NathanIW
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I've been doing some reading on civilians aeroplanes and ships. Categories currently in use are based on what the ship's purpose is and then there are a variety of systems to rate their sizes (mostly born out of tariff and taxation demands). For the military vessels, I liked Atgxtg's list because it starts with the smallest reasonable manned military craft and then doubles for each category. I think that works great and should also be applied to civilian craft. I'm going to come up with some examples for different size classes and just include them in the description. Now an interesting idea I have for my setting is that jump gates are the primary means of travel. In the real world, ships are often categorized by the passages that can pass through. For example, a ship of the largest size that can pass through the Panama Canal is called a panamax. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Panama_Canal_Miraflores_Locks.jpg As you can see, they mean it. Any wider and they won't fit through. If their keel went any deeper, they'd run aground on the bottom. So I'm going to include jump gate classifications and have size categories based on whether the ship fits through or can be transported by a given jump gate. There will be an upper limit in terms of height and width to fit through the gate and length in terms of getting through the gate while it is still stable. A nice simple class system based on common gate sizes. Idiosyncratic to my own setting? Absolutely.
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Okay, I'm going to write the full length text stuff for my own use and I'll make a short summary version for other people to use as they like. Something like: -- Hit locations are an option worth considering if you are interested in increased lethality and the targeting and damage of specific systems in your starship combat. If you want a cinematic or character centered game, the potential for a stray laser blast to open a ship to the vacuum of space may not be appropriate for your game. -- In the end though, it's entirely possible that everyone's ideas will be just too divergent to be in one document and the variety of optional ideas might be best kept in a separate supplemental document. Would we be better off with a separate list for civilian ships or simply putting civilian examples in the description? For example, under titan, mentioning that the largest colony ships and habitat structures could be that size. As for the larger scale issues, I simply haven't used BRP scale stuff enough to know how it really works, so I'll leave the commenting on that to others.
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So I started writing the text of my optional appendix entry. I wanted to communicate that hit locations are about the idea that where a shot lands can matter, the opening up of called shot options and the increased lethality of such an approach. I think it's equally important for an optional rule to tell you when you might want to avoid it as well as when you might want to use it. Why Hit Locations? When Runequest first arrived on the scene in 1977, it introduced the idea of hit locations into the RPG hobby. The authors had been doing a lot of sport combat and historical fencing which inspired their thinking about what RPG combat could look like. And that includes having where the blow lands actually matter. The same approach can be transferred to starships. A blast of energy might pierce through the shields and armour of a craft to damage a particular system. A missile salvo striking the engines of a craft might leave it a floating hulk. It also introduces the ability to go for called shots-- like when a starship captain orders the tactical officer to target the enemy's weapon systems or engines. One thing the original Runequest rules were known for was how lethal combat could be. Hit locations were part of this. It provides the opportunity to die in the pursuit of adventure with every shot fired. It is likely not the option you want to use if you are going for a character centered or cinematic game. If you want the chance of a stray laser opening the ship to the vacuum of space (and perhaps sucking a hapless character into the void) these optional rules are for you.
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Sorry, I was reading other posts in the thread while I did my reply and thought I was replying to something clarence wrote in another post with that paragraph. I'll edit. Sci-fi as a genre is definitely a story of us. The technology and it's implications are often the lense through which themes about humans today are brought into focus. Though it's quite common for thematic stuff to take a background role so we can enjoy ships blowing each other up with flashy energy weapons. My main concern with the ship categories was that they were to militaristic and not general like tiny, small, huge, large, etc.,. A simple "every category is about twice the size of the previous one" was definitely a good default approach. In my own game capital ships are pretty much only something the military has and everyone else uses smaller ships. Even the super-freighters are pod ships where a smaller ship connects to a bunch of cargo containers to pull them through a jump gate. It's definitely given me a clear jumping off point in terms of getting stats made for ships that have already appeared in game but haven't yet been in combat. For example, the freighter that connects to a bunch of cargo pods is a cutter with a bunch of economy engines, a thruster module, a robot arm and a cockpit. When it's not hauling cargo, it's actually quite zippy, but as a train of cargo pods adds effective modules, it get really slow and boring. The simple doubling of size at each category up from a fighter is pretty intuitive.
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One thing I've been trying to avoid in this thread is putting my desires for ships appropriate for harder sci-fi survival/exploration horror games into the general zeitgeist of the thread. I've been trying to clearly mark when I think an idea deviates from the more cinematic approach the document starts off with. I don't think it's the case here as these ship sizes and terms appear in a lot of science fiction media of all types. The only real borderline label is the cutter. It's a coast guard or harbour pilot classification with its history being the smallest naval vessel to actually get an official commission. In the 1700s if you were the captain of a cutter, you would have a legitimate commission from your nation as an lieutenant and you'd likely be the only actual officer on board. Anything smaller and you'd not be granted an official commission and instead would report to an officer elsewhere. Today though, various nations have ships the size of cruisers that they call cutters just because the ship happens to be performing harbour pilot or coast guard duties, though the vast majority of the ships used for these duties are much, much smaller. The numbers look really good for my purposes. Are they good on the larger side? Would someone be able to build a cruiser with up to 480 modules and be happy with the results? I'm going to go ahead with these classifications for future shipbuilding in my game. Thanks!
