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Libertad! posted:It's likely subjective on my end, but the X Without Number games are pretty low-power in terms of scaling, particularly for non-warriors. You don't get all that many hit points and the action economy of a bunch of enemies still means a lot. Especially so if you're playing Stars Without Number and several are equipped with heavy weapons. In comparison to 5e or even Pathfinder high-level PCs can at least afford to go "okay I can take a few blows from those hill giants." Yeah I don't disagree that his games tend to be on the lower end of the extreme power scale, but I think it's still very much a thing. Maybe the issue is that level 1 is just SO weak, combined with the fact that most NPCs, even trained soldiers, are supposedly 1 hit die. Things might feel a lot less wacky if the default was three hit die for someone who was expected to be able to fight things. I just don't like the feeling where we go from shamefully losing a fight with a shopkeeper and his son armed with pistols at level 1 to easily blowing through two dozen soldiers with assault rifles by level 6.
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Nov 15, 2022 18:00
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I've been running Worlds Without Number for a bit now, and level 1 characters using the Heroic rules are hilariously strong, probably overly so to be honest.
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Nov 15, 2022 18:05
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Colonel Cool posted:Yeah I don't disagree that his games tend to be on the lower end of the extreme power scale, but I think it's still very much a thing. Maybe the issue is that level 1 is just SO weak, combined with the fact that most NPCs, even trained soldiers, are supposedly 1 hit die. Things might feel a lot less wacky if the default was three hit die for someone who was expected to be able to fight things. 4E really got a lot of stuff right and one of the best parts was 1st level HP = max HP/level + CON score (not modifier). Gave everyone a good enough cushion that a goblin with a rusty knife couldn't off you with a crit, and smoothed the advancement to 2nd, 3rd, etc. Even your most punk-rear end wizard would be sporting at least 14 HP (and probably 15-16 HP) at 1st level. (Monster math (once they fixed it) was so awesome too. When I was running 4E, if I had an idea for a creature or an NPC encounter, I could just scrape the MM or other sources for effects similar to what I was thinking of for my baddie, plug in the numbers, and go. Also super easy to fix encounters if you are missing a player or two on a given night.)
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Nov 15, 2022 18:19
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Splicer posted:d20 options always seem to be your start off shitfarmer and graduate to dirtfarmer or you start off shitfarmer and graduate to god being. I want a nice crunchy game where your start off competent professional and graduate to more competent professional with better guns and a few tricks. I haven't played any even vaguely modern version, but if you're talking space games this sounds like Traveler; your character generation includes this whole career (potentially) that lets you intentionally create a mature, competent person from the get-go. And over time you can update your skills a bit but it takes years (the game is trying to be "realistic") to get significantly better, like you have to study or take a class or something, but of course you can get money and buy better guns and upgrade your space ship etc. On the other hand, Traveler isn't very forgiving in combat. If you want to get into lots of shooting laser battles and consistently survive, I'm looking at Modiphius 2d20 Star Trek. That system has some familiar trappings of D&D, like ability scores and skills, but is designed to give a lot of capability to the player to decide how much to push their luck, and expendable resources to more or less guarantee a success (but guaranteed consequences) on a given critical roll. In Trek-type stories, redshirts might die (and you can play a side-character while your main character is not in the scene!) but primary characters only die when the story is going to be revolving around that Very Special Episode type event.
