Dec edition playtest notes

chiron0224

Mongoose
Just did a quick and dirty scout vs scout fight (each armed with double turret with 2 pulse lasers link firing) and I took notes every time something seemed odd. I already posted about a typo that I saw so I won't rehash it here, but the other things are as follows.

1. How is the severity if a crit resulting from sustained damage calculated? The rules say to apply a crit every time the ship has accumulated 10% of it's hull in damage. Severity is normally determined by the damage of the attack but in this case it's damage having built up. So do you just use whatever attack pushed it over? Do you treat all sustained damage crits as severity 1? That's how I ended up ruling it during my play test fight and it worked well. Each sort of 10% threshold either opened a new system at 1 or ratcheted up one that was already damaged.

2. One of the actions the engineer can take is to jury rig a system to mitigate the critical effects of the damage. But for armour and hull this would require a trip outside the ship with some big ass pieces of metal so I think those two should be the exception to this action.

3. When rolling to try and repair some critical damage I rolled horribly without consequence. I'm not sure if it would be better or worse but I think an effect of -6 on a repair attempt could carry a consequence like stepping up the severity of the crit. Like the engineer screwed up so badly trying to jury rig the system that he broke it even worse than before.

4. A little clarification on the fact that critical severity effects are cumulative. Does this apply to the DMs? Like with M-drive severity one had a DM -1 and then severity two had DM -2 and severity three had DM -3. Does this mean that at severity three you have a DM of -3 or of -6?

5. Speaking of the M-drive, do those DM penalties apply to evasive maneuvers? The way I interpreted the evasive maneuver action is that it's not a roll (your pilot skill is simply applied as a negative DM to the opposing attack roll) and therefor M-drive critical hit DM penalties would apply. But then it doesn't make sense that no matter how beat up your maneuver drive is you don't get any worse at dodging. I mean, except for the fact that you have fewer thrust points to spend. But then you still take the DM to rolls to aid the gunners or dock.
 
Valid observations.

#5 is correct as is however. Without tying dodge to thrust value, dodging effect is not adversely affected based on thrust available. It is adversely affected because you have less thrust to use to maneuver and dodge, so probably less dodging.

I personally don't think we need to further detail it. Not really opposed to worse dodges as you take sev3+ m-driv hits - but not necessary.
 
I was wondering about repairs to hull and armour Crits as well. Every 10 percent of Hull damage is a critical, and if you keep hitting the Hull (rolling a 7) you can carve huge chunks out of the Hull points in a hurry.

Patching this up after a battle takes an hour per point and costs 1000 credits pg 150), but fixing it during battle may cost nothing? and only take 6 minutes?

The paragraph on pg 161 that reads " Note that only the effects of the critical hit can be repaired, and these quick repairs will only last for 1D hours. Any additional Hull damage and destroyed equipment and weapons cannot be repaired this way and will require the spacecraft to leave combat"
So an Engineer can only attempt to repair a system once? So one attempt per system, M-Drive, JDrive, power plant etc.
This makes a bit of sense to me, you patch around a break in the system, routing around the damaged area. This is cobled together on the fly and lasts for a few hours before it fails. There is a limit to how much you can jury rig a system.

Does anyone else read it like this?
 
You bring up an interesting point about a repaired system then suffering further damage. Does it pick up where it left off and either way can it be repaired again?
 
So I did a follow up playtest run, this time with one of the scouts having a double turret outfitted with a pulse laser and a missile rack.

So here's a couple of things that I found myself asking in this run

1. How do range modifiers effect missiles? If I launch a missile at long range do I launch it at -2? RAW seems to suggest yes.

2. On one of the rounds to two ships tied for initiative (their captains rolled to modify initiative at the end of the previous round which caused their initiative scores to tie) which made me stop and ask "Wait, what happens if they tie for initiative?"

3. With this range band stuff what do you do with more than two ships? Like if you have two scouts attacking a free trader and one has missiles so it wants to hang back while the other has beam lasers and wants to run in for the kill? Do you keep track of separate ranges to all targets? like from the perspective of the free trader it's at long range to one of the scouts and at medium to the other? In that case, where do the scouts lie in relation to each other? If one, for whatever reason, decides to close with his buddy does he draw further away from the Free trader? Let's say, for example that we have a free trader. It's at short range to one scout and long range to another. let's, for the sake of example, decide that the scouts are at medium to each other. So the scout at short range expends 10 thrust over the course of a couple of turns and is now at short range with his buddy. If we decide that this is also movement away from the free trader that would that mean that the free trader is at medium range to the scout that moved to be at short with his friend and is at long range to the one that didn't move? Even though the difference between the two ships that are now at short range isn't enough of a difference for one to be long and one to be medium. And that's with liberal use of house ruling for range bands.

4. What counts as a "weapon" in the rules in terms of point defence. It says one weapon at a time but I assume that the whole turret is involved in point defence so wouldn't it make sense to specify that? Also what counts as a "weapon" when taking weapon crits?
 
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