Playtest Feedback 5/20

[LucasC]

The game consisted of a gunfight and a starship battle. Unlike prior starship encounters, this one featured large ships and the PCs were not intended to simply survive but rather stay and fight.

General Feedback & Questions

• The increased defenses were well received and the small boost seemed to make a noticeable but not overly powerful impact
• The limitation on Deadly Strike had a definite (and IMO positive) impact - damage totals were down significantly and monsters were taking about 2 hits on average to kill (vs. just one)
  • One additional note on this - one of the players asked if he could swap it out for an alternative choice given the limitation. Two of them kept it as their combat trick. That's also a good sign I think.
• Is the Disarm trick meant to do damage as well as disarming the target?

Heroic Tier
Yesterday's encounters included three heroic-tier monsters.

My players expressed concerns that the results from these monsters felt pretty swingy. One hit in particular stood out where the attacker did 47 damage with a single shot on 4d8 (due to 2 or 3 exploders). The inclusion of these combatants definitely added a level of danger to the encounter.

Initial feedback from the players on this was generally negative. They feel like the tiers plus the skill rank limitations have changed the game from a skills-based game to a level-based game and they preferred the prior.

There was grumbling at the reduced chance to explode upon increasing from Starter tier to Heroic tier.

At the conclusion of the night all the PCs received enough XP to advance to Heroic Tier so beginning w/next week's feedback we will have more specific experiences w/Heroic tier.

Starship Combat
The starship encounter lined up a single battleship against about a dozen frigates. As this was our first large-ship battle I wasn't sure how things would go. The battleship needed more help than I thought it would.

The PCs were in the battleship.

Deviations from RAW

• I allowed each PC two actions as they get during personal combat.
• I'm not certain if you mean for any of the personal combat options to be available in ship-to-ship combat but we allowed a tradeoff of attack dice to damage at a 2-for-1 ratio. Without this tradeoff the frigates would have been unable to harm the battleship without exploding.

General Feedback

• A couple of players indicated they found the combat somewhat dull. In personal combat there are many things to consider such as positioning, cover, crossfire, movement, etc. while in ship combat it seems much more like a slugfest - these big ships get into position and then shoot at one another w/some movement to get at different firing arcs but not much more.
• Shield Deterioration has a huge impact on the fight. The battleship began with 18 SOAK from shields and enjoyed a high level of protection from the attacking frigates. Nevertheless, with so many attackers each firing at it multiple times, the shields were penetrated repeatedly. Each shot that got through then went against a SOAK 7 from armor. While it took a lot of hits, by the end of the first round the shields were down to about 8 and by the end of round 2 they were gone entirely. As the shield degraded the damage to the ship ratcheted upwards and by round 3 the ship would have been destroyed (but the battle ended early).
  • That's just an observation of how the encounter played out relative to shields btw, not a comment on whether it was good or bad - the fight was woefully one-sided favoring the frigates.
• In large ships with sizable shields taking significant damage, restoring 1 point of shield SOAK with an action can quickly consume all available PC actions (if they chose to do it at all) -
  • Although my PCs didn't opt to restore shields, recognizing they couldn't possibly keep up, I would probably allow them to make a check and restore 1 point for each DC they hit (so 1 @ DC 16 as written, then 2 @ DC 21, 3 @ 25, etc.)

Starship Design Feedback

• I had a much harder time getting my LUXURY high enough to not have a penalty with the larger ship - that's good as all the smaller ships the LUXURY rating was a freebie.
  • Of note, as Escape Pods don't take up space and add 1/2 LUX per I could actually add enough escape pods to pump my LUXURY all the way to 200% or more. You may want to limit the LUX bonus from escape pods to the crew size (each one is good for 2 crew members so really, after all crew members have a spot on an escape pod they probably shouldn't add more LUXURY).
• I could easily have built my battleship to be invincible by giving it more shields. I think the CPU will eventually limit this but anyhow, that's probably worth noting.
• The table on page 10 of the latest ship-building guide should go further than ship-size 12

 

[User_Undefined]

I've been thinking about exploding die and higher tiers and came up with two alternatives.

A) The exploding die doesn't change size with the die pool. It's always a d6. This will always give you the same chance of exploding, but it's usefulness decreases as you advance through the tiers.

B) The die advances as normal, but explodes on different numbers. 6 on d6, 8 on d8, 10 on d10, 11 or 12 on d12. While you would have a lower chance to explode in the central tiers, the final one has the same chance as the starting. This could give an incentive to work through all the tiers.

 

[LucasC]

I suppose you could, after Starting Tier, continue to assign a d6 as an exploder but roll it in excess of your actual roll and use it to determine exploding.

