What would you like posted next?

[aramis]

Scott: I think we should Go with linear armor, and keep the multiplication baseline at the following

Pen=2x AV or more: x2 base (Blowing shrapnel)
Pen=AV+ Base (A good direct hit)
Pen=0.5AV+ Half (Spalling or severe BFT)
Pen=0.1AV+ 0.1x (BFT, pinpoints, etc)
BFT= Blunt Force Trauma

Base damage should probably vary more than in MT, since each "hit" is 1d to attributes. A few MT GM's used it as an immediate apply-to-atts; others, like me, applied it post-combat to represent loss of adrenaline; others still simply used Hits only, never applying to atts. (I've done that last, as well, using the healing from Striker... hits take is light wound, unc is heavy wound, all gone is mortal wound, and at double total, chunky salsa... providing options is a good thing.)

One other thing: MT's x0.1 is also used for any hit on non-rigid armors. BFT is the key thing here.

 

[Anthony]

If you want to use a single scale for humans, vehicles, and starships, a logarithmic scale has a lot to be said for it. Most melee weapons can be stopped by 1mm of hard steel. Most pistols can be stopped by 3mm. A High Guard canon Tigress (16% armor by volume) has a hull 13 meters thick; if we assume that it's bonded SD, that's equivalent to ~180,000mm of steel. Hard to avoid messy numbers at that point.

Personally, I like a decibel (10xlog10) rather than the 8xlog2 of Striker. The equivalent of MT then winds up being:
Pen=AV+3: 2x base
Pen=AV: 1x base
Pen=AV-3: 0.5xbase
Pen=AV-10: 0.1xBase

 

[robject]

I've played with logarithmic battery factors a bit, but never got to the sophistication level talked about here. So I wasn't able to satisfactorially deal with damage.

 

[Anthony]

Doing logarithmic damage well takes a bit of work, and has the apparent oddity that hit points are flat. For anyone who's curious, I did a logarithmic base damage system for a modified Traveller space combat system a while back. The rules could do with some simplification, but might still have something people would find interesting. http://geocities.com/ac_jackson/traveller/BV/

 

[mike wightman]

Anthony, thank you for posting your rules. They are excellent

 

[Scott Martin]

Log damage strikes me as problematic. Actually it strikes me as overkill, and anything that can be eliminated from a rules system probably should.

<light hearted poke> Robject: get over the fact that damage "factors" will exceed a single (pseudo hex) digit </light hearted poke>

If you look at systems that use log scales (Richter scale, Decibels etc) they tend to be used for systems where there are a lot of orders of magnitude, and the granularity is largely unimportant. Traveller (at least TNE and T4 Traveller) damage is constrained to 4, or perhaps 5 orders of magnitude at most, and that's with monstrous huge behemoth spinal mounts.

Most "Player level" interactions will be well within 3 orders of magnitude, spanning from personal firearms to large starship weapons (DD and CL range weapons) The "biggest" BL weapon was a 2,000 MJ / 224 DV Destroyer-sized spinal mount. This is probably a fair ways heavier than what most Traveller players (playing the RPG) are likely to encounter.

Since TNE already uses a square root function to limit damage, having (10Log10(sqrt(energy)*some factor) strikes me as an awful lot of math for a simple system, I think that most folks can grasp the concept of "10,000" being a huge attack a lot better than "40" especially since anyome with enough math skills to do character gen will notice that "10,000" is 10X bigger than "1,000" and 100x bigger than "100". Most folks won't draw the same conclusion from the series "40, 30, 20"

Before anyone leaps in with the Tigress "200 m of steel" I'll point out that this level of armour is pointless when armour thickness derives armour value, instead of it being (factor) percentage based. The "insane-o" armour level at the end of 4 orders of magnitude is in fact close to that of the Tigress, (which would be an AV of 36,000, instead of 10,000 but it isn't adding more digits) This has the nice side effect of ensuring that fighters cannot have dreadnaught armour values...

BTW the particle accellerator required to penetrate a "mere" 50m equivalent of steel (the top of 4 orders of magnitude) would be 2 km in length, so some conversion for CT ships is probably in order for huge heavily armoured ships. MT ship conversion is guarenteed to be a problem, given that some of the ones that are in print require more than double their current volume to contain the armour plating, and their J-Drives are certainly not specced for it (and it neatly explains why MT cap ships are so sluggish...)

IMO it's a good thing that the armour levels on a Tigress (or any of the MT cap ships from Shattered Ships) is likely to show up in a T5 design.

Scott Martin

 

[Anthony]

If you want enough resolution to deal with both punching people and high end starship armor you're going to ranging over 5+ orders of magnitude, because your bottom level of armor resolution is going to be 0.5mm or so. There's a reason GURPS, with a strict linear damage model, winds up with capital ship DRs in excess of 100,000

 

[mike wightman]

Which GT:ISW reduces by introducing the dDR scale (which is the DR divided by 10), which is also applied to weapon damages.

I think I'm going to have to admit that I am a full convert to the GT:ISW ship building system.

