File-Sharing as a Culture-Preserver: the case of the FASA Star Trek Combat Simulator

From the perspective of somebody with a background in digital archiving, copyright is a squatter's right, defined by the ability to deny content to others.

The overwhelming majority of works are not Harry Potter, still sold, published, and making money. Most materials under copyright are not reprinted, not available, not distributed, with the rights no longer belonging to those responsible for its creation. But if an archivist tried to digitize it and make any of it available to their patrons without permission…wham! Infringement lawsuit.

This is a real problem because of the paucity of the public domain, which as a result of lengthy copyright durations, excludes nearly the entire history of motion pictures and music; in other words, the entire culture of the 20th Century. 

The interests of digital archivists responsible for making information and materials available, and the interests of copyright holders, are directly at odds with each other.

 

This is very strange, because computer technology has advanced to the point that information and content are infinitely reproducible via computers. To use a Star Trek metaphor (both for accuracy and to get everybody in the right mood) a computer is like a food replicator. With enough power, it can make infinite copies.

 To quote lawyer/advocate Eben Moglen, who may or may not have been a Star Trek fan:

"The great moral question of the twenty-first century is: If all knowledge, all culture, all art, all useful information, can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price that it is given to anyone — if everyone can have everything, everywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone from anything? 

If you could make lamb chops in endless numbers by the mere pressing of a button, there would be no moral argument for hunger ever, anywhere. 

I see no system of moral philosophy generated by the economy of the past that could evolve a principle to explain the moral legitimacy of denial in the presence of infinite profusion."

"Copyright maximalists" who take the most extreme and controlling view of the function of copyright, try to phrase copyright as a moral issue, and make an overly simplistic comparison of copyright infringement to "stealing" a physical object, and argue that downloading is denying compensation to the creators.

 

This doesn't work because there's no 1:1 comparison between a downloaded copy and a lost sale. By that logic, a checked out library book equals a lost sale, and lending a book to a friend is a lost sale. Most of us discovered our favorite books not because we bought them outright but because someone lent them to us. In that sense, online copying serves the same function lending a book to a friend does: discovery. 

As Cory Doctorow put it: the greatest enemy of creators isn't copying, but obscurity.

The "file sharing is stealing" argument gets even stranger when, in the case of some copywritten works, it makes you ask, "stealing from who?" 

A perfect example would be the FASA Star Trek Starfleet Tactical Combat Simulator game, made under license by the game company FASA, printed between 1981 and 1989. The STCS occupies a strange niche between wargame simulation, board game, and roleplaying game, where, on a hex map, players take the role of competing starships battling each other.

These days, not only does FASA no longer exist, but it lost the license to print Star Trek materials. In other words, there is no way I could ever directly compensate the makers of the FASA Star Trek game, mostly because FASA ceased to exist. They no longer have the license and the materials are out of print. I could buy the game secondhand on ebay or find some dog-eared copy at an old game store, but in either case, FASA would receive no money for the same reason textbook publishers don't receive money for the sale of used books.

At the same time, I am very pleased to have found copies online of the FASA books and I have run the game with some friends and printed counters on a dry-erase hex grid. To put my discovery into context, keep in mind that I am not exactly this game's target audience. As someone who was not alive when the game was originally published and in its heyday, I first discovered and picked up a copy of the rule set because it was possible to do so online. 

To my great delight, there are still some people keeping the Star Trek: Space Combat Simulation Game alive, almost entirely those who remember its heyday back in the 1980s. For instance, visit this website for the Star Trek Tactical Combat Simulator Database and Archive. The STCS archive explains its purpose like this:

Think of the STSTCSOLD&A as a nature preserve, designed to harbor a vanishing species of pencil and paper amusement. In a world now dominated by advanced computer games, the STSTCS is a beloved relic, akin to classic automobiles or vintage wine. In creating the OLD&A I am doing something similar to restoring a car, combining new parts with an old chassis, repainting the body panels and polishing the glass. As with most car restoration, the entire OLD&A project is a labour of affection, done solely for the sheer satisfaction of the thing. With my STSTCS game books slowly falling into shreds, I hope to preserve the essence of the STSTCS in a medium that cannot be dulled, dimmed, smudged, ripped, or otherwise folded and spindled by time. I also hope to bring a new generation of Trek fans into the Old World of gaming where mental activity, not processor speed, powers the action.

When copywritten material is totally lost, you're not just losing the material, but the culture around that material begins to disappear. Preserving materials is like preserving a culture. Mystery Science Theater 3000 can't obtain the rights to reprint some of the movies they licensed to spoof, so a longstanding piece of advice by Mike Nelson to his fans is to "keep on circulating the tapes." It's copyright infringement, sure, but it keeps a huge chunk of a fandom alive and saved from total oblivion. There are hundreds of episodes of Doctor Who that were thoughtlessly erased by accident by the BBC in the 1960s, which are only preserved now because fans saw fit to audio record the episodes as they watched.

Despite all that, the STCS Archive keeps away the one thing that really would play a role in new players rediscovering the game, which allowed a person not present at its heyday to get involved and become an active participant in the community.

Sadly, the one item most fans want most is the one item I cannot provide. At least half of all the letters I get are from relatively new and/or returning Trek fans who are just finding out about the game, or are rediscovering the game after a long time away from it. In both cases, people are desperate to try and get their hands on the game rules themselves, either because they never owned a copy of the game or because they were foolish enough to get rid of the game at some point in the past. While I would love nothing more than to provide each and every fan with a verbatim transcript of the entire STSTCS rules book, it came to my attention in 2001 that a third party purchased the rights to the rule system that the STSTCS is based upon. This third party is jealously guarding these rules and has already contacted other, older STSTCS sites in an effort to get them to take down any and all portions of the rules that have been posted on the web. So far nobody has been hauled into court, but I don't want to be a trendsetter in this regard so I am steering clear of this known legal iceberg.

