I like the recent submission with the "Hospital Life" table for characters
that fail their survival roll. Having already come out against the expanded
generation procedures, I thought I'd offer a "house rule" for this situation.
Any character failing a Survival roll is assumed to be still in service at the
time of the adventure. This means responsibility to authority, control over
certain resources, etc. Usually, the character can enter any particular
scenario without trouble (shore leave), though campaign play may be harder due
to fixed locations and tours of duty. Still, surviving "in service"
characters make excellent NPCs.
Once again on the subject of weapons emphasis. To my mind, SFRP has a lot
more opportunity for non-combat related scenarios. The average fantasy
fiction is a sequence of monster encounters with appropriate derring-do;
exceptions (e.g., _Wizard of Earthsea_) are hard to game since the sphere
of action (research and contemplation) are fairly introspective. But
science fiction has many examples where hard external decisions have to
be made which require no combat.
If you and your players are wargamers, then I can understand the decision
to do a lot of _Mercenary_ scenarios. But to my mind too many GDW offerings
center around the application of firepower. Adventures like Leviathan
suit my taste much better.
Of course, combat will occur (players and referees being what we are).
Has anyone tried to use Azhanti High Lightning or Snapshot on a regular
basis? I'd like to hear people's reactions.
Dark Nebula question. This game looked pretty fun, but a friend and I
spent a day trying to see how we could overcome what seemed a fundamental
imbalance. One of the sides (I forget which) gets a "cheap" battleship
costing seven points (the other side must pay 14). A winning strategy
seemed to be to buy the cheapies as quickly as possible and launch an
all-out attack. The only way we found to make it even was to force the
"Dark Nebula" to separate the two home systems, which gives the doomed
side a chance to build up strength. But this is artificial, as well as
nearly impossible given the map placement rules.
Also, each side gets only one (1) tanker. The rules imply that your
developed systems will only count if there is a tanker located in
every empty system along the route. Is this correct?
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