So you hate the crit chart?? how much do you hate this!!

[Kosh127]

So you hate the Crit chart??


So you hate the Criticial chart. Well how do you hate this. My gaming group was looking into play test as much of 1.1 as possible. We have also been looking into many of the post. We have been trying to make the Crit chart a little better for the higher PL ships. This may seem to powerful but please try it out. It has worked great and I am not just saying that. This has undergone a few changes already and this may be the way we go as a club.
Roll for location as normal. After finding out were you get the location take the following modifies into account. You may never get lower than a 1 or higher than a six
-Equal Levels no change
-1,2 levels below your own PL, +1 to result
-3,4 levels below your own PL, +2 to result
-5 level or more below your own PL, +3 to result
-1,2 levels above your PL, -1 to result
-3,4 levels above your PL, -2 to result
-5 or more levels above your PL, -3 to result
Fighters count as raid with no positive.

Example 1 your Skirmish ship at a Battle ship, you cause 2 critical. The location result is a 1 and 4. 1 is a engines and a 4 is a weapons (as you can see this has not changed) you then roll for each damage level you roll a 1-1 as you are unable to subtract 1 you will get a engine, level 1 hit. You then roll a 6 in the weapens chart. So you subtract 1 from result. The result would be a 4-5.


Example 2 A battle ship shoots a raid ship getting 1 critical. Rolling for location as normal you get a 3. Rolling for the level of the effect you roll a 5. with your bonus you now have a 6. your final result would be a 4-6.

Example 3 your fighter attacks a skirmish ship. You roll 1 critical hit. Rolling for location as normal you receive a 6! Rolling for the level of damage you get a 4. There is no change to the scale. Your final result would be a 6-4.

Example 4 your fighter attacks a war ship and gets 1 critical hit. You roll a 5. You then roll for the level of crit as normal and roll a 5. with the modifier you get a 4. The end result would be a 5-4.

Please try out these rules before you bash them. After that please give me some feedback. It works out very good for us. I know that I am not a writer or have the best or clearest writing style. Sorry, If it is confusing its hard to do at all as long as you understand the sliding scale. Please give it a go!!!!

 

[Lord David the Denied]

Crits shouldn't be tied to PL. That's a meta-game device that has no bearing on weapons in the game. An ion cannon is an ion cannon no matter what ship is carrying it.

 

[Kosh127]

an ion cannon on a patrol level ship should not be able to diable an Vorlon heavy cruiser. its not a meta gaming elament. Its to show how a much larger ship is more surrivable to average damage than a patrol boat. I am happy to see that out of the only thing I asked for people to play it before they rip it can be followed by all but the ... you get the idea.

 

[Foxmeister]

Please try out these rules before you bash them. After that please give me some feedback. It works out very good for us. I know that I am not a writer or have the best or clearest writing style. Sorry, If it is confusing its hard to do at all as long as you understand the sliding scale. Please give it a go!!!!

Ok, so I've not tried these out, but on the face of it I do rather like the idea - it's quite neat and simple and does get around many of my issues (like a fighter being twice as likely to send a Ka'Bin'Tak adrift as it would a Sho'Kov!).

One question though, and a suggestion!

Why are fighters considered Raid? Surely it would produce better results at Patrol, or at a push, Skirmish?

As to the suggestion, I think positives for being PLs above the target are probably over the top (purely a though exercise) - have you tried it without any positives?

Regards,

Dave

 

[Kosh127]

good questions and yes. The reason we have put the fighters at Raid is so that some fleets are set up so that there fighter are there main weopen. This would be very hard on them ( or in playtesting it made the Gaim worthless) as for trying diffrent + and - ya we tried other combos but these seem to work great. We also tried no + but then you are taking a negative with no possitive. don't forget that a fighter may be a raid but there is no bonus for it just min. the negative effects. The idea behind it would be that a fighter only a afew houndred or thousand meters would be far better at picking out weakspots and the like of larger ships.

 

[katadder]

this comes up about once a fortnight.
an ion cannon on a patrol ship should be able to disable a vorlon heavy cruiser as much as an ion cannon on a war ship. the reason it finds it harder is because it has less AD.
if you were to do a crit table balanced on PL then every weapon mounted on every level of ship would have to have the same stats no matter wether war or patrol as you are then representing heavier firepower by your crit mods instead of number of AD as it is currently.

 

[ATN082268]

Crits shouldn't be tied to PL. That's a meta-game device that has no bearing on weapons in the game. An ion cannon is an ion cannon no matter what ship is carrying it.

I believe your argument is flawed on a couple of levels. First, not every weapon of a particular class (Laser, Ion, etc) is the same. An Ion Cannon that has more range and/or damage than another will probably be bigger and harder to destroy than a smaller one that has less range and/or damage. Second, larger ships can probably shield their systems, weapons, etc better than smaller ones. It is true that the Point Level (PL) is not an exact indicator of ship size but larger ships do tend to be on a higher PL than smaller ones.

