NathanIW
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Everything posted by 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?
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I've always thought it was a weird concept that doesn't actually mesh with Glorantha's strengths. I've never been one for meta plots or huge world changing events caused in other dimensions and the actual cultures, potential for conflict and adventurer areas of Glorantha are just so damn good, why you'd want to leave them for a virtual reality metaplot is beyond me. I'm going to suggest The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H.P. Lovecraft for the right feel, but it obviously doesn't have the "you can change reality by doing stuff in this other dimension" aspect that heroquesting in Glorantha has. Some may find this reductionist, but the easiest way to emulate myth in play is to concentrate on the creation of just-so stories. For example, in the well known Genesis myth, it tells a story about why women experience pain in childbirth, why men must work hard in the fields doing agriculture and why men are ostensibly in charge. This mythological curse of Adam & Even eating the forbidden fruit. It's not a real explanation at all, but a "just so" story to justify it without actually explaining it. So when you heroquest, do the same thing. Look at what you do and then think about how you can use that as a "just so" story to explain something about the world. If you were doing a genesis heroquest, perhaps you prevent Eve from eating the fruit first, but Adam still eats it and then gives it to Eve (reversing the normal order of the story). The end result then would be that births become pain free, men still do all the work in the fields, but women are now in charge of society in general. You take a current myth, look for the "just so" structure and reinterpret acts in play into a new reality. Not my cup of tea. For me, it's all about the specifics. I think Call of Cthulhu is actually better with hit locations than without as it emphasizes human frailty a lot better.
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I'm going to answer the question on a more abstract level. There's an approach to play that most people would find some variation of in the core of many RPGs. It goes something like this: 1 - GM describes a situation that either requires or invites the characters to respond. 2 - Players describe the actions and words of those characters in response to the situation 3 - GM (primarily) applies the rules system as needed to resolve those described actions. 4 - GM describes new situation that results from their described actions. 5 - Go to step 2. It's an ongoing cycle of description and resolution. A system works great for this type of play when the resolution system keeps pointing you back at the description. A system works poorly for this type of play when the resolution systems keeps pointing you to further resolution system elements and takes a long time to get back to the description. BRP is the kind of system that keeps pointing you back to the description. The percentile system is intuitive and even the more complex options for combat keep pointing back to description elements rather than rules subsystems. I hope that made sense.
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So I think option 4 is best now that I've given it some thought. It makes for a starker contrast between military ships and civilian ships. The way I'd lay a ship out is to ask what systems are next to one another (if you care). If you don't care, then just fill up the grid and call it good. It's still a major abstraction, but it's got some element of deckplan layout. The placement of reinforced hull squares (extra hit points from your system) end up containing and segmenting important systems. So if the engine room has an ® square after it, you can't have damage cascade into the weapon systems with the first shot unless you end up first boring through the structural bulkheads. I have these transparent page protectors and each ship will go inside them and then be written on with wet erase or dry erase markers. The thing to figure out next is what does it mean for the whole system for one of it's module squares to have been damaged by an attack? If you have 5 engine module hit points and after shields and armour gets bypassed it takes 2 damage, what does that mean? Do you have a chance for engine failure? Roll on some sort of engine damage chart? Lose 40% of your speed? If all 5 boxes get filled in, then we know that every part of the system has taken damage and we can probably assume complete non-function. So I need to figure this out for other parts of the ship. If you have 4 squares of cockpit or bridge and 2 get damage, what does that mean for the pcs or npcs that are in the cockpit or bridge area? Is it exposed to vaccuum? Are they killed in an explosion? Is there a chance of damage? Are consoles exploding like in star trek: So basically I need to go through the document and figure out what happens when a system take some damage, most of it takes damage and all of it takes damage and how to relate it to the description of the ship and where the characters are aboard the ship. My personal preference is for a grittier approach where you better be wearing a containment/environmental suit if you're in combat because you never know where exposure to the vacuum can occur once you start blasting at each other with lasers, plasma cannons and missiles. Another approach would be to assume that the crew are relatively safe and the damage grid only represents the loss of function of a given part of a system, not damage to that area. So if you lose all the cockpit/bridge boxes it doesn't necessarily mean the bridge has become scoured off and exposed to the vacuum, just that the lights are going all dark and consoles and exploding and you're functionally disconnected from the ship.
