 March 13, 2012 - 2:39am | I remember that some 25 years ago, I scaled the Knight Hawks starship gun damage to fit the character-scale damage. Although rolling about 40 d20 for a basic Proton battery attack took some time, it was quite a fun -- suddenly, starship armament really produced a punch. Also, the scaled Hull Points were quite impressive. On the con side, the system had been unbalanced, of course, just for fun. I even remember there had been a "Cold Light" weapon (if you have ever read Mark Brandis, you know what I mean). Did anyone work out such a scaled damage system for vehicles and crafts properly, while keeping the character damage as written in the core rulebook? Last game played: Somewhere in the 80th (Vrusk by heart) -- fond of Jugger, a "post-apocalyptic" sport |
 March 13, 2012 - 2:23pm | I have a system I'm working on, I'll be out of town for a week but here's from memory. Goals
Character scale as the base A gyrojet rifle does 3d10 damage to another character.
For vehicles and spaceships I've been kicking around this idea use the character scale as a base and the following;
What I like - you are using the exact same dice roll with a multiplier. 3d10, 3d10 and 3d10. Next is to address the different scales firing at eachother. Character
Vehicle
Spaceship
If you go "down" a level is x5, two levels its x10. If you go "up" a level is minus x5, two levles its minus x10. "minus x5"  Of course, this is assuming spaceship weapons are more powerful than vehicles. I'm leaning towards creating weapons and not labeling them vehicle or spaceship or embankment. In fact, I need to finish my Non-Civilian Duty Spaceships - which should bring some of these ideas to light. Anyway... random thoughts by w00t! Lots of room for improvement. :-) |
 March 13, 2012 - 3:01pm | Somewhere on this site is a thread where we were talking about his. I'll have to see if I can remember it or dig it up. I have possibly a slightly different take than w00t and I think in that thread I postulated that 1 HP = 3000 structure points. From that you could scale up or down from character weapons and spaceship weapons. I'll see if I can find that thread. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
March 13, 2012 - 3:16pm | Found it. It was in this thread about powering the ship when the engines have been taken out and how much power the ship's weapons used. Refer to: Powering the Ship The convsersion there (1 HP = 3000 structure points) going the other way would say that a ship that does 1d10 HP of damage does 3000d10 of damage on a character scale. You do not want to get hit with a laser battery.  Of course if you use a different scaling between hull points and structure points you get a different damage scaling.On the flip side is a house rule I use, I say that a Pod laser turrent (basically a short range laser battery from one of the Dragon or Ares magazine articles), which does 1d10 HP in space, when operating in atmosphere functions like a heavy laser set on 20d10 but with double the range. In truth it should probably be more damage and greater range but it prevents the players from completely vaporizing everything while strafing targets with their ship. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
March 13, 2012 - 6:17pm | That was some good discussion - you can see ppl who like numbers and ppl who abstract. |
March 14, 2012 - 2:33am | Very interetsing, thanks! The different scales remind me of the Star Wars RPG, I think they used a similar system.
