Minimalist Sci Fi Gaming

I'm not sure exactly why, but I've had Star Frontiers on the brain the past couple of days. 

I know the game has a pretty bad reputation among many gamers, but it also has its ardent fans. I loved the game as a kid. And while I would probably not say I love the game anymore, I still like it and find it fun to play. Although it's been quite a while since I've tried to run it, I might still brush it off and give it a go some day. 

A few of the common complaints against the system that I find are as follows (not all inclusive, just what comes to mind right away): 

• It doesn't have starship operation/creation rules (until Knight Hawks).
• It's a "muddled" or "incomplete" system.
• It lacks realism in the skills it offers.
• The setting is under-developed and silly.
• It's a game for kids, not serious sci-fi fans.
• The tech in the game is dreadfully outdated.
  

I don't want to answer all of these criticisms in this post, but I may get around to them later. The thing that's been on my mind is the action resolution system of Star Frontiers. 

It's a simple percentile system, roll under your Attribute or Skill number. Easy peasy. 

It's the same resolution system that Call of Cthulhu uses, yet that system is not derided as simplistic. Of course, CoC has a big "comprehensive" list of skills, alphabetized on your character sheet. And having played a fair amount of CoC the past year or so, there are a whole lot of those skills that NEVER get used. In fact, one of my previous posts was basically about how I managed to make my PC's musician background relevant in the adventure, and helped out by making an Art (Jazz) roll at an appropriate time. 

Star Frontiers has a very limited skill list. There are skills for each of five or six weapon groups, martial arts, demolitions, mechanics, robots, computers, medical, environmental, and psycho-social. Each of these has subskills that you automatically gain access to when you take the parent skill. And when you improve the parent skill, all subskills improve. 

It's very minimalist in design. It features skills for things your PCs are likely to be doing (fighting space monsters or the Sathar, exploring planets and meeting alien species, and dealing with technology problems). The lack of starship content is because of the conceit of the setting. It's Aliens, not Star Wars. Starships capable of FTL travel are huge, expensive, and the province of governments and huge corporations. It's not designed to be Traveller with its African Queen style tramp-steamer starships. But that's a discussion for another post, I believe. 

Part of what makes Star Frontiers work well, at least for me, is that the eight Attributes can actually cover a lot of "skills" that aren't covered in the rules. For those not familiar with the game, the Attributes come in four pairs: 

• Strength/Stamina [STR/STA]
  
• Dexterity/Reaction Speed [DEX/RS]
  
• Intuition/Logic [INT/LOG]
  
• Personality/Leadership [PER/LDR]
  

Most of these don't affect skills. Your base weapon attack value is half of your DEX (you can use half of STR for melee/martial arts if it's better than DEX), plus 10% per level in the appropriate skill. The Technology and Bio-Social skills (everything not combat related), plus Demolitions, all have a set base percentage that you start at for each subskill. A few subskills are just set at that base percentage, but most gain a 10% bonus for each level of the skill a character has trained. 

So, people complain that the rules don't cover lots of other actions. But actually, they do. All those other actions, if they require a resolution roll to determine success, can be mapped to one of the eight Attributes. In fact, this makes the game system both rules-lite and fairly comprehensive in its coverage of actions that the system can resolve. 

Below, I've copied the skill list from d20 Modern. I'll note which ones are already covered by a skill or subskill in Star Frontiers, and which Attributes (or in a few cases other rules) could cover the action in a Star Frontiers game. 

