The trend to Gear-headedness

[Murph]

I think the trend towards being a Gear Head, and requiring a computer or a very powerful hand calculator to design ships and vehicles started with High Guard. Striker made it worse, a lot worse, and Fire, Fusion and Steel was the ultimate masturbatory fantasy of the Gear Head crowd. I think that the vast majority of players did not wish to use the rules to design starships and vehicles to that degree. I think most ended at the Car Wars stage of design.

Comment?

 

[mike wightman]

Completely agree.

I still prefer pen paper and calculator to using spreadsheets and the like.

I design most of the ships I use in game with LBB2 or HG2. If I want a truly detailed ship I break out FF&S and design every last detail.

 

[atpollard]

I am not sure that I agree with your definition of Gearheadedness.

I don't think that anyone WANTS the complexity of FF&S as much as we want the capability of FF&S. A gearhead wants the components described in real world units (kg, meters, joules) so that we can 1. Recreate real world items to verify the accuracy of the rules and 2. Create new items limited only by imagination that will be compatible with the real world items.

The opposite of 'gearhead' would be a game mechanics based solution like T5 offers where you start with a basic item (gun) and simply modify game stats with descriptors (light/heavy) (early/advanced). Notice how real world things like barrel length or caliber or muzzle velocity never enter into the picture. The advantage to the non-gearhead approach is an inherent simplicity since anything not directly related to a game mechanic is by definition ignored.

So why would anyone WANT the complexity of a gearhead approach?
An example that I have used before from FF&S is a TL 14 Marine Combat Dagger. So I want to build a dagger. So far so good, but I want to build it with a really sharp edge and build it out of a really strong material. To this point either system will handle the problem just fine.

Now, my dagger has a hollow handle of a certain size. I want to build a very short range (say 1 meter) laser that will fire up to five individual shots to fit inside that handle and be triggered to fire when the Marine drives the blade home on a target. How much damage will the laser do? How much will it cost? Can I build a single shot version at TL 10? At TL 12?

For a non-gearhead design system, the answer is whatever the referee says it is, the design system goesn't create items with real world units. For a system like FF&S I can actually calculate the answer to those questions. It is the ability of the gearhead rules to allow me to create whatever I can imagine by combining items with real world units that attracts me. The complexity is just an unfortunate price that I am willing to pay.

 

[ovka]

I'm not a gear-head. I prefer to use other people's designs. However, I prefer gear-head designs because the ships/vehicles/weapons/whatever have more of a consistency to them. The T5 rules seem to me to oversimplify to the point of hand-waving.

Cheers,

Baron Ovka

 

[Murph]

And handwavium does not bother me at all for the most part. My players played, they did not need to know that the G-Carrier has a six liter fusion engine made by GE, with a turbo ram toilet attached in an asychronous hydroflush system. All of which weigh 34.981783 tons, and is made with Chrome-moly-unobtanium plated alloy and....

They just want to know that the Starship had "X" amount of cargo space, could do Jump "Y", and Maneuver "Z", with a ships boat, and two G carriers attached.

 

[atpollard]

And handwavium does not bother me at all for the most part. My players played, they did not need to know that the G-Carrier has a six liter fusion engine made by GE, with a turbo ram toilet attached in an asychronous hydroflush system. All of which weigh 34.981783 tons, and is made with Chrome-moly-unobtanium plated alloy and....

They just want to know that the Starship had "X" amount of cargo space, could do Jump "Y", and Maneuver "Z", with a ships boat, and two G carriers attached.

I like this post.
It brings out a good point that I don't want people to miss.

Gearheadedness is not bad.
'Handwavium' (until someone comes up for a better name for the opposite of Gearheadedness) is not bad.
They are just different.

Unfortunately, they tend to be incompatible.
I actually like the way the T5 makers work.
I can admire clever game mechanics and appreciate the beauty of some simple design system.
I still prefer real world units for the final product, but that doesn't prevent appreciation for what others might like in a system.

There are Handwavium systems that suffer from excessive complexity, too. It isn't just for gearheads any more. . [Has anyone ever played a D&D type game that tracked armor damage? I think that the MgT Vehicles book is very complex for a non-gearhead system.]

Gearhead systems can also be simple ... Like the Small Craft design rules in High Guard.

