from here: http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=32356&page=3

Quote from: David Johansen;831317I like design systems and Fire Fusion and Steel and GURPS Vehicles are my favorites.  Spacemaster Privateers gets honorable mention for having more errors and errata than the 600 page entirety of Traveller V.  But I haven't really done any weird ships.  A garbage scow converted into a mercenary transport.  A free trader that's been gutted and up enginned and upgunned into a gunboat.  A colonial transport and assorted subcraft.

I have designed three different vehicle design systems for Galactic Adventures, Galaxies In Shadow, and Incandescent and I'm well on my way to a fourth.

Which brought about this reply:

Quote from: danskmacabre;831318Lol at Privateers, I bought the books many years ago and WANTED to like it, but it was such a mess I just gave up on it.

To which I said:

Quote from: David Johansen;831411It's a quite a bit simpler than Mega Traveller or Fire Fusion and Steel or GURPS Vehicles.  Just full of errors.  There was a guy who tried to codify and correct all of it on the ICE forums a couple years ago but ICE's staff really doesn't care about SPAM so they didn't encourage him with as much as a pat on the head.

Really, it's a nice game, just phenomenally badly organized and edited due to being the last real product of the original ICE's bankruptcy.  Well, at least we got Blaster Law and Future Law in the end.  

Of course, the fans hated the new setting and hated Silent Death The New Millenium's TNE style trashing of the original setting.  (BUGS!  The BUGS were there all along!)  Personally, the new setting was under developed but very well thought out in terms of playability.  

The evil empire was overwhelming the good federation  so they were handing out letters of marque in hopes of cutting the enemy's shipping out from under them and the races were all easy to grasp: animal people and the space ships didn't need fuel, the pacifist, vegitarian bear people were slowly going crazy, androids couldn't plug into the senseweb without dying, and the noble wolf people were being bombed into the stone age on defiance and thus attempting to immigrate there en-mass.  What more do you really need to know?

That lead to this:

Quote from: danskmacabre;831533Never seen any of those.



I was already pretty happily running Spacemaster anyway at the time, so I wasn't really that interestd in going to a new version of SM.
I remember attempting character gen and it was so disorganised I gave up and walked away from it.



I wasn't that keen on the setting either TBH. I was quite keen on getting into the Silent death games and would have if they were more compatible with the original Spacemaster.



The intelligent animal races I thought were kind of stupid and it also turned me off the game in general.

Still, I did actually buy some of the supplements and use some ideas from them in SM. so it wasn't a total disaster.

Wherein I said:

Quote from: David Johansen;831564The thing is that ICE was pretty obsessed with easy to play settings at the time.  In this case, the animal races were pretty specifically uplifted, if by ancient aliens, so you had cats in people suits rather than people in cat suits if you see what I mean.

I've always maintained it would have done better with an anime aesthetic where such things are more accepted due to a tradition of animal-people as allegory that's largely atrophied in our own culture.

The Races and Cultures book actually does a decent job of fleshing them out and making them more distinct.  Personally the problem lies more in the absurd stat ranges.  Oorts are Memory and Reason +10 with 50% off science skills.  That makes Albert Einstein a slow kid as he's only at Reason +10.  Most of the other races are similarly extreme with the Velocoraptor guys coming in at around -7 in Memory and Reason.

Anyhow, I personally think there's a potentially great setting in there that just didn't get the budget and development it needed.

But this is turning into a derail so I'm going to create a new thread as it's actually my all time favorite rpg.

So what makes SPAM my favorite rpg?

First off, I love the massive skill list.  Oh, I'd probably tidy it up a bit, there's a bit of a problem with the Science/Analytic and Tech / Trade category blocks that's a result of blending the skills with Rolemaster Standard System.  Actually I'd probably cut the weapon categories in RMSS down to Melee, Missile, Firearms, and Energy weapons if it didn't make so many problems in the fantasy game.

I love the highly unpopular skill / category split.  It's the cleanest relational default system I know of.  Really, skills are related by common information and (categories), common usage (professions), and common capabilities (stats) in RMSS which I like, so sue me, I have a brain dead job and I like to use my brain when I'm gaming.  I fully understand why accountants, computer programmers, and other people in data oriented jobs wouldn't.

I love the vehicle and robot rules.  I like that designing either is simpler than designing a character and that they have smaller stat blocks.  It's an rpg not vehicle simulator.

And of course, I love the charts, I love that sheering criticals from autofire lasers and light sabres take off limbs with 'A' crit roll in the low 30s.  I love that the medical tech exists to put you back together after you get cut apart by a psychopathic bear with monoclaws and powered armor.  I like that firearm and energy weapon criticals are significantly more brutal than those for sword blows and arrows.  I like the weapon critical and damage system.