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Nov 15, 2022 18:29
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Leperflesh posted:On the other hand, Traveler isn't very forgiving in combat. If you want to get into lots of shooting laser battles and consistently survive, I'm looking at Modiphius 2d20 Star Trek. That system has some familiar trappings of D&D, like ability scores and skills, but is designed to give a lot of capability to the player to decide how much to push their luck, and expendable resources to more or less guarantee a success (but guaranteed consequences) on a given critical roll. In Trek-type stories, redshirts might die (and you can play a side-character while your main character is not in the scene!) but primary characters only die when the story is going to be revolving around that Very Special Episode type event. I agree with you in general that the 2D20 system is pretty good at a lot of things. The one problem I have with your analysis is that Star Trek Adventures is a great game for simulating episodes of Star Trek (to paraphrase some goon), but probably not for running other sci-fi or space opera. (I'm thinking here of things like the D0 tests that you expect the Captain to take to build momentum for the group, the relatively anemic starship combat, the very forgiving nature of personal combat, and all the localization that's been done not just for the trappings of Trek but its philosophical milieu.) Would one of the other 2D20 games be better (like Infiniti)? Serious question; I only know STA and (to a much lesser degree) Conan out of the game systems. Link to the Modiphius thread: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3925914&perpage=40&pagenumber=1&noseen=1
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Nov 15, 2022 18:43
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Colonel Cool posted:Yeah I don't disagree that his games tend to be on the lower end of the extreme power scale, but I think it's still very much a thing. Maybe the issue is that level 1 is just SO weak, combined with the fact that most NPCs, even trained soldiers, are supposedly 1 hit die. Things might feel a lot less wacky if the default was three hit die for someone who was expected to be able to fight things. Yeah its been a while since I played anything D20 based but my recollection is that every group I ever played with started at lvl 8 or higher just because the math at lvl 1 was so swingy and you had so few options. Those first few levels in particular are really extreme increases in power, which kind of slows down because going from 1 hit die to 2 hit die is a lot bigger swing than going from 10 hit die to 11. I guess you could just reskin a setting such that just being a basic-rear end adult is lvl 10 and go from there.
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Nov 15, 2022 18:51
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Admiralty Flag posted:I agree with you in general that the 2D20 system is pretty good at a lot of things. The one problem I have with your analysis is that Star Trek Adventures is a great game for simulating episodes of Star Trek (to paraphrase some goon), but probably not for running other sci-fi or space opera. (I'm thinking here of things like the D0 tests that you expect the Captain to take to build momentum for the group, the relatively anemic starship combat, the very forgiving nature of personal combat, and all the localization that's been done not just for the trappings of Trek but its philosophical milieu.) Well, I'm still just starting to read the Star Trek rules, so your critique may be quite fair. I thought the request was for forgiving personal combat at day 1 in particular, e.g. you're not an incompetent schlub dying in a bar fight when you're "level 1" and the overall leveling arc for a STA character is much less severe than a D&D character.
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Nov 15, 2022 19:02
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Admiralty Flag posted:I agree with you in general that the 2D20 system is pretty good at a lot of things. The one problem I have with your analysis is that Star Trek Adventures is a great game for simulating episodes of Star Trek (to paraphrase some goon), but probably not for running other sci-fi or space opera. (I'm thinking here of things like the D0 tests that you expect the Captain to take to build momentum for the group, the relatively anemic starship combat, the very forgiving nature of personal combat, and all the localization that's been done not just for the trappings of Trek but its philosophical milieu.) If you're willing to do a bit of hacking, the current iteration of 2d20 (the one in the SRD and the one used in Achtung! Cthulhu and the forthcoming COHORS Cthulhu) is just sublime. (The "hacking" being they're games about WWII and Ancient Rome, respectively.) If you need sci-fi with guns out of the box, Infinity was designed to replicate the world of a scifi wargame, so it'll do just fine. It's the second crunchiest of the 2d20 games, and its layout/editing is... not great. But I really enjoyed my year with Infinity.
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Nov 15, 2022 19:02
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Leperflesh posted:Well, I'm still just starting to read the Star Trek rules, so your critique may be quite fair. I thought the request was for forgiving personal combat at day 1 in particular, e.g. you're not an incompetent schlub dying in a bar fight when you're "level 1" and the overall leveling arc for a STA character is much less severe than a D&D character. Your point is absolutely correct. As STA characters advance, they only really gain minimal bonuses to die rolls (e.g., +1 to an attribute or discipline) -- IIRC, most milestones give you the chance to shift values and focuses rather than add points -- and they start out about as tough as they're going to get (unless you dump all your advancement points into Fitness). I got distracted by your mention of Traveller and was thinking of variety of settings, missing the point about PC resilience. PCs in STA do start out quite resilient.
