WEP '12, Day 15 - Old Games

So I had a chance to play Star Frontiers this weekend.  That's the science fiction role-playing game from 1982 put out by TSR.  I have moderately fond memories of running games of Star Frontiers back in the day.  I've written in the past about the charm of retro gaming, but this weekend I got to see the flip side of that: old games.

Star Frontiers has not aged well.  Even with significant house rules by our GM, the game relies on a broken skill system based on percentile dice.  Like most percentile systems, you end up with most if not all of your skills below 50%.  In a system that doesn't have much in the combat system beside "hit him" or "shoot him" where most of your combat skills are below 50%...well, it lends itself to drawn out combats where the winner is whomever has the best guns and best armor.

That's what happened Saturday.  We scored a TPK (Total Party Kill) as we got overwhelmed by space pirates who had better weapons than we did.  The GM had overestimated our combat ability and actually beefed up the encounters, which killed us all.  But even if he'd played it straight, I'm not sure we'd have done much better over all, since the healing rules were so brutal.

And that's the problem with nostalgia games.  Because while sometimes you enjoy stepping back to simpler times, sometimes you step back too far and realize that yes, there have been major developments in game design over the last thirty years.

Star Frontiers fails for a modern audience in part because the system was always kind of clunky and harsh, but it also fails because, unlike Dungeons & Dragons, it was never popular enough to receive the gradual evolution of fan works, nor the sudden revelations of new editions.  Rather, the game got a few years of modules and supplements, then was abandoned.

That's the big difference, then.  The games I loved in my Retro Gaming all benefited from heavy modding.  Indeed, I prefer the Fall from Heaven mod to the base game of Civilization IV.  Star Frontiers never got that kind of work, and is thus consigned to the dustbin of history.  And the game store.