Sincerely,

Andrew Norris

 

[H]

a crit is not completely tied to the power of a weapon, it is tied to the random element of chance that the projectile/plasma burst/fire etc, happens to hit something important.
a Musketball fired through a powderkeg will make it explode (probably), a canon ball will smash it to poeces, and ignite it, same result, exploding powderkeg, but I think most people would realise a cannon ball is MUCH more deadly overall.

likewise in acta, a weapons power is defined by it's range and dice numbers, as well as traits. A crit is a crit no matter what happens to do it to represent a severed power line, a direct hit by anything on a targeting lense, a breach in the bridge.

 

[Ripple]

Right, the weapon is a weapon sort of works... but to take the powder keg analogy a bit farther... a war ship will have its kegs locked down in armored rooms, a patrol boat might have it sitting on the deck.

Think that is what folks have an issue with, the idea that my might war ship can have all it's armor around the vital parts bypassed by the small guns (muskets) when it should take a large gun to do it (canon). Right now, a lucky pee shooter can destroy a ship.

Ripple

 

[Burger]

Ripple is right. If you want to tie the crit chart to PLs, it should onl be the PL of the target that affects it. Not the PL of the attacker, or the PL difference.

 

[H]

that is of course currently represented by the hull score and the number of hits expected, alas with hulls of only 4 values it goes out of the window, luckily, I have a plan...

 

[Burger]

That worked until 2e came along and made beams ignore hull...

 

[Triggy]

I both agree with the fact that weapons should be able to do crits regardless of where they're mounted and that larger ships should get more crit protection (at least in relation to smaller ships).

I've started thinking that you could tie the severity of the crit into whether the weapon is single damage (-1 on table), double damage (+0 on table), triple/quad damage (+1 on table). Obviously bigger weapons are generally on bigger ships and ships would need rebalancing but what about the principle of the thing? Another option would be to have a modifier based on how much damage a single volley has done (before crits).

 

[Kosh127]

Burger wrote If you want to tie the crit chart to PLs, it should onl be the PL of the target that affects it. Not the PL of the attacker, or the PL difference.
Well its kind of the same thing. its how you look at it. I understand were your are going but I don't htink you see how we can up with this. If your warship is getting attacked by a patrol ship you have a better chance due to the power of the weopens. Its the same tie in. A heavy cruise can take down a battleship as its guns are almost as powerful as a Battleship. You as the H. Cruiser will have a harder time getting thought its armour. A battleship can Destroy a H crusier more easly as its guns are more powerful. Thats how it works in the real world and just trying to draw a parrelle in the game.

 

[Foxmeister]

if you were to do a crit table balanced on PL then every weapon mounted on every level of ship would have to have the same stats no matter wether war or patrol as you are then representing heavier firepower by your crit mods instead of number of AD as it is currently.

No it wouldn't at all!!! It's just a change in abstraction that is *all* it is. There' absolutely no reason why it would have to change any of the stats whatsoever.

The critical system as it currently stands is *fundamentally* broken, and it needs to be fixed. If P&P were to contain anything on this, I wouldn't expect it to be anymore than a band aid and this fits into the category.

Whether it adversely affects game balance is the issue, but given that it is an attempt to fixed something that is hideously skewed in favour of smaller ships I don't think that is likely to be the case.

Regards,

Dave

 

[katadder]

Burger wrote If you want to tie the crit chart to PLs, it should onl be the PL of the target that affects it. Not the PL of the attacker, or the PL difference.
Well its kind of the same thing. its how you look at it. I understand were your are going but I don't htink you see how we can up with this. If your warship is getting attacked by a patrol ship you have a better chance due to the power of the weopens. Its the same tie in. A heavy cruise can take down a battleship as its guns are almost as powerful as a Battleship. You as the H. Cruiser will have a harder time getting thought its armour. A battleship can Destroy a H crusier more easly as its guns are more powerful. Thats how it works in the real world and just trying to draw a parrelle in the game.

yes thats how it works in the real world. however if the battleship and heavy cruiser had the same guns only the battleship had more then the heavy cruiser would have a good chance at some serious damage before losing which is how it is in the B5 ACTA world.

 

[No. 1 Bear]

My idea remove the crit chart simple, and make precise weapons the same as AP, and Accurate. Problem solved.

 

[Foxmeister]

My idea remove the crit chart simple, and make precise weapons the same as AP, and Accurate. Problem solved.

Except that it doesn't even come close to solving the problem. Essentially, all you are doing is making Beams significantly more powerful over other weapon types since they will now be the only weapons that can *ever* shoot above their weight (by rolling up).

Regards,

Dave

 

[katadder]

basing off the OPs idea you could just have a standard crit table with mods depending on the target as its more likely to lose all weapons etc if small but not if large:
Patrol ship: +2 to result on crit chart
Skirmish: +1 to result on crit chart
Raid: Standard roll
Battle: -1 to result on crit chart to min of 1
War: -2 to result to min of 1
Armageddon: -3 to result to min of 1

this would mean big ships which have more systems are likely to get more -1 ADs etc as they wont lose all weapons in one hit but it has nothing to do with the size of the attacker, just how well the ship soaks damage.

 

[greenboy]

How about a threshold value for each pl level for the number of crits you have to roll against a target to get to roll on the critical chart

patrol skirmish 1
raid 2
battle war 3
armageddon 4

kind of like geg but for crits