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View Full Version : DM Help What changes in Space Adventures?



Yora
2021-09-12, 03:07 PM
I am deliberately avoiding the term science fiction, as what I am having in mind has very little to do with physics or hyper-technologies. The kind of game I am thinking of is more swashbuckling and pulpy adventures. In SPACE! Things like Star Wars or Flash Gordon.

In many ways, these kinds of settings take a lot from fantasy and westerns, even more so than from science fiction. But new aditions like space ships, radio, guns, and a range of technological gadgets does have an impact on stories, encounters, and the options that are open to players that are different from a typical adventure game.

I am thinking of taking a break from fantast and take a shot at Stars Without Number, giving the game a more pulpy and retro-futurisric angle. As someone who's pretty much entirely run elfgames set in Fantasyland, what changes in how GMs have to approach and think of things?

The main thing that comes to mind is that the big dungeon crawl no longer seems appropriate. You can still have hostile outposts full of enemies, but with even the most primitive communication technology any single guard can alert the entire place. And of course everyone will know you're there once a gun is fired. If players don't manage to take out guards quietly on first try, the game is up and the options come down to fignting their way back out of the place, or taking out all the opposition inside.
Partly it's ot course a question of the system, but I think generally you expect in gunfights that even super skilled heroes can't beat vastly more numerous enemies in the way that high level fighters and wizards could hold out against giant hordes of goblins. The game mechanics might allow it, but I think it just wouldn't feel right. Escaping from hundreds of evil minions who can't aim is fun, mowing down those hundrefs of minions would be quite appalling.

The other big thing is that I think in the vast majority of campaigns, everyone would expect the party to have space transportation at their free disposal pretty early on. Players could have a boat in a coastal fantasy setting which would work quite similar, but that's quite rare. In space adventures it's the default assumption.

Anonymouswizard
2021-09-12, 03:22 PM
First up, communication devices makes splitting up when you're not expecting combat much more viable. I've been in groups that have had each character go their own way because they can always call each other when they need to pay information along. The more stealth you're using the less practical this is, and of course if you're transmissions are unencrypted (you idiot) anybody can listen in, but it's a massive game changer when investigating.

Secondly if you're actually in space powerful weapons become a liability. Especially if your ship doesn't have internal airlocks between sections. Doubly especially if you're anywhere near hydrogen tanks (and there's probably a 50% chance rocketships are using hydrogen, if not it'll likely be water). While going more pulpy gives you leeway on decompression having multiple holes in the ship is just asking for trouble.

A badass with good weapons can take down a room full of enemies with surprise. With decent armour they can do it without the element of surprise. With powered armour they might be able to withstand anti tank weapons, but you're getting into Lensman territory there. But even the strongest armour will go down to heavy fire, whether you're a Space Marine or Imperial Stormtrooper. Hundreds of enemies is pushing it, tens is probably fine with decent equipment. So more crowds and less hordes.

SimonMoon6
2021-09-12, 04:03 PM
One big thing is the difficulty in getting help.

In a typical fantasy game, you can always just teleport back home when things get out of control. Or, if you don't have teleportation abilities yet, you can still run back to the big city. If you disturb a small army of orcs, you can wander back to the safety of the big city walls.

In space, no one can hear you scream.

That is, once you start to get outnumbered, you're not going to be able to run home so easily. And the enemies probably have spaceships too and their spaceships might be faster. And they might have more of them than you do. If you get into trouble, you're on your own. Running back home isn't an option.

Also, the enemies might wreck your spaceship. Then you're stuck on some other rotten planet. With the enemies, no doubt.

At best, you can radio back home and tell them that there's trouble. And they'll tell you that the nearest ship that can help you will arrive in two months. At worst, your communications are jammed and you're stuck. Of course, if you're an outlaw, then you don't have anybody to call for help anyway, most likely.

And if you fall through a wormhole into the Delta Quadrant, then you're totally screwed.

Yora
2021-09-12, 04:24 PM
This makes me realize that space battles probably make it much more feasiible to have situations in which PCs are getting capured. Players near universally have a very strong resistence to surrendering. They always think that a fight should be possible to win and subconsciously assume that the GM won't let them all get killed and the story end unresolved, so they just keep in fighting and refuse to accept that they are beaten while they are still alive. (Justified metagame assumptions, actuallly.)
But when you are out in space with your engines destroyed and no ability to go anywhere, I think players will be much more lilely to realize that there really is no other option but to see what will happen in captivity.


Secondly if you're actually in space powerful weapons become a liability. Especially if your ship doesn't have internal airlocks between sections. Doubly especially if you're anywhere near hydrogen tanks (and there's probably a 50% chance rocketships are using hydrogen, if not it'll likely be water). While going more pulpy gives you leeway on decompression having multiple holes in the ship is just asking for trouble.

What exactly is the issue here and its consequence?

Mechalich
2021-09-12, 04:56 PM
What exactly is the issue here and its consequence?

The general idea is that having conducting a firefight in the interior of a starship is generally a bad idea and depending on the technologies involved and whether or not the starship has been hardened against such weapon impacts has a decent chance of permanently disabling the starship (or at least that section of the starship) and killing everyone involved. While explosive decompression doesn't actually occur the way it's often shown in movies and comics, space is still a 'hard' environment, especially compared to land-based battles.


Partly it's ot course a question of the system, but I think generally you expect in gunfights that even super skilled heroes can't beat vastly more numerous enemies in the way that high level fighters and wizards could hold out against giant hordes of goblins. The game mechanics might allow it, but I think it just wouldn't feel right. Escaping from hundreds of evil minions who can't aim is fun, mowing down those hundrefs of minions would be quite appalling.

This is actually almost a purely mechanical question and has nothing to do with whether you're fighting with guns versus swords because in a game you can decide how much damage those weapons do and how impactful fictional armor is. Star Wars has churned out games using fantasy mechanics (often copied with minimal modification from actual fantasy systems such as D&D and WoW) for decades now and no one complains loudly. And mecha-style fantasy is often less lethal than traditional because when the pilot's machine is sufficiently battered they can just eject.

If you wish to up the lethality that's fine, but it's a matter of mechanical choices. You can always juggle the space fantasy technologies however you wish to justify it in-universe.

The Glyphstone
2021-09-12, 05:07 PM
As far as dungeon crawls IN SPACE, I think they'd still be possible, you just have to change the parameters. Have an abandoned space station overrun by rampaging killer robots, or a colony base where the inhabitants have been driven mad by alien fungus spores. Radio communication can instantly alert other guards, but the people being attacked have to be intelligent enough to do so in the first place.

Yora
2021-09-12, 05:15 PM
Ah, handguns inside space ships. I was thinking about ship weapons, which lead to my confusion.

As more people have shared in recent years, knives are actually extremely dangerous in gun fight if they happen at close range. Like the ranges inside cramped space ships. Combined with the danger of hiting something important when shooting inside a ship, this makes for plausible reasons why people would carry big knives and small swords to have that good old swashbuckling action.
Stars Without Number specifically had a system where close range weapons cause some injury even on missed attack rolls unless the target is sufficiently heavily armored. When you get into a knife fight, you are goung to get cut. And this means even if guns do much more damage, being in a close range fight with a gun against someone with a blade might put you in the worse position, because you won't do anything when your attack rolls miss. (A rule I found odd in the fantasy version Worlds Without Number, but which seems brilliant for space operas with devastating guns.)

Anonymouswizard
2021-09-12, 05:24 PM
What exactly is the issue here and its consequence?

The major problem about using powerful weapons anywhere on a ship is decompression, and thus lack of air. You can fight in vacuum suits to make it less of an issue, but unless you have very fast space drives you'll need to take the suit off at stone point.

The point of internal airlocks is to be able to shut off a section that's been depressurised so that the rest of the ship still has an atmosphere. Plus there are some instances where you'll want to intentionally depressurise part of your ship, raging fires being a well known example.

The issue with hydrogen tankage is that, while it's one of the good remass solutions for fission and fusion rockets it's very explosive. The absolute best case scenario is that you lose your remass and now can't go anywhere, the worst result is that the majority of your spaceship's volume just underwent a violent reaction.

Because reactionless drives are for those with no server of adventure.

Telok
2021-09-12, 05:24 PM
This makes me realize that space battles probably make it much more feasiible to have situations in which PCs are getting capured. Players near universally have a very strong resistence to surrendering. They always think that a fight should be possible to win and subconsciously assume that the GM won't let them all get killed and the story end unresolved, so they just keep in fighting and refuse to accept that they are beaten while they are still alive. (Justified metagame assumptions, actuallly.)


Ah, potential issues abound there. Been there, had that problem. Depending on the players they may assume that attacking customs agents and such is a good thing because of that and the long distance from "help" for the government guys. You may have to explain three or more times (for some reason twice wasn't enough) that two warships twice the size of the pc's trade ship will not take aggression and failure to surrender with "ok we'll just go home".

The other issues are, of course, dropping big things from orbit and the fact that any spaceship engine powerful enought to move you anywhere fast enough to be interesting is also a weapon of mass destruction.

NichG
2021-09-12, 05:33 PM
One thing I find whenever there's a ship scale and person scale is that you have to keep in mind that figuring out a way to bring a ship scale weapon to bear against a person scale obstacle is always potentially on the table, and either that can overwhelm any kind of reasonably attainable person-scale challenge, or you get some very wonky things happening at the ship scale. I don't necessarily mean firing your ship's missiles into a melee between the party and their enemy, but more like 'rather than going and having a shootout with those bandits, we could just call in an airstrike'. So individual protagonists and antagonists are even less stable as fixtures of conflict than in something like D&D. The BBEG might be a dangerous assassin who is unbeatable in close quarters, undetectable, and can get past any level of security. But if the space station he's on happens to get blown up he's as dead as anyone else.

hifidelity2
2021-09-13, 02:40 AM
One thing I find whenever there's a ship scale and person scale is that you have to keep in mind that figuring out a way to bring a ship scale weapon to bear against a person scale obstacle is always potentially on the table, and either that can overwhelm any kind of reasonably attainable person-scale challenge, or you get some very wonky things happening at the ship scale. I don't necessarily mean firing your ship's missiles into a melee between the party and their enemy, but more like 'rather than going and having a shootout with those bandits, we could just call in an airstrike'. So individual protagonists and antagonists are even less stable as fixtures of conflict than in something like D&D. The BBEG might be a dangerous assassin who is unbeatable in close quarters, undetectable, and can get past any level of security. But if the space station he's on happens to get blown up he's as dead as anyone else.

StarWars D6 handles this quite well with die Caps to the To Hit, Dodge and Damage between different scale weapons (from Character to Deathstar)


This is also a good system that is designed to be played like the films, fast and loose.
Re the Comms mentioned in the 1st post - how well do storm troopers communicate - if you look at the films generally very badly

Batcathat
2021-09-13, 03:09 AM
I don't think this has been mentioned (though I admittedly skimmed some of the answers) but I think an important part is that being in space feels different than being on a planet. That sounds incredibly vague but what I mean is that being in space shouldn't just be like being on Earth except with space suit and blaster instead of chain mail and sword — it's a very different environment and that should ideally be reflected in both descriptions and mechanics.

I'm currently playing in a space adventure and although fun in general, I find it a little lacking in this regard. For example, we had a gun fight on a largish asteroid (so basically no gravity) but aside from some token mentions, it didn't really feel any different from having it on a planet.

Granted, the influences you mention are usually pretty bad at stuff like that, but I would attribute that more to the technical limitations (though I suppose the Flash Gordon comics don't have that excuse) than something inherent to the genre.

noob
2021-09-13, 03:26 AM
Ah, potential issues abound there. Been there, had that problem. Depending on the players they may assume that attacking customs agents and such is a good thing because of that and the long distance from "help" for the government guys. You may have to explain three or more times (for some reason twice wasn't enough) that two warships twice the size of the pc's trade ship will not take aggression and failure to surrender with "ok we'll just go home".

The other issues are, of course, dropping big things from orbit and the fact that any spaceship engine powerful enought to move you anywhere fast enough to be interesting is also a weapon of mass destruction.

If we are doing excessively realistic space adventures then bigger ships are not really much better at fighting than smaller ones because even a tiny ship can carry amounts of firepower sufficient to break enough a big ship to cause the need for an evacuation.(and you can not really do efficient evasive manoeuvring either in realistic space adventures because it takes a lot of time to accelerate relatively to the amount of cover(none) and to the acceleration or speed of the weapons(insanely high) due to the humans in the ships)
In space warfare firing first is really important and those two warships might both be destroyed while destroying the trade ship that have 50 custom fit weapons(ranging from railguns to seeker nukes) added by the pcs (and yes it is horrible because everyone dies on both sides: fighting was not the good plan).

Berenger
2021-09-13, 04:01 AM
I have GM'ed a few games with in SWN.

Dungeon Crawls: You can totally have those, if desired. Abandoned space hulk full of cyber-zombies, ancient alien temple on an uncharted jungle world, sewers and underbowels of a crime-infested megacity, even a boarding action / infiltration mission against a large enemy vessel can be run like a dungeon crawl.

Com Systems: If instant communication between bad guys is a problem, establish how the systems in place can be jammed or misdirected and provide equipment and rules that can be used to that effect. One of our groups has a dedicated combat hacker that can disable communication grids, hijack surveillance drones and disable security systems. In other words, the SWN version of a D&D rogue.

Nukes from Orbit: Can be a problem for some adventure plots. Possible solutions to enforce boots on the ground include: Hostile base is located in a zone protected by intact pre-tech Planetary Defense Array. Hostages / civilians / the McGuffin / vital infrastructure that can't be sacrificed without repercussions or in good conscience are in the same area. A powerful third party will turn a blind eye towards attacks against that particular group of domestic villains, but not if it includes an orbital bombardment against their own planet. Of course, sometimes the players should be able to feel like angry gods and obliterate the opposition by virtue of their awesome starship. It seems to be quite cathartic.

Anonymouswizard
2021-09-13, 08:43 AM
I don't think this has been mentioned (though I admittedly skimmed some of the answers) but I think an important part is that being in space feels different than being on a planet. That sounds incredibly vague but what I mean is that being in space shouldn't just be like being on Earth except with space suit and blaster instead of chain mail and sword — it's a very different environment and that should ideally be reflected in both descriptions and mechanics.

I'm currently playing in a space adventure and although fun in general, I find it a little lacking in this regard. For example, we had a gun fight on a largish asteroid (so basically no gravity) but aside from some token mentions, it didn't really feel any different from having it on a planet.

Granted, the influences you mention are usually pretty bad at stuff like that, but I would attribute that more to the technical limitations (though I suppose the Flash Gordon comics don't have that excuse) than something inherent to the genre.

I think it depends on if 'adventures in space' is important or 'adventures in exotic locals' is. I've been rewatching a lot of classic Doctor Who and it's fiber even though it pretty much never feels like (realistic) space even when on spacecraft. That said it also tended to avoid situations where gravity would be important, although it did certainly come up in The Monster.

When going for classic science fiction there's very much a scale that on the one hand has Flash Gordon (where it being space doesn't matter) and on the other hand Skylark (where it very much does matter, although the characters get used to free fall remarkably quickly). What's more important than what side of the scale you pick is deciding on a point along it and sticking to it. Rocket Age is fine despite asteroids having more gravity than you'd expect because this is a specific thing that the game assumes (alongside operating outside your home gravity not being that difficult).

Slipjig
2021-09-13, 09:11 AM
You can greatly reduce the risk of using firearms inside a ship by using weapons that won't penetrate a bulkhead. Shotguns, beanbag rounds, tasers, or anything else that won't punch through metal is relatively safe to use on ships. Conversely, borderline suicidal berserker pirates eho use regular munitions should be utterly terrifying to EVERYBODY if they can get into boarding torpedo range.

One thing that will (or at least should) be very different from your average fantasy game is the distances involved. Interplanetary travel should take weeks or months. Instellar travels should take years, unless you have some kind of warp gates.

Communication will not be instantaneous. Even if you get a distress call out, nobody may receive it for weeks. PCs in space are fundamentally on their own in ways that simply do not apply to most genres. There is no cavalry coming, and if you can't get your engine running it's a race to see whether you freeze or asphyxiate first.

Batcathat
2021-09-13, 09:17 AM
I think it depends on if 'adventures in space' is important or 'adventures in exotic locals' is. I've been rewatching a lot of classic Doctor Who and it's fiber even though it pretty much never feels like (realistic) space even when on spacecraft. That said it also tended to avoid situations where gravity would be important, although it did certainly come up in The Monster.

When going for classic science fiction there's very much a scale that on the one hand has Flash Gordon (where it being space doesn't matter) and on the other hand Skylark (where it very much does matter, although the characters get used to free fall remarkably quickly). What's more important than what side of the scale you pick is deciding on a point along it and sticking to it. Rocket Age is fine despite asteroids having more gravity than you'd expect because this is a specific thing that the game assumes (alongside operating outside your home gravity not being that difficult).

Sure, realistic space physics aren't important (at least not in the genre we're talking about) but I do think the experience is better if it's at least notably different from adventuring on an Earth-like planet. The locals feel a lot more exotic if they don't just have extra moons and people with weird foreheads but actually behave in a different way.

Anonymouswizard
2021-09-13, 01:23 PM
Sure, realistic space physics aren't important (at least not in the genre we're talking about) but I do think the experience is better if it's at least notably different from adventuring on an Earth-like planet. The locals feel a lot more exotic if they don't just have extra moons and people with weird foreheads but actually behave in a different way.

Oh sure, recognising the effects of differing gravity or having significantly differing ecosystems or aliens are in my opinion better. But at the same time did the Star Wars characters ever have to deal with that?

Honestly, if you're on an asteroid or other low gravity environment it should come up. But it's also very easy to make that a non issue.


I've also considered running a humans only space opera game, because alien cultures are hard. But I don't have a group to pitch it to yet.

Pauly
2021-09-13, 04:50 PM
One significant difference is that the players usually will have a ship. Having a ship allows far more freedom of movement than a traditional fantasy game.

Broadly speaking there are 4 different models of how a ship affects a campaign.

1) The ship is a taxi (Firefly, Dr Who, Alien)
The ship does not have any meaningful combat capacity and you don’t get involved in ship to ship combat. The ship serves as a vehicle for getting the party from point A to point B. The party doesn’t need to sink too many character points into ship handling.

2) You’re in the navy (Star Trek)
The players are officers commanding a large ship. The ship is bought and paid for by someone else. The players will be sent on missions by a higher command. Combat involves the players ordering the crew to take actions. Ship to ship combat happens relatively rarely.
Sub-genre (Warhammer 40k, HALO, Aliens) The players are marines and take part in boarding actions in combat while the mechanics of ship to ship combat occur off screen.

3) The ship is a character (Blake’s 7, Star Wars TESB RotJ)
The players are the crew of a small ship and handle the combat duties hands on. Roles include pilot, e-warfare expert, gunner, fighter pilot, and navigator. Ship to ship combat is expected on a regular basis.
The capacity of the ship is a vital consideration when choosing missions and how to carry them out.
Ship handling capacity is a vital part of character creation, as every character will need to pull their weight in ship to ship combat.

4) The ship is a burden (Cowboy Bebop, Star Wars aNH, The Mandalorian)
Similar to the ship is a character, but with the important distinction that the cost of operating the ship (fuel, maintenance, repairs, docking fees and so on) is a constant and significant drain on the party’s resources.
Players will have to choose what gets repaired and what remains inoperable/jury rigged. Players will feel pressure to take on higher risk missions for the higher reward. Taking the safe option may not always be an option.

Telok
2021-09-13, 05:50 PM
If we are doing excessively realistic space adventures then bigger ships are not really much better at fighting than smaller ones because...

A. Space opera is the current discussion topic. IRL its mass & fuel concerns that make you want to strip out every excess kilogram and make a ship just capable of surviving its own thrust. Space opera usually isn't into taking 3+ months to reach the next planet and having all combat be one hit kills.
B. The incident I was talking about was a customs inspection where the pcs trade ship was at zero velocity relative to two ships designed for exactly this. The pcs literally attacked the customs teams as soon as the shuttle airlocks opened. The customs teams scuttled back and broke lock, then the cruisers punched holes through the trader's control & engine rooms. End of game.

The responses I get, to this day, revolve around "level appropriate" and "we thought the ships were smaller than us". In a Traveller game, where there are no 'levels' and the phrase "your 300t trader is bracketed by two 600t imperial customs warships" (or words to that effect, it was a number of years ago now) was said twice.

I'm simply saying that you can't expect players to make rational decisions like their characters should. People will often bring in expectations and habits from other games & media. Most players don't actually read much setting stuff or pay attention to things that aren't their character or the immediate encounter. They probably won't tell the DM anything about their assumptions until something blows uo in their faces.

I've see this in things like ShadowRun too. Often only people playing riggers (jack your brain into a car to be extra awesome at driving archetype) will pay enough attention to a vehicle description to hear th DM mention the freaking autocannon turret on the ex-police riot suppression vehicle in the parking lot. Then they're all surprised when their mugging goes wrong and a pc gets one-shot.

KillianHawkeye
2021-09-14, 12:25 AM
The biggest issue in my experience is when you have to do spaceship combat. To put it simply, it sucks.

Inevitably, you have characters who have basically nothing to do. If you're the ship's pilot or you're shooting the guns, that's great. If you're anyone else on the ship, your options are generally limited to just making a skill check to repair something or scan something or adjust something. Or assist someone who has an actual job.

For a movie example, let's look at the escape from the Death Star in Star Wars: A New Hope. They've just rescued Princes Leia and watched Obi-Wan get killed by Darth Vader, and the party escapes on the Millennium Falcon. Han and Luke rush to man the guns. With Han occupied, Chewbacca gets to fly the ship. R2-D2 briefly repairs something, while C-3PO and Princess Leia do literally nothing. If it were being played at a table, this combat could take an hour in real time to resolve (at least, the way my group usually plays). It's bad.

Mechalich
2021-09-14, 01:01 AM
The biggest issue in my experience is when you have to do spaceship combat. To put it simply, it sucks.

The best answer I've found is simply don't do space combat. This is also the solution that seems to have been reached by all the great space fantasy video game RPGs, with space combat either reduced to minor mini-games or ignored entirely. You can do combat inside ships - since repelling boarders is just another tactical variation, but combat between ships should be avoided, played as background or cutscenes only.

The tricky part can be justifying why you're not doing space combat, especially in the classic 'tramp-freighter' scenario when the PCs are the ship's only crew - compare to Mass Effect where none of the members of Shepard's team are naval crew with assigned space combat roles. This is doubly-so in 'retro-future' scenarios because you can't just say 'the ship's AI does the fighting at space combat speeds' like you might plausibly claim in a truly future tech setting.

One option is to offer up some sort of setting chicanery such that all space combat is boarding for some reason. Possibly you could do Dune-style shields at ship scale, such that high-speed weapons can't penetrate defenses so only a shuttle carrying crew can make an assault. You can also say that every ship has some impossibly valuable and easily damaged resource aboard such that everyone in space has agreed not to actually destroy the ships - for example if hyperspace access is dependent upon some kind of living psychic or something, and the psychics object to the death of their own, then destroying a ship means you can't do FTL any more so you just don't do that. This sort of thing has downstream setting implications though, so it needs to be handled carefully.

Batcathat
2021-09-14, 01:17 AM
The tricky part can be justifying why you're not doing space combat, especially in the classic 'tramp-freighter' scenario when the PCs are the ship's only crew

Isn't the obvious answer to not just have the tramp-freighter be armed? It's not as if every 18 wheeler or freight ship in the real world comes with their own missiles. Firefly is a classic example of what you're talking about (unless I misunderstand?) and the closest thing they come to space combat is having Jayne clinging to the outside of the ship with his gun.

Of course, that means that unless they can escape, the PCs are kinda screwed if they meet an armed enemy ship but that's also true if a party in a fantasy campaign without flight or reliable ranged attacks meet a flying enemy.

Anonymouswizard
2021-09-14, 03:58 AM
Yeah, I've got at least one setting premise that makes FTL relatively easy to activate combined with ship weapons being heavily regulated (and some planets regulating personal weapons). Space piracy just isn't practical due to the vastness of space and ease of running away, and interstellar wars are rare (leading to small navies).

