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RPR Archive Tips/Advice Articles: Space Battles

Discussion in 'Role Playing Resource Archive' started by NaboosPrincess, Mar 12, 2006.

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  1. SirakRomar

    SirakRomar Jedi Grand Master star 4

    Registered:
    Mar 30, 2007
    Well, to some questions. An in depth look might come one day . . . perhaps by our stat-using GMs? Guys I know you read it! I am a minor expert, here. Really. Just played a lot of pilots who blow things up ;)



    When you say this could never penetrate the hull because of the DR damage reduction, is there no accumulative effect?Or literally, you could fire these things till the cows come home, and they would not get through?

    Well, you can have lucky hits with 6d10, but I never saw someone throw 6 times a ten. So I guess it´s like hitting a tank with a M16. The guns are not made to get through such a thick armor. Then again I suspect the DR somehow includes the shields already. Otherwise the stats make no sense. But he could hit until the end of day.

    If 5d10 equals 50, does 5d10x3 equal 150?

    There is an argument among GMs what this means. My opinion backed by most book is . . . three bolts are fired each doing 5 ten-sided dices damage accumalated. So three times 5d10 damage. So three times a damage betwen 5 and 50.

    Others say it´s a max of 150. And argue that the x3 reflects scales. The Death Star has something like 5d10x50 as a weapon stat. That is a transaltion from the old d6 system to the new system but not what was meant, I think.

    The Stats

    The d6 stats seem to be realistic. The Saga stats make it far too powerful. The weaponary is fomidable and these ships would devastate most common enemies from later eras. I have the Golans in d6 in the Thrawn-Sourcebooks. I´ll do a comparison later, but I think the shields of the Golan might be a serious poroblem for a Accumulator. We´ll see.
     
  2. Saintheart

    Saintheart Jedi Grand Master star 6

    Registered:
    Dec 16, 2000
    At the risk of going into nerdspasm here, a Golan station should be a big problem for most capital ship assaults. If the best EU authors are anything to go by, Timothy Zahn basically wrote that a Golan station could take a hell of a lot of punishment from a capital-ship-style assault before succumbing. And Zahn drew a lot of his background and source material from the WEG d6 system. I have many fond memories of running that system (not to mention a lot of leftover d6s as a result of characters getting stronger and stronger... :D )

    I think in trying to work out what the hell different WOTC stats mean you have to contextualise it by the fact WOTC basically ported their d20 D&D system into the Star Wars universe. (IMHO Saga Edition was a test bed for most of their ideas on 4th edition D&D, but I digress.) To that end, it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that DR as applied to Star Wars comes up with some curious results, mostly because it has its origins in D&D, not in WEG's d6 system. Damage Reduction as defined in D&D is a quasi-magical ability that means damage taken which doesn't overcome DR effectively "automatically heals" before anything else happens. So flicking the concept into Star Wars capital ships where you're dealing with, well, metals for DR was always going to be odd. Ergo, don't think of it as shields per se, since once you overwhelm shields in the movies they're lost until they can be recharged. I'd say think of it as sophisticated damage control systems or really good hull patching emergency crews, or something like that -- if you don't do enough damage to overwhelm that, it has no effect since the ship's systems can compensate for it.

    I literally had this scenario come up in Tide of Flames. One of my characters was trying to open a lock, and couldn't, so the question was asked whether she could bash it open. Short answer was no -- because she only had a short sword (a light weapon) and wasn't terribly strong. In numerical terms, she could swing as hard as she could at the lock and even if she hit, she wouldn't break it -- it just wasn't possible. Sounds a bit odd when you consider surely you can chip away at something if you've got the time and inclination, but there it is; it's a mechanic, odd enough in D&D, weirder still when ported to Star Wars, but that's it.

    As for the "5d10 x3 = ?" question ... contextually, WOTC systems (well, D&D at least) tend to multiply the damage when you roll a 20 on a d20 and thereby do a "critical hit" (or a thief gets a good shot in between someone's defences with a "sneak attack", but let's leave that aside.) A critical hit represents a hit that does more damage than usual, in that the critical hit is meant to be a hit to a vital part of the body. Mechanically, it's "roll the d10 five times, add those numbers together, and then multiply by three." In 3.5 D&D some feats were created to get around the fact that this mechanic can result in some sniggeringly low numbers from time to time (fear the mighty barbarian who scores a critical hit and then rolls 1 for his damage dice...)

    Here you've got different multipliers for different
     
  3. DarkLordoftheFins

    DarkLordoftheFins Jedi Grand Master star 5

    Registered:
    Apr 2, 2007
    When it comes to SAGA everybody talks about how the force is handled and decides because of that how good the game is. It is generally ignored that the blaster-combat and ESPECIALLY the space-combat is miniature-like and pretty much a creative ruin.