Balance  DEX
Bluff    PER
Climb   DEX (there are climbing rules in the game)
Computer Use  Computers already covers this
Concentration  STA
Craft  A few of these are subskills, others could be Attribute checks. Crafting other than robots, or survival gear in emergencies, isn't normally part of the game, but if you wanted it to be, it could be.
     Ct:Chemical  LOG, Environmental, or Demolitions depending on the use
     Ct:Electronic  Technician, Computers, or Robotics depending on the use
     Ct:Mechanical  Technician, or Environmental for simple tools and weapons
     Ct:Pharmaceutical  Medical
     Ct:Structural  LOG or Technician
     Ct:Visual Art  INT or DEX
     Ct:Writing   INT
Decipher Script  LOG or INT, depending
Demolitions  Demolitions are already covered
Diplomacy  PER, but also partially covered by Psycho-Social
Disable Device  Technician, Computers, or Robotics depending on the use
Disguise  INT or PER depending on how it's being used
Drive   already covered by Technician
Escape Artist  DEX
Forgery  DEX or INT, depending
Gamble  LOG or INT, depending on the game
Gather Information  PER
Handle Animal  LDR
Hide   Environmental covers this already
Intimidate  LDR
Investigate   LOG
Jump   There are jumping rules that determine distance depending on local gravity that don't need rolls, but STR if a roll were necessary
Knowledge  Hmm, OK, here's an area that may be hard to cover. Lumping them all under LOG seems too broad. Some, like Arcane Lore, don't really play a part, and some others can be assumed by having other skills. A system like the Language rules (see below) might be imported if a Referee felt these sorts of determinations were important to the game. Otherwise, the closest Attribute or Skill, in my opinion, are listed below.
     Kw:Arcane Lore   not relevant
     Kw:Art   ???
     Kw:Behavioral Sciences  Pscycho-Social
     Kw:Business  ???
     Kw:Civics  ???
     Kw:Current Events 
     Kw:Earth and Life Sciences  Environmental
     Kw:History  ???
     Kw:Physical Sciences   LOG
     Kw:Popular Culture  ???
     Kw:Streetwise  PER
     Kw:Tactics   LOG, or assumed with a Military PSA?
     Kw:Technology  Technician, Computers, or Robotics depending on the use
     Kw:Theology and Philosophy  ???
Listen  I would probably go with INT for this, but it's a bit of a stretch. This is something the game assumes Referees will decide depending on circumstances, rather than requiring a roll.
Move Silently   Environmental covers this
Navigate   Environmental covers this
Perform   DEX or INT, depending on the use
Pilot  Technician covers this
Profession  There's already a system of determining pay per day depending on total skills known, used for hiring NPCs, or for pay offered to PCs for jobs. No need to make rolls.
Read/Write Language  The game contains a system similar to Skills for languages, with each level in a language costing 3XP and granting a +10% bonus to communicate in that language, starting at a 40% base.
Repair  Technician, Computers, or Robotics depending on the use
Research   LOG
Ride   DEX or RS depending on use
Search   I would probably go with INT for this, but it's a bit of a stretch. This is something the game assumes Referees will decide depending on circumstances, rather than requiring a roll.
Sense Motive  Pscycho-Social covers this
Sleight of Hand  RS
Speak Language  The game contains a system similar to Skills for languages, with each level in a language costing 3XP and granting a +10% bonus to communicate in that language, starting at a 40% base.
Spot  INT
Survival  Environmental covers this
Swim   There are swimming rules that don't involve checks, but STA might be used for endurance situations
Treat Injury  Medical covers this
Tumble  DEX

I think the case can be made that Star Frontiers actually can be a robust system, covering a wide variety of checks you might want to make with its base rules, even if they aren't covered in the Skill system. It's also a good minimalist game, focused on less serious sci-fi action, rather than hard sci-fi or more modern Star Wars-influenced sci-fi media. 

While designed and marketed as more of a kids game, compared to Traveller, it's not as bad of a game as many people seem to think.

Was rolling d20+Mod for skill checks the worst "innovation" of D&D in the past 25 years?

After a long, long break, today Steven asked to play d20 Modern. We got the book out, and I decided to quickly roll up a new PC. My Strong Hero/Martial Artist is cool, but the sorts of adventures we're running don't really play into the strong suits of my PC. So, I rolled up a new Dedicated Hero to join Steven's Fast Hero/Gunslinger. 

While playing, we talked a bit about the rules, especially the skill system. He's gotten used to my old school D&D game, where either you don't need to roll because you describe what you do, you roll x on d6, or roll d20 equal to your ability score or less for stuff like this. He's only 9, not the best at math, but even he can see that rolling d20 plus a modifier sucks for skill rolls. 

After the game, I remembered that there was a modern version of d20 Modern that came out recently. I went and looked it up. It's called Everyday Heroes, and it blends what was good about d20 Modern with 5E, according to its press and customer reviews. 

And from what I can tell (I'm not shucking out $30 for a PDF just to answer a question), it still uses d20+Mod for skill rolls. And instead of the ridiculous bonuses you could get for a few trained skills in d20 Modern (with everything else sucking), they went with 5E's bounded accuracy to keep modifiers low. Yeesh. 

I'm down for d20 Modern's take on classes. Basic heroic classes modeled on ability scores, with backgrounds, easy multi-classing, and later Advanced classes to customize your PC. Although it looks like Everyday Heroes may have ditched multi-classing. 

At least the Character sheet is a free download, and from that I can see that they have a much more reasonable, shorter skill list. And from customer reviews, they took the 5E feat style, so there aren't  dozens and dozens of feats that basically just give you small skill boosts, and ridiculously unnecessary feat chains to get your combat abilities halfway decent. 

So it may have some things going for it, but that skill mechanic just sucks. 

