Thoughts on Reading Stephen Dick's Space Aces: The New Guidebook

 
Space Aces: The New Guidebook is another offering I picked up during Kickstarter’s ZineQuest.  It’s a 24-page, full-colored zine that consists of 4 pages of rules and the rest of the pages are filled with tables and art.  The booklet is well-made, printed on high quality paper, and looks to produce good, campy fun through episodic, goofy adventures.
 
The rules are pretty disposable, consisting of standard RPG fare: a set of stats that give you a number to add to a die roll to determine whether you are successful or not.  You roll two dice when you set out to do something “risky, dangerous, or uncertain”: a d20, which measures your success or failure, and a d6 that determines whether you get a benefit or pay an extra cost.  Essentially the d20 determines the yes/no, and the d6 determines the but/and.  Success and failure are determined by deciding first how difficult it would be to accomplish the thing being attempted, and the game gives you 4 levels of difficulty: easy (5+), tricky (10+), hard (15+), and epic (20+).  Your stats let you add anywhere between -1 to +3. 
 
I’m not sure how any of those percentages work out, but to me that’s beside the point.  The question I ask is this: how interesting of a question is “how hard would this be to do?”?  While I’m not a fan of GM-decided target numbers in general, the real problem is that the question isn’t interesting and it seldom leads to exciting conversation at the game table.  The accompanying question is, “can I do this thing?” and that’s not especially interesting either.  Those two questions have been central to RPGs since the 70s, but are they really worth sustaining?  The author tries to counter for these uninteresting questions by including the d6, because the questions, “what good comes out of this?” and “what extra troubles come out of this?” are much more interesting by their nature.  Unfortunately, there are no structures to make benefits and costs inherently productive or interesting as they are left entirely up to the GM (or the table if there is no GM).  Costs are potentially tied to the rising action of the game through a mechanic called “heat,” which increases every time a cost is rolled on the d6.  The higher the heat, the more consequential the cost should be.  But again, what that means is really left to the players.
 
I know some of that sounds harsh, especially for a game that is so light on rules.  But having sparse rules only means that they should be tight and compelling.  An easy comparison is to look at Lasers & Feelings, which has much shorter rules, but which accomplishes the same ends with more interesting conversational prompts.  In fact, the basic episode tables reminded me of the Lasers & Feelings setup tables (and I can only assume Space Aces was directly inspired by the game, but there is no list of influences or inspirations within the text itself, so it can only remain an assumption).
 
That tables are where the zine really shines.  There are a lot of fun tables, and some of them are really well-honed lists of options.  Some of the lists and individual options are pure silliness, but that is one of the stated goals of the text.  There is one odd feature of the lists, which is that most of them are set up to require 2d6, the first to determine the column, and the second to determine the row.  Since the mechanics of the game run with 1d20 and 1d6, it seems like it would be a more natural fit to use them both for the tables as well.  This quirk also put me in mind of Lasers & Feelings, which uses only a d6.  It seems like this zine could easily be about additional tables to expand and shape your Lasers & Feelings game, and as such I think it is an incredibly fun and useful booklet.  In spite of the fact that I can’t ever see myself using the rules of the game, I can see always knowing where it lives on my game shelf so that I can have ready access to the tables.