The bigger issue is making sure that customs officers don't find the contraband you're running for your criminal contacts.

Suffice to say I've become very fond of 'ship as taxi', particularly because space combat can be boring. I even once got rid of ships entirely, their only use was to find terraformable planets and set up wormhole stations on them which was incredibly boring (although the group voted against that game, which revolved around taking down a criminal empire).

Yora
2021-09-14, 08:53 AM
I notice that very few space themed works seem to bother much with history before living memory. More often than not, it's even only the last 20-30 years. Specifically, that last big war we had in which the heroes fought not that long ago, but which is now water under the bridge.
Most fantasy stories would work with such a setup as well, but it seems rather uncommon. In fantasy, big history is expected. Space adventures rarely bother with it.

Psyren
2021-09-14, 10:28 AM
That is, once you start to get outnumbered, you're not going to be able to run home so easily. And the enemies probably have spaceships too and their spaceships might be faster. And they might have more of them than you do. If you get into trouble, you're on your own. Running back home isn't an option.

Starfinder has a unique form of magitech FTL (The Drift) that solves this one - no matter where you are in the galaxy, returning to Absalom Station always takes just 1d6 standard days because of the giant Starstone artifact housed at the station's core. This works with any drift engine-equipped ship, so even if the PCs severely damage or outright lose their own vessel, finding or jury-rigging a drift drive on the clunkiest space junker provides them a means to get back to civilization relatively quickly. I don't know whether SWN has a similar mechanic, but this could be something worth thinking about if you want to encourage exploration but still have a sense of safety that feels credible.



The other big thing is that I think in the vast majority of campaigns, everyone would expect the party to have space transportation at their free disposal pretty early on. Players could have a boat in a coastal fantasy setting which would work quite similar, but that's quite rare. In space adventures it's the default assumption.

You have a lot of control over the pacing here. One sample progression might be:

1) No transit - the PCs start off dealing with local problems on a starting space station, planet, or moon. No need for space travel.
2) Public transit - The PCs can't afford a ship yet but they can take a public shuttle, e.g. from a planet to a moon. Travel outside a system is unlikely, and even within a system, will focus on the most populated/cosmopolitan worlds.
3) Private transit - The PCs are beginning to make a name for themselves. Still can't afford their own ship, but a sponsor of some kind (organization or benefactor) is happy to send them somewhere that is outside of normal transportation lanes, and arrange for pickup when the job is done. Travel outside a system is likely but may stay within a cluster.
4) Rental Ship - The PCs are loaned or lease a standard ship. They can control where it goes within reason (subject to limits both soft and hard, regulatory or practical) but can easily be prevented from simply sailing off into the Black. Paying off the ship or keeping its owner happy is a great source of plot hooks. Travel outside a cluster is possible but unlikely.
5) Owned Ship - whether found or purchased outright, this will be the first ship the PCs can truly think of as theirs. This will usually be a standard model, though some customization is possible - think starter home. Because of this, lengthy exploration is possible but likely to stay within charted space.
6) Custom Ship - The ultimate form of transport, this would be the kind of ship you can build a whole campaign around. Maybe it's an experimental prototype, maybe the PCs have a degree of customization that truly makes it theirs, maybe it has a sentient AI on board, but the main calling card of this kind of ship is that it feels unique to the party and they get a true sense of attachment with it. The far reaches of the galaxy are becoming reasonable aspirations for the party, but of course will come with unique dangers. It may also have a unique form of FTL other ships don't (think Star Trek Discovery).

Berenger
2021-09-14, 10:46 AM
The biggest issue in my experience is when you have to do spaceship combat. To put it simply, it sucks.

Inevitably, you have characters who have basically nothing to do. If you're the ship's pilot or you're shooting the guns, that's great. If you're anyone else on the ship, your options are generally limited to just making a skill check to repair something or scan something or adjust something. Or assist someone who has an actual job.

That's actually not the case in Stars Without Number. The space combat system is specifically designed to have a slot and meaningful options for: one pilot, one captain, one comms officer, one engineer and one or more gunners. All of them require different skills to operate. Enemy hits regularly result in wounded crew or some variety of crisis on board that can be usually be dealt with in several ways. I have not yet encountered a character without at least a secondary or tertiary skill applicable in spaceship combat.

Anonymouswizard
2021-09-14, 10:57 AM
I notice that very few space themed works seem to bother much with history before living memory. More often than not, it's even only the last 20-30 years. Specifically, that last big war we had in which the heroes fought not that long ago, but which is now water under the bridge.
Most fantasy stories would work with such a setup as well, but it seems rather uncommon. In fantasy, big history is expected. Space adventures rarely bother with it.

Eh, I've read several science fiction series with long histories. Most Peter F. Hamilton works include a timeline for going from roughly present day to the start of the series, as does Revelation Space. Both Revelation Space and Nights Dawn also include various short stories filling out the earlier eras. Then if we go right bank Lensman not only had history going back to humanity's early days in size, but the core conflict stretches bank to the first sentient species in the two galaxies it deals with (maybe even the entire universe).

It is less common to have it have any impact on the story though, and you'll rarely get anything but broad outlines in the text itself. Science fiction is much more likely to have the threat be 'the new superweapon' than 'the ancient demon lord'.

KillianHawkeye
2021-09-14, 11:34 AM
That's actually not the case in Stars Without Number. The space combat system is specifically designed to have a slot and meaningful options for: one pilot, one captain, one comms officer, one engineer and one or more gunners. All of them require different skills to operate. Enemy hits regularly result in wounded crew or some variety of crisis on board that can be usually be dealt with in several ways. I have not yet encountered a character without at least a secondary or tertiary skill applicable in spaceship combat.

While I haven't played that system, the same could be said about Starfinder or Star Wars RPGs (on paper, at least). But what of people who don't fit into those roles? And do the captain and engineer really get equal play time to the pilot and gunners in that system?

If that's all true, it's a welcome exception and I may have to look into it further the next time we play a sci-fi game.

Yora
2021-09-14, 12:54 PM
There's always the option to keep space battles short and rare. A 15 minute space battle every 3 or 4 games in which one or two players don't have much to contribute are really not a big deal.

Psyren
2021-09-14, 01:34 PM
That's actually not the case in Stars Without Number. The space combat system is specifically designed to have a slot and meaningful options for: one pilot, one captain, one comms officer, one engineer and one or more gunners. All of them require different skills to operate. Enemy hits regularly result in wounded crew or some variety of crisis on board that can be usually be dealt with in several ways. I have not yet encountered a character without at least a secondary or tertiary skill applicable in spaceship combat.


While I haven't played that system, the same could be said about Starfinder or Star Wars RPGs (on paper, at least). But what of people who don't fit into those roles? And do the captain and engineer really get equal play time to the pilot and gunners in that system?

If that's all true, it's a welcome exception and I may have to look into it further the next time we play a sci-fi game.

In case it helps, Starfinder has the following starship combat roles:

Captain - Leader and can act in any phase of starship combat. Also gets access to some unique actions like taunting foes into mistakes and exhorting allies to exceed their limits.

Chief Mate - Can either manually push a system or assist another role each round (must be chosen at the start of the round). Can assume Captain role in an emergency. (Any role can assume Captain but the Chief Mate doing it likely means not leaving another role unoccupied.)

Engineer - can push systems, reallocate power, and make repairs.

Pilot - move the ship, bend or exceed maneuverability and speed limitations

Gunner(s) - operate weapons systems.

Science Officer(s) - analyze threats, identify hazards, aid with targeting and communications. Can also serve as medic if needed

Magic Officer(s) (optional) - identify and exploit supernatural phenomena, briefly augment systems/defenses/weapons/crew, utilize minor divinations/precognitions. Can also serve as medic if needed

There are also rules for special combat phases like evasive maneuvers or hostile boarding.

Anonymouswizard
2021-09-14, 01:59 PM
The main problem with Stationery is that it's 3.P in storage, with all the character building pieces and gear progression that implies. It's my favourite iteration of 3.P, but I'd still rather pay Frontier Space, Stellar Adventures, or Traveller isf I was giving the PCs a starship (if not any of the 40k games get added to the list).

Telok
2021-09-14, 03:32 PM
I personally wouldn't take points from Starfinder. There were... issues... with all the space stuff at release and to took... some years before they even had things for casters and melee warriors to do. Unfortunately a great many of the actions in Starfinder space combat boil down to "make a medium/hard skill check to get +2, apply -2, or reroll 1s on somebody else's pilot or gunnery roll that matters"

Of course I haven't touched the system in like a year and a half or two years, so it could all be fixed with another two or three splats & ditching a lot of the original stuff.

That does bring up something. Try to make sure that all the archetypes your system pushes the characters into will have something to do. Don't rely on players taking & maxxing out the correct skills & attributes for space stuff if it might not align with their archetype.

Anonymouswizard
2021-09-14, 03:50 PM
Honestly, I suspect Starfinder works better if you leave the ship out of it

The standard roles for spaceship combat which tend to matter are the pilot, the gunner(s), and the engineer. The former makes sure the ship's movements are predictable, the gunners decide which enemies need to be taken out, and the engineer messes around with power allocation and fixing vital systems. Anything else, even the captain, tends to boil down to giving the pilot or gunners a bonus (except for the sensor operator, who occasionally gets to detect stealthed ships). This is why I suspect most RPGs which focus on space combat give every PC a fighter/mech.

Honestly, the stuff on the ground is generally more interesting in my experience. Even if it boils down to bring the guy with the multilaser.

Psyren
2021-09-14, 03:55 PM
Oh I'm not saying to lift all the exact mechanics from SF, I'm sure these other systems have their own rules for such. Rather, I was just sparking ideas as far as "I'm on the bridge and we're shooting at something, what do?" beyond "go play Xbox until these 3 players are done with the encounter or you blow up and die."

Berenger
2021-09-14, 04:47 PM
While I haven't played that system, the same could be said about Starfinder or Star Wars RPGs (on paper, at least). But what of people who don't fit into those roles? And do the captain and engineer really get equal play time to the pilot and gunners in that system?

If that's all true, it's a welcome exception and I may have to look into it further the next time we play a sci-fi game.

Who gets to shine the most depends on what exactly the crew hopes to accomplish (e.g. taking down enemy engines - job for gunner and possibly comms officer, outrunning a hostile fleet - job for pilot and engineer). But the whole system hinges on the crew cooperating to generate Command Points to enable each other to do stuff.

In my experience, it's more easy to participate in starship combat compared to other systems I played (say, Star Wars Saga Edition or d20 Future). This is because every single skill encompasses a wide range of expertise and many tasks are not restricted to characters possessing some very specific talent. For example, a neo-barbarian horse archer nomad from some backwater world can use his Shoot skill to operate starship guns or his Pilot skill (hitherto only used to ride horses) to fly a shuttle as soon as he gets a training montage and a couple of weeks to acquaint himself with the new technology - he does not have to wait for three levels to obtain ranks in some obscure and possibly "cross-class" skill or get a feat called "Starship Operation (Space Transport)" or whatever.

If you are interested, take a look yourself - it's free. The rules on space combat are on pages 114-119: DriveThruRPG.com (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/230009/Stars-Without-Number-Revised-Edition-Free-Version)

Pauly
2021-09-14, 05:17 PM
I think with space combat it depends a lot in the size of the party. Once you get to 4+ players it can be difficult to give them enough things to do in a combat.

My solution is to increase the number of ships the players have. My most successful campaign in this was based on the 1930s trope of ships carrying one or two single engined fighters as air pirate defense. The core players had a main ship with a crew of 3 (pilot/navigator, gunner, e-warfare/comms)and 2 players had single seat fighters. Over the course of the campaign we had a few other players join/drop out and they took extra roles on the ship or provided an extra fighter.
I have run campaigns where the players had 2 ships, which worked well in combat but it also lead to splitting the party issues.

KillianHawkeye
2021-09-14, 10:07 PM
Yeah, Starfinder was the system I've played recently that has the exact problems I mentioned.

Sure, it has a bunch of roles for various crew members, but in practice it breaks down to Pilot doing the most important rolls and positioning the ship (which is of paramount importance considering weapon range and ship firing arcs), Gunners doing the actual attack and damage rolls (and getting all the glory), and everyone else makes one skill check a round for some minor bonus.

In short, the roles are not of equal importance and don't get equal play time by a long shot.

Psyren
2021-09-15, 01:59 AM
In short, the roles are not of equal importance and don't get equal play time by a long shot.

That seems like a GM issue to me. Yeah if all your fights take place in a featureless vacuum, the Science Officer won't have a lot to do. And if your ship only needs the guns to have power, your Engineer won't have a lot to do. And so on.

If you're GMing for a group of three that's completely fine, but if your party is 5+, it might be worth considering whether your encounter design can be adjusted to add fun for the others - unless you're okay with the rest of them checking TikTok and zoning out until the fight ends, anyway.

NichG
2021-09-15, 05:05 AM
I do think there's something about being able to independently position one-self and take responsibility/ownership of that which is appealing about the character-level stuff, and which the ship-level stuff can struggle with if you have players be crew of a single ship participating in a zoomed-out fight. For example, if you're the gunner you can say 'I need you to give me a good approach for a shot' but in the end you don't really have the ability to choose to prioritize maneuvering for that shot over other things. So even if you have stuff to do, it can feel more obligate (being the gunner means its your gunnery stat, but little else). So I'd lean in favor of every PC having a mech/dogfighter/etc which leaves the mothership and acts quasi-independently during such encounters, with the mothership acting more like an NPC.

Or if you are going to do crew-of-a-ship, I'd actually have the focus be on stuff happening inside the ship during the fight rather than the relationship between the ship and external things. So something like the gameplay of FTL or Shortest Trip to Earth where a lot of it is moving people around inside the ship to deal with emergencies rather than positioning relative to the enemy vessels and chasing them around a battlemap and so on. Possibly maybe even make it so that predicting who would win a ship-to-ship fight 'if nothing about the situation changes' is very easy, so that you can run things like 'we will definitely lose unless we manage to get 4 victory points in crew-scale objectives against the enemy (via boarding, etc)' or 'we will definitely win if we can prevent the enemy from scoring 3 or more victory points against us', with some weapons/etc introducing Complications which have to be dealt with at crew-scale (fires, invaders, knocking out crew and forcing people to switch stations, interrupting power, etc).

Anonymouswizard
2021-09-15, 05:40 AM
What on earth is the science officer doing in the middle of combat? It's a very important position sure, but like the medical officer the role's duties probably begin after combat.

But honestly, look at Star Trek. Space combat is rare, the interesting stuff tends to happen on the planet (and if not it's on the ship). Even in Khan's first appearance he's on the ship and trying to take it over, not commanding his own. If space combat is important it's generally much better to make the players a fighter/mech squadron, and larger battles are generally the backdrop to a more intimate confrontation with Char or something else important to the PCs.

KorvinStarmast
2021-09-15, 08:05 AM
I am thinking of taking a break from fantast and take a shot at Stars Without Number, giving the game a more pulpy and retro-futurisric angle. As someone who's pretty much entirely run elfgames set in Fantasyland, what changes in how GMs have to approach and think of things? When we first started playing Traveller with a group who'd been playing D&D for a while (when Traveller first came out) we were fortunate in having among us a lot of guys who had read a lot of science fiction and space opera and pulps - and yet we wanted to and could not wield a light saber in that game. :smallbiggrin: The key to our success, albeit modest - we had trouble keeping games together - was in focusing on "that's our space ship, and on it we will ___ {fill in the blank}" This made it, in a lot of ways, a pirate game with high tech: we went from place to place seeking our fortune with about three ideas foremost;
(1) upgrades to the ship, or a bigger ship,
(2) loot/riches of some kind (we tended to trade as we went from spaceport to spaceport with the added complication of 'if your ship is wrecked you are in a vacuum and you all die unless your escape pod works and maybe then you all die")
(3) avoiding combat unless we set the conditions of the battle and avoiding "the authorities" as much as possible. {Needless to say, when I first saw Firefly, my reaction was "Traveller Adventure Module!"}

Not sure how Stars Without Number facilitates that kind of play.

Yora
2021-09-15, 08:27 AM
I currently have the idea to begin the campaign with "You just had to leave the last planet in a great hurry for reasons that were really not your fault, but some people might not see it that way. You were not able to deliver your cargo and get paid the money you need to refuel your hyperdrive. You only made it to the next system that has a small colony and have to find fuel with barely any money."

Corey
2021-09-15, 08:29 AM
Example of space combat or its lack:

Star Trek and Star Wars have very little space combat.
Dune was carefully designed to dial down technology (knife fighting, no computers) and didn't have space combat. It also ruled out nukes via extremely harsh taboo.
Babylon 5 had more space combat, and it had some great emotional moments in space battles, but I don't see how that could translate well to an RPG.
The Miles Vorkosigan books had some boarding battles and a hair-raising unarmed-shuttle-under-fire scene, but they basically stipulated that actual space battles were computer-controlled boredom.


Some things I think space settings suggest:

Everybody is at least somewhat smart and careful, due to all the fragile life-essential stuff around. GruckSmashStuff barbarians or MeDoMischief kender aren't great fits.
Social scenes can be very different from populated planet to planet.
Exploration is almost entirely intellectual. The old D&D model of dextrous thieves who climb walls and pick locks doesn't fit well.

Yora
2021-09-15, 08:38 AM
Star Trek and Star Wars have very little space combat.
Unless you count the Star Wars movies, I guess.

Something curious I noticed yesterday thinking about how my campaign could have planets with multiple states, is that about every sci-fi setting seems to have one big human empire or federation or something. Star Trek, Dune, and Star Wars had it, and since then it appears to have just become a default standard that I never see really questioned or anything interesting done with.
There's also so much war that the distinction of Military Sci-Fi seems almost redundant. I was thinking that with how I want to set things up at the basic level, space armies don't make much sense in the big picture, and there should be more focus on paramilitary police forces that maintain order and security inside systems rather than wage massive battles in the far corners of the galaxy.

Corey
2021-09-15, 08:43 AM
Unless you count the Star Wars movies, I guess.

Something curious I noticed yesterday thinking about how my campaign could have planets with multiple states, is that about every sci-fi setting seems to have one big human empire or federation or something. Star Trek, Dune, and Star Wars had it, and since then it appears to have just become a default standard that I never see really questioned or anything interesting done with.
There's also so much war that the distinction of Military Sci-Fi seems almost redundant. I was thinking that with how I want to set things up at the basic level, space armies don't make much sense in the big picture, and there should be more focus on paramilitary police forces that maintain order and security inside systems rather than wage massive battles in the far corners of the galaxy.

I've only seen Episodes 1-7 of Star Wars. I struggle to recall any case where two spaceships were shooting at each other. Even the long climax to Episode 4 didn't really fit that model.

Anonymouswizard
2021-09-15, 09:21 AM
Unless you count the Star Wars movies, I guess.

Kind of depends on the era. The Original Trilogy is actually fairly light (it began right at the tail end of one, has one at the end of ANH, none in ESB, and one the main characters aren't participating in in RotJ), although ESB does have a space chase. Both the Prequel and Sequel Trilogies are heavier on them.


Something curious I noticed yesterday thinking about how my campaign could have planets with multiple states, is that about every sci-fi setting seems to have one big human empire or federation or something. Star Trek, Dune, and Star Wars had it, and since then it appears to have just become a default standard that I never see really questioned or anything interesting done with.
There's also so much war that the distinction of Military Sci-Fi seems almost redundant. I was thinking that with how I want to set things up at the basic level, space armies don't make much sense in the big picture, and there should be more focus on paramilitary police forces that maintain order and security inside systems rather than wage massive battles in the far corners of the galaxy.

From stuff I've read, both more modern examples.

Revelation Space doesn't have interstellar empires in the classical sense, and there's no certainty that the human groups within one system are part of the same state (as meaningless as that is for some groups). The important cultural groups are more along ideological lines, and there's a sense that the hard speed of light limit means that this can be somewhat arbitrary. There's also no interstellar wars, although there were many millennia ago, because there's just no real reason to fight over anything and starships are very expensive.

In Night's Dawn both interstellar empires and space navies are a thing, although there's no single human empire. Sadly there's issues with how planets get colonised, but most early colonies have their own empires and the interstellar UN equivalent acts as a de facto Great and Bountiful Human Empire. There's also relatively little war, but enough that a recent one is plot important.

KorvinStarmast
2021-09-15, 09:25 AM
I've only seen Episodes 1-7 of Star Wars. I struggle to recall any case where two spaceships were shooting at each other. Even the long climax to Episode 4 didn't really fit that model. Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi also had space combat, but I guess you missed that part of the original movies. The focus of the movies isn't SFX, like so many modern movies do; the focus was on the narrative arc with a bunch of SFX/Action interspersed to keep it exciting.

Corey
2021-09-15, 09:37 AM
Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi also had space combat, but I guess you missed that part of the original movies. The focus of the movies isn't SFX, like so many modern movies do; the focus was on the narrative arc with a bunch of SFX/Action interspersed to keep it exciting.

There certainly were hair-raising space ESCAPES at various points in the movies. I'm just not recalling the combat.

In particular, the original trilogy stipulated that the Empire's power seemed overwhelming, which is why the Rebellion was disinclined to face them in open battle except for Luke's desperate raid.

That said, I confess to forgetting that the second Death Star was destroyed in a second raid in the form of a more conventional battle.

KorvinStarmast
2021-09-15, 09:49 AM
The Miles Vorkosigan books had some boarding battles and a hair-raising unarmed-shuttle-under-fire scene, but they basically stipulated that actual space battles were computer-controlled boredom. Which is probably closer to reality if we ever get to space battles, a la Enders Game (The book). The space battles in Star Wars (eps 4-6) owed an artistic debt to George Lucas watching WWII movies involving naval combat that included aircraft carriers ... and old news reel footage ... :smallcool:

Telok
2021-09-15, 10:19 AM
That seems like a GM issue to me. Yeah if all your fights take place in a featureless vacuum, the Science Officer won't have a lot to do. And if your ship only needs the guns to have power, your Engineer won't have a lot to do. And so on.

In Starfinder its pretty much baked into the rules and adventures. I don't think it helps that the DCs for that system are pretty much based on the PC in a role being assumed to have a max stat + skill. Strength based warrior types and wisdom based casters were pretty screwed for a long time, and even the recent splats didn't do much for the strength characters (the "make an athletics check to open a valve or throw a lever that gives the pilot a +1" type stuff).

I have heard good sounds on the way the StarTrek rpg handles it. Although I don't have that system in my library (do have some adventures tho) so I can't give anything more than "haven't heard complaints every time it comes up".

Corey
2021-09-15, 10:31 AM
Which is probably closer to reality if we ever get to space battles, a la Enders Game (The book). The space battles in Star Wars (eps 4-6) owed an artistic debt to George Lucas watching WWII movies involving naval combat that included aircraft carriers ... and old news reel footage ... :smallcool:

And the Star Trek:TOS manuevers vs. a cloaked Romulan ship were probably inspired by WW2 submarine movies.

The exceptions to my "little space combat in Star Trek and Star Wars" claim keep adding up ...

Psyren
2021-09-15, 11:49 AM
What on earth is the science officer doing in the middle of combat? It's a very important position sure, but like the medical officer the role's duties probably begin after combat.

Several things, it's a matter of imaginative encounter design. Some Star Trek examples:

- Defeating an enemy ship's defenses (e.g. a cloak) by triangulating scans.
- Inserting/extracting a boarding party safely. (This is another good use for the remaining PCs if not every bridge role is needed, fyi.)
- Spotting a trap or feint by the enemy by correlating their actual damage taken to anomalous behavior.
- Using space phenomena for cover, hiding, ambush, tactical repositioning, or escape
- Using space phenomena to weaken or overcome a superior foe's defenses or offenses
- Meat-and-potatoes buffs to targeting, maneuverability, or protection during a firefight.
- Working with Engineering to rig up a dramatic eleventh-hour upgrade or new capability to turn the tide of a fight that is otherwise going south

You don't have to look far to find examples of all of these that can be drawn from. But if your encounters are just having two ships circle each other in empty space trading shots, yeah you're unlikely to have interesting moments like these. The goal is to not do that, unless simplicity is your aim anyway.

