Reading FrontierSpace Part 1

FrontierSpace is very loosely inspired by TSRs old space opera RPG StarFrontiers, which I actually played back in the day - though just a little. From the looks of it, it assumes the classical setup of a starship crew for hire, though the PCs probably won't start with a starship. True to its title, FrontierSpace also assumes that you'll operate in regions of space where the rule of law can mean the rule of the bigger blaster. It would probably serve well to emulate stuff like Firefly or Farscape. While the same can be said about Traveller, M-Space or Stars Without Number, FrontierSpace does its thing really, really well, and in terms of its rules, it might be my favourite science fiction RPG yet. It has pretty light and consistent core rules, and most of the page count of the two core books (which clock in at more than 400 pages together) is made up of sub-systems that can be slotted in and of encyclopedic stuff like equipment lists. I'm pretty sure that at the table, this is al lighter game than, say, Mongoose Traveller.

However, I haven't played FS yet, so this is just a thorough read-through of the core books. This first part is just about the first chapter of the Player's Handbook, which packs a lot of punch.

Overall Impression

Im reading a 248 page pdf here - hard- and softcover editions are available through drivethru. The cover has a classic space adventure feel (crashed starhip and a firefight) with some nie little twists - I really like how the one female character depicted is from a less human-looking alien species, and while you wouldn't know it from looking at them, the insect person is genderless.

The interior is black and white with pretty good line-art. It's artistically conservative and won't blow your mind, but it gets across the mood and the setting really well and reminds me of early editions of Traveller, Paranoia, Cyberpunk 2020 and even Shadowrun (sans Jeff Laubenstein). The layout is very clean, functional and generous to the eye (none of the grey smudges that look like someone made a color version first and then remembered that they don't have the money for a full-color interior and so put it all through a greyscale filter).

Having read through half of the Player's Handbook as of now, I'd say that it is extremely well-structured. There's a 12-pages overview of the rules at the beginning that covers all the basees, and from there on, we move on to character creation, character advancement and chapters about Robots, Vehicle, Starships and finally, the Setting. All the rules seem to be where I would expect them to find. The one structural decision that doesn't really make much sense to me is that they put the Equipment chapter in between character creation and character advancement. I guess the idea is that you will need the equipment chapter for character creation, so it should come before advancement, but in terms of initial reading order, hitting a forty-page-wall of everything from medkits to poison gas granades at this point isn't optimal, so I skipped most of that chapter on first reading. Anyway, when using the book at the gaming table, the order of chapters is less important than whether you can find all the rules in their proper chapters, and the latter definitely seems to be the case.

Now, let's go through it chapter by chapter:

Introduction

This part mainly explains the core conceit of the game being basically a gritty space western. It is assumed that you never quite have enough money and ressources, that you'll do a lot of your repairs with duct tape, that none of your gear is shiny and new and that most of the time, you'll be on your own.

The introduction then goes on to claim that FrontierSpace is an "old-fashioned" RPG that depends on the GM (called Referee here) being in charge and making rulings; though I must say FS doesn't feel old-fashioned to me, the rules design actually is pretty modern, and there's a lot of "player empowerment" baked into the rules, which is all fine by me. In the end, the core advice about the role of the Referee is: Let them do the rulings in the heat of the moment, they're not out to get you, and if there's really need for discussion, wait until afterwards. In my book, that's a good piece advice that you'll find in most current rpg rulebooks.

One thing that I don't really care for (pretty much the only thing that, as of yet, I don't like about FS) is the authors' short explanation for their use of the generic masculine. I'm okay with their decision - I tend to go for gender-neutral whenever possible, including singular they, but if they don't want to do that, that's no dealbreaker for me. I'm not even sure they're wrong, I've just decided differently for myself. But their explanation contains more than a little snark against anyone who prefers gender-neutral language, that just seems uncalled for. I will discuss this here and not come back to it (promised), because while on the one hand, I disagree with some of the things being said in that little text box, I feel that it doesn't really marr FS as a whole. So, if you don't care for this discussion, just jump to where the font gets bigger again.

The authors claim in that little text box that they're "just not wired" in a way that would make them think of people in terms of their gender, sexual orientation, race, class, age ... I appreciate what they're trying to say. But they might have stopped to think about how arrogant this must sound to people like me who assume that it is actually a daily struggle not to be racist, not to be sexist, to not act on all those ugly little notions that have been put into our heads by a society that keeps discriminating, keeps reproducing hurtful stereotypes. (Later, in the "Species" chapter, it is mentioned that "more than any other species, humans are shaped by their background", so I wonder how the authors, if they truly believe that, can claim "not to be wired that way." I'm pretty sure that they haven't grown up in a society free of racism and sexism.) The authors then go on to assure that the use of generic masculine is merely a convention of grammar that they have learned and don't want to unlearn (which, as I said, I can live with pretty well, though I would handle things differently) and then kindly ask the reader not to take offense to this "unless you also take offense to regular uses of the Oxford comma or occasional applications of split infinitives." Now really, this is a little too much - to me, it basically seems to say: "Hey, we're using high-brow language here, and the generic masculine is just part of it, if you don't understand that, you're just wrong and uneducated!" That not only feels insulting, it also goes against the grain of linguistics, which always strives to be descriptive, not prescriptive.

Apart from that, as of yet, there's nothing in FS that looks like they want to "stick it to the SJWs" - quite on the contrary, there's characters written against gender stereotype and there's some really good stuff in the species descriptions that I'll come to later. Still, that one little passage has kept me from reading most of FrontierSpace for 2 or 3 years. It just kept raising its head, souring my reading experience. I finally got over it, because hey, the people form DWD studios might disagree with me on this point, but everything else about FS points to their anti-discrimination statement being heartfelt and honest. In the end, I just hope they consider my reaction to this passage and find a less snarky way to say what they have to say in future products.

Okay, that being out of the way ...let's get to the next section, the Rules Overview. This is shiny. In twelve pages, they really get you up to speed on all the mechanics. You have six core abilities with starting scores somewhere between 30 and 75 (Perception being one of them, which, in my book is always a bonus). All tests are d100 roll-under; skills act as modifiers to abilities and can be freely combined with them. Unskilled rolls are at Ability-20, so if you have a skill at -10, it means you already have some expertise, a skill at 0 is solid, and every skill at +10 and more means that you are becoming a true master and gain some extra perks called Skill Benefits. Skills are broad (Medic, Pilot, Scientist, but also Artist or Thief), but you can specialise in one specific area and later gain Skill Benefits that often act as enableers, allowing you to use your Marksman skill for gunnery without penalty, for example. (The authors mention that they've been met with negative reaction about the notion that skills start at a negative value, but really, to me, this is much cleaner and more intuitive than how it works in FS's sister game BareBones Fantasy, were skill values are always positive, but are added to only half the abilitiy value.)

Dice-reading conventions are pretty low-math for a d100 system: doubles on your roll act as crits or fumbles, there's a die-switching mechanic for advantage and disadvantage, and bonuses and penalties to you roll normally come in increments of 10 or 20. There's a multi-action-penalty which seems to be the main tacticaly element of combat, and it's really neat and simple: When it's your turn, you can take as many actions as you like, but there's a cumulative penalty of -20 to your roll for each additional action, and yes, reactions like dodging also forward that penalty. Some version's of Chaosium's Basic Roleplaying have that kind of cumulative penalty for multiple defenses, but just extending it to all actions and basically allow everyone to keep acting as long as they are suficciently skilled to pull it off just solves so many problems.

Destiny Points are FS's version of Fate or Luck or Bennies. You'll start with between 1 and 5 destiny points (depending on how awesome your character is - the better your stats, the less DP). They refresh after each adventure, but you won't be able to raise your limit - actually, the limit will go down as your character improves (there's some interesting implications for advancement in that, because it gives you an incentive not to buy up your worst and best abilities early on). They are pretty powerful, allowing you to upgrade a roll (fumble to failure, failure to success, success to crit), to max out damage or even to be guaranteed to survive the next round - the idea being that this will allow you to pull off some really crazy stunt that might kill you otherwise.

To round out a chapter, we get a 3-page example of play that is pretty entertaining and shows how the multi-action penalty works in, well, action (though it made me a little confused about how cover works).

All in all, a pretty good start. Next post, I will look at character creation.