Spence

While I like tactical starship games, and have and played many of the ones people have mentioned above.  Starfire (2nd or 3rd editions) is perhaps my favorite.
But for RPG's IMO they just don't work.
 
I have moved to a model where ships are just like a fantasy games castle or tavern.  They are a location for the PC to act in.
Instead of an actual map or grid with the "ships" moving around.  I use a "plot" where the players ship is always the center and everything else are "targets" that move around the "plot".  The plot is laid out in rings for range and marked off in segments for direction. I am in the process of making a new plot for the Star Trek 2d20 I will be running at the local con in August.  Like most paper and pencil games the plot/map is mostly 2d, but I have found the layout spices up the games and the players seem to get into it fairly well. 

We ended up buying a house in Mount Vernon (I guess I need to update my profile).
I don't know about Dragonflight. It has been about 3 years since I went to a con.
 
 So as not to derail the thread if you want to send me a pm and we continue chatting.

I think that would apply to a lot of us.  As for Hero, while it is my favorite system, except for a stretch in the 80-90's I have actually played other games far more.  
Since about 2005ish games like CoC and the Gumshoe games have been my meat and potatoes.  Recently the 2d20 games have pulled me in, they are pretty good.
 
Unrelated comment.   Sedro Woolley!  That isn't actually too far from Marysville.  I've been thinking of trying to start something at Docking Bay in Mount Vernon since I work on Whidbey and drive through MV everyday. 
Are you planning on going to Dragonflight in August?

My copy of Superman Returns was included in a three-pack of Blu-ray movies, which also included Superman and Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut. While I've watched the other movies several times, Superman Returns basically is the movie equivalent of Pratchett's dwarf bread:
 
 

For my birthday today, my wife bought me the complete series of The Middle Man.  Watched the first three episodes with the wife and kids.  They loved it, as did I.

SFB is actually a really easy game even up to the later versions. 
The problem is that people didn't seem to comprehend that the options were just that and you were not supposed to use them all.  Especially at the same time.
 
It would be like trying to use every single option possible in every single supplement compatible with D&D 5th at the same time in the same campaign.   Why you'd find yourself playing Pathfinder....

SFB is actually a really easy game even up to the later versions. 
The problem is that people didn't seem to comprehend that the options were just that and you were not supposed to use them all.  Especially at the same time.
 
It would be like trying to use every single option possible in every single supplement compatible with D&D 5th at the same time in the same campaign.   Why you'd find yourself playing Pathfinder....

I sont suppose there is any chance you were just really,bad at learning SFB?
 

 
Seriously,though- were you playing the original "little baggies" or the over-stuffed and under-explained books that came afterwards?
 
 

Finished the available episode of Stranger Things.
Still excellent and has captured my interest.

Finished the available episode of Stranger Things.
Still excellent and has captured my interest.

On the old age of sail ships, most casualties (dead + wounded) were not from the cannon shot, but rather the splinters caused by the shot passing through the hull and bulkheads.
Modern warships (and many commercial ships) surface mount piping, conduits, ducting, wiring and various boxes for several reasons.  Ease of access, ease of inspection, ease of repair and, in the case of a warship, to reduce the amount of shrapnel from a penetrating round/missile. For damage control teams one of the most dangerous fires is one in a berthing space.  Berthing is one of the areas where you will find wall coverings and cubbyholes.  They will usually be filled with personal possessions, that include thermal, explosive and poison gas bombs.  Also known as personal electronics with batteries.  Plus all those blankets, comforters and sheets cunningly stuffed into tiny spaces are great to add to the fire and gas contents of the usually fully enclosed with limited ventilation compartment. People have died from asphyxiation ten feet from outside air because a hatch is heat-warped and the compartment is filled with toxic fumes from heat and fire.   The Navy learned a long time ago that leaving fittings and exposed and avoiding paneling and covers in the working parts of the ship radically sped up not just repairs, but being able to actually spot repairs.  On a ship every pipe has it's purpose and content painted on it with a direction of flow arrow.  In fact everything is identified by color code and direction if applicable.  
 
As for critical devices such as lighting and communication, they are all designed so that you have with zero electrical power to the ship.  Battle-lanterns are everywhere and the sound powered phones work off the the power of your voice as is implied by the name.  Control panels are designed so a crewman can operate it by feel in the event of no lighting and critical ones can operate without external power.  Because Murphy guarantees you will lose power.  
 
