Quote from: S'mon;965995Does Dougram spend 6 hours on 1 fight, at the end of which 1 mech from 8 has been destroyed? Because that is my Battletech experience.

heh. Thats why we stuck to mid size mechs. And didnt anyone ever have an ammo blowup? Those things were murder!

Dougrams interesting on several levels. Terrain is a big factor as is supply lines and logistics. About midpoint I think the action shifts from lone action to increasingly larger scales. Takes a while to get revved up though. The Dougram's advantage is its an ATV type. And unlike most anime, it is not a prototype. But due to bureaucratic interference it ends up the only one. Which is the other element the show had, lots of political jockying behind the scenes.

It oddly feels more grounded and "real" than other mecha shows like it. Moreso by far than Gundam for example.

and Dougram came out as a wargame before Battletech. 84. Came with periscopes to use to check LOS from the minis viewpoint. The minis are about half the size of Battletech ones.

Quote from: S'mon;965995Does Dougram spend 6 hours on 1 fight, at the end of which 1 mech from 8 has been destroyed? Because that is my Battletech experience.

Hah! Mine was exponentially compressed into an hour or two per mech destroyed because there was always at least two players who memorized the mechanics, tables, hit locations, and more tables! ... and it still took too long. :mad:

I cannot even imagine running the game without at least two engineering students with eidetic memories processing at full. No, really, I can't imagine it. :confused:

Quote from: The Scythian;965830If I had to narrow down the end of the Wild West to a specific moment, it would be when Frederick Turner presented his paper "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893.

Turner was full of shit.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;966209Turner was full of shit.

I don't agree with his thesis, but that's not necessary in order to recognize Turner's presentation as a pretty good marker for when people stopped thinking of the Western frontier as an ongoing concern and started thinking of it as a closed chapter.

Quote from: CRKrueger;965515Leaving the supernatural alone and sticking with Aces & Eights, I think a USA/CSA can still get you the Wild West, only even Wilder.

• Territories stay territories for longer, because there is no single Eastern Industrial Juggernaut to steamroll and assimilate everything.
• The native tribes can hold out longer or even thrive, for the same reason.

Neither of these are the Wild West, then. A key historical theme of the wild west was that the cowboys and the lawmen and the ne'er-do-wells moved around so much because they had to keep going further west to keep escaping the encroaching civilization.
The indians not getting wiped out and having their own nations able to stand toe-to-toe against the white man is great for a PC alt-history fantasy of the late '90s or SJW revenge-porn of the 2010s, but that's also not the Wild West. A huge part of the Wild West was the tragedy of the Indian Wars and the horror that was for all concerned. If that goes a different way, it changes everything.

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• Two American nations, plus continental holdings from the French, British, and Spanish make the politics and espionage way more interesting.

And destroys the fundamental nature of Wild West society.  The west was full of people who retired haunted from the Union Army or fled the defeated south seeking their fortune and holding grudges. The fights between Republicans (northerners, pro-railway, pro-industrial, dressed in black, generally lawmen) and Democrats (southerners, anti-industry, anti-progress, pro-taverns-and-shootouts, dressed in colorful combinations, generally outlaws) was a central backdrop of all kinds of conflicts that happened in the Wild West. The OK corral was a huge part of that (the Earps were Republicans, the Clantons were Democrats).
You have a civil war still going on, or a cold war, you're not going to have the wild lawless west. You're going to have a totally different setting. No Tombstone, no Dodge City, probably no Deadwood, no Las Vegas, no Fort Worth, no Dog Kelley or Earp Brothers or Masterson brothers or Doc Holliday, probably no Billy the Kid, all kinds of stuff would have been utterly impossible unless you just wave a gigantic magic wand of "I think it would be really cool if the CSA never fell but everything is somehow magically the same anyways, except maybe they're all politically correct and have black confederate colonels and everyone forgot about racism somehow".