I like what they tried to do with the setting and races.  The basic strokes are chunky and easy to grasp.  The races are easy to play and understand.  Any Traveller player who's seen debate around appropriate behaviour for a Zhodani or Hiver knows where I'm coming from with this.  There's a charming absence of nuance to it.  You've got arrogant warrior cat people, noble self sacrificing wolf people, pacifist vegetarian bear people who were clearly manipulated to be that way at some point in the past and are now coming out of it (look at those teeth, those aren't a herbivore's teeth), there are inscrutable psychic bug people who might be the real villains of the piece but don't blame the poor drones, barely sapient velocoraptor people who are highly logical when it comes to matters of who to eat or not, and Cousin It hamster mad scientist people, and those hairless ape guys too.  But there's also playable sentient robots that are actually simpler to make than humans and genetically engineered human super soldiers.

Ah well, missed opportunities.  I also think it would make a cracking good sf miniatures game.  

I've only managed to run one campaign with it and I've always regretted that I don't own the property outright.

I guess I'm just not into the intelligent animals thing, Especially when they're very Earth-like (meaning animals you find on Earth) and not that different or interesting.
Additionally, I'm not and have never been into Anime, so an Anime slant on it would have driven me away from it even more, but that's all just a taste thing.

I was however running RMSS, with all the categories etc with the skill structure, so it was good to see it used in Privateers.

Yeah the Robotics and vehicles books were a fun read. Funny I bought them really, I never actually used them... I did read them however and enjoyed reading them for fun.

For me I would have been happy with a well formatting update of the rules, bringing it inline with RMSS/RMFRP.
I defo did not like the setting and would have preferred it plugged into the original setting. I really liked the whole Imperium thing.
I guess they didn't want to go in that direction, which is fine, but it wasn't for me.

A year or so after that period, I stopped running RMSS and SM anyway and had moved onto other RPGs, such as the Elric RPGs, which I had run earlier as well, but I focused more on them and later again, the various Vampire, Werewolf etc RPGs.

I would have liked Silent death if it tied in with the Imperium setting, but I was using Star Strike for Space combat and Armored Assault for ground combat anyway, which was a lot of fun.

Did any of this game make it into HARP SF?

You know?  I'm not quite sure.  Knowing Nicholas a little, I would guess that  it didn't.

Anyhow, I recognize that many people dislike anthropomorphic animals and there are some good reasons for it and some silly ones like fear of appearing childish.

I think the reasoning behind using them is valid from a game design perspective but it was clearly a marketing flop.

Personally, I'd have gone settingless, much as ICE swears it would be too hard, I think it would be pretty easy, just leave out the setting stuff and have a few tech switches and setting building information in the core book instead of the fiction and setting stuff.  I'd probably include the furries but add a few more alien things.  And just justify the furries as the Elves and Dwarves of sf which need not appear in your games.

Really my biggest complaint is that they gave PCs reactionless drives and zero point energy.  Do you know how quickly they wind up turning salvaged drives into planet killer asteroids?

From the POV of myself, the Imperium seemed to work really well.
I was running RM in Shadow World, which tied in very well with Spacemaster.
Kulthea was even a planet in the Imperium, Ceril 7 I believe.

So the whole Fantasy/Scifi RPG line was tied in together quite well with even a background book associated with it.
Then they threw away Shadow World for years and dumped the Imperium and Spacemaster and replaced it all with something completely different which I didn't like.
We did continue happily using Spacemaster in the Imperium for a couple more years, but as I said, I/WE moved onto other stuff.
I'd imagine partially because the lack of new material.

I think there was a massive missed opportunity here.
They should have at least created a new SM which mechanically tied in with RMSS/RMFRP well. Probably with some conversion notes to use with the Imperium.
Then added all the races as optional, including the original SM races and the Animal ones if they really wanted to.
Or just release a separate supplement for each the Imperium and the Privateers setting that worked with the new SM.
Then I could have ignored all the Privateers stuff and got on with using the new SM rules (that worked well with RMSS) with the Imperium.

Regarding HARP SF. I've never seen it or read it or owned it.
TBH I've moved on from RM/SM anyway.

I DID run HARP Fantasy (or just HARP) and really liked it and ran it for a couple of years and it was pretty popular.
I moved countries after a while and didn't RP for a bit, so HARP fell by the wayside.

By the time I got back into RPGs years later, I was running Pathfinder and more recently DnD 5e for Fantasy and Sine Nomine's Stars Without Number for Scifi, which I really like.

I suspect Shadow World was dropped because relations with Terry Amthor became strained.  The original ICE had a crippling licencing agreement with Tolkien Enterprises that eventually killed them.  In the course of servicing the payments they wound up screwing just about every creator they'd ever worked with.  Bankruptcy courts pay freelancers last if there's anything left from paying government and business creditors.

The newest incarnation of ICE has done Shadow World stuff and is moving towards a new edition of Rolemaster.  I'd come to the conclusion that I was moving on from Rolemaster before the hostile take over from ICE version 2.0 (who's owners are still behind Silent Death at Metal Express if anyone was wondering) as it was very clear that the only thing they wanted from RMSS fans was any money they could squeeze out of us without supporting it.

I was on the revision committee for about a year and I think the new edition will be the best version of Rolemaster ever.  But it's the "Standard System" parts that I love and they largely ended up in the bin.  I think they've charted the course that will be most successful but I pretty much flamed out and burned my bridges there.  Oh well, I'd rather shake the heavens than doodle in the margins any day.