Recently I've been mucking about with my Mongoose Traveller quite a bit, but also revisiting the classic Trav books. Further, I also got lucky and picked up a copy of Space Master Privateers at the half price store (and subsequently several supplements from amazon...), which led me to discover my copy of Silent Death: New Millenium (which is linked haphazardly to Space Master...).
I seem to find myself in a quandary, in that none of these games, and others I'll discuss here, satisfies my itch for good old Sci-fi adventure with starships. Rather than post a monster wall of text discussing in detail, I'll graciously allow you to infer and deduct what my 'perfect game' would be like as I point out the problems with each in turn.
Traveller:
It turns out that I have a lot more experience with Traveller than I thought, including owning the main book for Mark Miller's Traveller (T4?) for well over a decade, and lots of play in GDW games over the years, to include Megatraveller the New Era. Mongoose may, or may not be 'the best' version, but it has, to me, the most sensible, appealing layout for character creation that makes it readily accessible. So too, almost every book they've released has had an effort to cram new gems for play, not just more blocks of careers (company rules, Dilettante Portfolios... you get the idea). Of course, they've REALLY skimped on artwork for later books for the most part, and several of the last releases are... sub-par. One wonders why no just lives on evergreen production with new releases when 'inspired'... like a better version of palladium.
That aside, Traveller isn't without issues for me. I'll leave off a long debate over merits of forcing lifepaths down our throats for another time. I'd prefer to focus on Ships. Now I like... even LOVE... Traveller ships, I do. However: One does need to stick to either default, underarmed civilian freighters or massive military capital ships in order for it to make sense. It doesn't scale well at all. Not the way guns are treated, and not the way armor is treated. I had an analysis somewhere (never posted) about how naval strategy in Traveller at the small end, the 'player end' of the pool was insanely simplistic, but I'd rather not rehash it just now. Lets just point out that the most heavily armored ship in the core book, the Gazelle Close Escort (400 tons, 8 armor), can be 'beaten' in armor by a sub-100 ton smallcraft cheaply and easily due to the way armor is treated (I could, for example, theory-craft a 20 ton fighter with 12 points of armor, and have in fact designed 50-ton 'support ships' that were running BSD to 15, making them essentially laser and nuke proof, slap a Particle Beam turret on that sucker (legal!) and it can also carve up the much bigger ship!). Now, a detailed analysis of the situation vis-a-vis armor would have to discuss surface area vs volume (going back to square-cubed law dragons...), power and so forth, but in essence we ARE talking about taking river runabouts and using them to shoot holes in naval frigates, while being able to bounce return fire, here.
Space Master:Privateers:
While I have fond memories of OWNING rolemaster, universally I hated PLAYING rolemaster. Sad but true. It does appear, however, that rules wise, they tried to tone the numbers way down, making the game at least resemble realism at the lower scales (note: I recall dimly a MERP game, eons ago, where the 1st level elf archer (me), with as close to maxed out bow use as possible, had something like a 20% chance of shooting a deer successful under optimal conditions. Maybe the GM was a dick on target numbers...). However, That largely comes down to if you like, or dislike RM style games, and is largely beyond the scope of discussion (see also: Trav Life Paths!).
First up, the setting is essentially balls-stupid. I won't get into deep discussion of the astro-politics, which are not horrifically broken, or the 'architects' seeding millions of worlds to evolve similar races. Whatever.
I'm talking about how the seven alien races are pure anthro, with a side order of stupid. You have big cat men who are apparently clumsy (no gymnastics skills...), you have giant bear men who are all pacifistic vegetarians (serious, did the writer learn anything about bears that didn't come from a teddy ruxpin commercial?), you have psychic bugs and samurai wolves and then you have... umm... oorts, who apparently evolved from a species that was wiped out on earth in the chixculub impact, called, helpfullly, Braanths. Note: Humans have evolved on hundreds of worlds, just like everything else. Now, since we have massively parallel evolution (which, btw, I'm fine with. Even anthro I could handle...), why do we have such stunning monocultural parallel evolution? And if the Oorts got their name from Earth humans who discovered their science ships in the Oort cloud, why don't we have what every other species (including themselves) called them for the millennia before Earth humans were on the scene? Eh, whatever. That's actually the very least of my beefs. I can IGNORE talking bear me that never eat meat and won't even fight to defend themselves.
I can't ignore that SM introduces Tech Levels in an established, written setting (complete with starter game setting, to whit: Privateers against the evil empire), and then proceeds to give us every bit of technology under the sun under any remote Sci-fi setting, expecting us to weed through the TLs and find whatever is appropriate for OUR GAME. THE FUCK!!!!.
Serious: The main book feels largely like a reference book, an index if you will, for the supplements to come later and explain all this shit. So you do get fairly detailed information on teh setting up front, then solid creation rules and combat rules... and then it peters out to nothing when you get to... ahem.. tools. Like guns, armor and most especially... space ships. Fine, I can handle it, I've played D&D for decades, after all. Aside from that, there is a minor layout issue, in that you literally have two chapters on picking a race divided by the combat rules chapter, and then again with classes, or careers. Its in there, but its counter-intuitive to look it up twice to get what you need.
Of course the supplements don't help as much as you might think. I don't recall seeing one for 'Privateers, the Setting', so you're still pretty much sorting through the equipment trying to figure out if the evil Empire uses blasters, plasma guns, or high-TL assault rifles (Plasma, I believe, from the chapter fictions... on that note, the main book has two characters which are impossible in the rules featured very prominantly: An android pretending to be human, and a 'falsie', which is unexplained. The Robotics book covers the android, and another book explains that falsies are combat clones addicted to a combat drug (which is itself not covered in teh rules! Layers of failure, now). Note that the equipment guide still doesn't solve this, as it merely repeats the main book 'chapter' on equipment with a tiny bit more text and adds pages of crit charts, if that's your thing, being otherwise utterly useless.
Which brings me to my big beef, starships. It is pretty damn hard to ensure a party has a starship to start the game, aside from GM fiat (which would break the (almost) purely random assignment of ships by the system...), which is fine, because aside from some rules on how ship combat works, and a couple of one man fighter craft, there are NO SHIPS in the book. Getting lucky on an assets role (or for that matter, a Privateer career role) and getting a 'freighter' means literally that you can write on your character sheet that you own a frieghter and nothing more. Wow. Now, I can only assume that one of the supplements (too expensive for me to buy casually...) probably covers starships in some detail, but really?? Really?
So far as satisfying my ship building itch? Utter and complete Fail.
Which brings me to
Silent Death: New Millenium
I have no idea how this book sat on top of my bookshelf for, what, two years untouched? An hour after I cracked the cover I was nearly hooked. Sure, Its not an RPG but a flight simulator tactical game. It is, more or less, Car Wars in space. Sure, its linked to Space Master (the player's guide, for example, lists several advantages with optional rules for SD), though with its own unique setting, that I know very, very little about. I did try to get the PDFs on the larger ships, but the company selling them took my money from Paypal (only) and never actually let me download the files, so I can't actually refer to how well it scales.
