LucasC
First Post
If your interested, you can read the play report associated with this update here.
This week's adventure included a single combat encounter and a series of non-combat encounters. The combat encounter was a mixture of a spaceship battle and a personal combat w/a boarding party.
Combat
We continue to prefer the new combat system.
Attack Rolls
For my group, attack rolls on the 'primary' attack seems to have normalized at a pool of 5-6 dice. This is derived from an ability score of 6-7 and one rank in the relevant skill. With the current DEFENSE scores this gives lots of room for PCs to deduct from their attack and add to their damage
I would personally like to see a little more flexibility in skill ranks - as the game stands at present with 1 rank limit per tier, a character will at maximum have a skill pool of 4d6. That total is equal to the starting pool a new character gets from their ability score. Likely by the time they reach tier 4 and have four ranks in the skill their primary ability will be higher (not sure how much but it's probably not unreasonable to assume it will have increased by 4-6 points for another 3-4 dice on the attack roll).
That will look something like - 12 dice attack pool
I don't like the way this forces a character to focus on ability score bumps instead of skill ranks as a primary means of getting better at what they do and it doesn't 'feel' right to me that natural ability outshines skill on every front.
To keep some sanity in the pool size though, I wouldn't think you'd want to release things too much, I'm thinking maybe a limit of two ranks per tier, and one rank for starting characters - meaning they cannot get that second rank until after they start the game and get some XP.
Here's the limits I (personally) think would be good:
This would inflate dice pools by 1 per rank so DEFENSE and general challenge ratings would need a corresponding increase of about 3.5 points per tier.
Damage
I'd say my players were doing somewhere between 15 and 30 points of damage per hit.
Damage dice sources include:
Every one of the 'combat' characters choose Deadly Strike as their combat trick and they are using it to full effect.
Because this fight was in close quarters, there was limited movement meaning most combatants had actions for two attacks a round so each PC was dealing about somewhere between 30 and 60 damage a round. Even after knocking 11 points off each hit for SOAK that took down the enemies pretty quick. And the round the melee character with Ambidexterity attacked four times I think he did just under 100 points of damage after SOAK.
Space Combat
We enjoy space combat. In particular, we like having the option for starship battles to break up the norm' of hand-to-hand or gun-fights. However, the rules make it pretty difficult to do combat outside of large battleships primarily for two reasons.
Superstructure
The PCs vessel is a class-II freighter. It has 2 points of SUPERSTRUCTURE without any addons. This is woefully low and leaves the ship in a position where a single shot will destroy it. Adding SS is very expensive and space-intensive. In an attempt to circumvent this I gave the ship 8 points of SS for free this week. Didn't matter, I still destroyed it on round one with a lucky shot that exploded.
I would recommend increasing the base SS to something that will allow smaller ships to at least take a hit or two. Maybe give them SS 20 + ship class. They will still be vulnerable to high-powered ships, particularly those w/many guns, but they won't blow up every time they get shot.
Actions
Granted I have a larger group but with as many as seven PCs at one time limiting the ship to 2 actions (due to its size) leaves too many of them sitting around with nothing to do. I'd say you should let PCs take as many actions as they can and the ship can support, then use the standard action limits for NPCs or ships that have more actions available than PCs.
For example, on my smallish ship, there are two guns, a computer terminal and a piloting station. PCs could feasibly take a ship action of some sort at each station. That increases the number of actions available to the ship but gives every PC a chance to partake.
Once we overcome the action limit, there's still not enough meaningful activity for the people not on the guns to do - especially before the ship has taken damage.
Here are some actions I've added to give people stuff to do:
None of this mattered in this week's game as everyone except the pilot was busy with the boarding party.
In general, I think it will be a real asset for your game if you can support both large-scale ship battles (for example, if the PCs are the command crew of the star ship Enterprise) and smaller skirmishes (if say the PCs pilot the Millennium Falcon and want to fight every now and then). Right now the former is pretty well covered I think but there needs to be some focus on the lower end of the ship scale to allow that to work.
General Feedback & Questions
That's it for this week.
This week's adventure included a single combat encounter and a series of non-combat encounters. The combat encounter was a mixture of a spaceship battle and a personal combat w/a boarding party.
Combat
We continue to prefer the new combat system.
Attack Rolls
For my group, attack rolls on the 'primary' attack seems to have normalized at a pool of 5-6 dice. This is derived from an ability score of 6-7 and one rank in the relevant skill. With the current DEFENSE scores this gives lots of room for PCs to deduct from their attack and add to their damage
I would personally like to see a little more flexibility in skill ranks - as the game stands at present with 1 rank limit per tier, a character will at maximum have a skill pool of 4d6. That total is equal to the starting pool a new character gets from their ability score. Likely by the time they reach tier 4 and have four ranks in the skill their primary ability will be higher (not sure how much but it's probably not unreasonable to assume it will have increased by 4-6 points for another 3-4 dice on the attack roll).
That will look something like - 12 dice attack pool
- 8 dice from ability score
- 4 dice from skill
I don't like the way this forces a character to focus on ability score bumps instead of skill ranks as a primary means of getting better at what they do and it doesn't 'feel' right to me that natural ability outshines skill on every front.