That was written, by the way, in 2001, when FASA stopped printing and started licensing their intellectual properties (including famous pen and paper RPGs like Shadowrun). Since then, the company in question, which incidentally did not even create the rules and game system itself, has done absolutely nothing with the property. Does anyone still doubt me when I say copyright is at times a squatter's right?

This strategy is even more shortsighted when one considers that the future of any business model in the digital age is to directly create a personal relationship with fans, communicate with them, and give them a reason to buy. What possible reason could there be to get litigious with those who might be your greatest customers?

This is a shame, because if the FASA game was reprinted I would absolutely pay real money to buy a copy now that I know it exists. For one thing, rules are easier to consult at a gaming table if they're in printed book form, and it would be great to have "official" playtested game statistics to represent Next Generation and later era starships (due to the timeframe of FASA, only the original series is really well represented and detailed). Also, there haven't been any new FASA miniatures made since the 1980s, something people will pay for because there is a real scarcity, not an artificial one.


Because I got my hands on STCS files, a customer now exists in me (and my friends) that didn't exist before, and I am proud to talk about and promote the STCS.  

What does all of this mean for digital archivists and information science professionals? Only good things, if they understand their changing role and required skill set. Institutions, like academic libraries and historical databases, should stop thinking about building their "collections," considering the spread apart, decentralized nature of modern content on the internet, and instead emphasize the reference skills of their own IS professionals to get patrons in touch with what they want, wherever it is and wherever it can be found.

The end result of all this is that file-sharing can play a role in preserving culture from oblivion, and expose new audiences much more thoroughly than inflexible squatting can. Somewhere out there, the teenage or 20-something Star Trek fan who will end up becoming the biggest fan and ultimately paying customer for the FASA STCS is only a click away from having his mind blown.

Game Review: Buck Rogers XXVC (1990)

Now here's an oddity I have trouble believing even exists: for a whole generation, the primary form we even knew about Buck Rogers at all was as a roleplaying game, and one that was a edgy reimagining of a goofy pulp character...before that was even a thing! It even does that word-salad XXVC subname, before hip, marketable undertitles shortened to the point of meaninglessness became a trend. In short, Buck Rogers XXVC is a game that was ahead of its time (though behind ours).

Of all the gritty reboots of a previously goofy pulp character, Buck Rogers XXVC, a roleplaying game produced by TSR back in 1990, has a certain logic I agree with: many science-oriented pulp characters were created with the intention they would be "state of the art," written with the best scientific knowledge available. This is undercut somewhat by artists and writers resurrecting pulp heroes with nostalgic, kitsch 1920s imagery like zeppelins and fin-helmets.

Buck Rogers XXVC is about a polluted earth inhabited by gangs exploited by a villainous, arrogant Martian megacorporation. This isn't as crackpot as it sounds for two reasons.

First, Buck Rogers still has alien monsters, space battles and ruthless villains, but in the words of the game manual itself, "while the flavor is the same, the ingredients are different." The unusual monsters and aliens are now products of genetic engineering, Mars and Venus are terraformed worlds.

Heck, the main means of interstellar travel in this game are rockets. It brings to mind how undervalued Goddard's invention is in science fiction, as rockets are the one vehicle that in real life has actually taken mankind to the stars, yet they're the least seen in science fiction these days. Making rockets the means of transport in the game is nothing short of a stroke of genius because with one creative choice it encapsulates the entire spirit of the setting: rockets are simultaneously plausible hard science, yet also evoke retro, classic science fiction.

Second, Buck Rogers is no stranger to varying takes. What's amazing to me about Buck Rogers is this: every single adaptation and version of the character is wildly different. It's like the craziest game of telephone ever played. The only other property I can think of where absolutely everything changes with every single new "take" would have to be Final Fantasy.

Take a look at the Dynamite Entertainment Buck Rogers comic. I haven't read it yet, but they're wearing friggin' Tron outfits so how similar can it possibly be?

Contrast that with Flash Gordon. It's shocking how almost every single version and adaptation of Flash Gordon from the 1930s serial, to the Filmation animated series, to the 1980 movie, have basically the same story structure and opening with barely any variation: Flash Gordon is caught in a plane crash with Dale Arden onto Zarkov's property. Zarkov captures them for a rocket launch toward Mongo. They crash and encounter Ming the Merciless as prisoners, where Princess Aura falls for Flash and Flash is sent to a gladiatorial arena to die, etc.

Heck, Mongo even looks similar in most versions of Flash Gordon.

Contrast that to the varying versions of Buck Rogers, where the basic relationships and even the location, enemies and setting aren't even permanent. The pulp novel Buck Rogers was based on, and the initial run of the newspaper series, didn't even actually have space travel. Can you think of anything more fundamental to the perception of Buck Rogers than space travel?

The villains were the Airlords of Han, Mongols who destroyed white civilization with superior airplanes and zeppelins. Yes, that's right: the original comic strip and novel version of Buck Rogers were based around a futuristic Race War with whites against the Yellow Peril.

And shockingly, our hero wasn't even called Buck Rogers until the comic strip!

We could be here all day listing the different versions of Rogers but the point is this: Buck is so wildly divergent, beyond even the normal variability of long-lasting multimedia fictional characters, that if somebody wants to do a state of the art, scientifically accurate version...why not?

The Setting

The principal conflict in the game is between a conquered earth ruthlessly lorded over by a Martian evil corporation, RAM, who arrogantly view earth as a mudball only fit to be exploited for natural resources. In the minds of the Martian RAM executives, they're the only good thing that ever came out of the earth.

The guy who wrote the series bible was Transformers/GI Joe writer Flint Dille, and that is something of a surprise as he's a conservative. It's surprising to discover a setting created by a conservative would have the bad guy be an evil, powerful corporation. After all, wouldn't Buck Rogers and the rest saving the Earth from RAM's rapaciousness be nothing more than interference with free market forces?

Get a job, hippie!

One of the pirate bad guys has a rocketship named "The Free Enterprise."