In space this becomes even more critical. If a micro-meteor puts a tiny hole in an outer bulkhead, I don't want to have to remove square yards of paneling to find the leak.  I also don't want to have half the personnel assign to the compartment shredded by fragments of of the covers that only served the purpose of "looking nice".  And when the lights and power goes out, I really hope I am not stuck with a touch screen as my only control panel.  And unless I can carry 5 or 10 spares of everything, I really hope that my critical systems have backups that are either electric components or integrated circuits build from electronic components such as transistors and for applications that require clean signals or power handling those much maligned tubes.  Give me a micro/min tool set and a micro-repair bench and I can repair them.  If necessary we can "rob" what we need from other gear.    And components are actually pretty small and you can store thousands of them in one cubic yard of space.  In real life high altitude flight is one of the reasons that reloading firmware and software packages is pretty routine.  You don't hear as much about commercial airlines because they don't really have anything and the majority of critical systems have been hardened.  The loss is because of the reduced protection from particles at altitude.  Microchips a especially vulnerable to particles and other EMI.  An actual spacecraft is exposed to far more.  And I am pretty sure anything that actually goes into interplanetary or interstellar will really see damage.    You cannot fix a chip.  Spare chips have to be carefully packaged and most of the particles that do the damage are not stopped by the ships structure or your body.  A chips is just a device that has millions or PN junctions (transistor, diode, etc)  and connecting runs at the microscopic level.  I have seen microscopic pictures of a failing chip from equipment that was in orbit.  The surface of the chip was covered in craters that looked like WW1 nomansland.  A full-sized or miniature semiconductor (transistor, diode, etc), component (resistor, capacitor, etc) or tube is so massive in comparison to the same purposed portion of a chip it wouldn't even notice the damage.  You will be losing a steady percentage of micro-components each and everyday you are outside the protective field of a planet.  This will happen invisibly and undetected until the new chip is installed and does not work.  A storage of components that are miniature or full-sized will survived for years unless they are mishandled.  
 
I have the good fortune to be able to work on not just a new platform with new birds that are less than a year old, but also the old legacy aircraft that have been flying for 40+ years.  If we get a blade or other circuit card and it has been over 5 years form manufacture it usually means problems of one kind or another, bios or firmware updates and sometime outright failure.  It just doesn't work for some reason.  But they recently released old war-stores for one the aircraft being sun-downed.  We cot old style circuit cards and IC that are literally 50 years old and still in the manufacturers original packaging, and they all work like the day they were manufactured.
 
Modern tech is fantastic and I don't know what I would do without my laptop.  
But to depend on microcomputers to be my only option if I were to go on a multiyear voyage with no way to abort? 
Nope.  They would need to ensure the existence of manual auxiliary methods of performing all the critical tasks. 
Otherwise the crew might as well just suicide before they go so the families can at least have something to bury.
 
 

On the old age of sail ships, most casualties (dead + wounded) were not from the cannon shot, but rather the splinters caused by the shot passing through the hull and bulkheads.
Modern warships (and many commercial ships) surface mount piping, conduits, ducting, wiring and various boxes for several reasons.  Ease of access, ease of inspection, ease of repair and, in the case of a warship, to reduce the amount of shrapnel from a penetrating round/missile. For damage control teams one of the most dangerous fires is one in a berthing space.  Berthing is one of the areas where you will find wall coverings and cubbyholes.  They will usually be filled with personal possessions, that include thermal, explosive and poison gas bombs.  Also known as personal electronics with batteries.  Plus all those blankets, comforters and sheets cunningly stuffed into tiny spaces are great to add to the fire and gas contents of the usually fully enclosed with limited ventilation compartment. People have died from asphyxiation ten feet from outside air because a hatch is heat-warped and the compartment is filled with toxic fumes from heat and fire.   The Navy learned a long time ago that leaving fittings and exposed and avoiding paneling and covers in the working parts of the ship radically sped up not just repairs, but being able to actually spot repairs.  On a ship every pipe has it's purpose and content painted on it with a direction of flow arrow.  In fact everything is identified by color code and direction if applicable.  
 
As for critical devices such as lighting and communication, they are all designed so that you have with zero electrical power to the ship.  Battle-lanterns are everywhere and the sound powered phones work off the the power of your voice as is implied by the name.  Control panels are designed so a crewman can operate it by feel in the event of no lighting and critical ones can operate without external power.  Because Murphy guarantees you will lose power.  
 
