Magic in Space (with a side of cyberpunk)

[RFLS]

So... on thinking on it, the absolute minimum HP for a fighter should be around... 120 total. At least, if we're dealing with things on a Air to ground fight. Perhaps we should do some form of number squashing so people don't have to track 2,000 hp ships constantly. In either case, I wouldn't object that in some situations that mages with fireball or disintergrate are able to go affect the course of a space battle... provided they are of an appropriate level to do so. Once we get into big stuff, they shouldn't matter too much that it's gamebreaking.

I agree about the HP. I was thinking HP would be number of available hardpoints*20, with bonus HP for specific slots.

It gets treated like an animated object and has hardness and reduces damage from magic ect, but it's in the range of things for people to actually destroy with the right setups, right?

Yup.

For weapons ... than standard weapons of course.

I'm going to temporarily put the discussion of specific weapons off the table. They're a rabbit hole that should come out of the system, not something to base the system around.

Perhaps called shots should only be doable in the weapon's first range incriment, but I dunno, I would want some way to easily randomly allocate damage from say far as away as possible as a "lucky shot" thing. Perhaps on a crit, we just add a table and have instead of a crit confirmation roll, the table lists out a part the weapon

I think called shots should be allowed, and a miss that still hits the AC of the ship + say, 5 (for example) hits the ship's general HP, rather than the specific HP of that component.

I don't like the idea of factoring every single turret of a given type into a bank that adds a bonus, because it has too many moving parts. Also, if we have to factor in and modify every single turret, we add too much mathmatical complexity, even if we treat them as banks, it'd still be simpler to just "upscale" weapons and say that they're either fluffed as size appropriate or
become a size appropriate number of turrets that are treated mechanically as a single weapon. There's going to be hundreds of small laser turrets on a star destroyer class Capital ship, I don't think we can really... math out in a simple manner. It'd be too complex and while I wouldn't mind crunch, not everyone who wants to make big ships is going to need to do that.

If we had to count individual turrets banks, what would be the mechanical difference of of 12 size 2 Turrets versus size 40 size 1's? And how meaningful is the difference between 21 and 23 small sized turrets? If there any difference at all because of stat counting, wouldn't people just not get the 23 turrets? and just wait to say get 24 because the way the stats work, they actually have the affect of getting a +1 to hit?

Another advantage of if we factor in all "banks" as being a single weapon: we can upgrade banks like magic weapons. If we were to treat each an every individual turret, it'd be really tedious to allow upgrading even for let's call them mid class ships. But that may be hit or miss on your part.

I think the simplest solution that still maintains balance is to allow identical weapons to be collected into banks of 10. Each weapon past the first grants a +1 bonus to hit to the bank. You roll to hit your target's AC once. If you hit, you deal damage. For every 1 you exceed the AC by, you deal the weapons' damage again. The specific effect of this is that it's hard to miss completely, and you have a 5% chance of max damage, vs a .001 percent chance of max damage. Basically, firing all at once means you're more likely to hit.

Thoughts?

I'm thinking that we should have room specific conditions: "Breached", "Off-Line" and "Destroyed" are particularly important for marking whether subsystem failure has occured.

I'm going to put this in the same territory as weapon categories for now, if that's okay.

We may need unique terminology to define ship sizes. We certainly need to define how big Capital ships are.

Gramarie actually did us a service there; the sizes are described in Eldrikinetics, and again in the Spaceship rules page at the top of this thread.

Which is why I mentioned the plug-ins. They apparently fix a lot of Ultimate Campaign's stuff, but was forced to be cut out of the main book because of space concerns, and then extra stuff was made to fix a few problems he found with Ultimate Campaigns stuff. Still, it's not a perfect system, but its probably better than trying to shove gramarie into a PF system when it comes to balance.

Oh, cool. That makes more sense. Where can I find the plugins? Googling hasn't kicked anything up on the SRD, unless I'm missing something.

I just call magic cybernetics arcanetics because mananetics doesn't sound right.

Coolio.