bluekieran said:
Avoiding combat because combat is deadly is all very well, but heroic combat is also good fun, and I'd rather not miss out on that.
Then run games using a methodology more familiar to them. I have five suggestions, use them singularly or in combination with each other:
1. Reduce the damage of weapons that do lots of damage to like half damage. This will also have the side effect of making pistol-type weapons more popular over long arms such as rifles, which is almost always a good thing.
2. A plasma gun or a VRF is not a +4 weapon as opposed to an ACR's +3 weapon and a pistol is not a +0 weapon. Make the more powerful weapons exceedingly rare. An ACR is closer to a
Fireball, a VRF more like a
Disintegrate, and a plasma or fusion gun is more like a
Power Word: Kill. You likely don't toss around Disintegrate or Power Word: Kill in games for the same reason why you likely don't toss them around in a D&D game: There's simply too many eggs in one basket or one saving throw.
3. Introduce incapacitation rules, sometimes known as a "no one-shot kill" rule. A character that is reduced to 0 stats is not dead, but is "mission-killed" for that combat in some way; likely injured bad enough that they can no longer meaingfully participate in the combat. However, simply having their morale broken and having the "flight" part of "fight or flight" cut in so they're overridingly concerned about just getting out instead of fighting is another option. Once a player is in this state, however, they are extremely vulnerable - if they are attacked again, they will die. However NPCs will ignore them at this point as "mission-killed" provided they play possum.
4. Hit them in the pocketbook instead. Replace "hit points" with monetary loss - once you're at 0 cr, you're dead not because you're dead instantly, but because the character will not be able to afford the after-combat medical bills and will have to retire. We have to assume that TL12 probably has some pretty amazing medical technology and probably only gets better as the TLs go up. While the standard healing rules are fine, I find it a bit punitive and counter-roleplay to have players laid up for weeks healing damage. Instead, I say that any reasonable starport (C or better) likely has a hospital that can quickly repair some pretty major damage to players and have them out in like 12-24 hours. No questions likely asked - it's a frontier universe. But it's not cheap. Getting healed from "death" to full life is not an issue ... but it's going to cost you 250,000 Credits. Less significant damage will be cheaper, but still not cheap. This allows players used to systems like D&D to see a number (how much credits they have left) and manage their risk accordingly.
5. Hit them in the pocketbook, part II. A local GM uses system where if a player takes damage that would kill him (or her) outright in a single attack, the player lives, but loses prominent parts of the equipment they were carrying (or had stowed, if it is a vehicle) - this represents a near miss where the player dove out of the vehicle moments before the missile hit it (but had to leave their gear behind in their haste), the player found some fortunate cover at the last moment but in their panic they dropped that shiny fusion rifle or maybe it took some high-speed debris that would have otherwise taken their head off. Now some people are going to say "that just means that players will simply travel naked" ... but seriously, when have you ever had players who aren't carrying half of the catalog of Amazon.com on them?
bluekieran said:
For decades and decades of my RPG existence, I've always thought that space combat is deadly.
Only now have I realized - it's simply not true. Not true at all. Inject some 'hard sci-fi' into your game on this point, and your game will be a lot better.
Realize that spaceships are not like ships sailing around our oceans today:
* Fires aren't a big problem in space. If you go to any source on naval battles, you'll find most warships that "sink" typically suffer from out of control fires that gut the ship (often when it reaches something that reacts violently to hot fires such as fuel or a ship's ammunition magazine). This fire and/or explosions cause so much damage the ship is marked off as a loss, then they're scuttled. However, fires don't burn without some sort of oxygen supply - the weapons fire in Traveller doesn't come with its own oxygen supply, so they have to use the existing oxygen in an area to burn. Unlike on Earth where where we're breathing this convenient oxygen supply that is very difficult to isolate ourselves from (in fact, a firefighter's entire career revolves around this problematic situation), atmosphere is a manageable to commodity in a starship. Ships in Traveller have things like sealable bulkheads and it's likely that most ships actually depressurize or fill their ship with some inert gas (say nitrogen) and everyone works in spacesuits during combat. Outside of the ship, there's unlikely to be any atmosphere at all, let alone oxygen. Fires aren't going to be the problem they are in the modern day.