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Nov 15, 2022 19:14
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I do think a space game should have robust space ship combat though. That's not trivial to do IMO, but I think you could reasonably graft a good space ship battles game to the 2d20 ruleset if you wanted.
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Nov 15, 2022 19:27
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Leperflesh posted:I do think a space game should have robust space ship combat though. That's not trivial to do IMO, but I think you could reasonably graft a good space ship battles game to the 2d20 ruleset if you wanted. As one of Trad Games' resident 2d20 fanbois, I can say that Homeworld's lack of good ship battle rules (or really, any) is loving ridiculous. Just infuriating.
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Nov 15, 2022 19:44
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Leperflesh posted:I do think a space game should have robust space ship combat though. That's not trivial to do IMO, but I think you could reasonably graft a good space ship battles game to the 2d20 ruleset if you wanted. I'm going to ask: what good space ship battles game? In most RPG's you're going to have one big ship for the party, and unless there are only two or three party members, it's really hard to actually leave something for everyone to do. I've yet to encounter a good vehicle combat system in any RPG.
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Nov 15, 2022 19:57
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PurpleXVI posted:I'm going to ask: what good space ship battles game? Yeah I agree. While I haven't examined all of the games in the "spaceship RPG" space (example: I haven't read Traveller) I haven't really heard of a good spaceship RPG ship-to-ship combat system out there. In this case I would turn to wargames. Maybe something like A Billion Suns might work. I've heard very good reviews. http://abillionsuns.space/the-game/ https://ospreypublishing.com/us/billion-suns-9781472835659/ Edit: Or Star Wars: Armada
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Nov 15, 2022 20:16
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PurpleXVI posted:I'm going to ask: what good space ship battles game? I mean the answer to this is give the ship enough guns so that everyone who isn't flying or maybe fixing can man a station, and build the combat math accordingly.
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Nov 15, 2022 20:16
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Maxwell Lord posted:I mean the answer to this is give the ship enough guns so that everyone who isn't flying or maybe fixing can man a station, and build the combat math accordingly. Alternately provide some individual fighters or combat pods or whatever that can deploy from the main ship and do their thing, or some NPC mooks to boss around while actions are ongoing.
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Nov 15, 2022 20:27
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PurpleXVI posted:I'm going to ask: what good space ship battles game? I like Transit's handling of space ship battled but it is very much AW With Ships so if you want like, robust crunchy complicated combat it is not the system at all.
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Nov 15, 2022 20:28
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The main thing I'd want from spaceship combat is elegant mechanics for handling relative speed and position rather than absolute, and momentum at all (compared to most traditional tactics games). Fragged Empire does this but I skipped it when I ran the system so I don't know how good it is. LANCER's got an upcoming sister game / module for fleet combat but I know even less about that one, apart from trusting the designers' pedigree.
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Nov 15, 2022 20:31
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CitizenKeen posted:If you're willing to do a bit of hacking, the current iteration of 2d20 (the one in the SRD and the one used in Achtung! Cthulhu and the forthcoming COHORS Cthulhu) is just sublime. (The "hacking" being they're games about WWII and Ancient Rome, respectively.) Can you do a quick rundown of your Infinity game? I'm trying to get into it from the wargame side and bouncing a bit on what a campaign might actually do.
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Nov 15, 2022 20:41
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Is there a space game that squares this circle by just going "gently caress it, everyone gets their own spaceship, you're a fleet of adventurers, everyone gets to be Han Solo" rather than having one guy pilot, a couple guys fire the guns, and someone just whacking off in the engine room or whatever?
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Nov 15, 2022 20:51
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Asterite34 posted:Is there a space game that squares this circle by just going "gently caress it, everyone gets their own spaceship, you're a fleet of adventurers, everyone gets to be Han Solo" rather than having one guy pilot, a couple guys fire the guns, and someone just whacking off in the engine room or whatever? Aforementioned Transit has every player has their own ship, but rather than being Han Solo you're the ship's computer like in Star Trek or The Culture. The crew itself is a stat.