Now, Silent Death isn't the perfect ship game, per se. It is designed around the fighter level (and yes, freighters are included, oddly enough, see SM:P, above), capping out at 'gunships', which more or less hit Traveller scale ships, only with an appropriate number of guns. Now, Silent Death doesn't do, for obvious reasons, ship maps, or really heavy engineering, but tinkering with, and building, ships with a variety of options is both dead simple and remarkably fun. Ironically, the rules scale is closer to Traveller than Space Master, and if I get really wonky one day, I may actually hypothesize a mashup between the two. I'd love to get my PDFs for bigger ships, and hell, if not for the now three month delay, maybe some of the models and actually play this sucker!
Thousand Suns:
For the most part, I don't mind much Thousand Suns. It seems like a low budget version of Traveller, but without some of the hang ups that irritate me, replacing them with new hangups that irritate me. Let me just focus on the starship supplement here.
First, while the book is fairly fat, actually designing ships is crammed deep into the back. I've fallen asleep a few times trying to read the main book to get to the part I actually bought it for, so I'm not entirely sure what's in there, but I suspect its long winded crap about the history of the setting's starship tech and some talking down to the readers about what a laser is, or something. (Well, that and starship rules... whatever)
THe actual ship design was something of a let down. Too many entrees, at least early on, rely on percentages of the ship's size, which reduces ship 'design' down to sliding scales of otherwise identical-ness. This actually stremlines ship construction too far down for my tastes. For example: You buy one of three classes/types of armor, and the total tonnage is a fraction of your ship's mass. Period. Now, Traveller's armor may be somewhat simple and thus difficult to scale well (see again: 20 ton fighters that have as much practical armor as massive dreadnaughts of several hundred thousand tons), but this is just breathtakingly oversimplified. I will assume that the rules cover the scaling (as you buy ship hulls in scaled catagories...), though I see no signs of scaling in the weapon rules (weapons have fixed tons). As I doubt I will ever play this, I guess I'll never know. Now, you might ask 'why bother reviewing it here if you won't play it?'... well, I might point out that I was actually inspired to play Traveller from their ship building rules. I was not inspired, perhaps anti-inspired by Thousand Suns ship building rules.
Serenity:
Not really a ship building system. Seriously, I may be one of the few people who enjoys the basic rules here, having played Sovereign Stone before 3E came out, but adding quirks and 'character stats' does not a starship make. Fun to play? Perhaps, but nothing that satisfies the inner engineer lurking within my cold, black, clockwork soul.
Star Wars Sage Edition:
I'm not going to muck about with the various D20 Star Wars (or rather, research to refresh my memory... but I recall being underwhelmed by the D20 Future rules, which I think were similar...), and I actually have zero knowledge of the WEG starwars ship building, if any existed, though I didn't mind the game.
Saga has a good enough system, though one not suitable to building per se. THere are dozens of ships, perhaps more, scattered throughout the books, and then a simple, reasonably flexible gear customization system which does, in fact, cover starships. While not a design system in the strictest sense of the word, it does fill a similar need. Oftentimes its not so much that players can't sit down and design their starship from scratch (which is fun, but impractical on a character level...), its that they can't effectively customize the ship they have, outside of GM fiat. The Saga system actually handles this need better than most of the others (though tweaking a Silent Death ship is actually not too difficult, given the limits of a game designed for tactical play only).
GURPS:
I actually like GURPS, though I do admit freely that it is heavily constrained by an overdesigned character creation system, and one with poor layout at that. Again, I'd like to focus on the sci-fi aspects of the game. In this GURPS does alright for itself. While not giving a setting (or rather, giving a tool box and some pre-built settings), and having a TL system... the TL system actually works well, with clear divides between levels. I still think the second edition Ultratech book was laid out the best, with TLs broken down into chapters, but they abandoned that almost twenty years ago, so 'spilt milk', etc.
Personally: if you can get past the clunky creation system, and the fact that combat is insanely divided into 'one second' chunks (thus necessitating multiple 'rounds' to do even modestly complex actions that most games bundle into single actions... like aiming and firing a gun), and the clearly punitive 'realism', GURPS is admirably suited to Sci-fi gaming, more so than it is fantasy.
However, Starship design is not where it shines. While it does alright with Traveller, being only moderately more fiddly than the original (and perhaps handling the scaling problem with more finesse as a result), its essentially Traveller Redux through a GURPS lens.
On the other hand, GURPS Vehicles is just... silly. I've heard a few people compare it to Fire Fusion and Steel (a supplement I once owned and miss dearly), and others(?) complain it was too complex, too math heavy... I found it was simply unworkable. Too many stupid or crazy options and not enough emphasis on workable systems. I don't need wooden sided bicycle powered space ships, or crazy spy cars that cram everything into them from every James Bond flick ever... if you want me to do engineering level math (not hard, but it can grow tedious), then I better damn sure be able to 'build' something resembling a working vehicle when I'm done, something that might actually be possible to make and even (Gasp!) draw. The problems are two-fold. THe system allows 'crazy clown-car' designs, where there is more stuff inside than is actually possible, and it is far too cluttered with allowing wonky designs that it makes practical designs much harder to access. That's more a layout issue than a design issue, mind you, but at least my version seems to lack any sort of system to its design process, or the book's layout. Sub-systems and components may have 'hard data', like size, weight and power-use/output, but the book itself never addressed why those mattered, that I could find. Thus it is more 'dream powered' than anything else. Of course, combined with GURPS Traveller it may actually be possible to do what Traveller failed to do, and that is create outside the box (in Trav's case, outside the terribly lackluster 'Tech Levels' the game provides. Or for 'aliens' using non-standard technologies (say... what if they used, oh... Mass Effect style railguns (instead of the crappy machine gun vision of High Guard)... or perhaps they built bay sized laser weapons (distinctly missing in Traveller, oddly enough...)? Gurps Vehicles, combined with Traveller might actually allow you to address those issues. (might. I haven't tried. I know, I'm a failure, woe and woe...), and provide the numbers necessary to plug in.
Fading Suns:
I like Fading Suns, for an operatic sci-fi game, it tends to tweak all the right buttons for me, it really does. I can get my Star Wars on, or my Dune, or a slightly cooler Aliens... (well, with noble titles and body shields...), but I never got Noble Armadas, so Space Ships are really just plot devices. I can dig it, game play is based around planetary actions and all that, but for this comparative review it does kinda leave me with nothin'.
Rogue Trader:
I am torn. Strangely, I sorta put RT right up with Traveller in terms of design, despite having a radically different approach and setting influence. It isn't without some ugly flaws that crop up, like having a teleporter room actually be more than 1% of a ship the size of a city, say, or the artificial limits created by, I believe, the License agreement with Games Workshop (Grand Cruisers are fine, but NO BATTLESHIPS!. Also, no alien ships will be treated in accordance with the rules, even though we'll let you loot the fuck out of them for components. Also, there are areas where they take abstraction a bit further than they seem to realize within the wealth system... among other issues...). One thing that RT does that Traveller doesn't is address power needs. See, if we can say that a ship scale turret draws so much power that you can only fit ONE on a 100 ton ship, then the creative player want to know if he can convert his 30 tons of cargo bay into a larger power plant and fit a second turret. Of course, RT has its fixed weapon hard points too, but it does sort of abstract them out, and makes them big enough (in 40k fashion) that it sort of gets away with it. Adding power to Traveller, rather than arbitrarily restricted hard points (FFS? Dunno, I only used it to design guns when I was a wee pika), would make a lot of sense (since, you know, we're already buying power plants and fuel tonnage...), and would address scaling well.
