Burger said:
TGT's crit system for his BSG conversion is quite good. When you get X crits with a weapon, instead of rolling X times on the crit table, you just roll once for location. The severity of the crit is then X.
So if one weapon system gets 4 crits, you roll a dice once, say you roll 5 then it's an 5-4 crit.
It means low-AD weapons cannot score the big crits such as 6-6, which is quite good, a Patrol ship will never take out a War ship in 1 turn.
I have to admit, this an awesome idea and beautifully simple as well.
If I'm understanding this right, it looks like
less crits would possibly be generated per attack, but if a crit result did come about, it would be a
more severe result then? In other words, instead of creating say a 1-2, 2-1, and 3-4 from a single attack, the new crit would be X-3, X being the location roll?
How would Precise work then? Given the odds of getting a crit are roughly doubled with Precise, it could a be given that each crit would be much more severe compared to a vanilla weapon, right?
Hmm, seems like a good idea. As far as game flow goes it might actually cut down on the huge amount of crits the big ships might accrue through a game (How many -2AD or -1 speed crits have you seen piled on a War ship?), would reduce the chance of a Raid or lower ship getting the 6-6 or something easily nasty, and would do a great deal to enhance the appeal of taking those big ships with usually more AD or Weapons traits (and thus more chance of the crits being devastating).
How well has this mechanic actually worked in practice during the BSG games?
I can only see one potential problem, and that's beams vs non-beam power becoming unbalanced again. With a runaway beam hit which is easily possible, I'm worried about Beams being the only weapons that can get crits. Too much swing from one to the other.
Also, it seems like it would make the "Redundancy" fan trait rather.... redundant. With no more boatloads of small crits being accrued (which is what Redundancy was supposed to help with), no more real need to nullify crits, although it's still a great fluffy rule I'd still use.
Actually, fluff wise, I think it makes a huge deal of sense. Those Shadow and Vorlon beams could quite possibly generate X-6 results with every shot, along with some of the Drahk and Minbari weapons. It would make beams quite a bit potentially nastier, but create a great deal more variance in their damage potential (good solid hit verses grazing hits for example).