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In Glorantha, isn't there a broo that is to the wild broos as the wild broos are to the feral broos? I believe he's actually a leader, maybe even literate, not filty or careless and teaches other broos his ways. Ralzarkark? I think there are also intillegent Broo princes in Doraster. Like INT 16 smart guys. A couple of these guys commanding the broo rabble would be far, far scarier than broo that just hijack ships for each journey.
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Got back into RQ2 a little while ago and am running it in Glorantha using late 70s and early 80s material. I got MW, RQ6, BGB, Renaissance and a bunch of other BRP related material and I find they're all pretty much interchangeable with some tweaking. As for Glorantha, mythology, history and comparative religion is right up my alley, so it clicked with me immediately. I get that there's this facet of the game where you heroquest into what are effectively other dimensions, but I find that so much less interesting than BRP based play in the lives of people that are part of cultures, tribes, cults, etc.,.
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I will. The extra hit points for a tough ship is currently what I'm thinking about. My ideas: 1)Just include them as extra modules in the grid that don't do anything if they are taken out. if you have lots of them, you have a higher chance of them getting hit and no systems getting damaged just from the mathematical odds. 2)They are separate boxes that must be taken out before damage goes to the grid. This makes them incredibly good and makes the difference between a military craft and a civilian craft with armour bolted on rather dramatic. 3)They are boxes in the grid and when they would be checked off they also reverse the direction the damage is recorded. Since damage always goes from left to right and then wraps around just like reading this text, if you place one right before a key system, then it's protected from anything other than a direct hit as any damage that flows into the reinforced bulkhead (extra HP) will destroy that bulkhead but then go to the next box in the opposite direction. And if you really want a system protected, put two or more reinforced bulkheads before that system. 12345678 1 rEEErLLL 2 rSSSSQQQ 3 rCCCHHHH 4 rHMMMMMM So if the ship gets hit for 4 damage that passed through the armour and a d4 and a d8 is rolled and a 2, 7 is rolled, the crew quarters (Q) will be taken out but the bulkhead will prevent any damage to the Cockpit © as the reinforced bulkhead ® will cause the last point of damage to go to 2, 6 instead of 3,2. 12345678 1 rEEErLLL 2 rSSSS[color=red]4[B]1[/B]2[/color] 3 [color=red]3[/color]CCCHHHH 4 rHMMMMMM 4) As above, but each reinforced hull spot would have a corresponding extra box like in option 2) and when damage hits an ® it leaves the grid and goes to the extra boxes before continuing along. 12345678 1 rEEErLLL 2 rSSSSQQQ 3 rCCCHHHH 4 rHMMMMMM rrrrr Same damage, same spot looks like this: 12345678 1 rEEErLLL 2 rSSSSQ[COLOR="#FF0000"][B]1[/B]2[/COLOR] 3 [COLOR="#FF0000"]3[/COLOR]CCCHHHH 4 rHMMMMMM [COLOR="#FF0000"]4[/COLOR]rrrr I hope the examples make sense. Whatever approach I go for, as you can see, it's a major departure from really tough ships where you don't have much chance of system damage until half HP are gone. I'm also thinking of a much simplified system to handle unimportant ships. While I'm fine with these location rolls and marking off boxes, not everyone will be. The original system that inspired my thinking was found in the Manhunter RPG published in 1993. While I had lots of fun with that game, it's not something I'd recommend tracking down. In that system grids were always the same size and if you had a larger ship you simply bought more grids. It had some problems with the odds of different locations getting weighted wrongly by incomplete grids, but the basic idea was fast and cut through some of the location problems. I pulled my gurps box out of storage as I'm going to want to reread the horror supplement as my sci-fi game is going to be about scary things in space, so I'll see if a copy of spaceships is in there and give it a look. I'll make it a priority.
