More Nostalgia: STAR FRONTIERS!

So I've been on this kick lately looking back at older role-playing games. There seems to be this magic point somewhere in the development of a game where too much makes the game unwieldy and too little makes it seem like there's something missing. Obviously D&D's switch point came with Advanced D&D. Star Frontiers, TSR's sci-fi RPG, had it's switch point with Zebulon's Guide to the Galaxy.

It seemed that the game started to "jump the shark" with the conversion of the rules to the Marvel Super-Heroes game mechanic, using a Universal Table with color results and "column shifts" for modifiers. It seemed to completely de-rail the simple percentage based mechanic of the earlier game. The addition of all the new armor types, weapons, and picky rules made the whole thing less satisfying than the original. I have the same problems with the upgrade to Knight Hawks. Sure this is an add-on to the game, but an important one that now allowed the players to pilot spaceships and engage in zero-G combat far above the planet surface - one of the draws of the Star Wars movies!

I've started going through the original rules for Star Frontiers, starting with the Basic Game and found those rules to be too simplistic. They gave little in the way of variation and seemed like more of a boardgame with freeform movement. The Expanded rules function as I remember, although back in the day we played like complete idiots trying to figure out sci-fi scenarios. Coming more from a Star Trek/Star Wars background, I had no true sci-fi knowledge which would have helped me greatly in coming up with scenarios. In the end I made my new campaign more like a Star Wars space opera than a true action scenario. It's hard to motivate people when they can buy weapons like laser pistols and steal what they need from others. In fact, most of our games ended up with the players being worse than the villains!

I'm still reviewing the rules and even looked into the newer d20 Modern/Future rulebooks. Just looking at the volume of rules one needs to know to run a car chase made me want to put these books away forever! If I can make the Star Frontiers rules work the way they should for what I need then that's good enough for me.