The kind of science fiction conservatives like is Starship Troopers, Honor Herrington or Halo: reveling in militarism, with a monocultural society that is presented as morally superior to an enemy group that's a multicultural, visually diverse Federation. Along the way there's usually some metaphor about how appeasement never works and how it's always 1939 and every enemy are always, always the Nazis.

Another big theme of the Buck Rogers XXVC setting is genetic engineering, and how "Gennies," or genetically created people, are just as human as the rest of us but are treated as property. Sympathy for oppressed minority outsiders (who often stand in the way of good land with resources on them) is not exactly a theme one would expect from a conservative author, although Flint Dille only wrote the bible and the game was developed by other hands.

Thanks to Gennies, despite the setting being humans-only, the world is nonetheless filled with weird Star Wars cantina creatures.

My personal favorite Gennies in the setting are the Venusian lowlanders. On terraformed Venus, only the highlands are inhabitable to human-type life, yet a crucial cash crop can only grow in the lowlands. So humanoids were created to survive in that environment, Lowlanders, who look like the scarier brothers of the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The rub is, the highland Venusians are trying to terraform Venus…which threatens the entire existence of the Lowlanders. Despite their rebellion and the fact they look like scary monsters, the Lowlanders have a pretty sympathetic position.

Instead of stormtroopers, RAM use berserker, genetically engineered soldiers called Terrines, who look like the kangaroo supersoldiers from Tank Girl. In the minds of the Terrines, the highest form of life in the universe are Martian RAM corporate executives, with themselves as the second highest, and everybody else beneath them.

The canon characters

It's interesting to see what shape the traditional Buck Rogers characters take. Ardala Valdemar for instance, is a highly connected, high-status freelance Martian RAM agent who functions as a double-dealing information broker and espionage agent. In one of the sample adventures, she seduces the sample player character, slips them a drugged drink and makes off with a valuable information disk.

Killer Kane, though, is a heck of a lot more interesting: he was a former earth rocket jock who was a lover of Wilma Deering, who after being captured by RAM agreed to work for them so Wilma would be released. Along the way though, Kane's enormous ego got the best of him: he believes he's actually working for the betterment of Earth, which would be a lot better off with him as its RAM administrator…and there's the tremendous ego-wound of possibly being the second best pilot in the solar system to a fossil from the 20th Century, who also might take Kane's girlfriend, too.

"Doctor Huer" is a digital personality, a kind of artificially intelligent computer program.

There are no Tigermen, but Mars does have a nomadic cat-race who vaguely suggest the Martian Tigermen.

If there's any complaint, it is that NPC characters defining the setting are never used in the adventure supplements the game puts out. You never really interact with Ardala, Killer Kane, space pirate Black Barney (who is obviously this setting's scarred, sardonic answer to Boba Fett), but rather with no-name, who-cares characters like Carlton Turabian and RAM security chief Marcus Wolfe. Not getting a mission briefing or scientific pointers from Doctor Huer is especially inexcusable, since it's not like a computer program is ever going to overshadow the player characters – the whole point of the character is to give quest missions and provide exposition, after all.

The failure to use the signature characters gives the overwhelming feeling the Buck Rogers elements are awkwardly welded on a totally different setting.

Why does this game even exist?

Buck Rogers is an IP that is frankly, overvalued. If anything, the association with Buck Rogers might have damaged the future of Buck Rogers XXVC, because a lot of gamers avoided this game thinking it was "cheesy."

(See also: the Lone Ranger. Recently, Gore Verbinski refused to direct "The Lone Ranger" starring Jonny Depp as Tonto because Disney wouldn't cough up a $250 million budget. Now, what, I ask you, about the Lone Ranger could possibly make it cost $250 million, unless Depp and Verbinski were straight up skimming $150 million straight off the top? And can anyone imagine any possible scenario on this or any other planet where a Lone Ranger movie makes more than enough to recoup that Waterworld-level cost?)

If calling it "Buck Rogers" hurt the game, why call it that at all? It's not exactly like the character has a built-in fanbase the way Indiana Jones or the Marvel superheroes have. Buck Rogers is one of those characters, along with Paul Bunyan, where everybody's heard of him, but nobody really cares about him.

The reason this game exists at all is, it was created to be a borderline-illegal money pipeline out of TSR, Inc. into the pockets of its chairwoman. I'm actually not making this up.

It kills me to say that, because this was quite possibly my second or third RPG ever (after Top Secret and the Palladium Ninja Turtles game) and discovering its reason for existence was un-kosher business practices is like discovering the show Sesame Street was created to be a cover for a pedophile ring.

Rather, the game was created because the former president of TSR was Lorraine Williams, known as the woman who led a hostile takeover that kicked D&D creator Gary Gygax from his own company, for suing fans in the 1990s who created AD&D fan websites (giving TSR the name "They Sue Regularly"), and for her nickname among rpg fans, "the Wicked Witch of the Mid-West."

You see, Lorraine was the granddaughter of the rights-owner to Buck Rogers, and so she could allow TSR to pay for all the expenses while her own company received the profits. Lorraine essentially paid herself royalties based on 60% of the print run, despite the fact that by all reports the game didn't sell and unsold product was everywhere.

I'm not a finance attorney, but that doesn't sound entirely legal. 

How is it as a game?

It uses THAC0. Oh dear God, THAC0 – the most annoying calculation in RPG history. Old school gamers lock up with PTSD when it's mentioned, and it turned 2nd Edition into not so much something you play, so much as as something you survive.

As you might guess, Buck Rogers XXVC uses a variation on Second Edition AD&D for its "engine," and so it's a class and level based game with classes like Rocket-Jock, Rogue and Warrior. In yet another respect that makes it ahead of its time, anticipating the way, years later, the d20 engine would be appropriated for even wildly inappropriate high-tech genres. After all, if a game is barely functional, it is vastly improved by the addition of street slang and zombie apocalypses, right?

Buck Rogers XXVC game commits a faux pas common to early class and level games, one inexcusable for a game made at its late date: it makes necessary to group survival some un-fun to play support classes, Medic and Engineer. These classes are a great idea for everybody but the poor schlub player that actually has to suck it up and be the healer, that is. Yeah, that's exactly what I imagined myself as a buttkicking space hero: medic.

