Retro RPG: Star Ace
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- Опубликовано: 20 авг 2024
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Description: Star Ace is a role-playing game published by Pacesetter Ltd in 1984. The players are members of a Star Team to restore the Alliance to control of the galaxy against the "Empire". They fly starfighters, use a mystic energy force, and have sentient bears as members of the team. Basically it's Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off.
I remember this game. I wasn't my favourite back then, but in the intervening years I've had a good look and I think It was actually rather good. It was easy to play, easy to have fun and extremely house ruleable.
The card names in the military ranks we changed for actual military ranks and we lengthened character advancement by starting with the a base level of the average of characters stats and added 10 points per level as a bonus for three levels, then added five points from forth and above. We just kept adding on the exp cost for each level.
It was poorly written and lacked description, but it was fun and with a few tweaks actually worked.
The problem with many modern games today is the level of intellectual and emotional investment required to play them in a worth while way. Without all of the feats, tweaks, adjustments and edges and drawbacks the characters just don't perform as you want them to. But the hours of invested time to prep a character is prohibitive to playing more than one game. Star Ace takes me back to a time when gaming was fun, story orientated and easy make work.
I have fond memories of Star Ace, but it does come from an era when RPG rules were pretty inconsistent, but it was a fun game which had a number of really cool ideas in it.
Cheers for the comment, much appreciated.
Thank you for going over this. I had this back in the late '80's (no idea what happened to it tho). I forgotten about it until you went through it and that art. I remember more of the art than anything else. I enjoyed that.
As I said in the video, it was one of my first RPG's, so I have very fond memories of it. Loved the way that it managed to have all the fun of Star Wars without actually being Star Wars.
You've got the setting backward. The Empire came first, the Alliance was formed to stop them from finishing their takeover of the galaxy. The PC Star Teams are effectively guerilla forces acting as deniable assets for the crippled Alliance, but they're just working to collapse (or at least slow down) the Empire, not to re-establish an older galactic government. The galaxy was pretty chaotic before the Empire came along or it wouldn't have risen to power so fast (7600 worlds taken over in less than two human lifetimes) and the Alliance was a desperation measure and would probably fall apart again without an outside threat - like the Empire, and the Xenophobes if they ever reach Alliance space. Also, the rights to Star Ace apparently belong to Reed & Shy from Ronin Arts, so if we ever do see a remake or new material it'll likely be through them...but their website's gone, although they are still selling pdfs on DTRPG and the like.
You'll excuse, I haven't actually read the rules since the early 90's, so the details are lost in the intervening decades.
@@RPGGamer Mine was on the shelf, I had to go double check to be sure myself. I didn't remember it being quite as blatant a copy of Star Wars as it would be if the Empire had displaced the Alliance. But it is still very much Star Wars with a reskin. Very strange to me that you can still get almost all the Pacesetter RPG stuff but this one is in limbo. Hmmm...maybe a relaunch in a prequel setting during the rise of the Empire? Followed by a confusing and partly incoherent sequel game written by multiple authors who hate each other's work? Now that would be a proper Star Wars ripoff. :)
Please consider doing a Rules Breakdown for Star Ace. I recently snagged a whole pile of these books and would really appreciate a tutorial!
I'm not doing Rules Breakdowns at the moment, but when I start again, I'll make the first Star Ace, so should be some time in January.