Newbish n00b questions, MkII

[stubby]

* Can Current Fields powered by a creation (like a tractor beam from a spaceship) be used to pull the creation closer to bigger things as well as pulling smaller things toward the creation? Like a spaceship pulling itself into an asteroid cave to hide when it runs out of move. Or is that better suited to SN Move Dice?

Sure, I think. It'd just be putting a current field on itself. Whether this is better or worse than SN Move Dice depends on which better matches the fluff you made up to explain how tractor beams work in your Kanon.

* Are Hazard Fields powered by a creation always in contact with the creation, or is there some leeway for "projecting" them some distance away?

My usual solution for projecting stuff is to start with a ranged weapon and add the Field stats as an added effect or replacement to the damage. That gives you good baseline stats for attack rolls and such.

I used to have a conversion table between Damage/Effect and Use and Range that made this easier; maybe I need to figure out where I put that, and resurrect it in a 2010-friendly form.

* How much CP would it cost to deploy a modular package of parts for a Mechanik to assemble into a structure depending on what the battle situation calls for? I'm thinking crates of parts that are kinda useless by themselves, but then with a Mechanik's special touch become a jeep (cockpit + wheels + light gun), tank (cockpit + treads + heavy gun), bomber (cockpit + wings + bomb bay), etc. The obvious tradeoff for any discount (and flexibility of what machines you field) is that the vehicles don't come onto the battlefield ready to roll - several rounds of assembly is required.

This is a tricky call. Discounts can be easily abused, especially if you're in a siege situation where you know you're just waiting around for the first couple of turns, and you don't lose anything by spending turns on assembly. I think this one has to be scenario-specific.

* Can big creations with bigger weapons carry smaller creations inside of them for the purpose of Gathering Power via Teamwork? Something like a Size 8" Space Gunship carrying a Size 3" Antimatter reactor within its cargo hold to help power the ridiculous amount of weapons on its surface.

I'm leaning against this one. Unless you can find a way to make the reactor interesting gameplay-wise, it's just a size 8" ship with size 11" stats. If all you want to do is break the power limit rules, then just break them, don't waste time trying to legitimize it with rules lawyery.

At minimum, I'd suggest that the 3" reactors should be external rather than internal, so that they can be blown up or stolen or some kind of gameplay potential interesting enough to justify having them exist in the first place.

[IVhorseman]

* Can big creations with bigger weapons carry smaller creations inside of them for the purpose of Gathering Power via Teamwork? Something like a Size 8" Space Gunship carrying a Size 3" Antimatter reactor within its cargo hold to help power the ridiculous amount of weapons on its surface.

I'm leaning against this one. Unless you can find a way to make the reactor interesting gameplay-wise, it's just a size 8" ship with size 11" stats. If all you want to do is break the power limit rules, then just break them, don't waste time trying to legitimize it with rules lawyery.

At minimum, I'd suggest that the 3" reactors should be external rather than internal, so that they can be blown up or stolen or some kind of gameplay potential interesting enough to justify having them exist in the first place.

I don't know, this is more or less how I treat vehicles that i've built exposable engines into. Blowing it up has the added effect of creating a massive explosion as well as completely de-powering whatever creation it is attached to. I did this with my big yellow tank in a battle against Roc77, and we decided that the turret could still be turned and fired but the vehicle had to come grinding to a halt. I didn't have the engine added as a way to break or extend power limits, but I had one built in and figured it ought to have a cool effect.

[IVhorseman]

Also, I'm working on a "internal damage" table for ships and other large vehicles - it seems rather bland that a ship can take enough damage to be reduced to half effective size, but no random redshirt inside gets killed by an exploding panel. The idea will be to allow attackers to forgo regular, boring critical hits in exchange for more interesting effects like starting electrical fires, causing coolant leaks, and disabling artificial gravity.

Mmmmm, nice. Good idea tastes so good.

