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Wednesday, December 14, 2016

Think About the Future of the Star Fleet Universe

This is Steven Petrick posting.

Star Fleet Battles has been around as a game system for more than three decades. This gives it a lot of history, and by this I mean "game" history. No one suspected when the initial history for the Star Fleet Universe was written that so many things would be added, so there was a tendency to "close doors." To say "this happened, the end."

Now, in this unforeseen future, we can find ourselves wanting to do things, and running into those "closed doors." Sometimes we find away around them, but we do hate to use the "conjectural" rubric.

So if we add a new ship class, we have to be careful about closing doors. Do we really want to say emphatically in the rule for the ship "only x number were built?" We really need to leave ourselves some wiggle room, because perhaps we might want to do a variant of that ship, and NOT have it be conjectural. [A Federation Strike Cruiser hull as a "drone bombardment platform" for example, or a light strike carrier variant (maybe only six fighters since the secondary/engineering hull is so small), same thing for the Klingon SD7 and so on.]

We also have a number of you, our customers, who are creative people and submit articles for publication. These can be carefully researched and present information already published, but themselves include things that make it harder to do some new variant of an existing ship type.

We need to look to the future, to some unforeseen point where something different needs to appear to add to the game. For that reason, we need to be careful about saying "only this many hulls were built" because we might want to open the door a crack, perhaps because one of our customers has proposed a new variant of an older design whose time has come.