New Rick Priestley game - Beyond the Gates of Antares

[Hobbit]

In fairness the Kickstarter hasn't actually started yet - the existing backers are far from naive and I'm sure will provide more info as and when appropriate.

Agree with Andy H's comment on the use of a scenario and GM - any set of rules rapidly becomes very silly when it is driven solely by army lists. Historical gaming gives lots of examples of this and there are lots of gamers whose only inspiration is those lists. If you read Rick's recent historical rule sets you'll see that he isn't over enamoured of army lists, but for HC has bowed to pressure from gamers and produced them.

The interview with Bryan Ansell in this month's WI is quite interesting - it talks about Warhammer rather than 40k - but states that as soon as they printed army lists and started to offer army deals the game started to take off. GW started off as enthusiasts, but it grew and business accumen took over. A lot of the decisions driving GW were pure business (I'm sure I'm not saying anything that you, dear reader, don't already know). Now we've all seen dozens of brilliant little companies come and go, filled with brilliant ideas, but in the absence of good business sense they eventually vanished. But love or hate GW's approach to gaming I don't think you can, or should, knock their business sense.

The bottom line here is if you like what you see join the kickstarter and/or buy the finished product and if you don't then...

[Baconfat]

Yes, what Andy H said is basically what I meant to say.  A better written playtested RT style skirmisher/RPGish game would be nice.    When we played it we had fun, but then we played it as prescribed. 

The current generations of the game is arse.  The rules and army books are catalogs forcing you to buy more and more.

[Conquistador]

Your right Andy. They did add army lists soon after though.

The other thing I guess we must keep in mind was it was the era of big is better. Remember 1000 counter wargames and RPG books so thick they could stop bullets. More rules and more complexity was seen as good.

ASL apparently had some rule that the italians had to have more water trucks than everyone else because they needed water to cook spagetti. Needless complexity was king.

These days people want a nice quick set of rules without any overly complicated bits. I for one think thats a big step forward. Will be interesting to see what happens. My guess is it will turn into a nightmare like T5

Yes, it was that kind of an era.

That said, many of today's rules tends to replace elegant with simplistic, elements of history (and good SF and Fantasy is solidly based on reality/history then extrapolates out,) with what is "Kewl" in a book or movie (but may not translate in a different media - such as a set of rules for a war game,)  and jaded mechanics.

Gracias,

Glenn

[Kitsune]

The current generations of the game is arse.  The rules and army books are catalogs forcing you to buy more and more.

Have you played a lot of 6th then? I don't think its too bad compared to the last few editions.

[Andy H]

Have you played a lot of 6th then? I don't think its too bad compared to the last few editions.

Depends what sort of game you like I guess - these days I collect miniatures around scenarios rather than armies, but without an army list to guide and inspire collecting its a lot harder to stay focused.

[cheetor]

Depends what sort of game you like I guess - these days I collect miniatures around scenarios rather than armies, but without an army list to guide and inspire collecting its a lot harder to stay focused.

After years of painting large tournament sized armies I paint based on small skirmish scenario sized forces these days too.  While it can lead to jumping around from one project to another and losing focus, its still better than stalling halfway through a large force of robots/aliens/whatever with another hundred figures to go. 

I get more miniatures painted per year now than I used to when painting bigger armies.  The variety in subjects keeps me interested and motivated, so the occasional loss of focus as a result of chopping and changing is acceptable to me.

I will keep an eye on BtGoA, but the market for miniatures rules is really very crowded these days.  I can use miniatures from any source in a variety of games but the rules would have to be something very special to get me playing them regularly.  The idea of having some of the game development run in real time is actually off-putting to me: I dont have the resources to keep regular tabs on yet another hobby thing. 

Still, I hope that the game does well.  I am interested in the direction that Rick Priestley takes with a sci-fi rules set post his GW experiences.

[Engel]

Not my cup of tea.

Big names so maybe they could pull something out of it but for now I really dont see anything I like.

Revers.. Reverted humans.. Well some monkeys with sticks (atleast that what I get from the picture), that sounds like a threat a couple of 1000years of weaponry development from now…



My Sci-fi lust is filled with Dropzone Commander (damn good game if I may say so) or occasionally games of 40k (I don’t like the rules but it’s easy to find someone to game with).
A friend have started to talk about Infinity that have some interesting miniatures.

