House Rules for Combat

[thewh0]

I thought I'd start a new thread based on something MrMorden said in my initial thread.

Originally posted by MrMorden:

As exciting as an RPG is with really deadly combat rules, in the end it slows things down. Players like action, and want to be able to have harrowing fights without having to lay around for weeks afterwards.

My gaming group decided that combat was too deadly and decided to tone it down some. And after going through the very first combat of our campaign where I was ambushed by four guys with Gauss Pistols, I'm glad we did.

I still don't think we have it quite right and I was wondering if anyone else out there was using modified combat rules?

Initially, for lifeblood damage, we were converting (lessening) the damage as follows: 0-1 did 0 damage to lifeblood, 2-4 did 1 damage to lifeblood, 5-8 did 2, 9-11 did 3, etc. But when we tried to work AR in, this didn't work -- basically, if you were wearing any armor at all, you'd never get hurt, which wasn't what we were going for, either.

I can't even remember what we finally decided upon. It had something to do with leaving the damage as rolled, but then removing the AR's worth of dice (always leaving one) and subtracting half of the AR from the remaining die or removing half the AR worth of dice and subtracting all of the AR from the remaining die. Whichever it was, it still didn't seem very good to me.

So, any of you have a good, modified combat system that you're using?

Thanks,
Rob

 

[daltoncalford]

Rob,

It depends, if you are talking about T20, then I can not really comment since I do not play it.

If you are thinking about traveller rules in general, then, I have found that the deadliness in combat was actually one of the things our group enjoyed since it made most people attempt to avoid fights whenever possible.

best regards

Dalton

 

[mike wightman]

Couple of suggestions.

1. Try increasing lifeblood - either add level, add fortitude save, or both (plus any extra for toughness feat).

2. Use a hit location system - hits to limbs cause half their final lifeblood damage, torso and abdomen regular lifeblood damage, head hits can be double damage.

 

[Crashlogic]

Well you can always drop lifeblood altogether and go straight hitpoints. And treat AR the same way it is in other games.

Part of Traveller is that combat is deadly. Four guys with guass pistols are very very dangerous. One way to tone down the game is not not have oppoents all armed with the highest damage wepons in the game.

Another apporach is to consider weapon typs agaisnt armour types. It add some serious detail, and takes a bit of artistry, but certain types of armours will be more effective agaisnt particular sorts of wepons, and weaker against others.

Cloth armour would be very good agaist bullets and shotguns, so you might say a character hit with a bullet takes no life blood damage if wearing cloth armour. Agaisnt energy wepons cloth armour might have no effect at all, and against edge and sharped weapons (or guass rifles) it protects normally. I am just sketching here, so don't pin me down exactly.

 

[Whipsnade]

Rem,

Try not using your guns so often. Seriously.

Are you playing a military campaign? If so, people die in battle. Your players can role play ways to tip the odds in their favor when battle occurs, but battle is deadly.

Are you running a merchant campaign? If so, why all the gun play? You were ambushed by four guys with gauss pistols? No cops? No weapon restrictions? Four guys with hi-tech weapons come out of nowhere and want you dead regardless of the consequences? Again, role play can help things here.

A Traveller session shouldn't resemble a dungeon crawl - unless it's Shadows or Twilight's Peak or Death Station that is!


Have fun,
Bill

 

[MrMorden]

Here's one that we use that preserves the deadly nature of combat but keeps people from re-rolling characters every session:

We don't allow a single hit to take somebody from half or more of their full lifeblood to -10 (dead). If a PC normally has 12 lifeblood, and is sitting at 6 and takes another hit for 17 lifeblood, instead of dead, we place the character at -5.

This gives the PC a chance to at least receive medical attention and get stabilized before bleeding out. The end result is that PCs go down just as often, but don't actually die quite as much.

 

[MrMorden]

Originally posted by Bill Cameron:
Rem,

Try not using your guns so often. Seriously.

Are you playing a military campaign? If so, people die in battle. Your players can role play ways to tip the odds in their favor when battle occurs, but battle is deadly.

Are you running a merchant campaign? If so, why all the gun play? You were ambushed by four guys with gauss pistols? No cops? No weapon restrictions? Four guys with hi-tech weapons come out of nowhere and want you dead regardless of the consequences? Again, role play can help things here.

A Traveller session shouldn't resemble a dungeon crawl - unless it's Shadows or Twilight's Peak or Death Station that is!

