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Star Frontiers- Should I pick it up?

Started by GhostNinja, April 29, 2023, 11:41:30 AM

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GhostNinja

#45
May 01, 2023, 09:16:25 AM
Quote from: David Johansen on May 01, 2023, 09:11:34 AM
No, that's the opposite of what WotC did.  Someone wanted to do something with it and make some money so they took the toys and slammed the door in eveyone's face.

Well we have see as of late that WOTC is not great with making smart decisions (OGL, Pinkertons, etc).
Ghostninja

BoxCrayonTales

#46
May 01, 2023, 10:15:43 AM
Quote from: Ratman_tf on April 30, 2023, 05:55:06 PM
Quote from: Baron on April 30, 2023, 03:39:57 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 30, 2023, 02:52:26 PM
Copyright law needs to be reformed...
The evil Disney corporation has perverted the law and ruined it for everyone else.

Totally agree. Say I'm twenty years old and I publish something awesome. I can see having forty or fifty years from which to have exclusive rights. Maybe that's even too long before it goes into public domain. But it should go into public domain before everyone who knows the property is dead, because the ability to publish related works (or re-publish it) has little chance of catching the eye of younger generations. Those kids have no relationship with the property and so aren't interested. So everyone who's part of the "Public" and actually interested and engaged gets nothing.

Eh. While I agree that copyright law in America is ridonkulous, I also think that people should be coming up with their own IP instead of piggybacking off of an existing one.

Have a tired, shitty sci fi idea that no one likes? Slap the Star Wars label on it!  :P
I tried doing that with Star*Drive. I gave up because it was too much work for too little gain when what I wanted was Star*Drive. I shouldn't have to jump through hoops to avoid being sued for copyright infringement when WotC doesn't even make the books legally available for purchase.

Star*Drive has too many specific unique features to skirt around in a retroclone. It wouldn't be a decent substitute. At least from my perspective. I don't have any co-authors to provide second opinions.

Even FrontierSpace plays too conservatively in my opinion. You could ripoff TSR's aliens from their various scifi games a bit more closely by drawing from the same scifi tropes.

Greg Bruni

#47
May 01, 2023, 10:31:18 AM
If anyone is interested I found a place where someone is hosting the Savage Worlds conversion that I did.  I will admit I don't really like the computers and robots sections that I converted.  I can't upload them to this site because the file sizes are too big.  With these at least one can see the artwork and tropes to see if they would like Star Frontiers in general.
https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/26021044/star-frontiers-players-guide-savage-heroes

https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/26021103/star-frontiers-gm-guide-savage-heroes

https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/3323081/crash-on-volturnus-savage-heroes

Godsmonkey

#48
May 08, 2023, 03:11:05 PM
Quote from: Greg Bruni on April 30, 2023, 11:02:16 AM
Several years ago I did a Savage Worlds conversion of Star Frontiers.  I included everything from the original game and just changed the mechanics to Savage Worlds.  I included all the original artwork including the covers, did a character sheet, and converted the first adventure titled 'Crash on Volturnus'.  I contacted Wizards of the Coast, told them what I was doing and they DID respond.  They said that it was okay for me to do this because they had "no intentions of doing anything with Star Frontiers in the future." 

So for me Star Frontiers has a place in MY gaming history, but to be honest, there are other games out there that will do and have anything that Star Frontiers is.

I would be very interested in that. Savage Worlds feels like it would be a good game system to replace the original one.

Viperian942

#50
May 27, 2023, 08:53:55 AM Last Edit: June 02, 2023, 09:31:42 AM by Viperian942
Love this game! I'm running an online Star Frontiers Alpha Dawn game, mostly one- and two-shots for now, on occasional Saturdays or Sunday afternoons (Eastern time, USA). We use Foundry VTT (free for players) and Discord for audio.

If anyone's interested in joining, let me know, we have room for more!

bump!

Omega

#51
May 28, 2023, 04:35:18 AM
I have the original playtest box still.

Star Frontiers is a pretty good RPG and plays fairly smoothly.

Combat can though be ridiculously unforgiving. A laser can take down someone in a few blasts when sliders are set to max.
 
The ship building system was not bad really and got the job done within the parameters. No artificial gravity!
 
What it sorely needed was a solar system and planet gen system. There was a effort made in Aries Magazine. But I used the solar system gen from Universe as that is still one of the most robust ever come across.

Zebulons Guide they tried to pass off as part of SF. But it is really its own thing.

Mistwell

#52
May 28, 2023, 12:28:45 PM
I have a great deal of nostalgia for Star Frontiers as it was one of the first three RPGs I played (Basic D&D and Marvel Superheroes being the other two). But I couldn't tell you anything about it from memory, aside from I liked the art and it's definitely a space adventure game with alien options.

Timothe

#53
May 28, 2023, 06:20:01 PM
It's a fun game. Make sure you use Alpha Dawn and Knighhawks (the starship expansion) but avoid their later Zebulon's Guide who basically rewrote the game and made it unplayable. My mostly-AD&D 1e group played it for a while in the mid- to late-eighties.

Omega

#54
May 30, 2023, 03:11:46 PM
Yeah I have Zebulons guide somewhere and its just, blah.

Standard TSR Loraine era push to fill in every blank space with something.
Unwanted psionics system that just makes you go, wha?
and so on.
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