Minifigs already get to overskill to add an extra die to the attack roll, but being able to add that die into more interesting effects like movement speed and skill reductions on creations further on the living end of the spectrum, while disabling controls or weapons or attacking crew members directly would also be pretty interesting.

I think allowing a shot to directly target a minifig inside a vehicle could be a little too brutal, but being able to expose pieces for a second shot aimed at an exposed pilot is another story entirely. You might be able to justify it with explosive weapons, where an overskilled shot means that the round punctured straight through an outer level of armor and can explode inside of a crew compartment or something, but even that sounds like it might be ripe for abuse. It is a crit after all though, so maybe the abuse is okay?

[stubby]

When rolling SN dice, do you have to take the full effect? Like if you rolled a 5 on a Move dice, but only wanted to move a thing 3" - can you choose to forgo the remaining 2"?

The 5" are yours to spend or not spend however you please.

[Gungnir]

I'd say it's anywhere between 1 and 5 seconds.

[IVhorseman]

I don't like the idea of allowing players to cherry-pick the effects... So it will be a table of random results.

Oh man, this is pretty much the exact opposite direction I'd like to see this go, for several reasons.

First, my experience with Brikwars has told me that tables are never ever ever fun. That may not be true for other people, and while they work in d20 systems where each player is only in charge of one character and can easily track status effects, this takes exponentially longer with a table full of minifigures. The Ker-Pow etc. tables from 2001 were always the clunkiest parts if you ask me.

Second, what's wrong with letting players cherry-pick effects? If it's triggered by a critical hit anyways, I think that the effect should be as beneficial to the attacker as possible. To counter this, there should really only be a very select few options players have to pick from for distributing critical effects (again, much like how overskill works but with a few other choices on how to assign an effect to that die) so that nothing too game-breaking is on the table. For example, reducing move speed by 1d6" or removing 1d6 bricks of the attacker's choice or something.

[stubby]

I do like a funny table from time to time, but I think if you make one that's generic enough for all the different types of ships and vehicles and weird aliens and animals in BrikWars, it'll end up feeling like something exactly that generic. Some kind of guidelines would be good though. Something like "thanks to Koincidence, your Bonus Die can be turned into an equivalent die of internal damage within the creation, if you can come up with a story to justify it."

Then the trick is figuring out how to limit it so that it adds cool flavor but can't be used to automatically kill the Captain or blow up the antimatter reactor on the first hit or something.

If we had a cool enough game mechanic for handling this, it might not even need to be reserved for crits. Maybe any time you blow through the armor with dice left over, you could spend the extra dice on flavor damage.

[IVhorseman]

Then the trick is figuring out how to limit it so that it adds cool flavor but can't be used to automatically kill the Captain or blow up the antimatter reactor on the first hit or something.

I think part of balancing it that way is to just throw around sample ideas and see how they'd fit. Ideally, the options players would have would offer interesting enough choices that players wouldn't even *want* to spend that die on simply killing off a critical operator in a boring manner.

[IVhorseman]

Maybe the defender should decide how damage is dealt?

So, for every critical die that the attacker chooses to allocate to "special" systems, the defender has to assign them to crew members inside or components of their choice. Sure the useless stuff will go first, but as options get slimmer and slimmer the player makes much more difficult - and relevant - choices.

[stubby]

Maybe the defender should decide how damage is dealt?

So, for every critical die that the attacker chooses to allocate to "special" systems, the defender has to assign them to crew members inside or components of their choice. Sure the useless stuff will go first, but as options get slimmer and slimmer the player makes much more difficult - and relevant - choices.

I like this in theory, but I'd want to see it in playtests. I have a feeling that players will still find a way to cheese it.

Is the range of rockets measured from the thruster or from the nose-cone?

Nose-cone. You can think of a rocket as a vehicle with a Move rating. If it moves five inches and its nose cone hits something, that's all it needs; it doesn't need its tail end to reach the target to go off.

[stubby]

Sure. I'd make a separate Attack Roll for the drop-off though, just to give it that extra chance to miss badly.