In space this becomes even more critical. If a micro-meteor puts a tiny hole in an outer bulkhead, I don't want to have to remove square yards of paneling to find the leak.  I also don't want to have half the personnel assign to the compartment shredded by fragments of of the covers that only served the purpose of "looking nice".  And when the lights and power goes out, I really hope I am not stuck with a touch screen as my only control panel.  And unless I can carry 5 or 10 spares of everything, I really hope that my critical systems have backups that are either electric components or integrated circuits build from electronic components such as transistors and for applications that require clean signals or power handling those much maligned tubes.  Give me a micro/min tool set and a micro-repair bench and I can repair them.  If necessary we can "rob" what we need from other gear.    And components are actually pretty small and you can store thousands of them in one cubic yard of space.  In real life high altitude flight is one of the reasons that reloading firmware and software packages is pretty routine.  You don't hear as much about commercial airlines because they don't really have anything and the majority of critical systems have been hardened.  The loss is because of the reduced protection from particles at altitude.  Microchips a especially vulnerable to particles and other EMI.  An actual spacecraft is exposed to far more.  And I am pretty sure anything that actually goes into interplanetary or interstellar will really see damage.    You cannot fix a chip.  Spare chips have to be carefully packaged and most of the particles that do the damage are not stopped by the ships structure or your body.  A chips is just a device that has millions or PN junctions (transistor, diode, etc)  and connecting runs at the microscopic level.  I have seen microscopic pictures of a failing chip from equipment that was in orbit.  The surface of the chip was covered in craters that looked like WW1 nomansland.  A full-sized or miniature semiconductor (transistor, diode, etc), component (resistor, capacitor, etc) or tube is so massive in comparison to the same purposed portion of a chip it wouldn't even notice the damage.  You will be losing a steady percentage of micro-components each and everyday you are outside the protective field of a planet.  This will happen invisibly and undetected until the new chip is installed and does not work.  A storage of components that are miniature or full-sized will survived for years unless they are mishandled.  
 
I have the good fortune to be able to work on not just a new platform with new birds that are less than a year old, but also the old legacy aircraft that have been flying for 40+ years.  If we get a blade or other circuit card and it has been over 5 years form manufacture it usually means problems of one kind or another, bios or firmware updates and sometime outright failure.  It just doesn't work for some reason.  But they recently released old war-stores for one the aircraft being sun-downed.  We cot old style circuit cards and IC that are literally 50 years old and still in the manufacturers original packaging, and they all work like the day they were manufactured.
 
Modern tech is fantastic and I don't know what I would do without my laptop.  
But to depend on microcomputers to be my only option if I were to go on a multiyear voyage with no way to abort? 
Nope.  They would need to ensure the existence of manual auxiliary methods of performing all the critical tasks. 
Otherwise the crew might as well just suicide before they go so the families can at least have something to bury.
 
 

I haven't seen the live-action Attack on Titan movie and so can't comment on what was presented there, but I've watched all of the anime that's been released so far (seasons 1-3, season 4 part 1).  Before watching it, having only seen images and short bits, I had originally just scratched my head over the appeal, but decided to give it a try after talking with someone about it.  Without spoiling anything - which, admittedly, won't then really answer your questions - I just have to say that it's a complex story and bit of worldbuilding which unfolds only slowly, so you start off thinking things are one way (and having one set of questions as a viewer), but changing perspectives and new information make for some dramatic shifts in understanding.
 
I like it, but totally get that it isn't for everyone.  Yes, there's some gore, but it's not the focus, and it's not trying to be photo-realistic or anything.  I'm not a horror/gore fan at all, so if that was its main focus, I would have ditched it early on.  It is character and story focused, with a lot of development of both.

With the number of people that seem to love this game I can only conclude we were playing it wrong. 
 
All I can remember about it was the color coded chart and that whoever had the higher number in a stat won. Period.
No point on trying anything because if the opponent had a higher stat you simply lost.
 
I am getting the vibe that this may not be true

Probably V&V or Marvel FASERIP.  
 
 
In practice, no.  Attacks do a flat amount of damage, so if you're comparing attacks vs. defenses, it's possible to be up against an opponent whose defenses you can't get through.  As with Champions, that means you have to get creative.  Blast the ground under his feet, or blast the tree behind him and knock it down on him, or something else.  