Ultimately, I guess I want a system of ship design that fully caters to the engineer without making them work for it (a la GURPS). Traveller is mostly hampered by artificial constraints that are hard coded into the system, which would need a near total overhaul of the system starting from first principles to overcome... that is, in essence, jettisoning the ossified cruft of the setting and game assumptions and setting out to just make a ship design system using Trav's basic rules (2d6+, not the other stuff...) to inform it. Armor, weapons and ship hits can be better scaled, though they don't suffer currently as written. Silent Death gets an Honorable Mention, being that its not really an RPG, and essentially we're only designing one type of craft (that is: Fighters, Gunships and armed Freighters being treated much like fighters in the rules (as a note: one Gunship (and one Canon Fighter (Shuttle) have FTL drives, but these are essentially transparent flash. Removing the FTL on the gunship does, apparently, allow an extra gun to be added, but really its just points being moved around, rather than a design compromise.
One issue that cropped up in Traveller that I glossed earlier is that the ships are positively leviathan. That is: The smallest 'ship' in traveller is 100 D-tons, the size of a good sized building (two story house, maybe?), yet are treated as small and fragile things. Even accounting for the bulk of the ship being fuel, engines and cargo space, there is plenty of room for three or four people, or more. The scaling issue rears its ugly head when you realize that 100 tons is not merely the smallest ship, but also the default unit of measurement in the system, the scaling issue mentioned earlier. You could almost literally lop off the zeroes and refer to ships, (and ship equipment) as 'size 1, 2, or 3...all the way up to 20 in core', and work from there if you really wanted to, with each 'point' of size translating into 100 tons of interior volume. Not that I recommend that, but it does refer to the scaling issue I mentioned. In theory, if one were to build 100 ton warships, a 150 ton warship would be a nice compromise between 100 and 200, but the rules don't allow for that compromise.
On a purely aesthetic note: I don't mind ships that look 'designed', but I do hate the 1950's era contrivance that star-ships would all look like erector sets, balls and tubes just floating in space.
Cars don't have 'bodies' because of aerodynamics (that came later), but because humans (and presumably sophont aliens) like covering shit up, hiding the guts. Sure, the ball and stick space ship from 2001 (the movie) was functional, practical and realistic, and all that rocks, but at some point people will make a space ship with wings, that looks like, I dunno, a plane or something. Maybe it won't be for landings, but just because people like wings. Note, this isn't to say Star Trek is bad, because while they certainly did do a ball-and-stick sort of thing, its a conscious design choice, as the ship is really the big saucer (with lots of important stuff in it, all co-located), and the main tube (with lots of co-located important stuff in it), and the only really concession to the ball and stick is the nacelles, which seems to be, again, a deliberate design choice rather than 'all ships are discrete compartments linked by space tubes'.
Sorry. Pet peeve of mine.
It did lead me to a stray thought a few weeks back about pre-fab shells for starships, where the builders sort of stick the guts into the existing shells, allowing for semi-modular interior designs (Traveller on the brain, I think...), and capped by the engines in the back. Since very little of the crew space has any practical need to actually touch vacuum (airlock and maybe guns), this might actually be a practical design decision. Of course, I also speculate that reactionless drives (gravitic drives, say), might still have big 'nozzles' in the back as 'heat sink/radiator' arrays. Because, why not?
Anyway. Long and pointless ramble. I gotta be me, whatever.
So it's Stars without Number then? Or maybe 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars?
What about Diaspora?
I think Clash has a Sci-Fi game as well...
Ooops...In Spacemaster: Privateers the freighters are on page 235. Just so you know.
Anyhow, SPAM as we lovingly call it is a bit of a tragedy. It was released in the dying days of the original ICE being one of the last things they brought out before going bankrupt and with many supplements coming out in the early days of ICE Mjolner run incarnation.
The editing and layout suffered horribly. I can't tell you how much it would have helped to have more of the bloody setting in the core book. The Races and Cultures book helps but the setting just comes off so narrow in its scope.
In its defense (I like it okay) I think it's a very well thought out setting from a utility of play perspective. Both sides of the war have the same seven races due to the architects seeding them all over the place. This means the PC party can actually do espionage work without splitting the party or doing brain swaps etc. The races were chosen / designed to provide easy flags to lock on to and play much like elves and dwarves do in fantasy games. You're a noble wolf guy, he's a braniac hamster dude who's only as dumb as Einstien and Eddison combined. The vegetarian bear guys are slowly going nuts and turning into violent canibals. Given that they've got carnivore teeth the real question becomes "who manipulated them to be pascifist vegitarians and why?" not "who has poisoned their minds and turned them into killers." I'll admit it's not everyone's thing and I recognize that there's a very hard core "no furries" segment in the sfrpg community. I've long argued the game would have been better accepted if it had anime style artwork which would go well with the over the top and hugely over powered races.
The less that is said of the fiction in the book the better. Still, at least it wasn't powered armor space marines hunting bugs in tunnels.
IRRC the Privateers setting is mixed tech levels. For instance the evil empire has stollen some higher tech stuff from the good and stupid confederation and winds up with a split TL as a result. The good federation has deliberately avoided several avenues of advancement as undesirable and is a bit regressed here and there. It's not a simple solution but it strikes me as basically reasonable.
The vehicle design and combat rules are pretty functional but contain many untested and flawed and badly explained subsystems that work less well. Also, the attack tables in the Vehicles book are simply wrong and were completely revised in erratta.
Character creation is awesome if you like RMSS and less so if you don't. It's not everyone's thing but it does what it does very well. The initiative system is a bit of a poor fit. It works but is far fiddlier than it should be.
...gasp...
Silent Death the New Millenium is based on the original Space Master setting rather than the Privateers setting. Said setting is a bit more Dune and Transhumanism and less crazy cartoon space pirates fighting the evil empire.
Don't get me wrong, both can be fun, but if you were expecting one and got the other I can understand why it would be bothersome.
SDTNM pisses off the original Space Master fans because it blows up the setting and destroys the empire ushering in a new dark age...stop me if you've heard this one before Traveller fans...
Anyhow, for contrived reasons involving bug alien fighter craft engagements involving anything bigger than escort class ships simply don't happen anymore.
It is, however, the best space opera starfighter game ever conceived and even got an official treatment of the ships from Star Wars in Star Wars Gamer magazine because it's just that damn good. I've always wanted an rpg tie in using similar rules rather than Space Master.
Silent Death is back in production by a group called Metal Express headed by Leland R Eriksen.
Quote from: GameDaddy;627466I think Clash has a Sci-Fi game as well...
Star Cluster 3, the layout and art are not as polished as games from bigger companies but it's well thought out and informed by prior art. Whether Clash's take on things is for you is another matter. Personally I like his Cold Space and FTL now settings. Nothing says 1980s sf like 1980s sf complete with commies and orion nuclear pulse drives.
Hinterwelt's Irridium also had an sf setting but I can't recall much other than being very jealous of the beautiful layout. It runs along the lines of Starfrontiers if I remember right.
There really needs to be a Car Wars in space.