To keep some sanity in the pool size though, I wouldn't think you'd want to release things too much, I'm thinking maybe a limit of two ranks per tier, and one rank for starting characters - meaning they cannot get that second rank until after they start the game and get some XP.
Here's the limits I (personally) think would be good:
- 1 rank for starting characters
- 2 ranks per tier
- 1 rank from any career list per-tier (so if you take soldier twice as a tier 1 character you cannot repeat the same skill choice but you could repeat it at tier 2)
This would inflate dice pools by 1 per rank so DEFENSE and general challenge ratings would need a corresponding increase of about 3.5 points per tier.
Damage
I'd say my players were doing somewhere between 15 and 30 points of damage per hit.
Damage dice sources include:
- 2 or 3 dice from weapon base
- +1 from high-quality weapon
- +2-4 dice from attack roll penalties
- + specials (like +2 dice for moving or +3 dice to-hit for SEEKER-turned-to-damage via Deadly Strike)
- + exploders going off
Every one of the 'combat' characters choose Deadly Strike as their combat trick and they are using it to full effect.
Because this fight was in close quarters, there was limited movement meaning most combatants had actions for two attacks a round so each PC was dealing about somewhere between 30 and 60 damage a round. Even after knocking 11 points off each hit for SOAK that took down the enemies pretty quick. And the round the melee character with Ambidexterity attacked four times I think he did just under 100 points of damage after SOAK.
Space Combat
We enjoy space combat. In particular, we like having the option for starship battles to break up the norm' of hand-to-hand or gun-fights. However, the rules make it pretty difficult to do combat outside of large battleships primarily for two reasons.
Superstructure
The PCs vessel is a class-II freighter. It has 2 points of SUPERSTRUCTURE without any addons. This is woefully low and leaves the ship in a position where a single shot will destroy it. Adding SS is very expensive and space-intensive. In an attempt to circumvent this I gave the ship 8 points of SS for free this week. Didn't matter, I still destroyed it on round one with a lucky shot that exploded.
I would recommend increasing the base SS to something that will allow smaller ships to at least take a hit or two. Maybe give them SS 20 + ship class. They will still be vulnerable to high-powered ships, particularly those w/many guns, but they won't blow up every time they get shot.
Actions
Granted I have a larger group but with as many as seven PCs at one time limiting the ship to 2 actions (due to its size) leaves too many of them sitting around with nothing to do. I'd say you should let PCs take as many actions as they can and the ship can support, then use the standard action limits for NPCs or ships that have more actions available than PCs.
For example, on my smallish ship, there are two guns, a computer terminal and a piloting station. PCs could feasibly take a ship action of some sort at each station. That increases the number of actions available to the ship but gives every PC a chance to partake.
Once we overcome the action limit, there's still not enough meaningful activity for the people not on the guns to do - especially before the ship has taken damage.
Here are some actions I've added to give people stuff to do:
- (in response to Evasive Maneuvers) make a Piloting check to reduce the attack roll penalties associated with the combat trick
- Angle Shields - using Shield Operations skill, temporarily pump one shield direction at the expense of another direction (use standard DCs with 2 points added to one shield direction for each success at or above 13, these deduct 1 from a shield of another direction, lasts one turn)
- Sensor Lock - gain a +1 dice attack roll via a sensor lock on opposing ship - this is either a set DC or opposed by the enemy sensor technician
None of this mattered in this week's game as everyone except the pilot was busy with the boarding party.
In general, I think it will be a real asset for your game if you can support both large-scale ship battles (for example, if the PCs are the command crew of the star ship Enterprise) and smaller skirmishes (if say the PCs pilot the Millennium Falcon and want to fight every now and then). Right now the former is pretty well covered I think but there needs to be some focus on the lower end of the ship scale to allow that to work.
General Feedback & Questions
- Should PCs derive a PERCEPTION or is this intended for monsters only and always an active roll for PCs?
- Does monster PERCEPTION use the calc in the books (abil *3) or the new lower-calc for DEFENSE?
- Seeker seems overpowered. +3 attack dice for a $5k investment. I'd start it at +1 dice and then have upgrades that get progressively more expensive.
- Ambidexterity could use more penalties I think - for the price of a single combat feat you double your attacks w/out penalty
- What is the DC for identifying a power that has been used on someone (like mind control) - this could apply equally for IDing magical effects in OLD
- With the open skill system, I'm seeing times when skills begin to overlap with a less-directly useful skill that could be applicable. Need to know how to handle this.
- Example: Lets say I want to hack into a computer mainframe. Computer Operations and Hacking are both viable skills to add to that roll. Hacking is far more specific. Someone with 2 ranks in Hacking should logically get more from them then the fellow with 2 ranks in Computer Op as they have limited their options for skill use. RAW don't recognize this though.
- I have been applying a 2-for-1 approach when I encounter this meaning the more general skills gives a 1 dice bonus for every 2 ranks while the more specific skill goes 1-for-1
- With the open skill system careers need to be more broadly worded on skill choices or the open system will actually be rather closed based only on those skills allowed by careers
- People still don't like LUC although they seem to be slightly more interested in it if I allow them to add to their rolls AFTER they see the result
That's it for this week.
