Recent content by Tychus

As someone mentioned earlier, a lot of these creatures seem to have originated in Spore's creature creator. The extra appendage on that last creature is a piece that increases the creature's stealth rating in game.

The cost of fuel seems out of whack. My players have pointed out that sicne their ship is equipped with fuel processors, it will almost never make sense for them to buy refined fuel. Looking through the various ship designs, it appears that most jump capable ships include fuel processors. If...

Starting one today.

I'm wondering how long it's going to take to ship out the replacement books. I mailed in my copy of High Guard 3 weeks ago, and haven't received anything yet. We have a campaign starting this weekend - it'd be nice to have the books in hand!

So I was wondering... How does the crew of a free trader pay the mortgage on their ship? Since there's no FTL communication, they can't just wire the payment to the bank at the beginning of the month. Do you assume the bank has branch offices in most major starports that will accept payment...

From the Career thread: Engineering is to Physical Sciences as Medic is to Life Sciences. After the volume of discussion concerning "what is science" over the last few weeks, I'm a little surprised to see this even come up. I agree that the current list of Engineering specialties are...

Huh? There is no reenlistment roll. If you switch careers, then yes there is a -1DM per previous career (not term) to enlist. This helps serve the necessary function of driving older characters (especially those anagathicly enhanced) out of creation and into play. I agree that events get...

Advancement rolls are made each term, assuming the survival roll is successful, and occur after rolling for events. I'm not sure what you mean about assigning skills. There's a character generation checklist on pages 2 and 3 of the character creation section. Is this not helpful? There's...

This is going to mess up the scholar skill tables. Currently, science shows up several times on the tables. Every time it is rolled, the player can choose which speciality to increase - either repeatedly pumping the same speciality to become an expert, or branching out into many specialities...

I have heard some pretty far fetched excuses from malingering soldiers, but are we in the Paranoia forum now? Seriously, if your roll a "near death" mishaps during character creation, suffering what would be crippling injuries (10 total points off physical stats), and the gub'mint patches you...

A non political answer: In a world where your injuries (even amputations and lost organs) can literally be repaired as good as new, there needs to be a cost to the player or there's very little reason to try to avoid injury. Especially during character creation - if you can recover from every...

I'd say almost every RPG. It's one of the things abstracted into a to-hit roll. I hope no one is seriously suggesting that players shouldn't have control over whether their characters can attack. As for the effect with regard to NPCs, does a GM really need rules for this? Just apply a...

Well v2 anagathics are actually cheaper than v1, but they require you to make two survival rolls per term. That would be serious if failing a survival roll meant real lasting damage to the character - but it probably just means a career change. Incidentally, requiring the second survival roll...

So the problem isn't with how skills are distributed, but that it's too easy to recover from mishaps. I've mentioned elsewhere that there should be a cap on medical debt, otherwise with anagathics you can effectively live forever while racking up ever increasing debt.

This marine probably didn't spend much time assigned to a line unit. Maybe he was on parade detail or the commo guy. Such are the vagaries of random generation. Keep in mind that the untrained penalty is -3. Getting a skill from untrained to 0 is a huge improvement. I think it's mostly a...