Jack Photon's 3rd Edition Polling Questions

[Jack Photon]

There's no way for me to measure which files are downloaded to whom or how often.  I get traffic reports, but they say nothing about individual file transfers.

Similarly, just because a forum thread says it has been read or viewed however many times, that doesn't count unique readers.

In the following poll, I ask three questions to which you can reply up to three times. 

I should probably make it three different polls, but this is the first I've ever created so let's see how it goes.

1. Quality/Utility of the work

2. Your download status

3. Where you are with it all

Peace and Contentment of Landru to you.

[aramis]

I'll note you seem to have dropped my favorite concept from the originals: normal duty tasks are 1d10 vs skill, rather than 1d100 vs skill+modifiers. I didn't read deeply, but at that point...
It's a pretty strong oversight if indeed it's not there, and if it is there, I missed it.

Your third poll-area is missing: Skimmed it and stopped reading and read portions but quit reading.

[Jack Photon]

Book 1, Top of page 15, second column; the complete and unmodified '1d10' and 'Under 40' rules from John Wheeler's 2nd edition.

I'm not a fan of those two rules as they are a clear indication the percentile system does not work as presented in either edition; indicating that character generation is weak or skill attempts are too hard for the ranges.

In this 3rd edition, a 10 skill + Prime equipment and the simplest of tasks has a 90 target roll. Put a mentor at their side and it goes up to a 99. Do that with a Skill 11 and fail only on a '00'. Throw in LUC Pool if they are feeling shaky about it.  Without conditional exceptions or sub-clauses, a straight-forward task/equip chart with none of the subtract-this-from-that-to-yield-a-percentage math required.  Throw that same skill 10 into an Impossible situation with Poor equipment and they'll fail on the same d% as any other skill or skill level.

This keeps the save dice constant as percentiles throughout the game for any skills or Attribute rolls of any rating, providing consistent expectations for players making those rolls.  This also helps keep the GM from assigning arbitrary die mods chosen off-the-cuff and inconsistently across sessions and situations.   Now, an Unexpected Surprise is always the same +15 no matter who is involved or their proficencies.

The page 8 book 1, Task/Equipment Die Mod chart is a fast, intuitive and consistent way for the GM to choose a difficulty and assign any equipment bonuses.  This is the same process matching personal combat.  In a phaser fight, there is no 'roll 1d10 if they are point blank in front of you' exception.  Why not?  You can't miss.  Yet, it's a percentage roll.  The To-Hit charts are consistent across all factors; skills, weapons, ranges, actions, et al.  So too now are task and equipment modifiers. 

Bringing the game system into self-consistency is the biggest challenge I've faced in this process.

I should note lest it be thought otherwise that most every original rule is included in this 3rd edition.  Rules such as the d10 and Under 40 Skills mentioned here, the Lt. Greentree medical saves, all the character generation, ship combat and everything else I can think of off the top of my head is all there.  I'm hard-pressed to think of a rule I deliberately dropped completely -unless it was movie-specific as this is TOS/TAS focused.  In that case, some 2nd edition may be gone and I am unaware of it for the movie-era factor.

Then again, there are some few great ideas in 2nd edition, but are functionally useless; specifically and such as OER.  OER was a great idea, but as implemented meaningless, without stakes.

Now, OER is a functional mechanism with real-impact on character creation that can be very good or devastating to a career -making OER an integral factor to role-playing the character's experience.   A POOR rating leads to lesser assignments, greater chances of reprimands and disbarment from medals and honorifics.  EXEMPLARY and OUTSTANDING ratings can lead to hand-picked assignments and greater chances of awards and honors. Meanwhile the 70% of AVERAGE folk get along with average chances like normal.

I included all the rules over editions to provide coverage, consolidate definitions and eliminate redundancies from across all sources gathered. This also allows the knowledgeable reader to see what is 1st, 2nd and 3rd edition by the text formatting. 1st and 2nd edition were very different from each other in font and layout. So too mine, allowing an evolutionary overview embedded in the pages for those looking to see what came from where and how they all blend.