[dijit]

I will keep an eye on BtGoA, but the market for miniatures rules is really very crowded these days.  I can use miniatures from any source in a variety of games but the rules would have to be something very special to get me playing them regularly.  The idea of having some of the game development run in real time is actually off-putting to me: I dont have the resources to keep regular tabs on yet another hobby thing. 

I agree with you to a certain extent about the state of rules systems currently, however I feel there is a huge hole for games that can do for sci-fi what Songs of blades and Heroes has done for fantasy - namely being a rule system that is really flexible enough to cope with whatever miniatures you have in your collection and using them at once. Most rules systems are so tied into their vision of the future (and therefore they're own miniatures) it can be difficult to find space in them for 'x,y,z' from your existing miniatures collection. There's little available really, either Fast and Dirty or Stargrunt for platoon level hard sci-fi or THW (which is a pity for all those of us who don't like THW's reaction system). Also there's another whole problem that comes into play when looking for platoon level games, I can't think of any good generic systems other than those mentioned.

If BtGoA can do this then it just might be the holy grail.
Duncan

[Jonas]

I think one of the problems about making a SoBaH type Sci-Fi game is that in fantasy the biggest part of any miniature range can be put into types and/or races, there is many Orcs, Elves, Dwarfs and so forth, they might be different from eachother, but still typical Fantasy races.

You don't really have that in Sci-Fi, there is much more different types of races and strange types (AND WEAPONS), so it for me it would seem much harder to do a generic game which will be useable for alle types of miniatures, unless it is VERY customiseable and don't have a set setting for the game.

Whenever I take some sci-fi miniatures from one setting and want to use them in a different setting one of the biggest problems is often to find substitutes for all the weeird different weapon types.

[palaeomerus]

I dunno. Sci-fi has some persistent pop-culture tropes though they tend to go through an in-fashion (Mass Effect) to retro(Starguard, probably Star Trek s as we know it) to reconstructed retro(Flash Rogers! Buck Gordon! Doc Civil!) aging process.

Right now most sci-fi games will get around to having at least a few of the following: some aliens (xenomorph) rip offs, a blade runner rip off, some form of killer robots, Aliens-esque future soldiers, flying vehicles, something like greys(zetas?), powered armor, energy weapons, enclosed helmets, big pauldrons(Judge Dredd not GW. Sorry GW), hyper-commando style techno-ninjas, cyborgs, guys with big guns, glowing eyes, and  stuff like that.

You can make something truly bizarre (Dark Age) but it won't be very likely sell especially well as a game. You have to hit certain notes to comfort your audience that they can get what you are doing without devoting all of their free time to it. They need to be able to check out how you handled certain things that they recognize as archetypes more than find out what your world is about from scratch.

if you don't you will have a haeck of an uphill clime (like Steampunk,

I agree that sci-fi has not yet had a great standardizing paradigm force like a Tolkien who (certainly inadvertently) keeps everything in or close to a dumb visual rut. There is still a lot of room between I Robot, Starship Troopers, Lords of Light, I am Legend, Dorsai, Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers, Neuromancer, Who Goes there, Them, Slaan, The House on the Hill, Dune, Berserker, The Man in the High Castle, Ringworld, etc...

But there is a generic sci-fi consensus slowly building in gaming and in TV. There is a formula growing. It's just not as absolute as the Tolkien paradigm which was itself heavily reinforced by D&D  (which tried to blend Moorcock, Vance, Tolkien, Leiber, and Lovecraft into a nice digestible soup).

I think. Just musing really.

[workerBee]

Depends what sort of game you like I guess - these days I collect miniatures around scenarios rather than armies, but without an army list to guide and inspire collecting its a lot harder to stay focused.

Coming from a historical first background (historical preceded fantasy and science fiction) I often find you can stay focused if you have a solid idea of what your army force would "realistically" or stylistically be based on.

You can develop alternatives of course.  For my fantasy armies - I have traditional axe and crossbow armored foot dwarf army; a steam powered artillery, spear blocks, and archery based dwarf army; a black powder artillery, pike, and musket dwarf army; an "advanced" technology (gyrocopters/orinthopters, small wood wall armored vehicles (pedal powered,) tripod mounted repeating crossbow support weapons,) dwarf army; a "Earth Magic"/Ranger forest dwelling Dwarf army; and working on plans for an "all mounted" (assorted mounts) dwarf army.

