Friday, September 17, 2010

Moments of Weakness

Okay; so I've been solid, solid with LBB123 these years. Right? And everything that happened with LBB678 pretty much confirm me in that.

Back in the day, I never really had a problem with Mercenary: it fit the flavor of the game well, and heck, I was a teenager, and big guns were fun. Characters tended to get more skills, but they were so specialized that I didn't get fussed, and they didn't change any of the rules that applied to other characters and their skills.

And High Guard was fine, mostly. Characters, again, were a little skill-heavy, but so did my LBB1 Scouts and Merchants tend to be. But there you see, more than LBB4, the addition of skills tied specifically to a new system of combat not compatible with LBB2; Fleet Tactics and Ship Tactics can't really apply outside of High Guard combat.

I remember being stunned by ship sizes, and in fact it was many years before I even really experimented building ships of even tens of thousands of tons, much less the Trillion Credit Squadron monsters that one sees. Certainly, the differences in drive and fuel tankage and damage calculation were there, but I didn't spend a lot of thought on them. The basic incompatibilities of HG/ LBB2 didn't really strike me until a few years ago.

It does occasionally strike me that introducing these - while breaking my experiment - wouldn't necessarily break MTU. If I were actually to run a GAME, with PEOPLE, and they wanted to do an LBB4 Mercenary type game, I'd incorporate it and no worries.

A big naval type of game? Well... that's a bit trickier. I keep meaning to experiment with the strategic terrain of MTU, and see what sizes of fleets make sense... and from that, what size ships make sense. As I'm envisioning things now, it makes sense for those big warfleets to stay home most of the time, because potential threats can come with little warning: most activity is going to be in the hands of patrol ships of one stripe or another, mostly operating singly. For the most part, LBB2 is just fine for those, and High Guard skills don't really signify for that any differently than LBB1 skills.

In some ways it's a shame, really, because I do like HG as a shipbuilding system on its own. I just don't care for an HG universe, I guess.

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