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I can't edit the poll as it has now been voted in.

Thank you for letting me know.
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If I am reading correctly and may summarize your experience; you read up to page 8 or so of book 1, flipped through the rest of book 1 and have not gone back as you thought one specific thing you liked was gone.

May I ask of you to roll a character, see how you feel after that and report back?

Thank you for downloading. I appreciate and welcome further comment and critique from all readers.

[Jack Photon]

Hi Aramis and all,
I've deleted the previous poll with one vote (Aramis's) not because I didn't like his answers, but because I've never made a poll before and messed up. The poll should now be fixed and will not be modified again.

[Falconer]

Hey, Jack. I admire your enthusiasm and your work. I downloaded the medium quality onto multiple computers. But my interest in FASA lies not in their rules—too granular for my taste and for the genre, I deem—but primarily in their adventures, and secondarily in engaging their TOS era lore (albeit in this area also they got too granular for my taste). FWIW, all my games are set in the TOS era, not the movie era. I have now run damned near all the FASA modules.

I have done extensive work on my own house rules (based primarily on the 70s rulesets), lists of ships (I hew pretty faithfully to FJ), timelines, etc.. So while I read yours with interest, it is mostly in a collegial mode, not really in the interest of adoption.

[Jack Photon]

Excellent and thank you. Interestingly, I never had interest in their modules and was all about the mechanics.

[putraack]

Pretty much what Falconer said-- I looked over your stuff, but not with an eye towards adoption. There's a lot there, I appreciate the work you've put into it.

[Jack Photon]

Thank you, Putraack.
I suppose what I would be asking of you folks is now that you've read or glanced through how I solved some issues, I'm keen to know how you all approached the same things with your house rules. Where I went one way with something, what was your work around? Or the harshest critiques given can only make my ideas stronger or die off entirely as the bad idea it is and should be abandoned. When one is the editor, writer and publisher, it can be difficult to see what is going on objectively and another set of eyes is welcome.

Similarly, my hopes for those with established house rules would be that the collation of all the sources into one singularly flowing work will be your biggest benefit. As far as I can tell, all the original rules are still there in my texts, just flavored with my thinking with expanded or alternate processes such as character creation where most of my work is and something like the Latimer rule for healing or psionics my next most major work.

As it's just a month since signing up and releasing my 3rd Edition Framework, I also wanted to say thanks to all those checking in on these threads. I'm not the only one that has driven the view count up on these. Though I do note one thing. In the 10-12yrs this sub-board has been going, there were some 110 posts total. In one month, this is my 62nd. So, I alone will likely be doubling this boards posts in the next month or so with further musings. Either I talk too much or this is very, very quiet here.


Either way, I hope my efforts make a worthy addition to your shelf and gaming considerations.

Last notes:
I'm working my Transporter ideas into Supplement 03, so far a 10 page document that basically pastes and consolidates all my thoughts from c-57d's Beam Me Uppp thread. I didn't realize I had written so much there!

The typo/gremlin hunt proceeds apace.
Site tweaks are ongoing.
While major efforts on this gaming system are now second to some other personal obligations, time will always be devoted to this project and small releases will be here and there.

All questions answered here.
All philosophical reasonings gladly debated.
Would like to hear how others solved some of the problems that I have presented.

Thanks again.

[aramis]

Since I have both FASA editions, and haven't really used them in almost 30 years, save as a baseline for my homebrew system which looks little like FASA's edition, a doubling down of the grittiness, and the overly complicated changes (while the 1d10 may not have been smooth, it was simple), there's literally nothing there of actual interest for me.

Like the others, I'll mine FASA adventures...

(My approach was to use a conversion from % to a much lower skill table, then set difficulty by number of dice thrown for skill or less.)
That table?

