Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

Denise Crosby did a QA session with Walter Koenig this past Saturday at Adventure Con in Knoxville, Tennessee. Crosby, who played “Tasha Yar” during the first season of Star Trek the Next Generation, was clearly excited to be talking with the original series’ “Chekov.” At some of these types of sessions, the stars get a brief introduction and move pretty quickly into taking questions. Unfortunately, us geeks are generally pretty lame: we are either going to ask stupid questions or questions that have been asked a million times. This time we managed to achieve a stunning degree of lameness in a short time: not only was the first question about how to pronounce Walter’s name, but the announcer even botched it when introducing him! (It’s KAY-nig. Like “Decay”-nig….)

Thanks to the comraderie between the two actors, we were spared such pain for the rest of the session. Koenig wanted to know about why Crosby left the show so soon. “I just got tired of saying nothing but ‘aye aye captain in every episode,” she said. “Oh really,” Koenig replied with a voice dripping with sarcasm. He turned to the audience and asked, “How many ways can you say Warp Factor Two? WARP factor two; Warp FACT-or two; Warp factor TWO!” Crosby said she wanted them to just make a model of her legs– that’s all you could ever see of her character back behind the captain and first officer! She’d go to work day after day and just stand there and not even get to say anything….

Koenig later described his most crushing moment. In the filming of Generations, he was pretty disappointed with his role as it appeared in the script. He asked for some changes and the Directors rewrote portions of it. Koenig felt that Chekov should have a scene where he mourns the loss of his captain– especially when you consider how long he’d been working with him. They shot the scene 8 times and he cried every single time. Koenig tried to tell us how moved the people were on the set. (Except for this scene… how often has he really gotten the chance to act?!)  On the ninth time, the directors specifically asked him not to cry, but when the film was finally released, all of the extra scenes he’d asked for were of course cut out. Koenig didn’t think that they ever intended to use them in the first place: they just wanted to get his name on the credits. “I’ve spent my career playing just half a character” he said.

The next day I went by their booths to thank them for coming. I think I came off as yet another incoherent fan boy to Koenig. I was in shock at being able to talk to him and shake his hand. I wanted him to understand that we never thought of Chekov as just a “bit part”, but I don’t think I was successful.  I did manage to hit it off with Crosby as she graciously laughed at my jokes and chatted with me. Both actors were pretty disappointed that none of us knew anything about the Star Trek: New Voyages fan films that they’d both participated in.  It was really great to get to see them, though, and to learn more about the people behind these classic episodes and movies.

Devin Parker has posted about getting fed up with GURPS Vehicles in his recent attempt to design a space ship for his GURPS Firefly campaign.  He struggles on with it because he’s “sure that all of this data will be useful down the line,” but I just can’t see it.  Ship combat in science fiction falls into just a handful of archetypes– and most of the ship combat systems don’t come close to addressing them.  As far as your actual campaign is concerned, once you’ve got your deck plan, you’re done.  Everything else is driven by the demands of the narrative.

Think about it.  The dramatic action is always focused on a few key heroes.  If the characters are hopelessly outgunned, straight up tactical ship combat will not be the solution: everything will hinge on a clever trick or deus ex machina.  Characters will feverishly work to buy time as crewmen die and systems explode.  The really tough opponents will require the heroic sacrifice of the “fan favorite”– or at least a new non player-character that was introduced for the purpose.

Ship Combat, like any other in-game crisis, will be tailored to the assets and abilities of the heroes.  Rarely will they face a threat that does not require them to all work together.  Individual failure should be possible, but it should also be possible for the team to compensate in some cases.  In the case of a major failure, there might be still one last opportunity to save the innocent, but the players will pay a heavy price and the campaign will necessitate a new tone and direction.  Survivors should be shown the consequences of their decisions in later adventures and should be given an opportunity to set things right only if they weren’t flagrantly reckless or foolhardy.  Players that achieve a reputation for being complete morons should be forced to choose between a life outside of the primary society or perhaps a spot on a suicide squad instead.

