What on earth is going on ?

[JoseDominguez]

I read the book, watched the films and the CGI, to be brutally honest, I don't think I want to fork out the extra cash for a rulebook that includes fluff that's not as good as Heinlenn.
Enough for a bit of background is fine, there are novels etc.. out there if you need more.
The fluff in the MI book was fine, just enough for me to ignore (If I want a story I read a novel).

How about separating it? Fluff for those who want it available separately.
It's called fluff for a reason

Mongoose have managed to make gaming accessible to none painters..... how about making it accessible to those who are put off by a 100 page rule book (and face it, most rulebooks are 80% irrelevant to the actual wargame). Put it in a separate book or make sourcebooks like most roleplaying games. Roleplaying games require fluff to work, it's the most important factor for the most part. But they don't cram the rulebooks with it. They don't tend to need the padding.
Then you buy your sourcebook/world book, scenario separately. In the case of most wargames you don't need fluff at all (I avoid the SST fluff as I've allready got my own version of the background from the novel and want to avoid contradiction). So how about a nice chunky rulebook with basic fluff and some sourcebooks for those who want it.

Actually, if you want fluff, buy the roleplaying game stuff. I'm currently buying rulebooks that have a lot of stuff I'm not interested in (and that's true for a lot of gamers). I love SST for the rules mechanics and the connection to the original book (even the film).

 

[Lorcan Nagle]

There's plenty of systems that have great rules AND great fluff - look at BattleTech and iron kingdoms. The rule- and sourcebooks for both universes provide insights and a continuing storyline, characters for the players to root for and boo, and plenty of story hooks to involve your own games in the fighting (and often sanctioned events to determine the fate of characters or factions in the game).

I'd love to see something like that for SST, where we get regular fiction that advances the universe on, give us a map of known space and what worlds are being fought over and stuff like that - short fiction and unit details and just a bunch of stuff to make the universe less of a background to hang a rules set on and more of an organic, evolving thing.

And I've no problem with that being a seperate book or PDFs or whatever.

 

[Poko]

i'd quote that for truth,but there's no need.

fluff is vital to any system,and while SST has the book and the movie, they aren't...uhm, holistic-they picture only a very small fragment of the universe, and the book, while a great picece of literature, is very sketchy when it comes to "the world",which is used only as a background for the political contents, and anything not relevant to the storyline is ignored.
card system is the perfect choice for a "living" storyline, since incorporating new or "of reknown" units/characters is as simple as printing them.rather than re-releasing whole book.
the info on worldwide campaign in the S&P article hopefully is a taste of things to come in that respectm,rather than one-off. 8)