Quote from: David Johansen;276250Thanks, I'm having fun with it.

Explore abandoned space stations and underground archologies for lost technology and fight monsters mostly.  I'm basically building the D&D in space that I always wished spell jammer was.  

I wasn't sure what's going on, but now I get it... I'd play that any day of the week.

Make sure you get a minis range to go with it. Battlefleet Gothic, only awesomer.

Quote from: Pierce Inverarity;276308I wasn't sure what's going on, but now I get it... I'd play that any day of the week.

Make sure you get a minis range to go with it. Battlefleet Gothic, only awesomer.

Battle Fleet Gothic is a little too Gothic and not nearly run down and cobbled together enough.  I'll have to work up some sketches.  I'm very specifically trying not to re-create Warhammer 40000.

The themes of theocracy and oppression and ignorance and hate are all absent.  Not that you couldn't fit some 40k feel into your campaign but my intent is to avoid it.

Some similarity is unavoidable because I'm working with fantasy tropes in space.  But I want an open, free wheeling setting, not one choked with dust and nihilistic theocracies.

Okay, here's a very rough pdf with lots of unfinished and missing bits.  Still I think I'm happy with where the rules are at.  I got rid of multiple stats per action and stat bonuses and it feels more like what I'm after.  I like it enough that I'm probably going to retool Advanced Men & Magic to be compatible.

Vehicle and weapon design are lagging behind.  But then, I've had a bad couple weeks when it comes to getting stuff done.

http://www3.telus.net/public/uncouths/Barren.pdf

Interfertility (oh come on you were wondering)

While they share a common ancestry, most of the races descended from humanity are not interfertile.  There are two major exceptions.  The horribley fecund Destroyers breed true with almost any human descended species,  producing a litter of around half a dozen Destroyers.  Their gestation and maturation periods are half the human norm.  Male hunters breed true with human females with the offspring being female hunters.  Female hunters breed with human males, producing human offspring of either gender.

Well, I've been working on a few things here and there like living machines and their ecosystems and a new race called The Loci and their various combat bug servitor races.  D&D in space needs a good monster manual.

Anyhow, presently Autofire is +5 or +10 to hit but I haven't written anything about supression fire.

I'm thinking about having it give a +5 to the character's defense against attacks from the suppressed arc and any attacks that miss by more than the target's Coordination are hit by a free attack.

I'm not absolutely sure that suppression fire belongs in a space opera of this sort but then again I also know people will want a rule for it.

Just allow people to fire around walls and give a larger bonus to defense than penalty to hit.

Yep that's basically it.  Well, if you shoot or look around you count as in cover but if you just stay behind the wall you don't.  But cover is good.

Anyhow, I've been working on Living Machines which could range from the bizarre tech worlds from Transformers after the movie or Transformers, or even Stuff like Marvel's Celestials (yes they pretty much always come up), The Magus from New Mutants, or Galvatron.

But I've got to get vehicle design sorted out first.  The hit location based system always winds up being too complicated when you start wanting to put multiple mounts in a location or figure out how many spaces a person takes up in a small vehicle.  But since Living Machines are designed as vehicles in many cases I need vehicle design sorted out.

Yeah I'm pretty much to the point where I can't move forward much without hammering out vehicle and weapon design.  Yes I do tend to get stuck there.

On the other hand, the other night I couldn't sleep so I got up and wrote part of an adventure for "among the beautiful creatures" involving a classy cafe and a street riot.

Well, I got stuck for a bit there and painted up some space orks instead.  Sigh, I'm only human right?

What I was stuck on was divided between the handling of vehicle design and the relationship between weapons and strength.  While painting the orks and stressing out because my boss broke his hip on Sunday, which left me in charge of his job and mine, I came up with the answers I want.

Okay anyhow, melee attacks are now back to a Coordination based action and margins of success are leaving the game.  Margins of success and open ended rolls just made it into arithmetic the rpg.

So what about Strength?  Adding Strength-10 to damage values is a bit too extreme, especially at the low end of the scale.  A character with an 8 strength can't hurt anyone bare handed and a character with a 2 strength can't hurt anyone with a sword.

So here's how it'll work now.  Each weapon has a Strength Requirement.  For melee weapons strength effects the weapon's initiative or damage on alternating points.  For missile weapons, alternating points under the strength requirement give a penalty to hit and  initiative.  Points over have no effect.

Initiative Modifiers reduce the initial roll each round and increase the number of initiative points per action.

Most weapons have a damage bonus equal to their die type and unarmed combat is based directly on Strength.  Two handed weapon use adds four to the character's effective Strength.  

