What it is, and what it never was
Interesting thread, and I think you guys really hit on what is going on with BL, Aramis in particular, that "you almost need a referee for competitive play."
That's exactly what BL was intended to be: an aid to help referees accurately portray Traveller space combat to the players and how it is connected to all of the other crucial pieces of the game.
Character generation and skills. Players spend a lot of time trying to build the character they want, with the right key skills.
Task resolution system. Players want to see those skills used in key, meaningful ways because this is a roleplaying game.
Gearhead/FF&S design stuff. Players want to design weapons systems and ships that are more effective and powerful than the alternatives, or more efficient in the roles for which they are intended, and they want to see this played out in concrete ways.
A realistic vector-based movement system that allows players to appreciate the actual environment they are operating in: planets (objectives), orbits, time-distance, the importance of the detection fight, and all of the tactics that come from that.
Player level details on damage, "what happened to our ship," "how long will it take us to repair it to resume our operations."
BL is intended to take all of those things seriously at the same level of detail that the rest of the game does. It was intended to allow the referee to let the players play out what happens when their free trader meets the pirate or the patrol cruiser coming to repossess them, and see all of those details that they are heavily invested in seeing.
Traveller had not had tools to do that for a long time, and it was showing in the story telling we were getting in submitted adventures. Starship encounters were deterministic caricatures with no room for the players to exercise their skills, equipment, and smarts to control their destiny. An enemy ship would appear, knock out their power plant, and they were being boarded. If a space-oriented SF game can't put starship combat front and center, what is the point?
BL was a detailed aid, or perhaps simulator, for role-playing, to bring in all of the gearhead, chargen, task resolution, and player creativity and combine them so players could see all of these details coming together. If Traveller didn't have a space combat system that allowed chargen, for all those precious skills and task rolls, to make a difference, that allowed all of the gearhead FF&S design to make a difference, that let them understand how their ship--in most Traveller campaigns, a character in her own right-- was affected, and see all of that in a realistic space environment, then what did we have all of those subsystems for?
BL was not "a game," it was the most detailed manifestation of the core rules. However, as TNE development went on, it emerged that we would not be able to include this stuff in a basic set, so it had to be spun off on its own in its own box and called "a game." But it never really was "a game," it was the RPG presented at the same level of detail that the RPG presented its other subsystems.
Logically, when BL became "a game," it could have been simplified or abstracted and loosen those ties with the core mechanics of chargen, task resolution, equipment and starship design, etc, but then what would have been the point? We'd have still been without a serious attempt to present what starship combat looked like for PCs, but with an abstracted game that separated starship combat from all of these other things that players wanted to be important. So I didn't abstract it; this was our one chance to have a simulation of how the Traveller system envisioned all of these subcomponents working together, at no loss of detail, RIGHT FROM THE BEGINNING, so people could experience how the universe worked.
As a game, it's unwieldy. Who remembers what all the skill levels are for every crewmember in a fleet of NPC ships? You don't want to. But if you've got your five or six PCs sitting around the table with the ref, gripping their dice, playing out their roles on the bridge, in their turrets, etc., it gives them meaningful things to do with impact on the outcome, which is what an RPG wants for them, and which BL was a chance to realize.
So BL never really was a game. It was a referee's play aid, and I think I was pretty clear all along that's what it was. However, anything in a box with maps and counters looks like a game, and that's the way either we ended up trying to sell it or how people perceived it.
I'm glad we got a good space combat simulator out there. Once you put out the detailed version to allow PC-level combat resolution, you can pull back and abstract out to your BR fleet action games, where "playability" is the most important consideration. But playability as "a game" with lots of ships and fast, snappy movement and damage resolution was not the goal of BL. Whether or not it actually found its niche as a PC-level RPG realization tool, I don't know, but I'm glad we got a chance to put one out there, and do it as right as we were able.
And you guys picked up on that, which was cool. Sorry it wasn't a game, it was supposed to be part of the core rules, like the wilderness maps and counters or plastic figures are with some boxed RPGs. We released it within months of the core rulebook, as was the plan, and oh, it lost as 1993's Best SF Board Game to...Magic the Gathering. Now there's some foreshadowing for you.
Dave
