Xavier Onassiss

As the former spouse/victim of a woman with BPD, I must strongly disagree with this. There is absolutely nothing "ideal" about their behavior in the slightest.* *And since this is, after all, the "cranky" thread, I should add that my tolerance for BS is at a particularly low ebb today....

In space, no one can hear you jump the shark....

I'm not sure if The Forever War is a particularly strong example of either genre; hard SF or space opera. However.... I've always thought the most interesting thing about The Forever War is the way it blends military SF and social SF. Haldeman succeeded in creating a powerful commentary on the military, society, and the divide between them.

'twas brillig...

Just to be fair, there were also quite a few Naval aviators (at least one Apollo crew was all-Navy) and one Marine pilot (John Glenn) in America's astronaut corps. For my two cents' worth: another reason future space forces are often depicted as being anologous to the Navy is that their ships often operate independently for weeks or months at a time, as opposed to Air Force sorties, which tend to last hours before their return to base.

I can recommend a number of excellent modern SF authors whose work is both hard SF and space opera.

Excellent rant, tkdguy. I'm with you 100%. This is EXACTLY why I wrote Terracide. I felt it was time, not just to break all these unwritten "rules" but to utterly annihilate any justification for them to exist in the first place, and prove that it was, in fact, possible to write a good SF RPG well outside of this utterly worn-out, dumbed-down, mass-marketed, nielson-rated, tired, cliched, drooling fanboi paradigm. Also, see here: http://web.archive.org/web/20070208103915/http://www.galactica2003.net/articles/concept.shtml That man is my fracking hero.

This sounds very similar to my experience. Thanks for posting.

Oh no, not you Cancer. You're a gentleman and a scholar.

This is correct. I double-checked the book; it says "Choose from list:" rather than "Choose one from list:" Edited to add further clarification: Terracide uses standard skill costs for 6th edition Hero System. So most skills cost 3pts to buy. Another tip from my campaign: if you're buying multiple templates, skills which appear in both templates may be counted towards completing both templates. So say you've got the Spacer template and at the end you're required to choose 9pts worth of skills. You chose Computer Programming, Gambling, and Combat Piloting for 3pts each. The Con Man template allots 15pts to "Choose from list"; and Computer Programming, Gambling are available choices. Since you've already got those, you can consider 6pts on that list already picked and just pick 9 more. Done. This is a good way to discount multiple templates which overlap, and give characters a few extra points for customization so they don't all end up looking too similar.

My last Star Hero (Terracide) game, I began with the PCs around 150pts. This was in 6E, so it wasn't 75+75; more like 100+50. It started out okay, but after 30 sessions or so, the characters were very powerful and I was having a lot of difficulty really challenging them. I think if I did it over again I'd start out around a total of 100 or 125.

Also, I am surrounded by uncultured dweebs. Oh wait, it's just the internet....

Car's in the shop again. No idea what's wrong this time. I heard the engine rumbling and knocking, badly, while driving home from Kate's place around midnite. She's out of town and I'd been looking in on her cats. So anyway, it's midnight, raining, and my engine sounds like it's about to eat itself. I made it as far as the exit at the state line, where there's a motel. It was waaay too late to call anyone for a ride -- folks go to bed early around here, so all I could do was park my sick/dying car and check in for the night. Sixty three bucks a night, I had nothing packed (I thought I'd be home that night!) and I was really too stressed out to sleep anyway. The next morning a co-worker had to come pick me up, because everyone at my house was out deer hunting. (Fresh venison this winter....) My mechanic couldn't get a wrecker up to the motel until later in the day, so I had to leave my car key at the front desk. I haven't heard from him, so he probably won't have a diagnosis until Monday. I'm betting it involves a new engine, which might as well mean a new car at this point.

Internet dogma.

The last time I ran Star Hero, (Terracide, w00t!) the "big fight" at the end would have been pretty much unworkable if I'd tried to run it "rules as written." There were multiple small skirmishes happening all over the place, some of which had combatants with long-range weapons (smart plasma missiles!) trading shots intermittently... while another group tried to prevent a starship from getting out of its spacedock. One of them went for the airlock, the others went after the engines, but they ran out of time when the ship's reactions jets opened up, and its railguns finally got a bead on them... meanwhile, troops from the rest of the ships in the squadron in adjacent spacedocks were rallying.* It was a huge mess, and deliberately so. Going by phases and segments would have taken forever, so I pretty much just had to "wing it." However, I prefer to run combats by the book if possible; that way the players feel like they know what to expect. *Closest I got in that campaign to killing off some characters; plasma warheads and starship railguns are nasty. Meta-helium rocket exhaust isn't any fun either.

I hear the Krasnikov Tubes will soon be accepting E-ZPass....

Fixed that for you. Couldn't resist, I was having an "eco-freak" moment there....

Until then, it's comforting to have this helpful guide... http://www.themorningnews.org/article/in-the-event-that-you-have-accidentally-swallowed-the-higgs-boson

I love that novel. And it's a good case in point. Stories about stoopid aliens are hilarious. Stories about really smart aliens... ...are difficult to write!

Me too. Also possums, coyotes, and bobcats. Rumor has it someone saw a mountain lion around here last year. But comets, not so much, so I'm gonna have a look. If you don't hear from me, I got et.

Any fan of hollywood science fiction knows that aliens are stupid. Either they come all the way to Earth and try to conquer it for a drink of water, (which they could get anywhere without a fight), or they try to conquer the Earth and fail to notice it's mostly covered in water... which is poisonous to them. I've read a few stories about wars between humans and "smart" aliens. They were a bit one-sided!

Twenty four hour days are too short. Maybe if they were 36 hours I'd be okay with that. Or 48 hours, then I'd definitely be catching up. Drat it.

It was decreed by Bondo, the Used Car God!

That's so awesome I bookmarked it. Here's another which I've used in my campaign:

This was another issue Niven addressed. IIRC, in the first novel, the biggest landmarks the characters saw were two huge meteor punctures. ("Fist of God" mountain and the "Eye Storm.") Also, the Ringworld had an automatic defense mechanism (which obviously wasn't perfect) against debris impacts, and it shot down their ship as soon as their course intersected the surface of the Ringworld.