[GZG] why I began playing full thrust

http://www.geneticanomaly.com/RPG-Motivational/slides/starfleet.html
---

Yep, quite awhile ago, saw the same thing, thought the same thing.

Fair's fair, though. It obviously was a fan boy thought project, and we all
know and deal with 'singes de cheddar'.

The original SFB was a lovely, simple little book, but did have some nasty
loop holes. They've been backfilling ever since, and new
additions/variations don't simplify the process.

It's the reason people like me fear change. We understand the rules have to be
written by someone smarter than us. We just fear them being written FOR
someone smarter than us.

The_Beast

Bob Blanchett wrote on 01/03/2010 07:13:28 AM:

> http://www.geneticanomaly.com/RPG-Motivational/slides/starfleet.html

SOOOOO true

Michael Brown mwsaber6@msn.com

> http://www.geneticanomaly.com/RPG-Motivational/slides/starfleet.html

Heheh! :-)

I promise never to do an FT SSD like that.....

Love the other posters on that site too......  ;-)

Ground Zero Games wrote on 01/03/2010 12:56:52 PM:

> >http://www.geneticanomaly.com/RPG-Motivational/slides/starfleet.html

Never fear, you've fan boys, too. We'll whip 'em up faster than you can deny
them.

> Love the other posters on that site too...... ;-)

The site has become harder to print from, which, as I've said before, makes
great changeable scenery in game store bathrooms. Fortunately, I can find them
printable elsewhere.

One of the most cherished was the 'Acceptance' poster. In case you're having
trouble finding same, it's of tabletop (FoW?) Russian tanks and soldiers.
'Call it what you want. They're still toy soldiers, and you're still playing
with them.'

The lads CAN take a joke.

> Jon (GZG)

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Gzg-l@mail.csua.berkeley.edu
http://mail.csua.berkeley.edu:8080/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lOn Sun, Jan 3,
> 2010 at 1:28 PM, Doug Evans <devans@nebraska.edu> wrote:

> Ground Zero Games wrote on 01/03/2010 12:56:52 PM:

The posters were originally found on RPG.net.

One of my posters is on that site. (I knew someone was cataloging them, but
didn't know where.)

It was a couple of years, though, since I created one. It was fun at first,
but I stopped paying attention to the RPG.net poster threads when they stopped
being funny and started to be endless variants of "Yeah, it's like that".

It's much more fun to just read them on the cataloging sites.

> On Sunday 03 January 2010 19:28:45 Doug Evans wrote:

Too late:

http://www.glendale.org.uk/ft/starwars/designs/imperial.gif

> On Sunday 03 January 2010 19:28:45 Doug Evans wrote:

Oh dear.

Has anyone actually let you play with that yet, Sam?  ;-)

Er, John? Have you seen the stuff Dean has been running for better than a
decade at cons?

http://www.star-ranger.com/SRStuff.htm
Full Thrust Fleet Designs and Conversions

I don't think there's anything quite Sam's size, but, on the table, he more
than makes up in quantity of ships and players. ;->=

Course, as I recall, the Super Star Destroyer generally sits in the middle of
the table, and everybody else dances around...

The_Beast

Ground Zero Games wrote on 01/03/2010 04:24:06 PM:

> >On Sunday 03 January 2010 19:28:45 Doug Evans wrote:

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http://www.geneticanomaly.com/RPG-Motivational/slides/acceptance.html

That is one of my favourites

> Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 18:56:52 +0000

Yeppers, that's the one I was talking about; the Flames of War players loved
it when I put it up early last year.

Next, along with the next Evil Overlord Tip, I'll prolly do the Warhammer
40,000 Chibi...

The_Beast

Richard Kirke wrote on 01/04/2010 11:18:14 AM:

> http://www.geneticanomaly.com/RPG-Motivational/slides/acceptance.html

> On Sunday 03 January 2010 22:24:06 Ground Zero Games wrote:

> Oh dear.

It was never really meant to be playable, however I did have a model to match
it:

http://www.glendale.org.uk/ft/photos/1997/destroyer.jpg

The 'small' ship is one of the larger FSE carriers.

