VBAM Games Forums

Deep joy. Just what the world needs. VBAM powered by F&E.

Not.

As they have that unicorn of Trek licenses, one that runs in perpetuity, I don't blame them for not wanting to jeopardise it and therefore err on the side of caution. Just a shame it didn't come out until years into the project.

I've certainly lost interest in FA, which is a shame as at one point it was (for me) the most eagerly anticipated SFU product for a decade. Trying to replicate the dull as ditchwater F&E is just nuts.

Charles Lewis wrote:That got a chuckle.

I aim to please

Handed over to "veteran players familiar with campaigns"? Oh dear God, no. That means the Galactic Conquest people. A contender for one of the most incoherent campaign systems ever written. I actually paid hard earned cash for that back in the day and I honestly felt like asking for my mon...

... VBAM is all luck? :roll: Yeah, you know, that VBAM game. The one where you may as well just toss a coin at the beginning to see who's won. UnIike the totally awesome F&E where you spend ages rolling dice and cross-referencing charts just to tell you that the larger fleet won while suffering...

In SVC's blog entry from yesterday, which was on the subject of how to be a good game designer, he holds up VBAM (without naming it) as an example of bad game design because there is little skill involved in playing it and the outcome is largely determined by luck. Of course, based on his extensive ...

What a bunch of self important dicks. Ah well, FA doesn't sound like it's going to be of much interest to me anyway after SVC's finished messing it up. And yes, Jay, you should definitely offer them a 2e version. They've been writing Traveller Prime Directive for about three hundred years as well......

Charles Lewis wrote:Yeah, the 10 years, or so, of VBAM 1E development and feedback from players was simply not enough.

They weren't on Jean's mystery list so they don't count.

PaulB wrote:You hear that? Fed Admiral is 10 games in one! What a bargain.

Ten, eh? Such a shame we can't just have the one that was originally planned... a VBAM supplement for Federation Commander.

Charles Lewis wrote:Which is why when I gaze upon my rather sizeable collection of F&E material I see a toolkit to someday do a proper Trek-ian wargame.

Aye, Charles, you're not wrong. There is a great game lurking inside the F&E box, just not the one in the rules.

Alas, this is true according to people I know who have played F&E. The game is largely one of manoeuvering pre-determined stacks using one of a handful of pre-determined valid tactics. Combat itself is just a dice rolling grind in which the larger force always wins. In short, it is a highly tedi...

Ha-ha! At the risk of laboring the point, this entry for this week's blog tells you everything you need to know about why Jay stood no chance.... 2. I read a lot of books. I have, for many years, always had a book in the bathroom that I was reading a few pages at a time. Any convenient scrap of pape...

In other words, he is a competent enough 1970s game designer, when things like clarity, conciseness, and uniformity of mechanic didn't really matter that much because people would happily stomach an ever changing rule book full of errata and clarifications as a given. But in terms of the current sta...

Underneath all the grumbling, my biggest concern is that he is making wholesale changes to the rules without ever having played (or even read) VBAM, and without any understanding of why things were done that way. The ship support costs is a case in point. Changing that to a decimal charge per ship r...