(rpg) Star Frontiers -- why did you like it?

[Son_of_Thunder]

Two Words

Two Words.

Sonic Devestator.

Man, we leveled whole cities with that thing. Also the best RPG session I ever ran was for Star Frontiers. Also the best session I ever played in was Star Frontiers. Man, that guy could GM.

I remember once we were walking home from school during an assembly and the stories he weaved about being in Vietnam made me believe he was in Nam. Even though he was a junior in High School.

 

[Voadam]

The races, some of the tech, the art.

 

[lukelightning]

My brother was a Traveller fan, I prefered Star Frontiers. I think the main factor was I wanted aliens and personal action, and my brother just liked humans and spaceship stuff.

 

[rogueattorney]

I only had the Alpha Dawn portion of the game, and never got into the Knight Hawks or Zeb's Guide.

What a lot of folk have stated is dead on - it was simple, stupid, and fun. (And stupid = so stoo-pid it's smart, like the Ramones and AC/DC.) It also hung together well enough for protracted campaigns, something that similarly lite games like the original Marvel Super Heroes game did not do. Thus it was easy to get into, but didn't wear out its welcome quickly.

If I was going to get someone new into rpg's and was going to pay absolutely no attention to genre or whether the game was OOP or not, Star Frontiers would be one of the top two or three on my list. They don't make games like this anymore.

R.A.

 

[Azul]

I only had the Alpha Dawn portion of the game, and never got into the Knight Hawks or Zeb's Guide.

What a lot of folk have stated is dead on - it was simple, stupid, and fun. (And stupid = so stoo-pid it's smart, like the Ramones and AC/DC.) It also hung together well enough for protracted campaigns, something that similarly lite games like the original Marvel Super Heroes game did not do. Thus it was easy to get into, but didn't wear out its welcome quickly.

I too had only Alpha Dawn and R.A. is pretty dead on. It was simple and fun. At the time, the only major sci-fi rival was Traveller (also fun, but for different reasons). Star Frontiers was beer and pretzels fun gaming, like playing Basic D&D.

 

[Richards]

I especially liked the dralasites. An amorphous race that loved bad puns and vaudeville jokes was right up my alley. The vrusk were pretty cool, too.

Johnathan

 

[frog]

Two words

Gyrojet Guns!!!!

 

[JollieRoger]

What I liked (mind you I have not played in over 17 years so some of my rememberances may be off):

The alien races were awesome, except the Vrusk. Just did not like the Preying Mantis/Grasshopper thing. I thought they should have been a bad guy race.

Little intresting tidbits about the aliens not just that they were a monkey, blob or insect but something special. The monkeys were light sensitive so they had to wear sun glass/gogles. The blob could have mutliple appendeges based of an attribute score. The Vrusks only had 3 fingers on each hand so all their equipment had to be specially made.

The rules were basic and easy to understand.

Character Generation was a snap.

The printed adventures were good.

You were given a good basic framework for the universe to play in. Because it was so basic it left you a lot to expand upon and explore so everything was new and different.

For me it introduced SF elements that I look for in SF games now. Gyrojet weapons, Vibro weapons, Sonic Weapons, etc.

The starship combat system was easy and the characters skills and attributes plug directly into the system. No converting because the combat was a different scale.

Starship contructions was easy.

What I did not like:

Skill system had quarks. Like the computer skill. You built your own computer and each level you advanced you could add something different or improve something on the computer or something like that.

In order to get a starship class (ie pilot, gunner, etc) in the Knight Hawks expansion you had to be a certain level and skill level in the Alpha Dawn game. If you played through it could take you a long time to get enough skills to crew a space ship. They did have rules on advancing quicker however.

Vrusks like I said above.

Starship construction rules did not allow you to build the combat vessels in the book. I do believe they explained that the military had advance miniaturation for the weapons and systems but I am not sure.

Fighters only had 3 rockets as weapons. Nothing else.

Alpha Dawn had almost nothing on Starship and Starship combat. Knight Hawks did not come out for a couple of years (at least in my area). But when Knight Hawks did come out we were right back into playing consistently again.

 

[dcollins]

The system was very clean, elegant, workable, and served the flavor almost perfectly. It was the first skill-based RPG I played (basically just 7 different skills, god how I'd love that today). To this day the Knight Hawks spaceship rules infect everything I think about miniature gaming. Kudos, Doug Niles!

Furthermore they did something really brillaint in the Basic Game -- they seeded it with the first adventure of the Volturnus trilogy, and a whole lot of stuff that gave you a taste of later adventures, so you were practically compelled to go get them. The basic box had:
- Monsters detailed that were on Volturnus (later adventures)
- Counter sheets full of aliens & monsters found on Volturnus (later adventures)
- A battle map of locations found on Volturnus (later adventures)

The curiousity was almost overwhelming about these monsters, aliens, and locations. I think that was a brilliant move I haven't seen since.

 

[3d6+15]

Wow, I was just this minute poring over D20 future and contemplating a converison of "Mutiny on the Elanor Moreas".

I liked the interesting aliens. Dralasite are the favorites it seems and I'll add my voice there, although I give the Vrusk a second.

I liked the Sathar but because they were the most obvious threat GM's tended to overuse them or use them too simplistically.

Could be I remember the rest of it more fondly than I should.