* About explosions. Another big threat on ships are explosions (you know, those pesky fires reaching the ammunition magazine). However, Traveller ships likely have a lot of fewer things that can explode than a modern day warship. "Modern" (say World War 1 and after) ships had immense quantities of thing that could explode - the propellant for their guns and their fuel supply. Traveller ships don't have these in such quantity. First things first: fusion reactors do not explode in some huge nuclear explosion. I don't what Michael Stackpole or any other "sci-fi" author says, they don't (the capacitors on them might explode, but this is a much smaller, less destructive explosion). If a ship has missiles, fires or laser penetrations might detonate them. The capacitors for lasers are likely to explode if they're hit as well. The hydrogen fuel supply is certainly prone to explosions but those are very dependent on having oxygen around to detonate - so unless ship-builders are particularly dense, it's probably routine to isolate the hydrogen fuel supply from oxygen sources and the tanks are designed so that in event of a failure, the explosion is vented out and away from the ship using a combination of being placed near the outer hull of a ship and likely featuring hull panels over it that are weak to being pushed out and away from the ship. If your players depressurize their ship, they're probably storing the gasses in a tank somewhere, so that pressurized gas could detonate if it is compromised by damage - it's likely that such tanks are actually placed near a position in the hull where the explosion will be vented outwards so it doesn't harm the ship.
* Starships don't just explode. This is probably the worst one, and why people think that combat is deadly. See my note on "about explosions" - no matter how much fire you pour into a starship, it's not just going to explode conveniently like something from Star Trek or Star Wars. Shooting an enemy ship to pieces is definitely more trouble than it is worth. Imagine a modern long-range delivery truck, but just the metal and plastic parts, no fuel and no hidden explosives - now you're given a few .50 caliber machine guns and told to "shoot the truck to pieces" - you're likely to run out of ammunition before you render the truck into scrap metal.
* Starships can't sink. This is an important one. When a modern day ocean-going ship takes too much damage, it's likely its buoyancy is compromised and it conveniently sinks into the sea, removing it completely. They can, of course, be pulled into some gravity well and burn-up/crash if they're fighting near such a place, but destruction like that isn't quick unless they're very low to the surface, unlike a ship rapidly taking water.
What's all this mean? It means that even if your party has their ship "destroyed" it is completely reasonable to assume that all of them survived, provided they took basic precautions like depressurizing their ship before combat starts and everyone is wearing a vacc suit. However, it's also likely everyone knows this in this universe. At this point, the enemy has two options: Either leave the player's ship and abandon the battlefield or close in to board the vessel (possibly to salvage it).
If the enemy ship(s) leave, the players have a new adventure. It's likely that a lot of critical starship systems can be restored to operation with some repairs - likely enough to limp to the local starport, land it on the surface of a planet, or put it into a stable orbit and everyone climbs into the Low Berths to hope for the best. If they're in an unstable orbit, it's very likely they'll have some hours or even days before the orbit becomes untenable and they burn up, so it's a race against time to get some sort method to stabilizing their orbit or controlling their descent working. Even if they're in an atmosphere and plummeting towards the surface, some rolls are likely to stabilize the ship sufficiently to either bring it in for a rough landing or stabilize it long enough for everyone to bail out.
The enemy may also close. This may be because they're pirates or groups like the players and likely want to pick over their defeated foe for salvage and/or any cargo. Navies are likely to close to rescue survivors (as prisoners) and salvage or scuttle the vessel by towing it into a gravity well or something. Again, the enemy is likely to know that there's survivors so they'll be appropriately wary. Again, now we have another opportunity for adventure. The players now have the option of setting up an ambush or even negotiating with their victors. Unless their opponents are particularly ruthless, spacers are likely to accept surrenders (though they might impose harsh penalties and will require the losers go into low berths for the duration of the trip - hey it saves the worry of having to feed and guard prisoners). Perhaps the condition of both ships is so terrible former foes are now reluctant allies as they both realize their in the middle of nowhere and have to cooperate sufficiently to get one ship working to jump back to civilization ("fighting seemed like a good idea at the time...")
