Interview meme

[gridlore]

1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me!"
2. I will respond by asking you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. You will post the answers to the questions (and the questions themselves) on your blog or journal.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions. And thus the endless cycle of the meme goes on and on and on and on...

Since I got this from Niece Prime, the interview questions come from madelineusher

1. Do you have any games currently running or currently being planned? No. Since I'm trying to get focused on my fiction writing, I've put aside gaming for the moment. I do have ideas for a Traveller game based around a group of starship repo men. The problem of course is time.

2. What's your favorite comic? Traditional strip format, Pearls Before Swine. Web comics, either Sluggy Freelance (is it not nifty?) or xkcd. I don't read comic books anymore. This is mainly because I got sick of there being no significant character development or advancement. This tendency was actually covered in one of the GURPS Infinite Worlds articles in the old Pyramid magazine. A time line where superheroes exist, but ever forty years or so they all reset with slightly different names and origins.

3. What book(s) are you currently reading? Plot & Structure by James Bell.  Also reading The Space Opera Renaissance ed. by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.

4. Are they any good? Yes for both. The Plots book is an excellent set of lessons and exercises in creating good plots and how to pace them. It already has improved my stories. The Space Opera tome (over 900 pages) is a magnificent overview of the genre, starting in the late 20s and moving up to the present day.

5. What game system do you hate most? For sheer unplayability, Twilight: 2000 (1st Ed). Clunky character design, unplayable combat, and a lack of non-combat roles made this a one trick pony. Worst combat rules ever? Phoenix Command. Not dozens, but hundreds of charts and an equal number of die rolls to handle every combat action. Way too much detail. When I was writing At Close Quarters one of the things foremost in my mind was to avoid doing the next version of Phoenix Command.

Comments

Okay. I'll bite

[capplor.livejournal.com]

Interview meme

[dalen-talas.livejournal.com]

Go for it, then.

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

Interview me!

[caerbannogbunny.livejournal.com]

Phoenix Command isn't that bad--rolling-wise.

I mean, if you don't try and include the eight million optional rules, it's not that much. (In the Hand to Hand system, there are actual, serious rules for chainsaws.)

• A roll to hit. (d100)
  
• If you hit-A roll for location and glancing roll. (Usually just 3 d10's of different colors. 2 are percentage and 1 is the glancing roll.)
  
• If the character isn't instantly dead, add the damage total and roll for incapacitation.
  
• If incapacitated, you can roll for duration or assume you're out of the fight.
  
• When the battle is all over, you can roll for surviving your wounds--if still alive.

I mean, about the only other system that I can think of that uses damage broken down by locations and uses fewer rolls of the dice was Top Secret when you used the Advanced Rules with the d1000 damage/location table...

...and all it did was combine all the rolls into one--other than hit--but TS was also still Hit-Points based.

As far as playability, we used to simply print out some of the basic tables/cheat sheets and throw acetate or plastic on them then use crayons to mark them up. Did the same for Car Wars.

Mainly, we used Phoenix Command as the combat rules for another system. It taught us five things:

1. Combat is risky and painful.
2. The best way to attack or defend is an ambush--preferably a mechanical one.
3. Avoid combat when reasonable, but win if you have to fight.
4. Sleeping/unconscious/restrained/disarmed targets are the safest.
5. Never, ever--if you can manage it--ever fight a fair fight: ambush, persuade, hire someone else to, force someone else to, use technology, use sorcery, use explosives, use whatever powers that be to not fight fair.

*snicker*

(We won a lot and carried it over into other people's games.)

Now, Twilight 2000 1st Edition, you have a serious point on. The only nice thing about the combat system was the reaction/initiative idea. The 2nd Edition's got a cool character generation system worth copying, but T2Kv1 was only good for being used as a resource for T2Kv2 and Morrow Project.

Then again, the idea of using a deck of cards to build basic personality for NPC's was kinda' unique.

[whiteknucklejoe.livejournal.com]

Interview me. :)

[jarlsberg71.livejournal.com]

Ok it's been a while. Interview me. (please)