Hypothetical Fun: What If A Different Genre Was The RPG Foundation?

[Wofano Wotanto]

Remember, even the US and USSR were trying to weaponize psychic powers during the cold war, pouring millions of dollars into remote sensing and other projects.

UK too, and probably every country with some military budget money to waste on psychic boondoggles. Still better than doping your own civilians with LSD for a lark.

And despite that implausibility, psychic powers, psionics, and telepathy have remained a fairly staple part of the science-fiction genre: e.g., Babylon 5, Firefly, Stargate, Starship Troopers, Star Wars, Dune, etc.

Dune was written in 1965 and Starship Troopers in 1959, during the period where psionics in literary scifi was still largely seen as quite plausible. The others are all movie and film franchises first and foremost, and the number of really hard scifi movies or shows ever made is arguably in the double digits even if you extend it to "plausible science at the time" like Disney's educational pieces. In literary circles these days, psionics removes a work from the "hard scifi" category pretty much automatically, which wasn't the case in the 1970s.

Which is ironic, because there's still a lot of things that are accepted as "hard" or "hard-ish" that probably shouldn't be. Psionics having become a "cheat" while (say) manned missions to other star systems using realistic physics and plausible engineering projections are still a-okay is seriously bemusing to me - and funny. Lot of supposed "hard scifi" writers need to admit they're doing soft science or outright space opera fantasy IMO.

 

[Reynard]

UK too, and probably every country with some military budget money to waste on psychic boondoggles. Still better than doping your own civilians with LSD for a lark.

If you have never listened to it, the Behind the Bastards podcast on MK Ultra is WILD

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

If you have never listened to it, the Behind the Bastards podcast on MK Ultra is WILD

Haven't, but MK Ultra is an familiar bit of insanity. Really quite remarkably crazy.

 

[Reynard]

Haven't, but MK Ultra is an familiar bit of insanity. Really quite remarkably crazy.

The deep dive details are completely insane.

 

[aramis erak]

That does not conform to either my memories (including Nexus, which I was subscriber to throughout its run) or the Memory Alpha page on FASA. Not that Memory Alpha is flawless, of course - they claim the company stepped away from tabletop products in 1990, which would come as quite a surprise to fans of Battletech, Vor, Crimson Skies, etc. AFAIK the license was simply terminated over the concerns about the RPG being too combat focused (something that reared its head repeatedly from the very start, not helped by some of the supplements) and Paramount becoming more invested in the IP and maintaining tighter creative control over it in general. The latter factor spawned the legal troubles with Steve Cole/TFG/ADB/SFB as well, which were complicated by the whole Franz Joseph Designs involvement.

Do you have a link to this FASA court case? The search engines are clotted with Axanar stuff, making it hard to dig back into the distant past of '88-90.

The court case isn't online, since it was late 80's. (87-90, IIRC).
If it was just that they didn't like FASA's direction, no suit would be needed - just withhold approvals.


Memory Alpha is a problematic source for anything. It still is touting a separate insignia for each patch, while production memos show that the TOS showrunners were pissed off by the swiss cheese of Capt Tracey and the partial triskelion of Commodore Decker. And Denial that Commodore is a rank in Trek. And using the FASA illustrations for maroons era ranks instead of the auction catalog entries for the screen worn ones. (Fasa got several wrong. Which isn't surprising, but also implies far less oversight than the McLimore interview here on EnWorld implies.)

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

The court case isn't online, since it was late 80's. (87-90, IIRC).

How inconvenient. What about these Nexus articles? Got copies of those? My own collection went up in a fire over two decades ago now and I've never bothered to replace them.

Memory Alpha is a problematic source for anything.

Granted, as I already noted. Not sure I regard Nexus as any more reliable, but it would be interesting to refresh my memory about what they said. It's been a long time and I wasn't all that interested in those articles back then since Starfire was my preferred game from TFG, not SFB.

 

[aramis erak]

How inconvenient. What about these Nexus articles? Got copies of those? My own collection went up in a fire over two decades ago now and I've never bothered to replace them.