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• Mexico is likely to be much stronger relatively, and Texas remain independent.
• Everyone's too busy to stop the Mormons from making their own country.

Again, all of those insanely stupid ideas only championed by people who don't really understand the complex mix of factors that made up the west and why it was the way it was.

QuoteThe real "Wild West" was a very short period in time due to the incredible expansion of the fully United States.  Anything that slows that down is going to be better for a long-term campaign I think.

No it isn't, because the Wild West had to be something that happened fast. That was part of the deal: even if they didn't consciously realize just how fast, everyone knew that it was a moment that was going to be lost forever. The real Wild West as we truly think of it was ridiculously short; it went from around 1870-1885. And the real real wild west, the part that most of the most important stories and movies and whatnot are based on was even shorter than that, from 1876-1882.

And the people in it who wanted that way of life were literally running from place to place, further west and further south and north to the ever-narrowing fringes of civilization because they could literally see it vanishing before their eyes. That's why Wyatt Earp started out in Illinois when the Wild West both began and started to disappear (because it started to disappear almost as soon as one could say it actually started to exist), and within two years he was in Kansas, and within less than 5 years after that he was off to New Mexico, and a year after that he was in Arizona (in his own words: "In 1879, Dodge (Kansas) was beginning to lose much of the snap which had given it a charm to men of reckless blood, and I decided to move to Tombstone (Arizona), which was just building up a reputation" - He was in dodge less than four years total, and in Tombstone less than two). After Arizona he was in Idaho, San Diego and the Klondike but by then it was just a shadow, there was nothing really of the Wild West left.

If you don't capture that in the setting, you're not doing the Wild West. You're doing some kind of Buffalo Bill wild-west show, and then you might as well set it in FakeName County, Southwestern America because what you're creating is a pantomime.

Quote from: Dumarest;965595Personally I think that no what-if scenario has ever been as interesting as actual history. Crazy, weird stuff happens all the time in real life.

Agreed. Alt-history can sometimes be a fun little exercise. Fantasy can be good for escape. But I've never, for example, seen any Wild West Tv Show or movie that was as amazing as the real story of what happened. And the ones that got the closest, shows like Deadwood or Tombstone, were the ones that tried to get closer to real historical events than most.


It's the same in fantasy. Game of Thrones is awesome, and has great characters. But it wasn't as awesome a story or had characters as interesting as the War of the Roses.

Quote from: jeff37923;965630FASA's Battletech and Palladium's Robotech both suck as settings and games. If they were trying to create a game that emulated giant robot action from anime and manga, they missed the mark by a very wide margin. R Talsorian Games' Mekton beats both of them hands down in emulating the genre.

I think Palladium's Robotech setting was actually awesome; particularly if you thought of it not as a "giant robot setting" but as a "apocalyptic post-alien-invasion setting that happens to have giant robots".

Setting wise, I think it was better than RIFTS as a serious kind of world.

Quote from: Dumarest;965631Sorry, I meant the time frame you are referring to in the previous post. I know what the word real means; I just don't know what period you are referring to as the "real Wild West."

I was assuming he meant it in the sense of the time and place that people think of when they think of the "west" and the period where most of the famous events of the post-civil-war west took place.

Custer's last stand (hell almost ALL the indian wars), Wyatt Earp in Dodge city, the great cattle drives, the lawless Deadwood, the death of Wild Bill Hickcok, Calamity Jane, the end of the buffalo trade, Bat Masterson, Doc Holliday, the Lincoln County War and Billy the Kid, the rise of the Cowboys, the Las Vegas gang, Tombstone and the Gunfight of the OK Corral, Wyatt Earp's revenge ride, the death of Billy the Kid, and the death of Jesse James all happened within a six year period from 1876-82.

Quote from: The Scythian;966001The closing of the frontier and the disappearance of the self-reliant, two-fisted men who had settled it is in the DNA of every Western, even if it's never mentioned directly.

Exactly. Which is why the "super-long never-ending wild west" is a stupid idea.