The big difference between the Buck Rogers game and AD&D is a surprisingly modern and progressive skill system using percentile dice. The relevant ability score is added (Dexterity of 17 adds +17%) and a chunk of points are given for class skills and outside of class skills.

Here comes the biggest hole in the entire system: there isn't really that much of a space combat system except for assigning statistics to vehicles.

There's a whole class based around skill with rocket piloting (Rocket Jock) but there's actually no bonus whatsoever in space combat for having high skill with piloting! There is no way to use pilot skill to coax speed or performance, no way to dogfight, no way to position oneself for a chance to hit, no way to perform evasive maneuvers.

Two ships with the same hit points, weaponry and dexterity bonus, but one with a 1st Level Rocketjock and the other with Buck Rogers, will have no discernable difference in combat statistics other than THAC0 for gunnery.

They mumble something about "special movement at the GM's discretion," an afterthought with no concrete functionality.

In the published adventures, the only times there are any actual rolls required for Piloting are for landings. Not even exciting landings, either, like gliding a crashing rocket safely…just regular, routine consequence-free landings, of the kind airline pilots make daily. In terms of drama and excitement this is somewhere up there with requiring skill checks for bathroom use.

The game lore makes a big deal out of Killer Kane and Buck Rogers' rivalry to determine who the best pilot in the solar system is, but considering piloting skills aren't a factor in ship-to-ship combat at all I have no idea how they could ever make that determination – or why it matters.

The damage done by futuristic weaponry in Buck Rogers XXVC is shockingly unimpressive. Laser guns deal 1d8 points of damage per successful shot. Considering that's the exact same damage as a sword in AD&D, and how lasers are just as subject to AC as swords are, and swords receive additional bonuses from high Strength and so on average do more damage than lasers...well, it's strangely pleasant to discover there really hasn't been much in the way of improvement in weaponry technology over the past 2,000 years.

(Didn't a Katana in 2nd Edition AD&D do something like 1d10 or 1d12 damage, depending on the sourcebook? A lot of games suffered from Katanaitis back in the day but this kicks it up a whole new level if the katana does the same or more damage than both a laser gun and a 1d10 monomolecular blade from 500 years in the future.)

That said, there are a few extremely cool parts of the system. The boxed set comes with a map of the Solar System, and it's an ACTIVE one. The orbits of the planets have ticks around them, with the position for January 2453 given, with each tick representing the planet's movement in a month. To determine where a planet might be at any given time, just advance (or subtract) its position by one tick for every month. So, if you want to know how far Mars and Earth are from each other in February 2454, just advance earth and Mars by 13 notches.

 

The system even comes with a transparent ruler you can put on the solar system map to measure how much fuel (measured in hit points) it takes to make a trip. As communications are far from instantaneous and happen at light speed, it can even tell how much delay there is between signals (it usually takes 13 minutes to send a message to Mars, which is 13 light-minutes away).

Overall though, the game has gaping flaws, though it is enough of a curiosity that I'd recommend it to the interested. I've never seen game art in my life where it's obvious the artist is just bored. Every problem I have with this game would probably be solved by a second edition – but considering the crazy reasons it existed at all, that's a guarantee to never, ever happen.

It will never be reprinted and so apart from secondhand on ebay it's impossible to obtain it legally. However, I would never, ever, ever, ever advise downloading it. Because that would be WRONG, you see…  :-)

RPGs made under license

RPGs produced under license have incredibly stringent rules about faithfulness to content and that can result in odd and hilarious situations where RPG writers try to passive-aggressively undercut elements of the world they don’t like.

Screw Medichlorians!

I’ve yet to see anyone in a Star Wars RPG product (or, for that matter, any other bit of Star Wars lore like novels and comics) ever mention or utilize the terminally retarded Medichlorians concept.

This is especially strange because in Star Wars RPGs, I’ve seen detailed treatments of something as throwaway as the Kessel Run used as the basis of an entire product, complete with gameboard, map and tokens, not to mention elaborate and detailed RPG treatments of Cantina-scene background races like the Hammerheads and walrus-men.

Medichlorians were explicitly described in the Phantom Menace as part of a huge exposition scene, yet much more detail and energy was spent in the roleplaying game devoted to what the monsters in Chewbacca’s holographic chess game actually are! You can’t tell me that’s not passive-aggressiveness in action.

Here’s another case of Star Wars RPG writer passive-aggressiveness: the adventure module “Tatooine Manhunt” by Bill Slavicek and Daniel Greenberg.



Have a look at that cover. Doesn’t it sound like the coolest thing you can do at your gaming table…have your buddies fight against the awesome, ruthless bounty hunter enemies in Star Wars, like Boba Fett, the Terminator-esque unstoppable assassin robot IG-88, and the lizard guy Bossk?

But wait! Look on the inside.



That’s right – for some reason, the module couldn’t use Boba Fett, Bossk, IG-88 or the rest. But that sure didn’t stop them from doing what the writer wanted to do! He made characters that are so identical to the iconic Star Wars baddies that to call them knockoffs would be misleading, because at least a “knockoff” would imply distance, that in some way these are different people. What happened was, most likely someone told them the characters were unavailable so they went and wrote this.

Star Wars is an interesting case because in many ways, the RPG created the entire expanded universe as we know it. You see, the RPG was the first place to consolidate information about the setting and revealed information previously unknown…so therefore RPGs were for a long time, only Star Wars “reference books.” Because the RPG materials were Lucasfilm-licensed, everything in them was first vetted and therefore totally canon! People writing the novels and comics had to read the RPG books because they were actually the most complete sources of information available on the Star Wars galaxy.

She-Hulk in Fantastic Four

If you replace a member of the Fantastic Four, no matter how good of a character you are, people will hate you because these guys are so beloved. Remember that loathesome motherfucker HERBIE, who replaced the Human Torch in the cartoon?