Yora
2021-09-15, 07:08 PM
Something I noticed in a range of space games that are based on a D&D chasis is that they keep the damage for close range wepons the same. Daggers and swords still deal 1d4 to 1d8 damage. But all the cool guns found in these game deal way more damage than bow, often jumping from a measly 1d6 (with no Strength bonus) to 2d8 or even higher. While hit points for PCs and NPCs are not changed.
In most cases, you expect space games to have much more normal people like basic guards, soldiers, and criminals as adversaries, with monster with multiple Hit Dice being a rare exception. That of course means lots of opportunities for one hit kills, but PCs remain highly vulnerable into higher levels.
i think this also changes the dynamics of ambushs and arests. Being caught in the open and surrounded by enemies can leace little choice but surrendering. And even pretty small fish NPCs can get a drop on the players and seriously threaten them with a gun. Of course a group of 3rd level PCs will beat a single normal human in a gunfighr, but there is a real chance that one of them could get killed before the other PCs mow down the enemy. Hands up and nobody move becomes something PCs must take much more serious, and it can come from very unassuming NPCs if they just have a gun.

Pauly
2021-09-15, 08:49 PM
Something I noticed in a range of space games that are based on a D&D chasis is that they keep the damage for close range wepons the same. Daggers and swords still deal 1d4 to 1d8 damage. But all the cool guns found in these game deal way more damage than bow, often jumping from a measly 1d6 (with no Strength bonus) to 2d8 or even higher. While hit points for PCs and NPCs are not changed.
In most cases, you expect space games to have much more normal people like basic guards, soldiers, and criminals as adversaries, with monster with multiple Hit Dice being a rare exception. That of course means lots of opportunities for one hit kills, but PCs remain highly vulnerable into higher levels.
i think this also changes the dynamics of ambushs and arests. Being caught in the open and surrounded by enemies can leace little choice but surrendering. And even pretty small fish NPCs can get a drop on the players and seriously threaten them with a gun. Of course a group of 3rd level PCs will beat a single normal human in a gunfighr, but there is a real chance that one of them could get killed before the other PCs mow down the enemy. Hands up and nobody move becomes something PCs must take much more serious, and it can come from very unassuming NPCs if they just have a gun.

It depends very much on the setting. Star Wars and Dune for example make hand to hand combat more lethal than shooting.
However generally speaking in a non propriety setting shooting is more lethal and more common than melee.

Also in ship/mech combat the setting usually gives players an incentive to not fight to the last.

So surrendur/running away is more feasible,

Yora
2021-09-16, 03:41 AM
I had not thought of that. Wounds heal by themselves for free. A destroyed vehicle is likely gone forever.
Players don't generally expect PCs to get killed just like that, but with vehicle there is much less readon for GMs to hold back.

"Stop shooting holes in my ship!"

BRC
2021-09-16, 02:15 PM
Something I noticed in a range of space games that are based on a D&D chasis is that they keep the damage for close range wepons the same. Daggers and swords still deal 1d4 to 1d8 damage. But all the cool guns found in these game deal way more damage than bow, often jumping from a measly 1d6 (with no Strength bonus) to 2d8 or even higher. While hit points for PCs and NPCs are not changed.
In most cases, you expect space games to have much more normal people like basic guards, soldiers, and criminals as adversaries, with monster with multiple Hit Dice being a rare exception. That of course means lots of opportunities for one hit kills, but PCs remain highly vulnerable into higher levels.
i think this also changes the dynamics of ambushs and arests. Being caught in the open and surrounded by enemies can leace little choice but surrendering. And even pretty small fish NPCs can get a drop on the players and seriously threaten them with a gun. Of course a group of 3rd level PCs will beat a single normal human in a gunfighr, but there is a real chance that one of them could get killed before the other PCs mow down the enemy. Hands up and nobody move becomes something PCs must take much more serious, and it can come from very unassuming NPCs if they just have a gun.


I ran a space game like this, and it really depends how you run things.

I just had Laser Blasters as D10 ranged weapons with no reloading property. Laser pistols were d8s. Which, yeah, makes things a bit more dangerous, but not notably so. I wouldn't say 2d8 ray guns are an inherent requirement or anything.

That said, it DOES make it a lot easier to justify enemies with unique weapons that the PC's can't really use, especially if you're like me and you are just refluffing monster stat blocks for the most part, although it kind of requires some buy-in from the players to not strip every enemy for parts and insist on reverse engineering their mechanics.


For example, I said "The Space Pirates have somebody in Power Armor", this particular Power Armored Pirate has identical stats to an Ogre, in melee they punch you for 2d8+4, at range they shoot you for 2d6+4.
Unlike Generic Fantasy setting, I don't have to explain why these particular enemies have befriended an Ogre, the "Ogre" is an ordinary space pirate, just one in some stolen power armor, so it's easier to have a mixed group of enemies with wildly different capabilities, even if it's theoretically all one species or whatever.


The Buy-in from the PC's is that, because the Power Armor statblock is now equipment, if one of them is like "Sweet! I want Power Armor!", you either need to indulge them, or go down a rabbit hole of why they can't fix up this power armor.

In general, the big shift is that abilities that were Inherent often get refluffed as being Equipment based. Without player buy-in that "We've stretched Flash Gordon over the bones of D&D", you can get into a lot of frustration. "If the Wizard's fireballs are actually Grenades, why can't he give one to each of us so we can open a fight with 4 Fireballs?"


Edit: I'll admit I mostly got around this by formatting the thing I ran as a series of one-shots with a recurring cast, in Adventure Serial format. Characters never leveled up, and didn't really change between sessions, so there wasn't really much motivation to scrap for treasure.



Edit II: In a more general sense, once you move to Space a bunch of stuff becomes Assumed for most character to have access to.

For example, communication, both short and long range can be casually assumed, as can access to information if your version of space has some internet equivalent.

Any Space Adventurer probably has access to some form of Spacesuit, which means that they have a decent degree of environmental protection, the type of thing that most Fantasy characters would need a reasonably powerful magic item to get.

Yora
2021-09-16, 02:47 PM
PCs probably have access to space suits. But they might not always be wearing them when they would come in handy.

Players could take the cool power armor from a group of bounty hunters they defeated, but their bodies might not physically fit inside them. (Except that one guy who insisted on playing that weird alien species and is having the time of his life with his new toy. :smallwink:)

For the campaign that I am working on, I've decided that there is direct beam radio communication, which has a limited range of a few kilometers that might be able to reach a ship in low orbit if it is going right over head.
The alternative option is to link into the local public communication network, but that only works in the vicinity of signal towers. (I assume that most space ports automatically give out temporary network access key as part of the landing fee or when going through customs.)
The third method is to connect to the local network, which is connected to the orbital satellite network, so you can make calls to colonies in other parts of the planet or to ships in orbit. While inside fully developed cities where you properly went through customs you can use your phone any way you like, being outside cities means your comms are back to being walkie-talkies. (Except of course on homeworlds, which have fully global infrastructure with worldwide network coverage.)

Modern gadgets can be nice tools in many situations, but it's also quite easy to create plenty of situations where the players have to make do without them from time to time. Which I think might be a cool way to mix things up and make different planets feel and play different. Hiding on a planet with green skinned humanoids is easy with some kind of extravagant headgear. Hiding on a planet of 1 meter tall grasshoppers is a completely different story.

BRC
2021-09-16, 02:54 PM
PCs probably have access to space suits. But they might not always be wearing them when they would come in handy.


What you'd probably want in this case is some sort of "Are you wearing a space suit" rule

Like, If you're wearing a space suit, you have access to it's onboard tools, plus a sealed environment, and resistance to cold damage
HOWEVER, if you become bloodied while wearing the suit, the suit has been breached, and no longer functions until it's fixed, which can be Expensive. This gives a reason to not just be wearing space suits all the time.


Players could take the cool power armor from a group of bounty hunters they defeated, but their bodies might not physically fit inside them. (Except that one guy who insisted on playing that weird alien species and is having the time of his life with his new toy. )

That's fine if they're only encountering Weird Aliens, but you might want a general system for not needing to convert every monster statblock into a set of PC usable equipment. Depends on how many fiddly new rules you want to make vs refluffing existing mechanics. Especially if you want to use robots with mounted weapons or what have you.

There's a certain type of player that will expect everything used against them to be something they can pry off and reconfigure into a usable weapon for themselves. It's probably a good thing to get a sense of whether your players have such inclinations.


Edit: You'll also want to get a sense of how much your Players are going to be Gun Nuts.

In my game, I had Laser Pistols at d8, Laser Rifles at d10, Heavy Blasters at d12 (Basically just moved Crossbows up one die type and took off reloading), but if somebody really wants to use, say, a Shotgun or Sniper Rifle or Laser Machine Gun or what have you, you might need to get a bit more granular with rules.

Like, an easy way to do it to say "Laser Rifle deals d10. Shotgun deals d12 but has a shorter range. Sniper Rifle deals d12 with longer range, but you have disadvantage if you move on the same round you shoot it".

SimonMoon6
2021-09-17, 09:09 AM
Eh, I've read several science fiction series with long histories.

[snip]

It is less common to have it have any impact on the story though, and you'll rarely get anything but broad outlines in the text itself. Science fiction is much more likely to have the threat be 'the new superweapon' than 'the ancient demon lord'.

Of course, for a notable exception, there is Stargate SG-1.

Of course, this show did a lot of things that were not typical. The main characters were modern day Earth people who didn't start off with any of the cool technology that all the space-faring races had. All they had was one Stargate. Then, they explored the galaxy through the Stargate, learned about what was out there, and slowly gained new technology from their travels in a way that doesn't usually happen in most science fiction TV shows. And a big part of their exploration was learning about the history of the galaxy and the various races. They even had an equivalent of an "ancient demon lord" in the form of Anubis, as well as several ancient (and Ancient) pieces of technology to be recovered.

And you've got to love a show that actually has a satisfying ending with all the main bad guys having been defeated.

Yora
2021-09-17, 09:29 AM
It's based on a movie whose premise is that immortal alien warlords used to worshipped by ancient humans as gods. Events in the present being tied to events 5,000 years ago was the original selling point, so when you expand the setting, exploring ancient history is a requirement to stay true to the premise. A very similar show could have been possible without that aspect, but its part of it's identity, and writers used that as something to work with. (I think, only watched a bit of the early seasons back when they first ran.)
As many people say, having to work with preexisting restrictions often works really well to get something that is different. If you can just do whatever, everyone's whatever often comes out looking pretty similar.

Just yesterday I was thinking how Starcraft, FreeSpace, Halo, and Mass Effect are all basically the same broad stroke story. And that's probably just the few most famous ones. There must be dozens more.

Anonymouswizard
2021-09-17, 09:46 AM
Of course, for a notable exception, there is Stargate SG-1.

Of course, this show did a lot of things that were not typical. The main characters were modern day Earth people who didn't start off with any of the cool technology that all the space-faring races had. All they had was one Stargate. Then, they explored the galaxy through the Stargate, learned about what was out there, and slowly gained new technology from their travels in a way that doesn't usually happen in most science fiction TV shows. And a big part of their exploration was learning about the history of the galaxy and the various races. They even had an equivalent of an "ancient demon lord" in the form of Anubis, as well as several ancient (and Ancient) pieces of technology to be recovered.

And you've got to love a show that actually has a satisfying ending with all the main bad guys having been defeated.

Note the intentional lack of definites in the but you quoted, I was talking about major trends.


Just yesterday I was thinking how Starcraft, FreeSpace, Halo, and Mass Effect are all basically the same broad stroke story. And that's probably just the few most famous ones. There must be dozens more.

Revelation Space as well I believe. It actually made me really disappointed in the Reaper's eventual motivation, despite their utter ruthlessness the Inhibitor's goal at least made some form of sense.

There are other popular be strokes plots at different points. But we might be starting to get into 'there are only X plots' levels where we're staying out back to such a basic level it might as well be meaningless (to say nothing on how many stories can have multiple plot types woven together).

Yora
2021-09-17, 12:31 PM
The problem is not that there's only a few plots (and whether that statement makes sense is a different topic altogether). What I am complaining about (and it is complaining) is that these works also use the same setting elements. If you see hand drawn concept art, it would be really hard to tell the difference between a Protos, Covenant, Vasudan, Asari, or Minbari ship. (I forgot to mention Babylon 5 in that list, but it gets a pass for coming before all those other ones.)

Anonymouswizard
2021-09-17, 12:46 PM
The problem is not that there's only a few plots (and whether that statement makes sense is a different topic altogether). What I am complaining about (and it is complaining) is that these works also use the same setting elements. If you see hand drawn concept art, it would be really hard to tell the difference between a Protos, Covenant, Vasudan, Asari, or Minbari ship. (I forgot to mention Babylon 5 in that list, but it gets a pass for coming before all those other ones.)

... Which is not what your post said. You mentioned story, how could I know that you meant setting?

BRC
2021-09-17, 12:47 PM
The problem is not that there's only a few plots (and whether that statement makes sense is a different topic altogether). What I am complaining about (and it is complaining) is that these works also use the same setting elements. If you see hand drawn concept art, it would be really hard to tell the difference between a Protos, Covenant, Vasudan, Asari, or Minbari ship. (I forgot to mention Babylon 5 in that list, but it gets a pass for coming before all those other ones.)
I mean, part of it is that visual archetypes form a shared language that make it easy to communicate stuff.

Let's look at the Covenent and the Protoss

Covenent:
https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/warehouse/v1.0/publiccontent/0a2226b6-7d5e-4200-83dc-84669dfaa550
Protoss:
https://liquipedia.net/commons/images/c/c4/Carrier_sc2.png

They look different, but in both cases we have visuals of curved, rounded designs which don't easily break up into distinct, commonly recognizable geometric shapes.

Compare to, say, The Starship Enterprise, which is a circle and some rectangles, or a Starcraft Battlecruiser, which is mostly a bunch of rectangles with some greebling.

Similarly, stuff like big shiny crystals works to communicate Power that we recognize, but don't understand (Protoss use crystals everywhere).

It's roughly the same reason every fantasy world uses Orcs and Goblins, it's easy shorthand for "These are the bad guys". Crystals and smooth, curved metal ships are "This is Powerful Alien Stuff". They're using shared archetypes to communicate effectively when they're not just straight ripping off each other.

Bringing this back to your space game, if your PC's recovered a photograph from a lost probe showing "A vast alien city, with smooth floating structures built around giant crystals spires", your players will probably assume "Ah, this probe discovered a Powerful Alien Civilization With Advanced Technology".

It's possible that the civilization pictured sucks at everything except building floating buildings and growing giant crystals, but smooth buildings and crystals is a handy shorthand for "Advanced Alien Race".

Yora
2021-09-18, 08:03 AM
Yeah, I'm not expressing myself very well. Language is hard. But also, what is "story"?

Coming back to the space battles thing, I've started getting into the spacehip part of Stars Without Number, and I was really surprised how much there is. This clearly is not just some slapped on thing. Only 28 pages, but that's in a game where the PC rules are only 15 pages. Ships appear to be made to be highly customizable, with each frame having a power budget for addons, internal spaces for additional systems, and mounting points for weapons. And then you can also tune them with additional mods. There is of course an off-the-shelf version for each ship type with a default loadout, but this clearly seems to be intended to work similar to an elaborate stronghold construction system.
I also like that there are rules with which mechanics can build temporary replacement parts from scrapyard junk, to make the ship at least make it as far as the next repair facility. Being stuck in some backwater system with a broken ship and only enough fuel for one or two more short jumps sounds like it could be a really cool adventure in itself.
There's also an elaborate looking system for PCs controlling the ship in a fight, but I have not gotten to that yet.

Corey
2021-09-18, 10:06 AM
What on earth is the science officer doing in the middle of combat? It's a very important position sure, but like the medical officer the role's duties probably begin after combat.


The Vulcan Nerve Pinch?

Alcore
2021-09-18, 10:58 AM
Considering how soft you want your sci fi you might consider reading normal aquatic adventures for material. There is little difference between islands and planet with floating in an endless sea and stranded in the void of space.

Yora
2021-09-18, 11:35 AM
Definitely. Two of the three sea battles I know the most about are Denmark Strait and Rio de la Plata, both of which had only 4 ships of battleship and cruiser size each, which I think are great models for space battles.
(The third one is Midway, which was 7 carriers, 2 battleships, 7 cruisers, 27 destroyers, and 600 fighters. The complete opposite of what I have in mind. :smallbiggrin:)

Anonymouswizard
2021-09-18, 05:35 PM
If you go for a reactionless drives that's hard to detect submarines are also a good model. If detection is as easy as with real world rocket drives bare in mind that the only real method of stealth is to manage to get your emission between your observer and a big source of whatever you're emitting.

I'm ignoring having to dump heat because of the pretty soft nature you're going for. Which means any space stealth arms race is going to be based around cloaking and picking out drive emissions.


Also yes, common design aesthetics are a thing. If I'm not aiming for hard science my preference is to go for a mixture of classic rocketships and spheres (rarely saucers though), or just rip off the Lighthugger look for anything truly massive. Sometimes you'll see something that looks relatively unique (40k had the Imperium flying around in war cathedrals) but as ideas propagate and people both homage and nick we get broad archetypes. These designs can help us understand more about the characters or factions, the difference in look between Naboo's royal spaceship and the Millennium Falcon says a lot about the difference in the groups that created and use them.

sktarq
2021-09-18, 06:37 PM
I know the hard things I found in space RPG's has as much to do with how do the players interact with the game world.

Firstly how do you make it feel like you are dealing with something of enough scale. Space is BIG! and trying to comunnicate that in game can be very tough. When a single science/sensor roll turns a whole planet into the one spot that the PC's need to go, why have the whole planet. It may as well be a different neighborhood with spherical introduction art and the guards are chatted with via radio than face to face in the mud before the town gate. The idea that there is whole rest of that planet out there can be hard when they can both kinda see all of it but have no real feel for any of it. Also with instantaneous travel, or time skip travel how to the PC feel that this new place isn't next door to the last place? But if you spend too much time in the spaceship that can become boring if not handled well and even hopping from interior of ship A, to spacestation B, to office of planetary magistrate etc it can be tough to make it feel that it isn't just a cutsceen on a sound stage. Also this kind of microsampling of places as the PCs make a grand tour tends to lead a lot of the worldbuilding weirdly monochromatic (like the one world environment that is so damn common) it can quickly turn illogical very quickly. It would be like England being only pubs Italy only vinyards, and Russia only snowy industrial zones. . . it gets weird if you are not careful.

How do you get around the idea that the PC's are not needed. Basically space travel needs infrastructure. Someone has to collect materials, process them, design them, teach everyone how to do all the other things, make them and generally ship them via lots of steps to get basically anything to the players. There are lots of steps and people involved. And organizing all those people includes protecting them et all. So Space travel needs powerful, organized, moderately functional social systems to even exist. Now why can't those systems solve the problems the PC's are tasked with solving. Again the problem is not insurmountable but has to be dealt with.

As a blend of the two issues above you get scale of the PC's actions. There is a big temptation to "scale up" the events the PC's interact with. Saving the planet of the week is damn tempting from point of view of many storytelling situations. But that can lead to scale imbalances (planet wide threat but the PC's can only effect things within a short range of their physical location) and also planet wide threats would logically pull in whatever systems (political, military, corporation, etc) is powerful enough to set up such a planet anyway. And thus the players are sidelined. Again this CAN be worked around but needs a degree of awareness that isn't found in many pseudo medieval games.

Specialization. More than most game types space based games lean toward particular rolls for people. This classically starts with people like pilots (who end up taking the lead with the in space parts but sit in the background on away missions if not careful) and computer specialists (great at their one thing and a pack mule much of the rest of the time) but does expand to lots of people eventually. This makes sense in a worldbuilding sense, greater complexity of society and greater training needed for filling a role (esp dealing with tech needed) does push specialization. But it can be a trap for an unwary DM/ST/GM.

Alcore
2021-09-18, 07:48 PM
part of the change is lexicon...


The kind of game I am thinking of is more swashbuckling and pulpy adventures. In SPACE! Things like Star Wars or Flash Gordon.

In many ways, these kinds of settings take a lot from fantasy and westerns, even more so than from science fiction.

If one just told me "space adventures" I wouldn't necessarily think of Star Wars or even Flash Gordon (and if someone mentioned Flash Gordon I would instead think of "Flesh Gordon" the light erotic spoof I actually have seen). I would expect a game with emphasis on space ships (in Mongoose Traveller I am more likely to know about the ship my character is in than what is on the character's sheet). Take The Fellowship of the Ring and reskin them as sci fi and not much changes. Same with urban. The reason is the emphasis is on the narrative and characters.


So if you plan to offer to run a sci fi you might want to try and get everyone on the same page. Dungeons and Dragons (and its many clones) fosters a zero to hero mentality which helps keep people on that same page even if most of it is slightly unorthodox; something your game might lack.



Scope and scale also changes but often doesn't... (or shouldn't)

A group of heroes walk into the capital city of the nearby kingdom they happened to be dungeon spelunking in. They are likely to be just one in a crowd. The DM (regardless of medium) is unlikely to put too much description into the crowd but it will still seem populated.


A ship carrying the heroes arrive in high orbit over the system capital of the kingdom they are adventuring in. Some DM's fall into the trap of "space is vast and empty" and it kinda is; so everyone congregates into small easy to get to locations because that is where the resources and trade is. So instead of finding one or two transponders in a bunch of emptyness;

Let us say the system is Sol (our system that contains Earth). In Stellaris (a PC game) the system has numerous resource nodes apart from the main planet (and mars which is unused until terraforming). For this example we will say there are 9 nodes scattered around. This means 9 government run shuttles will be in constant existence ferrying people and goods from these remote locations. Even if they can do a round trip in less than a week (assuming monthly shipments) they can still be employed from surface to orbit of Terra and thus about half should always be "in sight" of Terra doing something. Then you have the high port and any support ships (which may double the number of craft). Now you have to consider any orbital defenses, the navy they might have. How many corporations have space ships? Which aliens civilizations have embassies? more and more ships which need vary little other than a transponder and maybe a vary vague ship class.

In a PbP game I would roll of random transponder numbers and codes for all of them and hand the PCs a list of which ones they pick up on sensors. Around the table you might want to mention them or the PCs might not realize they are there and assume they just entered orbit of a normally empty planet. If my players walked into an empty city they will get abnormally cautious.

This is one way that scale just shouldn't change without providing a reason.



Depending on how hard your sci fi is will also change whether combatants can even visually see each other. Often they are shooting tiny pin picks a whole planet worth of space between them. Not too different from some "scry and fry" tactics or even lobbing big rocks over a wall by catapult.

Azuresun
2021-09-19, 03:42 AM
The biggest issue in my experience is when you have to do spaceship combat. To put it simply, it sucks.

Inevitably, you have characters who have basically nothing to do. If you're the ship's pilot or you're shooting the guns, that's great. If you're anyone else on the ship, your options are generally limited to just making a skill check to repair something or scan something or adjust something. Or assist someone who has an actual job.

For a movie example, let's look at the escape from the Death Star in Star Wars: A New Hope. They've just rescued Princes Leia and watched Obi-Wan get killed by Darth Vader, and the party escapes on the Millennium Falcon. Han and Luke rush to man the guns. With Han occupied, Chewbacca gets to fly the ship. R2-D2 briefly repairs something, while C-3PO and Princess Leia do literally nothing. If it were being played at a table, this combat could take an hour in real time to resolve (at least, the way my group usually plays). It's bad.

The Rogue Trader RPG had a decent go at giving everyone something to do--using social skills to motivate the crew, for example. The problem I find with spaceship combat is that the PC's can't really lose any encounter in the sense of getting their ship destroyed, because that's pretty much a TPK.

Yora
2021-09-19, 04:11 AM
Only in the csse that ships magically explode for some unspecified reason before they become inoperable. Which admittedly, 99% of sci-fi does. Space ships don't sink, so the preferred method to show that a ship is out of combat is to make them blow up. Somehow.
The Expanse is the only case I know where ships frequently get shot with so many holes that they shut down. Those that exploded either were blown up to keep them falling into ebemy hands,, or were hit by huge nuclear warheads.
Stories about damaged ships from World War 2 are quite interesting. There are many cases in which there wasn't much of them left before they eventually started to think. There's really only one famous case in which a lucky hit made a battleship just explode and disappear in seconds, but that's the one all space battles seem to use as reference.