In that it was pretty easy to make your cars and they more or less made sense.
And since the system had RVs and later semis, it should scale up at last to the small freighter level, if not huge ships.
Quote from: David Johansen;627469It is, however, the best space opera starfighter game ever conceived and even got an official treatment of the ships from Star Wars in Star Wars Gamer magazine because it's just that damn good. I've always wanted an rpg tie in using similar rules rather than Space Master.
Silent Death is great fun! As is collecting/painting all those addicting little spaceships.
I remember hearing rumors that Spacemaster was the RPG of the setting... then being disappointed that it really doesn't read that way.
QuoteSilent Death is back in production by a group called Metal Express headed by Leland R Eriksen.
My fingers are crossed on that one. Too good a game to be OOP.
StarCluster 3 ship design is definitely not for you, Pika. What you may enjoy fooling around with is the StarCluster 2 Starship Construction and Engineer's Guide (http://www.rpgnow.com/product/15751/StarCluster-2-Starship-Construction-and-Engineer%27s-Guide?it=1).
SC 3 ship construction is drastically simplified from StarCluster 2, though it's compatible with the SC 2 stuff, so there is nothing much to fiddle with. You can DL spreadsheets for both civilian (http://www.rpgnow.com/product/105148/StarCluster-3-Ship-Design-Spreadsheet) and military (http://www.rpgnow.com/product/105147/In-Harm%27s-Way%3A-StarCluster-Ship-Design-Spreadsheet) ship design for free.
Or whatever. Talking about questions of taste is like describing art by touch.
-clash
Actually I have Starcluster, got it off Amazon about six months ago, more or less. Not sure which one it is (2, 3... pi... whatever), but it fell flat for some reason. Dunno why off the top of my head, but I think my eyes glazed at the pages and pages of career stuff.
Thanks, David, for pointing out the Freighters. I kept missing them somehow. In my defense they are right after pages of dense tables? I dunno... I got nothin'. ;)
Of course, I could point out how little info there is, when you've got all three frieghters and two other ships ta boot on that single page... but I should be happy to have anything!
I did find your insight on the game interesting. I dunno if giving it an anime feel would have helped ease the sting of a hard anthro/furry alien setting or not, but it couldn't have hurt.
Like I said though: Its not just pacifist bear men that tweaked my 'wtf' buttons, but pretty much all of it. People are not particularly monkeylike, having evolved away from it, but these parallel evolution sophonts are all basically bad pastiches of their animalistic totems... The kagoth aren't just weirdly pacifistic vegetarian 'evolved from bears'... their bears that talk. All Wolf men, no matter how many societies they had, no matter how many worlds they developed on, all became samurai wolf guys and so on. The walking dinosaurs? Weirdly unemotional, maybe even.... ah... cold blooded?
Wow. The reptiles are cold blooded. Whoda thunk it?
See. In a purely anthro setting, that sort of weak, lazy stereotyping is expected. Its what people want from an anthro setting. In a sci-fi game that is supposedly informed by hard science (I reference page 13, in fact), that sort of lazy characterization needs a LOT of fancy explaining to not hit us (me, anyway) upside the head with how very, very lame it is. One example of how they MIGHT have tried to explain the very atavistic nature of these species (most of whom got space flight on their own long before Earth humans did...) would be to explain why humans have the evolutionary jump on them. Uplift, for example. But the setting tells us they evolved naturally, were seeded (along with humans) TO evolve into sapient races.
One of my (many) problems with the presented TL and equipment is not that there are multiple TLs of whatever in the setting. I get that.
More its that they are all dumped, unsorted and with zero information in our laps, like a jigsaw puzzle. Hey, I got assault rifles next to assault lasers next to assault blasters and assault plasma guns. Great. What should my player's be using?
No idea. Not enough information to go on. If you want two or three fairly massive chapter fictions you might get the idea that plasma is favored by Imperials, and that blasters are common elsewhere, but nothing like 'Use TL 17 default for the Empire, and TL 18 for the IST', or anythign like that. (also: Seeker sniper rifles that punch through I-beams and track human heads? Nifty high tech, not in the main book, despite the fiction. Oops.).
Worse, the individual TLs don't actually mean much of anything, much like they don't in traveller (only worse, because there are more of them!).
Look: In Traveller there is TL 9, when space ships and jump drives show up, then TL 12-13 or so, when you get fusion and meson weapons (or whatever) then TL 16 when you break the available technology, and TL 20+ when you are space gods. Does anyone really know or care what happens between 9-11? Not really. What's the difference between 14 and 15? Not terribly much.
That's terrible.
Space Master does it worse. Hey, at tl 15 we have plasma guns, at tl 16 we have more plasma guns, but the old ones are still cool with us. At tl 17? You guessed it! More plasma guns! But if you want to use the old ones that's totes with us! (totes, bad slang for totally. From TV. Don't blame me, the kids are all saying it, on tv...). If you're dividing TLs between high and low cyber ages, and you have three TLs just for the industrial age? You're probably doing it wrong.
More, it misses the point. SPace Master isn't GURPS Space, its a freaking built in setting. Not a terribly good or well explained setting, but its there. As tool using critters, the tools we use define the setting as much as anything else, probably more so. So tell us what people are using in YOUR setting (your being, naturally, directed to the writers). So what if the Empire is lagging, at least some of the equipment should be 'imperial gear', and so marked, so we know what they tend to use. Don't make me spend four or more years learning official anthropology to explain this to you guys from a position of authority!
As for Silent Death: I like it. Guys, that was totally a non-critical 'review'. Also, I mentioned dealing with the current holder for the PDFs. I know, I know: Wall of text, hard to parse, etc. I still don't have my PDFs that I paid for, which makes me unwilling to deal with them further, say, for models and so forth.
I was totally serious about calling it Car Wars in Space. Sure, you won't be doing quite the level of customization... okay, not nearly so much... but its there, mang.
tl;dr
Here is a link to Traveller Downport (http://www.downport.com/), a link site to many many other Traveller support websites. In each of them is at least one ship design, many have a whole lot.
I could probably give you some better advice or vector change you in a better direction if I got a more solid idea of what you would like to do with your Traveller.
Just want to echo GameDaddy's suggestion of Stars Without Number. It's great.
Yeah I'll admit the racial monocultures are a bit weak unless there's a subplot about the architects meddling which would go against the whole hands off experiment thing.
Personally the game would have been much better with toned down animal people presented as the sf equivalent of elves and dwarves and as an example of how races fit in a GENERIC core book. But ICE was dead set on their idea that sf had to have a setting or it would be too broad to cover. They also were a bit obsessed with the idea of settings that facilitate play.
I do think the setting had potential.
I'll admit Star Cluster never quite hits the sweet spot for me but I think that's because Space Master Character Creation with GURPS Vehicle Design and Star Fleet Battles combat is my dream game.
If you're looking for Ship Building in Star Wars d20, the OCR/RCR production of Starships of the Galaxy was much more a "go to" guide, than the later Saga Edition book.
(It also shows the different design focuses of each edition; OCR/RCR had starship combat as a separate "mini-game" in the context of the larger ruleset, with the vehicles as separate entities. Saga Edition tried to make vehicles a Template you put over your character, and then resolved similar to normal combat.)
