Bottom Line Up Front: The personal (melee) combat system seems fatally flawed. Am i missing something?
Tried a little "test drive" session with my regular group, all experienced RPGers, some in CT. Just wanted to exercise the systems, as written, in T5 before trying a "real" adventure. Used a few characters I'd pre-generated in the process of trying out T5.
My plan was just to go through some of the basic functions to get a feel for them, so the plan was: Starship trading (using straight rolls, with no fudging, I had a 5-term merchant character that earned 700 tons worth of ship shares... it would appear that this is free-and-clear hell-of-a-trader, but that's not the issue) to exercise those systems; a little bar brawl to try out combat; outbound jump (to try out astrogation and basic skill resolution); and finally a small ACS ship combat session to stretch those muscles. The idea was that after doing this, they'd have a better idea of the system when we did chargen next week.
The cargo purchase/passenger system seemed to work reasonably (though it seemed a tad watered down from Merchant Prince). Good!
The bar fight commenced with a three average (777777) knuckleheads throwing a bottle at the crew and then closing for fisticuffs. The bottle throw worked fine, bouncing a bottle off the chest of one of the crew, but once it came to blows... Hmmm. To hit is 2D<Attacker MN - Defender MN +/- mods... so my Str 10 character goes to hit Slob #1, neither with any fighter skill, range of 1. 2D<(10-7)+4, or 2D<7 Not bad. Slob to hit character would be 2D<(7-10)+4, or 2D<1. Hmm... Never. Ever. Not three dice, so no lucky 3. Doing the math, having an MN of 3 less than somebody means you can NEVER hit them in a fight.
This pretty much stopped the test as the players laughed at the system. We did try to jump out, and they tumbled to the same thing I had in reading it over, that there is no time given for the initial calculation of jump, and while mystified by the more difficult 24-hour confirmation, recognized the possible dramatic aspects... otherwise you'd just recalc from the beginning if your attempt is within 6 of required roll.
So: Am I missing something? I've poured over the errata, seen lots of alternative systems here in the forum, but found nothing addressing the imbalance of the melee system (more recent than the 2002 discussions). Is there an official fix? Obviously anybody can come up with another system, but I'd prefer to know the "official" answer... but right now, it's a deal-breaker for my group.
Tried a little "test drive" session with my regular group, all experienced RPGers, some in CT. Just wanted to exercise the systems, as written, in T5 before trying a "real" adventure. Used a few characters I'd pre-generated in the process of trying out T5.
My plan was just to go through some of the basic functions to get a feel for them, so the plan was: Starship trading (using straight rolls, with no fudging, I had a 5-term merchant character that earned 700 tons worth of ship shares... it would appear that this is free-and-clear hell-of-a-trader, but that's not the issue) to exercise those systems; a little bar brawl to try out combat; outbound jump (to try out astrogation and basic skill resolution); and finally a small ACS ship combat session to stretch those muscles. The idea was that after doing this, they'd have a better idea of the system when we did chargen next week.
The cargo purchase/passenger system seemed to work reasonably (though it seemed a tad watered down from Merchant Prince). Good!
The bar fight commenced with a three average (777777) knuckleheads throwing a bottle at the crew and then closing for fisticuffs. The bottle throw worked fine, bouncing a bottle off the chest of one of the crew, but once it came to blows... Hmmm. To hit is 2D<Attacker MN - Defender MN +/- mods... so my Str 10 character goes to hit Slob #1, neither with any fighter skill, range of 1. 2D<(10-7)+4, or 2D<7 Not bad. Slob to hit character would be 2D<(7-10)+4, or 2D<1. Hmm... Never. Ever. Not three dice, so no lucky 3. Doing the math, having an MN of 3 less than somebody means you can NEVER hit them in a fight.
This pretty much stopped the test as the players laughed at the system. We did try to jump out, and they tumbled to the same thing I had in reading it over, that there is no time given for the initial calculation of jump, and while mystified by the more difficult 24-hour confirmation, recognized the possible dramatic aspects... otherwise you'd just recalc from the beginning if your attempt is within 6 of required roll.
So: Am I missing something? I've poured over the errata, seen lots of alternative systems here in the forum, but found nothing addressing the imbalance of the melee system (more recent than the 2002 discussions). Is there an official fix? Obviously anybody can come up with another system, but I'd prefer to know the "official" answer... but right now, it's a deal-breaker for my group.