If a disabled ship doesn't instantly explode, then losing a space battle is no different than losing any other battle.

The Glyphstone
2021-09-19, 09:52 AM
That can be something difficult to train out of D&D veterans as well, the idea that you only lose when you're combat ineffective and every fight is to the death. But in many cases, its easier to run away in space than it is in a dungeon, so retreating from a fight you are going to lose means keeping your ship intact. The trick is convincing players that this is viable.

Anonymouswizard
2021-09-19, 10:38 AM
That can be something difficult to train out of D&D veterans as well, the idea that you only lose when you're combat ineffective and every fight is to the death. But in many cases, its easier to run away in space than it is in a dungeon, so retreating from a fight you are going to lose means keeping your ship intact. The trick is convincing players that this is viable.

I remember my first game of z Unknown Armies. Almost all the group has only played D&D and or overconfidence led to a near TPK in session 2. Despite not a single gun sitting on the whole game surrendering quickly became a preferred tactic (after running away). Chases became much more common in the game as whichever side was outgunned would almost immediately cut and run.

Berenger
2021-09-19, 12:09 PM
In SWN, ships kind of do explode (or break apart) when reduced to 0 hull points, killing all hands on board. But except for small fighter craft (which can be destroyed instantly) there are 2d6 minutes to get to the escape pods (you had the good sense to install escape pods, didn't you?) and / or make a last ditch effort at damage control to stabilize the ship.

The players can also decide to negate one enemy hit per round (thus avoiding hull damage) and roll for some crisis instead, giving them the power to ask for bad things other than sudden dead. Typically, a particlarly brutal fight neither ends with "ship spontaneously exploded and TPK" nor with "ship at 25% hull points, but otherwise fully operational and everybody on board alive and well".

Yora
2021-09-19, 12:28 PM
Indeed, which I found strange. If you approach space battles without the preconception that space ships have to explode when they are defeated, then this mechanic feels quite random and without reason. Instead of "when the ship is destroyed, engineers have X minutes to prevent it from exploding", you could very well have "if the engineers try to restore some minimal power, make a skill check after X minutes". Or a whole range of other options.
Ships exploding is only there because it's the default assumption that ships in sci-fi always do that.

noob
2021-09-19, 02:16 PM
Indeed, which I found strange. If you approach space battles without the preconception that space ships have to explode when they are defeated, then this mechanic feels quite random and without reason. Instead of "when the ship is destroyed, engineers have X minutes to prevent it from exploding", you could very well have "if the engineers try to restore some minimal power, make a skill check after X minutes". Or a whole range of other options.
Ships exploding is only there because it's the default assumption that ships in sci-fi always do that.

In real life what makes the spaceship explode is the missile hitting it.
Exploding without explosives from the opponent(like you got hit by a railgun) might happen if the destruction do mix the fuel and the comburant but who knows if spaceships will still be using fuel and comburant when we will be doing space battles?

Anonymouswizard
2021-09-19, 03:09 PM
In real life what makes the spaceship explode is the missile hitting it.
Exploding without explosives from the opponent(like you got hit by a railgun) might happen if the destruction do mix the fuel and the comburant but who knows if spaceships will still be using fuel and comburant when we will be doing space battles?

You could always use the Lensman model: ships blue up because anything that's powerful enough to take their screens down will just vaporise the ship into incredibly energetic plasma.

Pauly
2021-09-19, 03:54 PM
This is why repair and maintenance is a good thing. People stop fighting when their ship has too many holes in it, either to surrender, run away or allow the other guy to go away.

The problem is the “must fight to the bitter end” mentality of gamers. Some systems that I have seen that discourage this
- allowing ships to drop into non powered flight which makes targeting impossible. The cost is that re-powering the ship takes a long time.
- a social/legal taboo against killing. Winning the fight but killing the other guys leads to serious military pursuit to put you on trial for murder.
- cost/scarcity of ships means every hole in a ship costs you significant money either to repair or in reduced salvage.

As a GM you have to be careful because if you start running religious fanatics/aliens/etc. who never surrender the players will feel they should act the same way.

Yora
2021-09-19, 04:30 PM
In the end it always comes down to what the writer wants to happen in a battle. Some want battles to play out and look in a certain way they have already envisioned and then make up justificiations for how this could make sense in the internal logic of the setting. Others are interested in what a battle would look like if you'd apply known physics and technology in such a scenario, and work out what should logically happen.
I'm a big fan of the later, but I completely endorse just making stuff up with no explanation on other subjects, so who am I to argue about it?

Damage control is a very fascinating subject that is way more involved than being a technobabble term in Star Trek. In real naval warfare, ships don't have a percentage counter that goes down when it's hit, but have extremely complex internal structures and machinery. And most importantly, a hole in the side keeps taking on water, and a fire keeps on burning amd spreading after the innitial explosion. Damage control is less about fixing the ship, and really all about the damage not getting any worse without the enemy even landing more hits.
One of the most famous examples is probably the Yorktown in the Battle of Midway. Three Japanese carriers had been destroyed very quickly (in the same dive attack run, very epic) and the fourth one got also hit and burned out over a few hours. The American carrier Yorktown also got hit similarly badly, but the crew was much better trained, coordinated, and equiped to get the fires under control and keep the damage contained. They even almost managed to save the ship, but the ship that was trying to tow it back to harbor was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine the next day and took the Yorktown with it.
I think that's the main story that inspired me to have sci-fi with ships that remain a ship after being shot to pieces. Especially since space ships can't sink, and fires run quickly out of oxygen.

Quertus
2021-09-19, 10:13 PM
Random thoughts:

In a war game? Sure, pitting ships against each other can be fun. But in an RPG? Not so much.

"Playing the game" = "making meaningful decisions". Most ship fights, controlling just a single ship, there aren't a lot of meaningful decisions to make. Especially not without extreme contrivance levels.

Now, what might be funny is, run a fleet scenario, and give each player an identical ship (with identical crew) to run. That way, they're all making equally meaningful decisions. Then, after the fight, of the valid¹ ships, pick² one to be the PCs' ship.

-----

Characters created "at random" (ie, not with the specific goal of having a fun role to play during ship-to-ship combat) are even less likely to enjoy the "ship combat" minigame.

-----

You can absolutely do "dungeon crawls" in space (or PlanetSide) without it turning into "fight everyone all at once". In fact, IMO, some of the best I've seen are such. Some examples:

A) both you and the Orcs are using "whisper" brand Laser Pistols, as none of you want to awaken the sleeping Dragon. Using comms is similarly right out.

B) zombies, killer robots… some "unified" but uncommunicative force.

C) monsters, often unintelligent, of diverse sorts, that aren't actually allied with one another any more than the crocodiles and the Beholder are allies (ie, your classic D&D dungeon).

D) stealth.

E) disable comms.

F) wait for natural event to disable comms.

G) use their comms against them, to know their movements.

H) use their comms against them, to issue false orders (and maybe send them out an airlock).

I) monsters (zombies, killer robots, your own crew mutated by the warp, whatever) now infest your own ship; you've got to "dungeon crawl" through it to reclaim it.

-----

Space is 3-dimensional, and mostly empty. But the interesting stuff usually happens at the parts of space that aren't empty.

Most human minds struggle with things (like ships) that aren't oriented "correctly".

-----

Speaking of things human minds struggle with: movement & firing arcs in 3 dimensions.

-----

"Scope" becomes a bigger issue/question.

For example, how does travel work? FTL? Cryo stasis? In system only? Or "well, you're there - it's 1,000 years later, what's your new character?"

In Star Wars and (new) Battlestar Galactica, there's a definite "they're shooting and… poof, gone" feel.

In Star Wars, any star/planet in the entire galaxy is only a few hours/days away. If the PCs are on the run, and decide, "we'll hide there", and pick a random point of light, what do?

Similarly, anyone they're chasing could have gone anywhere.

-----

Most ships have more of a "chain of command" than most parties.

-----

¹ ship survived, all (PC) crew survived, whatever.
² highest "valor" rating, player vote, at random, whatever

Yora
2021-09-20, 04:08 AM
Most human minds struggle with things (like ships) that aren't oriented "correctly".

-----

Speaking of things human minds struggle with: movement & firing arcs in 3 dimensions.

Does this impact play?

Pauly
2021-09-20, 04:45 AM
Does this impact play?

In the combat minigame hell yes. If one side (GM) or the other (players) grok 3d and the other doesn’t space combat becomes space murder.

Having said that most space combat games treat space as a flat plane, but if you do use a 3d combat system it is a huge issue.

Anonymouswizard
2021-09-20, 05:26 AM
In the combat minigame hell yes. If one side (GM) or the other (players) grok 3d and the other doesn’t space combat becomes space murder.

Having said that most space combat games treat space as a flat plane, but if you do use a 3d combat system it is a huge issue.

The reason most space combat systems aren't 3D is, I believe, mostly because it's an increased in bookkeeping and maths. The same reason most use Speed scores instead of Acceleration scores (although it's nowhere near an accepted standards).

But yeah, just like how if one side understands tactics and the other doesn't in normal combat, the side with the best grasp of 3D vectors will do the best in 3D space combat. Also whichever side has the best understanding of orbits will have an advantage in neat-space battles.

Satinavian
2021-09-20, 07:51 AM
In the combat minigame hell yes. If one side (GM) or the other (players) grok 3d and the other doesn’t space combat becomes space murder.

Having said that most space combat games treat space as a flat plane, but if you do use a 3d combat system it is a huge issue.ImE it doesn't make much difference. You need at least 4 participants before the action is beyond a properly aligned 2D plane. And even then the number of tactics properly using the 3rd dimension is pretty limited because space is pretty empty and everyone aware of each others position. Usually it is not worth it moddeling 3D.

Acceleration instead of speed however does make a big difference and is worth implementing.

What i would avoid completely however, are relativistic effects on ship battles. That causes only problems and inconsistencies.

noob
2021-09-20, 08:07 AM
ImE it doesn't make much difference. You need at least 4 participants before the action is beyond a properly aligned 2D plane. And even then the number of tactics properly using the 3rd dimension is pretty limited because space is pretty empty and everyone aware of each others position. Usually it is not worth it moddeling 3D.

Acceleration instead of speed however does make a big difference and is worth implementing.

What i would avoid completely however, are relativistic effects on ship battles. That causes only problems and inconsistencies.

Relativistic effects on ship battles do not matters in game rules: ships are not going to be moving at even a tenth of the speed of light relatively to each other(else they would zoom away from each other in an instant or collide in an instant and so there would be no ship battle) and they are not going to be in a gravity field strong enough for relativity to matter because then they would be probably completely unable to escape the gravity field and then would die crushed.
It would not cause relativistic problems and inconsistencies to implement the rules for that: the effect would be invariably negligible in any situation where the ships can fight.

Also an assumption about ship battles is that they generally occur in places where the environment is interesting(else it is a "who shoots first" situation that is desperately similar to what real life space battles would look like) with plenty of stuff and the stuff have positions thus making them fit on a plane might be harder.
The reason for that assumption is because manoeuvring does not matters if there is no cover(Space weapons are often stuff like lasers, railguns and missiles and none of those do miss if aimed by an ai while the targeted ship can only accelerate/slow down/turn at 10g(else the people in the ship dies) and thus not change their trajectory a lot) and generally in space battle simulation in rpgs there is the assumption a piloting check can reduce the amount of incoming fire taken thus indicating that there is stuff you can use as cover between two of your shots (because just changing movement pattern would not help when you can barely change direction because you can only accelerate at 10g). Or you can have really realistic space battles where the crew(pilot included) evacuates immediately because ultimately a computer does the ship fighting better especially if there is no pathetic vulnerable flesh men in the ship capping the acceleration then the players switches over to saying how the ai was programmed and which kind of decisions it would take instead of controlling the crew.(or they focus on escaping at a crawling speed with their escape shuttles that can not accelerate beyond 10g and take decisions like "we spread so that they will have an harder time killing us all" or "we stay grouped because we know reinforcement is coming and is going to kill our opponents soon")

Telok
2021-09-20, 10:05 AM
The two big issues with space combat are:
1. Who participates?
2. How much effort do you want to use to model it?

Skipping #1... You can use a full on 3d boardgame that implements heat, facing, acceleration, etc., like Attack Vector: Tactical (not as complicated as it sounds as serious serious design effort went into playability & ease of use). But you're basically switching game systems at that point, even if you keep the same "characters". You can do a "simplified" board game of any complexity that just ignores 3d & acceleration/velocity. But again its switching systems and can be even more complicated than a real board game, yet infinitely more boring, depending on the system bells & whistles & bad math from designers.

You can go full 'theater of the mind', which can be pretty good if there are only a couple ships involved and relative positioning is fairly simple. Partial totm methods can be found in classic Traveller. One a simplistic 2-fleets method with a front line & reserve, the other a simple (but decently 2d accurate) acceleration & vector by ruler & paper method that can deal with multi-turn missile tracks.

Telwar
2021-09-20, 02:14 PM
For the most part, in popular fiction space combat, the only same-size combatants that can delete each other in one pass without truly ridiculous luck are usually fighter-types, and that's not always the case; main characters/popular side characters can limp off for repairs/exciting solo adventures, but unnamed NPCs probably just get vaped. Otherwise, you need to have significant size and firepower differences between the two combatants, such as DS2 vaporizing MonCal cruisers in single shots with the superlaser in RotJ.

Same-size or close-size ships tend to need to be battered down until they stop fighting, barring exceptionally lucky hits where the magazine or reactor goes up; reference the Profundity from Rogue One, which was severely damaged, but could still launch the Tantive IV. On the other hand, the luckless Nebulon-V got cut in half on the engine spar. Even at Wolf 359 against a single Borg cube, the Federation fleet was mostly wrecked ships that retained sufficient hull integrity long enough to let off escape pods prior to warp core breaches, rather similarly to (say) what happened with HMS Glowworm at the hands of the Admiral Hipper.

Interestingly, I can't think of any light-freighter/PC party-size ships getting vaporized on screen. To be absolutely fair, the ones we tend to see have the media's main characters on board, and so can't be allowed to be blown up unless the author is horribly tired of it all.

I feel like using main battery weapons on the PC-style ships is probably a) overkill and b) inefficient, since the main batteries might not be terribly good at aiming an hitting those small wiggly things, and instead you have your ship's secondary batteries for those (rather like how all-big-gun ships rapidly got secondary armaments added back to deal with torpedo boats and their destroyers); these have the play advantage of not vaporizing the party's ship in one go, and instead hitting it enough for it to be crippled and taken on board/boarded...allowing the PCs time to figure something out to not get hit any more than they have to. Think of ESB where the Millennium Falcon is being chased by an ISD; clearly they're not trying to vaporize the ship, since it has valuable intelligence on board in the form of Leia (and the rendezvous coordinates with Han/Chewie); sure, they might get super lucky, but the Falcon can take enough of the shots that they can probably get it incapacitated without killing everyone on board.

Corey
2021-09-20, 02:45 PM
Interestingly, I can't think of any light-freighter/PC party-size ships getting vaporized on screen.

The main example that quickly comes to mind of warships being vaporized on screen is

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIvLwQ5P-VM

(starting at the 1:30 mark)

But that certainly fits the template of the vaporizer being much more powerful than the vaporizee.

My sense is that those ships were envisioned as having crews of a few dozen or so.

Yora
2021-09-20, 03:22 PM
Capital ship guns in FreeSpace 2 certainly could do it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a__PCU1GeQk#t=5m32s). Even the heaviest bombers get instantly destroyed if they happen to run into the path of a beam canon.
Though then, being a videogame, you just restart the level and continue.

Anonymouswizard
2021-09-20, 03:40 PM
Just have the ship VWORP from place to place, it solves the problem with space combat and immigration (as long as you don't get too conspicuous).

Yora
2021-09-20, 04:07 PM
I think the three main differences we identified are in communication, transportation, and guns.
Which admittedly are the obvious ones.

Are there cultural and social aspects that also become a major factor to consider?

Lawless frontier worlds are quite common in many sci-fi styles, and those are deliberately based on the image of the Wild West. Just like typical D&D country. But in contrast to that, big urban centers are very much like modern cities today. That makes them much more like modern settings than fantasy settings.
The main impact of this I see in police and weapons restrictions. While I've seen these things occasionally pondered for a minute or two in fantasy settings, fantasy generally seems to assume that characters can walk around in full battle gear all the time, and if they get into fights, there's nobody going to bother them about it. Unless it's a particularly broken down city, or one of the aforementioned lawless frontier planets, that approach seems rather implausible in a sci-fi setting to me. Carrying weapons could easily be illegal on developed fantasy worlds, as it is in almost every industrialized country today. And police is going to respond to every public shooting where people can see it. If the PCs can be identified, then there will likely be a manhunt for them for quite a while. Leaving the planet would probably be a good option in many cases, and getting departure clearance might be difficult on smaller worlds that only have a handful of ships coming and going each day. Of course, all of that changes if the shooting happens in non-public places and is with people who have even less interest in getting the attention of the police.
But overall, I think police would play a much larger roll than generic fantasy town guards.

I know that several sci-fi games have a mechanic for weapons requiring licenses. I think on more civilized planets, that could really be a very good element to make use of, to create more contrast with lawless worlds.

BRC
2021-09-20, 04:33 PM
I think the three main differences we identified are in communication, transportation, and guns.
Which admittedly are the obvious ones.

Are there cultural and social aspects that also become a major factor to consider?

Lawless frontier worlds are quite common in many sci-fi styles, and those are deliberately based on the image of the Wild West. Just like typical D&D country. But in contrast to that, big urban centers are very much like modern cities today. That makes them much more like modern settings than fantasy settings.
The main impact of this I see in police and weapons restrictions. While I've seen these things occasionally pondered for a minute or two in fantasy settings, fantasy generally seems to assume that characters can walk around in full battle gear all the time, and if they get into fights, there's nobody going to bother them about it. Unless it's a particularly broken down city, or one of the aforementioned lawless frontier planets, that approach seems rather implausible in a sci-fi setting to me. Carrying weapons could easily be illegal on developed fantasy worlds, as it is in almost every industrialized country today. And police is going to respond to every public shooting where people can see it. If the PCs can be identified, then there will likely be a manhunt for them for quite a while. Leaving the planet would probably be a good option in many cases, and getting departure clearance might be difficult on smaller worlds that only have a handful of ships coming and going each day. Of course, all of that changes if the shooting happens in non-public places and is with people who have even less interest in getting the attention of the police.
But overall, I think police would play a much larger roll than generic fantasy town guards.

I know that several sci-fi games have a mechanic for weapons requiring licenses. I think on more civilized planets, that could really be a very good element to make use of, to create more contrast with lawless worlds.
Another thing to consider is the biodiversity of your setting, as regards sentient species.


How would a city look if it's citizens included 15 foot tall aliens with six arms, Humans, 2 foot tall blue frog people, hyperintelligent oozes who go around in robotic environment suits, and the occasional hivemind alien species that can't really carry on a conversation unless at least 3 individuals are in close proximity.


Can your different weird aliens eat the same food? Breath the same air? Might aliens from high-gravity worlds enjoy vacationing on lower-gravity planets where they have superstrength?
How does language work when different species might have wildly different vocal chords, or not even communicate using sound at all?

When I had my pulp sci-fi setting, I had a lot of fun coming up with weird aliens.

Psyren
2021-09-20, 04:41 PM
A lot of settings get around weapons issues by just having the PCs join an organization of some kind that is authorized to have weapons, or be deputized/empowered in some way. For example, in Mass Effect you start out as a member of the Systems Alliance Military and later join the Spectres - in both cases, not only is Shepard allowed to walk around just about anywhere armed to the teeth, all his/her companions are too. Similarly, Starfinder usually has the PCs join the Starfinder Society or a similar organization that can walk around most places with at least a sidearm. And all of that ignores the idea of alternative "weapons" like psionics, biotics, Force-use, tech/hacking skills or outright space magic - some of these are harder to restrict, which makes restricting physical weapons performative at best.

This is not to say you can never take the PCs guns away in some circumstances (e.g. visiting a corporate HQ or a government official at their office) but those circumstances should usually be the exception rather than the rule unless your setting is much more tightly regulated than most space opera settings, which tend to go for more of a wild frontier vibe (pockets of order in a mostly lawless expanse.)

As for big differences between sci-fi/space and traditional fantasy, a big one for me is information gathering. For fantasy you usually have three sources to learn something - find someone who knows and learn from them, magical divinations, or journey to a physical repository like a library or temple or school for lengthy research. In a space setting you get a fourth option - the internet, or some version of that concept, which if you want to throw in a dash of cyberpunk you can add strata too like the Deep Web and Dark Web.

Anonymouswizard
2021-09-20, 04:41 PM
But overall, I think police would play a much larger roll than generic fantasy town guards.

I know that several sci-fi games have a mechanic for weapons requiring licenses. I think on more civilized planets, that could really be a very good element to make use of, to create more contrast with lawless worlds.

On the first, I tend to find in games from about the Victorian era (or equivalent) onwards a reason why the PCs can't just call the police is useful. Generally either making them the police or making them be criminals or competitors (Scum and Villainy had three ship options which all give a reason why you don't want the authorities to be here).

On the second, it might have to do with the country I live in, but I don't see weapon regulations as inherent to any genre. I've had PCs get into fights with the town guard because they tried to walk around in mail carrying two handed swords (and I'll have similar rules in most fantasy games I play). Generally I use what weapons you can carry to establish how oppressive a settlement is: the default is being able to have your sidearm, freer societies tend to allow stronger weapons while oppressive ones might not let you carry a knife.

Yora
2021-09-20, 04:50 PM
How does language work when different species might have wildly different vocal chords, or not even communicate using sound at all?
Though it's a general questions for all settings to consider, I want to show of my own work on the subject. :smallbiggrin:

A trade language with a very simple grammar (like English :smalltongue:) and a single script, which has three different systems to pronounce the letters, which are designed to work with the anatomy of all the species (my setting only has twelve). While most people are only physically able to pronounce one of the three forms, they can still hear and understand the others. In principle, it's no different from reading the same text in all caps or all lower case, or learning to read text transcribed into the script of a different language, which billions of people do every day.
In case the voices of a species are partly outside the hearing range of another, regular personal comms can pick the voice up with their microphone and amplify them tona different frequency range. You'd still have to deal with very strong accents, but we actually do that all the time and stop noticing it after an hour or two.

SimonMoon6
2021-09-20, 04:58 PM
How does language work when different species might have wildly different vocal chords, or not even communicate using sound at all?

Even if the aliens can all use the same sounds to communicate, language is an incredibly complicated issue to deal with. There's a reason that Star Trek has the "universal translator" and Doctor Who has translation via telepathic circuits. Languages are weird. Even Earth languages can have very different concepts that don't translate from one language to another. I mean, take Japanese with its honorifics (-san, -chan, -sama, -sensei, etc) or its many different ways of saying "you" or "I" that have different connotations that will not translate at all into English. And that's an Earth language spoken by humans.

The use of languages in science fiction is something I always pay a keen attention to and I get really annoyed when it's not used well. For example, Stargate SG-1 started off with alien humans speaking a different language descended from Ancient Egyptian, so the guy who knew Ancient Egyptian could sort of translate a little bit. And then, after that, every alien spoke English. Even the ones in a distant galaxy who had no connection to Earth, not even ancient Earth in the years before English existed. It didn't matter who they were or where they lived, they spoke English and no other language. That annoys me to no end.

But one of the more interesting translation situations I've encountered was an audio only Doctor Who adventure in which the aliens were bugs who left trails of scent to communicate. Which meant that communications lingered and could be found by enemies.

BRC
2021-09-20, 05:09 PM
On the first, I tend to find in games from about the Victorian era (or equivalent) onwards a reason why the PCs can't just call the police is useful. Generally either making them the police or making them be criminals or competitors (Scum and Villainy had three ship options which all give a reason why you don't want the authorities to be here).