I think I used the Heavy Laser as a base to calculate the strength of spaceships. A Heavy Laser should be able to do some serious damage to a fighter, which is something like a bigger armoured vehicle really, so it may cause 1d5 damage (not too accurate, but this takes the simplicity of the SF damage system into account). Could have been 1d2 as well,of course, so one shot might not have been deadly. Equaling 20d10 (Hvy Laser character damage) to 1d5, a Laser Battery would do some 40d10 damage to a character (if scaled proportionally). Or, the other way round, a 5 HullP fighter would have some 200 Hit Points (not very much I have to admit, for the better feeling I granted it 400 HP). And yes I loved dice rolling ... ;) Just a offtopic side note: Is there a reason that I can't see my posts after submittung them and logging out, or is this due to some reloading issue in my browser(s)? Last game played: Somewhere in the 80th (Vrusk by heart) -- fond of Jugger, a "post-apocalyptic" sport |
 December 27, 2015 - 8:14pm | If you're basing it on character scale, then I suggest the following set of simple multipliers (labels explained beneath): Type PER VL VH SL SH SH+ PER x1 x.5 - - - - VL x2 x1 x.5 - - - VH kill/x4 x2 x1 x.5 - - SL kill/x4 kill/x4 x2 x1 x.5 - SH kill kill kill/x4 x2 x1 x.5 SH+ kill kill kill kill/x4 x2 x1 (-) no effect (kill/) If it doesn't make the appropriate resist, it's dead, Jim. If it does, it still may be dead from points. (kill) It's dead Jim. End of discussion. (PER) Personal weapons up to Heavy weapons per AD (VL) Vehicle Light (Heavy Weapons per AD) - Machine Guns, Grenades, RPGs/recoilless rifle rounds (VH) Vehicle Heavy [new] - Aircraft canon, Tank/Heavy Artillery/Naval guns (SL) Spaceship Light - Space fighter, Assault Scout pod weapons (SH) Spaceship Heavy - spaceship equivalent of Naval Guns (SH+) Spaceship Superheavy [new] - planetary defense scale weapons It is possible to do combinations. Examples:
Comments? |
December 28, 2015 - 7:46pm | Ok, an alternate I worked up, working scales into one continuum. No separate scales for spaceships.
KEY Weapon Types PR - personnel - man portable weapons, pistols, rifles, light (7.62) machine guns, grenades VL - vehicle, light - heavy, non-man portable personnel weapons heavy (.50) MGs, mortars, LAW rockets, recoilless rifles, etc) VH - vehicle, heavy - heavy mounted weapons, tank cannon/artillery, 20/40mm rotary cannon, light naval guns (5-8' equivalent), heavy man-portable/mounted missiles (TOW, etc) VH+ Vehicle, super-heavy - large naval cannon (10-18 inch), superheavy missiles/bombs (V-2, cruise missile, etc) VH++ vehicle, super-heavy+ - large emplacement weapons/planetary defense weapons (WWII Schwerer Gustav [900mm] equivalent) Protection types PR - flack jackets, body armor, etc VL - normal, unarmored vehicles (cars, normal trucks, aircraft [inc most fighters]) VH - armored vehicles or equivalent (dump-trucks/cement trucks, APC/AFV/tanks, A-10 Warthog, Apache/HIND helicopters, normal ships, etc) VH+ - large armored ships (cruisers, battleships) VH++ - heavily armored fortifications/battlestations Result Types # - damage multiplier KILL/4 - Make DC. If fail, “It's dead, Jim”. If pass, 4x damage (may be dead anyways). KILL - ”It's dead, Jim”. Don't bother to roll. |
 December 29, 2015 - 7:53pm | Moot's original quick method reminds me of how other games dealt with the scale between humans to vehicles to starships. Palladium just up the scale to the mega-damage weapons and it's been scale creeping up from there ever since. Where Mekton Zeta had a more reasonable that characters had hit points and vehicles had hits when dealling with damage to vehicles 25 hits was about 1 kill. But then this scale for vehicles was scaleable for whatever you were using it for. Most small vehicles were scored by hits, the larger vehicles like tanks and mechs and fighters would take kills from 2 to 22. Ships were just scaled up from that having 200 to 2200 kills, and the weapons were scaled appropreately as well. Then this ends up allowing to create really insane sized ships or weapons. I know there were people that scaled Star Frontier ships into the game Mekton which is more for anime type games. I'm prefectly fine with Moot's scale seeing as I've played with scales so similar already. In every age, in every place, the deeds of men remain the same. |
December 29, 2015 - 10:09pm | The one problem I had (which is why I got started on this side project) was that they were treating spaceships as a whole other class of vehicles. My sticking point was wondering why a "space battleship" necessarily had to be orders of magnitude tougher than a sea-going battleship (Yamato notwithstanding). So I took the original base (personal weapons scale) and started with the tinkering. After defining the weapons and objects categories I had to ask the basic question: if X hit Y what would be the expected result? Not math formula or that sort of thing, but what is the reasonable chance that if you get hit by a 105mm HEAT tank round that you aren't going to be a cloud of gore and a couple of legs (if that)? Kind'a put itself together after that. |
