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Scientific "Tricks"

Morrus

Well, that was fun
Staff member
It's easy to come up with a hundred combat tricks or manoeuvres - disarms and charges and trips and flying kicks. It's a little harder to come up with tricks in combat which aren't combat tricks.

A sci-fi game needs a space for the scientist in the combat encounter. As discrete manoeuvres, what "scientific tricks" can you think of that are analogous to combat manoeuvres and which don't delegate the scientist player to a position they'd find boring? Y'know not "find out info and - yawn - give the folks having the actual fun a boring old bonus" type things.

(On a similar note, lore-based tricks for fantasy games).
 

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Any season of MacGyver will be full of stuff- mostly improv. Star Trek Engineers do a lot of improv, too.

It probably helps if you watch some of the science trick stuff on YouTube, too.

Lets see...you could do fun things with:

Ultra and infra sonics
Non-compressibility of water
Mechanical resonance
Electricity
Magnetics
Thermal variation (extreme and/or rapid)
Lensing or focusing effects
Chemical reactions
 
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I once had a player who was a rl engineer who created an engineer pc. We had him use steel cable and a
Iightning generator to jerry-rig a maglev, he could also find the weak spots on any structure then use sonic resonance to make things collapse/pop/bend. He also got to identify methane pockets in a sewer amd use them to create directed explosion traps and in one challenge he was able to actively channel a poisonous fog safely through the city.

My alchemist PC has lota of fun with flammable gels, gas bombs, skin irritantants and improv grenades.

There always tricks done with light and mirrors (from basic illusions to the Archimedes solar lasers)n theres the classic "it's all physics, so I calculated the angular trajectory of the rock richocetting off the ceiling andstriking the bulb so that the splinter would pierce the casing just as he pulsed his ventilators"
 
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It's easy to come up with a hundred combat tricks or manoeuvres - disarms and charges and trips and flying kicks. It's a little harder to come up with tricks in combat which aren't combat tricks.

A sci-fi game needs a space for the scientist in the combat encounter. As discrete manoeuvres, what "scientific tricks" can you think of that are analogous to combat manoeuvres and which don't delegate the scientist player to a position they'd find boring? Y'know not "find out info and - yawn - give the folks having the actual fun a boring old bonus" type things.

Some ideas:

Mastermind Tricks: Periodically or at the cost of some resource allow the character to declare that at some time in the past they spent a single simple unobtrusive and unobserved action which their character could have performed preparing for this exact scenario - even if the player had no way to know the situation was about to arise. "I knew that you'd betray us, which is why I utility taped a sonic grenade under your chair before you entered the room..."

Analysis Tricks: Allow the character as a free action and a relevant perception check to aid another character during combat by pointing out some aspect of the situation to give them a relevant boost. "He's using Benetti's defence against you, attack with Capafel."

Knowledge Tricks: Allow the character with a successful lore type check (xenobiology, robotics, etc.) to gain a benefit in combat as he recalls or discovers a weakness in the foe they are facing, such as bonus damage, called shots, inflict criticals on creature otherwise immune to criticals, expanded or increased critical threat or something. "Those Type 89 combat droids had a defect in their lower glacis plate that allowed a well aimed shot to take out their main servo coupling."

Environmental Mastery Tricks: Allow the character to declare an attack on the monster using the environment if he makes a successful skill check and attack roll. "His heavy armor made him quite resistant to blaster fire, but I knew a reactor coolent pipe was accessible directly behind the bulkhead on his left." or "I knew if I ionized his antigravity belt, it would temporarily go haywire." or "The geology of this region was highly favorable to the production of sinkholes, so I just took advantage of that fact." The scale of these attacks should depend on the knowledge ranks of the character, but should generally be proportional in damage to dropping the foe 10', dropping something heavy on them from 10' up, converting the damage of an attack to a different damage type, improvising a ranged basic combat manuever (trip, entangle, shove, etc.), or improvising an attack with a common weapon (poor or standard quality grenades) the player doesn't otherwise have, ect. You might want to lmit this to a number of times per session or an expenditure of a resource just to keep it from being narratively stiffling when the player tries to do it every round.