The Tanforan Mall in South San Francisco used to be the Tanforan Race Track (where Japanese Americans were collected temporarily before internment.). The Great Mall in Milpitas used to be a Ford plant. Just some examples locally. 

Malls were generally built on obsolete industry or pre-trucking food packing and processing, so you could replace the malls with a Can factory, a stock yard, or a manufacturing concern that made things that were once common but are no longer, or were4 once common, but moved out of the city in the early 70's due to toxicity, or in the 80's when they were moved over seas.

One thing that helps mix things up on the speed chart is to start combat not on phase 0, but on phase 2d6, so you get a random first phase.  That can result in slow speeds actually acting first, representing surprise, instability, and random circumstance.

Well the original map is still on sale at Hero so it is an active product.  https://www.herogames.com/store/product/275-hudson-city-map-pdf/
 
The original map was made by Keith Curtis and Jason Walters is the company. 
 
If Jason Walters was OK with it, I'd be glad to post my adjusted map as a resource or offer it up to be added so that when you buy the original you get the modified versions.  But I'm not too comfortable in sharing someone else's work that I just tweaked a little, especially since they are not at the same level of resolution as the original.
 

I wouldn't.  Supers isnt my bag.  It was the Champions mechanics and logical simplicity of the system and the ability to simplify or complicate it to precisely your comfort zone for any particular story that kept me playing it.  
 
If there had been no Champions, I would still be running Classic Traveller and several variants of it, most likely, and of course, Cadilacs and Dinosaurs, Space Opera, a bit of Star Frontiers with the right group, and the Fantasy Trip- possibly some T and T for nostalgia reasons, but I doubt it.
 
 
 
 

To this day I am amazed at how many people from all over the world that played SFB are familiar with the "Klingon Hook".  I haven't played in years (early 2000's maybe) and I do not recall ever seeing an article or formal write up of the maneuver but I have seen countless players from all over the world that knew what it was and called it some form of "hook".  A perfect (to me) example of form following function.  The design and layout of the Klingon warship (D classes through C classes) just make it a natural result.  Along with Klingon warships always being in threes.  
 
Long ago when I was younger and we played regularly, I was a master (if I do say so myself ) of maneuver with my favorite formation of three C-9's with six D-7's in two groups of three. A ship on the receiving end of a three ship coordinated hook was usually shredded and out of the fight.  Getting caught by three C-9's was a ship ender. 
 
I miss those days

Right; I get that.  In '77, the abaolute only thing that I knew about a computer was that they were massive things that required highly-trained operators and near-sterile rooms and one had to take great pains to avoid any sort of static discharge around it.
 
 
Now bear in mind that this is what I _"knew_".  Even today, with regard to the state of computing in 1977 (when I started playing Traveller), I have no idea _at all_ of just how accurate this was, amd given that it was exactly 45 years ago, the accuracy of those assumptions is now only an irrelevant point of curiosity at best.
 
But I "knew" a couple of other things about computers, too.  I knew my Pong machine was a computer, and I knew that Lars's _much cooler_ Atari machine was one.  I had heard comments from people more familiar with computers say that Lars's Atari  had the same "computing power" as the machines that got us to the moon.
 
Again:  No idea if that was right or wrong, and at this point it doesn't matter beyond my personal curiosity.
 
I qas a did-hard fan of Star Trek, which featured gigantic-- but not room-filling-- computers, slave terminals, and dozens of computer-controlled and computer-monitored processes all over the ship, and alien room-filling xomouters that ran entire planetary societies-- from a single room!
 
All of this- and who lnows how many more sci fi books and movies-- and our tiny little home "computerized entertainment machines" led me (and Lars, who was my first Traveller ref) to just assume (again: we weren't actively trying to justify something; we just made an honest and, to us, obvious assumption about why the comouters of the future would be so gigantic in terms of weight.  Clearly they were going to get smaller and more powerful: we had seen it happen to calculators, radios, telephones, and car engines, and there were already computers (of a sort) creeping into cars to control various oarts of the ignition and pollution reduction systems, and none of them were more than little black plastic boxws filled with goo and a single circuit board.
 
