Re: Babylon5 Battles?

Niall Gilsenan writes:
@:) 
@:) Oh dear (you get the the idea by now).  Considering that I have
@:) tried playing SFB and failed miserably at getting a game up and
@:) running in any reasonable length of time, this is very bad news.
@:) It had occured to me that the Starfury diagram that appeared on
@:) the AOG site reminded of some game.

  Seems like there's a lot of concern around here that the new B5 game
could end up like SFB and thus be completely unplayable.  Some of this
may be valid but, having played SFB for several years myself I think I
can state that it is _not_ totally unplayable.	Something must have
kept it alive for almost 20 years.  There certainly are problems with
SFB but I think people get the wrong ideas sometimes.  

@:) Now that we know that its SFBinfluenced I can see the horror of it
@:) already.  20 pages on the various complexities of how a ship jumps
@:) into warp (see subsection X3.1214, Ooops not in this
@:) supplement!!).

  Actually I find that the rules size and complexity of SFB is anb
asset.	Compare subsection X3.12.14 with FT's "page 7 - special note:
the rules in this book are only valid with even numbers.  Odd numbers
do not exist in our FT universe and cannot exist in any FT universe
you create.  Odd numbers are an abomination and blasphemy".  I'd
rather have more rules than less.

  The real problem with SFB is not how complex it is because you've
got plenty of time to read the rules over again if you need to, but
how time-consuming it is to play.  It takes me about 30 seconds to
draw up a FT ship.  That's about enough time to figure out my drone
loads on a typical SFB ship.  Once you get into actual game play,
things rapidly deteriorate in SFB with 32 phases and simultaneous
firing and the like.  If they can avoid that kind of time lag, but
keep the rest of an SFB-style ruleset, all 800 pages worth, I would be
quite pleased.

  BTW, my favorite part of SFB is rolling my ship's destruction on the
damage chart so it wouldn't bother me at all if Star Furies had some
kind of critical hit table (I'm also a great fan of Interceptor's
damage system, though not of the rest of the game).  On the other
hand, if a Star Fury has 20 HP (what it looks like from the AOG web
page) one is forced to wonder how many HP an Omega-class Destroyer (or
for that matter a space station) might have.  I'm more curious about
the scale of this combat system than anything else.

-joachim