Weapons, weapons, weapons!

[Primitive Screwhead]

Some thoughts on personal weapons:


1) ION weaponry. Recommend changing the damage to read:
for each MARK of an ION weapon, it deals 1 point of damage to organic creatures or 1D of damage to mechanical targets.
Some mechanical targets are not shielded and may have a vulnerability to ION damage, like older model combat droids.
The ION Pistol listed in the Handbook is a Mark III

2) Weapon economy. In most futuristic games, the economy is important early on and then is pretty much ignored. Pricing of components can cause problems in a game when the players come across a financial windfall. I think it is better to link the cost of the components/upgrades to damage dice, reducing the damage dice in exchange for a 'better' weapon. An example is rifles with scopes. A standard rifle would not have a scope, but you could buy one for the same price that is lower caliber with a scope, say a scoped 22 long rifle. A high quality rifle gains a die for damage, but that would be traded to put a scope on it.

In this fashion, you can price components by dice costs and achieve better game balance, as well as remove the meta-gamey upgrade limits based on weapon size and quality.
Also see my next post about building a setting

3) Weapon quality: page 115. I just noticed the paragraph hiding under the table "...cannot gain advantage of weapon quality greater than your skill level allows. You must have taken a skill level the required number of times to reap the benefits of a master-crafted weapon"...
I don't see this in the skill chapter nor do I see specific skills tied to weapon types. Does this mean you need 'Marksman-Pistol' in order to wield the legendary pearl handled revolvers and gain the extra damage they cause? What if you do have 'Marksman-Pistol', but only two ranks. Does this mean you gain only a +2?
If you are untrained and fire a suppressed sniper rifle, does it make more sound?

Recommend removing this, possibly replace with something like: 'Without the proper skill, you do not gain bonus dice to attacks based on weapon quality or custom upgrades.'

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

4) Reach weapons are listed with a reach measured in feet while ranged weapons are measured in squares. This wasn't immediately obvious and caused some confusion.

5) Glass Cannons and flurry of misses. This is more a point about the Defence-HP-SOAK-Damage dynamics. Rolling for health resulted in two of my players having 'low' health scores. 7 and 9 respectively. A 'standard' pistol deals 2D6, more than enough to drop either of them. Put that in the hands of someone with marksmanship skill and a hit is almost guaranteed to take them out. The Sulliman brothers had 12 Health, so they could take a shot or two, plus they wore armor. They also had a Defence of 25, which meant that an average human (Agi 4) could not hit them without ranks in marksmanship, masterwork weapons, some method of 'getting the drop' on them, or rolling exploding 6s. The T-Rex is just a killing machine with 10D6 (average 30) to both hit and damage, the only way to survive is to stay out of range.. which might be the right feel for him.

But I don't think that this is the right balance overall as combat turns into a challenge to see who gets the first hit in. Fun when the players are first, but sucks when the NPCs get to ambush. Which makes it hard to have stories where the bumbling bad guys never get the first shot, but I digress.

How to fix? Oi. That is the hard question. I think hitting more often, but having more options for gaining soak...but options to bypass the soak with either called shots or the right type of damage.
Perhaps drop the defense calculation to 5 + (AGIx3) and grant everyone a base SOAK equal to their WILL. Narratively its the determination to fight through the pain. Then drop all bonus damage dice from skills or equipment, so the master ranked unarmed combatant isn't dealing 5D6 damage with his fists. Instead ranks can be spent learning combat tricks like quickdraw, rapid reload, crippling strike {reduce targets speed by half for one round}, etc..

 

[Morrus]

Excellent! Thank you! This is great, solid playtest feedback.

That DEFENSE value has gone up and down a couple of times. The right value will get honed in on as we playtest, and this really helps with that. Out of curiosity, did your players aim (for the extra 2d6)? Or did they feel too pressured to move instead? Any attempt at crossfires? Simply aiming increase the attack roll on average by 8.4, putting 25 DEF well within the ballpark. And my expectation is that most characters will have *some* combat skill and that accuracy scales up faster than DEF does in terms of character advancement.

Those numbers do get tweaked a lot, and will likely continue to do so for a while until it all feels right. The consistent feedback, which your reports match with, is that HEALTH can be too low; simply tweaking that will make a big difference to the experience. It's actually slightly less swingy than it originally was, but needs some more tightening.

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

We did not use the Aim not the Cross-fire, mainly due to me still trying to assimilate the rules. However I will have them try that out tonight.
I think that the Aim action would have gotten 'Lucy' to hit on both of her shots, and would have made 'Bob', with marksmanship III, not worry about missing when taking called shots.

 

[Morrus]

Ah; if you're not actually using the rules, they probably won't work very well. The math is all designed around those tactical actions