I have to disagree a little bit here...you are right that a Traveller game should not be like a dungeon crawl, but it is supposed to be fun. Turning a Merchant campaign into a game of Accountants & Actuarials doesn't sound like much fun.

Every sci-fi book or movie that I have really enjoyed featured a lot of action. It doesn't always have to be violent, but often violence or at least the threat of immediate violence is a factor.

I like that Traveller is a hard science game and has a "gritty" feel. But I don't want it to be a 100% accurate simulation of life. I want the PCs to be able to do exciting, unusual, and sometimes even extraordinary things, just like in those books and movies I love.

The only way to have these kinds of things happen is to give the PCs some chance of surviving when they try things like that. Otherwise whenever guns come out the PCs will run and/or hide. very realistic, not very heroic.

 

[Darium]

In my estemation most shots in gun fight would not be well aimed. You could try adding extra negative modifiers to hit the PCs. Lack of familiarity with the weapon or of combat experience in gereral could account for something.

 

[thewh0]

Originally posted by Bill Cameron:
Rem,

Are you running a merchant campaign? If so, why all the gun play? You were ambushed by four guys with gauss pistols? No cops? No weapon restrictions? Four guys with hi-tech weapons come out of nowhere and want you dead regardless of the consequences? Again, role play can help things here.


Have fun,
Bill

[SPOILER ALERT] For those who haven't played Stoner Express and want to, you may not want to read this

This was straight from the Stoner Express adventure. And it was really the first thing that has happened, besides a Naval Inspection. I was just walking around the Starport (class D, so little authority/security around) heading back to my ship from the brokerage house when I got jumped. Luckily, the group's tank was nearby and just happened to be carrying his HEAP greanade launcher, but still. And not only did they give the thugs such high-power weapons, according to the module, the critical threat range on their Gauss pistols is 18-20.

Since I'm playing the scenario, I obviously haven't read it, so maybe the Referee didn't do something right, but it just seems a little much.

 

[Whipsnade]

Originally posted by MrMorden:
Turning a Merchant campaign into a game of Accountants & Actuarials doesn't sound like much fun.

MrMorden,

No, that wouldn't be fun. But...

Every sci-fi book or movie that I have really enjoyed featured a lot of action. It doesn't always have to be violent, but often violence or at least the threat of immediate violence is a factor.

Violence can be a drunk in a bar, violence can be two guys in an alley with clubs, violence can be a riot in the street, violence can even be a verbal threat. So why does violence most of the published T20 adventures nearly always involve situations and weapons that will immediately kill the players unless some rabbit is pulled from a hat?

Read Rem's spoiler above my post. His character is walking around the port, four guys with gauss pistols ambush him, and he's saved by a fellow player with a goddam grenade launcher! Where the hell is that port? New Mogadishu?

No local cops? No port security? No one paying attention to grenades going off?

This isn't a medieval fantasy setting and those aren't swords and crossbows. You just don't go around dripping with weapons as if it is some fantasy setting either. Pistols and grenade launchers are deadly, deadly at a distance too. People take precautions around that kind of technology and societies develop mechanisms to deal it.

Simply mentally equating the new "ambusher+pistol" with the old "orc+dagger" and then running the encounter in the same old fashion doesn't work. Rem's questions prove that. This is a different setting with different precepts. Guns are deadly. That's why T20 has lifeblood, the designers needed a way to drive the point home.

I like that Traveller is a hard science game and has a "gritty" feel. But I don't want it to be a 100% accurate simulation of life. I want the PCs to be able to do exciting, unusual, and sometimes even extraordinary things, just like in those books and movies I love.

No one is suggesting that it 100% accurate. If it were that accurate Rem's character were be dead, the cops would have landed like a dTon of iridium on the four ambushers, and the grenadier would be lucky to be in jail instead of shot while 'resisting arrest'.

The only way to have these kinds of things happen is to give the PCs some chance of surviving when they try things like that.

You want to give the players a chance? There are two methods: tone down the weapons or tone down the violence.

You can either turn very deadly weapons into what is essentially a laughing stock and finagle those weapons, their effects, and/or the damage they cause to allow your PCs to waltz through a hail of gunfire.

Or, you can realize that threats can come in many different forms, violence doesn't always involve deadly gunplay, and use your imagination to create and provide action and suspense for your players without the need for a hail of bullets every five minutes.

