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Re: SGII for Victorian SF?

From: db-ft@w... (David Brewer)
Date: Tue, 19 May 1998 00:01:24 GMT
Subject: Re: SGII for Victorian SF?

In message <35648e2e.1870440@smtp1.sympatico.ca> agoodall@sympatico.ca
(Allan Goodall) writes:
> On Sat, 16 May 1998 03:09:43 -0600, "Mark A. Siefert." >
<cthulhu@csd.uwm.edu>
> wrote:
> 
> >I've been doing a little thinking.  I wonder just who
simple/difficult
> >it would be to use SGII for a Victorian Sci-Fi background. 
Personally I
> >think that a Colonial SGII would be a little simpiler to play, given
the
> >fact that you can leave out a lot of the technology.  (e.g. ECM,
> >Sensors, etc.) Any comments?  
> 
> I agree, Mark, it could be relatively simple.

Well, I hate to be the nay-sayer (*) but I don't think it would be
so simple.

There's an often encountered idea in wargaming (and role-playing)
that all you really need to do to turn a game for genre-X into a
game of genre-Y is to provide a different list of weapons, or even
turn it into a universal ruleset by providing the mother-of-all-
weapon-lists. I prefer to think that there is more to a game genre
than merely which weapons are being carried by the troops.

Consider Warhammer... what started as a cheerful dungeon skirmish
game that stepped up into a "mass" (ha ha) battle system then
warped into a sci-fi game with little alteration of fundamental
ideas. IIRC An assault rifle is barely more lethal that a bow.
A silly, dumb game.

[Now the design people are going to try peddling it to the
historical market. I can't wait... I want Warhammer Zulus Wars so
I can share half my points between super-hero Queen Victoria to
kick arse and the Archbishop of Cantabury to hold morale
together. Bring it on.]

OTOH hand I picked up on DirtSide because the game designer was
savvy enough not to go with all this trivial weapons shit and just
treated all hi-tech small-arms as effectively the same. The genre
assumptions were that all small arms were so good that the
limiting factors were all human. None of that Epic boltgun,
lasgun, shuriken, this armour, that armour crap.

Without some care being put into game scales and concepts a C19
StarGrunt could be a really mediocre game... aren't there enough
of those already? SG2 is optimised around dirt-kissing SF soldiers
with hi-tech armour and assault rifles, where close-quaters
fighting is performed with bursts of fire and grenades and space
wombles (of sorts) can wade through gunfire (to a degree). I don't
really think the basic genre assumptions are really the same as,
say, Space 1889.

[...bear with me here ...I haven't my SG2 rules to hand for
reference]

What would firepower, armour and impact mean in the 19th century?
What is firepower to man who intends to throw a spear at you? How
do you rate a bow and arrow? What are armour values in an era with
breast-plated heavy cavalry and Zulus with hide shields? What does
a horse consider to be a terror weapon? What does one throw in
close combat when using a sword and revolver, vice a bayonet? Is
the reaction of a bayonet or assegai-armed man "suppressed" with
overwhelming firepower going to be same if that firepower is a
single-shot rifle vice a machinegun from SG2?

If one wished to create a game where all the stats were inter-
compatible with SG2 for mix-and-match "tech levels" and wrote out
stats based on comparisons with SG2, then I fear that game would
be extremely poor for C19-only games, to put it mildly. 

OTOH... one could use SG2 reasonably as is if your own SF
background justifies it. I recall in Gibson/Sterlings "Difference
Engine" a policeman is armed with a clockwork SMG (a "Cutts-
Maudsley Carbine" IIRC). One has total licence to manipulate
history to provide the spurs needed. F'rinstance the hand grenade
came into general issue after the trench-fighting of WW1... but
the Crimean War included plenty of trench-fighting with grenades
(and shotguns). Good luck finding figures of redcoats with assault
rifles... I guess "tanks" could be scratch-built. There are plenty
of C19 rockets to revise as AT-weapons.

In short, I think there is a fine game lurking in SG2 for C19
SF... but that a great deal of thought and work would be needed in
rescaling and revising SG2 mechanisms to bring out the Victorian-
ness and suppress the hard-SF-ness.

-- 
David Brewer

(*) ...obviously not true.

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