Star Fleet Battles Open Community

On SFBOL. The problem is (well, at least the main one that I see) is that if it is a PVP kinda game, the winners just keep winning and getting better and winning more, and the people losing just keep loosing and loosing more.

What makes a MMORPG work (or at least what makes it work in this kind of situation) is that you don't have to fight other players. You can if you want, but you can play the game forever (I'm thinking completely of, say, WoW here, which I don't ever play, but know plenty of folks who do) just fighting NPC monsters and so you have the "leveling up" aspect (i.e. you get more powerful, have long term success, and get invested in your character or position or whatever getting better) without the "the winners just keep winning and the losers just keep losing" aspect.

To make some kind of SFBOL long term game with "leveling up" and the like, you'd need to have some way to be able to play against NPC ships/missions so you could level up and gain experience and power without having to play other players. Otherwise, the people who won would keep getting better and the people who lost would just keep losing, lose interest, and stop playing.

You could run a campaign with NPC/GM types running non advancing opponents in scenarios, but then the NPC/GM is basically taking the hit so everyone can play against the NPC, and I can't imagine that there would be enough support for a whole campaign like this. You could try the "double blind" kinda game that folks will do once and a while in campaigns on SFBOL where each player takes turns playing the "monster" or whatever (we did this in the FF Captain Campaign that was going for a little while, which had various levels of success), but then inevitably sputters out as folks lose interest in playing the NPC side of games like this (as they generally end up being fairly one sided, and you are really only playing the NPC/monster side out of obligation rather than entertainment).

So I can certainly see how this kind of idea would be cool, but I think there are significant hurdles.

I started off with a Kzin CVE and as I fought more fights was upgraded to a bigger ship, got more experienced Fighter/Ship crews, etc.

My friend basically ran the game as a GM and the "enemy" ships as NPCs.

I did something similar with some other friends where I was running the enemy as NPCs and creating scenarios for them.

So if you had someone operating as a GM creating the scenarios, providing the upgrades, better ships/crew, etc. Im sure you could do it.

You'd still have to stick to the 2 opponents (unless it actually allows multiple players?), but given MMORPGs are all about factions, each ship could be controlled by a different player, and that player would give directions to the controlling player (who would have to do what the other players wanted).

If SFBOL could be set to have multiple players then this would be very easy to do.

is the problem of more than two players in a game.

I don't know if you've ever tried to play a multiplayer game on SFBOL, but:

1) The game will pause while one player triggers Impulse Activity and the other player(s) miss it.
2) The game will pause again while Impulse Activity is stepped through and people get to react to things (launching WWs, launching drones after seeing plasma launch, deciding to shoot after fighters are launched, and then some).
3) The game will become nigh impossible to follow as damage allocation results spam the screen of the chat window.

Oh, and if one player drops out, or gets disconnected, the game has to stop, because there's nobody to push the "No Activity" button for his player position.

I've tried to run multi-player free for all scenarios on SFBOL. It's a disaster.

Kind of on the subject: My friend has a campaign system for Fed Com that has a cool feature: Good Luck and Bad Luck. He got the idea from an old computer game called M*U*L*E* from the mid-80s. Basically, each turn something might happen to a player. It could be good or bad. The players doing the best were more likely to have something bad happen, and the ones doing bad were more likely to have a good event, while those in the middle were 50/50.

In this campaign system you have the same thing, and it works to keep the campaign fun and give a little boost to those not doing so well but is not overpowering in this boost. Good events are extra money to buy ships, or a legendary officer becoming available (adapted from SFB), and other things. Bad luck is loss of resources, a legendary officer retires, and other things.

A person leading can get a Legendary Officer, but is more likely to lose one. This is better than rewarding the winners, which punishes lesser player and drives them away.