I just remembered that Dark Space was a Space Master offshoot. That was a setting I liked and got lots of ideas from... much more overtly Space Fantasy than SM though. I almost got the idea it meant to be some alternative to Spelljammer.
I think it had bear-men as well, but they didn't bother me and I didn't own Space Master when I bought it.
I recommend the Renegade Legion line. It's out of print, dunno if that's an issue with you. There's lots of great stuff, and the games are designed to interconnect. Use Legionnaire, with Leviathan and Interceptor.
Quote from: Spike;627453I seem to find myself in a quandary, in that none of these games, and others I'll discuss here, satisfies my itch for good old Sci-fi adventure with starships.
I'm in the same quandary, as there has never been a good published system for starship combat that both worked and allowed good ship design in at least a semi-engineer style.
I can create acceptable Ships in HERO, but the method for doing so is pure meta-game as I mix and match the powers and effects to achieve a predefined outcome. Even here however there are some things it just does poorly.
My first game design was simulation of TOS Star Trek, very different from anything anyone else has done. But it didn't include ship design.
Good, balanced, and 'realistic' Starship design is on my list of impossible RPG dreams, along with interesting single opponent melee combat.
I remember ship design and combat in Space Opera -- from capital ships down to fighters -- being pretty slick. I guess it might be too modular for you, but you'd have to find out for yourself. I don't remember enough to say how it relates to your other concerns.
Of course, it was totally Doc Smith: zooming inertialess, starkly annihilating rays, tractor beams and defensive fields, and so on.
Consider the PDFs at RPGNow: http://www.rpgnow.com/index.php?cPath=100 (http://www.rpgnow.com/index.php?cPath=100)
Even if the starships don't send you, you're likely to find your money's worth of goodies in the basic set.
Speaking of Space Opera, what about D6 Space? (Formerly Star Wars.) It had design quirks, handled scale well, and was reasonably fun to play. Not to mention it has gone OGL, so one could 'embrace and extend' if you so desired.
Quote from: JeremyR;627472There really needs to be a Car Wars in space.
In that it was pretty easy to make your cars and they more or less made sense.
And since the system had RVs and later semis, it should scale up at last to the small freighter level, if not huge ships.
great perspective on it--"soft" sf (yes, i know hard/soft is a loaded bit) should have something along those lines. millennium falcon vs. star destroyers, for example. two different scales, etc. never felt trav did that right, then again we winged ship combat a fair bit. . . .
(sorry if this was addressed, but i find spike's posts to be tl/dr territory, sorry man :o )
Quote from: mcbobbo;627643Speaking of Space Opera, what about D6 Space? (Formerly Star Wars.) It had design quirks, handled scale well, and was reasonably fun to play. Not to mention it has gone OGL, so one could 'embrace and extend' if you so desired.
didn't it have ship and capital ship scales? that's the angle to take.
Quote from: Phillip;627623I remember ship design and combat in Space Opera -- from capital ships down to fighters -- being pretty slick. I guess it might be too modular for you, but you'd have to find out for yourself. I don't remember enough to say how it relates to your other concerns.
finally got a copy of this, just need the time to grok it, which i don't have much of as i get older. same "aging gamer" story i guess. fond memories of incorporating SO stuff into my megatraveller campaign back in college (88-91). hadn't owned it at the time, but found it easy to integrate SO with traveller.
Quote from: Blackhand;627574I recommend the Renegade Legion line. It's out of print, dunno if that's an issue with you. There's lots of great stuff, and the games are designed to interconnect. Use Legionnaire, with Leviathan and Interceptor.
another i wish i had back in the day. have those now (plus "prefect" the strategic game, iirc) but just need the time to read & integrate everything, alas. . . .
Great analysis of starship building in this thread!
One system that went unmentioned was R. Talsorian Game's Mekton/Metkon Zeta. While designed originally for mecha, it worked equally well for building starfighters and capital ships. The trade-offs of scale used in Mekton meant that small, nimble fighters and huge battlestars both could have their place.
My issue with sci-fi games is that the starship rules are usually way more complicated than what I'm interested in.
RPGPundit
Quote from: RPGPundit;627989My issue with sci-fi games is that the starship rules are usually way more complicated than what I'm interested in.
Yeah, I'm not sure how those extra levels of detail would ever come up in game enough to bother me with their errors. None of the scifi games I've played in have focused much on the spaceships themselves... any more than the trains/cars/buses we used to travel around in.
Even when space battles happened it seemed more about character skills than ship design.
That said, I did like the ships in Ringworld. Empty transparent shells with various openings that could be customized with various interior/exterior bits... painted or left clear. Gravity on the walls and ceilings if you wanted (there were floorplans for at least one of those multi-planed gravity ships).
Which brings me back to Spacemaster Privateers. Yes, I know, I'm a terrible bore.
See, in SPAM, the big engineering style ship design rules produce a pretty simple in play ship.
You've got weapons with a type, Mark number, and possibly a bonus. You've got a Defensive bonus and a HUD / Targetting bonus, Hit Points, Armor Type and stuff like cost, crew, cargo capacity, and maximum speeds / acceleration.
But that's about it. Combat's attack roll + skill + HUD - Defensive Bonus - Range Modifier, check a chart, roll a critical. Yes the criticals give combat that "sometimes a stub fighter can take out the death star" effect.
Anyhow, there's something special about firing Mark 50 torpedoes, dunno why. If it said tiny, small, medium, large, and huge it'd do the same job but MK 50 just feels more substantial.
Man, this reminded me of the first huge mega-thread I ever did many years ago, on WotC boards for RCR d20 Star Wars:
Novastar's Naval Review (http://community.wizards.com/teststandardgroup2/go/thread/view/75862/19422814/Novastars_Naval_Review)
...I really should see if I can clean that up, and make a workable product out of it! :eek:
Rather than quote and post a dozen times, I'll try again to consolidate:
Pundit: I like the Traveller combat rules, being, like the rest of the system, functional and easy, and I think the design system isn't any deeper than it needs to be. I just found it has flaws that make it harder for me to accept than need be.
David: Don't have the vehicles book, but as I noted, I do like the Silent Death ship creation, though I do miss the non-combat elements of design for obvious reasons.
Amacris: I used to have Mekton-Z, pretty much all of the R.Talsorian games actually (including Teenagers from Outer Space!), but that was many years ago, and I don't trust my memory to make any judgements on the design system (which I did use for robots..). I could, on a semi-related note, cover the vehicle system from Heavy Gear, etc, which could also cover space craft, but didn't.
mcbobbo&phillip: I never was fond enough of the WEG starwars to try the D6 system, so I can't really say how their spaceships would fare against my terribly rigid standards, sorry.
Blackhand: I actually have the PDF files for Renegade Legion. I'm not terribly fond of reading PDFs, but I did somewhat regret missing this game during its heyday (though I do recall seeing the books for sale, they always had a problem of not giving me a good 'entry point'. With the PDFs I still had to work through four of them to find my 'starting point', as I recall...)
gliechman: True enough. I could have mentioned Heroes, which is not terribly dissimilar from a lot of games I didn't mention, and some I did (Serenity, say?). I don't actually mind such rules, they are fully functional and useful, but they don't scratch that itch.
