Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;988099Latest edition of the game (2005) is here.

History of the game here.

Yes, that's the one I have. Flashing Blades has an interesting relationship to En Garde from what I've read, though I prefer Flashing Blades.

Quote from: Dumarest;988101Yes, that's the one I have. Flashing Blades has an interesting relationship to En Garde from what I've read, though I prefer Flashing Blades.

The influence on Flashing Blades is clear. I can see why you might prefer FB. One can play Flashing Blades without having a large number of unrelated PCs. En Garde plays best if you have enough PCs to make who gets promoted in any given regiment and who gains which offices competitive and to sustain several rivalries between several regiments.

On a somewhat different note, I presume one reason Marc Miller listed En Garde was because the army combat subsystem from En Garde appears to have influenced Traveller's system for rolling previous experience.

Quote from: Bren;988301The influence on Flashing Blades is clear. I can see why you might prefer FB. One can play Flashing Blades without having a large number of unrelated PCs. En Garde plays best if you have enough PCs to make who gets promoted in any given regiment and who gains which offices competitive and to sustain several rivalries between several regiments.

At best I've been able to get four players for Flashing Blades. They don't tend to be worried about promotions and such as few of them have pursued military careers.

Quote from: Bren;988301On a somewhat different note, I presume one reason Marc Miller listed En Garde was because the army combat subsystem from En Garde appears to have influenced Traveller's system for rolling previous experience.

That's interesting; I never thought of that before you mentioned it. I've always assumed FASA Trek borrowed heavily from Traveller's character generation system as you got similarly experienced characters at the end of the career path.

Quote from: Dumarest;988302At best I've been able to get four players for Flashing Blades.

Exactly. While four players seems ideal to play any of the published Flashing Blades adventures or for running many types of FB campaigns, 4 people is really too few for the pursuit of status and office in En Garde to shine.

QuoteThat's interesting; I never thought of that before you mentioned it. I've always assumed FASA Trek borrowed heavily from Traveller's character generation system as you got similarly experienced characters at the end of the career path.

The FASA Star Trek RPG probably did get inspiration from Traveller.

On the other hand, the battle resolution process in En Garde and previous experience rolling for Traveller had some striking similarities. Both can be "played" as a sort of solo minigame. Since En Garde was published in 1976 while Traveller was published in 1977, I infer that the former influenced the latter. The FASA Star Trek RPG was published in 1982 so I assume it was probably influenced by Traveller. (I assume anyone from our dimension who was designing a Star Trek RPG in the early 1980s would already be familiar with Traveller.)

Since games are often in development for some time before they are published, it's possible that Traveller was developed at the same time as or even before En Garde. However since both games were published within one year of each other by the same company and since game companies at that time were small shops I would be greatly surprised if one game didn't influence the design of the other. There are other reasons to conclude that En Garde influenced Traveller (rather than the reverse). When I read En Garde it seems to be a less polished effort than does FB. EG reads to me like a proto RPG tacked onto a dueling system that is completely diceless. (Uncertainty in dueling arises from a rock-paper-scissors type matrix for how dueling maneuvers oppose each other. En Garde dueling probably owes more systematically to the Jousting mini-game in the old Chainmail rules than to any dice-based RPG combat system.)

To me En Garde reads like a very early effort in creating something RPG-like. Whereas Flashing Blades is clearly intended bo be an RPG that uses dice to generate most of the uncertainty in combat (like the vast majority of RPGs) and it has a much more unified system in which uncertainty is predominantly generated by rolling dice and much of play is intended to clearly follow the go on adventures mode of play inspired by D&D and used by the vast majority of RPGs developed since with the promotion part of FB being somewhat equivalent to the domain level of play in D&D where adventurers after they reach high level build their own castle, temple, or tower and focus on the development of their domain or demesne.

Well, don't forget that FASA produced a good amount of material for Traveller well before they published their Star Trek game, so I presume the good people at FASA were well familiar with Traveller. And if you're going to borrow ideas, the Traveller character generation system is a humdinger to choose.

Well, FASA did start out as a producer of Traveller supplements before branching out.

En Garde! is really intended to be a long-running campaign game, possibly resolved through PBM, with a dozen or more players in the same campaign. Joining a full-sized EG campaign should be more or less like joining an internet forum or something.

Quote from: jeff37923;988356Well, FASA did start out as a producer of Traveller supplements before branching out.

I keep hoping, vainly I know, that Harebrained Schemes (which is Jordan Weisman's computer company) will make a computer RPG like their Shadowrun games. But I would like to see a computer version of Traveller that doesn't suck

So, isn't this thread still two games short?

Maybe he was overambitious and couldn't come up with two more.

Looks like Voros took Labor Day off. I suspect Marc Miller probably did finish his list.

We'll never know?

I did go away for most the weekend but Mr. Miller has yet to post his final two picks on FB.

Quote from: Voros;989903I did go away for most the weekend but Mr. Miller has yet to post his final two picks on FB.

Lazy shit!

Quote from: Dumarest;989110Maybe he was overambitious and couldn't come up with two more.

Like I said...