Except a-lot of action takes place in towns, settled areas, or between town A and town B. It is possibly not so much the encroachment of civilization as it is the advancing wave of law enforcement?. It is one thing when you've got just a sheriff. But it is another when you've hot multiple marshals on your trail. And some kept moving as they wore out their welcome in one town after another.

So perhaps the west can persist to a point but eventually you run out of places the law cant reach you?

So perhaps the end of the West was that point when lawlessness couldn't outrun the law anymore?

Quote from: Omega;966403Except a-lot of action takes place in towns, settled areas, or between town A and town B. It is possibly not so much the encroachment of civilization as it is the advancing wave of law enforcement?. It is one thing when you've got just a sheriff. But it is another when you've hot multiple marshals on your trail. And some kept moving as they wore out their welcome in one town after another.

So perhaps the west can persist to a point but eventually you run out of places the law cant reach you?

So perhaps the end of the West was that point when lawlessness couldn't outrun the law anymore?

The law is a big part of it, but it's also the land.  Once a territory becomes a State, then Counties, land plots get drawn out, land gets bought, and the area a person can roam free in shrinks.

Quote from: Omega;966403Except a-lot of action takes place in towns, settled areas, or between town A and town B. It is possibly not so much the encroachment of civilization as it is the advancing wave of law enforcement?. It is one thing when you've got just a sheriff. But it is another when you've hot multiple marshals on your trail. And some kept moving as they wore out their welcome in one town after another.

So perhaps the west can persist to a point but eventually you run out of places the law cant reach you?

So perhaps the end of the West was that point when lawlessness couldn't outrun the law anymore?

A large part of "civilization" is "law enforcement".

And I have to agree with Pundit that the actual "Wild West" was a very brief eyeblink of an historical period. One that has been romanticized and spun out in the American myth.

Western games that alter core features of the history run into the same problem that most alt-history does. Too much unexamined "butterfly effect". Actually a lot of fantasy and scientific-fi stumble on the same block. Let us posit that for some reason the Natives were able to hold back White advancement, we now have to decide where, when, and how that advance of settlement was stopped. Are the cattle drives still possible? What about the railroads? Do we get an Eastward expansion of the natives?

No era really lasted all that long. because history has always been rather dynamic. What happens is that when you read a lot about or watch a lot of media set in that one era, it seems to be kind of static and eternal. At the other extreme, when you don't know much about something, it has a kind of timelessness about it. So any of these RPG settings that have technology, social structures, borders, and ethnic territories stay relatively static for centuries or even millennia are horribly unrealistic right from the very start.

We also tend, psychologically, to regard anything that has been around since before our parents' birth to be effectively infinitely old, and all things that were gone before anyone alive today was born as lumped together into a single mass of "ancient times" (which is why you'll see royalty in an RPG wearing 18th-century garb while the men-at-arms are wearing 12th-century armor, and there's a rival across the ocean kitted out like it's China in 200 BC).

It's just more obvious when it's the Wild West, since that's close enough to our era for more people to realize it didn't last long.

The notion that the invention and proliferation of barbed wire was what truly tamed the Wild West IMHO makes sense as well.

The thing that bothers me most about Deadlands is how much it does NOT feel like a Western, mainly due to the setting being infested with stupid and out-of-place weird science, giving it the appeal of some kind of silly theme park. Now if you enjoy that sort of thing, fine, but stop recommending the game to people who are looking for a Western RPG.

Quote from: RPGPundit;966396all happened within a six year period from 1876-82.

But that period lasted a lot longer, marked by the continual westward march of the frontier. Remember, "the west" used to be Ohio, and was as rough and untamed in the 1840s as the Black Hills, etc., of the 1880s. Robert Redford in Jeremiah Johnson was a Mexican War (1846-48) veteran, and folks had been out west well before his character.

The Civil War makes for an interesting time because the frontier effectively rolled back east for a few years as Federal troops were sent elsewhere.