Stargate Rpg

[Garmorn]

Anyway, i have seen there autofire in many other games with various flavors, HERo comes to mind as thats how they handled autofire for what, nearly 20 years for superheros. Like i said, its tried and true, just not particularly reflective of the show's depictions... i just dont see daniel counting bullets when he hosed down that jaffa.

Nor can I see letting some one who has a 150 round clip empty it in 6 sec from a submachine gun and that is exactly what your method would allow.


Going from a TV Show to a RPG requires compromises. This is just one of them. If you don't like the compromise then thats fine, but stating it is a flaw just because I not true to every episode and event in a show is like saying that no Starwar RPG is good because the Hero's can die.


For a game, the important part is the over all feel of the show. It the feel of the game close to the feel of the show. Does it as a whole an in most parts come as close as it can to the show. Even after you make allowence for the many different preceptives on the show by both fanboys and the casual view.

For this game it sound like it from the many responces I have read. True it has problems but the are not many, game stopping nor do they destory the feel of the show.

 

[swrushing]

[/QUOTE]

Nor can I see letting some one who has a 150 round clip empty it in 6 sec from a submachine gun and that is exactly what your method would allow.

Well, a couple of things.

In the show, the stated ROF for the P90 SMG the teams use is 900 rounds per minute, or for those d20ers, 90 rounds per round.

In the show, and in my game, the P90 has a 50 round clip, not a 150 round clip. i don't have any 150 round clip SMgG in the game. Neither do they.

So, in my game using my system, the max ROF is well within the ROF of the guns in the show and AFAIK IRL although i confess i have not gone back to the FN site to look it up.

Finally, book not in front of me so i am working from memory, but I don't recall there being any limit to how many bursts you could fire in the stargate book in a single round except of course the run out of ammo one. So, "my system" did not change that at all. In their game you can fire a number of three-round bursts equal to 1/3rd the ammo... thus emptying the mag. In my game, you can keep pouring it on until you are out of ammo. Both empty the clip. ooohhhh aaahhhh...

If it bothers you that my system allows you to empty some theoretical 150 round mag in 6 seconds, then you should also be writing AEG to complain about theirs, i reckon, cuz that was not a change of mine.

Going from a TV Show to a RPG requires compromises.

yes indeed. Fortunately for me, this is not one of them. This one can be done right without compromise. More over, the word compromise means giving up something for gaining something else. For my view, nothing would be gained by the old bullet counting method. Its not how it is shown in the show, its not significantly simpler and faster, its less realistic in that it puts radically different decisions than is involved to the player... where is the compromise? This sounds more like just a sacrifice, a sacrifice i do not need to make.

This is just one of them.

Why does this need to be sacrificed? What is gained? What benefit is gained by allowing a batch of SMG bullets to cumulatively add up to penetrate the force fields?

I would be willing to entertain the notion of this being a necessary sacrifice or even a compromise, but before I can do that you need to show me the gains i can expect or the reasons it has to be sacrificed.

If you don't like the compromise then thats fine, but stating it is a flaw just because I not true to every episode and event in a show is like saying that no Starwar RPG is good because the Hero's can die.

Actually, i do not recall any episode where the hose down fire was at all seeming like the pre-count-bullet method.

Actually, I do not recall any episode when the autofire seemed to hint that the bullets would cumulatively add up and get thru the force fields, that 10 bullets would be treated cumulatively for penetration.

Actually, the fact that it does not match the show is but one issue. The fact that it puts radically different decisions to the player than that the character/shooter would have is another.

Anyway, heroes dieing is a STORY element, not a mechanical element IMO. Whether you do autofire hosing down by precounting bullets and hoping or by watching what the shots do and stopping when you get the result you wanted is not story but mechanics. Their mechanic is unrealistic AND it fails to match the show.

Again, some people may think that people firing hose down autofire do indeed preselect the specific amount of bullets they will fire and then count bullet by bullet stopping at that preselected point. I am not one of them.

Thats why i see it as a flaw.

If you like it, thats cool, but please drop the universal "gotta compromise"... though if you want to speak to why for this mechanic we should compromise, please go right ahead.