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Nov 15, 2022 20:54
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:The main thing I'd want from spaceship combat is elegant mechanics for handling relative speed and position rather than absolute, and momentum at all (compared to most traditional tactics games). It’s bad. I’m over thirty sessions into a Fragged Seas session and the group has agreed to just drop the ship combat entirely. The first couple goes are fun, but it suffers from severe quarterbacking and ultimately doesn’t solve the “everyone doing one thing over and over again” problem.
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Nov 15, 2022 21:31
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Complaining about quarterback design in tactical RPGs is shooting fish in a barrel, honestly.
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Nov 15, 2022 21:33
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Asterite34 posted:Is there a space game that squares this circle by just going "gently caress it, everyone gets their own spaceship, you're a fleet of adventurers, everyone gets to be Han Solo" rather than having one guy pilot, a couple guys fire the guns, and someone just whacking off in the engine room or whatever?
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Nov 15, 2022 21:39
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It's possible to create a "fleet" of sorts in Traveller, if you have more than one Scout or Merchant in the same party. You just kinda split the group up by preference and assume most interaction is over comms. Really there's nothing stopping a group in any game from creating, say, a Rogue Squadron-like group of snub-nosed ship pilots (was there ever a Battlestar Galactica RPG?). Though then you may start running into a lack of variety. Tuxedo Catfish posted:The main thing I'd want from spaceship combat is elegant mechanics for handling relative speed and position rather than absolute, and momentum at all (compared to most traditional tactics games). "Flying Circus but with spaceships" is my holy grail.
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Nov 15, 2022 21:44
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Asterite34 posted:Is there a space game that squares this circle by just going "gently caress it, everyone gets their own spaceship, you're a fleet of adventurers, everyone gets to be Han Solo" rather than having one guy pilot, a couple guys fire the guns, and someone just whacking off in the engine room or whatever? The aforementioned (but not named) Lancer Battlegroup by threader resident Kai Tave kind of does this. I say "kind of" because it 100% does this, but it's "kind of" a role playing game. Maybe that's unfair? Everybody controls a fleet (or battlegroup within a fleet) of ships. It's got relativistic distances. But in between gritty tactical fleet combat it's got the lightest of role-playing rules. It's arguably closer to a wargame than an RPG. Not a space game, but thread resident Erika Chappell/open_sketchbook's Flying Circus does crunchy airplanes as an RPG. I don't think it could be reskinned (gravity, windspeed, etc.), but its existence shows you could make a good dog-fighting TTRPG. The entire game loop would work just fine. Nobody's really done it yet, though. Upthread I said "I wish Erika Chappell would make a spaceship game" and then someone told be about Torchship, so yay! Unrelated, "I wish capitalism would come to an end." grassy gnoll posted:Can you do a quick rundown of your Infinity game? I'm trying to get into it from the wargame side and bouncing a bit on what a campaign might actually do. It's been a few years and the birth of some small children since I played. I'm pretty sure the GM was running the Quantronic Heat adventure. Essentially, the Infinity RPG assumes (in core book) that players are members of the Bureau Noir, which is a black ops organization for the space UN (O12?). So you can come from any space nation, any background, and you're in teams where you go where the law can't. Basically, spy missions. The game is good, but there's no real "spy mission" game play loop, so you can kind of do whatever you want. Feel free to ping me in the General 2d20 Thread.
