Just curious what people thought of these two potential changes to 2e. I just got the book three days ago: I tried to support my local gaming store by purchasing through them, but apparently the U.S. distributors don't carry it (I eventually had to order directly through Mongoose after several weeks). Anyways, I haven't gotten a chance to actually try the game against another person yet, just tests with myself, but based on A. those fights; B. comments on the forum; C. my urge to tinker, here are three possible house rules I'd like comments on. This would be for a family, friends & fun group, not for tournaments or highly competitive games.
1. Beams: Cap the number of times a 'beam' die can be rolled at 4. This leaves them mostly intact, but puts some upper limit on freak, lucky beam shots. So you'd roll 4+, 4+, 4+, 4+ then stop even if you had scored a hit on the last shot.
2. Anti-fighter Dice: Allow each unused anti-fighter die to be converted into 2 AD of range 5" weak trait weapons (if you wanted to be more complex, you could decide what trait/range/AD it translated into for each race..). This is just a matter of personal preference: I'd like to see more basic, wimpy weapons again so the more powerful guns feel, well, powerful.
3. Redundant Systems: This was proposed a long time ago - during the last time I haunted the forum - to make high PL ships more viable. The idea is that they can ignore a certain number of critical effects (you don't get to choose, just the first X critical effects that happen to the ship), thus decreasing susceptibility to being 'defanged' by mass criticals. As arbitrary numbers, Battle PL ships might have Redundant Systems 1, War PL ships Redundant Systems 3, and Armageddon PL ships Redundant Systems 6. My vision of this was as negating only what was listed under 'effect' on the crit table, but you could also negate the whole crit, increased damage & crew and all.
The numbers are fairly arbitrary, so even if the basic idea is sound you may have a much better idea of better values to plug in there.
1. Beams: Cap the number of times a 'beam' die can be rolled at 4. This leaves them mostly intact, but puts some upper limit on freak, lucky beam shots. So you'd roll 4+, 4+, 4+, 4+ then stop even if you had scored a hit on the last shot.
2. Anti-fighter Dice: Allow each unused anti-fighter die to be converted into 2 AD of range 5" weak trait weapons (if you wanted to be more complex, you could decide what trait/range/AD it translated into for each race..). This is just a matter of personal preference: I'd like to see more basic, wimpy weapons again so the more powerful guns feel, well, powerful.
3. Redundant Systems: This was proposed a long time ago - during the last time I haunted the forum - to make high PL ships more viable. The idea is that they can ignore a certain number of critical effects (you don't get to choose, just the first X critical effects that happen to the ship), thus decreasing susceptibility to being 'defanged' by mass criticals. As arbitrary numbers, Battle PL ships might have Redundant Systems 1, War PL ships Redundant Systems 3, and Armageddon PL ships Redundant Systems 6. My vision of this was as negating only what was listed under 'effect' on the crit table, but you could also negate the whole crit, increased damage & crew and all.
The numbers are fairly arbitrary, so even if the basic idea is sound you may have a much better idea of better values to plug in there.