On the second, it might have to do with the country I live in, but I don't see weapon regulations as inherent to any genre. I've had PCs get into fights with the town guard because they tried to walk around in mail carrying two handed swords (and I'll have similar rules in most fantasy games I play). Generally I use what weapons you can carry to establish how oppressive a settlement is: the default is being able to have your sidearm, freer societies tend to allow stronger weapons while oppressive ones might not let you carry a knife.

Eh, wouldn't necessarily agree with as a metric of free vs oppressive. I'll take a detour to avoid getting into politics


Weapon restrictions are probably based on two factors

1) Necessity: What does this society consider a valid reason to be carrying a weapon around? Lawless frontier planets might have aggressive fauna, or potential criminal attacks and consider it legitimate to carry just about anything short of a heavy artillery. Meanwhile, a space station that serves as the assembly for the space UN might consider anything more dangerous than a kitchen knife to be illegal, since the station is theoretically safe enough that nobody needs to defend themselves, and letting people go armed increases the risk to any visiting VIPs.
2) Ability. The local authorities will generally want to enforce their monopoly on violence, but they won't be able to. If everybody who lands needs to go through Starport Security where they can be thoroughly searched for weapons, the Authorities might ban most weapons. However, if you can land your ship out in the wilderness and walk into town, the locals might decide they have better things to do than trying to track down and stop every spacer who carries a laser pistol.

Generally, I'd say that if the local authorities 1) Don't consider a given weapon to be something anybody has a legitimate reason to carry, and 2) can reasonably enforce a weapon restriction, they're probably doing so, if only because they have a vested interest in not letting anybody have bigger guns than they do.

Unless the place in question has cultural values around letting it's citizens go armed.


One fun thing to do in these settings is play with how weapon restrictions might be enforced/implemented.

For example, if police scanners can detect energy weapons, you might have criminal gangs resorting to stuff like crossbows and crude gunpowder weapons which won't show up on the scanners. Dune justified space-age swordfights by having personal shields that would stop a bullet but not a knife (and would explode if shot with lasers).

There's also good old fashioned Corruption, where weapons might be illegal without a theoretically hard-to-get permit, but you can grease a few palms and get yourself licensed as a "Personal Security Consultant", or slap some interesting paint on your gun and call it a "Culturally significant art object"

KineticDiplomat
2021-09-20, 10:41 PM
As an alternative way of looking at this:

The big difference is that you can actually set the expectations to whatever you want. Whereas so much of the generic fantasy expectations have been set by the high-fantasy-high magic-faux-renaissance-HP Battling-and-tolkien of D&D, you have freedom in space.

Take space battles.. Want space wizards re enacting the battle of Midway? Can do. Want ships of the line majestically pounding each other as shields flicker beneath titanic energies? Yep. Want a horrifying exchange of near autonomous weapons where after the humans commit to the plan, the attack and defense are mostly in the hands of computers for a furious bath of destruction? Sure. And anything in between. You are no more compelled to play "hard" science than you are to explain why somehow wizards live through crossbows to the face in some systems and wizards don't exist in others. The same applies for the ground...space wizards with laser swords, reskinned western gunfights, gunfights Ala the 20th century, fabulously complex interplays of networks and EM as low cost precision kill munitions stalk anything human...

And hey, you control the galactic history. Aliens, their status, humans, ancient ruins or a brave new frontier, empires or barely functioning pools of civilization between broad expanses of nothing. Jump gates, free FTL, no FTL at all and the entire adventure is on one ship traveling the stars. You control the technology, and what that means. You can tweak it all to the game you want...

So don't worry about what HAS to be different. Worry about what you want to be different.

Quertus
2021-09-20, 10:43 PM
Does this impact play?

Depends on the system, and how realistic or limited certain components of play are.

Suppose your primary weapon is a rail gun, 0 arc of fire, forward fire only. Your secondary guns are… magical old-earth broadside cannons, port and starboard only, 30 degrees arc of fire "up" from "waterline" / horizontal (no arc in any other dimension). Your tertiary guns are… top and bottom mounted anti-fighter guns alla the millennium falcon, with 360 degree coverage… but only for the range of, say, 5-40 degrees above (or before) the "horizon" (and really short range - say, 5 units).

Your ship is located at [257,42,-170], with momentum vector of [+20,-12,-10], maximum forward thrust/acceleration of 20, thrusters to give ±1 thrust in any direction or 20 degree turning or 5 degree acceleration/deceleration of rotation momentum per turn. Your ship is currently facing +60 degrees "up", +30 degrees "right", and has a rotation momentum of 20 degrees clockwise.

Plot a course to shoot the satellites at [120,70,15], [220,0,0], and [56,180,92] before docking with the command ship at [300,-50,0]. Momentum when docking must be between 5 and 7. Bonus points for lining up a shot with the rail gun on the enemy space station at [500,-666,0].

And that's with stationary targets. There's a reason why the AI wins here.

Satinavian
2021-09-21, 02:15 AM
I found that most of the time places with heavy weapon restrictions are also places where no one, not even PCs, expect to need weapons. Exceptions exist of course but they are rare. And unless you have a GM who wants to force fights with disarmed PCs, those expectations are not proven wrong.

The most important thing for me in a space adventure game would be to not make it "D&D in space".

GeoffWatson
2021-09-21, 03:03 AM
Depends on the system, and how realistic or limited certain components of play are.

Suppose your primary weapon is a rail gun, 0 arc of fire, forward fire only. Your secondary guns are… magical old-earth broadside cannons, port and starboard only, 30 degrees arc of fire "up" from "waterline" / horizontal (no arc in any other dimension). Your tertiary guns are… top and bottom mounted anti-fighter guns alla the millennium falcon, with 360 degree coverage… but only for the range of, say, 5-40 degrees above (or before) the "horizon" (and really short range - say, 5 units).

Your ship is located at [257,42,-170], with momentum vector of [+20,-12,-10], maximum forward thrust/acceleration of 20, thrusters to give ±1 thrust in any direction or 20 degree turning or 5 degree acceleration/deceleration of rotation momentum per turn. Your ship is currently facing +60 degrees "up", +30 degrees "right", and has a rotation momentum of 20 degrees clockwise.

Plot a course to shoot the satellites at [120,70,15], [220,0,0], and [56,180,92] before docking with the command ship at [300,-50,0]. Momentum when docking must be between 5 and 7. Bonus points for lining up a shot with the rail gun on the enemy space station at [500,-666,0].

And that's with stationary targets. There's a reason why the AI wins here.

You'd summarize or abstract it out.
Do you require players running a sailing ship to tell you exactly which ropes and sails they are using?

Vahnavoi
2021-09-21, 06:48 AM
In a game that's actually focused on sailing, putting such detail into sailing would be just fine - just like detailed three-dimensional navigation would be fine for a game that's actually focused on space navigation.

The best reason to not do the latter by hand is simply because computers do it better. The best reason to not do the former on paper is because if you're that interested in sailing, it'd pay off to actually go sailing.

noob
2021-09-21, 06:52 AM
In a game that's actually focused on sailing, putting such detail into sailing would be just fine - just like detailed three-dimensional navigation would be fine for a game that's actually focused on space navigation.

The best reason to not do the latter by hand is simply because computers do it better. The best reason to not do the former on paper is because if you're that interested in sailing, it'd pay off to actually go sailing.

While sailing there is empty times where you are not actively working on sailing so you could play a game about sailing while sailing.

Vahnavoi
2021-09-21, 06:58 AM
Yes. Characters in a roleplaying game can also start playing a roleplaying game. It's simply a question of whether the game allows recursion.

noob
2021-09-21, 07:03 AM
Yes. Characters in a roleplaying game can also start playing a roleplaying game. It's simply a question of whether the game allows recursion.

No it was not about rpg recursion.
I was talking about real life people that have empty time while sailing.
They do have the physical possibility to play a game about sailing during such empty time because in real life you can not skip empty times.

GeoffWatson
2021-09-21, 08:05 AM
It really depends on how spaceships work in your game.

Realism would probably be boring (really long travel times, carefully planning all trips, etc), so you'll have to make up some bull**** futuristic technology. With whatever properties you want it to have.
You'd also have to decide how communication works, how space weapons work, etc.

Yora
2021-09-21, 08:10 AM
The big difference is that you can actually set the expectations to whatever you want. Whereas so much of the generic fantasy expectations have been set by the high-fantasy-high magic-faux-renaissance-HP Battling-and-tolkien of D&D, you have freedom in space.

As someone with an interested in non-generic, non-D&D-clone fantasy worldbuilding, this is actually a really nice feature. In a space setting, players are much more open to consider that they don't already know everything there is about the setting and will listen to descriptions and ask questions.
If you announce that you are starting a fantasy campaign in which there are no dwarfs, there will almost certainly one or two people who say they really want to play in your campaign, but they want you to change it so they can play a dwarf. That just doesn't happen in custom space settings in my experience.

Quertus
2021-09-21, 12:01 PM
You'd summarize or abstract it out.
Do you require players running a sailing ship to tell you exactly which ropes and sails they are using?

The point is… well, there's several.

Abstracting out piloting to maneuver / get to a location vs to set up a shot for guns with limited firing arcs (and holding steady for the shoot vs maneuvering / dodging) is one thing, and *might* be reasonable to abstract.

But "here's your limited arc of fire", abstracting out how many of which guns you can bring to bare? Unless your abstraction never returns rail gun and millennium falcon guns simultaneously (unless you're shooting the broadside of a Borg cube from point blank), virtually always returns the "top" anti-Fighter gun whenever the broadside cannons are applicable, etc, there's going to be some cognitive dissonance between… well, not so much between the "fluff" and the "crunch", so much as between one set of crunch and another set of crunch. :smallfrown:

But the *main* point is, it had to "come up" in order for it to be something that gets abstracted out in the first place.

And, if you're using a realistic thrust system (something like I detailed with all those numbers), the amount of *planning* necessary to set up a shot isn't exactly trivial. Easier for a single gun than all those numbers make it sound, granted, but still quite complex when trying to consider multiple arcs of fire simultaneously, or when planning future shots in addition to evaluating the current situation. Which is another reason (on top of the other obvious reasons regarding human limitations already stated) why, IRL, I side with "the AI wins space battles".

Satinavian
2021-09-21, 01:54 PM
And, if you're using a realistic thrust system (something like I detailed with all those numbers), the amount of *planning* necessary to set up a shot isn't exactly trivial. Easier for a single gun than all those numbers make it sound, granted, but still quite complex when trying to consider multiple arcs of fire simultaneously, or when planning future shots in addition to evaluating the current situation. Which is another reason (on top of the other obvious reasons regarding human limitations already stated) why, IRL, I side with "the AI wins space battles".
And how does that matter for the game ? There probably is an AI or computer assist for that and the problem is just solved. There is no reason for the players to try figuring something out per hand what not even their characters actually need to do.


I mean i have had a coupble of space battles considering firing arc but only in 2D and it was fun enough. There are several systems that do this per default. But going actually to 3D at the table and consider firing arcs, acceleration and momentum and rotation around various axes is way to complicated for a game for very little benefit.

KorvinStarmast
2021-09-21, 02:44 PM
The problem I find with spaceship combat is that the PC's can't really lose any encounter in the sense of getting their ship destroyed, because that's pretty much a TPK. TPK isn't necessarily a bad thing. Roll up new characters.
In space, no one can hear you scream.
This puts "keep the ship repaired/running" as the central task for any crew.

That can be something difficult to train out of D&D veterans as well, the idea that you only lose when you're combat ineffective and every fight is to the death. But in many cases, its easier to run away in space than it is in a dungeon, so retreating from a fight you are going to lose means keeping your ship intact. The trick is convincing players that this is viable. Good point. Run away is better than being stuck in a vacuum where you just die. Wrecks at sea? People can live for days and even weeks clinging to floatsam... (in warm waters anyway)

You could always use the Lensman model: ships blue up because anything that's powerful enough to take their screens down will just vaporise the ship into incredibly energetic plasma. When outgunned, run.

This is why repair and maintenance is a good thing.
The trick is how to make that into interesting table top game play.


In the combat minigame hell yes. If one side (GM) or the other (players) grok 3d and the other doesn’t space combat becomes space murder. And if one side has read and comprehended Boyd, double down on that.

Psyren
2021-09-21, 03:55 PM
Weapon restrictions are probably based on two factors

1) Necessity: What does this society consider a valid reason to be carrying a weapon around? Lawless frontier planets might have aggressive fauna, or potential criminal attacks and consider it legitimate to carry just about anything short of a heavy artillery. Meanwhile, a space station that serves as the assembly for the space UN might consider anything more dangerous than a kitchen knife to be illegal, since the station is theoretically safe enough that nobody needs to defend themselves, and letting people go armed increases the risk to any visiting VIPs.
2) Ability. The local authorities will generally want to enforce their monopoly on violence, but they won't be able to. If everybody who lands needs to go through Starport Security where they can be thoroughly searched for weapons, the Authorities might ban most weapons. However, if you can land your ship out in the wilderness and walk into town, the locals might decide they have better things to do than trying to track down and stop every spacer who carries a laser pistol.

Just chiming in once again with the possibility of non-weapon weapons too. If your setting has supernatural abilities (e.g. Force Users, biotics, psionics etc) or preternatural alien biology (e.g. bioelectricity, acid spit, even simple super-strength) then convincing those people without such abilities to go unarmed is going to be that much more difficult even in common or neutral spaces.


It really depends on how spaceships work in your game.

Realism would probably be boring (really long travel times, carefully planning all trips, etc), so you'll have to make up some bull**** futuristic technology. With whatever properties you want it to have.
You'd also have to decide how communication works, how space weapons work, etc.

You can even have the same explanation for both or all three.

In Mass Effect for example, the same technology for long-range FTL (the Mass Relays) also facilitates communication, because the same physics that allows them to slingshot ships at FTL speeds lets them do the same to communications via the comm buoys. Then they came out with QEC communicators and you get essentially teleportation (for messages), albeit point to point.

Starfinder's Drift dimension works similarly, facilitating both travel and messages.

In those cases though, you need to explain how you can throw ships across the galaxy in seconds but not use that technology to somehow develop an infinite-mass arbitrarily high yield ordnance or suicide bomber.

Batcathat
2021-09-21, 04:20 PM
In those cases though, you need to explain how you can throw ships across the galaxy in seconds but not use that technology to somehow develop an infinite-mass arbitrarily high yield ordnance or suicide bomber.

Yeah, I feel like a lot of settings just avoid talking about that possibility or giving it some vague hand-wave. In the campaign I'm currently in, I'm secretly hoping for an enemy big enough to warrant trying that. We have some spare ships and from what the GM has said about how the FTL works, it should be possible. I suspect there's about a 75 percent chance he'll just come up with some reason in the moment why it won't work but until then I'll keep dreaming. :smallamused:

I'm not sure if someone's mentioned this already (I kinda skimmed parts of the thread), but on the topic of FLT communications I'd consider skipping it altogether. Being able to "outrun" information can be handy for adventurers (and their enemies) and having to use couriers to transport information opens up some possibly quests.

BRC
2021-09-21, 04:26 PM
Just chiming in once again with the possibility of non-weapon weapons too. If your setting has supernatural abilities (e.g. Force Users, biotics, psionics etc) or preternatural alien biology (e.g. bioelectricity, acid spit, even simple super-strength) then convincing those people without such abilities to go unarmed is going to be that much more difficult even in common or neutral spaces.


Eh I mean, think about Humans.

There isn't much your average unarmed human can do against 2 average unarmed humans who decide they want to do violence to them.

In a society with no weapons, any given person is in potential mortal danger from any two people who decide they want to kill or otherwise harm them. And yet, plenty of people go around unarmed, and plenty of societies on modern earth don't allow people to carry weapons.

If you replace "Two people who want to mug you" with "A single superstrong alien that wants to mug you", it can come out about the same.

On the other hand, you could have a mixed-species society where the Aliens are no more dangerous than individual humans, and yet the humans insist on being able to go armed because they fear (With or without reason) attacks from the Aliens.


A lot of it depends on who is making the rules and for whom.

Imagine a society with Humans and Groxlar. Your average Groxlar is stronger than your average human, with sharp claws. Unarmed, a Groxlar will almost always beat a human, but a human with a gun will almost always beat an unarmed Groxlar.

The society could say "We allow weapons, because Groxlar are basically armed all the time anyway, and it wouldn't be fair to our human citizens to leave them defenseless".

It could say "We ban weapons, because, sure, a Groxlar could kill a Human, but so could two humans. There are three times as many Humans as Groxlar here, and three humans could kill a Groxlar unarmed. Giving everybody guns doesn't really make anybody safer"

It could say "We ban weapons because we don't expect people to be able to defend themselves anyway. If you're attacked, you're supposed to go get help from the proper authorities, who WILL be armed."

It could say "We ban weapons because we want to make sure that our police officers outgun anybody they might run into, and we care more about that than about making sure human citizens can protect themselves against hostile Groxlar"

It could also say "We allow certain weak weapons, which put a Human and a Groxlar on roughly even footing, but ban anything more powerful".

It could even say "We allow weapons because we believe everybody should be capable of defending themselves with deadly force, Regardless of the presence of Groxlar"

This sort of thing is a good way to show what a society cares about.

For example, imagine a sci-fi setting where Energy Shields completely blocked most projectile weapons, but couldn't stop energy weapons.

If you had a society where VIPs, Police, and the wealthy could all afford personal Energy Shields, and that society only banned Energy Weapons, that would tell you a good deal about the priorities of the people who made the laws (They don't care about projectile weapons, since their cops can outgun anybody shooting bullets, and all the people they care about protecting have energy shields).

Edit: I suppose what I'm saying is that if you want to have a society that allows people to carry weapons, having potentially dangerous aliens as citizens is a fine excuse, especially if the aliens in question are dangerous enough "Unarmed" to put them about on-par with millitary-grade weapons, but that doesn't have to be the case.

Public demand for weapons is going to be based on perceived threat more than anything. If people think that there are roving gangs of muggers everywhere, they're going to want weapons, even if each individual mugger is no more dangerous than they are.

Similarly, if people feel safe, they might be okay with a complete weapons ban, even if some of their neighbors are sentient firebreathing bears who all know kung-fu.

Anonymouswizard
2021-09-21, 05:49 PM
Yeah, I feel like a lot of settings just avoid talking about that possibility or giving it some vague hand-wave. In the campaign I'm currently in, I'm secretly hoping for an enemy big enough to warrant trying that. We have some spare ships and from what the GM has said about how the FTL works, it should be possible. I suspect there's about a 75 percent chance he'll just come up with some reason in the moment why it won't work but until then I'll keep dreaming. :smallamused:

I'm not sure if someone's mentioned this already (I kinda skimmed parts of the thread), but on the topic of FLT communications I'd consider skipping it altogether. Being able to "outrun" information can be handy for adventurers (and their enemies) and having to use couriers to transport information opens up some possibly quests.

I did once write a piece of flash fiction where an experimental FTL drive was only good as a weapon (due to releasing lots of very hard radiation on deceleration). But yeah, most of the time is better to just ignore it. Have ships not travel through normal space when FTL and decelerate without side effects or use a wormhole network.

Although to be fair that universe also makes heavy use of zero point energy and dimensional travel. You see ZPE doesn't actually give a whole lot of energy, but nothing says you can't nick any from the universe next door...

On the topic of FTL Comms, I also like to do away with them. But in all honesty unless the PCs are very high profile or their enemies know exactly which system they're jumping to most of it gets lost in the deluge of data. If you want to make sure somebody in another system gets the message or don't want to use the public network you've still got a great reason to hire couriers, as does anybody who wants to move massive volumes of data (and now I'm picturing a rocket full of SSD arrays). There's also the question of FTL bandwidth and range, it might just be more practical to load anything nonurgent onto ships and fly them to other systems.

Yora
2021-09-21, 06:29 PM
Weapon power cell detectors are one of my excuses to have swords. :smallbiggrin:

Pauly
2021-09-21, 08:50 PM
There are also a couple of sci-fi sub genres that are worth exploring.

1) Steam Punk. Space 1889 really has this genre covered and I can’t recommend the setting highly enough. The system is a little clunky, but you can port the setting over to your system of choice without too much trouble. You don’t get interstellar travel but you do get in solar system travel and Jules Verne/H G Wells style moonmen, martians and venusians.
This plays very similar to regular sci-fi, but with genuine old timey technology.

2) Multiverse. The party is sent to alternate timelines of Earth for [reasons]. The party then has to negotiate an alternate history world to obtain the maguffin. The world and technology are basically the same, but you can have very different systems of government and societies. You’d probably want to have a power restriction or something that prevents the players jumping too far to keep it grounded.

3) Time travel. The party are time cops or revisionists. Time cops are trying to keep history from changing, revisionists are trying to make the world better, according to their ideals, by changing history. You can make the time stream relatively stable i.e. future tech doesn’t work before it was invented, forcing the players to use historical tech or relatively flexible allowing future tech to work before it was invented and the players becoming the basis for gods, myths, magic and so on.

Quertus
2021-09-21, 09:30 PM
And how does that matter for the game ? There probably is an AI or computer assist for that and the problem is just solved. There is no reason for the players to try figuring something out per hand what not even their characters actually need to do.


I mean i have had a coupble of space battles considering firing arc but only in 2D and it was fun enough. There are several systems that do this per default. But going actually to 3D at the table and consider firing arcs, acceleration and momentum and rotation around various axes is way to complicated for a game for very little benefit.

You're looking at it backwards: the physics (in most universes) *are* that complicated, the question is whether the game is going to *simplify* it for playability benefit, and to what degree you'll suffer fidelity loss.

And the AI? Unless your rules are good, The rules cannot calculate how many turns you need to spend lining up your shot while the target is moving and maneuvering.

Yes, I've played 2d war games with firing arcs, and it was fun. But the leak of fidelity to 3d space combat hurt… immersion? Or just some players' enjoyment?

And my stealth point is, know your players. Know how much "but why can't we go *over* the obstacle" level of dissonance between 2d and 3d representations will bother them. Know how much they'll care whether the fixed rail gun on the space slug gets to fire as often as the 360° federation phasers, the tracking missiles, and the agile fighter's laser machine guns.

KineticDiplomat
2021-09-21, 10:07 PM
There is a trend to watch for - because it is space we instantly think in terms of "realism" and "human scaling". Now, in many cases space opera is less about heroic martial prowess, and there are some very good series that are both realistic and human scaled, but the majority definitely aren't and people like those stories just fine.

Star Wars

Star Trek

Warhammer 40k

Honor Harrington - this one has the impratur of realism until you realize the numbers are all a disguise for Space Napoleonic Broadsides and eventually Space Progression of Naval Technology to the Mid 20th century.

Firefly

Mass Effect
....

The list could go on, but the point here is that no one seems to care about the exact firing solution for the Enterprise, or the specific impulse equations for Firefly, or the precise scientific nature of Collapsed Antimatter in the Iridian War. It doesn't matter for the same reason that the Giant Eagles don't drop the ring in Mt Doom and no one makes thermonuclear weapons in D&D...because thinking of clever real world physics answers to fictional physics really isn't the point.

So...don't listen too hard if someone insists that you have to get the technological ramifications right or you failed. George Lucas is laughing his way to the bank on sporadic, inconsistent, and wildly off physics and technology. You can run an OK game on the same premise if you want, pretty sure.

Telok
2021-09-22, 12:05 AM
no one makes thermonuclear weapons in D&D...

I know of one fantasy book (I'd need to scrounge the name & author tho) about a shared world rpg / parallel world setup where that happened. There was also, back in the usenet and bbs days, a decently shared around netbook of d&d drugs & alcohol that had a booze dragon as one of the material components for a massive fuel-air bomb spell as a poor mans nuke.

Mechalich
2021-09-22, 01:05 AM
I know of one fantasy book (I'd need to scrounge the name & author tho) about a shared world rpg / parallel world setup where that happened. There was also, back in the usenet and bbs days, a decently shared around netbook of d&d drugs & alcohol that had a booze dragon as one of the material components for a massive fuel-air bomb spell as a poor mans nuke.

