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View Full Version : Artillery [3.5, Sorcery and Steam, Dragonstar]



Ragabash
2008-10-04, 02:23 AM
There's something that I've noticed when looking at the Sorcery and Steam and Dragonstar books... the only artillery they present are cannons. This is something that I think needs fixing. I'll be working on it over the next little while, but I have a question for those with a more scientific bent than I do as it pertains to the Dragonstar setting.

It seems to me that railgun technology would be perfectly suited to making howitzers and mortars, man-portable, field and fixed types. Am I wrong in this?

For purposes of clarity, I'm also using the following definition for the three types of artillery: cannons for at high velocity in a low arch, mortars at low velocity in a high arch, and howitzers in between. I'm not going to differentiate between howitzers and gun-howitzers in either rule set, that would just get needlessly complicated.

Ragabash
2008-10-10, 08:22 AM
I'm working on the rules for mortars, which I'm basing somewhat off the rules in Heroes of Battle designed for indirect fire by catapults. Here's how it stands so far.

The artillerist aims the mortar at a square and makes a Profession (Military) check DC 15. If the roll succeeds, s/he rolls an attack against AC 15, adding the artillerist's Int modifier to the BAB.
If the target is in line of sight, the artillerist gets a +2 to hit for every miss they make, up to five times (for a maximum bonus of +10). Artillery can automatically hit the same square as the previous round.
Targetted squares that are not in line of sight suffer a -6 penalty, unless the artillerist is assisted by a spotter who can see the targetted square. A spotter can reduce the penalty by 1 for every missed shot up to five times (resulting in a minimum -1 penalty for firing "blind").

If the attack misses, roll for the direction of the miss as per thrown splash weapons (PH 3.5 pg 158), with the round going stray by squares equal to the range increment X 1d4.


I'm also taking the "air time" rule from Spycraft 2.0, that for every three range increments to the target after the first, the projectile spends one round in the air. I might alter this to it occuring for ever four increments after the first two. (So either 1= 0 rounds in air, 2-4= 1 round, etc. or 1-2= 0 rounds, 3-6= 1 and 7-10= 2.)



For those familiar with the Dragonstar rules, any opinion on whether mortar rounds should do damage along the lines of grenades or rockets? Would "light" and "heavy" mortars solve that problem?
For Sorcery and Steam, mortars will do damage along the same lines as cannons, but will follow the indirect fire rules above. I haven't worked out the change in ranges yet, and they will fire explosive shells almost universally.