Tell me what i would gain if i chose to make your preferred sacrifice or compromise? Why is pre-bullet-counting better? Why is cumulative penetration better? Show me the money! Then i can consider your notion of this as a necessary compromise.

For a game, the important part is the over all feel of the show. It the feel of the game close to the feel of the show. Does it as a whole an in most parts come as close as it can to the show. Even after you make allowence for the many different preceptives on the show by both fanboys and the casual view.

Right and my autofire is closer to the feel of the show.

This seems to be at cross purposes to your above. First we have to sacrifice autofire for unspecified compromises but now whats important is that we capture the feel and flavor of the show?

For this game it sound like it from the many responces I have read. True it has problems but the are not many, game stopping nor do they destory the feel of the show.

Did you miss that my review was POSITIVE. I endorsed this book. I said it was worth the price?

Let me repeat it...

Overall, the book was good. The pros outweigh the cons. The cons are easily fixed with house rules.

If you admit the existence of pros and cons, admit the perceptions will vary from game to game, then i cannot get why you would object to people house ruling away their specific cons or also recognizing the dlaws there are if they don't fix them.

 

[Garmorn]

Let me repeat it...

Overall, the book was good. The pros outweigh the cons. The cons are easily fixed with house rules.

If you admit the existence of pros and cons, admit the perceptions will vary from game to game, then i cannot get why you would object to people house ruling away their specific cons or also recognizing the dlaws there are if they don't fix them.[/QUOTE]
My aplogies. Going back over the whole thread, I miss read your second post.

Add that to my tone came across far more hostile then I intended. I don't post often because I have a bad tendicy to sound hostile when I am not.

Again my aplogies.

 

[swrushing]

No sweat.

believe it or not, i have, ahem, on occasion, been also noted as coming off more agressive than intended or needed.

Not that i am admitting to the validity of such claims, mind you.

 

[Morgenstern]

Hey swrushing ,

If the biggest con is Stargate's autofire system doesn't make you happy - like unto every other RPG system on the planet - I can live with that .

On the matter of counting bullets, I would say the character doesn't, any more than the character knows the exact distance between himself and the target and the number of "range increments" that constitutes. The player (quite separate from the character I'm afraid) is obliged to know these things because he's being used as a math sub-processor for the GM so that things can move along smoothly.

The count bullets and shoot system has three strengths of note - one, it's simple, not requiring any extra rolls allowing the player to work out the math for his shot while other players or the GM are doing their thing. Two - it places control over the resulting target numbers in the hands of the player; how many bullets hes' going to shoot sets the base dificulty. Three it provides several clear and fixed baselines which characters whith feats or superior abilites can improve upon. More skilled heavy gunners start to get extra hits on small increments over the base, and more importantly for bullet-to-damage efficiency start firing off volleys that only expend two round each. This make a huge difference between the "know how to pick it up and hold the trigger down folks" and the "live it, love it, want more of it gunnbunnies"

Never look at a Spycraft (or Stargate) ruleset without looking at the feats that affect it . They always work together to allow people to do a lot, but experts to do it better.

If you really, really have to have bullet-for-bullet randomness, AND can't accept that from the untrained character's persective he's deciding "tap the trigger, tug the trigger for a moment, or hold it down intill the buzzing sound stops..." even if the player is thinking "If I take a 5-ft. step I'll be a range increment closer, and I can probably hit a defense of 18, so four bursts is the way to go..." then sure, have the player pick a number of volleys he's trying to fire and having him roll a d6-3 to see how many actually come out, then roll another d6-3 to modify the exact number of bullets expended by the barage. If he's got the Speed Trigger feat, switch to using d4-2s for both rolls. Not a big deal . 10-second optional rule. But to blast a book over something like that really seems a little silly to me .

 

[FCWesel]

But to blast a book over something like that really seems a little silly to me .

Well, he and the other fella just went over that. Over and over and over...

He said that he liked the book overall. He said that it had more going for it then not. He said that he just didn't like this one thing for the most part and how he fixed it for his games.

 

[swrushing]

[/QUOTE]

Hey swrushing ,

If the biggest con is Stargate's autofire system doesn't make you happy - like unto every other RPG system on the planet - I can live with that .

Me too, after all, thats what house rules are for, taking a good game a making it BETTER for my game.