[stubby]

* So would I be correct in assuming that it's acceptable when buying Flight movement (which is expensive) for spaceships (which tend to have high SL) to buy a minimum of flight for maneuvering (antigravity), and then buy the majority of it's plain ol' forward movement as the much cheaper Thrust (conventional engines)? I ran the numbers, and this is much cheaper than buying the whole kaboodle as regular flight. You would just turn the spaceship in the angle you want it to go (using up your few flight inches) and then hit the thrusters and cruise the rest of the way. This is not trying to be munchkiny, this is trying to use common sense and be cost-effective.

I really want to say yes, because I love thruster battles, but not everyone does. Really the better thing to do is probably just to treat Space as a normal-cost movement type, separate from Flight.

* On that note, shouldn't getting from point A to point B in space technically use less move once you're pointed in the right direction and achieve necessary velocity? However, once a spaceship has accelerated to a desired speed, wouldn't it keep doing at that speed? If my starfighter flies 20" on turn one, and I don't make any effort to steer it and it doesn't get blasted out of the firmament, wouldn't it continue flying another 20" on turn two without technically expending any flight move or thrust?

This is tricky, because the standard Move system isn't really designed for frictionless space. If you want to go this route, it really is better to stick to Thrust rules exclusively for space movement, and to keep track of inertia vectors between turns, and to only use Move inches for movement actions rather than actual movement.

Or does the Move Rating already account for maximum distance a unit is able to cover via inertia?

In a "realistic" space battle, there is no effective upper limit to the velocity of objects, unless you want to try and calculate out the speed of light in BrikWars inches per turn. So if you poured on 20" of thrust every turn, you'd be going at a velocity of 80" per turn by turn 4.

In practice, this hasn't ever tended to be very fun, so the rules don't openly encourage this kind of realistic physics. But there's nothing stopping you from trying it if you want.

* I'm starting to do stuff with constructs, and I want to make sure I understand that section correctly. So a standard LEGO battle droid (before accounting for movement, mind, and weapons) has an armature of appx 1", so it would cost 1 CP, right? And then every point of damage would knock off one of it's 5 parts? So then a single hit for 4 damage would smash it completely? Am I on the right track so far?

Sort of. The cost of the Battle Droid's Connection Strength would be +1CP, but you still have to pay for its other stats. Something like:

• Battle Droid
  Size: 1"
  Armor: N/A (+0CP)
  Skill: 1d4 (Incompetent) (+0.5CP)
  Move: 5" (+2.5CP)
  Connection Strength: 1 (+1CP)
  Total Cost: 4CP

So they seem individually weaker than a minifig at the same price, but if you get a bunch of them together then they can be constantly reassembling themselves and each other in a way that minifigs can't.

Ironically, the Super Battle Droid which is supposed to be tougher in-universe, would fall apart after only 3 points of damage, unless you bought armor into it.

That's right, so I would either give it a higher Connection Strength or use Armor. Although I would note that 3 points of damage reduce both of them to the same limbless state at least, so it's not that big of a difference.

[stubby]

Try it and see. Since Thrust is handled by pushing stuff with your finger, there's not actually that much leeway in fudging the pushing angle before weird shit starts to happen. If you have a thruster at the back of your rocket and you push it at 45 degrees, it just makes the rocket fishtail in a completely weird way.

[stubby]

Launchers can launch any physical object. If you can build it, it can be fired.

[IVhorseman]

Well they're not really all that fun in all honesty. There's zero reason, even in most scenarios, to knock a minifig unconscious instead of killing them. Even then, a minifig lying face-down on the table is often forgotten about and left for dead in actual play.

If for some reason it DOES make sense to stun someone though, I'd just rule that the attacker can simply choose to knock out a fig instead of killing them outright with any melee attack or special knock-out gun, and that the fig can wake up on its turn with a UR of 5, or be woken up for free by any other minifig.