But referees will never simply eliminate a group of players just because of a single lucky roll in a tactical ship combat system.  That’s crazy.  Narratives simply do not work that way.  Oh and the repairs and revenues are the same: The players are always going to be struggling from one job to the next– and even if they make it big, they’ll soon have to use their gains to overcome the next obstacle.  If the players are all big-time agents, then they won’t have to track expenses at all.  Do you think money was ever an issue for James Bond??

Players’ abilities will be the focus in any action.  The ship is generally hardwired into the setting and just determines the tone and style of the events.  The players’ choices and sacrifices will have to matter… and at the same time, the plot will have to be adaptable to a great many outcomes.  This is an art, not a science, and hence these techniques are not amenable to hard and fast tactical rule systems.  This makes the stats and figures in your ship designs largely irrelevant to a real game.

You know its got to be bad if Scoble stops blogging….  When the little feed that occasionally pops up through out the day on my system tray began to be noticeably light on tech news, I had to wonder if maybe a nuclear bomb had gone off that I hadn’t heard about.  This was only a short while after he’d pronounced newspapers dead; maybe the media cabal had conspired to silence him….

It turns out that he’s stopped blogging for a week as an act of solidarity with a fellow a-list tech blogger that’s received several disturbing threats on her blog and elsewhere on the web.  (They’re pretty disturbing; don’t look unless you want to be grossed out.)  That’s shouldn’t be that surprising– but what really makes it scary is that the wacked out stuff is coming from, apparently, other well known tech bloggers….  Perhaps what’s most surprising about all of this is that it is in fact… uh…  surprising.  If we’d just paid attention to Clay Shirky, though, we’d have known all along that A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy.

(It amazes me that Shirky had written this as far back as 2003.  His speech is the only thing that makes sense out of the 25 years of technological development that I’ve witnessed first hand.  This is definitely one of those cases where reality is stranger than science fiction.)

Folding this in with my Traveller gaming, I’m going to play blogging in the far future as being one of those forbidden technologies that are outlawed and restricted the same way that robotics and psi research are.  It’s not that nanotech and blogging can’t exist… it’s just that any culture that goes too far with this stuff just mysteriously annihilates itself.  Whether the technologies are that inherently volatile or whether there are mysterious forces that want to guide civilisation along certain predetermined “tech trees,” it is not known.  But the information technology of the Third Imperium is strictly organized along the Encyclopedia Galactica approach.

I ran a Traveller game last night set in District 268 in the year 1111.  This gritty no-man’s-land is the perfect locale for pulse pounding pulpy adventure, so I knew I wouldn’t have any trouble getting the players into sticky situations.

We had one new player and one that had played some during the early eighties.  The old timer brought his character with him: an old army guy with lots of combat skills and a useless title.  (He also had original copies of the hardback Traveller Book and some classic Supplements.  Cool!) 

The new guy was forced to roll up a new one from scratch with no idea of the other guy’s skills, which was vaguely amusing: he couldn’t attempt to cover contrasting abilities in order to round out the team!  In rolling up attributes, he rolled a 2 for endurance.  This is one of those cases where getting killed in character generation is a good thing.  He went into the Scout Service and after his second term rolled another 2 for reenlistment.  Heh heh.  No death for you!

I noticed that the original classic Traveller skills are all either combat, vehicle, management, or shipboard-professional.  These do not cover thief/spy/investigation type skills in much resolution.  In practice, and especially given the narrativistic approach I was using, I ended up calling for a lot of “attribute checks” during the game based on off-the-cuff characterizations of a character’s career and background.  Skills only became relevant in a couple of instances– and if I thought a plan was particularly good, or if it was role played well, then I wouldn’t ask for a roll at all.  One technique I noticed emerging was skill rolls being called for even when a task was mostly certain in order to give one character or another the chance to make a decision.  I didn’t have anyone hogging the game or anything, but it seemed to me to effectively break things up and keep things moving.

I opened the game in the Bowman system at a grungy spacer-bar.  Much grungier than the one on your keyboard….  (Sorry.)  We actually had to spend about ten or fifteen minutes covering the core premises of the Traveller setting: jump drive, the Imperium, multiple human races, surrounding alien empires, the 5th Frontier War, outlawed psi, restricted robotics, no weird tech, no near-c rocks….  There was ample opportunity to geek out here.  After that we spent another ten minutes or so doing armchair theorizations about what the Bowman system was really like based on its Universal World Profile.

