D20 Future: Ship Combat Experiences?

[HeapThaumaturgist]

So I'm gearing up for a Future game based on the Externals War of Star*Drive ... what I'd like to know is has anybody experienced ship-to-ship combat? Large ship vs. large ship combat?

I'm looking over weapons and whatnot and, while they deal quite a bit of damage, it seems like they don't come in large enough numbers to do much. The system seems very much pointed toward grouping weapons into 1 or 2 Batteries or Links to overcome size penalties and iterative attack penalties. The problem there is that a cruiser with 4,000 HP and armed with a Heavy Mass Cannon Battery and a Mass Reaction Missile battery deal ~155 damage a round if it hits with both weapons every round. If two identical ships of that size do battle toe to toe, it'll probably take well over 20 rounds for one to kill the other. Seems like you have to hope for a crit to cripple some systems.

The other end of it is going against what seems to be the general build model and equipping each weapon in a single-mount and making 8 attacks or so a round, 7 of them at (-5?). THAT seems like it could finish combat up pretty quick ... if anybody can hit anything.

Of course I could totally be mistaken, since I haven't had a chance to slug it out toe to toe on a battle mat yet. Thus the general question to the boards.

--fje

 

[C. Baize]

I've done a little bit of ship to ship combat. But really, it was just until one could grapple the other and then it turned into a close quarters combat as the crew of one ship attempted to take control of the other. 'Fraid I can't be of much help, here.

 

[Christopher Lambert]

Use smaller ships (nothing more than 32 Hit Dice) and hunt down the jinking rules.

Someone posted an idea here (or at WotC)... an engineer could make a skill check to increase the amount of damage weapons do.

IMO the spaceship weapons need to be retuned ... er, make that rewritten. IMC they're all pretty similar to 10 times the damage of a DnD martial weapon for Ultralight ships larger than a fighter...

I need to do something about mecha weapons, too.

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

Gah. The whole point was to use larger ships. Y'know. Epic battles in space at the command of a cruiser ... hard-bitten marines landing and fighting in the trenches ... War: Space-Style.

I'm honestly thinking of scrapping this whole Future thing and going back to Alternity. It had its flaws, but here's something ELSE it had:

Complete Rules.

Cybernetics, Mutations, Guns, Armor, Space Ships ... you didn't have to use them all, but they weren't so mutually conflicting that you had to spend hours throwing stuff away. I've spent more time plugging leaks, chinking bad planks, and generally trying to make a Future game ship-shape than I really feel I've needed to.

There's alot in the book, but not enough of anything to actually make a game of it. You get a handful of ships from different PLs and no real rules on how to build them so you can't grab a ready-made navy from the book as half of the ships provided are PL 7 and half PL 6, so you HAVE to retool them ... oh, but those rules got cut. Genetic Engineering and Nanotechnology seem to be mutually exclusive and overlapping, but you have to do decide what goes or stays because the PL system is no help. GE and Mutation seem to be mutually exclusive, but again, hand-tooling. Cybernetics? That too. And if you want some arms and armor you've got to make that by hand too.

Grrrrrrrrr. I'm seriously seriously frustrated with this "toolkit". It's all kit and no tools. I can't even find any finalized rules for attack progression for starships in here! Some seem to follow the "2nd, 3rd, 4th ... -5" progression, others seem to have two weapons at full BAB and a third at -5 ... shwa? They did all the easy work and stripped out anything useful. I can BUILD ships, if they'd give me the toolkit to do so, instead of a handful of pregenerated ships and no rules on how to GET there. You just sort of have to guesstimate everything.

--fje

 

[HAR-Vee]

I've tried to do ship to ship combat, but I also had the boarding party issues. Plus I ended up making many adjustments to the rules in play. It worked well, but I had to use a lot of fudges. For example, what happens to a docking ring with a ship breaks grapple? What modifiers will spinning apply to grapple checks? Etc.

I suspect I'll keep running in to more.

 

[argo]

If two identical ships of that size do battle toe to toe, it'll probably take well over 20 rounds for one to kill the other. Seems like you have to hope for a crit to cripple some systems.

I haven't played with the future ship rules so my opinion is, of course, based on absoluetly no real experience. However, if your assessment is correct I'm not so sure I see the problem. 20 rounds is only 2 minutes in game time, for two capital ships slugging it out toe to toe that seems very reasonable to me.

Now I know that this is a game, that 20 rounds could take forever to play out at the game table and that a slow game is boring and not fun. But maybe you could focus on some ways to make the rounds go faster? Talk to your players and let them know they should be expecting 20 round combats and so they should not worry so much over making the perfect choice each round as they will have time to correct any mistakes in later rounds. If you can do a round in 2 or 3 minutes then a 20 round combat should be doable.

Just my humble, and completly uninformed, opinion.

 

[Christopher Lambert]

Gah. The whole point was to use larger ships. Y'know. Epic battles in space at the command of a cruiser ... hard-bitten marines landing and fighting in the trenches ... War: Space-Style.
--fje

D20 Future and it's predecessor Alternity didn't support huge space battles. At that point the characters become less important, anyway.

 

[Cergorach]

I started looking at D20 Future ship combat last week. It's very D&D like, which makes it easier to learn, but it makes it very unwieldy. 24,000 hit points is just to unwieldy! Even the basic PL6 fighter has 160 hp, keeping track of individual hp is cumbersome, not to mention the buckets of dice you need to throw when doing damage.

I was thinking of a streamlined fighter squadron vs. fighter squadron combat game based on D20 Future. My very first thought was to devide all the hp and damage by 10, that would decrease the time you need for keeping track of the hp and the time throwing and adding dice. Things like grappling and AoO rules would become optional (because very few fighters would have point defense systems or tracktor beams). The problem i found was that D20 Future just has very few options available, one fighter is exactly the same as any other. So now i'm looking at other OGC material for more options for fighters (anyone suggestions are welcome).

Well, what has this to do with Large ships? Well, the problem i found with the D20 future rules for space combat is that they try to cover everything in the 'basic' rules, and no one thought that doing combat with vessels that have thousands of hitpoints would be slow (if not akward). Dividing the hitpoints and damage by 10 should improve game play, maybe even by 20 for such large combats. Removing the rules you won't need for a campaign also helps.

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

Alternity did, eventually, better support larger battles in space. Warships pretty much was all about that. Externals included a streamlined abstracted system for large battles. And I plan on using an abstracted system for "large" battles as well.

But I intended to use that large battle as a backdrop for the PC's ship-to-ship battles ... give them a taste of war.

2-3 minutes IS a very small amount of time. This is why Warships rounds were ten minutes long. Every weapon on a ship got to fire without a penalty, etc etc. It made things go somewhat faster.

--fje

 

[Christopher Lambert]

Alternity did, eventually, better support larger battles in space. Warships pretty much was all about that. Externals included a streamlined abstracted system for large battles. And I plan on using an abstracted system for "large" battles as well.

But I intended to use that large battle as a backdrop for the PC's ship-to-ship battles ... give them a taste of war.

2-3 minutes IS a very small amount of time. This is why Warships rounds were ten minutes long. Every weapon on a ship got to fire without a penalty, etc etc. It made things go somewhat faster.

--fje

I have both products too, but I have to disagree. Well, partially. You're right about the Externals.

Warships had rules for large ships, but IMO it was very similar to D20 Future in that you had vessels that wouldn't die. Combat may have been faster if you didn't need to worry about turrets and the like.

I don't see why D20 Future inflicts penalties on the extra weapons. I would assume the ship has one gunner per weapon anyway.