Design Room: Star Frontiers

It was one of the best half-a-games of the early 1980's. I say half-a-games because this is a science-fiction roleplaying game that was released without starship rules. We ended up cribbing starships from Space Opera and Traveller for our games until the Knight Hawks rule set came out, and by that time the damage was done and we were left with a mess of a shared universe experience.

This was one of the great d00 TSR roleplaying games back in the day, and it overshadowed everything else in the TSR d00 library, like Top Secret, Gangbusters, and others. It was also one of the industry's first real conscious breaks from the Star Wars behemoth, with a believable and complete sci-fi world that had nothing to do with Star Wars at all. Star Frontiers is science-fiction gaming's Greyhawk, an original universe that let characters explore and have fun without having an Empire or Jedis breath down their necks at every turn.

It was refreshing in a way, as you spun up a cool space explorer, grabbed a laser pistol, and began blasting aliens. You got to play with computers, robots, and technology, so it was a break from +1 swords and magic wands for a while. What's not to love about good, simple fun? Let's break this game down and look at it's design today and see where it hit, missed, and stood out from other sci-fi games of the era.

The Game System

The d00 game system of Star Frontiers was clean, fast, and it worked. Characters were almost dirt simple, a collection of eight ability scores (rolled in pairs) and a couple starting skills, a race, and some gear - and that was it, you were ready to go. Compared to some of today's college-textbook level character design systems this was great, and part of me still wonders why roleplaying games in this day and age have to be so damn complicated when it comes to character design. Yes, you want to provide options to players to design the character they want to play, and that can be done simply. But when you build these towers of point-design babel where you are worrying if you should put one point into basket weaving, and how many points you want to put into underwater endurance just takes a point design way to darn far.

Sometimes I did wish for a little better character customization in this game. We ended up adding 80 or so skills to make up for that, as the base game only allowed characters to excel at ability scores or skills. If you were charismatic, you had a high personality score and that's it. Same thing for leadership, intuition, and any of the other scores - those were your design and customization choices.

The game, like many other d00 games, started to break down once you had scores that started moving towards 100 and higher (with a +10% per skill level up to skill level 6). There was a -80 difficulty modifier, which technically supported scores above 100, but after a while, rolling against a 130% STR score became a futile effort of mostly auto-success skill rolls, and the system started to break down. It was fun with scores in the 40-80 range, and outside of that the dicing system started to break.

Mind you, this is a roll-under game too, as rolling high for skill checks was bad. Despite some designer's negative feelings to roll-under games these days, I still like roll-under games and it is not terribly hard to shift your perspective so you can see low rolls (for skills and tasks) as good, and high rolls (for damage) as good.

Overall, this was a fun game system, and it held up and was fast and furious action at the tabletop. Not a lot of game systems can say that nowadays, when they send you spiraling in a rules reference nose dive through a 600 page rule book to find out the difference between a "stunned" and "dazed" condition is because some game designer never asked the question "do we have too many conditions?"

You see this "fear of speaking up" in so many game designs nowadays, where game designers work in committees, and nobody wants to upset anybody else and get their cool rules sub-system cut because the game needs to be streamlined. Good game design means saying "no" to 90% of the crap that creeps into a game, and keeping things simple. Star Frontiers is a good example of a design that had a strong core concept, and a designer who valued keeping it streamlined and straightforward.

The Game World

While we liked the base Star Frontiers setting and the classic Zebulon modules, one of the huge pieces that was missing was a universe guide. They gave you names of worlds and a simple map, and that's it. I would have loved to have a star system generator, or even a random sector generator like Traveller had, but the game provided little in the way of creating new adventure locals and starmaps. You were supposed to make everything up as you went, but I wanted more referee support for designing worlds and places in space to explore.

Our game first became stagnant on the base map, and then it blew up and over expanded with all of our add on starmaps. We never really achieved a great balance to new worlds and making things interesting, and this remains one of my great "do over" wishes in my gaming career. We expanded early too, so we were using the spaceship rules from other games to explore the universe, so our star system maps went from 2d to full Space Opera 3d with 100s of LY of XYZ 3d distance, and then back down to 2d XY when we realized we didn't want all that math and complexity. By then, the damage was done, and our established star map was a mess.

