OK, I'll resolve the turn tomorrow. :-)

Round two! If you want to fix the shields, you want the Repair action.

Like before, everyone post one action, and somebody also specify where the ship is moving to. :-)

Bear in mind that both bomber squads currently out are depleted, and will need to return to the ship before they can attack again. You can control 4 squadrons at once, so you or someone else could launch them. Then you can use an action to command them to attack with either your Battle rating, or the crew rating (d6).

Apologies, I hadn't remembered they were single shot. Recall them and launch two more with the orders I suggested, please

Would we be in a good position to swing by and broadside raider 1?

 It seems to be that concentration of fire is the best approach. Hit one raider and put it the hell down, then move onto the next. But Jak's busy. ^_^

I think I can have Odette do that if all are good with it. :) She's reasonable at shooting things.

Just need Morton's action, and we're all set.

While we're holding, what do you think of the SW conversion so far, and ship design / combat? Be as general or specific as you like, I always intended this game to be a beta test. :-)

Mechanically, it works, but I'm not sure if it retains so much of the flavour. Too early to tell, I suspect, but I found the Savage Rifts conversion stripped a lot of the gonzo feel from the setting

 But put back in a great deal of sense (at the cost of some really weird playtesting results - Bursters became absolute beasts).

 That said, this one's interesting but I don't think we've gotten all that far with it yet. One thing to look out for is how much impact raises and exploding dice can have, over and above the results expected on the old D100.

It's inevitable when you're using a general system. Though I found SW Rifts to capture the action-movie feel the original aspires to a lot better--MDC numbers are bought down, extras are something the system badly needed, and subsystems like chases and dramatic tasks just fit a lot better than Palladium. Plus, Juicers feel much closer to their "live fast, die wide" design, whereas in the original, it would never kick in unless you had lots of timeskips. Original Rifts was my first ever RPG and I have a massive degree of nostalgia, but it's really not a good system!



Yes, exploding dice aren't something I'm a fan of--it's very rare in practice for damage dice to go totally crazy, but it can happen, usually at weird moments. That was my gripe with Savage Rifts--combat between big things with big weapons alternates between "slapfight" and "instant death", and I find it works a lot better if you put a cap of 30 on toughness + armour. It was something I wanted to address here, and not have numbers go totally out of control.

I love the FFG Rogue Trader RPG in terms of atmosphere and worldbuilding, but I've steadily been more and more put off by the way the skill system works, and the way you're expected to constantly try and scrape up every +10 you can to be even semi-reliable at what should be a character's specialty. And then you get adventures that casually throw around -20 or worse penalties to skills that struggle to clear 50% without hyper-specialisation.


Also, no response from Morton. I'll NPC him tomorrow, and press on.

 That's been a problem with D% systems since Chaosium. Call of Cthulhu had the epic 'parachute' skill which needed three rolls to survive, all of which were at like, 60% if you were really good at them. Runequest had the horse nomad child of horse nomads whose main skill was riding and who would still fall off. A lot.

 Savage Rifts does at least make MD gear less instantly deadly (which is nice) but it doesn't handle size well. I played a hatchling dragon in one game of it, and my options were: fight like a normal human or miss everything because of the size penalty to hit anything, which wasn't quite the power fantasy I was expecting. I had a ton of fun mind, just not in combat. The Burster, meanwhile bumped his flame blast a lot and was doing cheap MD blast templates for 6D8 in no time.

 I've only ever seen a character one-shotted from intact to absolutely dead once though, in Deadlands. And once to a ship, in a sci-fi game based on the old XXVC Buck Rogers setting.

I'm following this discussion but I'm not good with figuring out system mechanics myself. Still I enjoy seeing inner workings of systems. :)

The second raider that got hit, is it intact enough to be boarded with void suits?

Yes it is.

On a related note, one thing I wanted to address in this conversion, but only really left half-finished was the inevitable "we board it and add it to our fleet" thing that every RT group comes out with the second they destroy or cripple an enemy ship. :-) The FFG system kind of....explodes if the PC's have a fleet, which was why I designed the dynasty mechanics to incentivise having other ships off-camera except in real emergencies.

Generally when a ship is taken out, it's missing a plasma drive and other vital components, other internal systems are damaged, and to salvage it, you'd need to get it somewhere safe, get new components and spend a lot of your Funds repairing it

They're not inherently flawed, just so long as you don't have base skills being absurdly low and THEN stack big negative modifiers on top of that. Just let characters be good (75%+ for a specialist) at the things the fiction says they're supposed to be good at, and then use negative modifiers when the task is supposed to have a serious risk of failure.

In reply to GM (msg # 121):

 I +1 the idea of having ships off-camera doing things (saving fleet team-ups for those odd occasions when a big event is taking place). I also +1 the notion that wrecking a ship instead of boarding it leaves it... well, a wreck - particularly since we can spam boarding shuttles and get a lot of bonuses for doing so...

 ...that said, I do not recommend boarding the obviously Slaanesh-possessed raider. Neither does Jak. ^_^

Psst, someone needs to roll for sensors.

 He asked an NPC crewman to do it, so... We should probably include crew rating as a stat for ships. ^_^

21:05, Today: Aurelius Vorn rolled 3 using 2d6, rerolling max ((2,1)).

Are we in the right system?

I assumed you were going to roll it. :-)

And yes, that's one of the perils of a beta version.



Remember you have Bennies if you want to reroll. If not, I'll proceed.

In reply to GM (msg # 127):

 Well Jak's handling the repairs... Also, I have to admit that I'm not entirely sure which skill is used for sensors, so I was hesitant to roll something. ^_^

Electronics. And we're out of combat time, so you can always roll one, then the other. In general, just roll and I'll tell you if it was actually necessary. :-)

Hey, everyone, got an update.

Odette's player has had to pull out of the game, so with 2/4 gone, I don't think it can really continue. Thanks for the playtesting, though, and if I decide to give this another shot, I'll drop you a mail. Hope you enjoyed it while it lasted! :-)

 Wellllll nuts!

 I'm definitely up to give it another run though.

Appreciate the heads up, boss