Ship combat critical damage

[mike wightman]

This just keeps bugging me.

Say a TL14 fusion gun battery, factor 6, hits it causes 6d20 damage.

To critical it needs a 16 and gets x5.

So on a critical hit do you:

roll 6d20 an extra five times - total 36d20;

or

roll 6d20 an extra four times - total 30d20;

or

roll 6d20 and multiply by 5;

or

roll 6d20 for the weapon and then an extra 5d20 for the critical effect?

 

[Valarian]

In answer: roll 6d20 and multiply by 5

However, the die reduction for armour will come before the multiplication.

Resolve any damage to the target, then multiply that damage by 5

 

[mike wightman]

Thanks for the reply Valarian.

In answer: roll 6d20 and multiply by 5

That's how I would usually do it.

However, the die reduction for armour will come before the multiplication.

Emm, critical hits ignore armour.

 

[mike wightman]

This is what's got me confused.
From the D&D SRD:

A critical hit means that you roll your damage more than once, with all your usual bonuses, and add the rolls together. Unless otherwise specified, the threat range for a critical hit on an attack roll is 20, and the multiplier is x2.

So if the multiplier is x5 you should roll damage five times?

Has T20 changed this from the D&D rule?

 

[Jeffkmd]

Originally posted by Sigg Oddra:


So on a critical hit do you:

roll 6d20 an extra four times - total 30d20;

You roll extra damage dice. Normal criticals are x2 and you roll one extra set of dice (for a total of two). In this instance, you would roll 4 extra sets (4 sets + 1 original set = 5 sets, or x5). You are supposed to roll each extra set and not just multiply. This would leave you with 30d20.

For simplicity's sake, it may be best to roll once and multiply or just take the average roll (11) to speed things up. The official rule is to roll each die, however.

 

[mike wightman]

Thanks for that jeffkmd, that's what I thought from researching the SRD above.

 

[BetterThanLife]

Actually the T20 rules for Starship Crits say an extra 5 times for the Fusion gun So a Crit by a Fusion gun is actually x6. (Read the table carefully, most starship weapons are x1 but it states an additional x1 on the table explaination.)

But according to both the Core Rules and the THB, you roll the dice each time. (Though I can't remember where I read it in the THB, I do remember it isn't in the combat section.)

However there is no statistical difference (if uniformly applied) between rolling the dice 5 times and multiplying the roll by 5, especially if you are dealing with larger numbers of dice. So whichever method you choose works as long as you don't change it to suit a particular roll.

 

[mike wightman]

I wonder if adding a number of damage dice equal to the base crit multiplier might "fix" the ridiculously high crit damage of fusion and meson guns?

i.e. if you crit with a fusion gun add 5d20 rather than multiply the [battery factor x damage dice] by five (or six ).

For a meson bay it would be 9d20 + 10d20 on a crit, rather than 9d20 x 10 (or 11?)

 

[BetterThanLife]

Sigg,
That would be one solution but it would also degrade the other weapons. I just slashed the Crit mult to x4 for both of those. (Or an additional x3)And yes it is supposed to be x11.

I think it was Falkyn that pointed that out to me.

But since x10 is more than enough to simply vaporize everything and I limit it to x4, I never thought much about it until this thread.

 

[mike wightman]

Good point about degrading the other weapons.

I find the weapon damage chart in the ships section breaks with a lot of D&D convensions, I just wonder if this is deliberate?

 

[BetterThanLife]

Originally posted by Sigg Oddra:
Good point about degrading the other weapons.

I find the weapon damage chart in the ships section breaks with a lot of D&D convensions, I just wonder if this is deliberate?

My thoughts on T20 ship combat are fairly well published here.

 

[RickA]

If it's x5 crit then I run it as damaged rolled plus all modifiers, x5.

Yes, many weapons have x1 multiplier in ship combat (beam lasers). These appear to be weapons of focused fire which don't do additional hull damage on a crit, they simply blow through and do the internal damage roll without doing more hull.

Some weapons do more hull damage on a crit (pulse lasers) as well as doing internal crit damage.

 

[BetterThanLife]

Originally posted by RickA:
If it's x5 crit then I run it as damaged rolled plus all modifiers, x5.

Yes, many weapons have x1 multiplier in ship combat (beam lasers). These appear to be weapons of focused fire which don't do additional hull damage on a crit, they simply blow through and do the internal damage roll without doing more hull.

Some weapons do more hull damage on a crit (pulse lasers) as well as doing internal crit damage.

But that breaks the general nature of Critical damage. A Rifle bullet is still a weapon of focused fire. And it simply blows through. (Especially the higher velocity ones.)As does a Laser Rifle.