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Just so you know, this won't stand up. You can't copyright rules at all. A person can read this and produce the exact same mechanics as long as they use their own words. And 30% difference in mechanics or feel is impossible to assess. I get that you want people to credit you if they use this or are inspired by it, but the law simply doesn't work that way. Also, there is nothing unique to stratifying social classes and assigning them a resource value that can be used in game. Pretty much every wealth system that doesn't deal with actual currency values takes an approach very much like that.
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First of all, it's a definite departure from space opera type ships for the land of horrible death traps waiting to be split open to the vacuum. I'm still working on it from a vague memory, but basically each system becomes a location where its size equals the number of modules it has. It's a location roll system weighted by the proportions of each system in modules. The basic premise is that if an attack gets through both shields and armour, it will damage some part of the ship. Whether it hits a weapon system, takes out the cockpit or punches a hole into the cargo bay. The grid thing itself might actually be a stupid idea, but basically you put the modules onto a grid where the size of each side is the closest it can be to an available die size and the total number of squares is as close as possible to the total number of modules. So if you have 43 modules in a ship, 8x6 is the way to go and you'd have 5 dead modules to put in as you like to make all the ship systems contiguous. For the systems that aren't bought as modules but might take up space anyway, you'd add on some squares beforehand. Or have a single extra square that represents these miscellaneous systems. You basically find the space the damage originates (in this example by rolling a d8 and a d6) and then marking off damaged squares. A damaged square is disabled and a special success has a chance for a catastrophic effect. So if 4 damage gets through and hits the last space on the cargo area and three more in the science lab, it means the shot exposed the cargo area to the vacuum and wrecked the science lab. As you can see, ships can become incredibly vulnerable and a lucky roll can scour the command bridge or cockpit off of a ship in one hit. There are some things that just don't work well with it yet. Like buying more HP to make the ship tougher. Where do those go? Do they just take up grid spaces as "reinforced bulkheads" and any damage that hits them is ignored? I haven't thought all of this through yet. That makes sense. In the end, it's just a matter of what people put on the character sheet. I didn't recall what the actual rulebook term for the skill was. I just thought artillery was about indirect fire weapons and didn't realize it was also the skill for ship weapons. Sure, I'll post what I come up with as I do. I was planning on making a campaign document so I have no problem with sharing stuff. The basic idea was that the personal shield would have a shield value and a recovery value just like yours do for star ships, but they'd be a suit you wear. I just haven't hammered out the particulars yet. How strong are they? How well do they integrate with other armour technology? What about EMR interference for other technology? Is their use so easy to detect you are screaming your location when you turn them on? Do they react differently when hit by an energy weapon rather than a physical weapon? I'm definitely interested in seeing it once you're done. I intend on stealing from as many sources as possible. I got the free PDF of Stars Without Number (a traveller type game that's basically D&D in space) and I find the system in there to be pretty good. I'll ignore the rules stuff and just use the random tables with BRP and adjust as needed.
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Some further thoughts: Hit locations. I've been a fan since the RQ days of BRP. So I'm probably going to integrate them into ship combat as well. I know it's an extra roll and that it can make lucky shots (like a cockpit or bridge hit) even deadlier, but I'm currently not into play where PCs are protected from things like that. I have good memories of building starships in the early 90s RPG Manhunter which organized ships into grids for (relatively) easy location rolls (roll x, roll y, consult grid). So I might do something like that here. I'll probably integrate damaging specific systems into this as well. I'm also probably going to call artillery either weapons systems or gunnery as artillery makes me think of indirect fire weapons that arc a shell high into the air to come down on their target from above. That's a nitpick though.
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I'm starting a sci-fi game and cobbling together rules from various sources and I'm definitely going to actually be using your document and ship system in game. I'm also going to use the shields system as the basis for personal energy shields for person-to-person combat.