The guy that had played Traveller before actually got really into this, throwing lots of facts around.  I was worried at first that I’d have trouble with a player that knows more than me, but in most cases I could work everything he said into my plans with only minimal corrections/nudges.  We’re all grown up enough to separate characters’ opinions from facts, so I really don’t see this as a problem: in fact, I want to encourage my players to help create background and setting specific “color” as much as possible.

The opening vignette was a simple TV-show style opener.  The characters meet a Darrian merchant and try to convince him to hire them to help crew his ship.  He brushes them off… and one of the PC’s notice some goons trailing him as he leaves.  The players follow and intervene in an awkward scene being played out in a back ally.  They rescue the Darrian, dispatch the thugs, and quickly find themselves on the ship heading out system.  Not quite as elegant as Joss Whedon, buy hey– might as well start with a bang.

As the characters traveled to Flexos, we engaged in another round of setting description.  As we picked apart the UWP, I was surprised at just how much the players wanted to know.  Just about everything: climate, flora, fauna, politics, and even history.  The information from the Flexos System Guide was essential, but I also found myself throwing out bits of things I’d remembered from Alien Races II and III.  I did feel a bit compelled as an armchair sci-fi story teller to “show it not tell it.”  But on the other hand, the players did not seem to see a fifteen minute discussion of all of this background as being ‘just’ for setting things up.  The questions and answers and theories all seemed to be as much a part of playing the game as rolling dice in combat or role playing an exchange.

My players went crazy when they saw the map, though.  (It really is beautifully done.)  They asked about locations of things I’d mentioned in passing and made plan for exploring an area as I gradually introduced an adventure seed taken from the Flexos book.  It surprised me.  I had no location maps or skill check data or anything, but just one little specific fact pulled from the System Guide could give the players 5 minutes or more of time spent discussing, planning, and worrying.  All of the facts that I needed were very concise and easily transferred to a game situation.  My role as a referee was simply to synthesize the facts as I knew them with the actions of the players.  Of course, I did have to improvise a lot of details– and the players would obsess over these things the most!– but it was easy to do so with the setting and background so clearly laid out.

There is easily enough material in the Flexos book to keep my players busy for several game sessions.  I can keep them there for an entire campaign or introduce something new every time they pass through.  For years I’ve stressed out about the daunting task of taking up the reigns of a Traveller campaign, but material such as that in the Avenger System Guides and Cluster Books really make it easy.  Most importantly, I think these materials demonstrate a best practice for fleshing out an area in Traveller– that way as I begin working on my own material I have a very practical model to work by. 

If Joss Whedon gave us the greatest Boba Fett story ever told, then the makers of Galactica have at least climbed up to the level of rehashing tried and true sci-fi moments in the later half of their second season.  They have it all: a crafty foe, a confusing nebula, a heroic sacrifice….  Let’s take a look at the action.

Here the Pegasus takes a beating in a surprise attack.  With the hyper drives disabled, she’ll have to stick around to duke it out:

She pulls herself together and now she’s come about.  “Fire!”

And the Base Star takes a lickin’ in return:

Not bad….  As you can see they do a lot of darkly lit shots really close up– you need explosions to see any details most of the time.  It’s hard to get a feel for the tactical arrangement of the ships.  From the details of this show, the big ships apparently just move into point blank range and unload on each other while fighters buzz around.  It looks like Star Fleet Battles being played by people with absolutly no tactical abilities.  (It remains to be seen whether Galactica will ever deal us an epic space battle to come close to matching the classic duels of the original Star Trek episodes.)

I’d much rather be able to drink in a nice slow long shot of a gracefully arcing vessel.  And so many people have died in this series at this point, the sacrificial death of another flawed leader just doesn’t have much dramatic punch.  (Not like when Spock or that Guy-I’m-Not-Going-To-Mention-In-Case-You-Haven’t-Seen-The-Movie-Yet died.)

