Quote from: StormBringer;376867No, 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.

Go flip through the rules and compare their content to that of Traveller from the same era. It goes a bit deeper than just genre conventions.

Quote from: StormBringer;376867The similarities you are pointing out are entirely genre related.  It may as well be said that Star Wars was a rip off of Traveller.

OK, now you have entered into hyperbole.

Quote from: Sigmund;376866Well 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

Honestly, I think the worst thing that Alternity had going for it was their task resolution system. God, that made me cringe...

But I think you have hit upon something important here. It is pretty well recognised that D&D was the grand-daddy of all fantasy RPGs and every fantasy game that came after is compared to it. A similar case can said for Traveller in that it is the grand-daddy of all science fiction RPGs and every science fiction game after gets compared to it as well.

Now, can these be then considered the pillars of Old School design thought?

Quote from: jeff37923;376870Go flip through the rules and compare their content to that of Traveller from the same era. It goes a bit deeper than just genre conventions.

I think Clash said it better earlier, I will defer to him.

QuoteOK, now you have entered into hyperbole.

Obviously.  It's like we have never met before.  

Quote from: StormBringer;376884Obviously.  It's like we have never met before.  

LOL That's what I was gonna say.

Besides, the first version of Traveller came out almost simultaeniously with the premier of Star Wars.

Did one steal from the other? No. Yet both products drew from the same source material in science fiction.

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.

Nope.

Back when it first came out - I bought a copy of Star Frontiers. It read like TRAVELLER dumbed down for Junior High School kids. It was very much an attempt to copy TRAVELLER.  The only thing I liked about it was the shopping mall map in the boxed set. That got used for a CAR WARS battle at a convention. (We were inspired by THE BLUES BROTHERS movie)

As odd as it seems, I pretty much gotta agree with Jeff on this one and his next 3 pages of comments.


- Ed C.

Quote from: Koltar;376899Back when it first came out - I bought a copy of Star Frontiers. It read like TRAVELLER dumbed down for Junior High School kids. It was very much an attempt to copy TRAVELLER.  
- Ed C.

This is possibly one of the most ridiculous things you have ever said, Ed.

Quote from: StormBringer;376900This is possibly one of the most ridiculous things you have ever said, Ed.

Huh! StarCluster is definitely influenced by Traveller - along with SPI Universe and Ringworld - and I've never made any bones about that. I own Star Frontiers - bought it when it came out - but never got a whiff of Traveller off it. I'd have liked it better if I had.

-clash

Quote from: StormBringer;376900This is possibly one of the most ridiculous things you have ever said, Ed.

Yeah, I have to agree. I much preferred Star Frontiers to Traveller because it is space opera like Star Wars. Traveller is much more like Star Trek or Babylon 5.

Quote from: flyingmice;376810D&D was not a framework system, Tavis. It was an Accretive system - Rules are added ad hoc to the existing rules as problems are encountered. Each problem has a separate but equal solution, and exceptions are handled via judgement calls. Rules inter-relate in strange and unpredictable ways. There is a lot of flavor inherent to this model - quirky, messy, and interesting.

Framework systems are designed - a set of abstract interfaces, to which modular sub-systems can be attached if they have matching interfaces. Sub-systems return a value which can be handled by the framework. Problems are resolved by application of a sub-system, with exceptions handled by other sub-systems added as needed. This model necessitates a high degree of abstraction, due to the need to standardize interfaces, but is extremely flexible - both in application and in design.

So what's your take on the discussion at this point.  Are you getting any usable insight out of Old School and New School out of this?  Is this part of that or should it be a different discussion?

Quote from: John Morrow;376947So what's your take on the discussion at this point.  Are you getting any usable insight out of Old School and New School out of this?  Is this part of that or should it be a different discussion?

Hi John!

Insight? Yes. It has been very interesting so far. A good discussion. I'm getting a much better handle on what constitutes Old School, and thus what constitutes the fictitious New School. One thing I'm seeing is that there is no New School, because Old School is a new concept. Old School is really a retroactive conceptualization of play, one which we who were running and playing games at the time had no idea of. Old School games are the way they are because of the limitations of the state of game design at the time, not because of conscious choice. Serendipitously, these very limitations of design created room for a certain freedom of play which has a real appeal.