Medical Tricks: Allow a player with medical skill who has combat advantage or whatever its equivalent is to do bonus damage on their skill ranks in medicine or to make an attack that debuffs the target in some fashion - pain, drugged, etc. Basically, it's Dr. McCoy does a sneak attack with the hypoinjector sort of stuff.
 

For Sci-Fi, you can basically just copy spells and call them science. It's not an invisibly spell it's a trie focal inversion or some other tech babble name.
 

If this is in any way related to the Santiago setting, aren't wizards alternatively scientists? Thus spells are programming code and magic items are tech devices. With that in mind...

Hacker Trick - circumvent security and reprogram tech devices. (As an Advanced Trick with Hacker as a prerequisite: Create a Virus...)

Interface Alien Technology - combine known tech with alien tech to diagnose and operate or repair alien tech.

Weaponization - use existing materials and tech devices to convert to improvised weapon systems or a single use explosive by causing an device power overload. (An Advanced Trick might extend its durability or cause a bigger boom).

Psionic Trick - if using Psionic rules, grant a limited psionic point pool, and access to random or specific psionic power. (Advanced grants more points and maybe a second power).
 
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  • Fix devices (okay, okay, boring)
  • Disable devices (jam their transmissions!)
  • Make devices do things they weren't meant to do (set the tricorder to self destruct! focus the main deflector to fire an energy beam! depressurize the bussard collectors to form a smokescreen! jump to warp for half a second to confuse their sensors!)
  • Circumvent immunities (modulate the phaser frequency so they can't adapt!)
  • Be better at attacking things that fall under their expertise (if we shoot a photon torpedo 143 meters to the left of the nacelle pylon, we'll cripple their shield generator!)
  • Identify and exploit enemy weaknesses (pre-war Romulan disruptors were always 335.2 MHz! if we set our shields to the same frequency, they won't be able to hit us!)
 
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PAX, one of my old "power armor goons" from HERO was basically designed as an anti-power armor goon/anti-AI/anti-robot/anti-cyborg type.

So besides the usual stuff- armor, increased strength, flight, etc.- he had a suite of weapons that let him reprogram and enslave other tech to his own purposes. He also had a weapon that exposed targets to simultaneous temperature extremes to make their armor or other structures brittle.

Another super-scientist in a supers game set around 1914 was Doctor Zeus*, an "uplifted" super genius orangutan with a taste for the scientific teachings of Nicola Tesla and a dislike for humanity. So he had his Death Ray- a lightning bolt generator- and Mechanical Resonance mines. I especially liked the MR mines: given enough time, they'd shake anything apart...





* with his powerful brain covered by a translucent dome, consider him a mix of Dr. Zaius, Monsieur Mallah, the Brain, Gorilla Grodd, and Mojo Jojo all in one.
 

Lots of cool ideas!

I guess the question is "What do Spock, Bones, and Scotty contribute?" Other than fisticuffs.

The difficulty is coming up with stuff that doesn't make them the 1e-2e cleric that everybody hated playing. Enabling your friends to have fun isn't fun.

Sadly, the wizard analogy is weak. Well, for some genres it might not be, but I'm thinking Trek, etc, here. Scotty doesn't run around throwing fireballs, and Spock doesn't run around summoning treants and creating walls of stone. Science is more grounded than magic, even in Star Trek.
 

Well...as long as you have a battery of any kind, you have a weapon or the makings of one. They tend to be made with dense materials- metals- so might make a weapon just based on mass. They include acids. They can deliver energy in a short period of time.

Which is the basis for many little jerry-rigged devices you'd see in Star Trek or MacGyver.

In one of the various wilderness survival shows, the host managed to boil water using snow. By that, I mean he made a parabolic shaped depression in the snow that focused the sunlight on a single point on a vessel he found. The snow was both his parabolic mirror and the source of h2o to boil.
 
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