Part of the problem was not having starships at the game's launch. Another part of this is that we were expecting Star Wars type adventure and exploration ships, and when Knight Hawks finally launched, they delivered ships that were closer to 2001 and NASA than TIE fighters and the Millennium Falcon. We couldn't escape the gravitational pull of Star Wars on what starships should be, so the more primitive starships with outboard engines (aka Star Trek) and no artificial gravity felt like a shock to us, and also we had been using other game's starships, so we completely ignored the Knight Hawks aesthetics and kept with our original borrowed designs.

Technology

Space Opera was our AD&D to the D&D game world of Star Frontiers for us. We borrowed so much from Space Opera, weapons, tech, sensors, hand computers, vehicles, heavy weapons, and so much more we were really playing a Star Frontiers rules version of Space Opera. We were kids, so we didn't know better, and everything was good. It was just more cool stuff to play with, so we dove in and had fun. Some ships from Traveller showed up and those were cool too.

You discount that as you get older and become a purist and a lore snob. When you think about it, kids don't care if you have light sabers in Minecraft, those are cool and they want them there. Does it matter that light sabers have no place or role or history in the so-called "world" of Minecraft?  No, not to a young mind, and that's how we were.

Later, yes, we did become purists and rules snobs, but we left our old choices in our game and lived with them. There is something to be said for tradition too.

That said, there is a lot of cool tech and gear in Star Frontiers to play with, and even a Car Wars inspired vehicle combat system that was fun, They had this strange hang up where they kept calling "lasers" as "blasters" or lasers and tried to make the same thing be both. Or perhaps it was the pull of Star Wars again and people wanted blasters, and the designer wanted "lasers". Why not just call them "blasters" and be done with it? You can see the hard sci-fi versus fantasy sci-fi conflict in this game, and it is a strange mix of genres.

The game wants to be "hard sci fi" (more so than Traveller, especially when Knight Hawks was introduced), but the players don't really care and want to have fun, at least in our experience. This leads to fantasy elements creeping in, like sci-fi melee weapons, flying monkeys, and alien worms with hypnosis. The game and designers could never make up in their minds, and it remains as a strange mix between fantasy and hard sci-fi. It is in a way sort of like AD&D being a mix between gritty and high fantasy, this was trying to be a catch-all sci-fi game.

In my feeling, Star Frontiers never got to a fantasy sci-fi level, and it remained as a Traveller+ sort of game. With our Space Opera modifications, it got there and it played how we wanted it to play. It was sort of a quandary with us where Space Opera had the better gear and starships, and Star Frontiers had the better rules.

Metaplot

Beyond the Volturnus series, the game just had a standard "bug eyed aliens" metaplot that worked better for security and war types of games. The Volturnus series was an incredible joy ride, and it remains a classic sci-fi planetary exploration and survival sandbox to this day. The game never (in our experience) got beyond that series of modules, while there were some interesting one-offs later, those felt too tied to Knight Hawks style technology for us to enjoy as much as we did the first Volturnus modules. I can remember counting the days until the next one of these modules were released, and improvising adventures on the small planetary map for all the trapped sci-fi explorers until it came out.

For us, when Volturnus was over, the game took on a military turn, and we never got back that cool "planetary explorer" vibe and feeling. You couldn't strand your adventurers on a new planet every time, and the game was waning by then and there we no new sources of fun, so we moved on to Car Wars and then Battletech. It was still our go-to sci-fi game, and chasing the Sathars became to focus of later games.

If the game were just Volturnus and you couldn't "go back home" and had to make your home there I'm feeling this would have been a stronger game. As it is, for us, when the characters went back home the game felt done and over with, pirates and aliens became enemies. There is something to be said about having a great start and basing the game from that point - if you had to explore the systems around the planet and make your home among the stars from there that would have been very compelling for us, and felt like a "fresh start" rather than saying goodbye to the world, leaving it to the mega-corporations, and wondering why no other planet in the universe was that 'fun' to explore.

