Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 doctor_mcpirate Oct 21, 2009 6:14:20	Ok, here are my new rules for the "special" vehicles in d20 future, I would appreciate any and all input, but preferably constructive criticism. For starships, I scrapped all the missiles listed there, choosing instead to base missiles of the AM(x) Sidewinder represented in the Menace Manual. So for PL 5 you just use the Sidewinder, then after that you add damage as you see appropriate (newfangled PL6 missiles I statted as doing 20d8). I also reduced the starship health by approximately 2/3 in all cases (a standard PL6 fighter has 55hp for example, so it will be taken down by a fairly average missile scoring a good hit where as an escort has 130 and will require a bit more effort). As for mecha, health was again, a problem so I used the "mecha as walking tanks" variant for future tech but instead of giving them more health (which I see as absurd) I used that as the one and only set of health for them and treated them as vehicles for the purposes of how damage affects them (for example, they are only disabled when reduced to 0 hp and destroyed when they are at negative (x) where (x) represents their starting health) Also, I changed the damage outputs on most weapons to deal less dice of damage but similar damage overall (for example the cavalcade in my rules does 3d10 rather than 5d6). This decision was made because I wanted feats like Burst Fire and Double Tap to be more useful in mecha combat. Anyhow, now it's time for your input, so have fun. Doctor out.
#2 backstabbist Oct 21, 2009 10:11:25	Dont forget to incorporate the different scalings of weapon tech as it applies to weapon roles. Sure, PL5 guided missile is a Sidewinder, but that represents a Stinger or Sparrow or Pheonix or Amram how?   Same base technology, but a magnitude 21 warhead is in no way representing a magnitude 88 or 135 AND a magnitude 6. Open up a Pheonix missile, remove the explosives, divide the explosives between 4 guys, each guy stuffs a grenade fuse in their sack of explosives, and ties it to the frontdoor of someone they wnt dead, when the impending dead guy opens the door, 30lb of high explosives goes off 1st lb is 4d6, next 29lbs are 2d6 each... 4d6 + 29( 2d6) = 62d6 of boom ..... which is only 1/4th what the undivided Sparrow does, right? The nominal roles of ordinance in the book is all messed up. They have fitted no primary systems, like the 16" guns on a battleship that fire every 5sixsec rounds, But have listed just the auxiliary systems, such as the 40mmBofors for battleships (biggest gun an Escort 'PTBoat' can carry).  Where is the scaling of LasCannon to fit the roles of 40mm / 3" / 5" / 8" / 16" primary weapons that use pl5 CHEcannon tech for Escorts / Destroyers / Cruisers / Battleships? "Fighters" use upto 20mm, while the auxiliary 40Bofors is way way WAY better than that, so lets not say it is a 'point defense system... them 40's can engage and defeat a PTboat Escort at the max range of the PTboats guns, since the biggest maingun of a PTboat is that same 40bofor. But the big deal of the PTboat(escort) is not the 40bofor gun, but what put the T in PT: torpedos. Forget the 5" swingout rockets on the PT, its the bigfish that can cripple or kill a carrier/barrleship. How do you represent a Torp that five of its buddies can put down a battleship? That the PTboat has 4 of them... it can hit with every 40mm ammo it carries and not cripple the battleship, but if it lands its 4 fish the battleship is scrued If you replace all the explosives in a 16" shell with peanut-butter, you still have a bullet that is killy enough to punch thru 30" of armor (1000damage for 30hp/in). If you dont have a 16" gun, the shell still can explode its 40lb of high explosives (82d6  bomb). so, when the shell hits the enemy, it takes 200d10 Balistic and 86d6 Fire, in pl5.... so whats a PL6 battleship got? Quick PL5 Q&A Q: each of the 12 500lb bombs a strike fighter carries blows up how much? A: each mk82 500lb bomb has 192lb of explosives, 4d6+ 192(2d6) = 396d6 The game reduces that damage a bit... a bunch... a whole lot... actually, hardly any of that damage is used by the game: what was about 120d20 folks trim down to numbers like 20d20.  That is a 0.000,13 kiloton nuke equiv explosive Lets fit it to Nukes: Rules say 1megaton nuke does just 16d8 in space, which places the Hiroshima 20kt lil pop at 1/50th that damage, or (128max) / 50 = about 2max damage for Hiroshima nuke
#3 dbay Oct 21, 2009 14:34:02	I like the OP's changes. Backstabbist, you have a good point- what's your proposed fix? Also, guns should scale by mecha size more than they do. A colossal mecha really has no extra firepower compared to a large mecha under the original rules, because it only gets 1 attack (or more with a higher BAB). so even if it has seven BFG's, it can only fire one. They should probably scale as per D&Ds standard weapon scaling rules (1d8-2d6-3d6, etc). stabby, wouldn't that make missiles a little... unfair? I realise they dominate combat in real life right now, but it is way more fun to chase after someone with guns than to fire a missile from the other side of the sun.