Granted, as I already noted. Not sure I regard Nexus as any more reliable, but it would be interesting to refresh my memory about what they said. It's been a long time and I wasn't all that interested in those articles back then since Starfire was my preferred game from TFG, not SFB.

I ran SFB tournaments... two of which generated Ace cards... And one of the guys I played SFB with got an ace card.
I played Starfire, too.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

I ran SFB tournaments... two of which generated Ace cards... And one of the guys I played SFB with got an ace card.
I played Starfire, too.

Congrats. Not an easy task during the game's long-ago peak. The last SFB "tournament" I played in was around thirty years ago and was struggling so hard to hit eight players I got roped in at the last moment and I'm pretty sure the organizer played under a false name just to be able to submit results, which was seriously pathetic. I might as well have been throwing mine for all the effort I put in while I was between the games I actually came to the con to play. If you can't beat a Fed cruiser playing the full-overload photon lottery in a tourney you shouldn't be there, and that was all I ran in the interest of speedy resolution. Sad part was the one match where I still almost won, stupid lucky photon dice scored 4 hits at range 8.

But what's any of that got to do with FASA's relationship with Paramount?

 

[aramis erak]

Congrats. Not an easy task during the game's long-ago peak. The last SFB "tournament" I played in was around thirty years ago and was struggling so hard to hit eight players I got roped in at the last moment and I'm pretty sure the organizer played under a false name just to be able to submit results, which was seriously pathetic. I might as well have been throwing mine for all the effort I put in while I was between the games I actually came to the con to play. If you can't beat a Fed cruiser playing the full-overload photon lottery in a tourney you shouldn't be there, and that was all I ran in the interest of speedy resolution. Sad part was the one match where I still almost won, stupid lucky photon dice scored 4 hits at range 8.

But what's any of that got to do with FASA's relationship with Paramount?

If TNG was part of the FASA license, which was intended to be TOS, TAS, and Movies when issued, then Franz Joseph's also would have been.
And FJ licensed both SFB and SFBM as sublicenses from his license from Desilu.
Getting TNG declared a separate IP from TOS/TAS/Movies was a vital step to preventing Franz Joseph Designs, and thus also Gamescience (Zocchi) and ADB/SVC/TFG from accessing that material.
Especially since Paramount lost vs ADB/TFG. (and that decision also ended any viability to suing Gamescience, since the issues with the Gamescience license are identical to those of ADB/SVC.)

 

[aramis erak]

Thinking about the timeframe ...
For RPGs to arise, they needed to arise from something. Minis Wargaming, both fantasy and historical, was present.
Naval Wargaming was present, both boardgaming and table-top minis, both modern and ancient, and a few hints of Sci-Fi. Most notably, the 1975 appearance of SFB and SFBM...
the 1970 Maj. Matt Mattson and the 1967 Star Trek games both have space themes, but are simple games.

1973-1974 sees more trek stuff, and a couple clearly not-trek...
but it's not until 1975 that we get good mins and/or tabletop board games set in space. But we also get Starfire, and a couple more pocket games in the Sci-Fi realm.

So, for an SF game to have been sufficiently able to motivate players to go RP-mode with their boardgame... there's not much there. So it probably would need to have been a moderns wargame adapted to do Trek (as heritage eventually did in 1978)...

So I can't see a strong enough fanbase to take us to anything recognizably TTRPG... but the rise of LARPing starts around the same time (The SCA starts in 1963; disaffected SCAers often created local LARP groups in the US... but not using the term "LARP"...

Much as I'd love to have seen SF be the first inspiration, I can't; fantasy was more popular.

Now, it's quite likely that many consims at various universities in the US as part of or involving members of the ROTC units got into mild in-character play... And that could be a rising point - Korean War...
Wargames? Check!
Tank and Patrol both are early 70's...

I can see it happening, but being even more obscure than D&D wound up being.

Battlestar Galactica, ST:The Motion[less] Picture, MegaForce, and Star Wars could have been a delayed start point, but I think their success is predicated upon a reaction to the prevalence of Fantasy... especially Star Wars.

But that delays everything by 5-6 years, and cuts off a lot of potential audience. Fantasy, it's much easier if no one can tell you "that's not in the source!!!"