That goes double for any character that replaces someone as awesome and universally liked as Ben Grimm, who is quite possibly the Morgan Freeman of the Marvel Universe: the guy everybody likes. Take the TSR Marvel Super-Heroes game module, which features the FF vs. Arcade.


The adventure module “Murderworld!” by Jeff Grubb had to use She-Hulk because the TSR game was set in modern continuity, and someone working under license can’t pick and choose. It’s not “cafeteria canon.” But it was obvious the writer wasn’t a big Shulkie fan. For instance, Ben Grimm’s statistics were prominently given in the back “for game masters that want to use him.” Uh, okay.



Notice his sheet is as big and prominent as She-Hulk’s despite the fact the character’s not even in the adventure module!

What’s more, when the FF arrives at the killer amusement park Murderworld, the She-Hulk’s ironic deathtrap was being on a simulator plane targeted by a gauntlet of traps and missiles and so on. The other heroes’ encounters were perfectly tailored for them in a traditional Arcade way. Placed in a plane? That’s something one would subject Ben Grimm to, since Ben used to be a pilot and war hero.



They mention briefly in the module that Arcade assumed the Thing was still in the FF. What does this mean? Two things:

1) The story as written makes no sense if used with She-Hulk but plenty of sense with Ben Grimm. Ben Grimm could fill in for Greenie and it would not require anything about the module to be changed!

2) Even in the story itself, the module writer made sure people are going, “hey, where’s the Thing?”

Women and the Lens

In the Lensman novels, Smith went out of his way to explain that women can’t use the Lens and have minds totally incompatible with the Lens in terms that are hilariously patronizing. There was one scene in First Lensman where it was deliberately stated that one female character went to Arisia and was outright refused to be granted status as a Lensman as she didn't have the mentality for it. This is canon, inarguable as gravity.

To say this creates a problem for gaming is an understatement. To REQUIRE a female player to play a male character against their will is pretty awful, and for the worst possible reason imaginable: because it’s impossible to enjoy being a woman in the setting that’s not a noncombatant nurse.

The Lensman RPG manual desperately tried to work around this limit in a way that could best be described as subdued panic. In fact the guy that wrote the guide once said in an interview that he was nervous about taking on the project because it would piss off his wife! The book contained a few sly, subtle hints slipped under the radar about how something like a female Lensman could be possible. One of them expressed a compromise possibility that perhaps Clarissa MacDougall needed to be the first female to use a Lens and after her, others were possible. That doesn’t make any sense, but it was something.

Hero System (Champions) 6th Edition Review

Champions, aka the Hero System, is my favorite tabletop role-playing game of all time, and so I grabbed the new edition, updated my running game to use it, and never looked back. Other superhero games are great, but none seemed as worthwhile as Champions. A majority of my long-lasting RPGs have been Champions games.

Like a lot of things I like, the Hero System is neither beginner or newbie-friendly...but while it looks difficult, the rules have such internal consistency that it's possible to understand how several rules work if you understand one. Character creation is infinitely customizable; there's never a danger of two characters looking alike.

My typical reaction to most of the changes in 6TH Edition was, “well, it’s about damn time!”

One thing that I’ve yet to see receive any praise as long, long overdue was the system for Long-Term END Loss. This is one of those so-called “Optional” rules, like the Dive for Cover maneuver, that in my experience, are ultimately not-so-optional because they fill a need and can be used almost every story. If a hero flies to South America, how tired are they by the time they get there? How exhausted are they by the cross over the desert? I have no idea why a system with this utility took this long to add.

What I find most impressive, and kind of creepy, is that an overwhelming number of the changes made are things that I personally used in my game on a haphazard basis. For instance, I used something quite similar to the Long-Term END Loss system for a while, and speaking of perfect timing…the very day before I got the book, a player asked if he could get an “all or nothing” limit on his Increased Density. At the time, I ruled that unless it was a huge amount, all or nothing is a -0 limitation. Imagine my shock to see that very ruling, with my exact language, in print! It was things like this that led me to believe this is a revision done by people that actually play the game.

The distinction between the Barrier and Entangle struck me as genius, since it was always unclear to me where Entangle’s ability to create barriers ended and Force Wall began. Further, the solution to Absorption – to list it as points to absorb instead of rolled dice – was exactly the kind of elegant, outside the box solution I hoped to see more of in this revision.

Another definite improvement was the unlocking of characteristics. On the plus side, the unlocking of characteristics means that combat doesn’t stop for 2 minutes while everybody figures out how their SPD is lowered by a Drained DEX. This is actually genius, since Drain DEX and CON are the single most common Drains. In addition to speeding things up, the unlocking allows greater character customizability. When I saw this change, the first character I immediately thought of was Marvel Comics’ the Thing: a guy that is big and rocky and slow, but who is very skilled and experienced at scraps and fighting. He’d definitely have a low-DEX and a high OCV.

This actually reduces the importance of super-crucial attributes like CON and DEX, which depending on their value, can make a character playable or unplayable. The single most common mistake that beginning players make is to have a low CON, which means every attribute derived from that stat is pretty low too.

The switch from inches to meters was an interesting one, but I’m not sure what it really changes. It does make me wonder, though. When I game, I usually do it with maps. A combat without a map, for me, is absolutely unthinkable – combat, to my mind, needs maps in order to be clear. Is it a common experience for people in other groups to play without maps? Is that the reason for the change?


What I find interesting is that most critiques I have of the 6th Edition can also be applied to 5th. The reason is, I’m just disappointed that the new edition didn’t go far enough in solving very basic problems with the Hero System.

1. Hey goober…where are the superguys?

When are they going to stop pretending this isn’t mostly a superhero game?