The series is doing okay.  Once again I get to a point where I’m not much concerned with what happens next.  The cheap tricks that they use over and over to resolve tough plot impasses get increasingly tiresome: I just don’t get the kind of pay off I’m looking for.  On top of that they’ve sallied forth into the area of suicide bombers, torture, rape, “treasonous” news reporters, stem cell research, abortion, and vote counting.  Traditionally sci-fi has dealt with these types of social issues more metaphorically… and I cringe whenever they trot them out.

The main thing that hurts the series is the overall lack of humor and tact.  Joss Whedon was able to effortlessly give us satisfying stories that forwarded an overall dramatic arc on his Firefly series.  When things took a surprising turn, it always felt inevitable– it did not feel like a cheap serial writer’s hack job.  Also, he could deal with difficult topics while still making you laugh.  Amazing.  The more I see of Battlestar Galactica, the more I appreciate the genius of Joss Whedon.

Yeah, I went nuts when I saw the advertisement for the book Game Design Volume 1: Theory and Practice in the pocket-box sized 1984 Steve Jackson Games catalogue.  I showed it to an old dueling buddy and told him how cool I thought it was.  I’d never even seen it on ebay… but somehow, the book ended up in my mailbox a couple of months later.  (Thanks, old friend!)

Anyways, when SJG first started out, they included pictures with the author bios.  Nowadays you just get snarky paragraph or three after the introduction, but in the old days these things were printed right on the covers:

Yo Steve!  As much time as I’ve spent playing this guy’s games, it’s funny how few pictures I’ve seen of him.  Maybe that was a good thing if he was going to maintain his status in my subconscious as some sort of Gaming Demi-God.  It looks like he took off his glasses just before they took the photo!

But if you thing that’s scary, check out this Aaron Allston photo from Autoduel Champions:

Aiiiii!!!

Okay… maybe taking off your glasses just before a picture isn’t such a bad idea!  It even says next to the picture that Aaron Allston’s interests include “theoretical and applied hedonism.”  Yoiks.  And I always thought that SJG was a wholesome company providing high quality family entertainment….

(And you wondered why SJG never prints author photos….  Heh.  If only you knew… if only you knew….)

Allston has fortunately cleaned up a bit since those halcyon days.  You can see for yourself on his latest Star Wars novels.  He and Battletech author Michael Stackpole singlehandedly wrote the entire X-Wing series!

I love the “just open the box and start playing” nature of games like Star Frontiers and Gamma World.  Those games were great in their day, but… times have changed.  On the other hand, I hate the “Gamemaster, get ready to spend 100’s of hours before you even play your first game” mentality implied by the new monster games of today.  Even so, for science fiction gaming, I still suggest a blend of Classic Traveller and GURPS 4th Edition.  Here’s my reasons:

Classic Traveller is dated and unrefined, but it’s also got two of the coolest gaming concepts ever invented:

The World Generation System:  The “retro” look of the world maps and subsector maps is completely rad.  I don’t see how people can’t get into that.  There are trade-offs with the “flat space” approach, but there are huge gains in usability and playability.  The coding format creates what amounts to a compact paper “mushware” database.  (An expanded/updated/debugged version of this appears in GURPS Interstellar Wars– the lack of something like this was a major shortcoming in 3e GURPS Traveller, in my opinion.)

The Character Generation Mini Game: You can do character design in half an hour or so and then immediately start playing.  (I hate the preliminary rpg planning session thing– I’m too old to waste a game session on that!)  It’s amazing how such a simple system can produce such characters.  The combination of folks that a whole gaming group rolls up together will imply all sorts of adventure ideas.  (The genre here is basically that of Firefly.  How cool is that?)  All you need here is Book One and Supplement Four.

GURPS is a much more consistent, streamlined, and refined gaming system– but it’s a toolkit for constructing campaigns and not really a full game in and of itself.  Classic Traveller is a full game… but you will likely end up in house-rule hell if you try to use it by itself.  (Hardcore Traveller fans actually get really into that, actually.)  Using GURPS by itself can leave you feeling like you’re in a vacuum.  There’s just no focus to a design that’s built from the ground up to be universal.  A few key Traveller tools like those mentioned above can give you the necessary grounding you need to successfuly pass your sanity checks.