So anyhow, there's a whole balance of focus issue when it comes to space ships in rpgs. On the one end you've got stuff like GURPS Space 1e that abstracted and dare I say wimped out on starship combat. A couple quick rolls and back to the PCs. On the other you've got GURPS Vehicles 2e with detailed rules for seat belt systems.
Personally Spacemaster and the GURPS Space Opera Combat system hit the sweet spot. There's lots for the PCs to do but the ships aren't harder to design than the characters.
I do have a fondness for Brilliant Lances for Traveller the New Era. Take four decimal place precision and vectors Star Fleet Battles. But Brilliant Lances is just a rational outgrowth of the TNE system.
I don't like it when ships and vehicles are treated the same as characters or built on points. Sure, all the numbers are made up anyhow. Sure, spaces are the same as points. Well except if you're using the space based system of measurement I wrote up for one of my games in which case a space is 250 square feet. But personally I expect cube square for armor and structure and power to mass for movement at the bare minimum.
Quote from: David Johansen;628345Personally Spacemaster and the GURPS Space Opera Combat system hit the sweet spot.
There was a GURPS Space Opera book? Somehow I missed that... or do you mean GURPS Lensman or Tales of the Solar Patrol?
Quote from: Simlasa;628352There was a GURPS Space Opera book? Somehow I missed that... or do you mean GURPS Lensman or Tales of the Solar Patrol?
GURPS Space is very good too, just to flesh things out.
There was a GURPS Space Opera Combat System that first appeared in GURPS Lensman and then in Compendium II for third edition. It's a fun little system that has a nice tactical feel without actually needing a map or miniatures.
Quote from: JeremyR;627472There really needs to be a Car Wars in space.
In that it was pretty easy to make your cars and they more or less made sense.
And since the system had RVs and later semis, it should scale up at last to the small freighter level, if not huge ships.
Didn't starfleet battles do car wars in space
Quote from: Spike;628059Rather than quote and post a dozen times, I'll try again to consolidate:
Pundit: I like the Traveller combat rules, being, like the rest of the system, functional and easy, and I think the design system isn't any deeper than it needs to be. I just found it has flaws that make it harder for me to accept than need be.
David: Don't have the vehicles book, but as I noted, I do like the Silent Death ship creation, though I do miss the non-combat elements of design for obvious reasons.
Amacris: I used to have Mekton-Z, pretty much all of the R.Talsorian games actually (including Teenagers from Outer Space!), but that was many years ago, and I don't trust my memory to make any judgements on the design system (which I did use for robots..). I could, on a semi-related note, cover the vehicle system from Heavy Gear, etc, which could also cover space craft, but didn't.
mcbobbo&phillip: I never was fond enough of the WEG starwars to try the D6 system, so I can't really say how their spaceships would fare against my terribly rigid standards, sorry.
Blackhand: I actually have the PDF files for Renegade Legion. I'm not terribly fond of reading PDFs, but I did somewhat regret missing this game during its heyday (though I do recall seeing the books for sale, they always had a problem of not giving me a good 'entry point'. With the PDFs I still had to work through four of them to find my 'starting point', as I recall...)
gliechman: True enough. I could have mentioned Heroes, which is not terribly dissimilar from a lot of games I didn't mention, and some I did (Serenity, say?). I don't actually mind such rules, they are fully functional and useful, but they don't scratch that itch.
You know what you want, you have the engineering chops.
Sounds like you should build your own ship design system.
Make it modular to play with traveller, d20 or a %d game like RM.
The design stuff should be the same across the different systems it's just the stats that need covering
Quote from: Spike;627453Recently I've been mucking about with my Mongoose Traveller quite a bit,...
I did not read it all. If you design you own ship, rather than use the pre-built ones, then of course you can build a small tough ship to cause some alarm for much larger pre-built ships.
I just use Mongoose Traveller for all my RPG settings. Sci-fi or otherwise.
Quote from: Spike;628059Rather than quote and post a dozen times, I'll try again to consolidate:
Pundit: I like the Traveller combat rules, being, like the rest of the system, functional and easy, and I think the design system isn't any deeper than it needs to be. I just found it has flaws that make it harder for me to accept than need be.
No, sorry, Traveller is explicitly one of the games I'm thinking of when I say "too complicated". For me, pretty much anything that involves point-buy or construction is too complicated, when it comes to starships... and unfortunately, that's how almost every sci-fi RPG does it.
I usually just ignore those rules and wing it.
RPGPundit
Quote from: Spike;627453Cars don't have 'bodies' because of aerodynamics (that came later), but because humans (and presumably sophont aliens) like covering shit up, hiding the guts.
Car bodies are meant to protect the engine and more delicate machinery from the elements as well as aerodynamic concerns. I don't think people will put wings on spaceships because they like wings, but they will need to cover up a bit to protect against radiation surges, solar flares, micrometeorites etc, basically the same reason as cars.
External heat radiators are a key thing for starships so wing looking things are probably going to be there. Structural strength and surface area both matter and a wing is a pretty good compromise.
I have two design systems, both are simpler than GURPS or Traveller but one is more detailed and fiddly and concerned with physical realities.
The most basic one is probably still too complex for the Pundit but you never know. Assign ten hit location slots to rockets, power plant, quarters, bays, fuel, ftl drive, shields, and weapons. Slots can be subdivided. The ship gets 1 g acceleration and 1 g hour of fuel for each rocket unit. Armor can be multiplied by any factor but acceleration is divided by the same factor. Life support, computers, crew stations and sensors are all assumed to be integrated parts of the ship's structure. Hits are scaled relative to damage. In Incandescent's case this is the cube root of volume, with damage scaling on the square root of weapon mass modified to reflect the weapon type. But any scaling system that puts damage at a desired ratio to hits would work.
Hit location 1 is assumed to be the front of the ship and hit location 10 is assumed to be the back. Hits to the front arc subtract 5 from rolls over 5 and hits to the back add 5 to rolls under 6.
Quote from: David Johansen;629033External heat radiators are a key thing for starships so wing looking things are probably going to be there.
I agree.
Also, good looks tend to be a selling point as long as the performance tradeoff is not too great: value judgements all around. Peacocks, sports cars -- space ships?
Finally, it's science
fiction, no?
Quote from: RPGPundit;628721I usually just ignore those rules and wing it.
I usually ignore Striker (or other reference for other RPG) and wing it on the rare occasion when something like a rocket getting shot at a tank comes up. The starship rules in classic Traveller (from Book 2 to High Guard and Mayday) have seen more use in my games because more players found the fun worth the investment of time.
Quote from: David Johansen;629033The most basic one is probably still too complex for the Pundit but you never know. Assign ten hit location slots to rockets, power plant, quarters, bays, fuel, ftl drive, shields, and weapons. Slots can be subdivided. The ship gets 1 g acceleration and 1 g hour of fuel for each rocket unit. Armor can be multiplied by any factor but acceleration is divided by the same factor. Life support, computers, crew stations and sensors are all assumed to be integrated parts of the ship's structure. Hits are scaled relative to damage. In Incandescent's case this is the cube root of volume, with damage scaling on the square root of weapon mass modified to reflect the weapon type. But any scaling system that puts damage at a desired ratio to hits would work.