Jeff Grubb wrote a Dragonlance short story, appropriately titled "Boom" that was officially published in the anthology The Dragons at War, in which a Tinker Gnome invents the atomic bomb. So nukes have officially been a part of D&D since 1996.

Pauly
2021-09-22, 01:38 AM
Another facet that space fantasy ROGs can do is technology differential. In a fantasy setting all the different races have access to the same effect even if the mechanics of how they achieve that effect differ e.g. a dwarf may have a proto-wheellock pistol, a dark elf a hand crossbow, a halfling an enchanted sling, the high elf mage a wand of magic missile, and a human barbarian a throwing axe. Despite the differences all these weapons will have similar range and do similar damage with the effective differences in the descriptive fluff.

Sci-fi allows for vastly wide differences between the party and the enemy. Not mere cosmetic differences in how to achieve the same effect.
It could be that party has superior technology in which combat plays like the defense of Rorke’s Drift (eg Aliens, the humans in Avatar) If you get balancing wrong the combat can go the way of Omdurman or Isandlwana.
The other way is the party has immensely inferior technology (eg Predator, Terminator, Ewoks in RotJ). Party tactics involve hacking weaknesses in enemy technology and ambushing isolated enemy elements. The big danger is it can be very easy to get a TPK if the bad guy hasn’t set their phasers to stun.

Batcathat
2021-09-22, 04:01 AM
The list could go on, but the point here is that no one seems to care about the exact firing solution for the Enterprise, or the specific impulse equations for Firefly, or the precise scientific nature of Collapsed Antimatter in the Iridian War. It doesn't matter for the same reason that the Giant Eagles don't drop the ring in Mt Doom and no one makes thermonuclear weapons in D&D...because thinking of clever real world physics answers to fictional physics really isn't the point.

So...don't listen too hard if someone insists that you have to get the technological ramifications right or you failed. George Lucas is laughing his way to the bank on sporadic, inconsistent, and wildly off physics and technology. You can run an OK game on the same premise if you want, pretty sure.

Personally, I'm usually fine with unrealistic and/or vaugly explained physics, but inconsistent physics bothers me a lot. Obviously not everyone agrees (as you point out, there are certainly popular examples with less than consistent physics) but it's probably worth keeping in mind (especially since it can – rightly or wrongly – seem like railroading to the players if the GM says "Yes, earlier X did Y but now it doesn't for unclear reasons").

Quertus
2021-09-22, 08:35 AM
no one seems to care about the exact firing solution for the Enterprise, or the specific impulse equations for Firefly, or the precise scientific nature of Collapsed Antimatter in the Iridian War.

So...don't listen too hard if someone insists that you have to get the technological ramifications right or you failed. You can run an OK game on the same premise if you want, pretty sure.

I can see why you'd say that. *I* don't care about hyper-accurate 3d firing arcs and such. But my players did.

So I literally *couldn't* run an OK game on failed technological ramifications.

I'm pretty much a "the map *is* the territory" war gamer most of the time. But when you are applying this kind of abstraction to something that people both have an intuition for *and* can do the math for (unlike HP, where I still can't get the funding to repeatedly drop thousands of puppies from various heights to create realistic falling damage rules), you have to be willing to drop the abstraction in favor of the territory.

Which means you have to understand the territory, and cannot simply hide behind the abstraction.

At least, if you intend to play with players like mine, who have expectations of a high-fidelity game, and look forward to things like the "combat in 3d space with limited firing arcs" minigame

Satinavian
2021-09-22, 09:30 AM
At least, if you intend to play with players like mine, who have expectations of a high-fidelity game, and look forward to things like the "combat in 3d space with limited firing arcs" minigameYou simply can't do that for a tabletop.

Not because the math is hard - it isn't really. But because it is way too cumbersome to be handled in a timely manner and without computer assist.


Complaining that 3D space combat with facing etc. is not correctly represented in the game rules is about as useful as complaining that proper fighting where everyone moves at once and every move takes times and everyone reacts to everything they notice simultaniously are not represented as such in any kind of turn based resolution system.

Anonymouswizard
2021-09-22, 09:44 AM
You simply can't do that for a tabletop.

Not because the math is hard - it isn't really. But because it is way too cumbersome to be handled in a timely manner and without computer assist.


Complaining that 3D space combat with facing etc. is not correctly represented in the game rules is about as useful as complaining that proper fighting where everyone moves at once and every move takes times and everyone reacts to everything they notice simultaniously are not represented as such in any kind of turn based resolution system.

Eh, I've seen systems that do 2D facing relatively elegantly (mainly by limiting the number of ways to face). So 3D facing isn't impossible. It is, however, generally more trouble than I'm willing to deal with. I'll stick to 2D space combat on three levels.

Although I also tend to go for more realistic space movement. You begin by moving what you did last turn, then spin and move up to your thrust forward. Which does make weapon arcs important, as your spinal mounted weapons can't fire of you're thrusting the wrong way

Telok
2021-09-22, 11:24 AM
You simply can't do that for a tabletop.

Not because the math is hard - it isn't really. But because it is way too cumbersome to be handled in a timely manner and without computer assist.

Its been done. https://www.adastragames.com/attack-vector-tactical

Thr issue is really what you want to put effort into. If you care enough to put in the effort you can reasonably model close to anything for table top. With a bit more effort you can produce models for different levels of resolution speed vs detail. But its that effort, beginning with caring enough to try to understand what will be modeled, that most people don't want to do.

People told me you couldn't make a simple-but-realistic perception system for games when I wanted one for a rpg that had a perception stat but no perception rules. It turns out that if you look at a some old military research and current visual cognition research you get a nice pattern you can map to your dice system. I ended up with a basic table and three simple rules for a model that decently replicates the probabilities in the research I found.

The ttrpg industry main players have a bad habit of repeatedly reinventing the wheel with various levels of ass-pull math and not checking for existing solutions. That does not mean anything they do poorly is "impossible", just that the writers of the big and well advertised systems don't care about it.

Satinavian
2021-09-22, 03:31 PM
Its been done. https://www.adastragames.com/attack-vector-tacticalThanks, that looks nice. You might still complain about angular momentum but it is way more complex than i would have assumed to ever have made it into a proper product.

BRC
2021-09-22, 04:03 PM
Its been done. https://www.adastragames.com/attack-vector-tactical

Thr issue is really what you want to put effort into. If you care enough to put in the effort you can reasonably model close to anything for table top. With a bit more effort you can produce models for different levels of resolution speed vs detail. But its that effort, beginning with caring enough to try to understand what will be modeled, that most people don't want to do.

People told me you couldn't make a simple-but-realistic perception system for games when I wanted one for a rpg that had a perception stat but no perception rules. It turns out that if you look at a some old military research and current visual cognition research you get a nice pattern you can map to your dice system. I ended up with a basic table and three simple rules for a model that decently replicates the probabilities in the research I found.

The ttrpg industry main players have a bad habit of repeatedly reinventing the wheel with various levels of ass-pull math and not checking for existing solutions. That does not mean anything they do poorly is "impossible", just that the writers of the big and well advertised systems don't care about it.

Bolded for emphasis

Some players may want a detailed tactical simulation of unrealistic star-wars style space combat.

Others may want a mechanical system for space combat, but care more about the narrative feel than anything tactical. Like, they want their Ace Pilot character to be making dogfighting checks or whatever to establish them outmanuevering their enemies, but don't actually care about modeling everything in a 3D Space.



With Sci-Fi, there's also plenty of different takes on Space Combat. Star Wars has WWII Naval Combat, some stuff has an Age-of-Sail analogue. Star Trek lines up with Submarine combat somewhat ( I don't actually know)

Yora
2021-09-22, 04:50 PM
The Wrath of Khan - the greatest Star Trek movie ever made - had a straight up submarine battle. Star Trek 3 and 6 also follow in those footsteps. The TV shows not so much, with a few occasional exceptions.

I think the old movies from the 80s and early 90s are Stat Trek at its peak Space Opera. Something very different from TNG with its bright, sterile, technobabble future. They are a prime example of big ships 1 on 1, in situations where charging head on and blasting all guns is not an option. They have battles as puzzles much more than action. It might potentially work for games too. While in the end the captain makes the decisions, usually you have others in the team make critical contributions and suggestions, and in the end the solution is a team effort. However, this relies heavily on the characters all having extensive knowledge of the capabilities of all the many tools they have on the ship, and how they actually work. Something that is generally not the case in RPGs. And I think everyone just making up technobabble until the GM gives approval could be very dull. Unless you have a robust system for such things. Maybe potentially with a custom made PtbA system.

BRC
2021-09-22, 04:55 PM
The Wrath of Khan - the greatest Star Trek movie ever made - had a straight up submarine battle. Star Trek 3 and 6 also follow in those footsteps. The TV shows not so much, with a few occasional exceptions.

I think the old movies from the 80s and early 90s are Stat Trek at its peak Space Opera. Something very different from TNG with its bright, sterile, technobabble future. They are a prime example of big ships 1 on 1, in situations where charging head on and blasting all guns is not an option. They have battles as puzzles much more than action. It might potentially work for games too. While in the end the captain makes the decisions, usually you have others in the team make critical contributions and suggestions, and in the end the solution is a team effort. However, this relies heavily on the characters all having extensive knowledge of the capabilities of all the many tools they have on the ship, and how they actually work. Something that is generally not the case in RPGs. And I think everyone just making up technobabble until the GM gives approval could be very dull. Unless you have a robust system for such things. Maybe potentially with a custom made PtbA system.

I mean, Battle-as-puzzle with Technobabble is an interesting approach.

List a handful of "Reasons we will lose the fight" (We can't break through the enemy shields, their guns will blow us to pieces, they have repair drones fixing any damage!)

Player can propose solutions to any of the problems, potentially bridging the gap with Technobabble.

Like, "We have a few Breacher missiles, we could fire those to bring down the shields temporarily, then rake them with our main laser battery" would be a low-roll, but relies on having Breacher Missiles, or some other thing.


"We can use Dexathorine Emissions to phase-shift our lasers just enough to bypass the enemy shields" Requires a difficult Science Roll to implement that technobabble.

Quertus
2021-09-22, 08:44 PM
Oh, almost completely unrelated: I, personally, enjoy "space combat as War Game", even if it's not "high fidelity".

But I cannot (or, at least, have not yet) imagined a space battle where I would enjoy… ahem… where I would expect any arbitrary player to enjoy any arbitrary role in that battle.

That is… I'm playing… say… Kent Manly, government agent, away teams specialist, currently assigned to comms. We're in Wrath of Khan. OK… what do?

Or… you're playing… say… Wally (no last name), cybernetic engineer 3rd grade and sanitation specialist, who earlier today fell down the garbage chute and broke his pacemaker. You're in the falcon over a forest moon, what do?

Outside extreme contrivance, most space encounters, it really feels like a significant portion of the party really isn't going to have much to do.

KineticDiplomat
2021-09-22, 10:41 PM
As an aside for Space Combat, I think one of the better RPG systems - as opposed to a war game- I've seen is the Expanse. It has a clearly delineated purpose for someone to run electronics/ECM (let's you modify critical dice rolls of you can out ECM the other guy), pilot (change range, maneveur, or improve offense/defense or act as primary defense), gunner (attack or use point defenses for missile defense) and captain (adds his dice to what he thinks of as the critical actions for the turn) , with an option for damage control. That pretty much gets you to a five player system if you want, but it mostly works because of the abstraction. You aren't playing full thrust where anyone not the captain is at best putting words to the figure moving, you're playing a crew.

Satinavian
2021-09-23, 12:48 AM
Oh, almost completely unrelated: I, personally, enjoy "space combat as War Game", even if it's not "high fidelity".

But I cannot (or, at least, have not yet) imagined a space battle where I would enjoy… ahem… where I would expect any arbitrary player to enjoy any arbitrary role in that battle.

That is… I'm playing… say… Kent Manly, government agent, away teams specialist, currently assigned to comms. We're in Wrath of Khan. OK… what do?

Or… you're playing… say… Wally (no last name), cybernetic engineer 3rd grade and sanitation specialist, who earlier today fell down the garbage chute and broke his pacemaker. You're in the falcon over a forest moon, what do?

Outside extreme contrivance, most space encounters, it really feels like a significant portion of the party really isn't going to have much to do.
Well yes, but the same is true for most other situation. There are many many crewmembers who would never be selected for an away team and don't want to either.

But if you have a big ship, you might tackle this issue via troupe play.

Yora
2021-09-23, 04:10 AM
When in doubt, you can always put a player on one of the guns to shoot at the enemy.

But yeah, not all characters being super useful in every situation is the nature of RPGs. That's what specialization means.

Pauly
2021-09-23, 07:54 AM
Oh, almost completely unrelated: I, personally, enjoy "space combat as War Game", even if it's not "high fidelity".

But I cannot (or, at least, have not yet) imagined a space battle where I would enjoy… ahem… where I would expect any arbitrary player to enjoy any arbitrary role in that battle.

That is… I'm playing… say… Kent Manly, government agent, away teams specialist, currently assigned to comms. We're in Wrath of Khan. OK… what do?

Or… you're playing… say… Wally (no last name), cybernetic engineer 3rd grade and sanitation specialist, who earlier today fell down the garbage chute and broke his pacemaker. You're in the falcon over a forest moon, what do?

Outside extreme contrivance, most space encounters, it really feels like a significant portion of the party really isn't going to have much to do.

There is a distinction between campaigns/systems where space combat is an integral part of the campaign and campaigns where space combat is expected to occur rarely if at all.

It’s like playing a 16th/17th Century RPG and telling the players before they create their characters that in the campaign they will be the crew of a Privateer and ship combat is an integral part of the campaign. If a player builds a character that can’t contribute to ship handling generally or ship combat, then the problem isn’t the system or the GM’s campaign, the problem is the player.

If your character sits twiddling his or her thumbs or tentacles in combat that’s not inherently bad if combat occurs once every 6 months. But if this happens every second session then it’s a bad thing and it’s your fault for coming up with a character that can’t contribute to a core part of the campaign. This is assuming the game system allows for sufficient meaningful ways for multiple players to contribute to space combat.

Psyren
2021-09-23, 02:06 PM
When in doubt, you can always put a player on one of the guns to shoot at the enemy.

But yeah, not all characters being super useful in every situation is the nature of RPGs. That's what specialization means.

I definitely agree with this.

Having said that - it's possible, with a degree of creativity, to create multiple roles on a starship that allow for most if not all PCs to be involved. In Star Trek, most of the main cast is involved when big ship battles happen - that is the ideal scenario, you don't want to default to the same 2-3 officers whenever that happens. Ideally you should be getting screentime for guns, engineering, science officer, captain, first mate, medical etc etc.

Quertus
2021-09-23, 04:13 PM
This is tricky.

Suppose you're playing Lough Kuss George, yesterday's whiny farm boy & today's best shot in the fleet - an overnight success, because he found religion

Tomorrow, you face off against a Grand Admiral, who, noticing the hit rate of the starboard cannons you're manning, simply deploys agile (and expendable) Fighters, that can (mostly) remain out of your arc of fire.

Later, you're heavily outgunned by the imperial customs agents some idiot fired on, and your pilot isn't bothering to line up a shot for you, simply trying to dodge until the warp drives come online.

Next week, you are on a diplomatic mission to Babylon 5, where there's nothing to shoot, and nobody cares about your hokey religion.

In D&D, "combat" is a) expected, b) one of three "pillars", and C) something where everyone can participate.

In space… it really feels like, outside extreme contrivance, most scenes involve minimal numbers of people actually playing the game.

And remember, playing the game isn't "rolling dice", it's making meaningful decisions. If the optimal play for your character is always to fire the guns, or run ECM, or whatever, you the player could just be replaced with a dice roller.

Give or take roleplayers taking the opportunity to characterize their characters, I don't feel like anyone but the Grand Admiral and Armus, facing off against each other across the 5d Wizard 2+d Space chessboard, are likely to really be playing the game.

But maybe that's just my ignorance, or an indication of what type of character *I* should play in a space game.

BRC
2021-09-23, 04:27 PM
I definitely agree with this.

Having said that - it's possible, with a degree of creativity, to create multiple roles on a starship that allow for most if not all PCs to be involved. In Star Trek, most of the main cast is involved when big ship battles happen - that is the ideal scenario, you don't want to default to the same 2-3 officers whenever that happens. Ideally you should be getting screentime for guns, engineering, science officer, captain, first mate, medical etc etc.

The issue with this is that a lot of times when I see something like this, it doesn't actually produce interesting gameplay.

Like, the Engineer is Fixing The Ship, which is going to be "Make a Repair check every turn to Fix The Ship" unless your game has very in depth mechanics for Fixing The Ship.

Like, you can certainly create a space combat system that gives everybody stuff to do and is Fun and Engaging, but at that point you're really just building a whole new combat system from the ground up.

It's also highly dependent on what PCs you want to play. Not every party is going to have a Captain Pilot Gunner Engineer Science Officer breakdown, especially if most of the campaign isn't about that stuff, so building a system independent of the PC's might just fall flat.

Yora
2021-09-23, 05:29 PM
I feel this is turning into moving goal posts.

Is the argument now that no campaign should have combat in space ever, unless everyone is playing a starfighter pilot?

Quertus
2021-09-23, 05:52 PM
I feel this is turning into moving goal posts.

Is the argument now that no campaign should have combat in space ever, unless everyone is playing a starfighter pilot?

Not "moving goalposts" (although playing 'moving goalposts' in a space campaign could be cool), because "limited firing arcs" (and related details) is a separate (if at times related) conversation from "who is actually playing the game?"

So consider them 2 different answers to your question of, "what changes", that just *happen* to have a little overlap.

(Or was that not what you were talking about?)

As far as everyone being a fighter pilot… I believe I suggested everyone running a copy of the ship in a big fleet, and choosing afterwards which was the *real* ship, so…

But, it *may* depends on your players. A group of clones of me? We'll probably happy roleplay Kent Manly, Wally, and the animated (robotic? Alien? Psychic?) goalposts, even if they are useless or "not playing the game" in this encounter.

Others may find rolling the dice as Wally completely fulfilling.

Yet others may think your Fighters idea is the (only) way to go.

Shrug. I'm speaking *mostly* in ignorance, as the most "space" I've played at an actual table (I think - darn senility) is cluelessly bumbling through WH40K. But, trying to quickly play through games in my head, that's what I see, so I'm dutifully reporting my findings.

Anonymouswizard
2021-09-23, 06:11 PM
I feel this is turning into moving goal posts.

Is the argument now that no campaign should have combat in space ever, unless everyone is playing a starfighter pilot?

Probably not never, but it likely shouldn't be common if they aren't.

Note that with Quertus's post about Geoff Shootsalot (or whatever he called the character) I'd argue that the issue is that the player created a one trick pony. If your character is the best shot in the Imperial Fleet and nothing else then you're screwed as soon as shooting things isn't an option.

Take Jayne from Firefly. He's the muscle of the team, and definitely shines in that role, but he's not completely useless otherwise.

It's why I really like Fate's skill columns/pyramid. To be the best shot in the Imperial Fleet you're going to have to take several other skills to support that, and at least a couple of those will be high enough to reliably fall back on. With a narrow default skill list characters don't become omnispecialists, but there's few situations where they'll have literally no options. If Charlie Gunz had to take Average Crafts, Fair Rapport, and Good Athletics to get that Great Shoot then even when they can't use their broadside cannon (which they're even better at due to their stunts) they still have skills they can use (and again, you'll have some proficiency in half the default list).

NichG
2021-09-23, 07:09 PM
I feel this is turning into moving goal posts.

Is the argument now that no campaign should have combat in space ever, unless everyone is playing a starfighter pilot?

I mean, after trying a bunch of different high-abstraction combat subsystems (armies, mecha, ships, etc), I am sort of reaching the conclusion that each player must have at least one piece on the board (whatever scale the board is) over which they ultimately have complete control authority and a responsibility for decision-making. Multiple-players-one-unit tends to collapse to play by committee, which I think tends to remove a lot of the spice of actually having multiple people at a table each with their own ideas and understanding and so on.

Telok
2021-09-23, 07:48 PM
Perhaps the issue is more that some games set up space actions as: 1) skill sets characters can reasonably lack, and 2) the number/type of actions available to the ship does not match the group of pcs.

Starfinder had both in spades. Trying to use a secondary stat skill or a skill without a class bonus was punished by the system revolving around archetype stat+skill spreads. Then the "ship" got 4 checks, 1 each in "captain", engines, sensors, & pilot, plus as many shooting checks as you had guns pointed at the enemy. I saw things like wisdom casters with literally no way to help and a melee engineer who couldn't make the DCs for not pumping intelligence before strength & constitution.

Now some limits are reasonable, like having one main pilot. But there's (usually) no reason only one person can use the computers at a time*, or only one person can make repairs.

*Classic Traveller based its computer tech on early '80s tech. One processer, 64k memory, weighs over a ton. Want a second processer or 128k memory? Pony up a more than a few thousand credits and another ton of mass. Yeah, that was just... often snarked at.

Psyren
2021-09-23, 08:13 PM
The issue with this is that a lot of times when I see something like this, it doesn't actually produce interesting gameplay.

Like, the Engineer is Fixing The Ship, which is going to be "Make a Repair check every turn to Fix The Ship" unless your game has very in depth mechanics for Fixing The Ship.

Like, you can certainly create a space combat system that gives everybody stuff to do and is Fun and Engaging, but at that point you're really just building a whole new combat system from the ground up.

It's also highly dependent on what PCs you want to play. Not every party is going to have a Captain Pilot Gunner Engineer Science Officer breakdown, especially if most of the campaign isn't about that stuff, so building a system independent of the PC's might just fall flat.

I don't think it has to be a binary between Simple-and-Boring, and Complex-but-Onerous. Just take inspiration from other games.

A simple act like allocating power from one system to another, for example, could function like reallocating essentia for an incarnum user, and that's inherently fun. Starfinder has rules for that that you can build on, the GM just has to create a situation where leaving the power in one place for the whole fight is suboptimal.

Similarly, complex skill checks are not really all that different than rolling to hit, and players love doing that all the time.

Satinavian
2021-09-24, 01:58 AM
Like, you can certainly create a space combat system that gives everybody stuff to do and is Fun and Engaging, but at that point you're really just building a whole new combat system from the ground up.
Yes. And there is no problem with that.

If you design a space game, making a proper space combat system instead of some lazy tacked on modified personal scale combat system is generally a good idea. The question is more whether you actually want to invest any complexity into personal scale combat rules.


As for PCs, sure, if you create independently, not everyone will be able to partcicipate meanigfully iin many situations.

But space combat is not special here. The last time i was in a group that actually did that, we got PCs with "can only operate properly in low-G environments" or "Is aquatic and needs to be moved in some kind of fishtank outside their quarter or their station". Was kinda difficult as the GM had envisoned more planet side action (on planets that all miracolously fit generic human living conditions) but hadn't communicated that properly.

hifidelity2
2021-09-24, 06:13 AM
I run a D6 StarWars and that allows for space combat
Ship to ship combat is expected in the game and the PCs know that

We have
- A pilot - Fly , front guns and dodge
- A co-pilot (runs shields / ECM)
- Engineer - jury rig fixes in battles
- 2 other PCs who have some gun skill in the turrets

One of the PCs started with 0 gun skill (above his stats) but has improved as he realised he was hampering the party by not being able to hit the Tie Fighter coming in from his arc

If there was no engineer say then they could have a droid as an NPC fixing things etc

Telok
2021-09-24, 10:25 AM
I'm reasonably content with the way Dungeons the Dragoning manages it. I even got it to accomodate multiple pilots.

There are no small PC ships, everything worth calling a ship is at least 400 meters long with at least 120+ crew. Its a roll & keep dice pool system, and space combat uses the crew as the rolled dice (in chunks, you only need 10 dice, not 120) with either the crew quality (essentially a ship building / rp cost) or the PC officer's skill as the kept dice. This means every round the PCs as a group decide who gets how many crew for their actions.