GURPS 4e Characters is very useful for fleshing out character concepts.  GURPS Traveller 3e contains guidelines for converting from previous versions of Traveller.  If you’re overwhelmed by all the options in GURPS, “upsizing” the old barebones Traveller characters will help make sense of things.  And even with just Basic Set you can work up a whole cantina of aliens quickly if you keep in mind that the full details are only necessary for people playing PC’s.

Regardless of what sci-fi rules you’re using, keep it simple.  Ignore advanced combat rules.  Ignore epic space combat.  Ignore physics, climatology and biology.  If you want that other stuff, go play Advanced Squad Leader, Star Fleet Battles, and Battletech between study sessions for the college science classes you’re signing up for.  Focus instead on character concepts and story.  Use the science fiction setting as a springboard into thrilling locations that boggle the mind.  Don’t get wrapped up in details and accounting.  The setting is merely a backdrop for action and adventure.  Don’t obsess over it– you need to let the players become the “stars of the show.”  Game mechanics and setting data are the rpg equivalent to matte paintings and special effects: they’re just tools for communicating a story; don’t get bogged down into them.

Also, don’t feel like you need to work out the nature of the entire universe at one time.  George Lucas didn’t and neither should you.  Make things up as you go.  Work things out in detail only after a game session reveals the need for it.  You’ll work in much more useful directions this way whereas if you try to make everything you need before playing you’ll never get started.  This is another place where GURPS system pays off.  You won’t use but a fraction of its rules when you start, but whatever direction your campaign ultimately goes, there’ll be solid rules there to help you out if you want them later.  In other games you’d be left with working out your own house-rules.

(One last note: GURPS has long had a reputation for being a decent system for “realistic” genres.  With Fourth edition, they retain a lot of that strength, but have put forth a lot of effort to address the fantastic side of things.  Superhero and fantasy monster type stuff has been retooled and integrated into the core books.  This may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but the system is much more flexible than before.)

[Adaen of Bridgewater asked me a quick question... and my answer quickly raged out of control, so it ended up here as a blog entry.  Be sure to check out their site.]

Wil Wheaton’s now reviewing the first season Next Generation.  (Thanks to GundamPilotSpaz for the info!)  It’s moderately funny stuff in places, but I like it because he really articulates all of the things that stink about the series in a such a loving way.  It’s an impressive feat.  (Also, Wil Wheaton played Car Wars… and was probably designing cars between scenes during the filming of the show.  You’d know this stuff if you’d read Dancing Barefoot.)

It’s somewhat depressing to me how this guy’s career has turned out.  I get the impression that he sorta left Next Generation because he was a hot property at the time… but then ended up going nowhere.  Now he’s married a divorcé, plays poker competitively, and blogs about his geekiness and how great life was when he was a teenager.  According to Wikipedia, his column in Dungeon magazine died, his column for the Onion has stalled, his book sales tanked, and he’s even had to post a huge online apology to his parents after going ballistic on some random topic.

I’d love to see Wil turn things around… but the whole wistful melancholy bit wears thin after a while.  I mean… I’m an aging nostalgic geek blogger… if life sucks for Wil Wheaton, then what’s it gotta be like for me?  I don’t want to think about that!

If you want to see someone that can pull this sort of thing off in a much more positive way… cruise on over to Dave’s Long Box.  This guy is insanely funny.  You have to be careful where you read his stuff because you will bust out laughing.  (I think so much of the guy, I even tried in vain to imitate him a couple of times.  I don’t come close, but I figure I get some leeway if I’m picking on George Lucas.)  I’m glad to hear that he’s going to be posting more regularly again.

Luke wasn’t the only one to get mugged.  It all started when a lone Ice Creature discovered what he thought was a Snack-Warmer.  It sure was hot inside the base, but the Taun Tauns were quite a delicacy:

He evidently went back to his buddies and let slip the news.  Soon, other Ice Creatures began to drop in:

When the Imperial fleet jumped in, a whole party of Monsters were trapped.  The Rebel leaders simply looked the other way when R2-D2 mercillessly taunted them:

These scenes were obviously cut from the film because they so clearly establish a moral equivalency between the Empire and the Rebellion.  It’s sad, really…. 