There are no lists per se but a focus on conscious design fulfills a similar functional model.

Gracias,

Glenn

[dijit]

I have to agree Palaeomerus, I think you can get by with many 'archetypes', and work with many of the more common themes in sci-fi film/culture - Star Wars, Star Trek, Alien, powered armour, etc. You typically have the alien-esque creatures; techno-savages - Klingons, Orks, etc; the high tech scary aliens - Predator, Eldar; The standard human grunts; the space knights of various types - jedi; powered armoured marines - Gears of War, Space Marines, etc; and then AIs gone wild - Terminator, Robocop, etc. You can also add in Cthulu/Thing/ Event Horizon for a little madness or add a little cyber-punk if you're inclined that way. Make sure you have these archetypes in and you're pretty much set, then add a background story that allows for loads of different races  and many races belonging to these different archetypes (Iain Banks 'The Culture' books could be a useful resource) and hay presto one good solid generic sci-fi wargame as long as there are decent rules mechanics to drive it. AE Bounty had a good go at it, but seemed to fall a little short as it lacked a little more balance and alien-esque aliens.

[tnjrp]

I agree that there are scifi archetypes by this day and age. The space marine jaeger in a power(ed) armour is an example of such in the scifi miniature games, definitely. You'll be hard pressed to find a game that's actually on the market that doesn't have any at all. The problem, if it exists, is of the aesthetic. Do you want shiny-far-future, anime-manga, gritty-industrial or perhaps future-gothic, or something else? Fantasy, especially the generic fantasy miniature market, tended to be dominated by quasi-Tolkienesque pseudo-Middle-Ages stuff that is generally speaking rather compatible accross the board. I suppose now in the wake of WARMACHINE's runaway success "steam punk fantasy" is taking up a bit but then again they tend to be more similar to each other aesthetically than, say, Warhammer 40.000 and Infinity.

Iain Banks 'The Culture' books could be a useful resource

The combat in Culture novels is I think rather exceedingly far removed from what most players are used to representing on tabletop. It's a bit like the Abominator class ship's avatar says in Surface Detail: humans can at most contribute chemicals (and thus colours) to the explosions.

AE Bounty had a good go at it, but seemed to fall a little short as it lacked a little more balance and alien-esque aliens

AE:Bounty was a big disappointed for me. I can't seriously count it as a good or even decent go at being a really generic game. In fact it even wasn't.

That said, there are more decent to good hard(ish) scifi generic games than two. They just aren't very popular, I believe. Therefrom I deduce that the gaming public as a whole don't want generic games, only a few "gronards" like me do. It's a common complaint for example that "oh noes, luvverly minis but I can't buy any because the company will go bankrupt in a year". It sounds nearly ludicrous to me but I can't doubt that those saying it are entirely serious in wanting a specific game and background to go with specific miniatures.

So BtGoA might well be on the right track in presenting a specific game and a specific background but letting people feel they have a say in developing it. Sorta like giving them the cake and keeping it too, assumign Mr. Rick can actually keep the unwashed masses in any sort of control.

[palaeomerus]

"The combat in Culture novels is I think rather exceedingly far removed from what most players are used to representing on tabletop. It's a bit like the Abominator class ship's avatar says in Surface Detail: humans can at most contribute chemicals (and thus colours) to the explosions."

It depends on where in the Culture series you want to start. 'Consider Phlebas' had some fairly conventional heist caper and western style shooting though most of it was at the degraded down on his luck merc-scum/bandit level cruising around the edges of civilization like Vavatch Orbital during the conflict with the Idirans. Not a lot of 'knife missile' or 'artificial special circumstances incognito terror weapon' going on. Just a lot of noirish Zap/Pow, smash and regrets. That nihilist cannibal guy who poisoned himself eating changeling fingers might be an exception and more of a straight hillbilly/hidden-village horror scenario.      

[Andy H]

I've come to think that 'generic' is now as much a genre as any of the others out there. When people use that term they're often thinking of something near/hard/mil sci-fi, recognisable late 20th/early 21st cultural references, some xenomorph types and no fantasy tropes. In other words, 'not-40k' 

I'm actually happy to play either, so long as the writers and players are all on the same page as it were.

Regardings

Andy