 

[aramis]

My biggest gripe from T20 tech is the non-linearity of ship's hit points.

I don't mind 3-5 digit hit point totals.... but I do mind 10 HP in one hit being a vastly different thing than 10 1hp hits...

The other consideration on ships: are we doing damage by crits, damage by cumulation of hits, both, or other. For comparison, Bk2 is a large granule cumulation with limited critical effects. Bk5 is pure criticals, as is Battle Rider. BL is mixed, but I don't recall the exact point. MT Vehicle rules are pure cumulation, but MT-HG is pure criticals. CT, MT, and T4 personal combat is a cumulation of hits with limited critical effects.

(Other would be hard to exemplify... but Memoir 44 and the other Command and Colors games probably qualify...)

 

[Anthony]

The main reason I favor log-based rather than linear damage is because addition and table lookup is something most people can do without a calculator. Multiplication, unless using very simple numbers, is not. Applying 6dx15 damage to DR 200 and 1,000 hp takes more math than most people can easily do in their heads.

 

[Scott Martin]

Originally posted by Anthony:
The main reason I favor log-based rather than linear damage is because addition and table lookup is something most people can do without a calculator. Multiplication, unless using very simple numbers, is not. Applying 6dx15 damage to DR 200 and 1,000 hp takes more math than most people can easily do in their heads.

I assume that this is from T20, since every other Traveller system does "N" damage, or possibly "N+2d6" damage. This is pretty trivial to knock off a 10,000 DP ship.

It looks like I'm going to have to track down a copy of GT:IW just to see how they handle things. It certainly sounds like they have spent a lot of time tweaking it (not really surprising, considering that SJG has a decent sized full time staff, and GURPS is their flagship line...)

Of course it als sounds like most of what they are doing is stuff that has been in Traveller "house rules" for aeons

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

Scott Martin

 

[Anthony]

It's from GURPS Traveller. You can get away from rolling if you eliminate variance from damage, but you probably don't want to eliminate variance from damage. For N+2d6, well, it only makes sense on a log-based system, since variance should be proportional to the power of the attack, and on a log-based system +2d6 is proportional to power, whereas on a linear system it isn't.

 

[mike wightman]

Another benefit to rolling damage dice in ship to ship combat is that the majority of the RPG players I've ever refereed for prefer to roll damage dice than to have a fixed damage value.

People with a wargame background are happy with fixed damage values, at least that's my experience.

 

[robject]

Originally posted by Sigg Oddra:
Another benefit to rolling damage dice in ship to ship combat is that the majority of the RPG players I've ever refereed for prefer to roll damage dice than to have a fixed damage value.

People with a wargame background are happy with fixed damage values, at least that's my experience.

I tend to agree here. Also, the more that ship combat mechanics resemble personal combat mechanics, the easier the rules are to learn.

But how do you rate ships? Give 'em a UPP with jump drive, maneuverability, structure?

 

[mike wightman]

For PC scale ships it could work, for the multi-kiloton battlewagons it would break down, but I'm sure we could come up with a conversion factor

 

[Anthony]

The problem you run into with hit point systems on large vehicles is that large vehicles can take huge numbers of hits that don't actually bounce off of armor, but don't cause a lot of damage either. A hit that cripples 1 dton of components is significant on a fighter, and an annoyance on a free trader, so it seems like you can't just ignore such hits. Now, how do you handle that for a 100,000 dton dispersed structure hull? Give it 100,000 hit points? And then make spinal mounts do tens of thousands of points of damage? Also, for armored ships, a 1000x larger ship has a hull that's only 10x thicker, but can withstand a thousand times more damage, so you can't use a unified penetration/damage scale (realistically, I will note that doubling the caliber on a weapon, which doubles penetration, actually increases energy by a factor of 8; penetration is more likely to be 1/3 power in energy than 1/2).

Of course, asking ship combat mechanics to resemble personal combat mechanics requires established personal combat mechanics.

 

[mike wightman]

Ship UPP for PC scale ships.

Strength(rename as Structure?) = 5 + hull tonnage/100
Endurance = 6 + power plant number
Dexterity(rename as Drive) = 6 + maneuver drive number
Intelligence(rename as EWR) = 6 + computer/sensor model number
Education = ? something to do with computer programs?
Social = ? damage control rating of some kind?

 

[robject]

I was thinking about this some more, and it seems that it doesn't really add to the roleplaying experience. I mean, where are the players all running about, trying to repair turrets that have been hit?

Also, I was thinking that Dexterity would be EWR, since that's the characteristic people use to hit things with weapons. Give a bonus for having a decent bridge.

So we'd need M-drive and J-drive, and a slot that breaks down further into weapons.

 

[mike wightman]

How about a simplified USP, again only for PC scale?
</font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">1 2 3 4 5 6
H F- J M P - C - T - c c c - t d</pre>[/QUOTE]hull size
fuel
jdrive
mdrive
pp
computer/sensors/EWR
turrets
crew
cargo
carried craft
troops
damage control

Roll 1d6 for hit location block and then randomise within, e.g. roll of 2 hits the engines, roll a d3 to determine which bit.