Given that we regularly played with fleets worth around 12,000pts, sometimes 4
fleets in a game, it probably wouldn't have been that unbalanced points wise
if I had fielded it, though would probably have been vulnerable to nova
cannons which were quite commonly used back then.

Having use of the whole floor of a hall at the gaming club made for some quite
fun very large games.

The design that was jokingly described on the list as the "Dreadplanet
Roberts" was mass 1120, and got halfway regularly played in my games. There
was a larger one as well that was over 2000, but it didn't see the table very
often because we usually held the custom games in the old group to NPV 5000
limits, but the bigger one sometimes came out on the rare occasions we got up
to 10000. The newer group's scenarios are getting much bigger than that, so a
3000 mass dreadplanet might just make an appearance.

E

[quoted original message omitted]

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Gzg-l@mail.csua.berkeley.edu
http://mail.csua.berkeley.edu:8080/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lOn Mon, Jan 4,
> 2010 at 3:04 PM, Eric Foley <stiltman@teleport.com> wrote:

> The design that was jokingly described on the list as the "Dreadplanet
There
> was a larger one as well that was over 2000, but it didn't see the

At which point:
http://www.geneticanomaly.com/RPG-Motivational/slides/shadowrun.html

Mk

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Gzg-l mailing list
Gzg-l@mail.csua.berkeley.edu
http://mail.csua.berkeley.edu:8080/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lAt that size
isn't the design akin to a ww2 battleship armed with machineguns.

Most ships seem to be armed with a small number of large calibre weapons and
some secondaries.

________________________________
From: Eric Foley <stiltman@teleport.com>
To: gzg-l@mail.csua.berkeley.edu
Sent: Tue, 5 January, 2010 9:04:12 AM
Subject: Re: [GZG] why I began playing full thrust

The design that was jokingly described on the list as the "Dreadplanet
Roberts" was mass 1120, and got halfway regularly played in my games. There
was a larger one as well that was over 2000, but it didn't see the table very
often because we usually held the custom games in the old group to NPV 5000
limits, but the bigger one sometimes came out on the rare occasions we got up
to 10000. The newer group's scenarios are getting much bigger than that, so a
3000 mass dreadplanet might just make an appearance.

E

[quoted original message omitted]

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http://mail.csua.berkeley.edu:8080/mailman/listinfo/gzg-l

_______________________________________________
Gzg-l mailing list
Gzg-l@mail.csua.berkeley.edu
http://mail.csua.berkeley.edu:8080/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lThere's no
calibers for any of the weapon systems except the K-guns. So as ship
sizes get larger weapons get smaller proportionally.

The sweet spot in ship sizes really seems to be ~70-120 masses. Ships
under that mass explode in one salvo and ships over that size get involed in a
slugging match of attrition.

Not sure how you would change this unless you could have calibers of beam
weapon.

________________________________
From: Eric Foley <stiltman@teleport.com>
To: gzg-l@mail.csua.berkeley.edu
Sent: Tue, 5 January, 2010 12:18:18 PM
Subject: Re: [GZG] why I began playing full thrust

It's true... Full Thrust at that scale often turns into a massive rolling of
mountains of dice. My current players like the number of ships though, so
we've been refining different ways to reduce the die rolling. (e.g. anything
involving lots of fighters is rolled all at
once instead of group-by-group, and lately we've been going with rolling
some fraction of the total and just multiplying). It didn't affect the
dreadplanets much, though... the way their weapons matched up with the
prevailing strategies in our games, there was usually just one massive dice
roll and the game ended then and there. Â E Â
[quoted original message omitted]

> On Sun, 3 Jan 2010, Bob Blanchett wrote:

> http://www.geneticanomaly.com/RPG-Motivational/slides/starfleet.html

Wasn't quite the reason I gave up SFB. It was the math.

I'm dyslexic. I can do the math for my ship for the turn without error or
reversing numbers. And that's about it.

In order to win battles with my local SFB players, you had to do the math for
every ship on the table for every turn.

God only knows what the tournment champs can do.

We almost had t-shirts made: "Do the math" on the front and SFB on the
back...

FT forever. Even if I have to personally teach each and every person I meet
who wants to play the game.