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The problem with sci-fi ship sizes is that size and role get divorced rather quickly. In sci-fi media (be it comics, shows, movies, games) a ship has a given purpose and its size is usually arbitrarily larger or small. Take a look at his site for examples: http://www.merzo.net/ However, they are often consistent within a given fictional universe. So the real issue here, is "what's the reference point?" Are we designing ships that are in relation to the rules for normal people? I'm more interested in a weird combination of harder sci-fi and exploration horror, so I'm likely going to go with an amalgam current naval classification system. If you add in single pilot fighters and borrow some coast guard terms, you could end up with the following: (heck, let's throw in titan from Master of Orion as well) titan battleship cruiser destroyer frigate corvette cutter small craft fighter So I'm going to figure out a number of modules for each size and they will slightly overlap. A sufficiently large fighter is bigger than the smallest possible small craft and a very large cruiser can be the size of the smaller battleships. I think this can pass the "same page" test as well, once a framework is accepted (and given the smallest crafts are single person fighters, we have one). It breaks down on the high end in certain fictional universes because you can have cruisers in one video game or movie be the size of titans in another. My solution to this is to get a bit idiosyncratic and concentration on the type of play I'm interested in. Harder sci-fi with sub-frigate ships being the most numerous and destroyers and larger being largely outside the scope of the player characters.
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Absolutely. I think general categories of a rough length or displacement is the way to go. A set volume or dimensions for each module might make a cool advanced optional rule though.
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I think tying modules to a set size is a bad idea. A module should have an average size that can be determined after the fact, but not a defined one set before a ship is designed. There are too many possible configurations to have a module to metre ratio set in advance. You can have ships that are cylinders and ships that are spheres and they can have the same volume but very different lengths. I think general size categories is the way to go and a range of lengths (or displacement) appropriate for a given number of modules.
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Too many options definitely will make things more confusing. I think things like firing arcs, or auto fire, or weapons vs armour type, or hit locations belong in a second document of optional rules. Or at the very least, as appendices at the end of the same document.
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I ended up being out of town for work stuff for the last week and I forgot to load my gaming related stuff onto any mobile device, so I did some thinking and took some notes, but didn't have my files with me. Here's the outline that I'm expanding into point form and then into paragraphs: Hit locations - Why? - Alternatives for those same goals Modifications to ship building - Which modules change - Laying out the grid - - Reinforced Hull boxes Modifications to combat - The location check - Aiming at key systems - Applying damage - - Reinforced Hull boxes - Critical hits Dials you need to set before play - What destroyed boxes really mean - - How vulnerable are the crew or passengers? - Shield options - - Directional shields - - Shield piercing weapons
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I'm split on it as I love miniatures so much and have been enjoying the miniature wargaming rules that take RPG elements and add them back into miniatures. It's probably best to take a miniature game and drift it in an RPG direction than to add miniature elements to an RPG to the point the characters become board game pawns. Also, the link in your signature doesn't seem to be working. To bring this back around to the initial post who was more interested in genre and categories than abstract approaches to play or on what level participants make decisions, I'd say that BRP is strong for most genres except when the goal becomes creating fiction in play. Any stories that arise from play will do so naturally and forcing genre stories out of play won't be well supported by BRP. So BRP will work well for any genre expectation where the types of things the characters are, what they do and what they interact with are enough to scratch the itch whereas it will do poorly for any genre where the expectation is more related to story structure or plot. Well, unless the GM/Keeper/Referee is willing to railroad things through, but then that's working despite the system rather than because of it.
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There are definitely players out there that enjoy making decisions based on system elements, but even their preferences will only go so far when the system produces results that require further system based decisions which produce more system based decisions and so on. At some level, it's always good when the whole resolution process gets back to the point: the description of what's going on. I'm a big miniature wargaming fan, but I've grown away from using maps and miniatures with RPGs. I find they replace description too much. I much prefer sketch maps to get people on the same page when needed and then back to describing rather than moving a playing piece. I'm confident that if you bolted on a miniature framework to BRP it would work quite well, but one of it's strengths, as is, is that it works so very well without one. As the resolution system is based on resolving what the characters do when the players say they do it.
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That's pretty much how my variant system is going to end up. I'll probably use aimed shot rules where you take a penalty to hit but be able to zero in on things a bit better.
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I figured there'd be more "spot rules" for underground environments. Thanks for the info on the combat system. RQ6 has an implementation of d100 combat that gives a bit more mechanical support for a variety of actions beyond just "I attack." Sounds promising for dungeon fantasy.
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So it what ways does the Combat chapter differ from RQ6?