The Chart in the THB on page 270 reads.

Critical Damage: the extra damage inflicted by a critical hit with this weapon.

Since it is extra damage it stands to reason that it is an additional x1 damage. (Especially since technically you are supposed to roll the damage that many times.)

Interesting enough though the Vehicle Weapons don't have a Crit Threat or multiple table in the THB. Virtually all of the personal weapons are x2 (All of them until you get to TA-1.).

 

[RickA]

I don't have my T20 book here, but seem to recall that the only weapons with x1 crit are ships weapons.

I'm not assuming that x1 means x2, I'm assuming it means x1. And that some weapons simply don't do extra hull damage, but they do extra overall damage because the shot went internal.

The way armor factor and crits work in T20 is fairly unique to T20 so I've been careful in my own game about reading more or less into the rules using my D20 preconcieved notions. I could very well be wrong on my reading here, it wouldn't be the first time, lol.

 

[mike wightman]

This is why I think you have to go back to the original D&D rules upon which all of this was built.

I think that the word "extra" in the ship weapons table is confusing/misleading, and the use of x1 crit multiplier is an error.

Here's the other bit on criticals from the SRD:

Critical: The entry in this column notes how the weapon is used with the rules for critical hits. When your character scores a critical hit, roll the damage two, three, or four times, as indicated by its critical multiplier (using all applicable modifiers on each roll), and add all the results together.
Exception: Extra damage over and above a weapon’s normal damage is not multiplied when you score a critical hit.
x2: The weapon deals double damage on a critical hit.
x3: The weapon deals triple damage on a critical hit.
x3/x4: One head of this double weapon deals triple damage on a critical hit. The other head deals quadruple damage on a critical hit.
x4: The weapon deals quadruple damage on a critical hit.
19–20/x2: The weapon scores a threat on a natural roll of 19 or 20 (instead of just 20) and deals double damage on a critical hit. (The weapon has a threat range of 19–20.)
18–20/x2: The weapon scores a threat on a natural roll of 18, 19, or 20 (instead of just 20) and deals double damage on a critical hit. (The weapon has a threat range of 18–20.)

Note the exception, this could be interpreted in T20 as the damage you get from battery fire.

Vehicle weapons must default to the crit on a 20, double damage, this is sort of implied by the vehicle damage rules on pages 165 and 176.

 

[mike wightman]

Alternatively the ship weapon table could have been deliberately written as is, changing some of the D&D pre-conseptions, but it would be nice to know that this is the case.

I can see the use of a x1 crit, since it bypasses armour.

 

[RickA]

I'll operate on the assumption that x1 means x1 though.

Like Sigg says, the table could have been deliberately written as it is, x1 is extra damage because you bypass armor and get the internal hit.

I've been burned by using D20 concepts as the interpreting lens for T20.

 

[far-trader]

I think that's the way Hunter has said it is meant to be read somewhere, but really it's counter intuitive and goes against D20 convention. Why it wasn't done right I don't know, seems like something that should have been caught in playtesting and we wouldn't (still) be having this discussion

 

[RickA]

I honestly don't know if it's against convention or not. If the intent was to illustrate how a beam laser turret can get an internal hit on a ship when you roll a crit, but because of the focused nature of the beam (opposed to the dispersed nature of a pulse?) it doesn't actually do more hull damage. It punches through and burns components.

Pulse laser is blasting extra hull damage out on its way in to the internal hit locations on a crit.

It makes sense if you want it to I think. It's just sort of odd because there IS no D20 space ship combat system. T20 made one up and made it D20-ish (which is good) but the differences stand out more starkly because of the similiarities.

 

[BetterThanLife]

I personally add the x1 so that the majority of weapons do x2, but I max out crits at x4. (To make the bigger ships viable. I also don't flat rate the Spinals, again to give you a reason to build something bigger than a Light Cruiser, I lost the +5 crit threat for spinals and Radiation damage isn't SI damage.(Though you do roll it to see if you got through the defenses, if you did roll on the Rad damage internal damage table.) While this all means that a Cruiser or a pair of Cruisers can still kill a Tigress, the pair aren't statistically going to kill one every combat round. (I also removed the Gunnery Skill and am going straight BAB, it makes no sense to me for a VFR Gauss Gun or auto canon on a pintle or carriage firing at an air/raft uses BAB, mounting the same weapon in the turret of an armored vehicle and it uses BAB against the same target but put it in a Starship turret, and fire it at the same target it now uses gunnery. Hunter wants to go the other way and make it all skills and lose BAB in the next edition, for now that is the route I am taking.

)


Using your logic on the blow through, a Beam Laser or a Particle Accellerator may only be x1 but an HE Missile?