D20 Future Q&A With Rodney "Moridin" Thompson and JD Wiker!!

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I have all the Alternity ship-building supplements, but couldn't find anything there on Babylon 5/StarCon-style Hyperspace travel.

By this, I mean you need a jump-engine to open a rift into another dimension, where you can travel faster (compared to the Prime). The journey is made as if you were flying in the Prime (it takes fuel, you can stay there as long as you want) except for the chance of getting lost. I do not mean that you can only jump exactly 0 light years through the other dimension, like the Alternity "Hyperspace" concept.

 

[RodneyThompson]

Are we misinterpreting this one?

Nope, that's correctly worded. But it's as it should be if you don't look at it from a purely mechanical viewpoint. It makes sense that an heiress should be able to get things for the party.

I'm not sure if the environmental feats I heard about actually exist (ones that boost Strength or give energy resistance), but they seem a lot better than talents.

Well, a feat should be better than a talent.

There are questions on two WotC threads:

I'm doing good to keep track of just the threads on this forum, so my responses over there will be delayed. Feel free to point people to this thread for convenience's sake.

 

[d4]

I ask because the fastest starship drives (until PL9, which is too high for most games) in the book seem to be the 25x speed of light one, which as the chart in the book points out, would make it take 2 months to go to the closest star system. Which would be too slow for anything but an "Aliens" style game.

i'm going to be upping the speeds of hyperdrives also. i had already decided for my sci-fi setting that Earth-like worlds are on average about 200 light-years apart, and i don't want to have to role-play 8 year-long journeys just to hop over to the next closest world.

in Star Wars, one can fly from the edge of the galaxy (Tatooine) to the core (Coruscant) in a matter of hours (or at most days)... either the Star Wars galaxy is much smaller than ours, or they're traveling at speeds of thousands of light-years per hour.

 

[RodneyThompson]

I have a starship question - was a section on "cinematic" starship drives cut out of the book?

I ask because the fastest starship drives (until PL9, which is too high for most games) in the book seem to be the 25x speed of light one, which as the chart in the book points out, would make it take 2 months to go to the closest star system. Which would be too slow for anything but an "Aliens" style game.

I was hoping for something of a "jump drive", a la Traveller (1 to 6 parsecs a week) or something akin to the speeds in Star Trek or H. Beam Piper's universe - about a light year a day or hour. (I know there is a jump drive, but again, it's PL9 and not quite what I'm after)

I don't know if such a section was cut from the book, but I can say this: you can always change the PL of something. They are just general guidelines, not hard and fast rules. And while the travel times on the Fantastic Travel Times table do only go up to LSx25, this is just one example of how it could work. All you have to do is determine how fast jump drives go in your own campaign setting, and multiply by that.

I know that's not an answer you were looking for, but realistically there's no way to have come up with every possible travel time chart for every type of space travel. That's going to be a campaign setting-dependent thing.

 

[RodneyThompson]

I don't know if such a section was cut from the book, but I can say this: you can always change the PL of something. They are just general guidelines, not hard and fast rules. And while the travel times on the Fantastic Travel Times table do only go up to LSx25, this is just one example of how it could work. All you have to do is determine how fast jump drives go in your own campaign setting, and multiply by that.

I know that's not an answer you were looking for, but realistically there's no way to have come up with every possible travel time chart for every type of space travel. That's going to be a campaign setting-dependent thing.

Oh, did I also mention that I'm a knucklehead? I just remembered the real answer to your question. Read the description of the Jump Gate technology again: it reduces all distances by a factor of 1,000. So, you travel at the speed listed on the Fantastic Travel Times chart, but the distance is modified to be shorter. And if you don't like the idea of wormholes and such, just change "jump drive" to "warp drive" and have it take place in realspace. I knew that there was something to account for that speed of travel, I just couldn't remember what.

 

[Apocalyptic Kitty]

Great book! Plenty of good material here to destroy perfectly good worlds with.

Just one question: where's the sathar?

 

[Buddha the DM]

Second question Biodroid & Bioreplica hero characters.. Should they add in the skill bonuses granted to them from their sensor suite even though they aren't listed in the "racial" info block?

 

[RodneyThompson]

Second question Biodroid & Bioreplica hero characters.. Should they add in the skill bonuses granted to them from their sensor suite even though they aren't listed in the "racial" info block?

Yep. The racial info block is really more for saying "here's what's different from the information listed in the item's description."

 

[Buddha the DM]

Ah ok.. Thanks again man.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

i'm going to be upping the speeds of hyperdrives also. i had already decided for my sci-fi setting that Earth-like worlds are on average about 200 light-years apart, and i don't want to have to role-play 8 year-long journeys just to hop over to the next closest world.

in Star Wars, one can fly from the edge of the galaxy (Tatooine) to the core (Coruscant) in a matter of hours (or at most days)... either the Star Wars galaxy is much smaller than ours, or they're traveling at speeds of thousands of light-years per hour.

www.stardestroyer.net - it's the latter.