Mega-Corporations

Speaking of mega-corporations, one of the lamest expansions to this game (for us) was the Zebulon's Guide to Frontier Space supplement, where TSR forced the "color bar" chart of Marvel Superheroes onto the game, changed all the rules, drew weapons with the worst Apple IIe or Commodore 64 art I have ever seen, and ripped up the game's story for some sort of Shadowrun inspired "corporate wars" plot after a galaxy wide "blue plague" apocalyptic event. The game became too much about what the game's mega-corporations were doing, and it felt like every time you discovered a new world, not far behind you were multi-national mining and development interests ready to make any of your discoveries or small mining outposts irrelevant with mass development - and worse, they would come in and start some proxy war over the new system with mercenaries and sabotage.

It felt like you couldn't compete anymore on the small scale, and you had to join or own a mega-corporation to compete. We didn't incorporate these changes, but the pressures were still there. The days of setting up a small mining operation and pulling molybdenum a couple hundred kilograms at a time from an asteroid and netting 50,000 credits were over, and any sense of small scale adventure were gobbled up by multinational corporations, banks, and shady armies of mercenaries.

It's like these space people had no ethics, and Star Law would never bust a space mega-corp CEO for running a mercenary army of space pirates in a far-off system. It became the norm in the game, and we felt Shadowrun's influence have too strong of a pull on a game that was supposed to be about space explorers and blasting things with laser pistols.

At that point, the last heroes left in the game for us were the military, and the space explorers part of the game waned as a backdrop. So our game shifted into the "protect civilization" mode of fighting off the "bug eyed aliens" and "space pirates" and an occasional "deal with corruption" plots. Yes, it became like the interplanetary political and military drama of Star Wars and there it stayed.

Character Types and Skills

One thing we loved about the game were the strong support for all types of character skills and "adventure time" - as every skill was important. You could play a medic and be needed on an adventure, along with being a scientist character or even a psio-sociologist. Really? You can play a space psychiatrist and contribute to the group's success? Yes, everyone was involved. The game also smashed the "space mechanics have no fun" trope that even the later Star Wars RPG from West End fell into, as a technician, your skills were needed, and you drove the vehicles and fixed the team's laser rifles and the party was good.

Of course, everyone had a couple military skills so they could shoot guns and hit things with electro swords, and those were cheap enough that even the medic could by a couple levels of beam weapons and get in on the alien-blasting fun.

Part of the success of the Star Frontiers skill system were all the detailed subskills laid out in the rules, and all the cool stuff you could do with them. In Traveller, so what you have Medic+1, you can't do anything cool with it beyond sit in the medbay. In Star Frontiers, you can treat poisons, heal wounds, do surgery, deal with alien diseases, and all sorts of cool subskills that referees could use to design challenges for adventures. This is a great example of the rules helping shape the challenges in the game world, and it remains a great part of the original game's design.

We made the mistake of adding dead-head and single-use skills that did nothing special (art skill, motorcycle skill), and that watered the game's focus down. The original skills are nice and tightly-focused, and they are detailed enough that the cover 90% of what you need.

Except crime skill and law skill, which we added to support our Star Law campaign, and we added subskills for those that did forensics, lock picking, forgery, and other cool stuff. Some of the skills we added were good, and a lot of the others were filler.

You Can Still Play This

There is a site out there, http://www.starfrontiers.com/, where you can download PDF copies of the rules, and it is in a sort of fan-supported version of the game. This was done with the blessing with TSR and it still continues today, as far as I know this understanding continues.

The Future?

Star Frontiers was a product of its time, where television shows such as Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica filled the airwaves, and that sort of heroic and noble space adventurer was the ideal. Today, things seem like a darker world mood, and our Dark Knight and the moral ambiguity of Game of Thrones makes the freewheeling space adventure game seem a little quaint and old fashioned. Of course in a game like this you can have bug-eyed evil space aliens, but in today's sensibilities you need to understand what the evil space aliens are angry about and send space ambassadors to endlessly discuss treaties and letters of understanding.

Sathar = Orc, got it?

Good.

That said, I'm not sure they could do another space game like this nowadays without writing a 600 page rulebook and making the game so expansive and rules heavy we would need a shelf of rules encyclopedias to sort it out. The tone would change too, to something darker and more nefarious like genetic manipulation and mega-corps, and the original charm would be lost.

Sometimes yes, I like my games simple and fun, and that spirit of adventure built into the game with no moral ambiguity or shades of gray. These are the heroes, here are some blasters, let's hop on our spaceship and get out there and save the universe, one planet at a time.

That, to me, is Star Frontiers.