The Hero System started out as Champions and is first and foremost about superhero gaming. I have no idea why this is even contentious at all. The assumption of superhero gaming is built into almost every element of the system: two different damage types, knockback, END costs for everything, the way only high ability scores impact skills, the unreal damage done by Martial Arts damage, the fundamental durability of living things, down to the very names of powers themselves, like “Telepathy,” and the fundamental notion of powers as something distinct from skills and characteristics. There are a million little examples, even in the current edition: for instance, the fact that Barriers are not assumed to be opaque unless otherwise stated, is a perfect example of thinking that is so idiosyncratically superheroic. De-emphasizing the game’s superhero roots so it’s trying to be GURPS is downright confusing from nearly every angle, especially since the game only really works as-is for superheroes and needs patching and optional rules for nearly everything else.

The Hero System is like Starbucks: sure, it’s great they offer salads and organic juices, but at the end of the day, their business is selling coffee. I figured if anything would cure the Hero System of this tragic delusion, it would be a giant push by a giant, superpopular MMORPG that even goes by the game’s original name of “Champions.” The people that prepared 6th Edition didn’t even change the name of the RPG back to Champions, so connection can be seen. Essentially, the people preparing 6th Edition squandered the highest visibility that Champions has ever received and ever will receive! With the push from the top-selling computer game that uses an abridged version of its mechanics, Champions could have been able to reach a wider audience than roleplaying games usually get. As the “Hero System,” it’s only bought by the usual suspects. EPIC FAIL.

2. Adjustment Powers.

The Achilles Heel of the system is and always has been Adjustment Powers. If anything called for a revision it would be them, and it’s interesting how the section on Adjustment Powers in 6th Edition bloated out to a whopping three times larger than any other power category. The worst is that a crucial element of how they work remains undefined: how many points are required to lower or raise a Power? How much does a single unit (damage point, etc.) cost in active points? I usually solve this with a house rule: record the cost of each individual unit. For instance, an 8d6 Blast with Armor-Piercing would cost 8 points (7.5 rounded up) to lower per damage class. This is something so crucial to quick resolution of how these powers work, but it’s not even on the character sheet!

3. Mental Powers.

One of the first lines that Hero System zealots will parrot at you as a strength of the game is how you buy game mechanics first, and define what something is afterward. And to the game’s credit, it does work that way…except, y’know, for Mental Powers, which are treated separately, on an island from nearly the entire rest of the system. They have different rules for perceptibility, line of sight, and competing rolls…all because they have a distinct and uniting special effect. They even use a totally different characteristic to determine hitting! And there are two different versions of a power depending on whether it is mental or not: Images or Mental Illusions. A more elegant system would have brought them together by now. Something like the “attack vs. EGO,” “Invisible Power Effects” and “No Range Modifier” power advantages from 5th Edition were a step in the right direction.

4. Movement Powers.

No matter how you slice it, movement powers in Champions are so distanced from any real-world measurement of speed, to the point where I’m not even sure what a movement value really means, even in comparative terms. With lots of supergames, it’s pretty clear. In DC Heroes, if you have 10 APs of Superspeed, you can move the distance of 10 APs per round (which has a real-world distance). In Mutants and Masterminds, a Speed of 4 indicates the ability to move at 250 miles per hour. To figure out something as crucial as real-world speed requires a calculation that isn’t even a part of the regular system. This is a really big problem because the distance a character can move in a given time is one of the few occasions where knowledge of a long-term result outside of combat is more important than in-combat, “on map” results. Finally, there are so many variables, noncombat multiples, SPD, and inches – sorry, meters – of movement that the characteristics are meaningless.

5. Create any hero! Except the ones that the rules don’t like.

It is a bug that is desperately spun as a feature that in the Hero System it’s really hard to instantly kill or transform anything despite the fact that tons of fictional characters and devices have these ability. This is an example of the system telling fiction and the players how the world works instead of the other way around. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a GM, I know some things just shouldn’t be available as gamebreakers. But even if something is too abusive or powerful to allow player characters to have, a way should exist to create it where it can exist under GM control. Another example of the rules making awkward a concept that is intellectually easy to grasp would be characters that are just plain immune to something. I hardly see how having a PC or NPC that is just plain immune to fire, radiation or electricity is so game-destroyingly broken that there is just no way to do it under the normal use of the character creation rules. The Immunity power in Mutants & Masterminds did this very classily and elegantly and didn’t require insane uses of active points.

6. As before, Mimics, Shapechangers and “photographic reflexes” characters remain awkward to represent.

I always thought one of the reasons that Shapechanger and Mimic character concepts were a base archetype in the main Mutants & Masterminds book was a direct diss to their greatest competition – that this game can create with such ludicrous ease what is so awkward and difficult in the Hero System. Sure, in Champions there is a way to have Muscle Mimics and Shapechangers, but still. In practice, “on the ground,” they’re downright unplayable, especially for new players, since it involves a VPP, and designing powers is not always possible off the cuff. Even the most fervent Hero System partisan must admit that character creation is not the quickest thing in the world to do. Because skills can’t be placed in VPPs, and for good reason, the Muscle Mimic or photographic reflexes character remains the one power set that Champions just can’t reproduce under normal circumstances. This is a direct example of the rules and system interfering in character concepts that are very common in fiction.

As a Champions GM, I had to discourage a new player – naively under the delusion the game can live up to its promise and do anything she imagined - from creating a power-mimic character. I hated to do it. I hated to tell a player “no,” especially to a character concept so very basic to comics…but better to do that, than having her spend 5-10 minutes every combat assigning and building points for new powers, while a more experienced player stood over her shoulder and helped her figure it out. Does that sound like fun to anybody else? I had an epiphany when I realized that a VPP is suggested as a solution for any area the system can’t do well. To those that say the VPP solution to mimics works just fine, I ask you this: when was the last time you saw a Mimic character in your Champions game?


