[d20 Future/Star Wars] Starships?

[wizardneedsfood]

Well, you have to strike a delicate balance between roleplaying and wargaming.

I listened to this "young" generation of roleplayers who simply want RPG, not wargame.

Me? I'm old-school enough to recognize and acknowledge where the root of RPG came from. That and the fact I like to blend them together, whether I'm a Lord of a vast army, or a loyal Davion House soldier piloting my Battlemech.

Ahh, Battletech, the nostalgia!!

 

[Ranger REG]

Ahh, Battletech, the nostalgia!!

Well, it is just like Coca-Cola. No matter how many variations are out there (including the most recent low-carb C2), the classic always remain the best.

 

[Vigilance]

Well, you have to strike a delicate balance between roleplaying and wargaming.

I listened to this "young" generation of roleplayers who simply want RPG, not wargame.

Me? I'm old-school enough to recognize and acknowledge where the root of RPG came from. That and the fact I like to blend them together, whether I'm a Lord of a vast army, or a loyal Davion House soldier piloting my Battlemech.

Well, I certainly *tried* to strike a balance. But there are some people for whom nothing that isn't 3-d and requires the use of a hypotenuse and a t-square will do.

Which, by the way, excludes the single best starship combat WARGAME of all time, Star Fleet Battles.

I hate to tell ya... but the rules have to be playable FIRST.

Chuck

 

[d4]

I've only read a bit in the store for now, but I looked up this point. A cruiser has a fusion gun battery and a missile battery. If both hit in a round, they will average 24 points of damage, after hardness, versus 4,000 hit points. However, crits are possible. I did not have time to read the rule on weapon crits.

there are optional rules for more "interesting" critical hits, but the default rules are the same as for personal scale weapons -- double damage on a successful critical. so not much help there in whittling down the strike cruiser's hit points.

what makes it worse is the the strike cruiser has light fortification (25% chance to convert a critical hit into a regular hit) and improved damage control (give up a move action to repair 4d10 hit points of damage).

and i made a mistake above; the strike cruiser has hardness 40, not 30.

so two strike cruisers fighting each other will do, on average (barring critical hits) 46 points of damage to each other per turn -- assuming both of their attacks always hit. (5 points from the fusion beams (average damage 45) and 41 from the plasma missiles (average damage 81).) however, each strike cruiser can also give up a move action each round (and remember, ships have 2 move actions per round, so they aren't completely motionless when they're doing this) and use damage control to repair on average 22 points of damage per turn. for a net loss of 24 hit points per turn -- and this is assuming the attacks always hit and the ships are only using one of their move actions per round to do damage control. after 16 rounds, the ships run out of plasma missiles and are doing on average 5 points of damage per round from the fusion beams -- at this point, damage control can (on average) completely remove all the damage sustained per round and the ships can never completely finish each other off.



i think it would be reasonable to multiply weapon damage by 5 or maybe even more... even at 10d8 x 5 for the fusion beams, it would still take 22 successful average damage hits to finish off a 4000 hit point, hardness 40 strike cruiser.

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

Ick. Doesn't sound good ...

I'll probably keep using Alternity's "Warships".

Seems that's where Chuck got alot of his ideas for Blood And Space and it's huge ... and free. I like free.

It's Alternity, but that's easy enough to convert. Set task DCs at or around 15 and use similar skills and anything that grants a step bonus stat up at a +2 bonus per step.

All the engines, guns, missiles, missile systems, hull types, and whatnot you could ever want.

And it works. Gamer playtested, DM approved.

--fje

 

[Vigilance]

I'll probably keep using Alternity's "Warships".

Seems that's where Chuck got alot of his ideas for Blood And Space and it's huge ... and free. I like free.

Although I owned a couple of Alternity books this is the first time I have ever heard the name "Warships" so sorry it had no bearing on BNS.

Blood and Space began as a book called Prometheus Rising, the last book I self-published before beginning my association with RPGObjects.

Chris, the owner of RPGO liked the starship construction and combat section (one chapter of the original PR) enough that he asked me to expand that into a whole book, and BNS was born.

Chuck

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

Great minds think alike, then. I got BnS and liked it, alot of it sounded familiar.

"Warships" was one of the products TSR had "all but done" for Alternity when things went belly up ... Warships, Final Church, and The Externals ... most all of them had completed manuscripts but Externals (especially) didn't have much in the way of layout design and art finished. TSR released them on their website as free PDFs for a while ... they later took them down and are offering Externals and Final Church as premium PDFs on the SVGames site (premium only in that they cost twice as much as any other PDF they have, which still isn't much for GREAT product). Warships, however, they didn't pull in the rights to and it's still available from fan sites like (I think) Tequila Starrise and Alternity.net.

Anyway, the boarding rules are very similar along with ship construction rules, etc. Not that it means much, as there's only so many broad ideas on how to do things.

I like using Warships because of its sheer SCOPE. It's a FULL SIZED book, couple hundred pages I think, with a combat system, construction rules for civilian and military hulls ranging from fighters and shuttles to Fortress Ships (name says it all). Weapons from PL 6 (small lasers and large projectile weapons with nukes and chemical explosives for missiles) to PL 9 (think Star Trek with transporters and banked energy weapons).

--fje

 

[SetzerZero]

Overall I'd say my complaint with the starship combat rules is how little damage missiles do. I can understand beam weapon batteries doing small damage, perhaps using them to take out smaller ships and using fire-linked weapons for larger ships, but as things are written, missiles have practically no use. They should be a middleground between the low damage of beams and the colossal damage of mines. As for the strike crusier example, it doesn't seem like a design for taking out other large ships. Something more like the battle cruiser can pump out considerably more damage per shot with less shots, making it more useful against larger targets.

 

[Furluge]

D4, just so you know, you're getting the Cruiser and the Strike Cruiser confused a lot. The Strike Cruiser has antimatter guns, not fusion beams. Also the ship has to succeed it's damage control check for it to heal that 22 damage.

Also I I believe that a cruiser isn't really the kind of ship you use to press an attack with. It's really general purpose. You don't blow up ships with that. In PL 7 you blow up ships with a Battlecruiser which does a whopping 32d8 damage, and that bad boy only has hardness 30 and 9,000 HP, or you send in wings of Assault Fighters which do 18d8 per ship attacking. Basically with these ships you have two types of setups, batteries and fire-linking. Fire-linking pours on the damage, batteries fire weapons groups of weapons in an array so they cover a larger area. Ship killers have fire-linking, group supports have batteries.

Edit: Yeah, I just noticed that someone else mentioned that about the cruiser. Speaking of the missiles, perhaps they're trade off with damage is that they're cheap/don't take up much space? I haven't looked at that yet.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I am looking forward to my copy of the D20 Future rules, though the information about space combat might dimish it a little bit. I like idea of making the rules similar to character combat, but I think there is not need to give ships 20.000 hp and weapons dealing 5d8 x 5 damage or so - this is just to much hassle and accounting. SPace combat should have its own scale, and 500 hp should be enough for a battle cruiser (but standard laser cannon would only deal 1d6 points of damage or so)