    I have the stats you need and provide them, Sirak. Give me a day or two . . .
     
  4. Sith-I-5

    Sith-I-5 Force Ghost star 6

    Registered:
    Aug 14, 2002
    I appreciate all the help everyone is giving me on this.

    Sithy
     
  5. LightWarden

    LightWarden Jedi Grand Master star 4

    Registered:
    Oct 11, 2001
    Ok, time to clear things up. First off, a battery is a collection of guns that aims and fires as one unit. Usually it's around two to ten "barrels" (four or five tends to be the norm) much like on battleships (or at least, much like they used to be. I have no idea what navies do nowadays other than the occasional overkill in African waters). The idea is that they don't use each gun to track a different target, they simply focus fire (and no GM in his right mind wants to attack and damage rolls for fifty+ guns) So it's not really three bolts, it's more like fifteen or more (or maybe a few dozen). In Saga Edition, it's an area attack, meaning it just sort of fills the region with fire. In game terms, this region is an area of one square on the battlefield map, meaning if it misses it still does half damage. Given that capital ships move only a few squares in a round, it's a pretty big square. Of course, it can't fill the entire square, since it's hundreds of meters on each side and more of an abstract; if the attack roll is too low (less than 10) or the target has some form of obstruction that causes you to miss, then your volley has either gone wide (usually if you're attacking a personal transport or fighter with your honking big turbolasers) or hits something in the way (like if you're shooting a ship that's hovering uncomfortably close to a much larger ship). Alternatively, if the target in question has Evasion, a miss means it moves fast enough that it's already moved (usually due to some hot-shot pilot at the helm).

    Ok, now on to DR. Saint, you're halfway right. In D&D, DR is a somewhat complicated affair. Back in the earliest editions of D&D, big monsters like powerful demons and demiliches were utterly immune to weapons below a certain bonus (or in the case of certain monsters like werewolves, made of a certain material like silver). The idea was that you had to have an artifact powerful enough to either crack the creature's magical defenses, or leave an injury it couldn't instantly heal, depending on how the DM ran it. Problem is, making something utterly immune to a character (or party)'s primary source of damage has the effect of rendering that character (or party) utterly useless and making it feel too much like a "you must be at least this tall to go on the adventure" thing. It has the effect of utterly stonewalling your adventurers, which is a terrible idea if you're not out to kill them (and if that's the case, not only is it a terrible idea, but you're a terrible person). So WotC mixed things up a bit: instead of absolute immunity, they created damage reduction, where the monster ignored the first X amount of damage from your weapon unless it had a certain property. In their words, "A creature with [damage reduction] ignores damage from most weapons and natural attacks. Wounds heal immediately, or the weapon bounces off harmlessly." Thus you didn't have to run away if you didn't have a silver weapon while facing a werewolf, you were just disadvantaged, but you could still pound on it and hopefully hit it hard enough to either crack the creature's magical defenses, or leave an injury it couldn't instantly heal, depending on how the DM ran it (I usually went with the former just for a unified mechanic). The difference is now that your own strength actually has more of an impact rather than it being entirely decided by what you were carrying in your golf bag of weapons (I am not kidding about the golf bag, you had to have silver, cold iron, good, lawful, chaotic, bludgeoning, piercing and slashing weapons). The problem was that there still was the whole golf bag of weapons (because the reductions were frequently on the order of 10 to 30 points of damage), and they still had a system where you had to have weapons of a certain bonus to bypass the DR (so again with the "you must be this tall" business). So when 3.5e rolled around, they rolled back DR a bit more, reducing the values and making it so that instead of requiring ascending bonuses, it was either DR/magic (requiring a weapo
     
  6. Sith-I-5

    Sith-I-5 Force Ghost star 6

    Registered:
    Aug 14, 2002
    Lightwarden, Sirak, Saintheart, DarkLordoftheFins, thank you all.

    Sheez, Light' your knowledge on the subject is encyclopaedic!

    I am sort of running a solo adventure, but allowing another player's character to come along for the ride, get something to put on his CV/resumé.

    So the specific intention is for the Acclamator to last (hopefully) long enough to knock out part of the Golan's shields, to allow a boarding action with all those LAAT/i gunships, rather than have a sustained slugging match.

    I shall have to go away with the two sets of stats, and these write-ups (thank you again for devoting the time), and see how I can see this playing out.

    Great stuff. And you doubled the thread's page count! :D

    Ooh, hang on. No-one has seen a floor or deck plan for a Golan II, have they? I have no problem making one up.
     
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