7. Lots of people are math-illiterate. The question is, what are you going to do about it?

I’m a mathy sort of guy; I took Calculus I and II in college and I was a “mathlete” in High School. I have periodically worked as a math tutor. I’ve often been alarmed at a world where most people are math-illiterate and seemingly proud of it, where even counting change is difficult for many. I don’t find the very basic elementary school math the Hero System requires to really be a problem at all. However, a stock critique of the Hero System is that it requires a lot of number-crunching, and it is an absolutely undeniable fact that character creation does take longer in this game than others. This critique keeps on popping up over and over and over and over. If so many people keep on saying it, if so many people bring it up, shouldn’t the people that design the game take the hint, realize there may be a problem, and do something about it? Maybe do something so character creation doesn’t take so damn long? So adjustment powers have an effect that results in quicker resolution? So figuring out your character’s actual speed in a meaningful real-world measurement doesn’t require an unintuitive calculation? So it’s possible to play a mimic or shapechanger for anyone but advanced players?

At the end of the day, that’s the biggest problem I’ve got with the 6th Edition: because it can’t acknowledge there might be something to the critiques, it doesn’t feel the need to do anything about them. Tweaking the cost of adjustment powers and their adders doesn’t change the basic problems. It really feels like the people that wrote 6th Edition didn’t think there were any basic problems with the game. Hero System fanboys and advertising copy go on about how “any hero is possible,” but game designers should know better than to drink the Kool-Aid, and strive to repair the real deficiencies that exist. The original Champions was not handed down on golden plates by archangels. Basic, fundamental things about it can and should be fixed. That’s the review of the 6th Edition Hero System in a nutshell: it didn’t go far enough.

Eberron Forever!

My long overdue D&D blog post!

This week I'm beginning a new sword n' sorcery game with my college buddies, so watch out for updates and even pictures here. You know, it's funny how times change. When I was an awkward overachiever in High School, I hung out with my fellow acne-covered members of the Mathematics Honors Society (mostly Asian, of course) and spent my Friday nights playing AD&D, telling calculus jokes, and ordering out for pizza, and dreaming what it would be like to smell a girl's hair. Things are totally different these days, naturally. For one thing, we no longer have acne.

My game setting of choice is, naturally, Eberron. I've loved EBERRON since it came out in 2004 and became the dominant D&D game setting, and I'm not alone: a recent poll showed it to be the most popular of all third edition products. The tale of how Eberron came about is nothing short of gaming legend, the story of a wannabe that got to be. Wizards of the Coast, owners of D&D, created a contest: they were looking for someone to design a setting that would be the new centerpiece for D&D. Over 10,000 one-page proposals for a setting were sent in from all over the world.

I was one of the 10,000 game masters that submitted a setting idea for the contest. A lifelong game master, I sent in a one page proposal of my homebrewed D&D third edition setting that I was running a game in at the time, a mostly underwater world of archiapelagos and sunken civilizations called UNDERSEA KINGDOMS, which combined dark horror with an underwater setting, sort of "Conan the Barbarian in Atlantis." My proposal didn't make the cut...which is a shame, because I think my game was a lot of fun and the gang loved it. It would take Kurt Busiek to realize the potential of setting horror Sword and Sorcery underwater with his series AQUAMAN: SWORD OF ATLANTIS.

(Intriguingly enough, in the original proposal, Eberron was to have a significant aquatic component as well, something that didn't make it to the final setting. According to Keith Baker, the underwater elements were not where WotC wanted for their keystone setting and requested he leave that part out. Well, if only I had known!)

I bear no ill will against Keith Baker, because Eberron is nothing short of a spectacular and unique achievement very different from the cookie-cutter Tolkien worlds standard for D&D. It was, instead, a very pulpy, Indiana Jones style world of ancient secrets that had elements of dark Middle Ages detective stories (think IN THE NAME OF THE ROSE), and unusual twists on the very stale traditional D&D elements. For instance, Hobbits are a race of Dinosaur-riding barbarians. This is the only setting I'd ever consider playing the lamest of all Tolkienoid races, Elves. There are two Elven countries: one an aggressive group of Mongol-style horseclans, the other an Ancient island civilization that worships their dead ancestors, who incidentally live as wise zombies in Necropolis, and who often tattoo their entire face with skull tattoos.

Eberron's dominant characteristic as a setting is the widespread use of magic. After all, if magic exists, and it obeys consistent rules, it stands to reason that magic would assume important functions in the world, like communication, transport, and so forth. What's important to realize here is that this is not magic used to approximate the 1930s or technology. There are no "magical dishwashers," as Keith Baker put it, nor does anyone use magic cars or anything like that. Eberron is fundamentally a world in the Middle Ages. In fact, it offers a pretty good explanation for why technology isn't getting any higher in a world with such a long history: because of how spectacular magic is, all the research and development and scholarship goes in that direction (as opposed to things like gunpowder and the printing press).

There are some pretty spectacular examples of magic on display in the world of Eberron. One of the "sexiest" are the elemental-bound airships, sky-galleons with elementals bound in them that allow for flight. Now, it must be remembered these airships are a very unusual part of the world, and usually only the super-rich can afford them.

A big part of the visual "look" of Eberron is a sort of magical technology, with clockwork monsters, constructs, and Guillermo del Toro-style diabolical, occult machines.

Likewise, because of the advance in low-level magic, Eberron is, at least in the cities and urban regions, a far more sophisticated setting than the usual Middle Ages world. For instance, banking is a big part of the world, credit exists, and with large sums of money it is more common to write checks and bank notes. Imagine the heroes of Lord of the Rings carrying travel and identification papers!

There are a few other distinctive elements to Eberron as well. One is the idea of the Warforged. They're a race of magical golem-like constructs made of wood and metal that were designed for war, and now that the Last War is over, they have no reason to exist. They have full sentience and rights as living beings, but that's not the same as social acceptance. Like modern-day war veterans, society would rather pretend they don't exist, an ugly memory of a bad conflict. The war was the Warforged's entire reason for existing, and now they have to choose their own purpose. Some of them work 24/7 at mindless jobs so they don't have to consider questions of this kind. There are labor tensions with Warforged as well: they're strong and never get tired or ask for breaks, so naturally employers are keen to exploit them and workers are keen to resent them, sometimes justifiably and sometimes not.

Warforged are not only the most distinctive player race besides humans, but also the most popular: I've never run a single Eberron game without at least one or two Warforged.

