hix

@rsanford is too modest to toot his own horn here, so I'll do it. This is over 600 pages of incredibly well-done sci-fi content. Tons of great gear, psionics, vehicles, horrid otherworldly beasts and Forbidden Science. The amount of work that went into this to deliver a free product is insane, and everyone involved should be proud. Great job.

A loose adaptation of ODnD realm rules for a scifi setting.

13 minutes ago, Andrew Collas Presents... said:

save me a LOT of time

what @rsanford said is the jist of it. if you already know how advantage works, just ignore the bonus. Luck and its associated metacurrency is also a new mechanic, but can be derived the same way. when 6e says a characteristic, it's the lowest number of the 7e set.

44 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

winds up relegating the PCs to spectators

This is what draws the line between a good game idea and a good story for me. The crux of the session should be player choice, and the consequences that come from it.

14 minutes ago, Baron Wulfraed said:

definition of "self-loading weapons"

It gets pretty hairy when you start thinnking about it. A game designer has to draw lines somewhere.

The primary goal of suppressive fire is to allow move-and-fire actions like bounding overwatch or initial troop placement. Suppressive fire forces the enemy to take cover from the fire of group 1 while group 2 moves on the battlefield. How do you determine how much area a SF attack can cover? my rule of thumb for burst fire is that the targets must be within 3 hexes (~10m). SF doesn't require (much) aiming, and thus should be able to cover a larger area.

How do you handle it? Autofire rules mention it, but it's not defined as such. We can assume a contemporary or future setting. Here's how my group is handling it:

Mooks under suppressive fire (SF) must go prone/take cover or take damage. Uses a full clip, can cover a large area of map with no chance to hit unless mooks don't dive. Anybody who doesn't have a name dies if hit. Only usable by weapons capable of burst fire.

1 hour ago, Ian Absentia said:

orthodoxy takes the day!

Saucy, but he has a point. The Mythos as it was formed was a collaboration between the various writers of Weird Tales et al. Killing each other off in their stories, expanding and playing off of each other the same way a roleplaying group does. A genre is a set of conventions, mashing them up can be as much fun as playing them straight. The Cthulhu Invictus line should have some cool ideas for stuff to do in a Classical setting.

22 minutes ago, Warframe44 said:

I'm not sure what you mean by this.

I was thinking of "facing" more than vector. A fighter, let's say, can reverse/adjust facing with very little thrust required and no resistance. Like in Babylon5/2000sBattlestar Galactica where they flip on a dime. As oppposed to naval combat where turning/facing is a big deal.

58 minutes ago, Questbird said:

distances where the combatants can't see each other

alright let's make some wild assumptions:

Lasers do damage with heat, needing contact over duration to do significant burn. So you have to be close to keep contact.

Railguns do instant kinetic damage, but because of their relatively slow speed have less range.

Missiles/torpedoes do instant damage but have range limited by fuel. they can also be detected, so you can't shoot from too far away.

what else ya got?

20 minutes ago, GothmogIV said:

it's challenging!

This is one of the most important parts of the puzzle to me. Yeah you can be a big damn hero, but a punk with an AR can still take you out. Changes the way that the players interact with the world.

2 minutes ago, Ian Absentia said:

matching ship speed and vector

matching speed is a matter of ship positioning and moves in the Chase system to stay within a certain Range

matching V sounds like a white-knuckle mano-a-mano dogfighter pilot affair, and should be settled with an opposed Piloting roll. I can imagine a series of opposed Pilot checks determining attack and defense initiative in a fluid way. This sounds very interesting.

Opposed checks between competent parties tends to end in a tie with both succeeding. Would this be the "even odds" situation, giving neither bonus nor penalty?

18 minutes ago, Ian Absentia said:

effects of momentum

yeah, I have used Weapon Range to account for this. Of course the tungsten or iron ball fired by the railgun will continue moving indefinitely in the void, but the relatively low speed means it's only accurate within a certain range for a moving target.

Missiles are another can of worms, still going back and forth on whether they should have movement and a presence on the battlemap, or to just keep it simple as an attack that can be dodged by the pilot.

How to use the existing chase rules in the black void of space, some ramblings:

1. There's no top speed in space, so the speed stat is not needed. Accel is king, perhaps mitigated by the mass carried if you want to get that crunchy.

2. No friction and preservation of momentum means no turning rules are needed, but the "moves" table in the chase section would be altered.

3. The Handling stat should determine the "class" of ship, and keep them in line performance-wise.

4. The abstract ranges are perfect for space battles, as the distances are usually too weird to imagine.

What else ya got?

Rifts does it well, portals to the cowboy universe, alien planets, fantasy realms appear in all of the above, linking the worlds to each other.

why do I need the "slot" designation here? Don't magic points do the job better?

Advanced Sorcery for Magic World takes a stab at emulating the Ars Magica style of freeform casting. A poster here made an alternate version which is really good, should be in the download section.

Classic Fantasy is d100 AD&D, specifically emulating the TSR game.

@Belisarreally easy, Mythras uses the same basic concepts, it's main divergences being initiative, skill list, derived stats. M-Space is a really cool toolbox to build any kind of scifi world you want, and as such is modular and highly modifiable.

You can pretty much run most OSR stuff as written as far as hp/damage goes, converting armor and skills using something like https://www.basicfantasy.org/showcase.cgi?sid=22

In Space Cowboys, we do this, allowing multiple actions. This quickly led to the fast guys acting 5 or 10 times a round, so we added SR to guns: 1 to pistols, 2 to sniper/anti-materiel/Mellowlink guns that are harder to swing around or you have to set up. This gets most players acting 2 or 3 times a round, which is about the right tempo for a gunfight, for my money.

Sarah Newton's adventure "Escape from the Slavelands" in BRP Adventures has a system to figuring out unidentified tech. This is a BRP adaptation of a Gamma World thing iirc, but might work well for what you are doing.

5 hours ago, peorthyr said:

stress rolls

Why not use the sanity rules?

Updating my game now to have three different throw skills, should submariners be their own skill or use an underhand throw augmented by sidearm? Just kidding @Baron Wulfraed I actually found this post very interesting.

Here's how I do it. I play on hex grids, so ymmv. A missed grenade lands d3 hexes away from the intended target hex. Roll a d6 to see which direction, each number representing the side of a hex.