ST Req. 2: d2
ST Req. 4: d3
ST Req. 6: d4
ST Req. 8: d6
ST Req. 10: d8
ST Req. 12: d10
ST Req. 14: d12

Anyhow, that's roughly what it'll look like.  So now an unarmed character with a 10 ST does 1d8 damage but when armed they'll do around 1d8+8.

Thinking a bit more about it I think I'll just go with bonuses from a base line of ten.  So now melee weapons alternate a damage modifier and an action point modifier while missile weapons alternate an initiative and action point modifier.

This lets there be a single chart and allows weapons to be stated out like so:

Broadsword: Initiative 0, Damage 1d8 Slashing or Piercing
Dagger: Initiative +2, Damage 1d4 Slashing or Piercing
Battle Axe: Initiative -2, Damage 1d12 Slashing

Autorifle: Initiative 0, Range 20, Damage 1d10 Ballistic
Laser Rifle: Initiative 0, Range 30, Damage 1d8 Heat

GAH!

Okay, so I think I've finally got it.  You add your Strength to your Margin of Success and every full ten points gives you a +1 to damage.  The Wound Threshold is (Strength+Endurance+Willpower+Grit Skill)/10.  It gets rid of a chart for Strength bonuses, it integrates with the Unconsciousness and Death Thresholds.  And it even makes every point of Strength matter if only some of the time.  Better still it lets me link weapon damages to their size/strength requirement.

Also I'm dropping initiative modifiers for weapons because I'm very attatched to the initiative penalty for movement and weapons just don't make you move faster.  Also I'm getting rid of anything that alters the basic 10 initiative points per action rule.  This is supposed to be a relatively clean and simple D&D varient.

Man I hate hitting mechanical road blocks like this.

Anyhow, lots of fun little tidbits are creeping in.  A spell that lets you fire missiles into the future.  Another that lets you edit history so you can insert that comeback you came up with an hour later.  A device that makes a vehicle bigger on the inside than the outside (come to think of it I'll need to add that one to the list of hypothetical tech for Galaxies in Shadow).

For anyone who feels it's silly to spend so much time fiddling with the damage system, all I can say is it's one of those things that dogs you for the rest of eternity if you don't get it right in the beginning.

Here's a bit of something you haven't seen yet that's less dull.

Living Machines
   The origins of Living Machines lie lost in the past, somewhere in between the interface of nano-technology and organisms developing from alternate chemicals like silicon.  Not entirely machines or life forms, these creatures have characteristics of both.  They eat or photosynthesize to obtain energy, reproduce through breeding, and have ecological niches like animals but lean towards more mechanical structures than carbon based life forms, perhaps due to less flexible chemical structures.  Whatever their true origins and nature, Living machines are often much more dangerous than animals or machines because they have the unpredictability of the former and the durability of the later.  There are entire worlds with ecosystems of Living Machines but whether they were made or just happened is lost to the ages.

Rolling Grazers
   A common example of a herbivorous Living Machine, these bus-sized creatures are found in herds rolling across the grass lands of their worlds turning grasses into alcohol in one digestive system which then powers their wheels.  The males can be quite hostile during the mating season and while they aren't fast enough to cause serious injury in a collision they are heavy enough to crush most organisms by rolling over them with their huge, clawed wheels.
 
Rocket Weasels
   These small, flying Living Machines are flying predators.  The whine of their jet engines chases their prey out of the bushes and few creatures are fast enough to out run them.  While Rocket Weasels hunt in packs they are quite vicious and will often attack stragglers single handedly.

Myrmidons
   Towering over the humans these Living Machines resemble, the Myrmidons are the last of an ancient civilization long lost to civil war.  It is believed that all the females of their species perished in the final war that destroyed their home world.  They are for the most part lone wanderers  among the stars on missions long since irrelevant by the passage of time.  At times found in small bands but this is almost always a direct result of happening upon ancient foes and seldom last beyond the outcome of that conflict's resolution.  Myrmidons often have access to advanced technology left over from the zenith of their culture.

Atomic Titans
   Even as carbon based life forms can grow to astonishing sizes under the right conditions, Living Machines of truly gargantuan proportions are occasionally encountered.  Such creatures generally have evolved to more efficient power sources than the crude alcohol burning metabolisms of their smaller brethern, at the heart of most of these titans lies a fusion reactor evolved out of need and unlimited growth but some titans even leave the bonds of their homeworld to capitalize on the vast energy available in orbits closer to stars.

Building Sized
Ogre Sized Example
Battle Ship Sized Example

Star Gods
   The greatest Living Machines are vast and terrible.  Some individuals as large as planets have been recorded.  Such beings are always sentient though their minds are often terrible and slow in their processing.  These beings eat worlds and cultivate stars with deliberate husbandry.  Most have little interest in smaller entities but there is a strong tendency towards humanoid forms for reasons which can only be guessed at.