Certainly I think there is some confusion in the ranks of the Old School adherents as to whether the "Old School feel" is an artifact of simulacra, or whether it can be consciously designed into a new game. If the latter is correct, which is my gut feeling, then the appeal of actual simulacra is a gestalt thing, which possibly may help in non-linear appreciation, and most definitely in nostalgia, both genuine and artificial - a considerable number of Old School adherents are too young to have real nostalgia for these products. In any case, the Old School movement is hardly monolithic. The variety of answers here confirms that if anyone doubted.

As for the Framework thing, that was an aside. I'm a framework designer,so it was important to me, but not at all germane to the discussion. AFAIK, there are no Old School Framework systems.

-clash

Quote from: FrankTrollman;376781But the real turning point of "New School" that you're probably thinking of happens in 2000. The year of d20. That's when the gaming world got turned upside down again by the fact that the 500 pound gorilla had made a new edition that was modern enough to appeal to the cheese eating gaming snob crowd. For several years, innovation pretty much stood on its head as people found that they couldn't make something that could compete with d20's combined assets of being something people already owned and also good enough.

And yeah, 2008 came around, D&D made a new edition that doesn't have that commanding position anymore, and people are making new games. And what boils out as the dominant paradigm of game design for this generation will be interesting history.

-Frank

Spoken like a true OGL worshipper.

Quote from: flyingmice;376982Hi John!

Insight? Yes. It has been very interesting so far. A good discussion. I'm getting a much better handle on what constitutes Old School, and thus what constitutes the fictitious New School. One thing I'm seeing is that there is no New School, because Old School is a new concept. Old School is really a retroactive concept of play, one which we who were running and playing games at the time had no idea of. Old School games are the way they are because of the limitations of the state of game design at the time, not because of conscious choice. Serendipitously, these very limitations of design created room for a certain freedom of play which has a real appeal.

Certainly I think there is some confusion in the ranks of the Old School adherents as to whether the "Old School feel" is an artifact of simulacra, or whether it can be consciously designed into a game. If the latter is correct, which is my gut feeling, then the appeal of actual simulacra is a gestalt thing, which possibly may help in non-linear appreciation, and most definitely in nostalgia, both genuine and artificial - a considerable number of Old School adherents are too young to have real nostalgia for these products. In any case, the Old School movement is hardly monolithic. The variety of answers here confirms that if anyone doubted.

As for the Framework thing, that was an aside. I'm a framework designer,so it was important to me, but not at all germane to the discussion. AFAIK, there are no Old School Framework systems.

-clash

I think its a bit simpler than that. Arguing with Old School people, the one unique point of difference, which only occurs when arguing with them, is the philosophy of challenging the player directly. Everything else is generally a matter of taste, tastes that can be held by people who aren't "Old School". At some point in the 80s, RPGs broke away from that philosophy, and until the OSR never went back. Even D&D itself abandoned it.

If one were to define "New School" as everything that isn't "Old School", it would cover almost everything released after the original wargaming phase, and have challenging the players by challenging their playing pieces(characters) instead of challenging the players directly as a core concept, and the philosophy that playing the game is an end in and of itself.

Quote from: StormBringer;376900This is possibly one of the most ridiculous things you have ever said, Ed.

I also have to agree. I owned and played both games back then (hell, I still own them), and one of the things that excited my group about Star Frontiers was how different it was from Traveller in both tone and mechanics. To see it referred to as a "Traveller Lite" knock-off now is hard to grok.

We liked Traveller, but it was much more "hard scifi," like a lot of scifi literature of the time (think of the stuff Pohl, Clarke, and Niven were producing in the 70s and early 80s); Star Frontiers was like Star Wars, which had pretty much grabbed us by the throats when it came to scifi gaming.

Quote from: StormBringer;376900This is possibly one of the most ridiculous things you have ever said, Ed.

The Doomsday Clock just moved ahead five minutes to 11:59.