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Nov 15, 2022 21:47
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Maxwell Lord posted:I mean the answer to this is give the ship enough guns so that everyone who isn't flying or maybe fixing can man a station, and build the combat math accordingly. PurpleXVI posted:Alternately provide some individual fighters or combat pods or whatever that can deploy from the main ship and do their thing, or some NPC mooks to boss around while actions are ongoing. Or what I think could be fun, have every PC be the captain of their own ship and have fleet scale ship combat be the game's primary focus
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Nov 15, 2022 22:00
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Out of curiosity, has anyone tried running or playing Deniable Assets? Backed it during its campaign, several people in my group love it conceptually, and it looks like I'm going to end up GMing it in a month or two (as a poor GM, this may or may not be terrifying). I've seen basically zero discussion of the game anywhere, not even an AP, which is... unusual considering how even niche RPGs manage to have surprisingly active communities. (For those unfamiliar, which is probably everyone, the one-sentence pitch is "cyberpunk, but you're playing the corporate villains as they rise and inevitably fall".)
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Nov 15, 2022 22:02
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SkyeAuroline posted:Out of curiosity, has anyone tried running or playing Deniable Assets? Backed it during its campaign, several people in my group love it conceptually, and it looks like I'm going to end up GMing it in a month or two (as a poor GM, this may or may not be terrifying). I've seen basically zero discussion of the game anywhere, not even an AP, which is... unusual considering how even niche RPGs manage to have surprisingly active communities. According to the write-up in the preview, you're supposed to actively engage against your own character: quote:In Deniable Assets, your hotshot is not at all precious and is very garbage. Your character is a scumbag, and you’re not going to help them out at all. You want them to scramble like a cockroach. You’re going to use their own greed and shortsightedness and arrogance to bury them, and all the other player characters too. I think that's going to be a pretty tough sell to a player group.
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Nov 15, 2022 22:07
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hyphz posted:According to the write-up in the preview, you're supposed to actively engage against your own character: is it? that's honestly the most appealing part of something like vampire (masquerade or requiem, either works) to me - you're playing a really just grotesque awful person and doing so like a stolen car, with every expectation to have a glorious crash and burn as part of overreaching some obscure scheme
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Nov 15, 2022 22:15
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hyphz posted:According to the write-up in the preview, you're supposed to actively engage against your own character: It doesn't sound like it's exactly ongoing campaign material. I've met only a few people who didn't mind screwing their own characters over in (e.g.,) Fiasco or other story games. Not that far to go to carry the concept over. Besides, I think I can already see the appeal. "Luger Kruge readies his vantablack Ares Predator heavy pistol. Nothing can survive this baby when I've got it loaded with incendiary rounds and cyberlinked, he thinks. Little does he know that the strike team coming for him just around the corner have AK-99s loaded with HEAP rounds plus full combat armor, and they're even more chromed up than he is. And that's my Shadowrunner cleaned up, hoisted by the petard of his own hubris."
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Nov 15, 2022 22:16
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hyphz posted:According to the write-up in the preview, you're supposed to actively engage against your own character: Out of four people in my normal group, two have been excited enough about the prospect that they've brought it up without prompting, outside of RPG chat entirely, multiple times since the idea of running it was originally brought up; the other two were solidly interested during the pitch, including the "engage against your character" part (which is more of "you're picking your fate when you do lose" than "determining when you lose", anyway). You're still playing your character "well" and building a story, but the setbacks are built in and expected to happen; poo poo going sideways is part of the experience, and your characters aren't precious and shielded from harm from it. So, depends on the player group. e: ^^^^ yes, it's designed as a short run game. More than one or two sessions (ideally), less than "run until everyone loses interest or scheduling conflicts come up" like usual. SkyeAuroline fucked around with this message at 22:20 on Nov 15, 2022 |
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Nov 15, 2022 22:16
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SkyeAuroline posted:the "engage against your character" part (which is more of "you're picking your fate when you do lose" than "determining when you lose", anyway). There are lots of games in this general category. One of my favorites is Carnage 3:16. We played a 'campaign' of it, but that took the form of "OK, half the group can't make it for this weekend's game, I'm going to pull out 3:16." New players created characters and joined the Space Army, usually getting callsigns from the older hands, and some players were willing to watch their PCs die when appropriate without using a strength or weakness. (Anyone who did that got to narrate their over-the-top kickass death.) One player in particular took it a little too seriously, gaming things that didn't need to be games, but everyone else was way into it. I just had to frame the mood and tone correctly from first mention of the game and whenever it came up later as a possibility to avoid mismatched expectations. (I have many favorite moments, but one was when the newly promoted Lt. got to deliver his first briefing. I handed him his briefing information, a paper that had three things on it: a circle (representing the planet) completely covered with green, a line leading into the circle labeled "Forests," and the heading, "Vermeer IV: Bugs (???!?)" The player pulled off a five minute briefing out of his rear end from that. It was a thing of beauty.)