Well… okay… maybe it had more to do with the fact that these scenes do absolutely nothing to propel Luke, Han, and Leia further into the action.  Even worse, the ice monster sequence that did make it into the film was probably the worst special effect in the entire series.  All you see is this big arm at first.  (Woah!)  Then when he’s coming to eat Luke in the cave, he looks like this stupid unmoving maniquin that’s just being rolled along the passageway.  Barf.

No, but Luke, Han, and Leia are really what its about.  But just sitting back and watching the films again, I have to say that the plot is really lacking something there.  You know… the films really need an epic prelude that undermines the centrality of those three… and that establishes R2-D2 and Chewbacca as being the chief spys and the key movers and shakers of the entire Rebel movement.

No… no….  Nevermind.  That’s a really dumb idea.  Forget I mentioned it.

The movie originally opened up with Luke observing the space battle above Tatooine, but the scene was cut because the hat he was wearing was just too embarrassing– even for the man who would later create Jar-Jar Binks!

We also would have gotten to see the “Toshi station” where Luke oh so wanted to go pick up power converters… but that scene was cut because Luke’s nickname was so irritating and also because Lucas later decided that a crystal ball did not fit so well with his vision of the Star Wars ethos: 

I had the Star Wars storybook as a kid and it also contained images of the following scene that hit the cutting room floor.  Man, I thought Biggs was cool.  I could not figure out why they cut him, but then in the nineties Lucas reinserted some of his scenes when he released the altered version of the film.  Oh!  The pain!  If only we lived in a world where Lucas had someone near him to tell him he was out of his mind….

You remember that scene with the shiny black miniature Death Star looking floating droid thing with a syringe?  I never could figure it out as a kid….  I mean here we are in this high tech supernatural universe and Vader can’t pull a Jedi Mind Trick while using some kind of high tech brain imaging.  No… we’ve got a floating death star with a syringe!  It just doesn’t fit.  Well, you should have seen what Lucas originally had in mind: a black droid with a mohawk and an earring!  “I pity the fool that don’t tell me the location of the hidden rebel base!”

He’s another lousy scene that should of stayed on the cutting room floor but that Lucas had to dig back up for his re-envisioning of the film.  At least you get to check out the frightening pre-slug Jabba:

And check out this rendition of the famous Remote and Blast Shield.  This image upset me even as a kinder-gardener with only a dim memory of the movie.  I guess the Marvel Comics artist lacked the necessary stills to pull this one off and had to make it up based mostly on the script?

And here’s the scene where Frodo is entering the Mines of Moria… oh wait… wrong movie.  You remember the scene where Chewbacca gets frightened and Han just randomly shoots his blaster down an empty hall?  It never did make any sense to me.  Apparently, Lucas originally had something different in mind there as we see below.  Hmm… maybe he was running out of special effects $$?

But if I was slightly confused by Han shooting down an empty hallway, I was quite perturbed by Obiwan Kenobi’s light-saber duel.  He just gives up!  He holds his light-saber straight up and lets Vader kill him.  Right.  (Luke, did Ben forget to tell you that not only do Jedi Knights venerate lying, but they are also heavy into ritual suicide.)  The comic book adaption of that fight is much better; Kenobi talks a little more smack and appears to go down fighting.  Here’s line that got cut from the film that puts one of Ben’s more cryptic remarks in context:

Here’s a particular juicy bit… in the earliest cuts of the film, Luke’s father was well known and well thought of.  Personally, I’d like to live in a universe where Ben’s not a liar, Luke didn’t kiss his sister, and where Vader was not Luke’s daddy.  This scene provides some evidence for those that think that things really were intended to be that way as the first film came together:

Here’s a scene that demonstrates how Lucas’s revisionism truly knows no bounds.  You can tell this is the revised adaption from 2006 because Lucas had Dark Horse comics remove the part where Luke screams “Carrie!!!”  instead he makes them put in some lame line about ‘Technicos.’  Right.  You’re not fooling anyone, George.  It’s bad enough that you’ve altered the movies, but could you at least stay out of the comic adaption and leave things be?