Are ray guns actually rays?

[andrew_kenrick]

Thanks for the thoughts guys.

Reminds me of the line in Sky High in superscience class:

Unacceptable! You've confused beams with rays! D! Minus!

So how about laser beams ...

 

[Ralts Bloodthorne]

OK, looking at the various examples of rays, I figured something out that is kind of obvious, so it's not exactly easy to spot. (LOL)

So, beams come from a PART of a creatures body (eyes, hands, chest, left nostril, etc) which makes aiming MUCH easier, think of "point and shoot" with an actual effect.

However, beam WEAPONS are hand held weapons making it harder to hit.

The "Ranged touch attack" was not only to simulate how it is easier to hit with something being fired from your body, but also that it didn't need to penetrate the armor.

However, high-tech beam weapons DO need to penetrate the armor, as well as are fired from an artificial source.

Just some stuff to mull over.

 

[Peterson]

So I'm writing up some rules for classic sci-fi ray guns and it occurred to me, are ray guns actually rays? In other words, should they use the ray rules and just require a ranged touch attack?

After all, if you take the most obvious ray gun in sci-fi, the Star Trek phaser, it seems to be a touch attack! It just needs to touch the target, no matter how well armoured they are, to stun them and bring them down.

So would a ray gun actually work rather well as a ray, or is it just a case of semantics?

Just a thought here about making any existing (that is, statted-up) weapon that isn't a ranged touch attack into one that is.

I would seriously consider adjusting either the range increment and/or the damage lower to what it is currently statted at, when making the weapon into a ranged touch attack. The reasoning for this is because it is quite a bit easier to hit an opponent who's armor does not affect the difficulty it takes to hit said opponent. Thus, this makes typically designed opponents (i.e. those who have Armor Proficiencies and spends the Wealth on armor) a lesser threat than originally intended (unless, of course, you've made adjustments already and/or are using a product that takes in account your particular mechanic chance - which is unlikely).

While this isn't a huge deal, I've found that making this sort of change to the rules (I once took a player's advice and made all Lasers ranged touch attacks, while making no other changes at all to the game) makes it easier for the PCs to gain experience, and being the devious gamers they are - they also opted not to spend feats on Armor Proficiencies....

Just thought you folks would like to hear from my experience. Remember, I'm not saying its a bad idea (I'm rather fond of it), but one that should cause adjustments to other aspects of the game.

Thanks for listening.

Peterson

 

[Bloodstone Press]

So I'm writing up some rules for classic sci-fi ray guns and it occurred to me, are ray guns actually rays? In other words, should they use the ray rules and just require a ranged touch attack?

When I created a bunch of ray guns for 1948, I made most, but not all, of them rays. Some of them effect an area,usually a cone, rather than shooting a ray.

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

Armor is a bit of an odd duck, I guess.

Armor as Damage REDUCTION has never really flown well with me, even for modern settings. If I walk up to you and shoot you half a dozen times in the chest with a handgun, even if you're wearing a vest, I'm pretty sure you'll know. But if that vest offers DR 5 ... well, you might notice, but not much.

At the same time, having that armor mean that, say, if I miss you by 5 or less that the armor totally absorbed the gunshot and you don't notice ... eh. Even worse!

Spell-rays (where we get d20-system rays) usually mean something that IGNORES the damage-mitigation of armor. You take Elemental damage, for instance, which usually ignores armor in D&D entirely. Or you get Disentegrated, or Enfeebled.

So, for D&D style armor, if we are shooting a Ray Gun that causes elemental damage (Fire, for instance, for a Heat Ray) ... then yes, I suppose that it should function as a Ranged Touch Attack.

BUT ... if we have Future Style Armor that is supposed to protect from Ray Guns ... then I would say NO. Which may be conceptually odd, but the reasoning is based on some fundamental assumptions they made when putting together D&D which all d20 is then based on ... for them, Elemental (Energy) damage ignored the damage mitigation of armor that made Armor Bonus functional.

Likewise we could say that Modern Armor wouldn't allow Modern Guns to fire as Ranged Touch Attacks because they're designed to protect vs. ballistic weaponry, so ...

While conceptually interesting, I think it's just too fine-grained to really bother with. You could do something like Archaic Armor functions as Armor Bonus to B/S/P damage, while Modern Armor functions as Armor Bonus to Ballistic ... but Archaic Armor offers no bonus to guns and Modern Armor offers no bonus to Piercing ... and Future Armor functions as Armor Bonus against lasers, but Archaic and Modern armors DON'T offer Armor Bonus ... etc etc.

There can be Too Much Of A Good Thing.

For my part, something I've started doing is Damage Conversion ... where armor ALSO offers its bonus as a number that converts Lethal to Nonlethal damage. Not going to say it's any more or less realistic than Armor Class vs. Damage Reduction, but it's sort of the best of both worlds and my players really liked it. I might eventually go to a system that does Damage Conversion with no Armor Bonus. Dunno.

Price to Value. In the end it is a game. You start adding too much realism to your game, it loses the game aspect.

--fje

 

[Staffan]

Armor is a bit of an odd duck, I guess.

Armor as Damage REDUCTION has never really flown well with me, even for modern settings. If I walk up to you and shoot you half a dozen times in the chest with a handgun, even if you're wearing a vest, I'm pretty sure you'll know. But if that vest offers DR 5 ... well, you might notice, but not much.

This reminds me of GDW's house system (used in Traveller TNE among other places). Basically, armor converted the damage dice from weapons to damage points. So if someone shot you with a weapon that would do five dice of damage, and you wore armor that would "absorb" three of those, you'd take 2d6+3 points of damage in the end. It was slightly more complicated than that, with some weapons being better than others at penetrating armor, but that was the basic idea anyway.