Hey swrushing ,
On the matter of counting bullets, I would say the character doesn't, any more than the character knows the exact distance between himself and the target and the number of "range increments" that constitutes. The player (quite separate from the character I'm afraid) is obliged to know these things because he's being used as a math sub-processor for the GM so that things can move along smoothly.

The range to targets is a great example. The character makes decisions abou where to position himself and such. The mechnics affect those decisions when made by the player. They affect the actions chopsen and what is reasonable and what is not reasonable. As such, the MORE the player decisions (based on mechanics) are in sync with the character decisions (based on the character's view of the world and how things work) the more the game seems to make sense. The more divorced the factors that play into the players decision are from the world of the character, the less sense it seems to make.

The bullet counting autfire seems very divorced when you look at the player decisions and the character decisions, the player knowledge and the character knowledge.

Hey swrushing ,
The count bullets and shoot system has three strengths of note - one, it's simple, not requiring any extra rolls allowing the player to work out the math for his shot while other players or the GM are doing their thing.

This seems to presume the results of that action are not relevent to the other events as well as knowledge of the targets defense score. I am sure in some cases that will be the case.

EDIT TO ADD: FWIW, my system has one to hit roll and one damage roll per hit made. IIRC thats the same number of rolls as would be required in the official stargate, except that if you had the dice in stargate the damage rolls could be made all at once it. The one extra roll i add is the single d10 rtolled afterward for wasted shots, which obviously can be done after the action moves on to others.

Hey swrushing ,
Two - it places control over the resulting target numbers in the hands of the player; how many bullets hes' going to shoot sets the base dificulty.

Why is that a good thing?

Hey swrushing ,
Three it provides several clear and fixed baselines which characters whith feats or superior abilites can improve upon. More skilled heavy gunners start to get extra hits on small increments over the base, and more importantly for bullet-to-damage efficiency start firing off volleys that only expend two round each. This make a huge difference between the "know how to pick it up and hold the trigger down folks" and the "live it, love it, want more of it gunnbunnies"

Gothca... but the same sort of effect would be seen in a non-bullet counting system. The more accurate shooter would gets hits sooner in the sequence and with the right feats would mark off less ammo per increment. I agree that the system making a visible difference between these types of gunners is a good thing, i just think both mechanics do that.

Hey swrushing ,
Never look at a Spycraft (or Stargate) ruleset without looking at the feats that affect it . They always work together to allow people to do a lot, but experts to do it better.

I don't, as such when i change a mechanic with a house rule i follow the feats that are affected and paty attention to them too. Figuring out how to fix toughness (as well as the other small hit point bonus abilities) when i ditched the hit points took a lot longer than the autofire feats did.

Hey swrushing ,
If you really, really have to have bullet-for-bullet randomness, AND can't accept that from the untrained character's persective he's deciding "tap the trigger, tug the trigger for a moment, or hold it down intill the buzzing sound stops..." even if the player is thinking "If I take a 5-ft. step I'll be a range increment closer, and I can probably hit a defense of 18, so four bursts is the way to go..." then sure, have the player pick a number of volleys he's trying to fire and having him roll a d6-3 to see how many actually come out, then roll another d6-3 to modify the exact number of bullets expended by the barage.

Why? Why should i even want to make the decisional basis for what happens something totally divorced from what the character is making his decisions on? Daniel is not worrying about or spending decision making time on "how many bullets" and he wont be whether it is a perfect count system or a guess on the count random shift system. its not as much "can daniel count bullets accurately" but rather "is counting bullets a factor at all in his thinking.

The factors which determine how many rounds he fires for daniel are very simple and easy to determine:
1. Is the gun still firing?
2. Is the bad guy still up?
3. Does it look like my shots are doing anything?

Thats it.

Each of those are perfectly applicable, describale, and useful pieces of info within the game as well as the character world.

So why would i want to throw all those elements out and use instead a bunch of other parameters (what is the remaining ammo by 3, how many volleys do i want to fire beofre seeing any results)?

It just seems more logical to base the factors that are used for the PLAYER decision mathc the factors that would go into the character making the decision.