If I were to remake the game, I'd probably go with a 2d6 skill mechanic, like I did for Chanbara. Bell curve distributions make skills more reliable, at least if the target numbers for success aren't ridiculous. That flat d20 distribution is great for combat. You want combat to be swingy. That makes it exciting. Having swingy rolls when you're just trying to climb a rope or convince the security guard that you're supposed to be there, when you're the expert climber or fast talker, really sucks.

Taking Unusual Skills

In our recent Call of Cthulhu campaign, the main Keeper, Richard, took a break for a few sessions to let his friend Brady try his hand at being a game master. For Brady's game, I rolled up a jazz drummer named Theo. He's running a module that requires all the players to have mob connections, so my jazz man is way in debt for lots of booze, drugs, and women. 

In the session last week (the third session of Brady's run), our investigators have become trapped in the boarding house where the thief we're trying to track down lives. There are all sorts of weird things happening in the house. In one of the rooms, there was a young girl playing violin, and my PC and the mob hitman ended up in that room while other players investigated other rooms. The music she was playing was strange, and the hitman checked the bedroom to find the girl's parents dead with blood pouring from their ears. 

It wasn't hard to put two and two together. As the girl (ghost? demon?) started to play again, my PC decided to instruct her on the finer points of jazz rhythms. After a bit of discussion, Brady had me roll my Arts: Jazz skill, and I got a hard success (less than 50% of my chance to succeed). So Brady decided that instead of the 2 minute performance she was supposed to give -- at which time bad things would happen -- my rhythm lesson sped up her performance and since it was over in only one minute, we were able to escape the room unharmed. 

Yes, that's right. I was able to avoid catastrophe with jazz. 

Never let a min-maxer tell you you're wasting your time selecting non-optimal skills or a non-optimal background. You never know when those oddball skills/proficiencies/knowledge may come in handy!

Skill Resolution

End of semester grading and some personal stuff have taken up a lot of my time. So not much blogging lately. And no real time to put together my final response to Alexis on why it's good to have some results of rolls secret from the players. It'll come eventually.

In the meantime, Jeremy was wanting to try a different game tonight -- Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells, but everyone was busy or not enthused. No offense intended to the game designer, who is a cool dude. I, at least, am feeling mentally drained from wading through the research papers of ESL learners and didn't feel like trying to learn a new system tonight.

Jeremy shared a Questing Beast video review of SS&SS, and he mentioned that there is a "background" option to let you flesh out the three character classes more. Of course 5E also has that. And maybe some other game Jeremy was pushing recently (or he just bolted that on from SS&SS into something else maybe).

It got me thinking about how skills have been handled over the years. OD&D through the RC has set abilities for some classes (dwarf detection, elf secret door finding, halfling hiding) that is usually X on d6, where the default is either "can't do it" or 1 in 6 chance of success. Then there are Thieves with their % skill system completely unlike any other. And later, other things not covered by the rules were usually suggested to be done by a roll under an appropriate ability score (on a d20, 2d8, 3d6, 2d12, or whatever). With the exception of Thief skills that improved every level, these skills also didn't change over time (unless you found some way to raise/lower ability scores).

Of course, the ideal of unified mechanics (a bad idea for many games IMO) in 3E meant that skills needed to be handled with the same swinginess of combat, that flat d20 distribution plus modifiers. This was, IMO, a bad move. Unless you really focused your character build (ability score boosts, feats, magic items), your skill use was really unreliable. Especially since the DCs for skill checks tended to go up along with your skill levels.

But all this thinking (on my bus ride home this evening) reminded me of something I've been wanting to dust off and implement for TSR and TSR-East. AD&D's Secondary Skills table.

It seems, from the Questing Beast video review, that SS&SS does something similar to this, although a bit more free-form. You get to pick a background and whatever it is, if you're trying something related to that background, you succeed (or get a good chance to succeed on a roll).

When I was a kid, looking at AD&D for the first time, I thought this Secondary Skills system was too generic. I wanted discrete skills that could be applied, with defined mechanics for how to use them. After all, BECMI demi-humans and Thieves had that, in different ways.

But these days, I think the freedom to just negotiate what your character can do with the DM based on a descriptor like this is a good way to handle these things. We kind of did that when we were kids anyway without having a chart to roll on. It was often impromptu, and something that we just made up about our characters on the spot if it ever came up.

I had a Fighter named Falcon, and somewhere along the way his father's profession became important. I said he was a blacksmith. No reason, I just thought it sounded cool to have a blacksmith for a dad. From that point forward, Falcon was assumed to know a thing or two about smithing, including weapon/armor repair.

I really like that, and I think it's a much simpler way to add some flavor to the characters in an RPG than having to pour over skill lists and micromanage skill points or whatever. Complete 180 from when I was young.