#4 backstabbist Oct 22, 2009 0:22:30	Look at the sidewinder rules on jinking with a missile on your six, add in the capitol ship CAWS/PointDef battery fire at the missile, and you will see a whole heapin lot of missiles get blowed up before they can get close to the target Needs to be a distinction between high velocity rocket missiles and heavy warhead torpedos. One distiction should be Time Of Flight Mechs have the same problem, a 'slot' is not the same size for a Large as it is for Colossal, so a 1slot gun uses the same stats wether it is one 5' slot or one 30' slot.... just as a Lasercannon is One Shipweapon space regardless if that space is 1/8th of an Escort or 1/10th of a Battleship. Why can Plasma guns be as samll as Pistols, and as big as HeavyPlasCannon for ships, but mechs dont get mech sized ones?   Most folks use a +50% DTap and +100%Burstfire with the big guns, cause then you dont need to convert them all to 2d50 and 2d75 for tanks. As for the captitol ships, just dont use them. You can have a good campaign of small craft with the government ships as just heavy PT Escort .  Trim the civialian armor and lay the cops armor on thick.  Destroyers and up are just plot devices the small campaign craft dont dare engage
#5 doctor_mcpirate Oct 23, 2009 5:05:37	Ok, I agree with all points. As for missiles, all I did was grab a base template as a sample weapon to use as standard anti-fighter missiles. I would indeed create a new weapons table including heavier warheads and whatnot, as I would be including capital ships as more than just plot devices occasionally (and at high level). I do also agree with mecha weapons scaling, and there are plenty of ways to do that, such as just size conversion charts. Personally though I don't use mecha above Huge (at that point they lose most of their advantages and get replaces by MBTs). Thank you for the input, this is all helpful. I would really appreciate help with the new weapons table though. Also I find that the best way to make larger weapons platforms more effective is to have AI controlled guns (maybe linked up to a HUD making use of a target lock feature). Doctor out
#6 winternova Nov 02, 2009 23:56:41	With mecha extremely rare in my campaigns, I've left that more or less alone. Large mecha use the stock rules as presented in d20f, while huge and larger operate as walking tanks. I did modify starship combat pretty extensively, though. I took a page from the SWRPG (hell, I took a whole chapter...) involving movement in space, missiles (gave them 50% extra damage dice too) and spiced up some of the crew actions introduced in d20FT. Had a big ol' document somewhere detailing all the changes. Half of my group loved it, really spiced up space combat. The other half complained that it was 'too hard' (despite loving car chases? Man what) and also complained because I replaced the jinking rules (which I found to be a lot of wasteful math) with the straightforward defensive driving rules presented in the vehicle combat section of the d20m core rulebook. Also added some bits about substituting defensive systems for weapons and vice versa, mastercraft starship equipment, and some hard and fast rules for improving a system without having to have first taken one offline. Also added a 'volume of fire' bonus to point defense systems on sufficiently large capital ships. It made attack runs against battleships and their ilk more dangerous, but still not impossible.