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Nov 15, 2022 22:30
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Mister Olympus posted:is it? that's honestly the most appealing part of something like vampire (masquerade or requiem, either works) to me - you're playing a really just grotesque awful person and doing so like a stolen car, with every expectation to have a glorious crash and burn as part of overreaching some obscure scheme Vampire!? I'm pretty sure the original pitch for that was always "You, you real-life Goth/proto-Goth, get to play an even cooler Goth in a world where Goths are the secret masters of everything."
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Nov 15, 2022 22:33
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hyphz posted:Vampire!? I'm pretty sure the original pitch for that was always "You, you real-life Goth/proto-Goth, get to play an even cooler Goth in a world where Goths are the secret masters of everything." Yeah, Vampire's maybe a bad example. Vampire's easiest to sell when you talk about it in an Interview With The Vampire "they're monstrous, but sexy and Byronic" way. I still agree with their point overall, it's easier to sell people on playing absolute scumbags who deserve what's coming to them than you're giving it credit for.
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Nov 15, 2022 22:41
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hyphz posted:Vampire!? I'm pretty sure the original pitch for that was always "You, you real-life Goth/proto-Goth, get to play an even cooler Goth in a world where Goths are the secret masters of everything." You know how there's a distinction in Shadowrun groups between being bigshots and owning everything or scrabbling hardcore to survive against the crushing cyberinfrastructure? Vampire has the same distinction - are you blooddrinking superheroes or are you terrible monsters cursed to doom. You can see both strands at work in the text of many books over the years.
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Nov 15, 2022 22:43
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hyphz posted:Vampire!? I'm pretty sure the original pitch for that was always "You, you real-life Goth/proto-Goth, get to play an even cooler Goth in a world where Goths are the secret masters of everything." Man, that depends a lot on whether you read the book or listen to people who played the game. The pitch in the books is clearly very much about mournfully battling your inner beast while struggling with the urge to use Potency 5 to toss a car through a werewolf, sometimes there is a politic. The groups I've ever encountered that actually played Vampire, on the other hand, always leaned towards playing night-time superheroes who responded to politics by using Potency 5 tossing a car through a werewolf. drrockso20 posted:Or what I think could be fun, have every PC be the captain of their own ship and have fleet scale ship combat be the game's primary focus I think there's a pretty big difference between designing a game that's purely about ship combat and does ship combat good, and a game that's about individual characters that are sometimes doing space combat. I.e. pure vehicle combat systems can work, but "normal" RPG's with a vehicle combat module tend to be busted up.
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Nov 15, 2022 22:54
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Lurks With Wolves posted:I still agree with their point overall, it's easier to sell people on playing absolute scumbags who deserve what's coming to them than you're giving it credit for. Maybe so. I guess maybe the other side is that playing a corper is a bit too close to what regular people do anyway. It's hard to see a corper as an absolute scumbag who deserves everything they get when you know they're only a scumbag because their boss says they have to be, they needed a steady paycheck and changing the world wasn't an option. (Cyberpunk Fierce Creatures when?)
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Nov 15, 2022 22:55
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hyphz posted:Complaining about quarterback design in tactical RPGs is shooting fish in a barrel, honestly. You're not wrong, but the "all PCs on a single ship" really elevates it to art.
