genshou said:
I have yet to see anyone on these boards who doesn't, which is a strong indication that the entire starships chapter of d20 Future was a huge, embarrassing mistake that is a mockery of the quality I'd expect of a d20 Modern supplement made by the Wizards themselves.
You haven't seen my posts
I think it's a good baseline (I like simple combat based on creatures), but I don't think the scaling or weapons are balanced. (When a fighter does more damage than the vessel that launched it, you have a problem. A fleet of fighters should be powerful, but a single one?) Plus, I had to make up a house rule for spaceship speed (on the grounds that small ships go faster in sci-fi, even if that isn't realistic).
I think the "slots" could have been a bit more detailed, too (eg one slot gives you a crew bay with this many people - in case the ship is designed to carry troops - or one slot gives you this many fighter vessels - corrected for size, since a slot in a superheavy vessel is bigger than one in a mediumweight vessel). And the FTL section in Alternity, while more complicated than it needed to be, was way better than what was in D20 Future, which has fewer FTL travel types and a ridiculously short recharge period. Would it have been so bad to say "spend a slot on this FTL method"? (For my campaign, the power plant is an "invisible" slot. Unlike in Alternity, they'll be balanced. Like in Alternity, you can only use certain types of FTL/virtual shields/etc with certain types of power plants. Because these power plant types are balanced, you can mix and match to suit your campaign.)
Some of these are easy to fix. Instead of a full-round, just declare "jumping into FTL" takes an hour, or 1d4+1 days, or whatever. It's easy and doesn't affect game balance.
And of course, D20 Future ship combat crawls if you use large ships (indeed, a ship could repair faster than it takes damage). In Alternity, they weren't afraid to say
"don't use large ships!" but this doesn't appear in D20 Future. (Don't go past Light. Really. Please. You'll only make things worse for yourself.)
I've never had that much of a problem with them. Sounds like you have a legitimate concern, though. Could you explain? I'm still very flexible when it comes to changes made
Compartments actually made combat take longer. You couldn't aim well at your target (there were ways of trying better through the assistance of the sensor operator, but you still weren't any good at it). You ended up spreading the damage over multiple compartments until you blew up something important. It also made ship design take
much longer.
Compartments also had an impact on crew. Anytime you hit a compartment, crew inside took damage (Ordinary damage, assuming the attacking ship used Amazing weapons). Unfortunately, then you were supposed to calculate the damage the crew took
after armor, and since they were probably wearing soft-esuits, this meant yet another dice roll. When Alternity characters took enough damage, they took penalties to dice rolls, which meant more bookkeeping and, oh yeah, meant you weren't supposed to ignore this. But that's not the worst part. Until Warships came along, most DMs did not know how to distribute crew. If you hit the engineering compartment, how many people were in there? If there's more, then maybe someone rolled lucky on armor and isn't dazed, and so they take over if the chief engineer got dazed. Or something like that. The Warships crew recommendations were only useful for larger ships (at which point using many compartments and many crew members would cause combat to crawl).
Alternity Warships did size a bit better than D20 Future did. So did Star Wars, but it's rules made even less sense when it came to putting ships together. I think D20 Future should have started out using Star Wars size categories.
