the time, a very clueless person who made life miserable for him for years, before there was some sort of shakeup.
It had gotten so bad, that Dave, Steve, and I actually had produced a complete manuscript for a game to compete against Starfire. We never got around to trying to submit it to any game company becuase there was a shakeup at TFG that moved the objectionable person out of the way, and allowed Dave to work with more reasonable people and he was able to produce the 3e games and mods with far, far less resistance.
I'll admit that I like the concept behind the tech trees and trying to create a situation where have NPRs having different weapons and system mixes. That's a great concept. However, the follow thru on that concept shouldn't be so complex that it turns off the players.
To be honest, I think that I could come up with a far simpler version of tech trees that would accomplish the same general goal without all of the pain and complexity. I could probably think of one as I'm typing right now, although it would probably be as full of holes as swiss cheese.
Try this...
Put all of the basic weapons into different trees or silos. Like in Ultra, take a SRW and a LRW. Then say that you can only develop new weapons within those trees until you either see a weapon from another tree in use against you in combat (possibly requiring scanner readings or not), or perhaps you encounter an NPR who uses weapons from another tree and is willing to share information. And there might be a provision for a breakthru or a technological epiphany that lets you open a new tree. But it just doesn't need to be so horrifyingly complex.
And most of the same things could hold true for non-weapons trees, BTW. Engine trees would be pretty important in this regard.
I'm actually trying to work on something along these lines for my upcoming solo campaign, just to create some racial differentiation, which is a worthy goal, even for "role-players".
Another thing that I despise about Ultra is the horrifically high number of generations of the same weapons. Now, I'll give ML a little pass since his tech trees go all the way up to SL50. But what the hell does he need to bother with going up in TL's that high for? Has anyone ever heard of a campaign that went much past TL20 or so?
I also hate how he has all these generations of the SAME weapons. Did I say that already? Yes, but a dozen or so generations of the SAME weapon... without any exposition, without any difference worth noting? Are all lasers exactly the same, just little upgrades that aren't worth mentioning? It's a Mark I laser, a Mark 2 laser, a Mark 9 laser, yada-yada-yada. Blah, blah, blah. BORING!!!!!! I want Lasers, Masers, Grasers, HET Lasers, and so on. I want to know WHY they're bigger and better. The damage numbers are useful in battle, but they're just data. WHY is a TL9 laser better than a TL1 Laser???!!!
Also, the very idea that nearly all weapons seem to start at TL/SL1 almost without exception and are the same weapons that exist for the entire game, is a ridiculous concept to me.
The idea that there are NO revolutionary technological developments is seems historically stupid to me. Yes, there are evolutionary changes in technology. They're the developments that occur between the big revolutionary technological leaps. I've read (probably some 4e devotees) complain about how life sucks in 3e if one side gets Cap Missiles before the other. Well, tough bleeping-crap!!! That's the way history is! When one nation (or whatever) develops some revolutionary new technology, they're SUPPOSED to have a major advantage!!! Life is supposed to suck for the side that doesn't have some big breakthru. That's why researchers are always trying to come up with big breakthroughs... so that their side gets a big advantage. Sorry, I'm ranting. But this idea of squashing out revolutionary tech developments really pissed me off when I read ML's little disertation on the SDS website, comparing 3e and 4e.!!!
Again, this goes back to his desire to balance everything. My argument to him against this was that real life is inherently unbalanced, and by balancing everything he was creating a game environment that was uninteresting and unreal, didn't get very far.
Of course, Marvin did have a point, Imperial Starfire and 3rd Ed are unbalanced, and to pure gamers that are in the game to fight against other people and defeat them, those imbalances are a significant problem. SM#2 went a long ways towards eliminating some of the luck factor by making NPRs much more nasty, thus less likely ally themselves with the race that discovers them.
As you said, real life is inherently unbalanced. Technological research is a process designed to create imbalance. People who are reasearching a new weapon aren't looking for a fair fight. They're looking to IMbalance the status quo, and they're looking to do so in the biggest way possible. It's the nature of real life.
But by pushing the balance uber alles system for competitive (aka power-) gamers, he's ended up alienating the non-power gamers. And pissing off a huge chunk of your customer base is REALLY stupid for someone trying to sell a product.
I too liked this concept, and I really liked the ?tough hulls?, where more than one point of damage was required to do damage inside of the shields/armor. Marvin wanted to get away from the armored-eggshell concept of standard starfire, where even dreadnoughts evaporated quickly once their shields and armor were breached.
I'm not as fond of tough hulls, but I understand what Marvin's getting at. I just don't buy that "hulls" give you this toughness. The point of armor in Starfire is that "armor" represents the toughness of the hull and its ability to take damage. Having said this, I had a scheme for making armor tougher that I presented on the List prior to it going down about a week into August.
