Quote:
Originally Posted by Daefaroth
I've used scaling multipliers for years (having played Traveller for over a couple decades now) and they work extremely well. And the two foolish PCs who tried to walk through ship-mounted laser fire did indeed not notice the difference. The biggest problem I've seen with scifi RPG equipment design systems is the ones that fail to be used are those that try to simulate, rather than emulate, reality. Most gamers want to play the game, not go through a self-study program for mechanical/electrical engineers and far too many games have been ruined by game designers who insist their game be "hard science" without understanding that science will make such games obsolete within a few years (or sooner).
IMO, a successful gear/vehicle/ship design system should be modular in nature, easily scalable (i.e. the same rules framework used to design a handgun or motorcycle is used to build a starship planetary defense emplacements) and allow tweaks and improvements to come from successful PC skill rolls. In other words, it has the simplified intuitiveness that's the winning characteristic of BRP. That's when a game gets "buy-in" from players.
Make it overcomplicated and players, and their money, walk away and never look at it again.
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Some truth there. On the other hand, make it too simple and everyone walks away with their money too. I've seen a lot of Sci-Fi games end up on the dust pile with very simple, but poorly designed, senseless, and inconsistent data.
The tricky bit is finding the happy medium.
I like VDS. Its good to have something that gives detailed results. But most of those details aren't really important, or even applicable in a Sci-Fi game.
I really like Stuff!. In part because it does have a modular design system and uses the same basic framework to build things. It also does allow for player tweaks, and scales the technology by era. A modern, c. 2008, late atomic era, radio will end up being more powerful and smaller that one from a century ago (Industrial Era). Likewise, future radios can be even smaller, more powerful, and have more capabilities.
Since Stuff! uses STR (power of motors and such) and SIZE (you can only fit so much into a space) as forms of currency when creating things, it translates well to BRP.
I tend to believe that some "crunch" is important in RPGs, just to keep thing internally consistent, but that most of the "crunch" can and should be transparent in play. For example, a game could have a formula that is used to calculate weapon damage dice, APs, Hit Points, ship's performance stats and whatever, but the players don't need to know them. They just need to know the final numbers and what dice they need to roll.
It doesn't hurt if you can have the guys at NASA design the ships just as long as the rest of us can run the ships in play.
The only real tricks with scaling are to make it consistent, sensible, and some slight problems with the bell curve. 2D6x10 gives the same range as 20D6, but has a wider spread of damage. Someone taking only 30-40 points or over 150 points is much less likely with 20D6.
Typically you do reach a point where the damage is sheer overkill for most PCs anyway. A SIZ 6450 Heavy Cruiser with, say 13,000 Hit Points and armed with banks of energy weapons designed to fight a similar ship from a rival power can probably dish over hundred or even thousands of points of damage in a round. So a PC who gets lucky and only takes 200 points of damage won't feel lucky (or anything else, ever again).