The effects of a failed landing roll
- Thread starter Enlightened
- Start date
I personally like the critical fail/sucess rules mods, but then I tend to like having at least the possibility that anything can go catastrophically wrong - or unexpectedly work out all right.
To my mind, you can get around the whole "decapitate yourself shaving" by only requiring rolls for situations with a dramatically meaningful failure. A character with even Pilot 0 probably has dozens of successful landings under his belt - I'd only make him roll if he was landing under fire, or trying some kind of hotshot landing trick he learned in the Scouts (not outside the realm of what PCs will attempt, IME).
If for whatever reason he does critfail at a time when it wouldn't make for a good story, there's always the option of just letting him roll again. A success means he pulls it out and just looks like a jackass (or on a high enough success, maybe even manages to make it look like that was what he meant to do all along). A failure could mean actual, if minor, damage to the ship or starport. If he tosses two critfails in a row, well, clearly the Great Magnet didn't want him to land.
To my mind, you can get around the whole "decapitate yourself shaving" by only requiring rolls for situations with a dramatically meaningful failure. A character with even Pilot 0 probably has dozens of successful landings under his belt - I'd only make him roll if he was landing under fire, or trying some kind of hotshot landing trick he learned in the Scouts (not outside the realm of what PCs will attempt, IME).
If for whatever reason he does critfail at a time when it wouldn't make for a good story, there's always the option of just letting him roll again. A success means he pulls it out and just looks like a jackass (or on a high enough success, maybe even manages to make it look like that was what he meant to do all along). A failure could mean actual, if minor, damage to the ship or starport. If he tosses two critfails in a row, well, clearly the Great Magnet didn't want him to land.
Rolls are really only needed if there is some degree of flexible outcome. Sometimes, there really is no reasonable possibility of failure, but only varying degrees of success. DMs can even result in no possibility of anything but exceptional success.
But, sometimes I just want to introduce my players to Murpy!
I have toyed with the idea of giving special meaning to natural 2 and 12 with an additional roll. However, it feels like the second roll should be based on 7 and +/- 5 for exceptional and in the initial roll it puts a discontinuity in relation to DMs and the 8+ to succeed system.
Ok - that was probably clear as mud...
Basically, its not neat mathematically and fundamentally the issue is really the limited range and precision of using 2d6.
But, sometimes I just want to introduce my players to Murpy!
I have toyed with the idea of giving special meaning to natural 2 and 12 with an additional roll. However, it feels like the second roll should be based on 7 and +/- 5 for exceptional and in the initial roll it puts a discontinuity in relation to DMs and the 8+ to succeed system.
Ok - that was probably clear as mud...
Basically, its not neat mathematically and fundamentally the issue is really the limited range and precision of using 2d6.
When Murphy strikes, there is an explanation for the result - at least inBP said:
hindsight: The pilot did not sleep well, he caught a cold, he was thinking
of the girl at the starport bar while going through the check list, there is
a minor problem with module 783-XD of the grav drive ...
Whatever it is, it can be turned into a modificator, preferably one the pi-
lot is not aware of (because otherwise Murphy would normally stay away)
- he can try to figure out what went wrong, and why, after the event, al-
though just as in real life he may never find a convincing answer.
In other words: I think 2d6 is doing fine when it comes to Murphy's visits,
the referee only has to open the door for him with a modificator now and
then, preferably at a good point in the plotline and with a little foreshado-
wing (NPC to Pilot: "Man, you look pretty tired today, must have been a
long evening at the crew lounge.").
That's fine if you want the crash to happen and need to rig the dice roll. But as I understand it, the question is how bad things get if no crash is planned for the plot, but the pilot rolls snake-eyes on what should be a routine landing.
I'd let the pilot roll again to see how bad things got. A good success means he compensated in time and just has to explain the concept of turbulence to the passengers, with particular reference to how it can occur if he's trying to land on an airless rockball or dock at an orbital starport. Anything else other than a really bad failure means either the starport's safety features caught him and all he has to worry about is traffic control laughing at him, or he pulled out in time and went around again. A second snake-eyes means "crunch"; either the characters are looking at some expensive repairs or the players are looking at new character sheets.
I'd let the pilot roll again to see how bad things got. A good success means he compensated in time and just has to explain the concept of turbulence to the passengers, with particular reference to how it can occur if he's trying to land on an airless rockball or dock at an orbital starport. Anything else other than a really bad failure means either the starport's safety features caught him and all he has to worry about is traffic control laughing at him, or he pulled out in time and went around again. A second snake-eyes means "crunch"; either the characters are looking at some expensive repairs or the players are looking at new character sheets.
