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wildfire
Lieutenant Commander
Joined: 19 Feb 2006
Posts: 234
Location: Scotland
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 Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2014 10:37 am Post subject: |
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| DougRed4 wrote: | | atgxtg wrote: | | The scale system is never going to be "right". Starfighters end up sluggish and poor at dodging compared to a human - just because of the way the scaling system works. |
I've never had a problem with how starfighers work, since they're never going up against a human (so the scaling doesn't really apply). Starfighters scale against bigger ships is the far more common occurence, and not only do they get the scale factor, but you add the pilot's skill on top of the ship's Maneuverability. So you end up with fast, quick ships that are next to impossible to hit. |
Simple way round this for capital ships is to retcon an anti fighter battery or two of Starfighter scale laser cannons, then you have no scale issues and they become a far more interesting combat 
I think either D20 or saga first introduced this idea I just nabbed it from there |
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atgxtg
Rear Admiral
Joined: 22 Mar 2009
Posts: 2460
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| Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2014 11:15 am Post subject: |
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Yeah.
There are also a few other ways to add the anti starfighter battery without actually having to add anything to the capital ship stats.
OPTION 1: Assume that the turbolasers and other capital ship guns can fire in an anti-starfighter mode (lower power, faster tracking) and just let them work at starfighter scale.
OPTION 2: Assume that the capital ship weapons affect a wider area that smaller weapons and their attacks could hit multiple fighters that are close together. This is similar to how the main guns on battleships could be used as anti-aircraft guns. |
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wildfire
Lieutenant Commander
Joined: 19 Feb 2006
Posts: 234
Location: Scotland
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| Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2014 12:37 pm Post subject: |
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Good ideas and simple all depends on how you see combat working, I obviously favour a layered approach to ships weapons.
Like the old WWII warships with a main battery and a secondary battery of smaller faster firing guns to deal with fighters. |
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atgxtg
Rear Admiral
Joined: 22 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2014 2:30 pm Post subject: |
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| wildfire wrote: | Good ideas and simple all depends on how you see combat working, I obviously favour a layered approach to ships weapons.
Like the old WWII warships with a main battery and a secondary battery of smaller faster firing guns to deal with fighters. |
Ah, but that's the interesting thing. Old WWII ships could use the main guns against fighters! The blast radius for an exploding shell fired from a main gun is so large from the big guns that they become effect against fighters.
To give you an idea what I mean, during the Vietnam war the US would fire a 16" shell from a Iowa-class BB to make landing zones for helicopters! I think they knocked down all the trees in something like a 50-60m radius. So that would be some pretty heavy FlaK. |
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CRMcNeill
Director of Engineering
Joined: 05 Apr 2010
Posts: 16345
Location: Redding System, California Sector, on the I-5 Hyperspace Route.
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| Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2014 2:47 pm Post subject: |
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A while back, we got pretty far along with an idea for using CS-scale weapons against starfighters by using a mass bombard to create hazardous terrain that starfighters had to fly through, with damage generated by how badly they flubbed their piloting rolls. It is somewhat more realistic, in that WWII era flak patterns basically did the same thing by throwing up a wall of metal that attacking craft had to fly through.
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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
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DougRed4
Rear Admiral
Joined: 18 Jan 2013
Posts: 2290
Location: Seattle, WA
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| Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2014 6:08 pm Post subject: |
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| atgxtg wrote: | Doug,
Don't you ever have situations where Starfighters go up against walkers or airspeeders?
Basically the scaling system makes walkers ponderous vs. humans -which is fine, but it also makes everything else ponderous. |
I've never had that occur (yet, anyway).
We've been trying out crmcneill's variant, which has been working pretty well:
Character 0D
Cycle +2D
Speeder +4D
Starfighter +6D
Walker +8D
Starship +10D
Capital Ship +14D
Dreadnaught +18D
Death Star +24D
I know some swap out the Walker scale and Starfighter scale.
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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 |
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wildfire
Lieutenant Commander
Joined: 19 Feb 2006
Posts: 234
Location: Scotland
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| Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2014 6:15 pm Post subject: |
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| atgxtg wrote: | | wildfire wrote: | Good ideas and simple all depends on how you see combat working, I obviously favour a layered approach to ships weapons.
Like the old WWII warships with a main battery and a secondary battery of smaller faster firing guns to deal with fighters. |
Ah, but that's the interesting thing. Old WWII ships could use the main guns against fighters! The blast radius for an exploding shell fired from a main gun is so large from the big guns that they become effect against fighters.
To give you an idea what I mean, during the Vietnam war the US would fire a 16" shell from a Iowa-class BB to make landing zones for helicopters! I think they knocked down all the trees in something like a 50-60m radius. So that would be some pretty heavy FlaK. |
I agreed about the validity of the blasts being large enough to engulf smaller fighters causing damage. I'm sure I've seen somewhere report of large calibre rounds designed to be used a flak rounds but can't place if it was fiction or not.
I just have issues with the capital scale guns being able to rotate fast enough to deal with small agile fighters close in, which can be explained and accounted for by the scale dice.
Also with crmcneill I like the about idea an area of space that causes damage to those that have to fly through it. I just find the addition of a few starfighter scale weapons an easy way to threaten fast and agile fighters with out throwing in too many house rules.
That said I also use a variant of crmcneill's scale system like DougRed4 |
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CRMcNeill
Director of Engineering
Joined: 05 Apr 2010
Posts: 16345
Location: Redding System, California Sector, on the I-5 Hyperspace Route.
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| Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2014 6:45 pm Post subject: |
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| DougRed4 wrote: | | I've never had that occur (yet, anyway). |
Agreed. And ponderous is a relative thing. A starfighter may appear swift and graceful, but when it has a turn radius measured in hundreds of meters at speed in an atmosphere, it is far more ponderous than a person on the ground, who can turn around on the spot. This is part of why I also apply scale modifiers to maneuvers in combat.
_________________
"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
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DougRed4
Rear Admiral
Joined: 18 Jan 2013
Posts: 2290
Location: Seattle, WA
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| Posted: Thu Jan 01, 2015 1:13 am Post subject: |
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That's a good point. You can watch the Blue Angels fly overhead and marvel at their amazing aerodynamics, but you on the ground can spin in place and change facing (and direction) hundreds of times more easily than they can in the air (at their fast speeds).
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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 |
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Theodrim
Lieutenant
Joined: 18 May 2014
Posts: 78
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| Posted: Thu Jan 01, 2015 12:13 pm Post subject: |
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| crmcneill wrote: | | A while back, we got pretty far along with an idea for using CS-scale weapons against starfighters by using a mass bombard to create hazardous terrain that starfighters had to fly through, with damage generated by how badly they flubbed their piloting rolls. It is somewhat more realistic, in that WWII era flak patterns basically did the same thing by throwing up a wall of metal that attacking craft had to fly through. |
I believe it was the original trilogy novelizations that originally brought up the notion of turbolasers having a flak setting (canonicity and relevance to an individual game notwithstanding). CIS ships in RotS straight-up had flak batteries of course, but that's prequel trilogy stuff (not to mention, not the Empire).
I always just play it off as Imperial bureaucratic stupidity that Star Destroyers lack any kind of point defense system. Some datapad-pusher somewhere decided an ISD's TIE complement would deal with anything too small for turbolasers to annihilate, that worked its way upstairs and became Imperial doctrine (and propaganda). Just one of the "174,000 design flaws waiting to be exploited", as written in Fragments from the Rim. The fun for the GM's is in deciding how competent Imperial officer NPC's handle their own equipments' shortcomings. |
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tetsuoh
Captain
Joined: 21 Jul 2010
Posts: 505
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