26 November 2009

Today’s Tabbloid
PERSONAL NEWS FOR riorio2@rogue-games.net

ROGUE FEED
Happy Birthday, Poul Anderson
NOV 25, 2009 01:49P.M.
Had he lived, today would have been Poul Anderson’s 83rd birthday.
Anderson is a favorite author of mine, both for his historical fantasies,
such as The Broken Sword and Three Hearts and Three Lions, and for
his science fiction works, particularly the Van Rijn/Falkayn and Flandry
series. My own SF RPG, Thousand Suns (which I am busily revising), is
strongly influenced by Anderson’s SF tales, so I feel a particular debt to
him.
As you’d expect, The Cimmerian offers up a fine tribute to Anderson and
notes some similarities between him and Robert E. Howard.
enough to be used without some hook with the setting I’m using. If a
player just wants to play a “holy warrior,” he can be a cleric or even a
zealous fighting man. If a player just wants to be a guy who kills for
money, he needn’t be a member of the assassin sub-class, which, to my
mind anyway, is something much more specific.
So, I do like and would allow sub-classes. I just think they need to be
uncommon and bound to the setting better than they are in baseline
OD&D.
ROGUE FEED
Retrospective: Space Opera
NOV 25, 2009 09:33A.M.

ROGUE FEED

On Sub-classes
NOV 25, 2009 11:54A.M.

Having been primarily an AD&D player in my younger days, I retain a

fondness for most of the sub-classes included in the Players Handbook.
As I’ve immersed myself more fully in OD&D, though, I have come to see
the proliferation of sub-classes introduced in the Supplements and The
Strategic Review as blurring the notion of what a “character class” is.
How to reconcile these two positions?

At present, I consider all classes beyond the original three to be

“specialists” and, except in the case of the thief (whose status is still
unclear despite years of wrestling with it), very specific specialists at
that. I’ve already talked about how paladins into my setting. Druids are a
secret society made up of former clerics of Lawful gods, who now oppose
Law and Chaos in equal measure. Illusionists are members of an esoteric
school of magic and assassins belong to a hidden brotherhood.
I simply don’t like the idea of “generic” sub-classes, preferring instead
that they all be tied to some aspect of the setting. I feel this way for
several reasons. First, it means that, by and large, most PCs and NPCs
will belong to one of the Big Three classes. Second, it means that, if a
player does wish to portray a member of a sub-class, he’s signing on to a
large number of “social” restrictions/demands to make up for his
character’s increased power compared to members of the base classes.
Finally, I genuinely think most of the “standard” sub-classes pretty much
demand some kind of in-setting context to work. I don’t think the
paladin or the monk or even the assassin, as written, are archetypal
I make no bones about the fact that, when it comes to science fiction
RPGs, I was and remain a Traveller man. Traveller was, after Gamma
World, my first SF RPG, and the one I undoubtedly played the most. My
first professional writing credits were for Traveller and the first game
industry professionals I ever met in the flesh were associated with the
game (at the 1991 Origins convention in Baltimore, where I had dinner
with Marc Miller, Charles Gannon, and the Japanese translators of
Traveller). To this day, when I think of “science fiction roleplaying
games,” Traveller is the gold standard by which I measure all others.
Though first, Traveller wasn’t the only SF RPG out there. In 1980,
Fantasy Games Unlimited released its own entry into the genre, Space
Opera. Rarely has a RPG gotten a title so evocative and apropos, for,
unlike Traveller, Space Opera was unambiguously — and clearly
unashamedly — an “unserious” game. By that, I don’t mean it was a

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Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR riorio2@rogue-games.net 26 November 2009

jokey or silly game, only that it had no pretensions to being a “deep”
game, ripping off, as it did, just about every bit of SF its writers could get
their hands on. As you can see from the cover image, this is a game
where Flash Gordon, Chewbacca, Ming the Merciless, Barbarella, and
assorted aliens can meet in a cantina and go adventuring among the
stars without the petty concerns of rhyme or reason. In concept, it’s
about as coherent as Dungeons & Dragons but, like D&D, it has the
potential to transcend its schlocky origins and become its own weirdly
appealing thing.
Traveller somehow managed to hide its sources better and its rules were
simple enough that you could very quickly get into enjoying the game
itself so that its derivativeness faded in importance. Space Opera never
managed to achieve that degree of unity, largely because its rules are
such a mess. I think that’s a shame, because a gleefully schlocky SF RPG
is a wondrous thing to play.

Alas, Space Opera never could reach such heights of gaming enjoyment
because its rules were terrible, possibly unplayable. Though written
during what I call the Golden Age of Gaming, Space Opera nevertheless
evinces a Silver Age obsession with complexity and I dare say “realism.”
Character generation is a long and tedious process, involving a
combination of random rolls, derived attributes, and player choice.
Unlike Traveller, where even a fairly experienced character can be
generated quickly, doing the same in Space Opera could easily take 30
minutes or more, especially if you’re not very familiar with the system.
Combat involved multiple rolls for each attack: to hit, to determine
where one hits, to penetrate armor, and to determine extent of injuries.
Space combat was even more complex — as were most of the game’s
systems.

Now, as you should know by now, I don’t see anything wrong with
multiple sub-systems within a game. Indeed, I am increasingly
convinced that one of the hallmarks of old school design, as opposed to
nostalgia games, is that they are built upon multiple, separate sub-
system that work in unison rather than a single universal mechanic.
Space Opera falls down, I think, because its various sub-systems don’t
work in unison. Instead, they give the impression of a Frankenstein’s
monster, sewed together from bits and bits pieces scavenged from here
and there without any regard for what the end result would be. A friend
of mine, who’s played more Space Opera than I ever could stomach,
suggested that the game was written by a committee of people who were
each given a separate section of the game to write and who didn’t like
each other very much. As it turns out, he’s almost right. According to
FGU’s Scott Bizar, Space Opera was written by correspondence by
several authors who’d never met one another; it shows.

Nevertheless, Space Opera a slew of supplements its initial release and

1985. Of these, the Space Atlases are the most interesting, for it’s here
that you get a sense of the glorious cheesiness of the game’s official
setting, which I can only describe as “kitchen sink SF.” You remember
those guys in high school who used to argue about whether the
Enterprise could defeat an Imperial Star Destroyer? They went on to
write the Space Atlases, where the United Federation of Planets — yes,
they call it that — can fight Space Nazis, Space Soviets, and the Space
Viet Cong/Mongols, not to mention the Bugs from Starship Troopers.
There are Vulcans and Kzinti too, along with many other ideas torn
bleeding from the bodies of science fiction books, movies, and TV shows.

To be fair, Traveller‘s official setting is also highly derivative, swiping

heaping helpings of ideas and terms from H. Beam Piper, Poul
Anderson, Larry Niven, and Jerry Pournelle, among others. But