Luckily, FRED enables the Joss Whedons and the Joe Whackos to each try their hand at mission design. Each has a chance to fail designing a Battle of Endor mission, so I think the analogy fails.
It would be trivial to rework the analogy so that instead of asking for funding, he was asking for advice. But even without reworking it, there's still evidence that the analogy holds weight. See
this thread, for instance. Clearly at least one person thinks BOE has an inherent stigma attached to it that could cause problems for them. Institutionalizing it in the wiki will just solidify that impression.
I would suggest that the Joss Whedon would at worst create the illusion of the Battle of Endor because a "big" mission would interfere with -- rather than promote -- his storytelling. Even if the execution could work (with largely scripted events, cooperative player, etc.), I believe a good design leads to a simpler, focused design.
Saying that you know what Joss Whedon would do with FRED is a pretty crappy argument to stand on, especially when you go right back to saying he would do it your way. All you're really saying there is that you think you're right. We've established that, already.
Since nobody is arguing that the battle in Serenity is an example of BoE, I'll go right back to it. To draw the analogy in more detail, the main characters would represent the player. Firefly, in this case, would be Alpha 1.
I don't think this is too much of a stretch here. Many movies
do use karajorma's design ethos if you take the main characters to be Alpha 1. There's lots of suspense and drama built up around accomplishing a task that is difficult, and oftentimes the hero's victory is something of a photo finish to maximize the suspense and dramatic effect.
Furthermore, key campaigns like Derelict have blatant similarities in writing to movies or plays. More generally speaking, you could probably group all of them under 'storytelling' and assume that since the audience comes from the same culture, the same principles will generally apply to all three, although obviously there will be differences because of the medium.
So, what purpose does the battle in Serenity serve? It's cool. That's pretty much it. There's no reason to have an entire fleet there - in fact, it stretches the realism a bit to think that the Reavers would have so many battle-capable ships, and that the Alliance would be willing to commit an entire fleet to a supposedly-quiet operation. Neither the Alliance fleet nor the Reaver fleet played any part in the story until right before the battle.
And many people liked the battle because it was cool and there was a lot of eyecandy, not necessarily because it was such a rich and deep contribution to the story. Plus since it'd be pretty pointless to have the movie end with
Serenity getting blown up by a malfunctioning missile, most people are going to subconsciously realize that it's
not supposed to be darkly tense but exciting.
So the purpose of the battle was to take all the tension that'd been building up to that point and release it, and add a cool battle, that was also exciting.
Can you do that in Freespace? Yes! You can have several tough assault, escort, and covert ops missions leading up to a big battle.
(Side note: I don't think Serenity would've been near as effective as if it hadn't had the battle done exactly as it was. The battle was such a "Disney Ride" of a scene, that it has a lot more impact when Wash is killed...if the entire scene had been darkly tense, and killing Wash was the release, it wouldn't have been the same at all. It wouldn't have set the movie up for the next scene, it wouldn't have made Simon getting shot as dramatic, and so on and so forth.)
Now granted, the crew of the Serenity was 'balanced on a knife's edge' to some extent, even if we as the audience know they aren't going to be killed randomly. (And I think it's important that the sudden killing happens
after that point - if they did, we would be expecting Serenity to die. Joss could've easily had the surviving Alliance soldier shoot Book, instead he gave him an extensive death scene.)
So I can't disprove karajorma isn't right on that point with that example, but I do think it's been done in some games as a 'bonus mission' kind of thing, and I don't think it's necessarily wrong to have a bonus mission as long as you do bookend it with more serious missions. The mission may lose its context in and of itself, but as part of a larger whole, it doesn't actually have to be a complete story or even embody all the aspects of a mission. For all we know, it could dovetail into a Red Alert mission that
is hard as hell.
Using the Battle of Endor missions as a negative example stimulates discussion of design concepts, and I think the reason there are so few missions is that the lessons have been learned. That the community no longer churns out Endor-style missions is a sign of maturity in mission design, and lessons that learned through discussions like this (and the wiki).
That's a completely circular argument. Fewer BoE missions is only a sign of maturity if it's wrong to make BoE missions no matter how they're designed, which is exactly what we're trying to hash out here.
And it may stimulate discussion of design concepts, but it's not nearly as good of an example as something that is commonly used. With BoE, you're working with a completely different set of rules than an escort mission. You don't use an example that your audience isn't as familiar with and doesn't plan on working on to teach skills. You can use it as a negative example, but that's still assuming that BoE missions are inherently worse than other mission types. And according to your boiled-down design schema, they
are. I can't really contest BoE missions without contesting your belief that simpler is better. So it would seem that we could argue over BoE missions until the universe ends and never get anywhere, because the fundamental assumptions that we're making about what's right and what's not right are different and would lead to the same conclusion, no matter how we looked at BoE missions.
But what if Lando had decided "Bugger that for a game of soldiers" and just ran away? 
Hmmmm. Reading my previous response I can see why you thought I was saying the players actions must decide who wins. That's not at all what I actually meant though. What I meant is that the player must have something to do which you can turn into a pass/fail debriefing. Too many BoE missions end up with the player just flying about killing things while the capships get on with resolving the story. That's what is poor mission design. Because it doesn't matter how many fighters the player takes out the capships will always resolve the mission the way the mission designer intended and the player will see the "You may now play the next mission" debriefing.
And an always win mission is bad design. There needs to be a way for the player to lose. Sure the player can get destroyed but unless we're talking about a desperate Custer's Last Stand mission where survival is the only goal it's not enough.
As I said before the player must have a task to accomplish that stands on a knife edge and will be resolved by the quality of his flying. It doesn't matter whether this is something that resolves the battle in one direction (Destroy the Death Star), Helps it (Take out the beam cannons on the enemy destroyer) or is completely irrelevant to the outcome (Protect those civilians until they can jump out). There must be something more than just aimlessly flying about shooting ships.
It's quite rare to see a mission where someone has simply stuck a bunch of enemy fighters in a mission and said "Kill them all to win" with no story or plot to it. But in a BoE mission it's easy to disguise that you've basically done the exact same thing.
I've bolded what seemed to represent the three main points...
Here's one quick example. Suppose you decide to a campaign based on an epic struggle between a gumshoe rebellion and an evil galactic empire.
It's a little more evenly matched than the movie it'd be ripping off.
What the player knows is that he has no explicit objectives. He's told at the start of the first mission, a BoE mission, that the rebellion has just been formed and the key member states have banded together to assault the empire.
The battle is a rout and the surviving rebel ships are driven off. The rest of the campaign is about the rebels recovering from the disastrous initial battle and eventually managing to strike back at the empire. There's no way for the player to change the outcome, and there's no way for him to save all the ships.
What the player is not told is that every one of the ships that can be destroyed sets a persistent variable. For certain ships, they appear in later missions and make things easier. Other ships cause crucial plot points to be revealed, new situations to arise, and even missions to appear that weren't possible before because the rebellion wouldn't have had the manpower. Again, there's no way for the player to save all the ships, so there's an
incredible amount of replayability.
The player's only risk in the mission is dying. The player will get pretty much the same briefing regardless, because saving a handful of ships will not change the fact that the battle was an overwhelming failure. The player isn't balanced on a razor's edge unless he gets into a battle and makes it be that way himself (of course he can also bite off more than he can chew and die). But the player does have great incentive to participate in the battle and try to save a new ship each time.