The only thing that made sense to us with regard to the xomputers of the future was that "computer tonnage" included not just the processors and memory- which we assumed to be significantly huge, of course, as they would have to make who-knows-what kind of calculations and references and maintain how many floating points and track God-himself-might-have-to-double-check moving stars and obstacles just to calculate a songle jump, and do it quickly enough to make space travel an efficient meqns of exploration, warfare, and trade.  So yes: we knew there would be massive amounts of whatever was needed to do all that, and there were similar data and processing needs for firing solutions and maneuvering in and out of harm's way during a space battle, but we still just assumed that the rest of the "bulk"-- the _majority_ of the bulk-- was going to be the hardworking and the various slave terminals and thousands of solid-state components that allowed everything else on the ship to be monitored or even controlled by the ship.  Given the dangers of space and the inability to just pull into a full-service Texaco whenever we had a hitch in our giddyup, we also assumed multiple redundancies  in every instance.
 
 
Ultimately, the only difference here is that we had, without even pausing to reflect on it, made an assumption based on what we were actually seeing in the world around us instead of looking for a justification to force the rules to make sense.
 
Ultimately, it doesnt matter:  No matter what we assumed about the how and why of it, we all gor to a point where a four ton comouter made perfect sense, right? 
 
 
The only "advantage" to our interpretation of the rules is that it slides nicely into the change Mongoose made with regards to computer bulk.     🤣    so we got lucky enough that, should we switch to Mongoose, we dont have to backport or upport or house rule anything there to make a direct swap.
 
 
 
 
Yep.  And the way the optional rules came out-- you literally,biught a packet of tiles, and it came with optional,rules!  You bought a larger packet to add a new race and their ships, and _it_ came with optional rules!
 
It lead to a house rule that optional rules could only be implemented if everyone playing already owned and was both familiar and comfortable with them (probably because after the first guy wins with the Klingon Butthook Maneuver, _everyone_ starts looking for really obscure optional Butthook Maneuvers of their own... 
 
 
 
The English lqnguage is the largest, most complex, most vocabulary-laden langaue in the history of mankind.
 
It totally failed to produce words extreme enough to express my hatred of the touchscreen interface, and worda vile enough enough tobdescribe what I woyld like to do to the body, mind, and soul of the guy who decided flip-out and slide-out physical keypads were no longer the way forward for portable internet devices....  🤬

The Hostile RPG by Zozer Games follows this sort of universe paradigm, since it emulates gritty, retro-future (zeerust) movies from the 1970s like Outland and Alien. Computers are robust, easy to use and easy to repair to survive whatever gets thrown at them in the unforgiving vastness of space. Solid and well-made keep people alive, so buttons, dials and toggle switches took the place of more fragile touch screens and keyboard commands while gauges and meters replaced multi-purpose LCD screens.
 
 

Great if lengthy post
 
 
A couple points to reply
 
1) I too absolutely hate trying to post via the tiny touchscreen on my phone.
 
2) Computer size.  I have no problems with being able to believe a computer being room sized.  The first real computers I worked with used punchcards and reel to reel mag tapes.  So the concept is not just believable, but I can remember the advanced airborne mission computer that had 64k of processing with three independent memory units that could store a whopping 1 megabite of data each with the entire computer (minus tape drives and keyboard/ display logic units) weighing in at 600 pounds.  So an early game making computers big is not an issue.
 
I have been toying around with using a modified version of John Morressey's setting for his A Law for the Stars book.  Star travel in this universe uses jump drive, I can't remember if it is like Traveller jump drives or Starfire style warp points but it doesn't matter.  The issue is that the jump irreparably fries semiconductor junctions, meaning micro chips become lumps.  This has two major results.  Starship computers are large, bulky, simple and made using vacuum tube, individual electronic components (resisters, capacitors, etc.) and mechanical calculators.  Navigators crunch numbers with sliderules and spacefarers have to be able to actually understand celestial navigation and be able to fix things.  It also means a colony world will never see modern electronics unless they visit Earth or a colony that has been around long enough to develop the infrastructure needed to build the tools to build the tools to build the tools to build....well you get the idea.  Suddenly exploring new star systems takes on a whole different vibe.
 
3) Vehicle/Ship rules.  I NEVER ever use HERO vehicle rules.  For Traveller I use the rules out of the original game book 2 (Starships) plus parts of the original High Guard.
 
4) Loved to play SFB's. You just had to remember that "optional rules" were just that, optional.
 
5) I hate tiny little touchscreens too.
 

There were items adressing points raises by both of you.  Unfortunately, the limitations of a phone screen being what they are, it is more than a little difficult to track multiple quotes, etc.  I have no doubt that I goofed up more than once.
 
I ask your grace in those instances.