#7 AnimeSniper Nov 04, 2009 19:31:14	Before the board change I was compiling every peice of Homebrew Starship post from the old boards and the archives and included my own houserule/homebrew to them... Still working out how to say how many weapon systems a ship can have... like a colossal battleship has the area for one MAC gun or two MAC guns of the smallers size category
#8 backstabbist Nov 04, 2009 19:42:19	If the MAC capital ships are big enough for a bunch of smallfry turrets and a defensive array like the capital Outbound Kinetic Emitters, then you could have a big MAC, small fries, and a cOKE
#9 AnimeSniper Nov 18, 2009 16:15:10	Okay I have a small question on what everyone thinks about using the Increase/Decrease Weapon size table from the D&D DMG 3.5 book... I was thinking that as a houserule you could take a weapon from the Weapons Locker and inrease it to the relevant size for Mecha use.... I know a 9mm pistol would become either a 45/90mm Pistol in a mecha's hand. And I am still working on the whole homebrew/houserule doc for mecha and starships...
#10 nobodez_here Nov 18, 2009 18:42:52	Well, there's a problem with that table, in that it's designed for muscle powered weapons, not chemical or otherwise powered weapons. Just look at the difference between a .22 round and a .50 round. By the D&D standards, the .50 round is about one size category larger than the .22 round, but it deals 2d12 (or more) rather than 2d6, which the table would give you, instead you'd have to go three size categories larger to find even a close match (4d6). So does that mean any "large" mecha guns should do three size categories larger damage than their "medium" equivalents? I'm not sure.
#11 AnimeSniper Nov 18, 2009 19:07:24	So the table would needs reworked, I agree and any thoughts on how to accomplish it... I mean a Plasma Pistol {2d10} became 5d8 for a huge handheld mecha version.... now for bladed weapons I can see leaving as is but then the question is how to stat something like the Heat Axe from the Zeon arsenal...
#12 backstabbist Nov 19, 2009 21:54:32	also, the relationship of scaling up from x" long to 2x" long, in the 3d world we exist in, is actually an 8x volume/mass scaling. If you had a 1lb block of explosives, when you scale it up to be "twice as big" you now have a cube 2 blocks long, 2 blocks high, and 2 blocks wide... that is EIGHT 1lb blocks going from 1lb to "twice as big" 8lb of C4 is a 700% increase, going from 4d6 to 4d8 for Up-Size is a 33% increase now, folks will say that is just for exposives not guns, but there will be 700% more gunpowder in a 'twice as big" AK47 for Large sized guys
#13 AnimeSniper Nov 20, 2009 14:10:14	And don't forget the size of each bullet increasing... something along the lines of a 9mm Pistol become 90mm equivalent for a mecha or the 7.76 AK47/74 becoming 77.6mm or something... so not only would we need a good Increase/Decrease table for core weapon stats but also a mutliplier for the round type.... I could easily take the core D20 Modern Vehicles weapon stats say for 155mm smoothbore and stat that out as an assault rifle. Edit: I was thinking while reviewing the DMG Increase/Decrease table and thought that if you took the weapon stated at 3d12, use 1d12 by 3 which would give you 12d6 at the end which is double the original stats...
#14 backstabbist Nov 21, 2009 9:34:33	actually, I have long been a promoter of the Mc79 Breaktop 120mm Rifle (pl5+) marry a Rhinemetal120 (abrams) with a 'Nam m79 40mm breaktop for a Gargan(-4) or bigger mech 2hand single-rate rifle "Dont worry about the 5in shells, just make sure you dont get within that guys BAYONET range" what would be really scary is the Mc879 rifle, made from old m110 8" SP-arty guns If artillery is SuperUber, then what do we call Heavy Artillery
#15 AnimeSniper Dec 04, 2009 1:59:18	Does anyone have thoughts/regards to Mecha/Starship Salvage Operation for when the crew abandons them  or outright killed in combat... I have a Repair table that centralizes around bonuses for say the orbital repair facilities full equipped and the Mecha repairs under fire which adds minuses to the roles of any npc repair crew the GM grants the team for those BattleTech/Gundam 08th MS Team style campaigns.... EDIT: Done some thinking which entails the condition of the mecha/starship Condition of Mecha; salvageable, specific part disabled/destroyed, leg/arm disabled/destroyed, cockpit completely destroyed, Condintion of Starship; Salvageable: Drives disabled/destroyed, Mass decompression, disabled/destroyed section