So while people like to think of FF&S as what all gearhead systems are like and they like to think that all Handwavium systems are easy to use, and these stereotypes are often more true than not, they are not ALWAYS true.

 

[ovka]

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that all hand-wavium is bad. I agree that when I as a referee give numbers to my players, I typically only tell them

that the Starship had "X" amount of cargo space, could do Jump "Y", and Maneuver "Z", with a ships boat, and two G carriers attached.

But if I can't personally reconcile the hand-wavium to something more concrete, I have difficulty using it. Some hand-wavium systems round numbers that were derived by performing calculations on rounded numbers that were derived by performing additional calculations on other rounded numbers. That is where I have a problem with hand-wavium.

Cheers,

Baron Ovka

 

[Spartan159]

It's too bad this seems incompatible. I for one like being gear-headed on a personal level, I would just prefer it to be in this day and age to be in a program that I could just plug in what I wanted and have it calculated for me. On the other hand I can easily see the desire for the off the cuff style of the T5 makers. It's just not for me is all. I want a consistent framework to work with, even if I don't use most of the information. Just my personal 2 credits.

 

[ovka]

It's too bad this seems incompatible. I for one like being gear-headed on a personal level, I would just prefer it to be in this day and age to be in a program that I could just plug in what I wanted and have it calculated for me. On the other hand I can easily see the desire for the off the cuff style of the T5 makers. It's just not for me is all. I want a consistent framework to work with, even if I don't use most of the information. Just my personal 2 credits.

Agreed. A spreadsheet version to calculate the numbers behind the hand-wavium is perfect!

Cheers,

Baron Ovka

 

[Blue Ghost]

I think the trend towards being a Gear Head, and requiring a computer or a very powerful hand calculator to design ships and vehicles started with High Guard. Striker made it worse, a lot worse, and Fire, Fusion and Steel was the ultimate masturbatory fantasy of the Gear Head crowd. I think that the vast majority of players did not wish to use the rules to design starships and vehicles to that degree. I think most ended at the Car Wars stage of design.

Comment?

We built ships after we left Starter Traveller and embraced the Big Black Book, because at that time FASA came out with their ACS module, and that module combined with what was already provided in the Traveller Book, provided enough variety for our adventures.

*EDIT*
At that time I had been drawing fictional space ships as a hobby, but got busy and burnt out on it. I think my friends and I planned out a few ships, but never laid down any serious deckplans for any of them.

 

[kilemall]

I am total unabashed gearhead, I want it because I want the game to feel hard and consistent even if the science isn't exactly, and the effort to crawl around inside the equipment makes it more real to me, because I know why I made X tradeoff design judgement over Y reasons.

Where I get in trouble is when the assumptions built into Z gear system do not agree with either my entertainment goals or are just annoying.

 

[Vargas]

I like "gearheaded" rules because while I like something like Book 2 quite a lot, it has it's limits because of its modular nature. Please note, I like HG, thought MT's starship system was ultimately too fiddly and loathed FF&S, so gearhead is a relative term to me.

 

[flykiller]

you spend hours and hours with these "makers" making up spaceships but there are no space combat rules?

space combat is hard.

actually there are dozens of space combat rulesets, none of which seem to command any relevant plurality of users.

 

[atpollard]

I like "gearheaded" rules because while I like something like Book 2 quite a lot, it has it's limits because of its modular nature. Please note, I like HG, thought MT's starship system was ultimately too fiddly and loathed FF&S, so gearhead is a relative term to me.

I think that Striker has the right amount of complexity ... it is just 'organizationally challenged' (which makes it hard to follow). HG starship design worked well, but the combat rules were not as much fun. It still annoys me to no end that the charts in LBB2 couldn't have been made to agree with the formula in HG. There is no innate reason that they HAD to be incompatible. [sigh]

 

[mike wightman]

Well they did get the drive formulae in HG the wrong way round compared to CT LBB2, but everything could have been brought into alignment if CT'81 revision had used HG2 percentages.

 

[aramis]

space combat is hard.

actually there are dozens of space combat rulesets, none of which seem to command any relevant plurality of users.

The three tacticals I see get the most fan speak are SW:XWing, ACTA and SFB. AVT occasionally gets mentioned, too; everything else seems tier or two further down. Mayday seldom gets mentioned except amongst Traveller fans.

