I had White Star boxed up in a post-OGL funk about d20 gaming in general. Mind you, D&D 5 is still on my "sell it all" list, and I will get those books ready to ship soon. If a book brings me negative vibes and feelings, it gets put away, and these days, it gets sold. 5E alone isn't at fault; the Wizards team is, and D&D is still dead to me.
This was a mistake; this one is one of my best sci-fi games.
It is easy to underestimate and dismiss this game, but it is good. It has a sort of Guardians of the Galaxy feeling to the proceedings, with a mix of anthropomorphic kin, aliens, and humans. You can make up a race (pick 2 special abilities or modifiers) and insert it or do race-as-class. Stars Without Number feels more Traveller and Star Trek to me. This feels like space dungeon crawling.
Frontier Space is still my best Star Frontiers replacement, and I have that on my shelves. But FS doesn't do B/X and White Box very well, and I need a space fantasy game with good compatibility. Yes, I have Stars Without Number, which is also great. But something about the digest-sized, straightforward, no-frills White Star implementation perfectly emulates Swords & Wizardry White Box, which only uses a d20, d6, and maybe the d00.
d20, d6, and d00 are the Cypher System dice, and games that use this set have an elegant and streamlined feeling that I love. I never knew eliminating the d8, d12, and d4 could speed up a game so fast and shift the focus back to the story and away from the rules - but it is true. Never having to roll a d4 again is also excellent, especially since classes are so tied to them (thief, rogue) that the little caltrops-like and impossible-to-pick-up pieces of triangular plastic junk drag those classes down.
When you have too many dice, you start inventing reasons to use them, which puts too much focus on the dice and rules. Without them, and with a single modified d6 for damage rolls, your design goes from cluttered to elegant. The average roll between a d4, d6, and d8 is only a 1-point difference, and you could do all this with a d6, plus or minus one. The die size matters far less than the fixed modifier. White Box fixes the out-of-control die roll modifiers in B/X and reduces the need for stat inflation.
Without the extra dice and "+3 at 18," you are not getting less of a game - you are getting more. I used to feel White Box was less of a fun game than B/X, but it isn't. You can roll 3d6 down the line in White Box for stats, and you can't in B/X. That graduated set of +2 and +3 modifiers (and higher) on the 3-18 scale creates such pressure for high stats the trouble starts from here and never stops.
The 3d6 generation should be the heroes. 4d6 and drop the lowest is an inflationary patch to a design flaw.
White Box implementations fix many of the problems that later editions introduced and enshrined.
White Star completely replaces Starfinder for me. If I toss in a book like White Box Fantasy Adventure (a 5-dollar book on Amazon), I have it all: fantasy races, spells, classes, plus sci-fi. The same digest-size, small shelf space packed with fun and not a bloated collection of digest books is fantastic. I feel this is what many of these giant, 8.5x11 books miss; they are too large to collect, and the size leads to bloat. I am happy with a tightly-designed digest-sized game with familiar rules.
Downsize your roleplaying game collection, and not just in the number of books. If you give a company like Paizo or Wizards a 600-page 8.5x11 book, they will pack it with filler and hide it with great art. You get an indie doing a digest-sized White Box genre implementation and have my attention. You shrink that book, and the designer must do severe game-design flex to fit all the rules while avoiding bloat.
Games are the same as electronics; the smaller they get, the better the design must be. The cleaner the UI needs to be. The smaller the game, the better the user experience needs to be.
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| Only $5??? |
Two digest-sized books, White Star plus White Box, give me more than two shelves of Starfinder books. In White Star, starship, vehicle, and mech combat all follow the same formula as personal combat. In GURPS, I was doing algebra and adding and subtracting modifiers from +30 to -30 on a 3d6 scale. Starfinder and Star Frontiers need hex grids and completely different systems for every type of combat.
Starfinder has that infamous 3.5E bloat. The Wizard's design model is to write bloated games they use to sell you hundreds of pounds of filler-packed books. The design theory of Paizo and Wizards is similar to how they sold IBM mainframes in the 1960s: get you in the door and install such a bloated and heavy system you will never replace it for decades.
It is less of an engineering design theory and more of a sales and support model. And the support often sucks and breaks the system later. And you can bet your wallet these games lure you into an expensive post-sale support stream.
Shout out to Stars Without Number, a fantastic game that deserves to stand alone. This has White Box compatibility, but for some things, I feel it strays away from the simple way of handling things and gets into the weeds, ship combat, for one. The starship combat system has good details and layered tactical depth, but I want something even more straightforward. The system is designed to give every character something to do and fight boredom, but sometimes, I want to avoid all these layered rules.
Let White Box be White Box.
Having ships fight like any other character or monster is fine. The White Star number of attacks against a ship's AC, reduced ship hit points, and destroyed at zero is okay. It does what it needs to do. Mechas and vehicles work the same way. I could have a mecha (or vehicles) exploring a "mecha/vehicle dungeon" or a starship flying around a "starship dungeon," it all works the same as character combat.
Easy.
My brain thanks me.
Like Cypher System, I can do more with fewer rules. I can focus on the story.
The goal is to replace Starfinder with a mix of fantasy and science fiction while keeping the standard tropes and backgrounds. Starfinder has moved on to the tax-form character record sheets of Pathfinder 2, and I wish them well, but damn, is that character sheet horrible. They are also removing a bunch of favorites from lore, like dark elves, and I like my space dark elves (and they have them in Warhammer 40K, so don't OGL me).
White Star plus White Box Fantasy Adventure is my "D&D in space." I can use all the classic monsters, reskin them, put lasers on them, make them robots, use them as creatures in cyberspace, or use them any other way without problems. I can have space wizards and a selection of magic items. I can roll a +2 flaming laser pistol as a magic item (+2 to hit, adds 1d6 fire damage, can ignite objects). The more this feels like a crazy version of "He-Man in Space," the better. Unlike Stars Without Number, this game is more goofy and lighthearted.
A simple set of rules lets everyone laugh and have fun.
Best of all, they are all digest-sized books.
Little books, big fun.
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