There's a limit of one piloting roll for the ship, one captain roll (but thats the exception as it doesn't use crew, only one skill applies but uses three different social stats and the skill doesn't need to be 'trained' or high), and as many shooting rolls as there are guns. But other than that the only limit is how many crew the PCs want to assign to stuff. Multiple pilots works with fighter bays where a PC can lead the fighters, generally much better than than leaving them on their own. Tech-use for typical engineering stuff, but still limited by the crew splits so they can do 3 rolls a turn if they want (although the 'divert power' action is a once-a-round one). The game runs on magi-tech handwavium that puts all sensors, comms, and space stealth (magic!) on the arcana skill and makes 'silent running' mid-fight possible. Melee fighters get to play with boarding actions that are really quite good at taking out enemy crew and bypassing shields & armor, and you can split crew to make multiple trys each round. Plus you want a melee officer to defend against boarding actions. And of course the shooty PCs get to shoot things, while medic PCs can 'heal' some crew losses.

Of course the game also lets the party declare non-interest in space combat and the whole thing becomes moot. Any space combat then is just the PCs doing smaller scale stuff on their ship (or on an enemy ship by boarding action) with a space battle as background music. You could even manage all the PCs as fighter/mech pilots by moving to the action to the vehicle chase rules (maps/grids optional). The thing the system really won't do is "super millenium falcon flies around blowing up star destroyers" type stuff.

What I like most is there's no one objectively best ship design. Stealth, speed, big guns, overwhelming boarding actions, and 'captain seduces the opposing leaders', are all viable tactics.

Quertus
2021-09-24, 04:10 PM
Note that with Quertus's post about Geoff Shootsalot (or whatever he called the character)

Perhaps the spoof would have been more obvious had I named him Lucas George?


I'd argue that the issue is that the player created a one trick pony. If your character is the best shot in the Imperial Fleet and nothing else then you're screwed as soon as shooting things isn't an option.

He's also got "whiny farmboy" and "has found religion". That's "best shot in the fleet" and "has found religion" over what most people want out of their "zero to hero" characters!

And yet he still only had something to do in most scenes in the source material because of GM pity plot / taking Leadership / authorial fiat.


Take Jayne from Firefly. He's the muscle of the team, and definitely shines in that role, but he's not completely useless otherwise.

I'm not so sure Jayne would fare much better in arbitrary scenarios. In fact, other than max ranks in "one-liners" (Jayne was who I was picturing when i talked about "the chain of command" earlier), Jayne actually seemed pretty useless when he wasn't shooting things, even in the single author fiction of Firefly.

(Although, given that I could have been picturing Babylon 5, or numerous scenes from Star Trek, or even Alien, the chain of command obviously is important in the space genre.)



It's why I really like Fate's skill columns/pyramid. To be the best shot in the Imperial Fleet you're going to have to take several other skills to support that, and at least a couple of those will be high enough to reliably fall back on. With a narrow default skill list characters don't become omnispecialists, but there's few situations where they'll have literally no options. If Charlie Gunz had to take Average Crafts, Fair Rapport, and Good Athletics to get that Great Shoot then even when they can't use their broadside cannon (which they're even better at due to their stunts) they still have skills they can use (and again, you'll have some proficiency in half the default list).

And which those skills will you use on the diplomatic mission to Babylon 5?

The related problem I have with the pyramid is, Princess Leia finds that she's useless aboard a ship. Say she actually has "shoot stuff" at level 1. To get it to level 2, she needs to widen her base, and take "craft: underwater basket weaving" and "kissing" at level 1. Then, to get it to level 3, she has to take "it's a trap" (a popular option) at level 1, to support kissing a wookie to get kissing to level 2 to support having "shoot stuff" at level 3.

Now, try explaining to your non-gamer friends why it's necessary to kiss wookies in order to get better at shooting things, and you'll understand my beef with the pyramid.


Similarly, complex skill checks are not really all that different than rolling to hit, and players love doing that all the time.

Players for whom that is true are easy to please. Players who feel that playing the game means making meaningful decisions, and who feel that their choice of target / attack type / etc constitutes meaningful decisions, OTOH, might not be satisfied with just "rolling dice".

NichG
2021-09-24, 04:19 PM
This thing about skills/character abilities is part of why I think its important for each player to have an independently autonomous 'token' in every situation. Even if you are terrible at combat, if you have a token in a fight you still need to think about 'how do I keep safe when I have no offenses/defenses? where should I stand? etc'. Those are impacted by character abilities, but they're not a question of character abilities - if you have no abilities, you still need to care about those things, think through them, make decisions, etc. In a large team/crew situation, it can be too easy to justify 'we should only let the specialists do each of the things'. If everyone has their own token and you're flying your own small craft and there's an massive solar flare incoming and you've got 9 minutes to get to shelter or be fried by the radiation, sure your buddy might be a better pilot but you're going to have to figure out if making it to the nearby abandoned mining station, hiding in the shadow of an asteroid, or jerry-rigging the power system to redirect life support to shields and hoping you can survive the hypothermia is a better option for you.

Or e.g. for character-level, even if you have a bad Diplomacy check, it still usually ends better if you speak for yourself on your dates than asking the party face to be Cyrano for you.

And in the end that helps expose the parts of the game that are about players making decisions, rather than about numbers on sheets making decisions.

Of course even if you have such a token, it can still be boring if you have absolutely nothing to do and no decisions to make.

noob
2021-09-24, 04:47 PM
The related problem I have with the pyramid is, Princess Leia finds that she's useless aboard a ship. Say she actually has "shoot stuff" at level 1. To get it to level 2, she needs to widen her base, and take "craft: underwater basket weaving" and "kissing" at level 1. Then, to get it to level 3, she has to take "it's a trap" (a popular option) at level 1, to support kissing a wookie to get kissing to level 2 to support having "shoot stuff" at level 3.

Now, try explaining to your non-gamer friends why it's necessary to kiss wookies in order to get better at shooting things, and you'll understand my beef with the pyramid.


That looks like a very interesting concept: why not make a rpg where each time you start a new adventure you need to roll dice on a table to know the dependencies on the skill pyramids.
Like this time we rolled so that art of the blade required bread baker for reaching rank 2 but maybe next time it would require Noble speech (speaking in a way to look noble) or even Dancing.
So the pyramids would look random because they would actually be random.

Anonymouswizard
2021-09-24, 05:05 PM
Perhaps the spoof would have been more obvious had I named him Lucas George?

Oh, I got the reference. It just wasn't funny enough for me to go back and check however it was spelt.


He's also got "whiny farmboy" and "has found religion". That's "best shot in the fleet" and "has found religion" over what most people want out of their "zero to hero" characters!

And yet he still only had something to do in most scenes in the source material because of GM pity plot / taking Leadership / authorial fiat.

Cool character traits, I wish more PCs would be religious. But they're separate to his skillset.

But focusing on Luke for a bit, his skill set isn't just his great shooting skill. He's also pretty athletic, s good pilot, and has basics technical and survival skills (although not to the point where they'd ever be the focus of a scene).


I'm not so sure Jayne would fare much better in arbitrary scenarios. In fact, other than max ranks in "one-liners" (Jayne was who I was picturing when i talked about "the chain of command" earlier), Jayne actually seemed pretty useless when he wasn't shooting things, even in the single author fiction of Firefly.

(Although, given that I could have been picturing Babylon 5, or numerous scenes from Star Trek, or even Alien, the chain of command obviously is important in the space genre.)

While he's not a great fit for those specific situations, the point was that he had a legitimately broad skill set, and it's applicable to the series/campaign premise.


And which those skills will you use on the diplomatic mission to Babylon 5?

Rapport, and possibly Crafts. And that's just one column, he could have Provoke in another one!


The related problem I have with the pyramid is, Princess Leia finds that she's useless aboard a ship. Say she actually has "shoot stuff" at level 1. To get it to level 2, she needs to widen her base, and take "craft: underwater basket weaving" and "kissing" at level 1. Then, to get it to level 3, she has to take "it's a trap" (a popular option) at level 1, to support kissing a wookie to get kissing to level 2 to support having "shoot stuff" at level 3.

Now, try explaining to your non-gamer friends why it's necessary to kiss wookies in order to get better at shooting things, and you'll understand my beef with the pyramid.

I mean, it's down to personal taste.

Also, for the record, it would be asking the lines of 'I know it's not realistic, but it's too encourage having broader skill sets. It makes the game better by allowing you to contribute more, instead of being left out because you brought a Space Marine Devestator to the Babylon 5 diplomatic mission.'

Pauly
2021-09-24, 06:13 PM
I feel this is turning into moving goal posts.

Is the argument now that no campaign should have combat in space ever, unless everyone is playing a starfighter pilot?

No.

The issue is that if you have a campaign centered around [X] and if a player creates a character that cannot do [X] that creates issues. It’s a character creation problem, not a genre problem.

If you have a campaign about thieves in a thieve guild and a player turns up with a meathead fighter with minimized Dex, Int and Cha then that character will have a lot of downtime not contributing to the campaign.
If you have a campaign about exploring the wilderness and fighting wild beasts and a player creates a character that’s an inner city pickpocket then that character will have a lot of downtime not contributing to the campaign.
If you have a campaign which strongly features space combat and a player creates a character that doesn’t contribute to space combat then that character will have a lot of downtime not contributing to the campaign.

Not every sci-fi campaign needs to be centered on space combat. In some campaigns space combat never happens, others it never happens on screen and in others it is a rare event. In those type of campaign it is perfectly valid to have party members who contribute minimally if at all in space combat because it is not expected of them.

If you do have a campaign that heavily features space combat and a player creates a character that doesn’t contribute then the player shouldn’t complain that their character has nothing to do in space combat.
The side issue is whether the game system gives sufficient scope for every player to contribute. Clearly sone systems do it better than others. If a game system is chosen that is poor at providing players sufficient things to do in space combat, then the problem is choosing the wrong game system for that type of campaign.

Mechalich
2021-09-24, 06:45 PM
If you do have a campaign that heavily features space combat and a player creates a character that doesn’t contribute then the player shouldn’t complain that their character has nothing to do in space combat.
The side issue is whether the game system gives sufficient scope for every player to contribute. Clearly sone systems do it better than others. If a game system is chosen that is poor at providing players sufficient things to do in space combat, then the problem is choosing the wrong game system for that type of campaign.

One reason the space combat issue comes up so often is that the skills to contribute in space combat tend to be highly specialized. This is true even in 'retro-future' setups where the combat is based on naval warfare from the past.

Naval warfare is a specialized field. 'Sailor' is one of the oldest skilled positions on Earth, and a seaman who knows how to fight is specialized even beyond that. Even as early as the Napoleanic Wars naval crew, and especially officers, were hyper-specialists who often trained their entire lives to become masters of their craft, and they were extremely exclusionary with regard to outside interference out of a long-established recognition that it tended to have catastrophic consequences. As a result the kind of generalist character who shows up as an 'adventurer' in most RPG contexts is almost never the sort of specialist who serves as warship crew.

This means with regard to space combat either all your characters have to be naval crew who have additional skills they use to go on adventures - this is the model used by the X-wing series of Star Wars novels, where every character could be described as 'X-Wing Pilot +' and in game terms were basically all gestalt characters - or you can have adventurers who aren't naval crew. The latter model is probably more common, especially as adventurer characters are often 'marines' - combat capable personnel who are aboard a ship and will defend that ship but who don't fight the ship. Commander Shepard, from Mass Effect, is a marine, and your party is essentially the universes most eclectic marine platoon, and NPCs - notably Joker - fight the Normandy when it comes under attack.

Either approach is viable, however, the secondary approach provides more flexibility in terms of rotating the party roster since if characters aren't required to be able to fight a ship in some fashion at need then you can recruit people from primitive backwater planets or religious technophobes or bizarre aliens who don't think in base 10 or whatever. Generally I think this works better unless space combat is something that players deeply want to happen and find exciting, and having the ship's fighting crew separate from the PCs also offers the GM a stable of NPCs to work with for interaction and storytelling.

Yora
2021-09-25, 04:25 AM
The issue is that if you have a campaign centered around [X] and if a player creates a character that cannot do [X] that creates issues. It’s a character creation problem, not a genre problem.

Oh, sure. But that makes space battles no different from gunfights. If you have a campaign setup in which many PCs can't shot guns in a space battle, then you have just as many PCs who can't shot guns in a gunfight.
Should RPGs therefore have no combat? Is it wrong for RPGs to have combat?

SimonMoon6
2021-09-25, 08:36 AM
The issue is that if you have a campaign centered around [X] and if a player creates a character that cannot do [X] that creates issues. It’s a character creation problem, not a genre problem.

Or it's a campaign creation problem.

Pauly
2021-09-25, 02:33 PM
Oh, sure. But that makes space battles no different from gunfights. If you have a campaign setup in which many PCs can't shot guns in a space battle, then you have just as many PCs who can't shot guns in a gunfight.
Should RPGs therefore have no combat? Is it wrong for RPGs to have combat?

No space combat doesn’t mean no combat. There are plenty of sci-fi properties where inter-ship combat either doesn’t occur or doesn’t occur on-screen. Mass Effect, HALO, Warhammer 40k, and Dune are examples of sci-fi properties where inter-ship combat happens off-screen from the character’s perspective. Dr Who, Alien/Aliens and Firefly are examples where the character’s ship does not engage in inter-ship combat even if inter-ship combat does occur within their universes.

Space combat is one element of sci-fi RPGs. It’s a feature many players want. How prominently it features in a given campaign will vary. The point I’m trying to make is that if space combat is going to be an integral part of the campaign the players should create characters that reflect that.

Anonymouswizard
2021-09-25, 03:21 PM
No space combat doesn’t mean no combat. There are plenty of sci-fi properties where inter-ship combat either doesn’t occur or doesn’t occur on-screen. Mass Effect, HALO, Warhammer 40k, and Dune are examples of sci-fi properties where inter-ship combat happens off-screen from the character’s perspective. Dr Who, Alien/Aliens and Firefly are examples where the character’s ship does not engage in inter-ship combat even if inter-ship combat does occur within their universes.

Space combat is one element of sci-fi RPGs. It’s a feature many players want. How prominently it features in a given campaign will vary. The point I’m trying to make is that if space combat is going to be an integral part of the campaign the players should create characters that reflect that.

I'd put an asterisk against 40k (space combat is very important but if you're involved in it it's going to be the entire game batting some Space Marine campaigns) and Doctor Who (the TARDIS engages in space combat on Engines of War, but that's a Way Doctor story). But you are right on the broad idea: not even a space opera game strictly needs space combat rules. The Doctor Who RPG Bartlett include vehicle creation rules in its core book (but they are in the UNIT book).

Yora
2021-09-25, 03:28 PM
I want to say I am amazed this thread has gotten to six pages. I didn't even expect one when I started it.

Even though we've been talking about whether there should be space combat since page 1. :smalltongue:

Anonymouswizard
2021-09-25, 03:41 PM
I want to say I am amazed this thread has gotten to six pages. I didn't even expect one when I started it.

Even though we've been talking about whether there should be space combat since page 1. :smalltongue:

At least it's actually on topic, it's a pretty major chance in Space Adventure. But not a strictly necessary change.

Pauly
2021-09-25, 03:43 PM
and Doctor Who (the TARDIS engages in space combat on Engines of War, but that's a Way Doctor story). But you are right on the broad idea: not even a space opera game strictly needs space combat rules. The Doctor Who RPG Bartlett include vehicle creation rules in its core book (but they are in the UNIT book).

For me Dr Who goes William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, John Pertwee, then some guy in a scarf and after that a bunch of randos. I hear they were planning on doing a remake a few years back but never followed up on it.
Daleks do not climb stairs and never will.

noob
2021-09-25, 03:50 PM
For me Dr Who goes William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, John Pertwee, then some guy in a scarf and after that a bunch of randos. I hear they were planning on doing a remake a few years back but never followed up on it.
Daleks do not climb stairs and never will.

Yes instead they engage hovering mode then hover up very very slowly.

Anonymouswizard
2021-09-25, 03:50 PM
For me Dr Who goes William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, John Pertwee, then some guy in a scarf and after that a bunch of randos. I hear they were planning on doing a remake a few years back but never followed up on it.
Daleks do not climb stairs and never will.

Real Daleks just level the building.

Honestly, most of the revival it's even worse than Colin Baker's TV run.

Telok
2021-09-25, 04:47 PM
Real Daleks just level the building.

Honestly, most of the revival it's even worse than Colin Baker's TV run.

Harsh.

On topic: A lot of the answer to "what changes" depends a lot on system & adventure/setting design. You could run the original 'Expedition to the Barrier Peaks'* in space by simply saying an automated system re-launches the ship once the PCs enter. You can run do "wild west/spaghetti western" in Traveller by crashing on an appropriate planet after an EMP incident frags all your electronics and explodes all batteries & fuel cells. Any wh40k game can just be a series of basic dungeon crawls with guns if you pick the right sets of space hulks, hive world sewers, and abandoned ruins.

Compared to those a random 'pink mohawk' style ShadowRun mission on an orbital habitat can look like a super high-tech hard sci-fi space adventure.

* For those not old school: its an original AD&D module were the PCs explore a crashed & malfunctioning spaceship.

Yora
2021-09-25, 05:29 PM
I would like to talk about setting up adventures and campaigns. And I don't really have any insights to share at this point, and don't underatand enough to articulate a specific question.

But when I had decided on the basic parameters for a setting for a Stars Without Number campaign and some general thematic ideas and thought about how to proceed with that, simply making it an open world sandbox in which the players are dropped in to explore as they want and get involved with whatever catches their interest doesn't seem very practical.
I mean you could do a campaign where you make things up as you go, but for it to be comprehensible to players, it would need to be kept very generic, just so that the unspoken preconceptions the players have are pretty much true. I don't see that as much of a problem with fantasy campaigns, but I think sci-fi setting are much more specific in their details. As I believe we discussed earlier. In a fantasy campaign, you encounter dwarves or orcs, or even just something that seems like it's basically an orc, and you say "cool, I know what this is and what to expect of if". With space aliens, you have much more expectation that this will be something you have not seen before, or at least something that is a fresh new take on something relatively similar. And of course the whole thing happens again with technology. In fantasy, the only important question is usually "gunpowder, yes or no?" In sci-fi, it could be anything before you see it established in play. Thankfully, this effect is much reduced in space opera compared to hard sci-fi, but it's still significant. And of course the whole issue that they can land on every spot on a planet they want, and don't have to proceed from one area to the next in a predictable path.

Because player's are much less well equipped to find their way through an unknown world with setting expectations, I think they will have to be able to understand what's going on through narrative patterns. Even if they don't fully understand what all the things around them are and what they do, understanding the kind of dramatic situation they are in should help a great deal with helping players to make plans and decisions that exercise agency. If the setting takes time to know, being able to go with the flow of events should help making the game fun to play.

This is a very long winded way to say that I think in a space opera, adventure type game, you need to have a story with familiar patterns. Thing is, I think writing a full script for what scenes the players will be going through is a terrible misuse of the RPG medium. Players don't get inspired to play a campaign because they want to experience the story the GM wrote. The wonderful promise of RPGs is that the players can influence a story with their actions.
I very strongly believe that a GM should prepare encounters, but not write scenes. An adventure that says "First the PCs will be doing this, then they will be doing that, and then they will go there to to that" is a failure.

What can a GM do to let players free roam when a conventional sandbox is impractical? Not a space travel campaign specific question, but one that I think becomes necessary when approaching such a campaign.

NichG
2021-09-25, 06:17 PM
I would like to talk about setting up adventures and campaigns. And I don't really have any insights to share at this point, and don't underatand enough to articulate a specific question.

But when I had decided on the basic parameters for a setting for a Stars Without Number campaign and some general thematic ideas and thought about how to proceed with that, simply making it an open world sandbox in which the players are dropped in to explore as they want and get involved with whatever catches their interest doesn't seem very practical.
I mean you could do a campaign where you make things up as you go, but for it to be comprehensible to players, it would need to be kept very generic, just so that the unspoken preconceptions the players have are pretty much true. I don't see that as much of a problem with fantasy campaigns, but I think sci-fi setting are much more specific in their details. As I believe we discussed earlier. In a fantasy campaign, you encounter dwarves or orcs, or even just something that seems like it's basically an orc, and you say "cool, I know what this is and what to expect of if". With space aliens, you have much more expectation that this will be something you have not seen before, or at least something that is a fresh new take on something relatively similar. And of course the whole thing happens again with technology. In fantasy, the only important question is usually "gunpowder, yes or no?" In sci-fi, it could be anything before you see it established in play. Thankfully, this effect is much reduced in space opera compared to hard sci-fi, but it's still significant. And of course the whole issue that they can land on every spot on a planet they want, and don't have to proceed from one area to the next in a predictable path.

Because player's are much less well equipped to find their way through an unknown world with setting expectations, I think they will have to be able to understand what's going on through narrative patterns. Even if they don't fully understand what all the things around them are and what they do, understanding the kind of dramatic situation they are in should help a great deal with helping players to make plans and decisions that exercise agency. If the setting takes time to know, being able to go with the flow of events should help making the game fun to play.

This is a very long winded way to say that I think in a space opera, adventure type game, you need to have a story with familiar patterns. Thing is, I think writing a full script for what scenes the players will be going through is a terrible misuse of the RPG medium. Players don't get inspired to play a campaign because they want to experience the story the GM wrote. The wonderful promise of RPGs is that the players can influence a story with their actions.
I very strongly believe that a GM should prepare encounters, but not write scenes. An adventure that says "First the PCs will be doing this, then they will be doing that, and then they will go there to to that" is a failure.

What can a GM do to let players free roam when a conventional sandbox is impractical? Not a space travel campaign specific question, but one that I think becomes necessary when approaching such a campaign.

There are a number of space roguelikes (FTL, Shortest Path To Earth, Everspace, ...) as well as space fiction that use a particular pattern - there's an overall urgency towards going 'forward' in some direction (a fleet is chasing you, you're depleting the exotic resources of the sector and there are fuel costs, you know the direction of home but it will take you 10 years, etc) which takes care of the question 'do we move on?' such that the answer is always basically 'yes', but there's always a perpendicular direction that you can (and indeed must) explore in order to find good/safe paths, get the resources you need, etc. It does rely on establishing the understanding that if you just rush straight towards your path, you won't have the resources to make it to your destination - so some degree of exploration perpendicular to your path is mandatory and isn't just a luxury.

In a campaign I might do it so that there's a sort of collective mothership which will spend two weeks or a month or whatever in each system/sector/whatever before engaging the high-cost warp and taking everyone to the next point, and the passengers are all independent ship operators or crews of smaller craft who are jointly relying on the mothership for large-scale transport. There could be a voting system for 'what is the next warp destination?' or just based on scouting and surveying that happens during that month (so the PCs can influence the next destination based on what they report), but staying still isn't a choice. And if the players want to leave the mothership and settle down, that in some sense means they've figured out enough about the setting to know what's going on and what they want.

Telok
2021-09-25, 06:50 PM
What can a GM do to let players free roam when a conventional sandbox is impractical? Not a space travel campaign specific question, but one that I think becomes necessary when approaching such a campaign.

I just run a sandbox. The bugfest... (weird typo) The biggest difference, to me, is that the players do better the more they interact with the setting and non-combat parts of the game.

My main group has two semi-regulars who can coast along in d&d style stuff and tend to tune out during everything non-combat. Which works OK for d&d style dungeon crawl games with "level appropriate" fights. They played world of warcraft and watched the recent tolken book films, enough to have a half-decent grasp on "generic fantasy" tropes. But in sci-fi, supers, modern, horror, etc., type games they keep having problems. Since they never really engage the settings and zone out during "talky bits" stuff keeps popping up that they just don't understand.

Most d&d style generic fantasy doesn't really do much with consequences of the PCs action because there usually isn't any real law enforcement or authority figures, and the PCs can always just move to the next town/country to escape anything. (Again, most d&d style generic fantasy runs that way, especially if you use any published adventures. Not everybody's homemade campaigns.) What those players have problems with in every other genera & system seems to be the consequences of modern/future communication, media, law enforcement, and especially anything without an expectation of "balanced" or "level appropriate" combats.