FASA	1	2	3	4-5	6-7	8-9	10-12	13-15	16-18	19-22	23-26	27-30	31-35	36-40	41-45	46-51	52-57	58-63	64-70	71-77	78-84	85-92	93-100	101-108	109-116
HBTN	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20	21	22	23	24	25

Routine was 1d3, Simple was 1d6, moderate 2d6, hard 3d, insane 5d6

[c57d]

Being a FASA STTRPG 2nd edition grognard, I don't plan on using any other rules set for TOS. However I have skimmed through some aspects of your work and can heartily appreciate the labour of love you have created here.
But, I am curious that you mention that 2e fails to fix the errors of 1e. Now other than some setting fails (the Federation map being the biggest imho) I have never felt that 2e had any real rules problems, and would appreciate it if you could kindly share what errors you have found in 2e, so I can house rule them away.

[Jack Photon]

May, it's now October. I haven't replied as I had to put all this work away and concentrate on other things in my life.

Over the last several months I've come to wonder at what point is a game system not the same game system? With something like D&D, the modern game seems to be top to bottom different game system entirely trading solely on ill-gained brand recognition. Does it start with changing the definition of the dice used? Percentiles to d20 to another? Is it whole-sale rule changes, getting rid of Action Points for something else for example (not that I'm proposing that. D&D went from minute rounds to segment combat apparently these days). Is it when you change the math and count up or down instead of down or up? Is it in the ignoring of rules? Or perhaps it's the integration of too many house rules?

In my case, I've tried to keep things as pure as possible, keeping original rules and offering in-line alternatives. Back in August on the 40th anniversary of Fantasimulations getting the writing gig, I began re-writing my edition with a pending release of January 2023 for the 40th anniversary.

In reviewing yet again all the rules from both editions, I find so much in 2nd edition that ranges from pet-peeve to infuriating with infuriating relegated specifically to 2nd edition's page layout and editorial design work, not the rules themselves. Those are mostly pet-peeve for not fixing the problems with 1st edition and creating new ones and missed opportunities lost.

I've never gone on to fully enumerate each issue as is being asked of me now. Reading my Book 1 character creation and Book 2 rules changes will suss out the differences between 1st, 2nd and my editions.

1st edition rulebook was written and went to publishing and release in 5 months or less. Likely an unprecedented feat of its or any time since for similar works. As such, the work is tight. It's rough. It's got raw un-sanded edges. The rules are laid out fast and in a conversational tone as they were thinking and typing it out themselves on typewriters.

2nd edition had 18 months to do what they did. Three times the time and we got three manuals, each of which says much of the same thing as the other. What it amounts to is a lot of page padding and needless redundancy for the needless duplication across the three books as a whole. FASA were table-top gamers, not Trekkers and Fantasimulations main difficulty was just that. This is a design/page layout management decision rooted solely in profit margin.

As example, I am in the last days of proofing my re-edit of the STIII Tac Cbt Simulator rule book. Skipping the ship stats, there are some 58 pages of actual rules, inc a 2 full-page index. Removing the redundancy and making it a straight-forward read dropped to 38 pages and a half-column index. 20 full pages of redundant info spread across the basic, graduate and expert sections. All say the same thing just a little different, paraphrased just enough to make me think John Wheeler was trying to do a 3rd-grader's plagerization job on John Wheeler. But no they had a word/page count to meet for publication/price-point purposes.

Prior to now, I could never read that book as I could never remember which rule was where or when it applied or what. The rules are lready big and there is some sense in dipping the feet, but the added redundancy was overwhelming to me. With everything being written just differently enough to make me question what I was reading and where I would find it again. Maybe I'm just stupid.

Now, all the Chief engineer stuff is on 2 consecutive pages of chief engineer stuff. All ship movement is under 3 consecutive pages of Ship Movement. Go figure. Romulan Cloak and Plasma have a nice 2-page spread of their own. I've added in the 1st edition player panels, created new mini-counters and numbered map sets for an easier table-top experience for those who don't have access to the standard maps and counters.

All information in that book is now grouped together in one logical, straight-forward, no-nonsense and objective manner. I look forward to releasing that pdf soon.

Likewise, strip the redundancy out of 2nd edition rule books and you mostly have first edition and its problems; just with John Wheeler signing his name in crayon all over it. Which again gets back into the design and editorial side of things...