Personally my preference is to have the rules to create ships but also have two hundred and thirty eight premade ship types with simple customisation options, particularly as regards weapons.
I find it amusing that the OP suggests he wishes to avoid a big wall of text, and then posts one.
Quote from: RPGPundit;628721No, sorry, Traveller is explicitly one of the games I'm thinking of when I say "too complicated". For me, pretty much anything that involves point-buy or construction is too complicated, when it comes to starships... and unfortunately, that's how almost every sci-fi RPG does it.
I usually just ignore those rules and wing it.
RPGPundit
I don't really understand this position.
To me, taking the time to craft a ship using the design rules of the game is not that different from crafting a good physical location for an adventure or campaign. It is easier in science fiction than in fantasy because there are usually rules for ship design that integrate with space or personal combat and the skill system of the game, something which tends to be absent from fantasy games - thus causing GMs to 'wing it' in the creation of their physical settings.
A ship can also be an extra character in the game, not neccessarily as in an AI driven craft played as a PC, but as an integral part of the adventurer team. Examples are legion, from the
Millenium Falcon to
Space Battleship Yamato to the
Enterprise to the
Galactica to
Macross/SDF-1. In this manner, the Players can care for the ship and be emotionally invested in its condition while playing, which I have found, increases the fun of playing a tabletop SFRPG.
Quote from: jeff37923;629270I don't really understand this position.
You must take into account Pundits limits, both his inability to deal with rules and his overwhelming desire to get everything his way.
Starship Construction rules run afoul of both vices- requiring a tiny amount of skill and knowledge on one hand, and limiting things to what the game considers reasonable on the other.
Quote from: jibbajibba;628371Didn't starfleet battles do car wars in space
Somewhat, although you could not really design our own ships. It was also the most insanely complicated thing I have ever played.
Quote from: Votan;629292Somewhat, although you could not really design our own ships. It was also the most insanely complicated thing I have ever played.
Power allocation was crazy in SFB.
Car Wars in space is closer to
Mayday or
Star Cruiser, for
2300AD although you could not design your own ships in
Mayday. Maybe
WarpWar qualifies, but combat was pretty simple in that microgame.
I’ve been enjoying the idea of my next science fiction game perhaps using Buck Rogers XXVc. Now, before one jumps on the game for the way it was produced, rather than the game itself, consider that it was designed by Mike Pondsmith. I find it to be a pretty good somewhat hard science fiction game. Here are the full ship construction rules for this very out of print game. It's a long excerpt, which I brought to this text format specifically for this post, but it will never see print again. So, a longer excerpt is fine in this case. I find these construction rules to be pretty succinct. The ship combat rules place the characters in the center of the game, rather than the ship.
Mike, if you happen by here, thanks for the work on this one, which I imagine you wish turned out better handled by TSR. If you have anything you would like to share about the game, it would be cool to hear them.
-----------------
SHIP CONSTRUCTION
Designing a rocket ship is a lot like designing a character; there are attributes, hit points, weapons, and armor to be determined and selected. But unlike character attributes, ship attributes are not determined by using dice. Instead, they are directly related to the tonnage of ship.
TONNAGE
The first thing you'll need to consider when building or buying a rocket cruiser is its tonnage. A common misconception is that because rockets are often called "ships," they must weigh as much as Earth-type watercraft (which can be upwards of 100,000 tons). In reality, a rocket ship is actually a rather sophisticated aircraft. With the exception of battlers, 25th-Century ships are capable of flying in atmosphere just like other aircraft (and even battlers need to visit the fringes of an atmosphere periodically), which requires that they be as light as possible.
Tonnage is expressed in multiples of 5 (a 32-ton ship, for example, is not possible). Table 30 gives standard tonnages for common ship types in the XXVc™ game.
Table 30: Standard Tonnages
Ship type: tonnage
Fighter: 10-20
Asterover: 20-30
Scout Cruiser: 20-50
Light Freighter: 30-50
Heavy Freighter: 55-80
Medium Cruiser: 55-200
Light Transport: 80-200
Heavy Transport: 205-350
Large Cruiser: 205-500
Space Liner: 500-800
Battler: 1000-5000
LENGTH AND WIDTH
The length of a rocket is determined by multiplying the tonnage by 2. Thus, a 50-ton rocket is 100 feet long.
The width of the rocket is determined by dividing the tonnage by 2 (rounding down). Our 50-ton, 100-foot long rocket is 25 feet thick.
CARGO
All 25th-Century rockets have some cargo space; even on the smallest ships, there's room for provisions and personal belongings of the crew members. Cargo space is measured in tons and is determined by dividing the overall tonnage of the ship by 2. For example, a ship weighing 30 tons can carry 15 tons of cargo. Cargo space can be traded for weaponry at a cost of 10 tons of cargo space per weapon, or vice versa. (Installing weapons is covered later in this chapter.)
SPEED AND MANEUVERABILITY
Speed is also a factor of tonnage. The more your ship weighs, the less quickly it will be able to accelerate and move, even with its larger engines. For a standard ship design, speed is rated from 1 to 5. Most of the time, speed is used in a combat situation to see who can outrun whom. It also comes into play when a ship is moving above the surface of a planet. (See the section on Space Travel later.)
Maneuverability is the equivalent of the ship's Dexterity, and is also based on the ship tonnage. Instead of being a single number, maneuverability is represented by two figures: a ship's Reaction Bonus (used to help determine who wins initiative, just as in character-vs.-character combat) and its AC Defense Bonus, which modifies the ship's basic Armor Class (see below). Table 31 contains the speed and maneuverability figures for standard ships of certain tonnages.
Table 31: Speed and Maneuverability
Tonnage 5- 15; Speed: 5, Reaction Bonus: -2, AC Defense Bonus: -4
Tonnage 20- 45; Speed: 4, Reaction Bonus: -1, AC Defense Bonus: -2
Tonnage 50-100; Speed: 3, Reaction Bonus: 0, AC Defense Bonus: 0
Tonnage 105-200; Speed: 2, Reaction Bonus: 0, AC Defense Bonus: +1
Tonnage 205-500; Speed: 1, Reaction Bonus: +1, AC Defense Bonus: +2
Tonnage 505 and up; Speed: 1, Reaction Bonus: +2, AC Defense Bonus: +3 or more
HIT POINTS
Ships have hit points just as characters and creatures do, but instead of being an overall figure, these points are allocated to each of a ship's six major sections. These six sections, and the hit points that each section has, are as follows:
1) Hull: Hit points equal to ship's tonnage X 4.
2) Sensors/Commo: Tonnage x 1.
3) Controls: Tonnage x 1.
4) Life Support: Tonnage x 2.
5) Fuel System: Tonnage x 3.
6) Engine: Tonnage x 3.
For example, a 30-ton ship would have the following hit points in each of its sections:
Hull 30 x 4 = 120
Sensors/Commo 30 x 1 = 30
Controls 30 x 1 = 30
Life Support 30 x 2 = 60
Fuel 30 x 3 = 90
Engine 30 x 3 = 90
In ship vs. ship combat, every hit on a vessel causes damage to one of its sections. If the hit point total of a section is reduced to 0, it is unable to function. (For more information, see the chapter on Space Combat.)
