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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8974890" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>So to give some details, the encounter took place in a sprawling megacity. The city is like in my head roughly the size of the California coast, as if a single city as densely populated at New York or Milan extended along a stretch of several hundred miles. It was never my intention to try to map out a city of such size. I had in my notes that the BBEG had at his beck and call an armed space freighter that was loitering somewhere nearby. Likewise, the PC's also had their own armed space freighter loitering somewhere nearby. The city has a massive amount of traffic and complicated traffic rules governing how all the aero-space traffic above the city is supposed to move. These rules and the complex grid of aerial traffic lanes were also something I was unwilling to try to map out the specifics of.</p><p></p><p>All I really had to go on was both groups would be trying to hang around nearby without being so near as to be noticeable. Given the speed at which ships can move (potentially in kilometers per second) that didn't have to be very close at all. So in my head these ships are hanging out unobtrusively in some sort of 'freeway' in the sky waiting for a call, but with me not being able to know with any certainty how far away they were or how long it would take them to respond to an SOS. </p><p></p><p>What I did know is that the NPC made the decision to SOS 3 rounds before the party did. I settled on 10 rounds as reasonable, and the 10+3 came from the fact that the PC's radio'd for help 3 rounds after the NPC's did. I did think that this was a more interesting choice than other numbers and I wasn't being completely unbiased, but I don't think that when you are improvising you can be completely unbiased.</p><p></p><p>Could the PC's have altered the timeline? Well, maybe. What I would have ruled is that the PC's could have gunned the engine and gone much faster, but that this would have been like doing 150 mph on the Los Angeles freeway. There would have been skill checks involved and the likely consequences of failure would have been collisions with civilian vehicles and the PC's getting sued for more money than they have, which would have made their Guild really unhappy with them and probably resulted in the PC's indentured servitude. As it happens, the PC's didn't really probe me for alternatives to get there faster. I don't know if this is because they didn't think they could alter the timeline, or because earlier they had attempted a high speed chase of the BBEG through the skyline and had nearly smashed into some families and commuters in small air cars and one of their stray blaster shots blew up the outer wall of apartment on a skyscraper and scared the crap out of the inhabitants - which they ended up having to pay for. So they may have just figured that they weren't under enough time pressure the be worth pressing through traffic as they had previously learned a (comparatively) gigantic spaceship isn't the best thing to use in a high-speed chase through a city.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 8974890, member: 4937"] So to give some details, the encounter took place in a sprawling megacity. The city is like in my head roughly the size of the California coast, as if a single city as densely populated at New York or Milan extended along a stretch of several hundred miles. It was never my intention to try to map out a city of such size. I had in my notes that the BBEG had at his beck and call an armed space freighter that was loitering somewhere nearby. Likewise, the PC's also had their own armed space freighter loitering somewhere nearby. The city has a massive amount of traffic and complicated traffic rules governing how all the aero-space traffic above the city is supposed to move. These rules and the complex grid of aerial traffic lanes were also something I was unwilling to try to map out the specifics of. All I really had to go on was both groups would be trying to hang around nearby without being so near as to be noticeable. Given the speed at which ships can move (potentially in kilometers per second) that didn't have to be very close at all. So in my head these ships are hanging out unobtrusively in some sort of 'freeway' in the sky waiting for a call, but with me not being able to know with any certainty how far away they were or how long it would take them to respond to an SOS. What I did know is that the NPC made the decision to SOS 3 rounds before the party did. I settled on 10 rounds as reasonable, and the 10+3 came from the fact that the PC's radio'd for help 3 rounds after the NPC's did. I did think that this was a more interesting choice than other numbers and I wasn't being completely unbiased, but I don't think that when you are improvising you can be completely unbiased. Could the PC's have altered the timeline? Well, maybe. What I would have ruled is that the PC's could have gunned the engine and gone much faster, but that this would have been like doing 150 mph on the Los Angeles freeway. There would have been skill checks involved and the likely consequences of failure would have been collisions with civilian vehicles and the PC's getting sued for more money than they have, which would have made their Guild really unhappy with them and probably resulted in the PC's indentured servitude. As it happens, the PC's didn't really probe me for alternatives to get there faster. I don't know if this is because they didn't think they could alter the timeline, or because earlier they had attempted a high speed chase of the BBEG through the skyline and had nearly smashed into some families and commuters in small air cars and one of their stray blaster shots blew up the outer wall of apartment on a skyscraper and scared the crap out of the inhabitants - which they ended up having to pay for. So they may have just figured that they weren't under enough time pressure the be worth pressing through traffic as they had previously learned a (comparatively) gigantic spaceship isn't the best thing to use in a high-speed chase through a city. [/QUOTE]
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