Otherwise whenever guns come out the PCs will run and/or hide. very realistic, not very heroic.

How often do guns need to come out? Using them sparingly makes them all the more effective.

If you play heroic-cinematic, that's fine. Historically Traveller rarely presented that kind of adventure.


Have fun,
Bill

 

[Crashlogic]

I gotta agree with bill on this one.
I appreciate the cinematic desire to play a guy straight out of the hong kong movies, but really that is never what traveller was about. Combat was always dangerous.

Having it be dangerous makes it more tense, and your characters should feel like every time the confront a guy with a gun they could be killed. They should not run the risk of that in a bar room brawl, so i usualy apply all that sort of damge as stamina. You can get killed in a brawl, but it takes a bit. Martial arts are a whole other can of worms, and I have nto really put a lot of thought into them in terms of traveller.

Of course Traveller does, of necessity ignore the notion of transhumanism, and technology remains sort of backwards in the fields of medicine and other technologies, like nano tech. This stuff was not arouind when traveller was first published really, and subsequent thinking has not been incorporated inot the rules. Maybe it shouldn't really, as it takes away the "travellerness" of the game. But I think given a few thousand years of technological development, medice will be able, if properly resourced, to heal people much faster.

If you like your player to bounce back from combat, simply have them heal faster, assuming say they are somewhere like a starship sickbay, with a reasonably competent medtech.

Its a thought.

 

[MrMorden]

Don't get me wrong, I don't play Traveller as a "gunfight a minute" game...in fact, our last 12 hour session had NO combat at all in it (but a lot of potential for combat if handled wrong).

All I mean is that when the guns do finally come out, I want my players to be properly worried, but also to feel like they still have options in how they play it. I don't want them to be afraid to try something unusual the might be very risky in real life. This kinds of things make up the moments that players talk about for years afterwards.

 

[archhealer]

Guns aside, I ran into a bit of trouble with a recent encounter that should have been fairly easy for my poor players.

They have a vehicle, custom built, which is essentially an armored jeep (Hummer sized) with an autocannon turret on the top. They were crossing a desert area and happened across a swarm of insectoid, aggressive hunters, which proceeded to assault the vehicle. Now, these things weren't very tough, but there were a bunch of them, and two score critical hits with claw attacks.

Against a vehicle. Which means internal damage.
Even though, after scaling the damage, the two critical hits only did 1 and 2 ponts, respectively. However, they hit the fuel tank and the control system, so the vehicle was immediately disabled.

I thought that was stupid, so I just applied a penalty to all control checks until repairs were made, and started counting rounds till all their fuel leaked out.

However, if I'd applied the damage in full, I'm pretty sure the players would have died. That seems a little... Broken, to me, that a bunch of small to medium bugs could really take out an armored vehicle like that.

 

[pdohoney]

I was the Referee for the module that Rem Kodarr was playing. The law level was low and Rem's description of the combat was not exactly correct but it was close enough. Our group is still trying to absorb all of the T20 rules and I can and do make mistakes.

Our group does not play a "gunfight a minute"! As the module was written, this was the first combat scene and it came in Act 4 scene 3. We play about once a week and at each session we get through about one act. This scene in the module was designed to be violent and the characters had to be prepaired to deal with the eventuality of violance.

I don't like violance, but if you look at the world around us violance is a part of life. Deadly situations are a major motivator in almost every RPG that I have played. I have looked at quite a few T20 modules and almost all of them put the PCs in deadly situations. If T20 is going to have modules that put PCs in deadly situations (like four thugs with guns ambushing you) then the players are going to have to be able to play through them and have a chance at survival. They can't run away from every combat scene that is set in front of them. They can try to find creative ways to deal with these situations but eventually they will have to fight one of them.

As a Referee I do not take the death of a PC lightly. I have to do my best at making the game enjoyable to play. Killing a PC is not enjoyable for the Player or for the Referee. I would like to see the PCs challanged and hard pressed but not dead.

The problem that we as a group are trying to manage in T20 is that one good hit can kill a PC no matter what their level. Coming from a D20 world this just seems broke. We are trying to modify the T20 combat rules (including stamina, lifeblood, and AR) so that we can keep the PCs alive long enough to complete a combat scene. We were just wondering if anyone else has already come up with a solution? At this point I am thinking about dropping the T20 combat rules and going with the D20 Future combat rules.