ARMOR CLASS
As with characters, Armor Class defines the quality of a ship's basic protection: the strength of its hull, whether it has electronic jamming devices, and other special defensive features. There are four basic Armor Class ratings:
AC 8, or Civilian armor, is used on most nonmilitary ships, including transports, freighters, asterovers, and some cruisers.
AC 6, or Military armor, can be placed on any type of ship and is standard for fighters.
AC 4, or Maximum Military armor, is usually found only on cruisers of 100 tons or more.
AC 0, or Battler Class armor, is found only on battlers.
WEAPONS
The last step in constructing a ship is to add weapons. Each ship gets a maximum number of weapon spaces equal to its tonnage divided by 10 (rounded down). Some weapons that can be installed on ships will take up more than one weapon space. (See Table 32, in the following section on Buying a Ship, for more information on weapon costs and weapon spaces.)
(Table 32: Ship Replacement Parts
Part: Cost (cr)
Sensor/Commo Unit: 4000-6000
Controls Unit: 3000-5000
Life Support Module: 7000-9000
Fuel System: 8000-10000
Nuclear Engine: 20000-40000
Weapons (and # of spaces required):
Beam Laser (1): 1000
Pumped Laser (2): 1500
Gyrocannon (1): 2000
Missile Mount (1): 2000
Ught Acceleration Gun (1): 2500
Heavy Missile Mount (2): 3000
Heavy Acceleration Gun (2): 5000
K-Cannon (5): 10000) [Buck Rogers XXVc: Character & Combat 79]
DESIGN YOUR OWN
Page 94 of this book contains a form that you can use to create ships of your own design, with spaces for all of the vessel's statistics plus an area for a few lines of description or other notes on what makes this ship special. Once you've filled out a form, you can use it during the play of an adventure the same way that you would use one of the Ship Data Cards in the game box.
VARIATIONS
In this section, we're trying to give you a general idea of the characteristics of 25th-Century rocket ships, but we can't possibly cover all the varieties of ships that can and do exist.
The statistics and tables in this section are meant as guidelines, not as limitations. For instance, when we say that a ship of 15 tons or less has a speed of 5, we're talking about a standard ship of that size.
When you design ships to populate your game universe, you can build in any sort of variety that seems reasonable.
Mike Pondsmith, Buck Rogers XXVc Science Fiction Roleplay Game: Characters & Combat 77-78 (TSR Inc. 1990).
I've always liked XXVc and felt it got a bad rap.
Quote from: gleichman;629273You must take into account Pundits limits, both his inability to deal with rules and his overwhelming desire to get everything his way.
Starship Construction rules run afoul of both vices- requiring a tiny amount of skill and knowledge on one hand, and limiting things to what the game considers reasonable on the other.
I know that you think game rules are your only friends, dude, but you know that they can't actually "consider" anything "reasonable" or otherwise... they're not actually people. Its sad that you relate to them rather than to, say, human interaction or physical reality, but I think its important that someone try to remind you that RPG rules aren't actually alive.
RPGPundit
Quote from: jeff37923;629270I don't really understand this position.
To me, taking the time to craft a ship using the design rules of the game is not that different from crafting a good physical location for an adventure or campaign. It is easier in science fiction than in fantasy because there are usually rules for ship design that integrate with space or personal combat and the skill system of the game, something which tends to be absent from fantasy games - thus causing GMs to 'wing it' in the creation of their physical settings.
That's the thing: "crafting a physical location" is a lot easier when you actually just do it the organic way: you think up some terrain or you draw a map. You don't go around using point-buy to try to build a physical environment (unless you're gleichman), because that would be retarded if you were anyone other than someone incapable of relating to reality on a level other than the mechanistic (what we could call gleichman-syndrome).
And yet, SF-rpgs constantly want you to jump from the standard way of designing setting components in RPGs to suddenly having point buy and hardpoints and heat synchs and tonnage and all this other bullshit; which I understand is there mainly as a relic-holdover from wargames, and of course some gamers like that part of it because it turns spaceship combat into a little wargame, which is fine if that's what you're looking for.
But if you're not, then its not really useful at all. And in many cases (when you're talking about licensed settings, mainly) I find it to be anti-emulative.
RPGPundit
I don't use starship construction rules from RPGs to build my ships. I'll look over that chapter's rules once and then start eyeballing the size of my ship and what it will have compared to the example ships in the book. I don't use a grid anymore on the deckplans. Player characters are free to move about the cabin.
I pretty much referee a game in real time, so determining skill/combat rolls are very quick. I don't use combat rounds or initiative. Players know if their character's back is turned, so they can't just shoot someone that is behind them. Players like to role-play struggling eachother for that alien artifact in the briefcase that a player is threatening to drop down the waste shute. One player says his character is drawing his sword and wants to cut the other player characters had off (to get the briefcase). They both roll and then (sometimes) damage gets rolled, too. That's when the ship's medic gets involved, or not.
As fast as you read that last paragraph, that's how fast the action occured in my last session where sword damage did separate a hand from a ship's captain. This is the ship they are on. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46GKDNh2bz8
Are you considering taking your pen to a science fiction game Pundit?
The Buck construction treats ships pretty much like a type of simple henchmen in their generation. The Buck universe is so ill defined that emulation becomes rather unattainable. So, one must set it some place. The Buck description is so spare that it seems oddly plausible.
I think a lot of players like a consistent way to build them for a setting. It provides a feel for the setting, and there are special issues with those interested in science fiction. The finer details of a setting become a lot more important. It's a challenge to make them happy in this regard.
I do like it when the players are kept the focus of starship combat. The Enterprise doesn't win the day because it is a nice ship, in a sense it is just a sword. It is because of Kirk! Well, his crew helped him a little too. So, ya Pundit, the way you describe your requirements and how Shawn house-rules such things gel for me too. Really, it just depends on the players. Sometimes a more wargame approach is cool, sometimes not.
Mostly what I do is stay out of the players' way. I'm just the ref. So far, my players are not breaking rules. They want to role-play. They accquired a ship from a gambler that lost. Went into jump space with the thing. And discovered two frozen passengers onboard that are now pissed off that there is a new captain running things and that they won't be going to the planet they thought they were.
The players (6 players now) are going cabin fever in the thing now after two days of jump space together. Lots of back-stabbing going on. One player has already set the ship to explode if he doesn't get his way. The other players don't know he did this yet.
Quote from: Kuroth;629795Are you considering taking your pen to a science fiction game Pundit?
Can't say that I am, for now. I'd have to get really inspired...
RPGPundit
Quote from: The Traveller;629213Personally my preference is to have the rules to create ships but also have two hundred and thirty eight premade ship types with simple customisation options, particularly as regards weapons.
Deep 7 did this for their 1PG games. They featured a vehicle creation system in the 1PG companion (which included rules for starships). Then in a supplement for Star Legion called Blastoff, featured various starship examples. Not as many as you list, but there is a decent array of examples for use in Star Legion games.
Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;629786I don't use starship construction rules from RPGs to build my ships. I'll look over that chapter's rules once and then start eyeballing the size of my ship and what it will have compared to the example ships in the book. I don't use a grid anymore on the deckplans. Player characters are free to move about the cabin.
Yes, very this. Why reinvent the wheel, unless it really, really matters?