Recent content by dayriff

The ship they were salvaging was embedded halfway in a rather large comet that was rotating rapidly (it picked up a lot of spin when they collided). They actually had to land on the comet. There are only three PCs, and they insisted on keeping the guy with Sensors on duty to watch for the...

Basically, I want stunners to be a law enforcement weapon, not a military weapon. I'm comfortable with players using stunners to take down gang members or drunks in a bar, but not a serious combatant. Whether a bad guy is wearing armor or not seems a pretty good distinction.

Thanks for the suggestions, everybody. I think I am going to assume the ship was equipped with a ten man regular security squad and enough weapons to outfit about 3 dozen troops against a boarding action in an emergency. (That's a third of the crew after all.) I think I am going to assume the...

I'm not entirely happy with how stun weapons work. I don't mind the basic mechanic, that if you're hit you're very likely to go down. (That high a penalty to an endurance check is brutal.) However, I feel that stun weapons should be nearly useless against armored foes. They are primarily a...

My players got to salvage the armory of a wrecked Escort vessel before making a fast retreat. (I used the deck plans from the P.F. Sloan in High Guard, but it doesn't have to match up exactly.) Nothing should be higher than TL-13. As in the book, I figure a crew of about 112, all devoted to...

Yes, but why should they "follow the rules"? What's the benefit? That's what I don't understand. If I could analogize with another game, it seems to me that's like buying a Dungeons & Dragons module and getting upset that the dungeon was obviously not generated using the 'random dungeon...

Is there some virtue in following the random generation rules that I'm not seeing? IMO, the primary virtue of random generation is speed. I can roll up a world quickly rather than have to spend the time to make a conscious decision on every little bit. It also helps keep me from falling into...

It depends on what you consider the OTU. I use the 3I as a backdrop, but I prefer to generate my own subsectors rather than use prepublished material. When randomly generating worlds according to the published rules, there is nothing indicating whether they are orbiting gas giants or not (that...

I see no reason to assume that two examples are necessarily representative of how every gas giant must be. We have four GG in our solar system; two of them don't seem that great; and two might be good if they were in the habitable zone and had the appropraite type of world circling them. If...

It's not clear to me that we know enough about planetary science to be able to predict how extensive those problems would necessarily be. Will more tidal stress be a problem for day-to-day life? Maybe, maybe not. It may just mean that you really, really don't want to build on any fault lines...

Why do you characterize these worlds as marginal/dangerous? There doesn't seem to me to be any reason that they should be more or less marginal/dangerous than a world that orbits a star on its own rather than being part of a gas giant system. I guess it depends on how significant you think...

So I find when making new worlds, I am often tempted to put them in orbit around gas giants. This is especially true for Size 0 to 2 worlds, as it makes sense in my mind that you would want to be close to a source of hydrocarbons. However, I also have a fondness for 'forest moon of Endor' type...

I was talking about DM penalties to actions, not the initiative penalty. Why would not having an initiative penalty make having a high initiative worthwhile? Initiative is pretty weaksauce.

Dodge is what makes having a high initiative actually useful. Since penalties to your actions don't carry over to the new round, you're good to dodge as many times lower in the initiative as you like. And as was said, it's always at least a little effective. Of course, Dodge has nothing on...

That's not too tough. All you have to do is contain the antimatter in a vacuum where it doesn't touch matter. We use magnetic fields today, and with Traveller technology you could use gravity controls to pin the mass in place. The trouble is if the power shuts off.