If you want to model this in an at least remotely plausible way, you haveAdrianH said:
to find a way for dice roll results with a probability of 1 : 1,000,000 and
less. This is hardly worth the effort, considering that most campaigns are
unlikely to see 1,000,000+ routine landings of a pilot character.
So, if you want an occasional appearance of Murphy, the best way seems
to make it a very rare but planned event that has a connection with the
plotline.
Ah - planned Murphy-isms are no problem. Though MGT doesn't deal with this directly, I too subscribe to the 'Plot DM'.
One issue here is when the player is calculating their own DMs and knows what is being rolled for. In the case of the landing, a player with +5 DM might question his misfortune on a role of say 5. I think the natural 2 thing is more the unplanned, skill and situation and logic don't matter - **it happens type of mechanic. It factors in 'luck' to the effect of the roll for the PC - and everyone would know it. This has more use when the Referee is playing a more 'wing it' style game where the plot just follows the dice, vs. a more event planned game where the dice add some spice and multiple paths, but are not intended to control the PCs destiny.
For my part, I've always been the latter. So in rust's example, I might tell the player to roll, but also tell them they are exhausted and find the task more difficult than normal (I use modified Difficulty DMs as Plot DMs). I generally only use 'hindsight' to explain normal failures/successes, not my own special 'DMs'. My players know the rules we are playing under - hence I house rule Difficulty as being situational as well as simply task related. Thus, without explicitly talking DMs in the game (don't like rule mechanics directly in RP), my players still understand why an otherwise good (or bad) roll is that way in one instance and not another.
Not really a 3I referee, but actually would not consider the odds regarding PC actions to match those of the setting itself - i.e. the crash rules (and trade rules) and such needn't apply to the 3I as a whole, just the PCs. Otherwise, the PCs would be just like 99.999999999% of all the rest of the sophonts in the 3I. Which would be a whole different style of 'adventure' than most would be interested in playing (myself included).
One issue here is when the player is calculating their own DMs and knows what is being rolled for. In the case of the landing, a player with +5 DM might question his misfortune on a role of say 5. I think the natural 2 thing is more the unplanned, skill and situation and logic don't matter - **it happens type of mechanic. It factors in 'luck' to the effect of the roll for the PC - and everyone would know it. This has more use when the Referee is playing a more 'wing it' style game where the plot just follows the dice, vs. a more event planned game where the dice add some spice and multiple paths, but are not intended to control the PCs destiny.
For my part, I've always been the latter. So in rust's example, I might tell the player to roll, but also tell them they are exhausted and find the task more difficult than normal (I use modified Difficulty DMs as Plot DMs). I generally only use 'hindsight' to explain normal failures/successes, not my own special 'DMs'. My players know the rules we are playing under - hence I house rule Difficulty as being situational as well as simply task related. Thus, without explicitly talking DMs in the game (don't like rule mechanics directly in RP), my players still understand why an otherwise good (or bad) roll is that way in one instance and not another.
Not really a 3I referee, but actually would not consider the odds regarding PC actions to match those of the setting itself - i.e. the crash rules (and trade rules) and such needn't apply to the 3I as a whole, just the PCs. Otherwise, the PCs would be just like 99.999999999% of all the rest of the sophonts in the 3I. Which would be a whole different style of 'adventure' than most would be interested in playing (myself included).
Well, yes, but normally the player characters are considered to be a littleBP said:
more skilled or more lucky than the setting's average citizen. However, if
their probability to crash a starship is higher than that of the setting's ave-
rage pilot (e.g. 2 x snake eyes = 1 : 1296 instead of the average pilot's
1 : 1,000,000 or less), this is turned on its head - the characters now are
the worst pilots in the entire setting, no matter how high their skill levels.
I am quite certain that "my" players would start to throw hard objects at
me if I would do this to their characters.
CosmicGamer
Mongoose
From page 48rust said:
So, no roll needed to tie shoelaces.
Since rolls only need to be done for the reasons above, I'm ok with a natural 2 being - lets not call it a failure - some form of non perfect success (3% of the rolls may be a 2 but the percentage of times the character rolls a 2 and also has at least +6 in DMs would be lower). Why are you rolling at all if the only outcome is success?
I'd even let routine landings go without a check as long as the character has Pilot 1 or better. Roll if landing an unstreamlined ship, trying to land without any local navigation aids, and other non typical landings.
