FF&S was such a great example of gearhead craziness. On the one hand, it
always seemed like the Traveller players wanted more gearhead stuff than we
could do, but at the same time, we at GDW wanted to do all of that gearhead
stuff just as badly as they did, so off we went, united in gearhead
craziness.
It did make the job a lot harder, though, because we were always designing
stuff all the time, but it was so easy to make mistakes in the complex
systems that we had to do a LOT of work doing internal checks. Frank made
mistakes, Loren made mistakes, and it was my job to check them all. It was
a system where it was definitely easier to make a mistake than it was to
check them and fix them all.
Although having a sounder system to work on was good. I was all the time
having to respond to errata questions about "Shattered Fighting Ships," I
finally got to the point where I had to say, "they're all broken, no one
knows how that system works to even fix them, please just let us get out
the new rules so we can move on."
On Sun, 10 Jun 2012 03:44:53 -0700, Evyn MacDude <>
wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 10, 2012 at 3:02 AM, Roger Malmstein wrote:
>
> You go to bed now, knowingly you have a friendly crowd here. I
> don’t think you need to justify things in any way. You did what you had
> to do for good and bad to keep the wheels turning. With TNE I never felt
> cheated, I think most of us knew that errors was bound to creep in no
> matter what. TNE was never close to MT in the way of errata, which had
> the horrendous Shattered ship of the fighting Imperium.
> Yah, What he said. FF&S had a few short comings, but nothing really
> gamebreaking unless someone went out of their way to min/max the designs
> like meson rifles, huge death star like lasers and so on. For most part
> designs worked as intended within their reference framework. The fun
> thing with FF&S was the versatility of the system. I have never seen
> anything like it since.
> I would say Gurps:Vehicles (2nd Edition) came close, but Dave
> Pulver admitted