Archive through May 05, 2012
Star Fleet Universe Discussion Board: Company-Conventions-Stores-Ideas: New Product Lines Development:
GENERAL PROJECTS:
New Product Suggestion Topic:
Archive through May 05, 2012
Calendars aren't something I'm interested in pursuing.
1. They don't sell much. Ken always swore he made some money on his calendars but he didn't repeat the project so I'm dubious that he actually did. Our own experience was that we bought five calendars to hang up in our own office and that was 60% of total sales.
2. They go "stale" very very very very quickly and stale inventory is dead inventory. I still sell copies of CL23 every week. I could not sell a 2003 calendar at all.
3. They're expensive to print in small quantities (zero profit) and the risk of large quantity printing is pretty evil.
4. Most calendar formats don't work very well with our existing art, and doing new art is ridiculously expensive.
To be sure, the ONLY way we'd ever do a calendar is by Kickstarter, but I'm not convinced we'd sell enough copies to be worth bothering, and I don't need a humiliating failure on my Kickstarter record.
Sounds like something you might try 10 or 12 Kickstarters down the line.
A "fix" (albeit not a good one perhaps) for the stale calendar problem would be one of the perpetual calendars where all 7 configurations for the month (14 for Feb) are on the page?
OK, swing and a miss, but I thought I'd suggest it...
Gary, your batting average is the worst in the league, but you have the same number of home runs as the best of them. Go figure.
Two possible game themes:
1. Clue: Murder on the Federation Express. A Federation Express from Earth to Klinshai is the scene of a gruesome murder. Was it "Orion entertainer" Miss Viridian in Engineering with the phaser? The paranoid Paravian, Professor Plume, on the Bridge with the Klingon Dagger? Or the Reverend Gorn in the cargo hold with the tribble? (And how exactly do you kill someone with a tribble anyway?)
I'm thinking perhaps instead of place, weapon, and suspect, you might have something like Method, Motive, and Opportunity. E.g. Professor Plume committed the murder because he did not want it revealed that he is not a Paravian but simply a madman in a chicken suit who got onto the ship by accident. Opportunity: the dead man tripped over a tribble and was killed while unconscious from the fall. Etc.
There are some gadgets in various rooms on the ship: the Tricorder helps you figure out the Method, the Mind-Sifter helps you guess the Motive, and the ESS Surveillance Tapes the Opportunity. Players could only use the bonus for each item once, then it goes to another player (or is placed in a random room for someone else to pick up).
In addition to that, each character gets a special ability (except the Reverend Gorn 
)
2. Some kind of goofy kids' game involving Tribbles. Components include little pom-poms about the size of a finger-joint (or smaller) representing the tribbles. You could probably find these in craft stores and buy them in bulk from the manufacturer, as you did with the hit-markers from SFBF.
After seeing SJ Games' Revolution! I was thinking you could license it and re-skin it as a Klingon starship instead of a city and call it Klingon Mutiny!. The IKV Fire Magnet is so full of traitorous crewmen that there are various factions vying for leadership of the eventual mutiny. Each turn, players bid "stars" (money), ESS surveillance (blackmail) or disruptors (force) to place control blocks (representing crew loyal to their faction) in parts of the ship. The ship itself is the board, with areas like the bridge, engineering, shuttle bay, et cetera. Various parts of the ship are worth different values and/or have special rules. E.g. the transporter room can move other players' blocks around, the Bridge grants a lot of VPs, the Security Stations grant extra surveillance but are hard to control, and so on.
How about an MMORPG game where two opposing teams (Klingon/Fed, Lyran/Kzinti, Gorn/Romulan...etc.) fight to take over (or defend) a starship?
The characters could be based off of d20 Modern (or whatever system the RPG part of the SFU runs under), and they get better with experience.
NPCs are just crew who are, sadly, nothing more than fodder for casualties.
I actually did some of the playtesting for REVOLUTION when I was in Austin in early 1999 and wrote up an SFU version of the game and sent it to SJG who had no real interest.
Or base one on "awful green things from outer space",
---Angry Tribbles on a Klingon Cruiser ---
Alright I was thinking on Eric's ideal of a pocket combat ship game. What if you used Gunboats or Interceptors? You could make a nice little color ship card, maybe laminated, with the Front/Back - 2 shield block school of thought. Your efficient Chief Engineer would make sure you had enough power to move at a standard speed and fire all weapons as standard loads. Drones and Seeking Wepons would need a simple rule for direct fire.
For playing piece what if you used a dice that had a ships silhouette. (Maybe a hex shaped die holder maybe not.) You could use the PF Damage Allocation Chart and cut all speeds and ranges in half because you are working with a smaller map. You could even use a turn with 4 movement/firing breaks just to give it a little SFB feel. All combat would be simultaneous.
“QRCodes” on the Package could lead you to a Webpage with a alternate weapon variant (Drone)or a Leader variant, maybe even a Scout Type with simplified FC styled scout rules. You could even add Advanced Rules to cover things like trading speed points for overloads or losing speed and unable to fire weapons to reflect taking engine damage. An example would be for every engine hit you take loose 2 movement points.
ADB could go so far as to make a Flotilla Support Pack that would include extra ship cards and dice/markers that could be set up as a mail order item if nothing else.