Hey swrushing ,
If he's got the Speed Trigger feat, switch to using d4-2s for both rolls. Not a big deal . 10-second optional rule. But to blast a book over something like that really seems a little silly to me .

Here we go again.

Maybe someday, we will be spared this nonsense.

If you had read my posts, especiallyu my review from early in the thread, you will find that I endorsed the book, did a pretty good job at it iirc. In this review i said

"While it does have flaws, the book is well worth its price and will serve a GM wanting to run a stargate game well from both a rules perspective and a genre setting perspective."

and i said...

"The "problems" are easy to fix (Well swapping out hit points takes a bit of effort) and relative to the good stuff are not that serious."

and i then said...

"As a final summary, i am using their book for my game, with my own house rules to plug the problems, so that should give you a rough notion of my overall feel. it is worth it."

and even a little further back I said...

"While i list these in brief, these two are big IMO. So, dont let the fact that I spend more bandwidth explaining the cons to give you reasons to believe the cons outweigh the pros."

So, frankly, morganstern, if this is what you want to use to go off on this "blast a book" over is silly nonsense, then I guess we get a good notion of what kind of reasoned analysis and perception to expect from those people working on spycraft?

Even though it may be totally lost on those who work on Spycraft, there is a difference between criticising a mechanic or even several mechanics in a game book and "blasting the book" and I did more than a little to bring that out in my review... even though that seemed lost on you.

geesh.

Maybe a caution about overzealous defenders going overboard against criticisms of any mechnics should be added to my reviews?

 

[MattyHelms]

Well, he and the other fella just went over that. Over and over and over...

He said that he liked the book overall. He said that it had more going for it then not. He said that he just didn't like this one thing for the most part and how he fixed it for his games.

Don't forget to ask Joe and the other gamers at the Chicago Gameday about it tomorrow!

 

[Khorod]

It sounds like you need to buy three books to have the completeness of a thorough one. Is that true?

Does the core book do anything for you if you already know most of the series? For B5 I'd consider a fact book, but I can remember most of Stargate off the top of my head.

Mistwell: To make a Stargate kick-off, get to the Sci-fi channel on a monday night between 7 and 11 pm. If you can see 3-4 shows, you will probably see 1) a power hungry Gou-ald doing something exploitative to gain power, 2) A crazy conspiracy back home, and 3) A inexplicable monster or event troubling a people at a technology level comparable to earth or dark ages.

Scenario Begins:
General Hammond: Well, Senator (that idiot senator) has been causing some more trouble, so our lead team SG-1 has hand picked each of you. SG-1 Takes a Bow. You will begin a survey of worlds from the other end of our list. (Carter turns around and mentions something about divide and conquer sorting to confuse the politicos as SG-1 leaves)

The party takes a jeep to this other world, and goes cross-country camping. The wild-life here is all terribly screwed up, and keeps attacking.

This is because some crazy Gouald from who knows where has been spraying psychotropic chemicals all over the planet to make everyone more easily amenable to his rule. He prances down a day or so later, expect everyone to drool over his fancy armor. The team kills him, and takes his fancy armor back to base. Since they took his fancy armor, the instantly get a reputation with the system lords, and that Gouald's daddy wants them dead. Now as they continue to go out, they are hunted by the Lord of the Assassins quite casually, which means he can find them about every other planet they are on for more than a week.

 

[swrushing]

It sounds like you need to buy three books to have the completeness of a thorough one. Is that true?

Well... kinda yes and kinda no.

The core book has tons of stuff, with some glaring lacks like the jaffa armor. Its being errated with some preview-semi-official errata already up, to plug those gaps a little and to get the laien stuff to be more "matching the show" rather than more "scifi stuff."

It looks like the System lords book will officially close the gaps in the alien stuff and give us the final versions of these gizmos and such. So this as a second book will likely be one of those in your "need three books". Quite frankly, even tho i am running a game, i consider this book to be a maybe for me. Since i am not waiting and already"fixed" these things for my game, which marks me as diverging from their tack right away, if this book is predominently more of the same it wont be needed by me. if it shows lots of other stuff which seems useful, i may go for it.

The other book would be some d20 core book. The experience chart is needed from somewhere.

For me the things I am anticipating the most are their season books.