Scale Difference with Starship Weapons

[atgxtg]

[garhkal]

[CRMcNeill]

That's what complications are for: capacitor banks that take up lots of cargo capacity, power fluctuations that shut down the entire ship when you pull the trigger, extremely low fire rates, cannon blows up or otherwise spectacularly malfunctions on a Wild Die. And that's without getting into the legality issues of having something like this installed on your ship. The point is, it's more fun to, rather than say "well, the rules say you can only do this", say "okay, you can install this, but here is what it will cost you, plus you have the potential for these mishaps, plus you don't want to get boarded with this thing installed, you are going straight to jail. Your call." If they still want to do it, fine; let the fireworks show commence.
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"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.

The CRMcNeill Stat/Rule Index

[Ral_Brelt]

[DougRed4]

Talked by phone with one of my players last night (the one who asked the initial questions), and got everything straightened out.

In our case, the question was more how do we handle starfighter-scale weapons mounted on a capital-scale ship?

I've heard it said before (and I tend to agree) that this game would be far more streamlined if they simply had Starship Piloting and Starship Gunnery. It sounds like that's all there is in the SAGA version of the game. SAGA also has things far easier when it comes to pricing weapons, or figuring out space for them and other factors, as they all work on the same numbers, but larger ships (and weapons) apparently have different modifiers across the board.

Part of what makes the D6 skills confusing is that there are four different piloting skills (Archaic, Capital, Starfighter, and Space Transports) and two different Gunnery ones (Capital and the generic 'Starship'). Then Starship Gunnery, to complicate things even further, works sometimes for capital-scale ships and sometimes for starfighter-scale.

I think for my game, I'm going to always assume the weapons are of the same scale as the ship they're mounted on, and if there's an exception (which we've seen a bit of lately) that will be spelled out with an additional line in the weaponry stats, saying "Scale: Starfighter" or the like.
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Currently Running: Villains & Vigilantes (a 32-year-old campaign with multiple groups) and D6 Star Wars; mostly on hiatus are Adventures in Middle-earth and Delta Green

[atgxtg]

We rolled all the piloting skills into "Piloting" in our campaigns a couple years back, and it worked out fairly well.

These days, I am thinking that it might be nice to make some sort of related skill rule. Maybe something like how languages works, with a character who becomes "familiar" with a certain type of piloting avoiding some rolls, some penalties or at least reducing the difficulty.

SAGA did make some stuff easier. Perhaps because they had seen what happened in D6, or perhaps because the new series have mixed stuff a bit more than WEG had. WEG's scales was something of a quick fix to address the stats given in the Sorcebook. I wish WEG would have updated the stats and gotten rid of scale.

WEG's DC RPG gave a method for handling large numbers of dice, multipliers, and that probably could fix most of the scale bugs.

[garhkal]

I could maybe see rolling fighter and freighter into one piloting, but not cap and archaic in with those 2.
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Confucious sayeth, don't wash cat while drunk!

[DougRed4]

Well, archaic is hardly ever used, that's true.

I think the easiest and simplest is to either:

a) Just make one Piloting skill roll (for all piloting); this seems to me to best reflect the films. Back in the days of the OT we thought Kenobi hated space travel, but by the Prequels we learned that even he could buzz around the busy streets of Coruscant or pilot a Jedi Starfighter.

or

b) Do like the Star Wars CCG did, and break all ships down into two classes: Starfighter and Capital. Ships like the Millennium Falcon are considered 'starfighter' class.

My own inclination would be to do (b) above, but for now I'm keeping the (somewhat confusing) skills of the rules.
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Currently Running: Villains & Vigilantes (a 32-year-old campaign with multiple groups) and D6 Star Wars; mostly on hiatus are Adventures in Middle-earth and Delta Green

[Leon The Lion]

For my own, I solved the weapons skill thing by dividing weapons by crew requirement. Scale is unimportant, and so is weather the weapon is mounted on a spaceship, tank, or ground emplacement. Everything which can be effectively directed and used by a single person, like the fixed weapons on a fighter or light turrets like on the Millenium Falcon, is used with Gunnery skill. Everything else, which needs more people to effectively employ - crew-served guns - is used with Artillery skill.
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Plagiarize! Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes! So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize... Only be sure to call it, please, "research".
- Tom Lehrer

[jmanski]

I kind of like rolling up all skills to Piloting and Gunnery, personally.

I've also wondered the same about repair skills... perhaps make all the identified repair skills specializations? Seems odd to me that someone can be extremely good at fixing a starfighter but not a landspeeder.
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Blasted rules. Why can't they just be perfect?

[Leon The Lion]

Well, how similiar is fixing a car to fixing an airplane? I'm sure there is some cross-over, but I wouldn't think it's the same exact skill.

For myself, I allow defaults between related skills like that. So if you're good at one, you get to use it to do the other that you have no normal training at, at reduced value but still better than the bare atribute.
_________________
Plagiarize! Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes! So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize... Only be sure to call it, please, "research".
- Tom Lehrer

[garhkal]

Very true. I am great at repairing communications gear, and can do passable work on PCs and radars. But give me a robotic unit (like say those on assembly lines), or a car, i suck.
_________________
Confucious sayeth, don't wash cat while drunk!

[jmanski]

I guess that's true. It just seems like there are so many more skills necessary to be a tech.
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Blasted rules. Why can't they just be perfect?

[atgxtg]

[garhkal]

Fellow ET (squid style!).. Nice. What are your NECs?
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Confucious sayeth, don't wash cat while drunk!