Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(Psi)SeveredHead" data-source="post: 3576552" data-attributes="member: 1165">I used to play and run it when I was younger and more interested in just combat rather than villainous plotting. It was a great system. It was designed for sci-fi rather than modern, so it did StarDrive game balance much better than Dark Matter game balance. I regularly convert Dark Matter adventures into d20 Modern (which I think does modern-times gaming better). I would rather play Alternity for sci-fi, although I must admit that sci-fi has so many barriers to it that I doubt I'd play anything other than Firefly/Serenity setting (which is so close to Modern that Modern probably does it better, re: Reynold's use of Remain Conscious).While Alternity is light-years better than d20 Future for sci-fi (IMO) it made spaceship combat way too complicated. The rules were making spaceships were much better designed but also much more complicated. Naturally for some reason my players always wanted to design their own ships.Practically any maneuver required Vehicle-space checks (but at least there was a mechanical benefit). A "realistic" space combat system should go into an advanced rules section so those of us who are more interested in cinematic combat can ignore it. That includes the hated facing rules (which weren't present in Alternity personal scale combat).Compartments meant that combat got way too complicated, as "focus firing" on each one was too difficult, and things got worse especially because of Alternity's "condition track". Here's an example:An enemy spaceship has five compartments: bridge, engineering/stardrive, weapons, quarters and cargo. There's a roughly 20% chance of hitting each compartment (assuming you hit). You (onboard your own spaceship) could better your aim with help from the sensor operator, but you didn't get much benefit when it came to targetting compartments. As a result, you were just hitting the enemy ship all over the place ... kind of like d20 Future.The enemy ship has many crew members, most of whom are NPs (Alternity's version of the 0th-level character) and have Con 9, so durability 9/9/4/4. They're all wearing soft e-suits, which gives armor.Every time you hit the enemy ship, your opponents take damage (equivalent to the damage dealt to the compartment). Each compartment had its own durability (hit points) and condition track, so that's just more numbers to keep track of. If the compartment NPCs are in takes stun damage, this applies to all their stun ratings (and can eventually inflict step penalties or unconsciousness), but armor applies. If the compartment they are in takes wound damage, they all take wound damage (armor applies, penalties can build up) and half that as stun damage (armor does not apply, unless they have lots of ranks in Armor Operation; penalties can build up). I'm going to assume you just roll armor once for each hit, rather than roll armor dice for each individual NPC. It's just faster that way.You can batter the crew into weakness or unconsciousness by hitting the compartments; because you can't effectively focus-fire, you end up facing an enemy ship with multiple damaged compartments with multiple damaged NPCs taking almost random-seeming penalties (their weapons are at a one step penalty to hit due to compartment damage, their pilot is taking three steps because he's taken lots of stun damage and his compartment has taken lots of wound damage, etc). Each compartment could take up to four steps in penalties from stun and wound damage (one step each for losing more than half its stun points, losing more than half its wound points, crew losing more than half their stun points, crew losing more than half their wound points) and all this assumes that the crew are in the appropriate compartment (they aren't always; the gunner might be on the bridge while the weapons compartment, which doesn't have life support, is on a more strategic part of the ship).Now what happens if the enemy ship has multiple named NPCs (or just specialists; some Marines, some engineering crew, different stats for the pilot, commanding officer, XO, and so forth)? Oh dear... the PCs don't face this problem because each PC can quickly calculate their own damage, as long as they don't have (m)any specialized crew types on their own ship.That's a lot of work to no benefit. IMO you shouldn't be able to "focus fire" at compartments, at least not if you have any kind of "condition track" system for NPCs. (D20 Future went too far towards simplicity by just stating that "PCs can't take damage when their ship gets hit", which of course makes no sense.)That makes me want to play Firefly/Serenity, where no one walks around with exotic energy weapons (except one episode) and the eponymous starship doesn't even have weapons!</blockquote>

Verification