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Nov 15, 2022 22:59
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One of the more "realistic" tabletop space ship wargames that I've played is Full Thrust. That game at least accounts for things like momentum using Newtonian physics, although IIRC it's still played in two dimensions. If I was going to tack on a space ship combat system to an RPG I would want to make space ship fights feel the way they do in a TV show like Star Trek: There's a few seconds of the bridge, the captain barking orders... there's some pew pews and some explosions maybe - but there's also something else going on, because a straight up fight is always either "the Enterprise massively overmatches the foe and they lose" or, much more commonly, "The Enterprise is horribly overmatched and is going to lose... UNLESS... and occasionally "The Enterprise is trying to stop this fight, because of a Big Misunderstanding/ someone is making this happen against everyone's interests/this is a distraction keeping us from achieving our Episodic Goal/etc/" and in all of these cases, the drama doesn't come from specific maneuvers or how many hit points of damage a photon torpedo can do, it comes from stuff going on with the battle in the background. The status of the shields, amount of visible destruction and bodies, etc. are used just to set a certain level of tension, provide visual interest, and give the viewer an idea of how seriously bad things have gotten. So I guess what I come back to is, what are you trying to achieve with your space ship combat system? Is your game about the space ship, or is the ship more of a setting element, occasionally chaotic, usually reliable, sometimes very comforting? Placing the ship (the castle, the village, the hive, the duchy, the elemental plane of air, Asgard, the zoo, the spire, the bloodline, the faction) into imminent peril adds drama and tension, and the PCs address the problem using their skills and wits and spells and so forth. This could include manning the guns or squeezing ten percent more out of the warp drive or improvising a crazy maneuver at the helm, but it could also include solving the untranslatable sigils on the artifact in the ready room, figuring out how to talk to the aliens, convincing the space squid to eat something more tasty, fixing the warp engine so you can get away, triggering the nearby star to go nova, curing the space sickness that has driven the rest of the crew into a murderous fugue, or maybe just beaming aboard the space station and having a traditional laser fight with some other dudes. Or, is your game about exciting ship battles? Then poo poo, yeah, there should be a structure that provides interesting choices in every fight. An interesting choice is one where there's not one clearly best option. We know what this looks like: good RPG combat systems already exist, where you don't just click Power Attack every round, you get to choose between stances/maneuvers/spells/powers etc. and so does the foe and the terrain matters and there's something fun to engage with every round, even in the 40th combat you're having in this system. Give everyone at the table interesting choices to make. Don't focus so much on traditional hierarchical roles like captain vs. underlings just following orders. You can have someone in charge of a drone swarm, someone in charge of a bunch of flavors of directed energy fields, someone setting targeting priorities, someone can access a chart of abstracted trickeries that may or may not mislead opponents in a variety of interesting ways, I think there's lots of design space for good tactical space combat. Give ships a bunch of different stats that matter, create interesting matchups - not just rock/paper/scissors (that's not a bad place to start though: pick the right weapon vs. their particular defenses...) but also speed, maneuvering capabilities, ability to operate in atmosphere/pressure, cloaking, abilities with cooldowns (a burst of speed, a burst of fire, etc), drones or manned fighters, ECM. Provide terrain, space battles are always going to be more interesting in a dense asteroid field or above a stormy gas giant or in a mine field or amidst a flock of migrating psychic space whales or right in the middle of an active nova. IMO the hardest part is dealing with 3d and, if you choose to, newtonian physics. I think flattening space into a grid that you can more easily handle with minis or a map is a reasonable albeit disappointing compromise, and if you don't want to deal with proper physics you can also basically treat space ships like boats and let them fly graceful arcs like they do in most space shows/movies. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Nov 15, 2022 |
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Nov 15, 2022 23:02
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| # ? May 25, 2024 07:38 |
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The element of WoD that really really works against playing the characters like stolen cars is not anything to do with the setting or flavor but the character creation process being really involved and very aggressive about pushing and remind you of its progression system. If you're going to treat your characters as disposable I'd rather have a system with character creation on the level of kill pupppies for satan or even thinner like Nice Marines. IDK I don't think I'm that weird for this but my general feeling is that the more involved the character creation process is, the more I want to make sure that the character that comes out of it gets some real screen time.
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Nov 15, 2022 23:14
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