Example-

You attack with a 4d8 pool. You roll 4d8 + 1d6. The rolls come back as :

• d8 = 2, 3, 6, 7
• d6 = 6

You exploded. So now you roll 1d8 + 1d6. The rolls come back as:

• d8 = 4
• d6 = 6

You exploded again. So now you roll 1d8 + 1d6. The rolls come back as:

• d8 = 2
• d6 =3

You have not exploded again so you total all your d8 rolls to determine your result.

• 2 + 3 + 6 + 7 + 4 + 2 = 24

The d6 rolls are disregarded as they're only rolled to check for the chance of exploding.

 

[Morrus]

I personally like the chance of fate having less influence as you master your destiny to a greater extent. An experienced character makes his own luck.

 

[Tigerlil]

Improvements

Very interesting report.
Very clinical as well

What do you feel could make the space combat less stale? What seems to work for new is that it enforces movement. Anything that could encourage that?

 

[LucasC]

What do you feel could make the space combat less stale? What seems to work for new is that it enforces movement. Anything that could encourage that?

I think there are numerous factors that are combining to make ship combat feel less engaging.

For starters, the PCs are all in one ship and the element of personal danger and choice is impacted by this. Their ship moves all of them, so each player is not making a decision on how to position his/her character. Instead, the ship is being positioned and then actions follow. They don't have hit points, instead the ship does. It's sort of as if they are all running one character.

Secondarily, the actions they have available are limited by the ship. Again in personal combat, there are numerous factors to consider such as personal hit points, targets, positioning, knockdowns, disarms, firing arcs, etc. but now there is just one large target (their ship) that all the bad guys are shooting at. The PCs can (1) shoot back or (2) repair that ship but that's about it.

Additionally the environment is less exciting - I can impact this and will have to spend some time thinking about how to spice it up.

Here's a picture of our two encounters. The space battle is basically just a big, wide-open board where spaceships fly around and shoot at each other. I can put in a few hexes of cover and such but that's about as far as I've taken it. The personal combat scene on the other hand has a variety of things going on, multiple elevations, lots of ground clutter, a spaceship to interact with.

 

[Morrus]

I totally get what you're saying Lucas. It's an issue every starship combat in an RPG has had, and it needs some clever ways to overcome it.

I think you'll like some of the stuff I have planned. Once these basic combat rules are firmed up (as in, so we know they work), the focus will be on the following aspects, with sections devoted to:

- giving characters more stuff to do; this will partly focus on the idea of simultaneous events. So while they're flying the starship together, they are also running round the ship looking for the saboteur or boarding the enemy vessel and assaulting the engine room, and so on. So the characters operate independently to the ship.

- making the environment awesome. As you say, right now it's a empty map with a bit of cover sometimes. There aren't many tools to make the environment interactive. That's something I want to change in a big way, to the extent of saying fairly explicitly: "a combat in empty space is like a gunfight in an empty field: it's dull". To do that, there will be lots of things you can put into a space combat, plus various overall environment templates. A moving asteroid field near a magnetic pulsar, the surface of a moon-sized space station with laser towers and trenches.

- most importantly: combat missions. A combat which is just "shoot at the other guy till someone dies" is much less fun than "escort this transport convoy across the map" or "work out which ship contains the captured ambassador, get on board, rescue him, get back to your ship, and escape" while trying to survive overwhelming odds, or "evacuate 300 colonists before the space station explodes", or "beat the Spartans to the weapons cache on that big asteroid" and so on can all be enormous fun.

 

[Tigerlil]

Really good stuff.

I mainly backed NEW because I want to run a space opera game in the veins of battle star galactica or starship troopers and Titan AE. So a solid space combat system paired with character rules is great.
I plan to use fighters a lot, and in many space opera movies they are for some reason always a threat to really big things (Death Stars, BSG etc). I was thinking that I could symbolise this by fighters being at a certain short range can ignore the shield value of bigger ships, do you think that would work?
Invaders on the ship also sounds like a good idea, to give those martial characters something fun to do.


Lucas, those ships are amazing...I can really see why you want to use them in an RPG
I've gone for the Full Throttle range from GZG as they are more within my budget.

 

[Morrus]

I have specific ideas in mind for fighters!

 

[LucasC]

Prior to this large-ship battle everything has been with small starfighters or scenarios where the PCs had objectives other than destroying the enemy (usually surviving an overwhelming foe). However, the rules for starfighters are incomplete at this time and I wanted to try a combat more inline with the system Morrus has been focused on.

We did a boarding party in one of the encounters and it definitely spiced up the battle. In that instance, one PC was busy piloting the ship, one was busy keeping it from blowing up and the rest were running around repelling invaders.

As an aside, in starfighter combat you will not have some of the problems I note above as each PC is likely to be in their own ship with their own problems.

Except for the star destroyer (which was actually representing a space station) those ship miniatures are from the Battleship Galaxies board game (http://www.amazon.com/Wizards-of-th...400765274&sr=8-1&keywords=battleship+galaxies).