X-Wing is quick, cheesy, and fun.

ACTA and SFB both do Star Trek, as does Fed Commander. ACTA also does B5. ACTA seems to appeal well with casual gamers; Fed Commander is (literally) SFB lite, and SFB is one of the old "lifestyle" games - you don't play unless you adopt it as a major part of your lifestyle, because there's sooooo much for it.

Star Trek Attack Wing gets some chatter because it's trek.
Attack Vector Tactical gets very little chatter, and while Ken B. explains it well, it's just more work than many want to cope with, especially since it runs in 3D
Mayday gets a little love outside the traveller community, but only because it's fast playing and rules-light (for a boardgame).

BL and BR get almost no mention; I see more for Ironclads and Ether Flyers than BL/BR combined, except here.

Starfire is a good old game, but the tactical side is not loved by the current owner. Marvin is so totally fixated on the strategic game that he's alienated most pure tactical players, and worse, he did so before purchasing the rights from Steve Cole. (Yeah, original Starfire was by the same guy as SFB.) The strategic game is a lifestyle game, not for large rules, but due to long playtimes. (Most of the play reports are, in fact, solitaire.) Marvin has recently rereleased the 1st and 2nd ed tactical rules... in PDF.

 

[whartung]

The three tacticals I see get the most fan speak are SW:XWing, ACTA and SFB. AVT occasionally gets mentioned, too; everything else seems tier or two further down. Mayday seldom gets mentioned except amongst Traveller fans.

I'm not familiar with ACTA. None of these are anywhere close to "realistic", in contrast to what the Traveller games try to be (HG withstanding).

Of the ones that I have played, none of them were as satisfying as SFB. With complexity comes depth, and I guess I enjoy the depth, despite continually and routinely being beat by my friends at the local game club. To me, that was sort of the compelling aspect of the game -- there was a stark difference between good and mediocre players, and the local tournaments were good venues to explore that. The really good players always made it deep in to the tournaments, and our club really had a lot of those players. I'd almost say we had the best club in SoCal at the time, as was witnessed when we did serious damage at Origins when they came to town.

We had great fun with SFB.

I never played the others to get the nuances of it, they just didn't have the richness of SFB. You move and fire, move and fire, move and fire, move and fire, with a bit on maneuvering in involved. Never got much of a combined arms feel from them. A real ballet of maneuver and weapon fire. More just *BLAM* *BLAM* *BLAM* *BLAM* *BLAM* *BLAM* *BLAM* *BLAM* *BLAM* *BLAM*.

I think BL has the capability to a degree of that, when you combine the small ships, vector based movement, and limited fuel aspects. But it's not a game you can just easily pick up. I think SFB is more approachable, frankly, especially with an experience player there to tell you all the stuff you don't need to know. Pick up an easy ship to fly (like a Klingon) and you're off and running.

Starfire is a good old game, but the tactical side is not loved by the current owner. Marvin is so totally fixated on the strategic game that he's alienated most pure tactical players, and worse, he did so before purchasing the rights from Steve Cole. (Yeah, original Starfire was by the same guy as SFB.) The strategic game is a lifestyle game, not for large rules, but due to long playtimes. (Most of the play reports are, in fact, solitaire.) Marvin has recently rereleased the 1st and 2nd ed tactical rules... in PDF.

I have to give them credit, they keep bashing on it, as slow as their process and progress is, there's at least movement vs abandonment.

I didn't play enough SF to get any real tactical depth in it. I felt it was still kind of a slugfest. I should try some of the larger scenarios to see if it gets more interesting. I do give props to the SF guys though, as they have always had a good grasp on the issues at a strategic scale. From supply, to comm and travel lag, to personnel. It soon becomes "war of the spreadsheets", but, in truth, aren't they all.

I think the thing that's fascinating me currently, is simply the strategic game of directing strategic forces so far removed from communication. You get a taste of that in the SF novels, but I'm not interested in the tedium of the economic game to dive in to it too deeply.

What Traveller "realistic" combat has taught me is that "realistic" space combat is not that interesting. Or, maybe it's very interesting, because of it's lethality, but just not very fun. SFB has the great balance that the game is not immediately lethal, but it's not a grind fest either of ships just parking as close to each other as practical and blasting away turn after turn. SFB is mostly about maneuver, but not completely.