What's that scenario where the Kongo security force is trying to catch an Orion spy but they keep arresting diplomats instead?
Could maybe be scaled up/refoobled into one of those host-a-mystery games.
Also, I'd play the murder on the federation express. Probably once a year, at a con, but I'd still play it.
(SH67.0) DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY
An ideal for a pocket style game based on a man2man model deplicting a Prime Team in action as opposed to squad level of SFM. Though ther is no reason small segments of SFM could not be played out in this system. This may actually be part of the way you thing KRAG would work. If designed right it might almost qualify as a solo RPG. Types of scenario would be basic infiltration/espionage, rescue/recovery or assault. Could also be used to scale up RPG combats with bridging rules.
I don't see much point in pocket games. Low profit, small amount of components, nobody takes them seriously.
What people want for KRAG and the like is a boxed game, mounted board deck plans, and miniature klingon warriors. And yes, KRAG could very closely resemble a simplified RPG and could be used as a combat system for prime directive.
Well, what people REALLY want is a 3D holographic version of SFMA and SFB with real time replay, but that might be a bit beyond even Kickstarter.
Now if we could get an SFMA version of Call To Duty... I might start playing FPS's.
I worry about games with deck plans because there is a compromise that must happen (I think). Due to size limits the ship needs to be small like a Gunboat and so the mission veriety ends up being contrived and not meshing well with the sort of images most people have of the Trek experience (big ships... even a FF is big but small at the same time). But how do you make a map board of a full starship deck plans?
I'm curious to see how this problem is handled.
GDW did shipboard combat on a large hull in Azhanti High Lightening, but they were only able to pull it off by doing a ship design where the same layout repeated on several decks. For example, 10 of 11 drive decks and 5 of 6 power plant decks were identical. You then only need one sheet for each deck type rather than one sheet for each deck. No way to pull that off with most SFB ships, but I wonder if ships of the same empire have enough internal similarity across classes that a set of geomorphic maps could be used to approximate deck plans for a variety of ships of that empire.
Loren if I was going to make a Boarding Party game for the SFU I would do something like a "Risk" style conversion of the exsisting Boarding Party Diagrams. Each section of the current BP Diagram would break into more inter conected area sorta like countries on a continent and the access points would bridge the continents together.
SVC did a D7 deck plan that is very simplified. Maybe that's the sort of design that would work?
FASA published 15mm (1/2 inch, same scale as Traveller) deckplans for The Federation CA and Klingon D7 for their Star Trek RPG in the 80's. ADB should/could do something similar for Prime Directive
What is a map of a ship used for in an RPG? Unless it's a "Starship Mine"/"Die Hard" scenario, can't you just have the same number of sets as at Desilu, including generic corridor, and tell the players the turbolift lets them off within 15 feet of the door?
For starters, it is a play aid like a map. The characters are here, the broken computer is here, the alien monster is here, the Klingon boarding parties are in this section etc. At a tactical level when you are in combat rounds and having a firefight it is nice to be able to trace line of sight for firing. Knowing how far you can move each turn down the corridors. Where the doors are and ladders and hatches, either because you are chasing or being chased and finding cover. I have also used them for exploration, your ship finds this ship dead in space what happened to it? Then the characters have to move through the ship to gain information, find things, repair , rescue etc. That what I have used deck plans for in the past. A more general abstract map is good for some of that, but at times it is important to know exactly how many squares/hexes a character moves each turn and what squares they are walking in.
I do see what you are saying about the tiles, I have played games like Advanced Hero Quest where you had tiles for corridors, and tile for junctions and corners with tile for several types of rooms. You then laid these out as you needed them based on what the characters could see. Space Hulk uses something similar. That is possible as well, most of those that I have seen like that was at a one inch scale for larger miniatures.
Having used both types I think I would prefer the deck plans and smaller scale for on the ship fights and the larger scale and tiles for planet side adventures. The tile work better for fantasy than sci-fi because the sci-fi weapons have longer ranges than fantasy weapons
The question of amount of detail in a RPG is driven really by you Game Master. Is he, or she, the type that never uses a mini and the whole game is run strictly by his narrating what happens and only he knows what is really happening. Does he use detailed maps of individual rooms to acomplish specific actions to further his story. Or is he the type that lays a full map out on the table treating the entire ship as another NPC in the game? It all comes down to style.
Now with that said there may well be a market for 15mm Deckplans but of what ships. ADB has made them for G1 Gunboats but how well would they sell? Who knows that maybe another area where ADB could look at doing a KS on the more iconic ships because there maybe a larger market for those but idoubt you would find much intrest outside of the D6/7, CA, or Warbird.
That said something like the simplified D7 Deckplans maybe able to be tweaked to be used accross multiple game plat forms.
Another thought, ADB Prime Directive is porting into Traveller soon. Traveller has a long history of deck plans in both 1/2 and 1 inch scale. GURPs PD and GURPs Traveller use hexes. AS the PD line grows inevitably they will sell and need more deckplans.
Jack Bohn,
I (and others) have suggested something similar before. Small scale but full deck plans with play-scale sets like the bridge and other high priority rooms. Use minis on sets, and counters on the main deckplans.
Anyone got a spare million to buy the rights to the old FASA plans?