Well, I do not.CosmicGamer said:
If it is a routine activity or one where the outcome is not in any way im-
portant for the current plotline, I do not ask for skill checks - I trust the
characters to be able to handle their everyday life without turning their
surroundings into a desaster area.
The Expendables game has a nice rule for this, Competence. Once a cha-
racter has reached a skill level of 20 % in any skill, he is considered com-
petent and always successful with all routine activities based upon that
skill.
However, if one insists on skill checks for routine activities, like landing
a starship under normal conditions at a normal starport, I am extremely
sceptical of attempts to give the characters a higher probability of a fai-
lure than the comparable non-player characters - and a failure on a roll
of 2d6 = 2 would happen far too often to keep the game plausible (in my
view, of course).
Especially given the amount of property damage a 200+ dTon ship coated in bonded superdense would make if it smashed into the wrong bit of a downport at quite a few miles per hour.
Essentially, I wouldn't have a screw up on the pilot check (which is a sort of 'background activity) result in a major crash/whump/fireball/can-someone-pass-me-a-character-sheet.
Those things will occur, but that sort of thing must be rare enough that it shouldn't happen without the GM intending it to; either it's plot-specific, or you want to punish them for not keeping up with the maintenance, or (for whatever reason) it's not the 'proper' pilot doing the flying (as the pilot has taken a gauss carbine round to the chest and is currently bleeding out), or the ship is under fire, or whatever.
I can buy failed landing roles inflicting damage on the ship (I'd imagine equivalent to several months missed maintenance rather than a head-on ram), and (in extreme cases) some damage on the pad itself. For a worst case, you clip the antennae farm of the Instrument landing system and end up with a bill from hell for a load of TL14 navigation beacons.
Not an explosion.
It's standard RPG rules - you shouldn't put a major risk (and a full-blown starship crash is almost inevitably a TPK) on a basic activity like getting around.
:lol:locarno24 said:
Well put.
In tabletop games, I referee a very dice lite style of play. I consider non-combat rolls to represent inflection points - possible deviations from plot and player intent. The exception being, 'Observation' rolls tend to get used fairly often (to keep the players on their toes and avoid too much clue-ing in).
That's fair enough. Regularly putting the Fear of God, Punji Pits, Snipers & Cthulu into your players is a GM's unassailable right, so long as you don't spontaneously kill them. As stated above, if the players are in a crash situation, they're going to damn well know they're in a crash situation because one or more bits of their ship have probably already fallen off.
captainjack23
Cosmic Mongoose
locarno24 said:
My players had been ignoring maintainance for speed; I was surprised how effectively simply announcing that they all had horrible migranes on and off for the week in hyperspace after an iffy jump got them to pay more attention to those things.... No real (ie quantifiable) consequences, just one that worried them in character..
...and they made sure they had lots of "Hyperprophin, (tm) it's not just an analgesic, its ASTROGESIC ! (IISS approved)"
Not sure why "fails to make a landing roll by 1" equates to "crashes ship", which seems to be driving the discussion.
Aeroplanes fail to land as expected *constantly*. Very few of these are crashes. Mostly they're takeoff delays (I was once stuck in Frankfurt airport for 14 hours because a service vehicle collided with the plane's front wheel and they had to get another 747 diverted from somewhere...), weather related or scheduling issues. At a busy port, you may be put in a holding pattern for some time.
The chance of something like THIS happening once every 36 flights is not remarkable; weather and traffic issues are the most likely routine problems. Given the communications lag, traffic control has perhaps an hour or two for each arrival to schedule their berthing. If there's an unexpected rush of arrivals and they run out of berths, you may be put in a parking orbit for some time.
Failing the "to land" roll doesn't mean the pilot can't try again without penalty unless the Referee says so. Putting the ship into a holding pattern when you have gravitics and fuel for weeks isn't so hard.
Aeroplanes fail to land as expected *constantly*. Very few of these are crashes. Mostly they're takeoff delays (I was once stuck in Frankfurt airport for 14 hours because a service vehicle collided with the plane's front wheel and they had to get another 747 diverted from somewhere...), weather related or scheduling issues. At a busy port, you may be put in a holding pattern for some time.
The chance of something like THIS happening once every 36 flights is not remarkable; weather and traffic issues are the most likely routine problems. Given the communications lag, traffic control has perhaps an hour or two for each arrival to schedule their berthing. If there's an unexpected rush of arrivals and they run out of berths, you may be put in a parking orbit for some time.
Failing the "to land" roll doesn't mean the pilot can't try again without penalty unless the Referee says so. Putting the ship into a holding pattern when you have gravitics and fuel for weeks isn't so hard.