 

[mike wightman]

Hi Hezekiah,

welcome aboard

As has been pointed out several times by now, Traveller is a dangerous game.
CT - lethal
T20 - almost as lethal

Another rule fudge I can think of that may help it to allow characters to make a will or fortitude (or both) save to take an action while at negative lifeblood.

Hope you win the fight and then rely on high tech medical treatment to sort you out

 

[mike wightman]

Originally posted by Hezekiah Rhodes:
The problem that we as a group are trying to manage in T20 is that one good hit can kill a PC no matter what their level. Coming from a D20 world this just seems broke.

Traveller's combat paradigm in all its iterations, bar one, has been to be realistic rather than cinematic.
Characters can die from a single bullet to the head - just like in real life.

It promotes a different approach to combat within a game - it becomes something to be avoided, or approached with overwhelming advantage on your side.

We are trying to modify the T20 combat rules (including stamina, lifeblood, and AR) so that we can keep the PCs alive long enough to complete a combat scene.

As Bill posted earlier, just because T20 is a D20 based game, that doesn't mean you can carry over your D&D experiences.

We were just wondering if anyone else has already come up with a solution? At this point I am thinking about dropping the T20 combat rules and going with the D20 Future combat rules.

A couple of more things to try before abandoning the T20 system altogether:

give characters a level based defence bonus;

allow for reflex saving throws to half damage.

Oh, and according to the adventure the thugs should have autopistols, not gauss pistols

Changing from one to the other makes the thugs much more lethal

In D&D terms it would be like giving a kobald a wand of magic missiles to use - it increases the CR of the encounter dramatically.

 

[pdohoney]

Traveller's combat paradigm in all its iterations, bar one, has been to be realistic rather than cinematic. Characters can die from a single bullet to the head - just like in real life.

I understand realism is important to many Traveller players, but Traveller is still a game. Players are supposed to have fun playing games. We are trying to find a balance between realism and game playability. I believe that our group feels that we would rather sacrafice a little realism to make the game playable.

It promotes a different approach to combat within a game - it becomes something to be avoided, or approached with overwhelming advantage on your side.

This is a very idealist response. Yes, the PCs must be creative and try to avoid combat situations, but running away and hiding doesn't allow the PCs to complete their mission and most of the time PCs can't afford an overwhelming advantage.

As Bill posted earlier, just because T20 is a D20 based game, that doesn't mean you can carry over your D&D experiences.

I am not trying to start a war about what is or is not the right way to play Traveller. Our group is just trying to find a way to play Traveller that they can enjoy!

A couple of more things to try before abandoning the T20 system altogether:

give characters a level based defence bonus;

allow for reflex saving throws to half damage.

These are constructive possibilities and I will bring it up with the players.

Zek

 

[Crashlogic]

Well I was always bothered by the lack of progress with technology. Cloth armour is Medium armour at TL six. I figure its light armour by TL12, almost if not quite, street clothes. Cloth has an AR of 6, I recall. So give your characters cloth armour and most lifeblood damage short of fusion gus will be absorbed through AR.
Criticals are problematic, as all damage, as I understand it, gets to life blood. this make criticals deadly. If you ar enot comfortable with this, eliminate criticals either against PC's or altogether. An interesting compromise might be to not allow criticals except on called shots. One shot kills will be very rare in the game.

Another interesting variant, that comes from somewhere, is to use a defensive roll instead of giving an auotmatic base 10 to AC. Making every to hit roll opposed.

 

[Chaos]

One thing that I´ve thought of trying is giving a bonus to Lifeblood on higher levels. So if a level of a class gives +1d10 Stamina, it also gives a 10% bonus to Lifeblood (usually 1 point) with no additional Con bonus; you add up all the bonus percentages from all levels, and modify Lifeblood by that total... so for example a elvel 6 Marine with Con 14 will get (14*0.6)=8.4 ~ 8 additional point for a total of 22 Lifeblood - better than by normal rules, but still not superhuman.

 

[mike wightman]

Or lifeblood could be character weight (in kg) divided by 5, plus STR bonus, plus CON bonus...

to increase it further there's the toughness feat, and the option of adding fortitude save as well.

Another option would be to have 3 serious wound stats:

musculature - Strength

lifeblood - Constitution

coordination - Dexterity

normal lifeblood damage is split between the three...