Quote from: FrankTrollman;376842That's a good way to put it. 3e D&D probably made the nineties last an extra six or seven years.

-Frank

It must have been a hard time for the swine.

Quote from: J Arcane;376678You especially see it in their attempts at doing other games, in stuff like Alternity and Gamma World 4e, like their trying to puzzle out on their own mechanical concepts that were quite familiar by that time to everyone else, and winding up with this weird convoluted half-formed thing.  

Like those moments when you come up with what seems like a good idea, and you're struggling to explain it to a friend, and then the friend says, "Oh, you mean this?" and you realize that's exactly what you were trying and failing to get at and if you'd only been more literate on the subject you'd already know it.

Star Frontiers and Alternity were pretty blatent attempts to be competitive with Traveller, from what I read of them.

Quote from: jeff37923;376850Star Frontiers and Alternity were pretty blatent attempts to be competitive with Traveller, from what I read of them.

Then you must not have read very much, Jeff.  Star Frontiers was about as far from Traveller as it was from D&D.

Quote from: StormBringer;376854Then you must not have read very much, Jeff.  Star Frontiers was about as far from Traveller as it was from D&D.

And Dark Matter was Alternity's best setting, which was so not Traveller.

Quote from: StormBringer;376854Then you must not have read very much, Jeff.  Star Frontiers was about as far from Traveller as it was from D&D.

Bullshit. Everything in their Knight Hawks expansion was an attempt to copy Traveller's free trader campaign style with riffs on Beltstrike and Broadsword.

Quote from: Sigmund;376855And Dark Matter was Alternity's best setting, which was so not Traveller.

Yet the rules for creating star systems and worlds was a dumbed down version of Traveller's star system generation rules while their Progress Levels was a compressed take on Traveller's Tech Levels.

You are talking setting where I am talking rules.

Quote from: jeff37923;376856Bullshit. Everything in their Knight Hawks expansion was an attempt to copy Traveller's free trader campaign style with riffs on Beltstrike and Broadsword.

What?  Knight Hawks?  That was first and foremost a space battles miniatures game.  The ship design and incorporation into the role playing part was secondary.  There may have been some indications of a free trader kind of campaign, but that was really minor, and just a natural consequence of having ships with cargo space in the first place.

You know I am a big Traveller fan, so this isn't any kind of denigration of that, but I think you are pretty far off the mark on this one.

Quote from: jeff37923;376857Yet the rules for creating star systems and worlds was a dumbed down version of Traveller's star system generation rules while their Progress Levels was a compressed take on Traveller's Tech Levels.

You are talking setting where I am talking rules.

Think about it, Jeff -  the star system creation rules were attempts at  modeling physical fact as understood at the time. There really aren't many ways to do that. I see it as a less well implemented version of the same concepts. As for the tech/progress levels, both come from the ages of man (stone age, bronze age, iron age, etc.) concept that was prevalent at the time. Did they model them after Traveller? If they did, they should  have done a better job - after all, the work was already done. As others have pointed out, TSR had a corporate obliviousness to other RPGs that was staggering.

Now, were these games *responses* to Traveller's popularity? Absolutely! Did they copy from Traveller? I really doubt it. They probably never actually read it.

-clash

Quote from: StormBringer;376858What?  Knight Hawks?  That was first and foremost a space battles miniatures game.  The ship design and incorporation into the role playing part was secondary.  There may have been some indications of a free trader kind of campaign, but that was really minor, and just a natural consequence of having ships with cargo space in the first place.

You know I am a big Traveller fan, so this isn't any kind of denigration of that, but I think you are pretty far off the mark on this one.

If Knight Hawks was primarily a space miniatures battle game, then why were most of its contents designed to be a supplement for Star Frontiers, a RPG?

I think you may be misremembering the product.

Quote from: flyingmice;376859Think about it, Jeff -  the star system creation rules were attempts at  modeling physical fact as understood at the time. There really aren't many ways to do that. I see it as a less well implemented version of the same concepts. As for the tech/progress levels, both come from the ages of man (stone age, bronze age, iron age, etc.) concept that was prevalent at the time. Did they model them after Traveller? If they did, they should  have done a better job - after all, the work was already done. As others have pointed out, TSR had a corporate obliviousness to other RPGs that was staggering.

Now, were these games *responses* to Traveller's popularity? Absolutely! Did they copy from Traveller? I really doubt it. They probably never actually read it.

-clash

While I understand your line of arguement here regarding TSR's obliviousness. Alternity is I think a special case since it came out not long after the harrassment lawsuit filed against GDW by TSR over Gary Gygax's involvement with Dangerous Journeys for GDW. So I'd venture to say that TSR knew about GDW and its product line.

Quote from: jeff37923;376861If Knight Hawks was primarily a space miniatures battle game, then why were most of its contents designed to be a supplement for Star Frontiers, a RPG?

I think you may be misremembering the product.

Umm look here. KH was an RPG supplement, but it was playable as a stand alone board game. That is *exactly* what it was. I never got it, as Star Frontiers never clicked with me, but it's a real miniature war game.

-clash

Quote from: jeff37923;376862While I understand your line of arguement here regarding TSR's obliviousness. Alternity is I think a special case since it came out not long after the harrassment lawsuit filed against GDW by TSR over Gary Gygax's involvement with Dangerous Journeys for GDW. So I'd venture to say that TSR knew about GDW and its product line.

OK - I can't argue. I'm not familiar enough with Alternity to say one way or another.

-clash

Quote from: flyingmice;376863Umm look here. KH was an RPG supplement, but it was playable as a stand alone board game. That is *exactly* what it was. I never got it, as Star Frontiers never clicked with me, but it's a real miniature war game.

-clash

I'm not arguing against the fact it was an RPG supplement that could also be a standalone miniatures wargame. I am arguing against the idea that Knight Hawks was only a standalone miniatures wargame.

Quote from: jeff37923;376857Yet the rules for creating star systems and worlds was a dumbed down version of Traveller's star system generation rules while their Progress Levels was a compressed take on Traveller's Tech Levels.

You are talking setting where I am talking rules.

Well heck, even Clash uses Tech levels. It just works, as does the system and world generation stuff. I still got little to no Traveller vibe while running Alternity, either with Dark Matter or Star Drive. Different feel (setting stuff), different mechanics, just... different. I wouldn't argue that Traveller was a big influence, but I wouldn't call Alternity "dumbed-down" Traveller unless most subsequent license-free sci-fi games are "dumbed-down" traveller.

P.S. I'd say Traveller is a hard act to follow, so of course anyone with half a brain is going to rip off at least a little bit, because it's good stuff. The settings are what really set it apart though, which is why I mentioned Dark Matter first. I suppose it doesn't really matter though. Maybe they should have ripped off more from Traveller actually, the game might have had a longer production run

Quote from: jeff37923;376861If Knight Hawks was primarily a space miniatures battle game, then why were most of its contents designed to be a supplement for Star Frontiers, a RPG?

I think you may be misremembering the product.

No, I have the product on a shelf less than 2m away.

Naturally, there will be a larger portion of it related to RPGs, there are more hooks into the larger body of rules.  That doesn't mean they were trying to pander to the Traveller crowd.  The games are so far apart in terms of tone and approach, about the only similarity they share is space and space ships.  The space combat part was pretty much stand alone, and the RPG portion was entirely optional.

The original Star Frontiers didn't have space ship rules, obviously, so it was pretty much all handwaved.  That didn't change all that much when the Knight Hawk's rules came out, except now there were rules for mass combat in space.

The similarities you are pointing out are entirely genre related.  It may as well be said that Star Wars was a rip off of Traveller.