My idea was roughly that armor should take damage differently than it does currently. Say that you have 10 points of normal armor. And you take only 9 points of damage. The armor repels the damage without taking any damage to itself. If you took exactly 10 dp, you'd mark off 1 A, but the armor penetration would do no further damage. But, if you took 11+ points of damage, the armor "belt" would lose 1 A and the remainder would penetrate the armor and damage the inside of the ship. However, you'd still have 9 A remaining, so that the next volley that hit that ship would have to do 9 or more damage to the armor belt to penetrate and possibly do internal damage. A ships armor belt would be able to withstand a number of penetrations equal to the # of A it started with.
Having proposed this, I don't know how well it would work out or what problems would come from it. It might be necessary to limit the number of hullspaces of armor to a percentage of the ship's total HS to prevent creating nearly invulnerable ships. of course, any "invulnerably" armored ship would probably be severely lacking elsewhere.
BTW, I proposed doing much the same thing with shields. My thought process was to give some serious advantages to larger ships. Clearly, smaller ships would be limited in the number of S and A that they could mount, but larger ships would become much tougher customers.
One thing that I *do* know would result from such rules is that they'd severely weaken swarms, since shields and armor that could repel damage that isn't strong enough to penetrate would make plinking attacks by swarms of ships each only doing 1 dp totally useless against much larger ships. My first wild guess is that you'd probably need to take on a large ship so protected with a similarly large ship, like BB vs BB, so that your ship would be mounting enough weapons to produce enough damage to create shield and armor penetrations. I also mentioned on the list that this protection scheme wouldn't TOTALLY make swarm ships useless, but what it would do is to force them to mount certain kinds of weapons, such as primary beams or weapons capable of producing heavy damage, although at short ranges, like perhaps force beams, plamsa guns, or plasma torpedoes, etc. And the result of this is that you'd have your swarms having to act like swarms have always done historically ... i.e. having to charge their larger enemies and make "torpedo runs" or get in really close so that their pop guns might do more than scratch the paint of their enemies. I actually find this idea to have an interesting historical feel.
I suppose that if with tough hulls, if you didn't do the full 3 dp to destroy the system, the partial damage was ignored, you'd end up with the same effect as my armor belts. I guess that I've always felt that ships really are just eggshells. It's just that the "shells" in Starfire simply are not strong enough in any historical context. It seems to me that the "shells", i.e. the shields and armor should have the ability to repel damage that cannot penetrate, just as the armor on a WW1/2 battleship could take LOTS of hits, but unless you actually penetrated it, you did no damage, and even if you did penetrate it, that didn't mean that all of the rest of the ship's armor simply vanished.
The thing I didn't like about Starfire was that ships retained 100% of their combat ability right up to the point that their passive defenses were penetrated, and then they evaporated. Even battleships tended to take some damage, even from shells that didn't penetrate. They might even be destroyed or knocked out by the first shell to hit them if it penetrates their armor, which can't happen in Starfire. Of course, real life battleships don't have shields, either.
True, BB's don't have shields. But Shields are just another form of armor.
And as far as the rest of it, you always have to remember that SF is a very simple tactical system and there are limitations to what you can do and still keep the system simple.
And there's the problem of balancing the tactical game between the "needs" of people who only play the tactical game and those who play strategic Starfire. The people who only play the tactical game might like a smidge more complexity, particularly since it seems that many of them like small battles. However, the strategic player probably favors the simplicity since it speeds the play of the tactical battles and helps to prevent the strategic game from getting overly bogged down with those pesky battles.
Also, the system I describe above would actually create a situation wherein your were getting internal damage without completely wiping out all of the passives. Of course, depending on the size of the ship and the numbers of passives it was mounting, the target ship could absorb quite a bit of punishment before you penetrated the passive. Honestly, I think that there's a workable idea in there, it just needs to be honed.
Like I said, good stuff. I look forward to any campaign reports you would post.
I hope to finish my Ultra-ized system generator soon, as well as my "3rd Fred" House rules. Maybe then I can get started on my solo campaign.
I actually already have my two player races created.
One is Earth, called The Solar Concordium. Nothing fancy.
And the other is The Pitariad. The Pitari deserve to get played in some way, so what the heck. The Matriarch is itching to conquer somebody!
Aside from the above work on my system generator and house rules, I'm also trying to give some thought to a campaign theme. it seems that the best campaigns that I've seen on the list have good themes. Like the After the Fall theme, or the (ugh) TrekFire theme, etc. Good themes seem to be inspiring. I have a theme idea that I'm working on, although
it seems to have ended up suspiciously similar to the Markukan campaign in ISF and Ultra.
BTW, I've got a question for you, Kurt. I've seen in plenty of List posts by Marvin that he's always been properly concerned about the copyrights for the Dave and Steve's 3e history. But I'm confused as to why he feels that he can use "Berzerkers" without any copyright problems? Do you know if he has some sort of waiver from Fred Saberhagen? Or is he thinking that Berzerkers are public domain? Seems a bit fishy to me...