I would be interested see some more logistics and supply issues combined with something like TCS, combined with the command lag. It's easy to see how major conflicts can stalemate very quickly. The front line is either far from supply, far from intelligence, far from command or some combination of all of the those. And that can stall a lot of things. The lines would stabilize when conducting the campaign is equally difficult for both sides, especially once attack fleets have suffered enough attrition.

A week by week game when ships take years to build -- stalls fairly quickly.

 

[flykiller]

I would be interested see some more logistics and supply issues combined with something like TCS, combined with the command lag ....

... and you want it now.

well, the system I'm trying to set up in the jump game thread has the capacity for full logistics - construction, supply, cargo, fuel, transfer, damage control, repair, and operations - should it ever reach that point and should you be interested.

 

[epicenter00]

The really involved gear-building systems are a single-player game in itself. I think fairly early on, game designers realized this solo-play aspect was profitable which in turn encouraged these systems. This also coincided with the complex = realistic crowd. (To be fair, I do enjoy many single-player games, especially if a computer is there to moderate things for me.)

I suspect as gamers age, many lose their play groups so an increasing number find solo-play options to be more alluring; generating systems, subsectors, and gear. So these systems may be increasing (I dunno if that's true, though - I don't think I've seen anything as complicated as TNE's FF&S version). I've stated this before, but in FF&S in TNE, these complex systems passed beyond some singularity of complexity. The grindy gearhead factor increased to a point where it was stated a few times by GDW that they used a "simplified" version of their own rules to make ships and so on ... which is why the numbers are ballpark but don't match those produced in FF&S. When a system is too fiddly for the creators of the system to use, it's gotten dumb (iirc, GDW did this kind of thing in 2300's ship design sequences for Star Cruiser as well so FF&S for TNE wasn't the first time).

As a GM who runs games still, I find these complex systems often fail to produce things I could really use. Like a system might go into exacting detail about the size of a fusion reactor I want to install in a ship and make me determine if I am using a Tokamak or a Stellarator and have large design sequences for each asking me what kind of materials I'm using or something similar. Yet, this 40-odd step design process won't help me generate deck plans, something that'd be immensely useful in a game. (Mind you, this might be best done with an application on a tablet or computer, but that seems to run into the anti-tech bias of a certain portion of gamers ... including players of games that are set in the future.)

 

[aramis]

I'm not familiar with ACTA.

Mongoose's 'A Call To Arms" - I've only played the starfleet version, and for fleets, it works well enough. Duels would be slot-machines.

I didn't play enough SF to get any real tactical depth in it. I felt it was still kind of a slugfest. I should try some of the larger scenarios to see if it gets more interesting. I do give props to the SF guys though, as they have always had a good grasp on the issues at a strategic scale. From supply, to comm and travel lag, to personnel. It soon becomes "war of the spreadsheets", but, in truth, aren't they all.

Starfire's true deth was the fleet tactical. If you don't have at least 5 on a side, you're not actually seeing the tactical side. It's all about the overlapping fields of fire and maintaining the correct ranges for your weapons.

I think the thing that's fascinating me currently, is simply the strategic game of directing strategic forces so far removed from communication. You get a taste of that in the SF novels, but I'm not interested in the tedium of the economic game to dive in to it too deeply.

The Problem is that Marvin and Cralis are SO fixated on the economic game that they don't consider the tractical worth much without it. All post-Imperial editions are fixated on the strategic game.

What Traveller "realistic" combat has taught me is that "realistic" space combat is not that interesting. Or, maybe it's very interesting, because of it's lethality, but just not very fun. SFB has the great balance that the game is not immediately lethal, but it's not a grind fest either of ships just parking as close to each other as practical and blasting away turn after turn. SFB is mostly about maneuver, but not completely.

I would be interested see some more logistics and supply issues combined with something like TCS, combined with the command lag. It's easy to see how major conflicts can stalemate very quickly. The front line is either far from supply, far from intelligence, far from command or some combination of all of the those. And that can stall a lot of things. The lines would stabilize when conducting the campaign is equally difficult for both sides, especially once attack fleets have suffered enough attrition.

A week by week game when ships take years to build -- stalls fairly quickly.