A few more distinctive elements include the Dragonmarked Houses. Dragonmarks are magical birthmark tattoos that give magical powers, that have allowed the families that use them to become rather like the Spacing Guild from DUNE: families with jealously guarded monopolies with vast economic influence that are (theoretically) politically neutral.

I've often found that when playing with D&D vets that haven't tried Eberron before, the easiest way to incorporate their character into the setting is to make their characters members of a Dragonmarked House.

Then there's the idea of Dragonshards. Dragonshards are unique magical gems that make magic possible. Wizards place their spells in Dragonshards over spellbooks, usually. This is an example of what settings should do: introduce distinctive world specific magical treasure. In fact, to bring home the fact this isn't your garden variety D&D world, I've often given out nothing but Dragonshards as treasure awards the first few adventures.

Another thing I like about Eberron was how the setting was designed with gaming in mind. I've always felt that even though roleplaying games have an element of interactive storytelling, they are GAMES first and stories a distant second. One example of the overlap is in the continent of Xen'Drik. It's sort of like an H. Rider Haggard or Edgar Rice Burroughs pulp version of Africa, with all the racist and colonial elements removed in a fantasy context. Xen'Drik is a continent that is barely explored where, in the undiscovered jungle and desert interior, there could be, literally, ANYTHING. A lost city of gold? A dragonshard the size of a mountain? Ding! Any kind of spooky monster you like? If a race of Bee People lived on the same continent as human civilizations, history would be different to reflect their presence. But the Bee People could be placed into the depths of Xen'Drik in their own nutty ERB-style lost city with no problem.

In other words, Xen'Drik was created with a game purpose in mind. I can respect this a great deal, because it is world background and story that explains how something can be used for a game, instead of the other way around: how something is used is determined by world background and story.

Another example of this phenomenon would be how, despite the fact Eberron is a setting with distinctive characteristics from the garden variety D&D world, everything that is in D&D has a place in Eberron. This is an innovation that is absolutely terrific, especially from the point of view of a DM: it means you don't have to throw anything out. Even absolutely weird supplements like ORIENTAL ADVENTURES have a way they can be used in traditional D&D: the civilization of hobgoblins have an ancient martial tradition, so a character class like Samurai would be very much at home there. The idea of a Kung Fu goblin made my day, by the way.

This attitude is especially helpful if you're a Dungeon Master, and you just got a fantastic new adventure supplement you want to use. I've been able to insert a great many non-Eberron products into Eberron. For instance, the adventure in the back of Frostburn for 5th Level characters and the recent FORTRESS OF THE YUAN-TI adventure (which incidentally, I placed as a lost city in Xen'Drik).

I have one other nice thing to say about Eberron: for the first time in a very long while, gaming fans have had the touchstone of a shared experience. Let me explain what I mean by that. In the beginning of roleplaying games, it was very rare for a game master to create their own world or adventures, and there were a set selection of buyable Adventure Modules to run your players through. So, it was very common for two different players from two different regions of the world, one from New York City and the other from Norway, to meet and chat about how they handled the Gargoyles in room 14-B.

With the variety of campaign settings (some of which are vastly different), homebrewed rules, and the realization among Game Masters that they too can create their own dungeons and monsters, suddenly every single gaming group was a totally unique experience. This is not necessarily bad, of course: one of the great advantages of roleplaying games over the traditional forms of media like television and movies, and why I think RPGs are perceived as a threat, is because roleplaying games are interactive instead of passive activities. Yet, it is a shame this shared touchstone of game experience is lost. Until Eberron, the only shared activity gamers had were experiences with the rules themselves, the one thing that is usually more or less consistent: how Wizards tend to start off low-powered but eventually come to dominate the game in the upper levels, for example.

Eberron though, had an adventure for first level characters right in the campaign setting book itself, which left a big fat "to be continued" for further adventure modules that the game setting published. Almost every Eberron group I know ran through that first level adventure (so did I!) and ran through the others like WHISPERS OF THE VAMPIRE'S BLADE. What's interesting about the adventure supplements was how important they were to the setting. For instance, the rules for handling the all-important Lighting Rail carriages first appeared in SHADOWS OF THE LAST WAR.

My one problem with the adventures was, because a lot of the supplements had the responsibility to introduce the unique elements of the setting, so the writers made a decision to throw in "everything but the kitchen sink." The worst by far was GRASP OF THE EMERALD CLAW by the otherwise wonderful Bruce R. Cordell (who did SEA OF BLOOD, my all-time favorite adventure modules for 2nd Edition that I rewrote for my aquatic horror game), which had elements of the Dragon Prophecy and an appearance by the Lord of Blades that was totally un-needed. My group had a great time in GRASP OF THE EMERALD CLAW story, but it's one of the few times I've had to rewrite an adventure module with a big black marker, going "okay, not gonna do that, it doesn't go anywhere..."

Finally, I think I should end this article by talking a bit about the future of Eberron now that D&D has entered into a fourth edition. A lot of the FIU gamers have already dropped to their knees to suck off D&D 4th. From what I've read of D&D 4th, it's a mixed bag that I'll probably eventually get used to, just like I did when 3rd came out. In fact, the fact there is no Eberron for 4th is part of the reason I'm slow to adopt it.

All I have to say is, thank God there are no longer any Grapple checks. I really hate those moments when someone wants to do something and everybody at the dinner table whips their books out simultaneously to look it up. It's a little thing, but I like that there are no longer any racial ability penalties. Even in 3rd, that was an anachronistic throwback to the old days of game design when you could never have an advantage unless you were slightly annoyed by something.

Then again, D&D now shows elements of video game thinking. For instance, there are Encounter Powers that can only be used once per encounter. An example of this would be Tripping an enemy. You can only do that once per encounter? I don't get it. I suppose it can be rationalized by saying that tripping is a maneuver dependent on surprise, and so once enemies see you do it they get wise, and that maneuver just won't work again on them. Still, an extremely awkward way to represent a combat move.