Just caught up with it, very good stuff.
BFG definitely has nine lives - I'd all but abandoned it, but the Vassal option and free rules will bring me in for the campaign. If the GW re-issue is a true re-launch with faction support across 40K factions, the game will be HUGE (to the dismay of my Firestorm expansion plans). If GW does one Special ed. box set with two limited factions, I wonder if that won't crush everyone's hearts enough that the game would die.
All that said, I'm eager to see how the fan-rules have addressed the
I'd love to say that B5 lives, and in fact I plan to play a few games over coming months. But that's just cause I still have so much stuff, as do Stephan, John, and others. The online Forum fanbases have evaporated for many reasons, mainly that there's nothing left to talk about. No new releases, no hope for a new game, and WB seems content to hide the IP in a box til kingdom come. And Mongoose burned every last shred of affection I had for them when they blew management of Trek CTA. Mongoose could offer a solid gold B5 model to every prior customer to return to a new edition of the game, and I'd just tell them where to stick it.
Fun part now is, if we resume play, we can define fan rules as we want. I might start a separate thread to talk Beam Variant rules, squadron rules, and such.
BTW, if you ever revisit Class C games, we need to talk Star Trek Battles from FASA, the Renegade Legion Games (Interceptor and Leviathan), Saganami Island Tactical Simulator, Sky Galleons of Mars, WEG's Star Warriors. and Silent Death.
Also, I didn't catch the full Class B discussion, but did you talk FULL THRUST?
For Carrier Ops, you guys hit the main issue: Either they're on table and don't work like "real" carriers, but somehow still show force projection of air power; OR they're a total abstract like the Grand Fleets version, that sounds about as bland and flavorless a game solution as one could imagine.
In DW, I've always imagined the fast "refresh rate" as not being a full refuel of the current launched squadrons, but the second and subsequent waves that took a little longer to get prepped on the deck. (Ditto for Firestorm too). It makes more sense in the timeframe than anything else. The first waves are what could launch and prep once enemy initially sighted, the rest take the 5-10 minutes to ready and launch. The DW "standard 10" SAS you can always buy also obviously represent the off-board carrier capacity.
I look forward to the discussion how they work in Firestorm, HALO, and Star Wars Armada.
For Greg's musings on weather rules, I've got the bit in my teeth now to work up a page of rules for it in Dystopian Wars. Watch this space. :-)
And lastly, Ruck's thoughts on why Naval Historicals don't catch on? Accurate on the perception that the rules are often both difficult and/or tedious for anyone not a Navy-fan. There's many past examples to set this precedent. Also, in my humble experience, the minis are usually the opposite of inspiring. Most of that is down to scale hang-ups - for ships to seem like remotely the right scale on the board, the ships are made too tiny to visually appeal. Plus, a lot of the hardcore Navy gamers seem to get REALLY hung-up on accuracy, and they're negative over ANY abstractions for playability, and that negativity and tiresome micro-management drives away any casual-player consideration.
If you want to see a popular WWII Naval minis game, for instance, you need to start with the Firestorm base-peg abstraction. The ship models need to be BIG, but their actual presence on the table might be equivalent to a tiny red dot in the model's center, from which all is measured. I also think the HALO system for Captains, each offering a special order dice ability, adds HUGE amounts of fluff-fun and rules innovation. Whether you could use historical real-life people, or invent personalities, that could be a neat hook to bind people into the game. Lastly, make your box set be Pearl Harbor. Terrible battle example, politically sensitive, but HUGE recognizable factor, and great way to justify a wide variety of ships in the starter Japanese and American fleets. Include the docks with the box set terrain, challenge the American players to launch ships and respond to the Japanese attack, and have the carrier/flier rules right built in to the starter game. I can clearly envision it as a hook that would WORK. Heck, it'll push that "Dare the patriot" button, to somehow turn Pearl harbor into an American victory (reality and historical accuracy be damned to balance the scenario for fun).
Once you have them in the door, with the game bought, THEN you can do all the "real" and "properly weighted" scenarios for the sticklers.
I look forward to episode 4!
