Supplement Four
SOC-14 5K
Does anybody play using LBB5 starship combat rules?
Do you like the abstract game?
Do you like the abstract game?
CT Only: LBB 5 High Guard Starship Combat
- Thread starter Supplement Four
- Start date
AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
I use it and like it. It is fast and simple, a simple combat doesn't take hours to resolve.
I've used it a lot. I don't like it much now, because it's piss-poor and unfun for ACS level ships.
Supplement Four
SOC-14 5K
My view was that it was almost meant to be an option--not the only option--for starship combat.
ACS level? Use LBB2 or Starter Traveller...or even Mayday.
Want to describe huge capital ships going at it to your players, with hundreds of lasers firing, hundreds of missiles in the "air"? Then, LBB5 is your game.
Just my impression.
I used them all, S4. Mixed them all together in various ways too. The computers listed in HG2 all have CPU/Storage ratings.
Despite that all my mix and matching of the three, Wil's comment is spot on. LBB:2/Mayday are ACS while HG2 is BCS. It's hard to involve players in HG2's as a 2D6 roll can only "absorb" so many DRMs before it's distorted past utility.
I'm sure you've read before how I used occasionally Mayday for the players' trip to and from the 100D jump limit. The map & chits would come out and they'd plot their trip while I "showed" them things about the system in question rather than simply "telling" them. Sometimes the trip was important and sometimes it wasn't, but it was always interesting.
Horses for course, S4, horses for courses.
Despite that all my mix and matching of the three, Wil's comment is spot on. LBB:2/Mayday are ACS while HG2 is BCS. It's hard to involve players in HG2's as a 2D6 roll can only "absorb" so many DRMs before it's distorted past utility.
I'm sure you've read before how I used occasionally Mayday for the players' trip to and from the 100D jump limit. The map & chits would come out and they'd plot their trip while I "showed" them things about the system in question rather than simply "telling" them. Sometimes the trip was important and sometimes it wasn't, but it was always interesting.
Horses for course, S4, horses for courses.
Supplement Four
SOC-14 5K
I don't disagree with that at all.
I haven't used LBB5 combat that much. I did using it one time running TTA with a big ship battle between Tukera and Oberlindes.
I gave the players both sides, and I Reffed it.
It was fun, but not something that I'd use that often.
It did do its job, though. It gave the players a different experience, kinda like switching to mass combat when you've been playing personal combat all the time.
That's a good way to explain the difference. Sometimes your players are involved in mass combat rather than personal combat.
You're probably sick of reading me post about how my groups were usually wargamers first and roleplayers second as I've been bleating about it for decades now. Stepping up in "scale" to a less personal wargame and then stepping back down wasn't as much of a problem or mental shift for them. They didn't always need the personal focus RPGs most often provide.
While their PCs were not making rolls every turn, Mayday movement coupled with HG2 combat was plenty exciting for them thanks to their wargaming background.
None of Bk2-77, Bk2-81, TTB, ST, nor Mayday have armor rules.
They have other lacks covered by Bk5/MT, too. Bays, Fusion turrets, and more.
I think the best balance was T20...
We fiddled with all sorts of things like that, but nothing really proved to be worth the trade-off between complexity and "playability".
The larger HG2 computers can run almost every Mayday/LBB:2 program at once, so the entire "game within a game" of outwitting/guessing your opponent's computer moves doesn't happen. The benefit accrued is no long worth the effort made so HG2's computer differential becomes "good enough".
We toyed with various missile rules too. The simplest put a one turn 15g missile counter on the map marked with the battery code. You had the move the counter's future position marker to make an intercept. The Short/Long range DM determination depended on how many hexes the future counter ended up being moved from it's initial location. A wrinkle on that had the counter lasting two turns. A further wrinkle had any ship within 5 hexes of the missile counter's straight line present marker-to-future marker "course" allowed to fire beams at it. None of the benefits these additions produced seemed worth the effort they required.
We tried justifying HG2's 20 minutes versus Mayday's 100 minutes turns in many different ways; changing map scale, increasing firing rates, etc. Again, nothing proved to be worth it, so we just kept Mayday's scale and ignored HG2's.
We tried applying SFB's impulse rules too. With range bonuses and prohibitions part of the HG2, the idea was that it would allow the players to choose when to shoot. Wasn't worth it.
We tried to keep the Line/Reserve mechanism a number of ways. Nothing worked. We tried "same hex" escorting. That sort of worked, just not enough to use all the time. We tried to limit stacking via ship/fleet tactics skills. That sort of worked too, but again not enough to use often. We tried various targeting wrinkles like flank spotting and the like for another big nope.
We tried a lot of stuff and we kept coming back to "Move 'em like Mayday, fight 'em like High Guard".
Supplement Four
SOC-14 5K
I've heard Brilliant Lances, for TNE, is a good game. I've got both BL and the capital ship game, Battle Rider, but I've never played either.
Complexity on BL is extremely high. Play is slow, too.
I'm an SFB and CW player, and found BL unplayably fiddly and needlessly complex...
BL is a great game. It's also insanely detailed and that's coming from a guy who enjoyed Avalon Hill's Trobruk and plays Victory Game's Fleet series with all the advanced and optional rules. For example, you need to create a "3D-ish" external/internal model of each ship to determine damage.
Imagine pushing a skewer through an orange. A weapon strike - the skewer - at the forward port ventral location of a ship - the orange - will damage/destroy the specific equipment/system located there and then, depending on weapon strength and armor, propagate through the ship damaging/destroying specific equipment/system along that path. It gets that detailed.
The game also included a "slide rule" to help the players keep track of all the Diff Mods that will effect each die roll.
BR is Mayday movement coupled with a stripped down version of the CT/MT USP. Combat (mostly) focuses on what HG2 calls critical hits. The "Swarm of small/weak ships mission kill large/strong ships via fuel hits" tactic doesn't occur.
No die rolls either. You flip a special deck of cards. That's interesting, but it can be "gamed".
pendragonman
Absent Friends Margrave
As an SFB player, I also found BL more annoying than playable
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Replace Brilliant Lances movement with Battle Rider's more traditional Mayday like vector system and you have a winner.
BL offers a very detailed damage resolution system ideal for PC ships and major NPC vessels.
BR movement is much easier to use.
Once you have mastered AV:Tactical then that movement system is probably the most playable 'realistic' I have yet found.
BL offers a very detailed damage resolution system ideal for PC ships and major NPC vessels.
BR movement is much easier to use.
Once you have mastered AV:Tactical then that movement system is probably the most playable 'realistic' I have yet found.
Last edited:
Supplement Four
SOC-14 5K
I'm sure that you haven't forgotten the Mayday + HG article in JTAS.
No I haven't. However, the Mayday/HG2 mashup we played most often was limited to just what I told Fly: Move like Mayday, fight like HG2, X hexes equals Y range.