Now, those guys did fine in things like Starfinder adventure paths which are just the usual generic fantasy adventure with some technobabble fluff on top and heavy into the "level appropriate" style (to the point that it extends into the equipment, vehicle, & space rules). But as soon they move beyond being the strongest people around and facing simple "beat everything to death" fights designed to fit some "x per day of y danger amount" they start failing against simple things like "10 million horde of clockwork horrors that can burrow through metal".

Pauly
2021-09-26, 03:52 PM
I would like to talk about setting up adventures and campaigns. And I don't really have any insights to share at this point, and don't underatand enough to articulate a specific question.

[snip]

What can a GM do to let players free roam when a conventional sandbox is impractical? Not a space travel campaign specific question, but one that I think becomes necessary when approaching such a campaign.

I think what you say about a conventional sandbox is true. In a space opera the players just have too much agency and go to too many places for a GTA/Skyrim style sandbox to work.

Some suggestions.
1) A power forcing the players to move to a goal as discussed above.
2) Space is big but the places the players have energy enough to get to is small. The players have a choice of 3 to 5 places/missions next.
3) Space is small. The game setting takes place in one solar system. Many of the outer reaches are outposts with only 2 or 3 fully inhabited planets.
4) The players belong to a guild that they choose missions from. Bounty Hunter. Xeno Hunter (go to new and interesting places and kill the locals for trophies). Explorer (can be exploring new alien worlds or re-establishing trade routes in a fallen Empire). The rewards handed out by the guild are their source of compensation. This works best in a high cost of maintenance game world which forces the players to keep taking missions just to keep the lights on.
5) Privateers/Paramiltaries. There’s a war. The players are set loose on the enemy, but there is limited military oversight. There is no pay so the players rely on loot for their compensation.
6) Chase the Maguffin. The Maguffin can be moving by itself or be carried by others. The players have to be invested enough to keep chasing it.
7) Quest to find the Maguffin. The Maguffin is hidden and the party has to find clues as to where it is. You need some type of ticking timebomb to keep the players on the job.
8) Paranoia rules. Due to space plague/fears of war/fears of organized crime and piracy/general xenophobia getting into new planets takes a long time with players needing to prove their bona fides every time they enter a system. The time and money cost prevents players from skipping from world to world to world on a whim.

Psyren
2021-09-27, 02:09 AM
Players for whom that is true are easy to please. Players who feel that playing the game means making meaningful decisions, and who feel that their choice of target / attack type / etc constitutes meaningful decisions, OTOH, might not be satisfied with just "rolling dice".

But that's my point - making "meaningful decisions" part of the encounter is the GM's job. If there aren't any, that's the GM's fault, not the players'. And "choice of target / attack type / etc" doesn't require guns either.

Quertus
2021-09-27, 05:56 PM
But that's my point - making "meaningful decisions" part of the encounter is the GM's job. If there aren't any, that's the GM's fault, not the players'. And "choice of target / attack type / etc" doesn't require guns either.

Say you're running an engineer.

One mission, you're set to repair anything that gets damaged, but the pilot makes all his "dodge" rolls, and so you've got nothing to do.

The next mission, the hyperdrive gets hit with a "will explode in 10 minutes" crit. You've got rolls to make, but no meaningful decisions.

Then, after that mission, there's an important question of whether to fix shields or weapons first, but the captain made that decision.

I'm just not seeing most roles actually getting to make meaningful decisions, outside the worst kind of contrived scenarios.


I don't see that as much of a problem with fantasy campaigns, but I think sci-fi setting are much more specific in their details. As I believe we discussed earlier. In a fantasy campaign, you encounter dwarves or orcs, or even just something that seems like it's basically an orc, and you say "cool, I know what this is and what to expect of if". With space aliens, you have much more expectation that this will be something you have not seen before, or at least something that is a fresh new take on something relatively similar. And of course the whole thing happens again with technology. In fantasy, the only important question is usually "gunpowder, yes or no?" In sci-fi, it could be anything before you see it established in play. Thankfully, this effect is much reduced in space opera compared to hard sci-fi, but it's still significant. And of course the whole issue that they can land on every spot on a planet they want, and don't have to proceed from one area to the next in a predictable path.

Because player's are much less well equipped to find their way through an unknown world with setting expectations, I think they will have to be able to understand what's going on through narrative patterns.

…what?

I very much disagree that Fantasy has inherently comprehensible, predictable beings, especially compared to Space Opera.

Even looking through 9 Star Wars movies, you've got… what… one race that maybe resists Force manipulation, maybe 2 races that can fly, and a bunch of brutes?

Compare that to one D&D movie (ugh) that I thankfully haven't seen in… has it been decades?… where I can still remember 2 flying races, 1 fire breathing race, and who knows what their "Beholder" could do?

Or, for a better D&D movie (that I've also seen this decade), "The Gamers: Dorkness Rising" had… various "no biology" undead, "can only be trapped in its own element", charm / mind control, wish granting, fire spewing (I think - that's how the demon attacked, right?), and basic luminance, at least.

Or… "urban fantasy"(?) Harry Potter (+ Fantastic Beasts makes 9 movies now, right? That matches Star Wars.). You've got… golly… I'm sure I'll miss lots… 5+ fliers, a telepathic shapeshifter, a fire breather, a soul / XP / "happy thoughts" sucker, unknown amounts of indestructible (seriously, I can just picture young Voldy in the Tri-Wizard tournament shooting "Avada" at everything), water breathers, "invisible to those who haven't suffered loss", "swarms around the heads of those who are confused", "bigger on the inside" storage, teleportation, invisibility, various aptitude with magic, poison x3+, death gaze, healing tears, self resurrection… and even I can remember more, but I'll stop there, because that's more than enough.

So… I'm not seeing where the basic premise holds true, that Fantasy is inherently less fantastical and more predictable than Space.

I also don't see how "here's the map of Faerun - where do you go?" is any less daunting than, "here's the space map - where do you go?"

There's just… Hmmm… less pre-built for you in the void of space?

BRC
2021-09-27, 06:04 PM
Say you're running an engineer.

One mission, you're set to repair anything that gets damaged, but the pilot makes all his "dodge" rolls, and so you've got nothing to do.

The next mission, the hyperdrive gets hit with a "will explode in 10 minutes" crit. You've got rolls to make, but no meaningful decisions.

Then, after that mission, there's an important question of whether to fix shields or weapons first, but the captain made that decision.

I'm just not seeing most roles actually getting to make meaningful decisions, outside the worst kind of contrived scenarios.


The way to cheat around this is to include some sort of meta-resource, which can turn the act of "Roll to succeed" into meaningful decisions (At least from the player perspective).

Yes, fix the hyperdrive, but do you burn the meta resource to succeed, or do you just try it again next round and save your resource for later.

NichG
2021-09-27, 06:57 PM
…what?

I very much disagree that Fantasy has inherently comprehensible, predictable beings, especially compared to Space Opera.


Maybe going outside of space opera its a bit more balanced. From various harder sci-fi novels I can recall things like: blobs which are living neural networks which can subdivide and merge their minds freely and exchange mathematical theorems via chemical communication, eyestalks that move along vast living ice carpets which harvest charged particles from the surface of an airless moon to feed the eyestalk, intelligent low-temperature insect-plants which concentrate radioactive materials and poop them out to construct a fission bomb underneath their own colony to spread spores from planet to planet, lifeforms engineered to live in the superfluid medium of a neutron star which use magnetic vortex cores like building materials, etc. Star Trek and Dr Who had their share of humans in rubber suits, as well as the weirder stuff like interdimensional warp fungus, living nebulae, planets which borrowed sentience from the thoughts of visitors (if I'm remembering that really weird Casino Royale episode), parasites that lived inside the transporter beam, living shadows, memetic contagions, etc.

Pauly
2021-09-27, 08:58 PM
Say you're running an engineer.

One mission, you're set to repair anything that gets damaged, but the pilot makes all his "dodge" rolls, and so you've got nothing to do.

The next mission, the hyperdrive gets hit with a "will explode in 10 minutes" crit. You've got rolls to make, but no meaningful decisions.

Then, after that mission, there's an important question of whether to fix shields or weapons first, but the captain made that decision.

I'm just not seeing most roles actually getting to make meaningful decisions, outside the worst kind of contrived scenarios.

?

For the combat role of the engineer it depends on what the system allows the engineer to do.
For example
Energy allocation. Shields, guns, engined, life support, med bay, transporters, comms, ECM all require power. You don’t have enough energy to piwer all of them at 100%. The captain may say he wants full power to guns then the engineers has to juggle where that energy comes from.
Repairs. Damage control (i.e. fighting fires, sealing holes basically stopping the bleeding) or jury rigging a critical system? In damage control which damage do you prioritize.
Boarding actions: Sealing doors, blowing airlocks, turning off life support, venting waste gases into enemy occupied rooms.
Engine management. Do you use boost for extra power at a cost of fuel, being easier to target risk of engine damage? Do you run cool for stealthiness or fuel conservation at the cost of having less energy this turn?
Out of these possible actions the engineer may be only able to do 1 or 2 actions.

There are systems that allow for this type player decision making. Some have it explicitly written into the rules. Others are a more generalized the DM responding to a player’s description of their action.

However if the system is a D&D type make a skill role system as you described in your example then there aren’t many choices for the engineer to make.

Engineers have plenty to do. Whether the system recognizes that and gives the engineer (or whatever role you choose) player sufficient meaningful choices is a different question.

Psyren
2021-09-27, 10:01 PM
Say you're running an engineer.

Okay.


One mission, you're set to repair anything that gets damaged, but the pilot makes all his "dodge" rolls, and so you've got nothing to do.

He only made all of those "dodge" rolls because you diverted power to the engines, which you chose to do instead of leaving it in the guns for additional damage because you knew in this particular fight/phase that not getting hit was more important. Or, because you overclocked the sensors at the science officer's urging, the pilot knew where to dodge to in order to put {insert phenomenon here} between you and the enemy's fire.



The next mission, the hyperdrive gets hit with a "will explode in 10 minutes" crit. You've got rolls to make, but no meaningful decisions.

Sure you do. Stopping it from exploding is the obvious one, but maybe using that critical drive core to turn your ship into the only bomb that can take out the Big Bad's dreadnought while everyone hits the escape pods is the better approach. Or maybe if you can immobilize that enemy ship, jettisoning the hyperdrive entirely (instead of trying to fix it) and escaping at sublight speeds could actually be easier. Or maybe your skills can turn that 10 minutes into 20 so rescue has time to arrive.



Then, after that mission, there's an important question of whether to fix shields or weapons first, but the captain made that decision.

A good captain would get the engineer's opinion on a question like that. Moreover, whichever one got fixed first, if you had to hurry and take off before fixing the other, the engineer would be pretty key at that point.




I'm just not seeing most roles actually getting to make meaningful decisions, outside the worst kind of contrived scenarios.

If any kind of encounter design is "contrived" to you, then nothing in any game will be interesting, no.

Telok
2021-09-27, 10:53 PM
I very much disagree that Fantasy has inherently comprehensible, predictable beings, especially compared to Space Opera.

The thing I think is that "fantasy" overall & in general is more generic than sci-fi. I think that the venn diagram of "gamers" has lots of overlap with "fantasy" and much much less with any of "space", "science", and "sci-fi'.

While "like medeval plus magic and dragons" is variable, there's more consistency in assumptions just because there's more media thats medeval/faux-medieval. The "sci-fi" concept tends to get stuffed with space fantasy (Star Wars, Dune), space opera (Star Trek, Honor-verse), cyberpunk-ish (Blade Runner), computer fake-out (Matrix, Tron), and a bunch of other stuff.

This sort of double applies to many gamers who haven't really played much beyond D&D+knockoffs. Just the difference in setting & assumptions between a "reaction drives & hibernation" setting (Alien, Avatar) and the Star Foo "hyperspace cut-scene & hop a bus to the next planet" creates massive gameplay differences that may be cometely alien to people used to straight dungeon crawls. I've had players absolutely stunned by the audacity of a suspected smuggler to call the cops when they started murderizing his ship's crew at space-dock. In D&D-land the PCs normally so massively overshadow normal guards and communication/response time is so long that they expect to get away with that sort of stuff. Just the act of a non-violent criminal using a phone and getting a response within five minutes was incomprehensible until it happened to them.

Satinavian
2021-09-28, 02:19 AM
I'm just not seeing most roles actually getting to make meaningful decisions, outside the worst kind of contrived scenarios.
If you really want a space game, design ship posts in a way that they all have meaningful decisions to make. It is not actually difficult but it does mean to do more than D&D style skills and "wing it when it comes up".

You could make the captain direct the general flow of the battle, a gunner choosing targets an weapon modes, a sensor guy deciding which enemy stats to reveal or give target bonuses to the gunner but not both, a pilot plotting the actual course and choose from various flight maneuvers, some guy distributing energy between subsystems, someone doing damage control in the ship, directing repairs, prioritizing and making decisions of shutting down damaged stuff or keeping ot running at the risk of it blowing up. Before damage occurs, this person could also run countermeasurs and decide which ones to turn on. Maybe you also have small fighter crafts with their own pilots. The only ones on standby by default are marines and medical personal.

Quertus
2021-09-28, 07:00 PM
Hmmm… rather than directly address people's comments, let me hit this from another direction.

A D&D party doesn't need to be cookie cutter - most any party can have fun trying to find inventive ways to handle problems.

But - and maybe it's my inexperience - I don't see valid characters likely having fun on arbitrary space missions. And certainly "random valid characters" struggle to run a ship by themselves.

Suppose we make a system. And the players make Han, chewy, Luke, sis, and R2. On the falcon.

Or Picard, #2, data, Diana, and visor man on the enterprise.

Or Mal, Jayne, Zoe, Simon, and… Kaylee on Serenity.

And they each encounter…

Babylon 4.

General Roth'h'ar Sarris.

Reavers.

A rescue mission inside an asteroid field.

Far Point station.

Earth, circa… WW2.

The battle over Endor.

Earth, during "close encounters of the third kind".

The Andromeda.

I look at this, and see Jayne twiddling his thumbs while spouting awesome lines whenever they're not a fight (you know, just like he did in the series), Simon being completely useless (same)… and, well, just… most of the characters not having a good time on most of the missions. I think most of the Enterprise crew could have fun on most of those missions, actually, but modifying the missions enough that everyone has fun on every mission seems like it'd be not just too contrived for my taste, but for most people's taste, as well.

I mean, I'd love to see the serenity crew encounter Hugh, but they're really not spec'd for engaging that scenario meaningfully.

Do my concerns make sense? Or am I over-thinking it?

My *actual* most experience in space (that I remember so far (darn senility)) was with a primitive screwhead telepath, who (Illithid Savant style) quickly learned to see the world as they did (-1 crew), and began running the transporters (and comms) (-2 crew). I was Control, and it fit the character perfectly. Useless in most fights (until he started getting creative with the transporter), but good at coordinating and logistics.

I'd enjoy playing him in most of those scenarios, but… I'm not sure anyone else would.

Or maybe I'm just being silly. Maybe the focus on balance on the Playground has blinded me to the truth, that in space, as anywhere else, the key is to have a character that you enjoy, regardless of how big their role is.

Satinavian
2021-09-29, 01:15 AM
A D&D party doesn't need to be cookie cutter - most any party can have fun trying to find inventive ways to handle problems.
D&D tried to go back to being a tactical wargame and making every character a combattant (which screwed over the fighter) to solve the problem. If i would actually pose that varied fantasy problem to a D&D group, i would get the very same problems as many D&D characters can't do that many things, if fighting is not relevant.

But more importantly, "science fiction" or "space adventure" is way too broad to automatically make fitting characters. I mean, if you say "Star Trek campaign inspired by TNG", you will likely get an assortment of characters that fit well enough. Did that twice already, worked.


Or maybe I'm just being silly. Maybe the focus on balance on the Playground has blinded me to the truth, that in space, as anywhere else, the key is to have a character that you enjoy, regardless of how big their role is.There is also that. I mean, you regularly express how much you dislike Shadowrun's way of doing things, having minigames not engaging everyone. But there are more than enough players who actually like Shadowrun and playing this way, so maybe the problem is not actually that huge.

Easy e
2021-09-30, 10:28 AM
<Insert awkward phase to change of topic here>

One of the big things about space that often is not emphasized enough in the space adventure genre is that.... space is deadly to human life.

Imagine living with only 6 inches of steel plate (or less) separating you from untimely and unpleasant death. You are constantly dependent on machines to do what they are supposed to be doing flawlessly, 100% of the time; when you know they do not work that way. Seems stressful.

Getting to most planets is not much better either.

Batcathat
2021-09-30, 10:41 AM
Imagine living with only 6 inches of steel plate (or less) separating you from untimely and unpleasant death. You are constantly dependent on machines to do what they are supposed to be doing flawlessly, 100% of the time; when you know they do not work that way. Seems stressful.

It probably is. At first. But humans can get used to almost any situation.

It's not that different from being on an airplane, really. If the complex machine around you stops working, you're likely to die. But aside from some people with extreme fear of flying, most people don't really think about it after a while.

Easy e
2021-09-30, 11:44 AM
It probably is. At first. But humans can get used to almost any situation.

It's not that different from being on an airplane, really. If the complex machine around you stops working, you're likely to die. But aside from some people with extreme fear of flying, most people don't really think about it after a while.

Sure, but you don't live for months or a lifetime on a plane.

Perhaps the experience of Submariners is a better example.

Batcathat
2021-09-30, 12:10 PM
Sure, but you don't live for months or a lifetime on a plane.

Perhaps the experience of Submariners is a better example.

Sure, but I suspect the issue of spending months in space isn't really stress or fear but rather discomfort. Submarines are probably a good source of inspiration, I'm guessing people on those spend less time thinking "Oh god, I'll die if we spring a leak" and more "Everything is so damn cramped".

Easy e
2021-09-30, 01:58 PM
Sure, but I suspect the issue of spending months in space isn't really stress or fear but rather discomfort. Submarines are probably a good source of inspiration, I'm guessing people on those spend less time thinking "Oh god, I'll die if we spring a leak" and more "Everything is so damn cramped".

Yeah!

I know a few Submariners, so I will ask and report back.

Xervous
2021-09-30, 02:05 PM
Sure, but I suspect the issue of spending months in space isn't really stress or fear but rather discomfort. Submarines are probably a good source of inspiration, I'm guessing people on those spend less time thinking "Oh god, I'll die if we spring a leak" and more "Everything is so damn cramped".

Probably the reverse for Russian subs given their track record.

Cramped you eventually grow used to, the same as the smell. It’s the things that you can immediately blame someone about, things that can be controlled, like that idiot who keeps stomping by when you’re trying to sleep, that doofus who broke the ice cream machine that you now have to fix, or whoever put you on night watch when there was a daytime swim scheduled.

The main thing it could inform is what the spacers indulge in when given the chance, seeing how they can’t address XYZ in space. (Bath and fresh clothes!)

Yora
2021-09-30, 05:19 PM
I think when we move from Hard Sci-Fi to more Space Opera, where a group of scruffy PCs can afford their own space ship to travelmto other systems, launch costs from surface to orbit become nearly trivial. And you also often have big space ships that can't land on planets and therefore have to be made in space.
In those circumstances, open space inside ships would be expected to be really cheap. The only thing that is important for speed and fuel economy is mass, and additional empty space comes with little additional mass.Space ship hulls are much simpler and lighter than submarine hulls. Bicycle tires are under pressure differences several times higher than a space ship. (Things change of course when you want the hull armored, but after the space for engines and cargo, increasing the crew space still increases wall and floor material only marginally.)

Psyren
2021-09-30, 06:42 PM
A D&D party doesn't need to be cookie cutter - most any party can have fun trying to find inventive ways to handle problems.

But - and maybe it's my inexperience - I don't see valid characters likely having fun on arbitrary space missions. And certainly "random valid characters" struggle to run a ship by themselves.

Once again, this is the GM's job to solve.

First, you find out if the players want space battles at all.
Second, you find out which players want to do stuff during those battles.
Third, based on their characters, you give those players options as far as what that stuff might be.
Fourth and final, you design the encounters so that those options come into play.

And if you ever end up with a situation where not everyone wants to be involved, or where certain roles don't have a good character archetype (e.g. ship full of soldiers, no medic or scientist) - that's when you get creative. Stick an AI or hologram (https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Doctor) on the ship to cover that role while the PCs live out their space jockey or jarhead fantasies. Or if the ship has no guns and no gunners, problems in space become puzzles instead of combat encounters. In short, make something up and roleplay.


<Insert awkward phase to change of topic here>

One of the big things about space that often is not emphasized enough in the space adventure genre is that.... space is deadly to human life.

Imagine living with only 6 inches of steel plate (or less) separating you from untimely and unpleasant death. You are constantly dependent on machines to do what they are supposed to be doing flawlessly, 100% of the time; when you know they do not work that way. Seems stressful.

Getting to most planets is not much better either.


It probably is. At first. But humans can get used to almost any situation.

It's not that different from being on an airplane, really. If the complex machine around you stops working, you're likely to die. But aside from some people with extreme fear of flying, most people don't really think about it after a while.

You can handwave this pretty easily. The computer/medic does regular psych evals, or the sleeping pods pipe in Sylurian Moon Jazz which keeps any phobias from developing, or space travel has just become the norm long enough that people don't really notice or care about this stuff. Most spacefaring settings have entire generations, from infancy upward, who spent their entire lives on ships and stations even.

Or you can lean into the unease for a space horror campaign, those are always fun.

Mechalich
2021-09-30, 09:15 PM
In those circumstances, open space inside ships would be expected to be really cheap. The only thing that is important for speed and fuel economy is mass, and additional empty space comes with little additional mass.Space ship hulls are much simpler and lighter than submarine hulls. Bicycle tires are under pressure differences several times higher than a space ship. (Things change of course when you want the hull armored, but after the space for engines and cargo, increasing the crew space still increases wall and floor material only marginally.)

Heat matters too. The vacuum of space is a vacuum, which means you can only lose heat through radiation. Which means gigantic, and vulnerable, and maintenance intensive, heat radiators all over the place. This creates a very strong incentive to keep as much of the ship as possible at as cold an ambient temperature as you can in order to minimize this issue.

As an addendum, this gives a species that runs at a low core temperature with a low metabolic rate (or can naturally enter a torpid state) a significant advantage in long-term space operations.

Yora
2021-10-01, 04:29 AM
I think engine heat makes the body heat of the crew negligible.

Zombimode
2021-10-01, 05:06 AM
Also, heat considerations may not be an aspect that your setting cares about. As I understood Yora this is about "softer" Space Opera. More Bab5, less Expanse.

Telok
2021-10-01, 10:29 AM
I think engine heat makes the body heat of the crew negligible.

That depends on how the ship is set up and the engine type. You can set up a puller type Bussard ramjet engine on a long cable that has basically no heat transference to the ship. You could put a nuclear lightbulb at the end of a long scaffold with an insulating shadow shield, run it until it melts down and dump it (not a good idea but possible).

In any case, you really want to separate the engines from the crew spaces for lots of reasons, not the least of which is accidentally cooking the crew with engine waste heat. Unless you're using TV/movie style handwavium engines.

Mechalich
2021-10-01, 06:44 PM
The body heat of the crew is probably negligible, but there are plenty of other heat sources. Essentially everything that the ship does: operate electronics, maintain life support, and fire weapons generates heat. Powerful energy weapons, in particular, have the potential to melt your own ship if you don't have a good way to dump the waste heat they generate (no weapon is 100% efficient).

Obviously you're probably going to handwave heat to some degree, but it's still an element you can use. For example, firing a ship's weapons may make it impossible to stealth the vessel (since you're allowing stealth in space) until it cools back down again. Or the extreme heat of certain types of energy weapons may make it impossible to mount them on vessels below a certain size minimum (since bigger ships can handle a greater heat load). Or if you have shields, heat accumulation can be a reason why shields experience progressive failure, since the massive power loading of keeping the shields up threatens to melt the ship.

Quertus
2021-10-02, 06:09 PM
Or if the ship has no guns and no gunners, problems in space become puzzles instead of combat encounters. In short, make something up and roleplay.

I was honestly about to ask, "what if you've got no guns, but the GM included lots of very Combat geared encounters. Like… Reavers." :smallredface:

So… obviously it *can* work. Just doesn't feel kosherized. :smalltongue: