"GURPS Star Frontiers" Topic

A couple of years back, I dusted off the old TSR Star Frontiers game, wrote a cool one-shot adventure, and talked my gaming group into playing it for nostalgia's sake. It was a disaster. Try as we did, we couldn't get back into the craptacular percentile-based system of TSR's days of yore. The game fell apart because of the mechanics…I think after decades of playing RPGs that simply have better systems, we lost patience.
Still, I always liked Star Frontiers, and recently we decided on converting the setting to GURPS. It requires almost no financial investment, since we all own GURPS and most of us own SF (and it's free to download online if we didn't).
I quickly found out that some folks have already done this, like this guy:

link

Just wondering if any TMPers have done anything similar with this game, and how it turned out for them.

I have with Mekton Zeta but that was ages ago. MZ is a great rules set that really required no modification to do Star Frontiers. Just trade out mecha with ships/fighters and there you go. Heck, all you need are the core Mekton Zeta rules and you really have everything you need except maybe robots- which you can build using the striker scale mecha

A couple of years back, I ran the original Star Frontiers game. Everybody had a blast. I'll be running another Star Frontiers games sometime this fall and everyone is still happy using the original rules. So short answer, no.

Still, SF is a great setting and I see no reason why it wouldn't work using GURPS.

Sadly your link doesn't work for me.

Same for me, but it's possible that the site is down temporarily.

That is weird. It worked this am, and I just re-googled it and the google search link doesn't work, either. (Now I know how Big Bird felt every time Mr. Snuffleupagus would inconvenienly wander off while BB was trying to prove his existence.)

link

It WAS there. I swear it!

Hate to say this so blunt, but the mechanics of an RPG are secondary, an RPG is only as good as the GM.

Some RPG's are almost unplayable with their mechanics, but good GM always trumps mechanics.

SF is has a lite mechanic system, it should not have been unplayable.

Then again some groups have "off" nights and a game that should be fun is not for a variety of reasons.

The best RPG system in the world run by a bad GM, makes for a bad game.

I never said SF was unplayable. I said we got frustrated with it and lost patience since we've gotten used to playing games with more developed and (in our opinion, better) systems, and this wasn't exactly a return to greatness. Light mechanics? Sure. It left us wanting more. Remember, the game is almost 30 years old, with no real upgrades (beyond Zebulon's Guide, which none of us have). Which is why we're toying with the idea of changing it to GURPS which has much deeper character creation and combat systems, while retaining the setting we love.
Unplayable games vary, depending on the person. I found TSR's Indiana Jones game was unplayable. I found Twilight:2000 unplayable. I'm sure others would take umbrage with these choices (well, maybe not with Indiana Jones). Star Frontiers worked fine for me when I was 15. 22 years later, I found it limited, and so did my players.
Then again, perhaps I'm a bad GM.

My real problem with Star Frontiers was it always felt like the people writing it got their Science Fiction from Saturday morning cartoons. Which in contrast with Traveller left it lacking, both games are very simple so it really wasn't a mater of complexity of rules.

And to be honest I had been reading SF for nearly a decade and playing Traveller for 3 years when Star Frontiers came out. And the only game I ever played in was run by someone who had only ever watched SF movies and TV.

Recently I had a chance to reread the the rules, they did not fair well against my memory of them. But to be honest I have found most of the rules written by TSR in that period to be woeful lacking in any merit.

Which I find to be disappointing as the original DnD was such a watershed moment in my young life. Though Star Fleet Battle was my 1st serious war game.

@The Angry Piper, a lot of people found Twilight:2000 unplayable, I found most of the problem with the game was in some of the choices made in the combat section, where a weapons shots was a group of trigger pulls instead of the number of bullets. And that the most important combat stat in the game was Coolness under Fire as it governed how much you could do in a given round. I alway appreciated the elegance of the system in that having Uber-Atributes meant that you got slighted on points for skill purchase. It was one of our favorite RPGs when I was in the service. (I always loved the irony of playing a bunch of Sailors and Marines in the Far East playing a bunch of Army and Airforce grunts in Europe).

"Then again, perhaps I'm a bad GM."

Don't be down on your self; not everyone can GM, look at me I have played my share of RPG's for 30 years and I am a horrible GM. I am envious of good GM's

Now some bad almost unplayable games IMHO were the Tri-Tac system and ICE's Rolemaster.

I was also in the service, and played Twilight 2000 for about 5 years and loved every minute of it.

When I played SF in High School we just used it to play Star Wars as that game would not come out for a few more years. Sorta of Star Wars with out Jedi, and that was OK as there were almost no Jedi in the first three movies.

> And the only game I ever played in was run by someone who had only ever watched SF movies and TV.

Since the game was really meant to cater to movie and TV scifi fans that was not a problem. SF was TSR's attempt to cash in on Star Wars when it comes down to it. I loved the game way back when, played all the modules, then just stopped.

The link in the OP seems to be back up and working.

I have to say, Zebulon's Guide was a great revamp. Not perfect, but replacing the entire system was a bold move that I think really worked. Try to find a copy and give it a try. It's not state of the art (by modern standards) but much improved over the original game.

I love the old Star Frontiers, like I love the old D&D… but I would never want to play either of them again. Yet if someone ran a game of such, I could enjoy it. I agree that the game system of a RPG (although important) is very much secondary to the quality of GMing and the expectations of the players. As others have suggested, problems with Star Frontiers generally arose from the world/universe concepts (IMHO never a complete concept, and designed for very limited sort of 'dungeon crawl' adventures) and not the game system. Zebulons guide tried to patch up some of the technological and character skill/proffesion holes, but the rewrite of the game system at that point was needless and prevented the new ideas from being implemented as a consistent whole. If you want to use GURPS, go for it… but I would suggest trying a different SF universe/setting as this is probably the root of your problems.