Folks:
This post is two parts.
I) Is there a rule of them that someone should use when creating new weapons or modifying weapons stats?
II) I wanted to build the HK MP7; however, I am currently just taking the stats for the submachine gun. It is wise or should I even worry about making new stats for weapons I want to seed my campaign with? Or should I just skin the MP7 to use the standard weapon stats?
Thank you
It depends. When I used CT/Striker a lot, it was quite easy to come up with new weapon stats, and amongst other things a 'Tactical Pistol' (much the same as what you've described) is one of the things I came up with. There was much more as I was young and keen at the time. Now I'm older and wiser from having done a lot of Traveller house rules, designed other systems and sci-fi/space opera adaptations of other systems such as FATE.
Here are a few musings:
You probably don't need more than a dozen or two personal weapons in your whole game
2 - perhaps more if you include hand-to-hand weapons or if larger support weapons are relevant to your campaign. If you design 100 subtle variations of different weapons you will wind up with ones that are just undifferentiated or slightly inferior versions of some preferred equivalent - and nobody will ever use them.
However, Rule of Cool still applies. If your players are inclined to gear-headedness you can do some items or variations for depth or flavour; an example of this might be a counter-sniper variant of an ACR that lacked the grenade launcher but worked better at range. OTOH, this sort of thing is a bit pointless unless it has some discernable effect on game mechanics. Whether you bother is really a function of whether your group is into that sort of thing. I've done this on plenty of occasions. Sometimes it gets used and sometimes it doesn't.
Think of the game balance. Building a weapon that is 'like a Gauss Rifle but awesomer'
1 is counterproductive as a Gauss Rifle is already verging on overpowered in most versions of Traveller.
Think of the niches. What capabilities do you want in-game, for example:
- Small, concealable handgun (e.g. body pistol)
- Powerful handgun (e.g. magnum revolver)
- Mainstream combat rifle (e.g. ACR or Gauss Rifle)
- High penetration (e.g. laser rifle)
- Everyman weapon (e.g. shotgun)
. . . and so forth. Think what you do and don't want, and the game balance issues. Decide on your preferred technologies and background and build stuff to fit these capabilities.
3
1Yes, guilty as charged; I did an extended magazine variant that was even more overpowered. It lived on as a support weapon but got withdrawn. The same balance problem applies to snub submachineguns unless you nerf the effects of the HEAP round somehow.
2I've done a few games and campaign settings that were deliberately much more pulpy than the OTU, and I found that even with several parallel technologies - blasters, lasers, gauss guns, rocket guns, slug throwers etc - there are really only a dozen or two niches and it becomes difficult to think of reasons for many more different things to actually exist. In my experience this process tends to run out of steam at around 15-20 different types of firearms and a dozen or so hand to hand weapons. You can add more for colour but they tend to wind up being much the same as some other weapon.
3For example in some settings (e.g. Star Wars or Star Trek) blasters, phasers or some other technology is the mainstream rather than slug throwers as in the OTU. I've done settings like this on more than one occasions.