So what were some of the rules that weren't fixed? I keep wanting to talk about END, but the whole CURR MAX OP THRESH BULL CRUD keeps clogging my brain. In an interview, one of the things the original writers said of 2nd edition was the 'militarization' of verbiage such as the CURR MAX OP THRESH stuff and how it was something of a fade that came and went. It certainly went all over 2nd edition, profusely so.

So with END, 1st Ed had 1/10th END as UNC LVL, 2nd Ed everyone no matter who has a... 5, is it? What? That part of END wasn't broken to need fixing. What was broken was the notion Lt. Greentree should be in such good condition so quickly. My Latimer ruling speaks to that.

What else was broken about END? That a low END had no effect on any other stat. You may be at UNC THRESH+1, but in 1st/2nd Ed, your 99 STR is still a 99, your 70 INT is still a 70, your CHA and everything else, nothing changes. That's nonsense. You get weak, you lose strength, your brain gets foggy, you slur and maybe stutter and can barely walk. I fixed that.

Skill rolls. Being percentile based, it's too easy to blow easy rolls. 2nd Ed solution, create four different ways to interpret one die roll based on your skill level. That's a problem made worse. For me, I fixed that with a simple die mod table for easy-to-beyond-impossible situations. Being wholly independent of all other factors, the die mods are universally applied with no consideration other than degree of easy, hard, complex. Not, "is your skill level 1-10, roll this", "11-this, interpret that ", this other to that number this 3rd interpretation and finally if your skill is above x, then you read the dice normally. That's a problem as I see it.

Skill names. How does ST ENG (Gen) become Astronautics? WTF! Astronautics, the science of... being an Astronaut has what to do with ship design and engineering? Come on. There are so many more terrible decision there alone that gets back them being primarily wargamers.

There are other problems made worse from 1st to 2nd, but this is off the cuff.

Worst Missed Opportunity: OER. HOW could they introduce that and give it no effect? What a brilliant idea utterly wasted in game mechanics. I fixed that with Poor getting screwed, Exemplary and Outstanding being rewarded on their next cruise assignments while Average sails along with normal rolls.

Related to that, commendations and reprimands at the very least, if not medals and honors.

How about some falling damage? Lt. Latimer, Technician Fisher, Kirk, Spock, McCoy and there are others.

How about some variable gravity rules?

And 2nd Ed Character Creation... Well, I stomp all over that in my Book 1.

This is exhausting. The question was how to house rule 2nd editions problems away. My editions are the full answer to that question. Some folks like the 2nd Edition dice interpretation. Others have apparently gone to different polyhedrons entirely as a work-around. For me, it was a problem that needed addressing.

The first house rule 14yr old me made was the Bullshit Efficiency Ability as we all realized that just because we could not roleplay a fizzbin situation, our characters with their CHA and some LUC should be able to. So, average the two and you get BS Efficiency, now re-titled 'Foolies' for my 4.0th Fantaversary Revision in January. Following from there, Perception INT+LUC, Perseverance as either INT+LUC or END+LUC and when I created the COOL Attribute, FOCUS became the 4th Ability with INT+COOL to maintain your mind in bad situations.

[Jack Photon]

COOL Attribute. How else to account for Lt. Bailey's 'excitement'? Janice Rands mousey-fear when she curls into Kirk? Spock's steely nerves broken by Kirk's name calling in This Side of Paradise.

"Right next to the dog-faced boy"
That's Spock rolling a CRIT FAIL with at least an IMPOSSIBLE DIE Mod against him. Each taunt in that scene gives Spock a new roll on his Cool. He does good and laughs those first few off. But the dice and mods go bad for him fast. "My mother was a teacher." Just watch things go sour in game mechanics terms. Nice.

At that point, FASA has normal Vulcan Strength that punches through a replicator panel and folds what looks like a steel/titanium/future-metal cylinder. In my House Rules, Spock's Psionic/Awareness/Enhanced Strength just kicked in and PSI Points are burning.